So I've always been curious about how strongly loud music really does affect your hearing. I attended my very first rock concert, ever, 20 years ago yesterday. I saw INXS at the San Diego Sports Arena. My friend and I had fairly good seats, (we were off to the right of the stage) and as I was only 14 years old, I felt like I'd been catapulted into cooldom just by having been there. Well, the next day (20 years ago today), I noticed an interesting fuzziness in my ears. I realized it had been loud, but that just made it even cooler, right? Well, in the next four or five years, I attended many more rock concerts in many different venues--xFest, which features Sugarcubes, PIL, New Order and De la Soul; Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb; Nitzer Ebb by itself (I got all the way to the front of the crowd and touched the guy's boots), the Cult; the Cure; the Cure and Love and Rockets; PIL and Flesh for LuLu; Anthrax, Megadeth, and a group which will remain unnamed; the Dead Milkmen; and They Might Be Giants. I think I might have left out something, but it doesn't matter. The point is, I was exposed to a lot of very loud music.

Now that I'm 34, with 5 kids, I notice that I often have to ask people to repeat themselves. I mean, I can hear fine, but I just want people to speak a little louder. So my good father-in-law gave me a hearing test and determined my left ear has a mild-to-moderate loss in the lower frequency area. He even gave me and over-the-ear Oticon hearing aid. Husband developed a cool website, http://www.understandhearing.com/, where I can take a hearing test and then have the results, as shown below. What I'm curious about is if my results are typical at all of people who have had a similar exposure to loud music. My dad has a slight hearing loss, but my mom's hearing is near-perfect.

I have also heard that pregnancy contributes to hearing loss but I'm not clear as to whether that is temporary or permanent.

I think it would be an interesting experiment to note one's hearing before and after attending a loud event, and then check it again in maybe a month or so, to see if there is an noticeable effect. My rock concert going days are over, though, as now I 'm much more interested in seeing a symphony perform Debussy's Fetes. The last classical performance I attended (besides Beulah's middle school orchestra concert) was Handel's Messiah. And that really wasn't very loud. The last loud event that I've attended was a Monster Truck rally. (Don't ask why) and I wore earplugs, left early, and won't ever go again. So it's an experiment for someone else I guess. Well, Goose is making loud noises from the kitchen (can hear those just fine, thank you very much). So off I go.

Okay, I was going to try to put a picture of T-Bone with the sharks up but it was proving too difficult. Instead, I'm going to relate the following account:

This morning Beulah stomped upstairs and growled, "What's for breakfast?" When she heard the reply, she scowled, "Cold cereal? I can't believe it! That's stupid!"

It's the little things in life that bring us pleasure.

We were able to persuade Goose to sleep in with us this morning. She is still cuddling with Husband. (Hence she isn't trying to disturb me as I type).

Oh the agony and ecstasy of school projects. T-Bone wrote a story which he first titled, A Sharky Tale, but then renamed a more cautious My Ocean Adventure. I worked with him to find pictures of sharks for the purpose of illustration. and then Husband spend h-o-u-r-s enhancing the pictures and finding little diver bodies to match with pictures of T-Bone's head. (Now I'm going to interrupt myself here and say that initially I wanted T-Bone to illustrate the book by hand, but then I realized that playing with graphics on the computer is an excellent way to fulfill one's artistic desires ) Well, Husband is a perfectionist, and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked but finally the pictures were all ready. So we printed the images out onto the special paper provided for us by Studentreasures. Oops. Even though we told the printer that we were printing on photo paper, it still used way too much ink and the pictures were runny. They were cute--they just weren't as crisp. And we had no extra sheets to reprint on. Husband was not happy about this. In the morning he called the company and was told we could go buy more special paper of a special weight and then bring them into school and swap them out with T-Bone's originals. (Of course the book was due this day) But in the end T-Bone thought they were fine and didn't want to go through the extreme measures of replacing them.

I will show one of the pictures in my next post....

So we discovered last week that Goose gets carsick. We'd been a good two hours into our trip when she started to cough. It was a wet cough, a bit juicy for our comfort, and up came the banana and chex cereal. Worrying that she was sick with a stomach bug, I threatened Husband that we would have to go back home if she spewed anymore. She actually did vomit one more time, but the road was really windy and it seemed too big of a coincidence for her to suddenely get sick when we get in a car. We found some dramamine in the side of the door. I quartered the tablet and inserted it into a grape (This was Beulah's idea, btw). She gobbled it up, we rested for a few minutes, and then we continued on our way, with no more nasty episodes of regurgitation.

The weekend was good. Husband and T-Bone caught some bass using lures (they feel so manly when they can catch without live bait).

Beulah fell in the giardia-ridden lake (we'll have to watch her for any unpleasant bathroom experiences). Skilly won the prize for catching the first fish. He chose to get a "special" set of cowboy guns and accoutrements at the indoor swapmeet. Janey was a daredevil in the pool and was generally pleasant and sweet as always.

Beulah wants me to add that she is every bit as much of a daredevil. Believe what you want to.

I am happy to say that the shelves look good. Now all we need to do is the other side.
We're trying to think of a title for Husband's book. I think he should wait until he is done (he's a third of the way through?) But he's going hog wild finding website names (ever since he had to pick a name for his project with his bro. They got "Pixelhunt.com" but now that he knows how hard it is to get what you want, he tries to snap up names as fast as he can), and I know he just wants to stake his claim on the title. He's already got the .dom name for his main character.
I finished Book 5 from The Wheel of Time series. So fun! What's going to happen when Lan goes to meet Myrelle, only to be thrust in front of Nynaeve, and this right after he's sent word that she needs to be done with him? The heart beats faster in consideration! And will Aviendah ever let Rand touch her again? Talk about an anticlimatic love scene, by the way. Oh well, at least I can't complain that it was too graphic. I was fine with seeing Moraine go (she had no romantic interest so who cares about her?), a little bit sad to know that Lanfear won't pop out anymore to eviscerate any woman that Rand looks on too fondly, and I liked Rahvin gone. I want Luca to go chase down Nynaeve and reveal that he has some channeling power, to give Loser Lan a run for his money. I'm not a fan of Elayne, either, that spoiled, simpering princess. Maybe Aviendah can challenge her to a fist fight for the honor of loving the Dragon Reborn. And in support of geriatric love, let's see Gareth Bryne locked in a passionate embrace with Siuan. But at Robert Jordan's speed, that's probably part of the last book that hasn't (and now never will be) written yet.

Sigh.

Our library is smelling fumy. Yesterday, Husband and I stained the shelves (well, half of the shelves) that he put up a couple of months ago. As we were just getting started, we were chagrined to see that we had purchased the pre-stain conditioner for water-based stain, instead of buying the conditioner for the oil-based stain, which is of course the type of stain which we had bought. Well, he suggested he could go back to Home Depot to buy the correct material, but I opined that with these shelves which are theoretically going to be covered with books, it probably wouldn't matter if we skipped it, and at any rate, we could just do one shelf (the top) and if it didn't look good, we could stop, get the conditioner, and then do the others. Well, as with many things in my life laziness won out and we chose to forgo the pre-treatment. We used an ebony stain and were a little startled at how dark it was. ("Ebony" is black so we shouldn't have been surprised). We like how it looks, though, especially when the light hits that wood grain that we can see through the stain. We still have to put on the polycrilic finish. I remember my Grandma saying that her least favorite part of carpentry was putting on the verathane. I'd just like to be able to apply the stain in a way that it wouldn't splatter across the wall. Several times. I kept thinking, "This is actually fun. If only I were really good at this; we could stain things all the time."

I'm sporting two band-aids on my fingers. In the dry of winter, the skin on my hands shrivels up and becomes papery. Add to that my compulsion to wash my hands when I touch anything having to do with Boon Dog, or diapers, or laundry, or even mail (yes, I've had issues with the safety of mail ever since the anthrax scares after Sept. 11). Compounding the problem is my seeming inability to dry my hands after I wash them. Yes, logically I know that the moisture that evaporates off of wet hands includes what tiny amounts of natural moisture I had had, but still I don't do dry my wet handsproperly. Maybe I do it to subvert Husband's wishes.
I love Dr. Seuss. I'm working with my five year-0ld, we'll just call him Cheeseball, (see The Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants), and last night I whipped out Hop on Pop. At first he was a bit skeptical about reading (we'd read a word here and there occasionally, but I've tried not to push it), but as I gently worked with him, he was able to go 6 or 7 pages before going to bed. I've done Hop on Pop with my older children and while it's never been completely smooth sailing, they've all enjoyed such pride from being able to finally read a book.