Coffee with the Principal

Tom and I went to the coffee with the principal at Morningside Elementary this morning. The big news is that Becky is expecting the new school zones to be posted on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) website today -- or if not today, no later than Tuesday. Because of growth in enrollment at Morningside and other nearby elementary schools, a new school is being built on Ponce de Leon, where the Morningside kindergarten campus currently is. She said that she expects that APS will convene a Community Meeting about three weeks after the new school zones are released, and then after getting that public input APS will develop a final proposal that will go to the school board for a vote.

She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.

Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.

I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.

Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."

I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.

ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).

Wessyngton Road & the Bermuda Triangle

A while back the old Mr. Coffee died. It was made of black plastic and we had had it for a long time. Tom got a recommendation from David for a an on-line place that sold coffeemakers, and so I looked at what they had and picked out a diecast stainless steel KitchenAid ProLine model that had gotten pretty good reviews. It also sounded like it was very substantially built and that is a desirable feature in our household. So even though it cost probably 10 times as much as its predecessor, it looked like it would be a good one and I ordered it.

The really big box came a few days later, and we unpacked it, and this coffeemaker was - well, it was very large. That's okay. So it didn't fit under the counter. It didn't need to fit under the counter. We put it all together and Tom made a pot of coffee. It was perfectly fine coffee. This was going to be okay.

But then the next time we put water in it, the "on" light came on, but then it switched off; after brief deliberation the machine had evaluated the situation, decided there was no water inside, and turned itself off. There was nothing we could do to convince it that we were not the kind of people who would try to make coffee without putting water in the coffeemaker (well, not very often anyway) so we eventually concluded it had a bad sensor and called the on-line place about a return. They told us we had to do that through KitchenAid, so we called them, and they sent us a new one. We packed up the old one in the box the new one came it and left it in the front room awaiting Federal Express pick-up.

The second one was just like the first one, large and heavy, with a glowing blue "on" light just like its predecessor. (There actually are three blue lights and two knobs across the top - there's the "on" indicator, a blue-illuminated digital clock/timer, and another light that indicated how long the coffee had been sitting there. Given our difficulty with actually making coffee up to this point, we possibly had not noticed this third light.) It also was just like the first one, in that after we ran one pot of water through it to clean it out it would shut off every time we turned it on.

We couldn't believe it. Was it our aura? Did we live in some kind of Bermuda Triangle for coffeemakers? Tom thought it might be a bad batch of microcontrollers. He called the on-line place we had purchased it from and said we were returning it and wanted our money back. We now had two extremely large, heavy diecast stainless steel virtually indestructible coffeemakers, neither of which actually made coffee. We were concerned at that point about having them both in the house; we thought they might reproduce.

So then we were at Caramba one evening, drinking Margaritas and discussing the competing theories (aura/Bermuda Triangle/bad batch) and Tom came up with a fourth one. The electrical conductivity of the water in Atlanta is extremely low. What if the water level sensor was somehow dependent on being able to send some electricity through the water? (The only city water with lower conductivity than Atlanta's is New York City. Of course, the only people in New York City with kitchens big enough for this coffeemaker probably have servants to make their coffee and have no idea if the coffeemaker works or not.) So when we got home, we put a pinch of salt in the water reservoir (it was full of water, since dumping it out into the sink was hard, given the weight of the thing) and turned it on. The blue light went on, and then it turned itself off. So much for that idea.

But the next morning, it did work, and it made a perfectly fine pot of coffee. It might be that the next time it didn't work, but the time after that it did, and it has every time since. For a while I was putting a few grains of salt in each pot of water, but I called KitchenAid to try to find out if this made any sense at all. The first time I called it was clear that discussions of the conductivity of water were not in the service person's script book and she really didn't want to talk to me. When I called the second time (FedEx had not yet shown up to pick up the first one) that person was more interested but still couldn't tell me if the conductivity of the water had anything to do with how the sensor worked.

So we still have the coffee maker. We named it/him WALL-E after the robot in the movie, to which it/he bears a certain resemblance. Every morning I get up and turn the knob to the right, and the blue light comes on and stays on, and he makes me a very nice pot of coffee.

This is all true. I could not make this up if I tried.

Missing caterpillars

For years, a ritual of summer has been looking for caterpillars on the fennel plants in Kathy and Steve's front yard. They are green, black, and white, and eventually make light green chrysalises. After a week or two the chrysalis becomes almost translucent and a damp and crumpled swallowtail butterfly emerges. We have had caterpillars in jars, fed with fennel until they metamorphed into butterflies, and then we would release them and watch them fly away. But mostly we have looked out for the caterpillars, looked for the chrysalises old and new, and kept track of their comings and goings. Every year by August they were plentiful, with young small ones and middle-sized ones and big ones that had assumed the distinctive comma shape, that meant they were about to be encased temporarily in a chrysalis while a miracle happened.

Until this year. Is the heat, or the drought, or global warming? Hungry birds? Habitat loss somewhere else? Whatever the reason, I have not been able to find a single caterpillar on Kathy and Steve's fennel. Every few days I look, and the caterpillars are not there.

Whatever the cause, this seems to me to be a bad sign. I don't know what critical role swallowtail butterflies play in the great scheme of things, but does this mean something really important is not going to happen? Perhaps they will be back next year.

There is that wonderful Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder." (Confession: I did not remember the title, but "Ray Bradbury butterfly time travel" typed into Google retrieved what my memory could not.) A time traveler going back into the past is warned not to change anything, and when he comes back to his present, it's not the same as when he left. On the sole of his shoe, he finds a crushed butterfly.

Perhaps they will be back next year.

Rats!

Honestly, I didn't start this blog to only write about pest control, but this follows logically from the first posting about the possum in the living room.

A week or two ago we were having dinner with David and Alka, and they mentioned driving by a place "that sounded really scary" - and we recognized it right away as one of Tom's favorites - "Do-It-Yourself Pest Control" (that really is the name of it - it's on Chamblee Tucker Road).

There is - let us be frank here - a rat issue in the neighborhood. We used to have a cat, but then we got the dog and the cat moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve, who did not have a dog, and then later the cat died. So we no longer have an effective natural predator of small rodents patrolling the perimeter of our house. At around the same time a house on an adjacent street (not Wessyngton Road) was knocked down to make way for a Large House that is Architecturally Dissimilar from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH). The neighborhood rumor is that the house that was knocked down was infested with rats. So the rats, now homeless, went Searching for New Homes and some of them decided that they wanted to live at our house.

Now it's not that we didn't already have rats - we did. Sarah has two rats that live in a cage in the upstairs bathroom. (Actually for several days one of them was living behind the washing machine, but that's another story.) But these are actual pet rats, obtained from people who make you wash your hands before you handle rats as opposed to washing them after you handle them, not the more independent ones who are accustomed to making their own way in the world.

So Tom went to visit the guys at Do-It-Yourself Pest Control, and got some traps. We never caught a rat in the traps, and as the nocturnal visitations went on there seemed some danger that the rats would get comfortable, move in, bring their friends, and generally not be good neighbors - and perhaps even chew through the insulation on some wire and burn the house down. So we knew we needed to move on to more desperate measures - either getting another cat (who might not distinguish between the various rats potentially available for catching) or poison. The guys at Do-It-Yourself didn't have cats but they did talk to Tom about poison, and I have to say the results were pretty stunning.

The poison looks like azalea food but comes in big chunks which are put in the same black plastic boxes that housed the traps. We lost a couple of the boxes (raccoons, we are guessing) but have seen no non-resident rats in the house since Tom put the poison out.

Of course rat control is most effective if implemented at the neighborhood level. We have a couple of LHADAHs on our street, one of which is under construction, and one of which is completed and currently for sale. Anyone who is thinking about paying $1.3M for a house....well, don't you think they should know? Full disclosure and all.

Possum Fritters

Sunday night when Tom and I got back from walking the dog, we found Sarah standing on the chair in front of the computer in the living room. (Since this chair has wheels on it, this seemed like a particularly bad idea.) She thought she had seen a small gray animal make its way across the living room toward her - perhaps a rat, maybe a possum. Bullwinkle, the black lab, was not going to be helpful so I put him in his crate in the other room even though he was wet from the rain, and Tom and the girls started looking for the small gray animal.

It seemed most likely that it was behind the sofa (this would be the sofa that I bought when I was an intern that has been subsequently been destroyed by the cumulative effect of multiple moving companies, three children, and especially the aforementioned Labrador retriever), so Tom looked behind it and didn't see it at first. I went to return Bullwinkle's second blanket (since he was wet) to his crate, but once I opened the door he was out, and the hall door wasn't closed, so Bullwinkle was back in the living room. In the meantime, Tom had spotted it but with the dog back in the room no telling where it had gone.

We turned the sofa over (no animal) but ultimately got it under a blanket and then into a wire wastebasket. It was a young possum, doing its best to look fierce, with its mouth open and hair on end (I told Sarah it had spiky hair like hers). Tom carried it - wastebasket and all - up the street to the church where he let it loose - hopefully far enough away it would not make its way back to our house.

When the kids ask what's for dinner, or what some unfamilar food is on the table, Tom often answers "possum fritters." We had our chance, but no possum fritters tonight.