Day: August 7, 2006

Confrontations

By / August 7, 2006 / 8 Comments

I read a story today about a man who gave a donkey to his friend. He assured the friend that the donkey was very well behaved, he only had to whisper in the donkey’s ear and it would do what it was asked. The friend took the donkey for two days and then brought it back. He couldn’t get it to do anything. The man offered to show the friend how it was done. He took a wooden stick and whacked the donkey on the nose, then whispered in it’s ear.
“I thought you said all I had to do was whisper.” Said the friend.
“Well, yeah, but first you have to get it’s attention.”

I’m feeling great affinity for that story after managing Gleek today. She is a wonderful, sweet little girl. I can ask her to do things and she will do them gladly. But often I have to metaphorically whack her on the nose to get her attention first. Sometimes that means a major confrontation in which I have to find the right lever to apply. I don’t have as many levers as I would like because she is so happy go lucky about almost everything.

I have been having a terrible time getting her to bed lately. I’ll tuck her into bed. She’ll object about my departure. Then all will be silent for an hour. I’ll send Kiki to bed only to discover that Gleek is not asleep at all. Gleek is wide awake playing in her bed. That is a major problem because shutting those two into a room together is a recipe for a fight. I need a way to make Gleek stop keeping herself awake. If she lies still for 5 minutes she is out like a light. I have scowled. I have scolded. I have confiscated her lamp. I have confiscated toys. I have given detailed instructions about what she should do, which she ignored. She was willing to live with all of that. Each night she claimed to be sorry, and she probably was, but not sorry enough to remember it the next night. Tonight I warned her and then confiscated her security blanket. She imediately let forth a litany of “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

I let her feel upset for awhile until she started saying things like “everyone badons [abandons] me. Now even my family badons me.” People believe the stories they tell themselves. Gleek was telling a story about being a victim. I couldn’t let that continue. I went in and talked to her about choices and consequences. And how “I’m sorry” doesn’t mean anything unless you stop doing the thing you are appologizing for. She listened and I think she finally heard. She met my eyes and promised never to break the bedtime rules again. I believed in her sincerity and returned her blankets.

Hopefully she will remember this tomorrow night and she will stop pushing the limits in this direction. It is too much to hope for that she’ll stop pushing limits completely. I figure I’ve got another couple of months before this pushing phase is past for awhile.

Household quirkiness

By / August 7, 2006 / 20 Comments

Houses and the devices in them have a tendency toward quirkiness. It usually happens slowly and I adapt to the quirks so that I hardly notice them until I have to explain them to someone else. Then I start feeling silly for putting up with such an obviously defective gadget.

I’m thinking about quirks because we just replaced all the doorknobs for exterior doors. The front doorknob wouldn’t unlock with a key, you could only unlock it from inside. This meant we had to use the bolt to lock the house when we left. But the bolt wouldn’t slide into place if the door was shut tight. Instead you had to shut the door loosely. The back door would bounce back open unless it was shut gently but firmly. The garage doorknob simply came off in my hand one day which prompted us to change all three.

While we were in a house fixing mood, Howard also replace the laundry room light switch. It didn’t turn off. Flip up = on. Flip down = on. There was one spot halfway between up and down that was off, but you had to carefully balance the switch into that position to get it to stay. The off spot was increasingly difficult to find and had begun requiring sideways motions. Very strange for a switch. Howard replaced it and it works normally. Now I just have adjust my habits of thought that tell me trying to turn off the light isn’t worth the trouble.

We still need to fix the switch in the girls’ bedroom which doesn’t have an ‘on’ position.

Our dishwasher is less quirky than it used to be. For a long time we had to make sure to hit the ‘cancel’ button in between dish loads. The water wasn’t completely draining out and if we didn’t empty it we’d end up washing the next batch in left over dirty rinse water. Frequent additions of vinegar to dish loads seems to have broken up the deposits that caused that problem. Our glasses are clean again.

The clothes washer still makes clothes smell funny unless I run one batch in three on hot water. Also it over flowed once, so I’m afraid to use it on the largest load size.

The kid computer sometimes doesn’t realize that it has a CD drive. This panics it so much that it won’t boot properly and has to be restarted.

My computer can not be on unsupervised because the cooling fan is dying. We’re going to get it fixed, but we keep getting distracted.

There is a lump underneath the wall to wall carpet in the family room. I’m pretty sure it is a loose piece of padding that failed to get pulled up when the carpet was replaced.

The keyboard tray on the kid’s computer desk often gets jammed underneath the desk. I have to hit it at exactly the right angle to jar it completely off track and then I can manhandle it back into position.

The fronts fell off of three of our kitchen drawers rendering them unusable and ugly. We used duct tape on one of them so that it could still be used for our silverware. I still have the drawer fronts, but we need to build new drawer boxes for them to attach to.

The water line in our fridge sometimes freezes up so that no water will come out. It seems to have to do with too much ice in the bin becuase emptying the bin will cause the line to unfreeze about an hour later. When the line unfreezes it spits some water out onto the floor.

All of the labels on our fusebox are only mildly accurate depictions of what throwing that fuse will actually turn off.

Funny how we’ll live with a minor annoyance for years without thinking about it. Some of those things would be easy to fix, we just never seem to get around to doing it.