Crazy busy weekend… February 6, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in family, older son, personal, younger son.Tags: cleaning, dog, fingernail polish, fortran, girls
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Okay…totally a fluff post. But you need those sometimes, eh?
• Finally realized one thing that has been making the homeschooling part of things hard on the older boy: he likes to work to a ‘good stopping point’. Telling him to work on something ‘for two hours’ is just too vague. So I’ve been sitting down and coming up with how much he should do. Things like, ‘work to the end of this chapter.’ This seems to be working worlds better, and his pace has been picking up a lot.
• Younger boy likes finger nail polish. So much so that I had to paint his toenails with some holographic stuff I got. I didn’t paint his fingernails because I know there are boys at school who would pick on him. He did, however, have to take off socks at gymnastics. I was very nervous about it, but no one said a thing. He did ask one of his teachers what she thought, and she said his nails were beautiful. Huge relief: boys get judged so harshly for being different, and I’m so glad people didn’t get judgmental. I did warn him, however, that it might happen.
• Honestly, I used to get nervous about wearing nail polish to work. No one has said anything over the past couple months when I have worn it, so I’ve been indulging a lot more often in one of my few very girly interests. Even been wearing sparkly stuff.
• Younger boy also strongly associates girls things with pink. We went to buy some dog supplies yesterday, and anything that came in pink was what he chose to buy. No one will ever question whether our dog is a boy or girl.
• My house is clean. It’s always good motivation when you have guests staying with you. Also discovered the teenager is getting amazingly good at cleaning.
• I’m relearning Fortran. It’s been a while…a very long while.
• I’m getting braces tomorrow. Not. Looking. Forward. To. That.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Foretran! You guys also use COBOL? Do you send your memos around in vacuum tubes? Are your blueprints actually blue?
I don’t know if the trend for boys and nailposh has made it up to your parts, but around here it’s not unusual to see guys wearing nail polish and bracelets and other things. It’s part of some sort of “emo” trend. I’m sure a-holes still mock them, but it’s not an automatic association to dressing like a girl or anything.
No, I think this is the result of ‘legacy code': code that was developed a long time ago (in a galaxy far away)…and it would be a pain to recode it into something else without a significant benefit.
I think I live in a part of the country where boys with finger nail polish would be looked at with great suspicion. Which is sad, because Robert Smith has been doing it as long as I can remember…you’d think they’d have gotten over it by now. :-)
I was talking to a (much) older colleague today (he started his career the year I was born), and I mentioned that my lovely spouse was working with some FORTRAN code. He laughed, replied “That’s good. I used to program in FORTRAN. Real men still program in FORTRAN,” and launched into a big story on how he had implemented a bunch of electromagnetic field calculating functions in Visual Basic since that was all he could get access to. I’m not sure which would be more painful, dealing with that cruddy FORTRAN syntax, or trying to do complex arithmetic in Basic.
[...] My younger son has always seemed somewhat interested in ‘girly’ things, starting at about 3 or 4 when he was in love with anything having to do with Dora the Explorer. He wanted to paint his room pink and decorate it with Dora and Boots. I never did it…but that was more because I didn’t have time. But when he asked me to get a Dora the Explorer backpack, I declined. However, I have painted his toenails. [...]