I Like Friday

My tooth/jaw was fine but it's flared up again and it's late and I don't have the energy to put forth the effort for a thorough blog post tonight so some quick things...

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and mother had a phone date to talk when I picked her up today.  Due to some things changing around with our schedule, when my mother called, I was sitting in the basement at our house and my husband was on the way to pick her up so I sent her over to his phone to have her phone conversation with her on the ride home.   Apparently, they had a nice time catching up as they rode home on the nice, sunny Friday afternoon.  A very nice way to kick off the weekend. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son said he believed in moderation today on the ride home.  He was talking to his father over the phone and me in the driver's seat.  He said he wanted to have screens in balance with other things like playing with friends outside.  He was going to go out any time they knocked on the door. He was going to go knock on other doors of friends.  He also said it would work well if we could give him a reason to get off the computer that might help motivate him and "train his brain" to break from the current activity.  He said he wouldn't yell at us (which happens when he gets upset, even though that's not what he intends to do, high emotions take over sometimes.)  He was going to have a balance and as such, could we not subject any specific rules about times or hours he should or shouldn't be on the computer or other screens.   Tonight after asking and then reminding and then telling him to get off the computer by his father, I came in and said it had been a full additional thirty minutes, and whatever it was he 'had to finish' was well and truly beyond any level of reasonable expectation.   He jumped up, turned off the computer, and then proceeded to yell at us.   He had been on the computer for six hours straight, stopping five minutes to eat a hotdog.  He yelled at me, said I was mean and tried to mock me by imitating my gesticulations.   Said all sorts of things that now that he was off the computer, he felt sure were the case even though they hadn't been.   He was livid, wanted to leave, insisted he just wanted to go to sleep and we were keeping him from doing so (except he had just been on the computer with no signs of stopping).  All his reasons were defeated.   His behavior was the exact thing he said he was not going to do.  His disrespect of me had me now the gatekeeper of any computer time instead of his father.   Tomorrow, he will have to have a lot of that other half of the balance he talked about and a whole lot of respect if he expects to have any computer time.   The thing is, his ideas today were such good ones.  I hope he can execute on them better in the future, because I'd like to have him more in control of reasonable screen time himself. 

The Lemonade Stand

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Lemonade Stand Calculation:  After dinner tonight my son came to the table with a pencil and piece of paper with his sister trailing behind.  They had decided to create a family lemonade stand—a theoretical one.  How much money could we make if we had a lemonade stand?   It would be fun.   We would all be a part of the process of discovering if and how we could have a successful lemonade stand. 

He started explaining how they did this at school for the pizza they ordered for the class one day each week.   There was a grid and numbers would be entered.  It was a system, he assured us;    worked for a good while on explaining the things we'd need to know while my husband and I gave information that would help the calculations be reasonable and the exercise completable in less than five hours. 

We all contributed information and at the end they were happy that all the lemonade and limeade had been sold.  They had made some money too.   Then my husband had them calculate how many hours they had worked to get the lemonade sold.   Then he had them figure out how much money they made per hour.  It was something like $1.25.   

I thought they would be disappointed by that, but they were the opposite, they had a job of sorts and they had made money!  Seventeen dollars across two days.   That's a lot when you're ten and eleven I suppose.  

Gimbal

I got a gimbal in today.  I can't tell you how excited I am about this because it is going to enable me to do the kinds of amazing camera things you see in videos made by professionals.   I am so much of an amateur photographer and videographer that I am just beyond the turning the camera on and pushing the button stage.   Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but taking quality videos is very complex.  It is so much more complicated than I would have thought it could be. 

With a quality camera, certainly taking good videos would be easy, right?  As it turns out, that's not so at all.  You have to know how to set up the shot and most importantly, what settings you need to have for the camera in order to get the best image or video possible for the setup.   It's fiendishly complicated and it is not made any simpler by a fancy camera.  That only adds to the number of options you have to choose from. 

This is something my husband has excelled at learning since we started taking photographs and videos of the 3D printing.   One thing we've had difficulty doing is getting stable shots of things or shots that pan across the models in a smooth way.   This gimbal will give us a lot of digital control over how we move the camera and will move it not only smoothly while we clumsily move around, it will make the motions for us while we have the gimbal staying still.  

And this is a good thing.  Except it is another product with its own set of software we'll need to learn to integrate into the already complicated camera itself.   I have a feeling I'm going to be looking at a lot of YouTube videos to learn it in the coming weeks. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son counted up all his bills he'd been saving and rolled them up to store into a combination codex he created from one of the KiwiCo kits we got in the mail recently.   He had "fifteen" cents in the total of bills when he was proudly telling me about it.   The fifteen cents was some foreign money he'd been given that apparently has an exchange rate of about fifteen cents he'd asked Alexa about. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been wearing something that will help her wake up in the middle of the night when she needs to go to the bathroom.   She will sleep through it sometimes and wake up as she's starting to wet the bed, resulting in panic on her part.   I don't blame her, I'd panic too.  She needed an extra boost to help her wake up and this little device has helped train her brain to wake up more.   Hopefully, she won't need it soon enough.

Agony

I had odd dental work today.  My dentist removed an implant, which was brutal with some extreme torque on my jaw before the old implant released.   Then, before he put the new implant in (with bone granules to improve its ability to mesh with my own bone) he did a sinus tap. 

What is a sinus tap, you ask?  I'm ever so glad you did.  It's where he takes a spike and a mallet and whacks up deep inside your jaw where the distance from your sinus is very, very thin.  He whacks until the bone inside your head cracks so he can screw the new implant in such that it can impeed into the sinus area by just a millimeter or so so there is more room for the implant to connect bone-wise over time. 

Let me tell you friends, 'tap' is not the word.  'I was fine until I got home later and the blood clot dislodged, leaving some exposed jaw bone in a position to get air on it.   This is similar to what you may have heard of as dry sockets for wisdom teeth removal.   

I thought I could take pain, but this was sheer agony.  For about an hour I was holding my head, which was throbbing in the most awful of ways.  I was icing my face, putting ice against my open wound area, and trying not to fall over when the pain happened again and again.   

I was moaning and rolling around on the bed, unable to get away from the pain.  Finally, I closed my mouth and didn't open it.   The phone was ringing but no way was I answering it or talking to anyone else who wanted needed anything from me.  I just lay there and hoped it would pass. 

Keeping my mouth closed helped.   Trying not to talk was tough though.  You know me. 

The tissues should have covered the exposed bone by tomorrow and hopefully, I can talk again. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son threw an epic tantrum about screens and being bored tonight.  Insults, stamping and stomping around and nothing got him screens.  When he accepted that fact he turned back into a normalized child again.  Amazing how that works. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We found out the only qualifier for nationals at the regional competition for the Braille Challenge this year is our daughter.   She is so excited, more so than she is letting on.  We're pretty darned excited too.  

Being Someone

Today was an odd day.  I was just another person watching 3D printing videos and buying filament.  Then we embark on this Filament Stories endeavor and now things have changed.  I had an hour-long video call with one of the content creators I've been watching for years.  He wanted to get to know me so he could have me as a guest on his channel.   We had a good time getting to know each other and he gave me some ideas of things he'd been thinking of doing but thought it might make more sense for me to do. 

He also asked for my advice on the current climate of social media and content creation.   We're going to have a second call next week because there are some things we might work on together.  It was a very casual call with someone whom I never would have thought I would be collaborating with on anything, ever. 

Then, this evening at ten, I was given a special tour of a large Chinese filament manufacturer.  The owner had an interpreter available to help as he doesn't speak English.  That surprised me because he and I have been messaging back and forth since last year.   He responds quickly, perhaps he has an auto-translation feature but for all I could tell, he was fluent in English from the way he messaged me. 

This large company wants to know if we could collaborate.  This is a company I've worked with as they came into the US market and have helped them get a positive foothold with the videos we've done.   He is creative and doing things no one else is doing.  He is very generous with helping me and I try to be equally generous in helping them.   

It was an odd day.   I'm still not sure how to act sometimes, but since the best thing I know how to do is be me, that's what I do.  

The Flavor Gummy Story:  I got a bag of what I would call gourmet gummy bears today whilst getting some black-out material for our time-lapse rack since the prior material is too small.  There were twelve flavors and the colors didn't give away what they were.  I told them if they got the flavor correct, I would give them another.  And then I realized I didn't know what flavor was what, so we decided to figure it out.  This is what my son did to lay them out.   We all tried some and I tried not to think about little hands handling the gummies more than once.  We could only figure out eleven flavors.   We don't know if we missed one that was colored similarly or if we just didn't get any of that one.

Banned Worries

We are at the mercy of things larger than we are and out of our control and we're putting ourselves into that position more and more as technology and our dependence on electronic media grows.   Today, a friend of ours woke up at 4AM to find his TikTok account banned.  He had 3.7 million followers and has been creating content in the 3D printing space the entire time.   

His videos are family-friendly, he doesn't swear or use bad language of any kind.  He is supportive of everyone, never says inflammatory things, is non-confrontational, and doesn't pick fights or respond when people say unkind things about him.  He is a positive person who wants to inspire adults, children, and families interested in 3D printing.   He's a very kind person and I'm glad I've had a chance to get to know him.

He doesn't know why his account was banned as there is no information as to what the reason was.  He doesn't know if it was a particular video and if so, typically a video is removed for not adhering to community guidelines in that case.  We've had that happen to us twice, both times by the algorithm going through the videos and thinking there was something that shouldn't be there.  Both times we appealed and the video was restored.   

Ben said that with an audience his size, he invariably had people report him for various things but that the reports were always declined.  So he's left not knowing why his account was banned and little recourse to try and get the decision reversed.   The reason I'm writing about this is that it has been alarming to those of us who have been working alongside Ben, creating similar content in the same space, making family-friendly videos that aren't inappropriate, and being supportive of all people.    Could the same thing happen to us?

We don't know.  We all hope Ben gets his account back, in the meantime, there is little we can do other than to let people know he has started over, from scratch, with his personal account and to warn them that the impersonator accounts (he was not verified, so he also can't appeal these fake accounts) are not him.   I hate it for him. 

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Biting Trampoline Update:  On the trampoline today there were three large boys, my son a six-year-old, and a two-year-old.   That's two too many.  I yelled out to drop it to four.  I yelled out a few minutes later to drop it to FOUR!   When that didn't cause action in a few minutes I stormed outside and yelled at them all that if they could not respect the well-known rule of four on the trampoline at one time, everyone was going home.  I got some, "I'm sorry" responses.  This was in part anger due to my ten and eleven-year-old children getting in a fight and biting each other.  Biting?  Really?   My daughter cried and went outside to make sure they didn't go home but my son came in and was screaming at me.  He was utterly embarrassed.   I had a very intense conversation with him about our potential liability if the very small little boy got hurt (or anyone for that matter).  My son didn't care.  He went on about how they all hated me and I said I would rather be hated if it took the rules being respected.   My son said we should write them down.  I reminded him that it was on the trampoline laminated beside the entrance.  He told me to just go into the bedroom and leave him alone.  So I did, and I locked the door. he said a lot of other mean things.  I called my husband to tell him what had happened and my son told him when he came home how sorry he was for what he said.  He came to find me later and hugged me and told me he was sorry.   I hugged him and told him I loved him very much.  

Strawberry Patch

I don't even know what to write at this hour it's so late so I'll make it quick.  I didn't feel great today.  Not ill, just not ready to do whatever it is I needed to do for the day.  There is an issue with my Apple credit card that is a long story involving many interactions with their help.  It's not an issue on my side, or rather our side now as it has implications with our family sharing and so my husband ended up talking with the upper-level support when I was done with my phone for a good while.  They are flummoxed as to what is happening and how it got into such a state.  They are escalating it even higher up to see if the developers can figure out what happened so it won't happen to other people.   

I can make changes and nothing is in jeopardy, things are just not as they are supposed to be and we're not sure what Apple did to get things in such a state.   By the time I was done handling that, I was just ready to quit for the day so I took a nap.  Little did I realize it was seven at night already.  I love how it's light later these days. 

Oh, wait, my brain is working now.   We did something fun today which is why I was so surprised it was as late as it was when I got off the call.  We went and picked strawberries.   We had a nice drive over until the children got into a ferocious argument over who didn't want to go where for lunch, ending up in us going nowhere (as a bluff) until they got their heads on straight again.  After lunch, we went to the strawberry patch which was just a few miles from our house and I never knew it was there until today. 

There were so many strawberries you could fill a basket in ten minutes.  My son was "allergic" to them so he said and hasn't liked eating them for several years now but seeing all those fresh berries made him change his mind.  He and I went up and down the aisles, looking for the largest available.  My daughter and husband went down a few other rows and in only a short while we had two full baskets. 

Everyone had a really nice time.  I brought a small stool, but I hardly needed it because it was more of a walk down the row and grab what you wanted and then keep moving.  Aside from the initial unpleasantness of finding something to eat, everyone had a very nice time. 

It reminded me of my Aunt Pat who would pick strawberries and then give them to us sometimes when we would get together to see her and my cousin Rebecca.   I don't know why I associate freshly picked strawberries with Aunt Pat, but I always have.   She would give us a lot, which made me think even as a child that she must love the process of picking the strawberries.  I remember as a child that it wasn't as fun as what we did today.  It was more moving along and slowly finding some that were ripe and a lot of scooting along on the ground.  Today, these were huge and all over the plants so there were a lot less to pick and the job went ever so much more quickly.   I miss Aunt Pat. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son was touched by a bug in the bonus room yesterday.  He is suddenly completely afraid of bugs and wanted to eat inside at lunch today.  I wouldn't let him, saying if he let his brain win out with fear this time, then it would only get worse and worse and that I wanted him to beat his brain and not let it win.  By the end of lunch, he seemed back to normal and had completely forgotten about bugs when we got to the farm to pick strawberries. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was the one who wanted to pick strawberries in the first place.  She really had a good time.  I am not surprised in the least.  She ate a good bit more than I'm sure you're supposed to eat whilst picking them.