Sumas, Ho!

OK I think the Dudes on the Crane have had more than enough time above the fold. The memory of that waving leg still freaks me out, though as far as I could tell they were fine. (Really. Really. They were fine.)

I was going to tell the story of My Harrowing Second Annual Holiday-Mailing Trip Down to Sumas In teh Snow last Thursday, in four-part harmony, with feeling, but now it's been a few days and I'm afraid much of the narrative juice has leached out of it. Suffice it to say that the car started lurching and slowing down alarmingly a few miles down the highway, I pulled off at the first exit and drove around frantically (and ever more slowly) looking for a place to pull over, finally found a parking lot that belonged--joy of joys-- to an auto-supply shop! just as the car seemed to be getting over its ailment and speeding up again, pulled over, the guys inside spent a good amount of time brainstorming about my problem (and intermittently dissing VWs), they said it was probably not a crisis situation and gave me the name of a good VW mechanic.

On my way back out to the car I called RW, who said oh, yeah, she knew that mechanic, and also she knew that car problem, it had happened with her last year and the mechanic said it was moisture in the gas tank and put something in it to dry it up. I turned around & went back in & told the car guys that, and they said, Oh, We Know what he put in there, here, we'll sell you a bottle of it, pour half the bottle in the gas tank and then fill up with premium when you get down to the States (it's cheaper there), and sold me a bottle of something for $3.99.

So then all was well until I thought I missed my exit and got off at the next exit and then had to figure out where I was while also not getting stuck on a snowy side road (by the time you get that far East, all the cars have snow tires if they're driving off the highway. Except not me), somehow managed to find a gas station with only a little skidding around, got directions, got back on the highway, and then the car started lurching & slowing down just as I got off at the right exit.

So I lurched the few miles down to the border, whereupon I was hassled by the requisite A**hole Border Guy--they appear at random intervals and never when you expect them--who chided me for sealing the packages so he couldn't easily get a good look at them, but fortunately (for time's sake, not for what was in them, which was exactly what I said was in them) didn't insist on opening them then and there.

The post office itself was pretty straightforward, and everything got mailed, and then I stopped at a gas station & tried to fill up with premium, only the premium gas pump was frozen shut. So I drove home without even stopping for cheap cheese, or actually back to work because by then I was late for my 1:00 shift. It should've only taken two or three hours but it took four and a half. And I was very very cold.

Well. It felt heroic at the time. But it's hard to capture the magnitude of it. Because when you come down to it, I drove an hour on the highway, mailed some letters, and drove back.

In other news, today I feel like Norma Frickin Rae, in a similar spirit of exaggeration to that of the heroic epic above. If you ask me I will tell you about it.

And two people at work spontaneously wished me Happy Chanukah, which was pretty nice.

It's all lighter from here on out!

The Dudes on the Crane

This morning I went to a meeting for That Job. I had to wait in the snow and take the bus downtown, but I didn't mind. These meetings are generally pretty fun; I don't get to do much creative stuff myself, but I get to work with creative people and artists, and we spend a lot of time brainstorming and tossing around ideas and folding up pieces of paper and scribbling on them and such.

The meeting took place in a conference room in a big building. The room has one of those panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows, and across the street was a squared-out, sort of hollow construction crane at the same level as our floor-- that is, 9 stories up--and angled straight at us. At one point we were deep in discussion about some item we were trying to figure out how to make, when I looked out the window and saw that there was a leg sticking out of the bottom of the crane, sort of waving around, like maybe the guy crawling around in the crane had lost his footing on the snowy metal.

I must've gasped, because everyone else looked out the window too. The mood, which had been in turns raucous and purposeful, became charged--here we were, all together, a bunch of people who really didn't know each other that well, witnessing something that was either horrific--if the guy was in danger--or funny--if he wasn't--and it was obvious that in either case there was nothing we could do about it.

I covered my eyes. "I can't look, I can't look!" I cried. "I'm scared of heights! I can't even look!"

I looked again anyway. The leg was gone, pulled back into the boxy part of the crane, and then there it was waving out the bottom again. Then we saw another guy, crawling around inside the crane.

"There are two of them!" another administrator gasped.

"I'm pretty sure they wear harnesses," one guy said.

"They're fine," said someone. By then it seemed pretty clear that they were actually fine, or at least we decided that they must be, and we were overtaken by a wave of giddiness and black humor.

"And we wouldn't be able to see them hit if they fell, anyway," said someone else.

"I'm sure there's a trampoline down there," an artist reassured me. "They'd just bounce right back up."

"Maybe we should put up a sign in the window," the graphic artist suggested. "Like, DO YOU NEED HELP?"

Things went on in this vein for a few minutes, along with some discussions of equations regarding terminal velocity that seemed perfectly appropriate and hysterically funny at the time and now seem callous and horrifying. And then we went back to planning.

Tonight, one of the administrators emailed me some meeting notes that she's sending to our boss. I wrote back with a few of my own notes, and added that it was probably just as well that she hadn't included the part about the guys on the crane.

She wrote back to me: "I didn't include the part about the dudes on the crane because I never ever want to think about that again. :)"

And I know just what she means.

Checklist

Cards: Almost all done, except for a couple people whose addresses I have to get (and if you want one, and didn't get one last year, let me know-- we have lots!) Still need to be mailed, mostly in one big batch South of the border later this week.

Shopping: Done, mostly online. Except for RW. She is the toughest.

Packages: A couple of small ones still to go out. Need cardboard for mailing photos.

MG's photos: Wallet-sizes cut up, bigger photos allocated. Not all sent yet (see "Packages", above).

Menorahs and Hanukkah candles: unearthed.

Party this weekend, preparation for: Oh, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, right.

However, the art is all hanged! Hung? Hanged? Well, it's up, anyway.

Question of the Day

WHY is hanging pictures such a miserable thing?

I don't think even moving put this much strain on me and RW. Feh.

In Which I Rant About the Fiction of an Entire Country

I apologize in advance to all Canadian readers and writers. But I don't often feel inspired to produce a big literary rant, and so I thought I'd better get this one down before I forget.

The Renaissance Woman and I have been interviewing for lots of library jobs. Sometimes, during these interviews, we're asked to talk about something we've read lately. Sometimes, since we're in Canada, our interlocutors want to know about a Canadian book we know well enough to talk up.

Here's my problem: I find much mainstream critically acclaimed Canadian grownup literature to be...depressing.

I know, I know, it's not fair to generalize about a whole country's literature. But, here, here are some prominent, bestselling and/or award-bedecked Canadian authors/books, and quick summaries therof. Draw your own conclusions:

Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: Depressed and miserable Mennonite family, struggling to communicate with each other and in constant fear being shunned by their stultifying community. And RW says her new book is even sadder.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X and other works: Alienated professionals in their twenties and thirties, living in anomie and isolation, working in cubicles.

Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals: Alienated and miserable young girl whose parents are heroin addicts.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries. I'll just give you the Wikipedia summary: "The fictional autobiography about the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy struggles to find contentment, never truly understanding her life's true purpose."

Alice Munro, virtually the entire oevre of: Short stories about miserable women, often unhappy in their marriages and/or living in isolation in the countryside or in stultifying small towns. Sometimes, for variety, their children run away and the protagonists never see or hear from them again.

Margaret Laurence, virtually the entire oevre of: Novels, similarly depressing to the above.

Ann-Marie Macdonald, Fall on Your Knees. God, I loved this book. But it's incredibly bleak. Spoiler alert: early on, a woman dies while giving birth to premature twins. As the family reels in grief, the twins' older sister takes one of the babies out to the river, believing it must be baptized to be saved. Of course, the baby dies of exposure. The rest pretty much follows from there as everyone is overwhelmed with grief and guilt for hundreds of pages.

Anita Rau Badami, Tamrind Mem: Actually, not quite as depressing as the others. But still: nobody knows how to talk to each other, nobody understands each other, the whole family is basically mired in mutual recriminations and incomprehension. Our heroine eventually decamps from India to Canada, where she continues to feel baffled by and isolated from her mother and sister.

Okay, I will give you Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies. They are not depressing, or not as much. Yes, terrible things happen in their books: people die, people betray each other; in one recent Atwood the entire human race basically goes extinct and comes close to taking all the other species with it. But still, there is a certain spark and irony which lively things up a bit.

It's true that bad things happen in ALL literature, all over the world. Or we would not have plot. And I do understand that without the mandatory happy endings and/or hopeful coming-of-age themes of children's and YA fiction, things can get kind of bummed out in general, and that this is not specific to Canadian literature.

Truth is, I can't claim anything like a comprehensive knowledge of CanLit, so maybe it's rash to draw conclusions. I have not yet read the new Karen X. Tulchinsky book, for example, the one all of Vancouver is reading this winter. And I hear Ivan Coyote's stories are good, and funny. And from the little I've read of Nalo Hopkinson, she's terrific and not at all depressing.

But I don't think it's a coincidence that the three authors I just mentioned are each non-mainstream in at least one big way: lesbian, transgender, African-Canadian, genre ghetto (science fiction).

Nor is it coincidence that I kept wanting to use the same words when describing the books above: Anomie, isolation, bleak, hopeless. Over and over, Canadian literary heroes and heroines live their lives in despair of ever truly connecting with the people they are supposedly closest to. Over and over, they face lives of isolation and loneliness, often in inhospitable environments.

I mean, even the Brits aren't as depressed as this in their literature, and they've had it way worse, what with the Blitz and the lack of central heating and the brutalizing boarding schools and all.

(Oh and then there's Stuart Maclean, who is funny and un-depressing (mostly). But his stories are really humorous radio pieces, written for the ear, not the page. It's a different kind of writing.)

But be that as it may...what gives, Canada? Why so blue?

Wonderland

We interrupt this blog to bring you the following breaking news:

SNOW! SNOW! IT'S SNOWING! IT'S BEAUTIFUL! IT'S PERFECT! IT'S REALLY SNOWING! NOW IT'S COMING DOWN HARDER! IT'S LIKE A WATERFALL OF SNOW, AND NOT A SLOW WATERFALL, A FAST WATERFALL! I THINK IT'S STICKING! MOMMY, LOOK, IT'S STICKING TO THE ROOF A LITTLE BIT OVER THERE! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! SNOW! AREN'T YOU HAPPY, MOMMY? SNOW!!!

OMG!

We have Olympics figure skating tickets!!

(Well, not the actual tickets yet, they'll be mailed later.)

We put in for men's, women's, and pairs figure skating, figuring we might get one of them if we were lucky. And we got men's short program.

Considering the overwhelming demand for tickets, it feels like we won the lottery. I guess we did, though we're paying them rather than the other way around. (The VanOc email was somewhat confusing, so I confirmed that we did actually get tickets by checking our Visa account, and, yep, there's a big new charge there, so I guess we really bought them.)

Her Voice is the Loudest (in our house, at least)

So, the Annual Santastravaganza Performance at the Mermaid Girl's school was today. I went to both shows: the afternoon one full of little siblings and grandparents, and the packed-to-the-gills evening one, and both were very good, and MG's class did a nice job with their dance.

Just like last year, the theme was all about how wonderful Santa is and how all the little children are waiting breathless for his arrival. At least this year there was a literary tie-in; it was based on The Polar Express. I felt for MG, though, especially at the end where the protagonist has a little speech about how the silver bells will always ring for all who truly believe. Aside from the Jewish thing, RW doesn't believe in encouraging kids to believe in Santa, and so MG has never believed although at times I know she has wanted to, and has wanted Santa to come. She believes in Nisse (still), and the Tooth Fairy (sort of), but, as she said to me somewhat wistfully the other night, "I know Santa can't be real, because if he was, he would come to everyone, right?"

So I felt for her, being inundated with all that singing and dancing and pontificating about Santa and Presents and Sleigh Bells and Belief. Afterwards, when we were home eating our macaroni and cheese and she'd graciously received congratulations and we'd talked about which parts we liked the most, I asked her which was harder for her at school, the stuff about Santa or the stuff about Jesus.

"The Jesus stuff," she said. "But don't tell Rona." (Her very kind, very Catholic after-school caregiver and surrogate grandma.)

I was surprised; I'd been sure she'd say Santa, and that my frothing at the mouth about those religious songs she's singing in choir was just my own baggage.

"You know," I said, "I decided not to make a fuss about you singing those songs about Jesus, because I didn't think you'd like it if I did. Was that right?"

"Yeah," she said.

"Were you worried I might?"

"Yeah!" She looked relieved.

"I also didn't think it would be fair to Mrs. Ito [the choir director], especially since you started in the choir so late in the year. I thought she might be kind of upset if I asked her to change the songs in November."

"Yeah!" MG said. "She'd be going crazy! And then she'd be like, [pompous voice that's not like the fabulous Mrs. Ito at all] 'Children, we have to learn ALL NEW SONGS, because MG is a Jew!'"

She put this lovely fruity funny curlicue on the word "Jew". Then she did a handstand. I cracked up, in amazement as much as anything. I hadn't realized she'd thought the whole thing through with such insight.

"And that would be so much fun for you!" I said. She cracked up.

Then I told her I had been thinking about going to talk (nicely and kindly) with Mrs. Ito in January, and asking if, since they're singing religious songs in choir, they could include a song or two about Hanukkah next year, and would that be okay with her? I was surprised at how enthusiastic she was about that prospect, so I guess I really will do it.

Then she sang me the offending songs, "Away in a Manger" and "Silent Night." I refrained from correcting her pitch.

You know, I think she's old enough now to take part in our annual reading of Grace Paley's "The Loudest Voice."

Standing on a Table

This is for people everywhere who are facing the prospect of doing something they are scared of. (You know who you are.)

Let YA author John Green inspire you!

Job Updates

So, I interviewed for a job today. It's a job in a system I'd very much like to work in, doing something I'd very much like to do.

I probably won't get it, since hiring is determined about 90% by seniority. Still, I think I did all right at the interview.

It helped that last week I phoned someone I knew was on the hiring committee, to ask about the job and what they were looking for. It never would have occurred to me to do this-- in fact, I was under the distinct impression that calling ahead to ask questions of someone on the inside was sort of cheating. Wouldn't you think? But a friend and mentor who's been in the system for a long time urged me to do it, and said it was important and expected. And indeed, the hiring person seemed fine with it, there were several interview questions that I wouldn't have known how to answer if I hadn't talked with her beforehand.

On the other hand, in this system you're not allowed to use any notes during your interview. I couldn't refer to my resume or break out my hand-written book log to jog my memory about my favorite titles.

It all seems kind of arbitrary: why allow someone to call ahead and get tips? Why not allow someone to use notes? At other systems, it's the exact opposite.

In other news: RW has been Abroad, on a business trip, for the last two days. Isn't that glamorous? She had to do a presentation and was all worried about it, but yesterday she sent an email saying they'd liked it so much they asked her to present it again that afternoon!

She comes home tomorrow. MG and I can't wait.

Bechdel Victorious

I'm a fan of Alison Bechdel from way way back. I remember reading early Dykes to Watch Out for strips--before it became a serial featuring Mo and the gang, even; when it was just a series of observations on lesbian life--in the dinky little NYC queer paper, when I was just out of college, just out as a lesbian, and floundering around in a post-college haze in the big city. I felt like Bechdel was my companion in the bewildering maze of grownup lesbian life, and I went on feeling like that for a good decade or more. Her characters are mostly five or ten years older than me, and their lives and problems aren't too far off from mine and my friends' a lot of the time.

When her graphic novel Fun Home came out a couple of years ago, I was as wowed as anyone else, but was...bemused to see Alison Bechdel hailed as if she'd come out of nowhere, when she's had a passionately devoted fan base for lo these twenty years. I bet I'm not the only one who still has a DTWOF T-shirt tucked away, and one or two greeting cards from back in the 90's, when she was still selling novelties.

And now the great Gray Lady has noticed that she was here all along.

Wow.

I feel really happy, but...old.

I stand defeated at 20 Questions

Things the Mermaid Girl made us guess at Twenty Questions tonight:

• Roller coaster
• Armadillo
• Sea anemone
• For Sale sign
• Hellevator ride at the PNE

Uncle Skaterboy, his spouse, the Union King, and I were able to guess the first two, though it took us a while. The last three were me alone in the car, and they were hard!

Thoughts on Reading (Well, Skimming) This Week's New Yorker

• Is it just me, or does Naomi Klein sound like a truly irritating person? I can tell Larissa McFarquahar thinks she is, but is she really?

• On the other hand, I am less irritated by Tracy Morgan's character on 30 Rock than Nancy Franklin is.

• Articles by Ian Frazier and Adam Gopnik. Bonanza! If only Malcolm Gladwell had one, too, the Trifecta of New Yorker Awesomeness would be complete.

• This whole issue gives the impression that the entire New York Metropolitan Area is battening down the economic hatches in a big way. But for most people I know, things are not so different than they were a few months ago. Maybe the economic crisis is less severe here in Vancouver. Or maybe the New Yorker people are looking more at the high fliers, who are bound to be more affected. Or maybe I just live under a rock.

Apropos of nothing, except maybe the Naomi Klein article: Could someone remind me what is the matter with liberalism? From the left, I mean, not the right. It came up in an online discussion a few weeks ago and has been nagging at me ever since.

I'm embarrassed to ask, because this is one of those things I should know already. But either I never did really know and only pretended to, or I once knew and have forgotten in the vagaries of middle age.

I asked RW, daughter of old lefties, and she started singing the old Phil Ochs song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal." She then glossed it, explaining that liberals are reputed to be hypocrites who only care about being liked.

And, okay, but I mean aside from that.

Skip This One if you Hate Lists

Today, I am going to brag. And also to descend into listiness. Because I have been very very productive in the last two days.

Here's what I did yesterday:

--Had the Energy Evaluation people here for two hours while they tested our house
--Went over their report and made my own list of improvements we can do which might earn us a rebate from the govt. and maybe even a bonus if we do enough stuff.
--Worked on That Job for an hour
--Billed my freelance blogging job
--Compiled all our Extended Medical receipts and filled out the reimbursement form. (This was major. It took two hours, and required two different phone calls to various entities.)
--Picked up the Mermaid Girl from school, and while on the playground asked her friend's mom for a childcare favor for next week
--Drove MG to circus
--Bought groceries
--Did dishes
--Arranged for a friend to come over & play with MG for this afternoon
--Made my super-special Deviled Eggs for RW to take to her library's xmas lunch party this afternoon
--Reviewed and signed MG's report card (she's doing very well in everything except time management and speaking up in class. And her attendance record bizarrely lists eight absences for the month of October, which I think may have been a mistaken recording of some of her many late arrivals).

And today!

--Worked on That Job for two hours, and got things moving at long last
--Had a pre-interview interview on the phone with someone who's going to interview me for a job next week
--Worked at my regular job for seven hours
--Photocopied all the Extended Medical receipts before I send them in
--Encouraged RW, who is having her own contract job anxieties

Of course the bad news is that there is still incomprehensibly more to do than can be done in the time we have to do it. But still, it always surprises me when I get into a productivity jag like this, how getting things done makes me want to get more things done and it all makes me unexpectedly happy and cheerful. I think it's like stasis and momentum, where once a thing gets moving it wants to keep moving, and once it stops in front of the computer and sluggishly surfs the Internet that is all it wants to keep doing, forever and ever, unless jolted out of its static state.

More on That Job

It is SO HELPFUL to have the company of my invisible friends inside the computer. Thank you. The suggestions helped, and also made me laugh, especially Phantom's which is a trick I definitely use sometimes-- in fact, the spectre of the Freelance Job is probably responsible for more of my productivity in the rest of my life than anything else. Frequent rewards are good, too. I got a bit done yesterday, and will be talking on the phone with my boss today and then doing a bit more.

But ah, if only I could print the whole thing out and look at it! Or just buckle down and get it finished! I feel compelled to explain that this is a complex, year-long project, with many different aspects and plates to keep spinning, each dependent on one or more previous aspects and each with its own deadline, and involves coordinating disparate people (and sometimes groups of people) and also reporting to multiple people and entities, and scheduling meetings, and sometimes not knowing how much I'm supposed to be doing on my own and what I need my boss's okay for and what I can just decide independently, and sometimes something I thought was no biggie will in fact be an Issue that not only do I need my boss's okay for, but she has to take up to her bosses, who dither and make us all wait while meanwhile people are waiting on my okay and wondering when they'll be able to get going with the next piece.

Hmm. When I put it that way, it's no wonder I get scared and procrastinate.

The thing is, this is my second year doing this job (which is probably better described as "contract" than "freelance," now that I think of it), and last year felt perfectly justified in calling my boss every few weeks and saying "okay, what do I do now?", but since I've DONE it once already I feel like I should be able to just get down to it this time around, and yet I find myself paralyzed. Sometimes, like Rachel, I do procrastinate because I'm bored, but in this case--and this is what happens to me more often when it's work-related and not, say, housework--I procrastinate because I'm uncertain and scared and feel like I should know what I'm doing and yet I somehow don't.

It's a lot like what Baggage is writing about in this post: despite myself, I have the sense that someone else out there would really know how to do this job, while I'm just muddling along. Intellectually, I know that not only did I get hired, which means that as far as the Powers that Be are concerned I'm the best person to do it, but my boss specifically asked me to do it again this year and (despite what I felt like were all my mess-ups last year) that I did a really good job. But I can imagine what someone who was actually doing a good job would be doing, and it's a lot different from what I've been doing: they'd have charts and printed lists and sacrosanct weekly chunks of time set aside for this project, and would be unafraid and be constantly working backwards from the final deadline and keeping people in the loop and organizing meetings and phone conferences and, and, and...

I am not doing all that, or at least not in the manner of the Ideal Person. But I did somehow manage (with a lot of help) to get the project out the door in time for the final deadline last year, and it seemed to work okay, so I guess I can do it this year. And it's probably okay to keep asking my boss for help and feedback. It's different every year, after all.

Okay! Onward!

Because Working On My Own At Home Is Truly Not My Forte

...and also because I apparently have no self-discipline whatsoever and am freaking myself out about that,

would someone please, please tell me that:

a) I really need to get to work on my freelance library/project manager job, just focus for an hour or so, because there is stuff that needs to get done, and

b) I really need to not panic, because it is not Too Late Already and everything can indeed get done?

The challenges of keeping both (a) and (b) in mind simultaneously are causing me to hyperventilate and guiltily procrastinate such that I am neither having any fun goofing off nor getting anything accomplished. So if you have a blog and have noticed a disproportionate number of return hits coming in rapid succession from my part of the world (and you are not Andrew Sullivan, who actually posts every hour so, so that checking compulsively actually makes some kind of sense, though it is starting to freak me out and make me wonder if Andrew Sullivan is some kind of blogging robot or maybe a conglomerate), that may be part of the reason.

Turn It On Its Side and It's a Figure Meaning Infinity

Well, heck, let's see how long I can keep this daily-posting streak going.

One day in fourth grade, my teacher, Ms. Cantelmo, had a fit--remember teachers having fits?--she just lost it and started yelling at the whole class that we needed to get our acts together, buckle down and LEARN THE FRICKING MULTIPLICATION TABLES. Well, she didn't say fricking, but you get the idea. And that we'd better stop goofing off and go home and memorize those tables and have them learned by Monday.

I skittered off home in a panic. Of course it wasn't anything I'd done that had set her off, but I was sure we were going to have a big test on them on Monday and that I was going to FAIL because I did know some of the multiplication tables but I was a long ways from having them down, especially the 6's and 7's.

So I sat down in my room that night, on a chair in front of my little orange suitcase record player, and I listened to the Multiplication Rock album over and over and over until I could sing the songs by heart. Even the sevens, even though I didn't like Lucky Seven that much, I thought that rabbit was kind of irritating.

By Monday of course Ms. Cantelmo had forgotten all about it, but it didn't matter: I knew those tables backwards and forwards and up and down and sideways. Even today sometimes when I'm trying to remember, say, what twelve times eight is, I'll hear Blossom Dearie's voice in my head reminding me that it's the same as ten times eight plus two times eight: "80 plus 16...96!"

The Mermaid Girl is working on her multiplication tables now; apparently we've advanced mathematically here in North America and third grade is now the standard age for multiplication-table learning. Tonight I brought home Schoolhouse Rock on DVD from work, and we watched a scattering of songs--two or three as a reward after each step towards bedtime. By the time she'd done her homework, practiced the piano, put on her pajamas, fed the fish, and brushed her teeth, we'd run through most of Multiplication Rock and a fair bit of Grammar Rock. She got as big a kick out of the videos as I did--I'd forgotten how funny and clever the animation is--but I also saw her focusing during the math ones, mouthing the words to herself.

So now my kid will be taking up the fine old tradition of learning math facts from Multiplication Rock. Thank you, Bob Dorough. And thank you, Ms. Cantelmo, too, wherever you are.