Autobiographical Notes: Education-Biology 101

My education was proceeding nicely.  I was learning the way children should learn: at their own pace, taking in information in whatever order I needed it to explain the world around me. I occasionally picked up useless bits of information that I didn't need immediately, and I stored them away, figuring they might come in handy later in life, once I got to go past the main gate without that damn dog dragging my butt back to the house.

Every few months, all of us kids would get scrubbed clean, loaded on the bus, and  hauled to Chattanooga to take achievement tests required to show that we were learning up to the same level as public school kids. What a joke.  The overall level of education would have been greatly improved if the State had required all the public school kids to come out to our farm and let us teach them how to run through a cow pasture without stepping in a fresh cow patty.  The ability to shag fly balls in cow pasture softball and not have your Nikes become bovine scat collectors requires a level of hand-eye-foot coordination that you just can't learn anywhere else.  That sub-conscious attention to the environment gives country kids a cognitive advantage in life.  We make note of, and learn from, things that children educated in a sterile playground never even notice.

I had taken and passed the 7th grade standardized test for home schooled students and was well into the High School Curriculum when, just before my tenth birthday, a traumatic event occurred and changed my life forever.  Puberty.  I was not prepared for this. I had read about it. Puberty was something that happened to old people: you know – teenagers.  I wasn't even ten yet and here this debilitating, age related affliction was attacking my lovely prepubescent body.   I was devastated. I was growing boobs. I mean, I had plans for that year:  trees to climb,  brothers to harass, frogs to gig, snakes to catch.  And every morning when I'd get up, my center of gravity would have left a forwarding address. In six months I grew three inches vertically. My body had apparently forgotten how to walk. Then my scrawny little golf club shaft of a body began to fill out.  And out.  And out. By my twelfth birthday I had reached my final adult size. 4'10-3/4” tall. 32C-20-32. With muscles.

During this two year period I was way too clumsy and uncoordinated to do much roaming around by myself.  I still spent four or five hours a day outdoors doing chores and taking care of the kennel which had somehow become my domain. The rest of my time was spent indoors reading and studying.  I actually had textbooks and everything! By my tenth birthday (03 July 1986) personal computers were fairly common even if they weren't very powerful. I was enrolled in an accredited correspondence based High School so that I could get a diploma without having to wait until I was 18 to take the GED.  Being that we were in the age of HighTech®, all of the correspondence was done via an online BBS hosted on CompuServe. Access was via a 300 baud dial-up modem (later 1200 then 2400).  They could actually overnight a disk with assignments faster than we could download them.

I finished all the required course work in September 1988 with a GPA of 3.9 out of 4.  The one flaw in my perfect academic record was a biology course in genetics in which I received a D.  The text used in the class was outdated and wrong.  I submitted breed records from our farm to prove my point and current research from the University of Tennessee that agreed with my data.  I was told that the text in use was the best available and was the standard in the field. Ergo, I was wrong.  Bad call on their part.  The Scientific Method says theory has to account for observed results or you have to adjust your theory.

The school wouldn't issue my degree until I turned 13 in July of 1989 which gave me nine months with nothing to do but try to correct this imbalance in the intellectual equilibrium of the universe. So I wrote to the publisher of the text book and pointed out the error of their ways.  And they agreed.  They already had a second edition in the works but it wouldn't be available for another year at the earliest. Meanwhile, they issued an addendum to the existing text that corrected the chapter on genetics and agreed that my answers had, in fact, been correct.

I finally graduated on July 5, 1989 with 24 credits and a 4.0 GPA.  Whee!!!!1111!! I'd been a teenager for two whole days, I can't drive, I can't legally consent to have sex, I can't legally work more than 10 hours a week (somebody tell my parents that—please), but I have a high school diploma.  I'm set for life.  All I have to do now is hang out till I'm 18.

Autobiographical Notes: I was a free range young-un

I was reared by hippies and grew up living on a communal farm. My parents – all five of them – were poly-amorous.  There was always a house full of kids and no one seemed concerned with who belonged to whom.  We were expected to obey any of the adults who lived there, even the ones just passing through.  We all knew who our mothers were and a few of us knew, for one reason or another, which of the two men had actually fathered us. The farm was officially owned by my biological father, who everyone simply called Doc. Papa Bill was the other man in the house.  He was married to Mother Sarah.  Doc was legally married to Mother Celeste, my mother, but he always slept alone.  Momma didn't. She shared her bed with Mother Anna.  They all five shared one large room with three beds.

Daddy passed away in  1998 when I was 22.  He had set up a corporation to own the farm and issued 25 shares of stock.  In his will he left one share to each of the surviving parents and one each to the  21 siblings who had grown up on the farm.  This was the first time in my life I actually knew how many brothers and sisters I had.  As it turns out I have two brothers and two sisters who are full siblings.  Seven others are half siblings – two have the same mother and five the same father as I – and of the other nine, one is a neighbor girl who was being abused and  came to our house for protection and the rest are offspring that have no blood relation.  To avoid legal hassles, Doc and Celeste legally adopted every one of the children before they were a year old – except for Hope, who was 10 when she came to us for shelter.

I was a free range young-un.  By the age of three I had taught myself to read and had more or less learned how to walk upright. Shortly after my third birthday momma put a harness on me, attached me to one of the German Shepherds and told the dog to make sure I didn't do anything stupid.  Then she pointed me out the door, told me to go explore the world, and that if I had any questions come back and ask.  Otherwise, she'd see me when I was 16 and ready for a drivers license. In the meantime, she reminded me, don't be late for dinner.  I wasn't totally sure what the word meant but I was pretty certain that I had just been weened.

Before you start condemning my mother for child neglect, keep in mind that there were five adults, fourteen older children and a German Shepard nanny that out weighed me by a hundred pounds to look out for me.  For the next seven years I wandered around the farm, got dirty, got in the way, asked all kinds of questions, and without anyone telling me it was happening, I was home schooled. And seldom late for dinner. I read everything I could get my hands on (a lot of it not necessarily age appropriate) and I learned who I could ask about certain things and when to keep my mouth shut.  Up to a point.  I never have quite mastered that art.

I'll continue with My Autobiographical Notes next time with  'Education: Biology 101'

Synchronized Snoring

Yesterday's anticipated heat wave amounted to a blazing high of 33° F.  Nothing thawed. The body count in front of the fireplace has actually increased by two.  That's an even dozen people in the living room, four in the office, Emily and I in the loft above the office, and six more in the two bedrooms in the basement.   So, I'm lying here listening to the collective breathing of everyone and wondering what kind of load rating I used when I designed the floor trusses for this place.   Twenty-four people in a cabin I designed to be cozy for just Emily and I!

Well, it's just real  cozy about now.  I'm writing this at 3:00 AM while listening to the whole damn family snore, in unison.  Except for Emily, the poor dear.  Em and I have lived together for eight years now and my family considers her one of us.  Her genes,though, just don't quit know how to adapt to some our ways.  Like, apparently, snoring together.  She's just not quite in sync.  In fact, she's so out of sync that it's driving me nuts.  So I wake her up.

If there were an empty couch in this house, I'd be sleeping on it for the next week.

We've been having WEATHER

I really didn't intend to skip ten days without posting but Mother Nature is a bitch. When you live on a farm, even if you claim you don't work there, when the weather goes to hell, you either work or get disowned.

We're in the middle of the longest, coldest winter freeze the region has seen since 1985. The long underwear I had in 1985 has long since been eaten by moths and I've grown a bit since then ( I was 9 that winter ). There used to be equipment here to handle this kind of cold but none of it has been used in 25 years and most of it refuses to work any more. So everyone, whether we're dressed for the occasion or not, has been drafted and has been working overtime hauling feed and water for the critters. And we're counting ourselves among the critters. One third of the houses on the farm are without water and one quarter are without heat and power. Anyone with a fireplace is very popular right now. I only have two bedrooms but I've got ten people sleeping in front of the living room fireplace. One of my sisters, her husband, and two daughters have commandeered my office for the duration.

It's supposed to get above freezing tomorrow for the first time in over ten days. Which means all the pipes will thaw and leak and the nice solid frozen ground will turn to mud. And we all shift from disaster response to cleanup and repair.

I'd tell you that life should be back to normal by March but I live on a farm: this is normal.

It seemed like as good a time as any.

I've been intending to start a blog forever but just never got around to doing it.  Well, today seemed like the perfect time.  It is, after all:

• The end of the month.

• The last day of the year.

• Tonight will be a Blue Moon**

• But it is not, as the news media would have you believe, the end of the decade!

I find it totally baffling that 80% or better of the college graduates in the United States still don't grasp the concept of zero.  Zero is a place holder for nothing.  Zip. Nada.  We don't have any.  It's been a real handy digit this past year when balancing my check book.  But with a calendar there is never a case when you have a year with no time in it.  You never have a year zero.  You always start with the year 1.  And decades always end with the year 10 (or a multiple thereof), centuries end with (century x 100), and millennium with (m x 1000). You can argue common and accepted usage until you're blue in the face but it doesn't change the mathematical fact that the first decade of the second millennium won't end for another year.

** Today the commonly accepted definition of a "Blue Moon" is when there are two Full Moons in the same calendar month.  According to SkyandTelescope.com this is historically inaccurate, and it's their fault.