Category: Culture

Camp every day! Camp all year round!

Posted on by Suki

This is my seven-year-old’s mantra this summer: Camp every day! Camp all year round!

That girl is just so darn happy. And no wonder: In school, you have to conform. Camp is about expressing yourself. In school, they try to get rid of your bad habits. In camp, they put up with them or turn them into art projects. In school, they tell you what you’re learning will be useful someday. In camp, what you’re learning is useful right now!

She has had two great camp experiences this year, and I wanted to write about both of them because we have a whole month left of summer (those of us who don’t attend PVUSD), so don’t give up on camp yet.

When my son was six, I read about Renaissance Camp and talked to a very happy parent, and we decided to try it out. It was fabulous, and he went for two summers. Luckily, the very happy parent warned me about the waiting list. She said, “Call them and find out which day and time registrations open online. Then put that on your calendar and register right as soon as it opens because they always fill.”

Renaissance Camp is all about hands-on art and science. Younger campers are joined by camp alumni who work as teen counselors. The staff is fabulous and they take amazing fieldtrips. This summer my daughter went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. My son’s group went to the Exploratorium. All expenses are included in the camp fees. You get a really great calendar each week telling you what they’re going to do. Your child comes home brimming with new ideas and insights. I have absolutely no complaints.

This year, however, things were different. The camp didn’t fill. The director was put on furlough so she couldn’t be there full-time. None of this affected the campers — they were happy as clams. But I noticed it. There was a sign up informing parents that there was space in all three sessions still. (The third session starts Monday, and I bet they still have room…) The staff seemed particularly interested in having us fill out evaluations — the County, of course, is looking for any way to cut funds, and a program for kids that didn’t fill this summer might look like an easy target.

After Renaissance Camp, we took some time off camp to travel and relax, then she was back at it with Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. Again, I have not one complaint to lodge. Like last year, the program was lovely, my daughter was very happy, and she learned a whole lot more than just soccer moves. I wrote an article about Santa Cruz Soccer last year and also blogged about it.

Like Renaissance Camp, Santa Cruz Soccer is also experiencing great declines in enrollment. It runs on a weekly program, with new sessions every week, so you can sign up anytime during the summer. Unlike Renaissance Camp, SC Soccer is not a County program. They can only function if they get enough money, and most of that comes from enrollment. And most of their enrollment comes from word of mouth (or in this case, fingers!).

It’s a hard time now for everyone, and one of the hardest things to judge is this thing they call “Consumer Confidence.” Even people who haven’t seen a decline in their income are starting to think twice about spending. The problem is, when confidence goes down we start to get a snowball effect: Those who have enough money start spending less, which results in fewer jobs and less tax revenue. In a county like ours, that means that services we have known and loved for years start to disappear. And once they disappear, they don’t necessarily just pop back into place when the economy starts up again.

In my own mind, I have to fight with this lack of confidence. When I spend the money on a camp, I remind myself that not only does it make my daughter extremely happy (camp all year round!) but it also supports our local economy and continues programs that I support. I’d hate to think that these wonderful experiences won’t be here for future Santa Cruz kids. The people providing these services lose their jobs, move on to something else, somewhere cheaper to live, and their accumulated experience can’t be replaced.

I’m fine with change, but not that kind of change!

So I guess my message for the day is this: If you have the money, camp is a great experience, and your choice of camps is out there this summer. These two camps are just two that I know have room, but I’m guessing most of them do. And many of them are probably offering discounts. And if you’re not in Santa Cruz, I’m sure this is happening communities across the country, too.

We’ve got one month left of time to offer your child the experience of taking joy in creation, movement, and invention.

As I told the owner of Santa Cruz Soccer, the most precious thing to me about the camp is that I see my daughter shining with success. She’s not always successful at other things she needs to do in life, but camp is all about success. And that’s a gift I’m happy to give her, each summer until the money dries up!

My edit for the day

Posted on by Suki

The thing about print media is that it’s absolute. This is something that I had trouble explaining to my clients in the early days of web design. “Print is static,” I’d explain. “The web is dynamic.”

They’d want to get their website “perfect” before it “went live.” I knew they’d be shocked at how often they’d want to change it, or their customers would want them to change it. I tried to warn them. Some of them got it.

Fast forward to these days, and print is positively last century. My husband and I did a lot of soul-searching before we canceled our newspaper, a huge deal for us. We love print. We love paper and ink and having books on our shelves.

But as a writer, I’m very happily in the digital age. Every time a piece comes into print, I start thinking about how I’d change it, what I’d add, what I’d leave out. But there it is, sitting in piles outside your favorite local kids’ clothing store. I have to let go, and let go I do.

But then again, I have a blog! I can fix things!

First up, my article about sunscreen in this month’s GUISC. Right after it went to print, I realized that I forgot The Whole Point that I should have been making. Oops. Sometimes we forget things.

It has to do with what was going on in my life three weeks in June: I sent my pale, obstinate, little wonder-child off to day camp. Pale: she needs sunscreen. Obstinate: she decides when she wants to do pretty much anything. Day camp: a place where they like to have fun and not be School, which is where they Make Kids Do Things.

Thus: I’m guessing your child’s camp is like my child’s camp. As I was writing the sunscreen article, and telling the world of Santa Cruz Parents how important it is to reapply it every two hours, it occurred to me that I’m a major offender in that category. I dropped her off one day and asked, “So, do you have a sunscreen reapplication time at noon, since you’re outside so much in the afternoon?” The camp leader looked at me thoughtfully, “Now that’s a good idea,” she said. “No, we don’t.”

I didn’t get the sense that today would be the day they’d start. Let’s face it, getting one obstinate child to apply her sunscreen sometimes ends in a battle of screaming, head-tossing, and occasional nasty language. Doing 30 of them? At summer camp? Gimme a break!

So here’s what I should have said in my article: It’s a great idea to ask your child’s camp whether they have sunscreen re-application time, and remind them that all sunscreens, regardless of variety, degrade in the sun and heat and need to be reapplied every two hours.

[Yes, the cynic in me is saying, Good idea: Fat chance!]

A few days later, a homeschooling friend sent a link to this blog about the various unknowns and partial-knowns about what a good sunscreen is and the possible dangers of ingredients in the sunscreens we use, and this website with recommendations of sunscreens that don’t have these possibly dangerous ingredients.

This is something I would have taken longer to decide whether to commit it to print. As you may have noticed, I don’t jump on every single bandwagon that rolls by. A lot of those bandwagons are driven by people who just love to drive bandwagons! They hear about a new supplement and they just want to be on that bandwagon! Then they hear about a dangerous pesticide and they want to be on that bandwagon!

Like anyone, I’d be pleased to have been in the right, say, when European doctors were prescribing thalidomide to pregnant women and American doctors said, Wait a second, we’re not so sure about this. But I also know that I didn’t jump on the bandwagon that was trumpeting a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, which has now been soundly disproven. (This may be a cartoon, but this is the very best summary of the whole thing I’ve read.)

So, you may freak out when you read that an ingredient in sunscreen is suspected of encouraging certain cancers. I, the daughter of a scientist, am rather more cautious. So about that I would say: consider keeping current with the recommendations about the types of sunscreen to use. For now, the Skin Cancer Foundation knows more about it than you or I do, and they’re still saying sunscreen is safer than repeated, blistering burns.

Feels better, too.

I say this as a card-carrying member of the highest skin cancer risk group. Not only do I have pale skin that pretty much never tans, and I get freckles, and some of the freckles have become darker and raised up in recent years, but as a child I knew nothing about sunscreen. I lived in Michigan, where I felt victorious if I could get a sunburn after a whole day being outside in the sweltering heat “laying out” with my friends (who always got beautiful tans, of course!).

When I was in high school, I went on a school trip to Mexico. It was a mind-opening experience, and I loved it till our last stop: a beautiful island off the coast near Cancun. There I sat on the beach and giggled when a Mexican boy sat down next to me and said, “You and me? We kees?” and I smeared on a little of whatever cream someone in the group had brought.

That night I was in agony. The next day on the plane, I was ill. For the next week, my body was in revolt, not from Montezuma’s revenge but from the second degree burns all over my body. My mother, not usually squeamish, enlisted my older sister to peel the skin off me in sheets. I was left with a lot more freckles, and a new statistical likelihood in my future.

In other words: Protect your children. Keep a watchful eye on what comes next in sunscreen research, but until then, do what is better than letting them burn.

That’s my edit for the day.

Making a greener home

Posted on by Suki

At some event we went to within the last few months, my husband noticed a booth sponsored by PG&E and AMBAG — The Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments. They had a program called Energy Watch, which has funding from PG&E to do free home energy audits. We’re always interested in figuring out what we can do to save energy (and money, which is not always the same thing), so it seemed like a good (and free!) option.

Each time we do something to the house, we’re trying to be conscious of balancing how “green” our choices are with the realities of life. It’s amazing to me how much our consciousness of these choices has changed since we bought our house in 1996. Then, it didn’t occur to me that living at the top of two very large hills might make it less likely that I’d ride my bike to the store rather than drive. Now that I have kids, no way am I going to race down the hill on our bikes if we need to haul a gallon of milk back up.

Similarly, back when we bought our house, solar technology existed but didn’t even enter my thoughts as I looked at the gorgeous redwoods and cypress that surround our house. I was appreciating the green… trees! Not noticing that the lack of sunshine hitting our roof meant that we couldn’t be green: no chance that solar panels would ever pay off, or even pay for themselves before they had to be replaced.

Back when we bought our house, we were charmed by the very high ceilings and the airiness of the house. Now, I shudder at all the money we spend heating up that air with our forced air heating system. When we bought our house, I was annoyed that there was a large front lawn, but I watered it anyway. Now, we just let it die every year. As someone said to me, they let their lawns die on the East Coast for months at a time…during the winter! Ours is lush and lovely during the winter, and bit by bit I’m getting rid of it through less thirsty landscaping.

We have done some very good things to make our house more efficient. When we did a big remodel (before we had kids, of course!), we replaced all the leaky windows with high quality double-paned ones. We try to keep all the doors well-sealed. We have programmable thermostats and as we get hardier, we keep lowering the temperature they’re set at. We have all low-flow toilets and showerheads, of course, and have replaced all the light bulbs we can stand to replace with compact fluorescent.

So we had our AMBAG audit, and our interviewer said that we’d probably done almost as much as we could. The big payoff of doing the audit, it turns out, is that we are going to be part of a huge survey of local homes, to find out what people are doing and what things they haven’t adopted yet. This will help set policy and make decisions about how best to create more energy-efficient homes.

Our interviewer said he was impressed by all we’d done, though I always feel like we haven’t done enough. He promised to get us some answers to our questions (such as, what’s the best way to save money on heating, individual electric baseboards in our rooms, or continue to use the natural gas forced air heating that heats the entire house?), and he gave us some ideas for which changes make the most sense now vs. later. His major point was that making changes that don’t pay off (such as installing solar panels that will end up not saving energy because of our shady location) just doesn’t make sense, so I’m supposed to stop worrying about it. (Fat chance.)

But mostly, he said, by taking part in the survey, our house and habits are going to be part of a fact-finding mission that will hopefully result in all of us finding out how to make our homes more energy efficient. If you’re interested in adding to that database — whether you consider your family a model of green living or happy energy hogs — call up AMBAG and get an appointment.

The big stink

Posted on by Suki

If a desperate family of four comes knocking on your door in the next day or two, consider giving them a break.

They might be running from the stench.

The stench of what, you might ask? Well, as they say, whaddya got?

It starts like this: The husband gets up in the middle of the night, feeling restless. As he sits in the living room, he sniffs. What is that… awful smell? Soon he goes back to bed and back to sleep. In the morning, the smell seems like a dream until he walks into the living room. There it is again, stronger.

He goes back to tell his wife about it. Long-suffering wife of a man with a highly sensitive nose, she offers some sympathetic words. When she goes out to the living room, she can certainly smell something off, but nothing to get upset about.

The day wears on. As it does, the smell seems to migrate. When the mother and son come home from an appointment, now it seems like it’s in the stairwell. What gives? By dinnertime, it’s strong, and it’s nasty. Luckily, it hasn’t rounded the corner into the kitchen area where they eat.

By the next morning, it’s a definite stench, and they start to take measures. They’re sure it’s probably something that died in the crawl space. Mother and son walk the perimeter of the house, checking all the screens. They’re all secure. They go behind the house and toward the door into the crawl space. Son decides it’s really very important for him to play on the rope swing at that exact moment.

“Please? I need your moral support!” the mother pleads.

No way. She’s gonna have to be the adult this time. She gingerly takes the cover off the entrance to the crawl space. She’s armed with a large flashlight, which will both illuminate what she doesn’t want to see and clobber anything else that makes a run for it.

The smell that wafts out of the crawl space is musty, earthen, and dark. Perhaps even a bit dank. But definitely not the smell in the house. Nothing like putrid. Nothing like something dead is slowly starting down the road to decay. Hmph.

In the day that follows they check everywhere else. They check under all the furniture. She remembers the smell of her car when the son’s sippy cup full of milk rolled under a seat on a hot summer day. They start wondering, can the smell be coming down from above? They’d had mice in the attic space. Perhaps from there?

Another day passes, the mystery still intact.

The wife has lunch with a friend who’s the wife of a contractor. She offers the sort of sensible advice that the wife of a contractor has heard before: “Well, this is a problem that will eventually take care of itself, you know.”

Big help you are. Some friend.

The smell becomes nearly unbearable. Incense is burning all the time they are in the house. They try fans. They try opening up the upstairs to get more air circulation. That results in their shared office becoming filled with the putrid stench of death.

She starts to become irrational, at home alone with the kids. Nothing the poor daughter (who is missing most of this due to day camp and who swears, in any case, that she can’t actually smell anything bad) does is right. The mother is irritated. She hates this house. She hates mice. She hates her cats, who perhaps killed the thing that is now causing the stench. She corners the cats one by one: “Did you do it?”

They don’t answer.

The family gets testy. They all have low-grade headaches from the incense-filled air. The stench hovers below the smell of the incense, gnawing at their nerves.

Then one night, they’ve just had enough. Each grabs his or her most important things, his desert island disks, her computer that holds the records of all her thoughts and desires. The son always travels light, with just an iPod and his trusty stuffed rabbit. The daughter protests, “Really, guys. What’s the big deal here? It’s not even a bad smell, really!”

They all consider leaving her behind, but that would be too cruel, even if she is pretending that she doesn’t notice the stench. Seeing the desperation in their eyes, the daughter packs a large duffel of her most important things, including three different types of tape, the entire rag bag from the hall closet, and her knight costume.

This motley crew strikes out down the road, leaving the cats behind, confused. “Was it something we did? Something we said?” asks the orange cat.

“No, stupid,” hisses one of the black cats. “We don’t talk to them, remember? They think we don’t understand English.”

“Yes,” confirms the other black cat. “They think we’re too stupid to know that they’re stepping out on us. I bet they went and got the house repossessed by the mortgage lender. That’s happening a lot these days. It’s always the cats who pay in the end. Always the cats!”

The family walks desperately down the street, peering into windows that are lighting up, displaying happy families, couples young and old, and the occasional single person eating ramen. Who will take them in? Who will believe it could be so bad?

Who will save them from the big stink?

Talking the talk, clicking the click

Posted on by Suki

So another day in my life: I was interested in getting a book for my kids. OK, if you must know, the Manga Guide to Electricity. My 7-year-old will read anything that has bubbles coming out of mouths, so I figure she might as well be learning about electricity while she’s doing it!

I did my usual few steps: First, check the Santa Cruz Public Library. This is where I always go first, because why buy something before you know if your kids are going to like it? And besides, we just love our library!

Manga guides let your kids learn things from bubbles rather than paragraphs!
Manga guides let your kids learn things from bubbles rather than paragraphs!

The library did have the book, but only as an e-book. This is a great option for many books, especially technical books that will go out of date almost as soon as the library can shelve them. The library also has a wonderful e-book service called Tumblebooks, which my daughter still loves even though she can read just fine. Tumblebooks are animated books that are read out loud to the child. As the words are read, they are highlighted so the child can follow along. It’s a fabulous thing for emerging readers.

An e-book of manga, however, is a lost cause. First of all, they can’t fit an entire page on my screen, so I have to scroll to read the book. Second, I can’t just leave an e-book lying around for my kids to discover. This is one of my most successful ways of teaching my kids. I call it accidental learning, but I do it on purpose!

So my next step was automatic: Type Amazon.com. It’s easy, straightforward, and beautifully executed. (OK, I would believe it’s beautifully executed even if my husband and I weren’t friends with the guy who built their system!)

It is, however, the very opposite of shopping local, which is what I keep telling myself (and everyone else) to do. Even when it’s not quite so convenient. Even when it costs a bit more. Even when my hands type “ama” and the link comes up in my browser. So yes, of course, Amazon had the book. And if I added the Manga Guide to Molecular Biology (which my son wants to study), I’d get free shipping, tax-free, to my house.

Ah, temptation.

However, I recently had a very nice conversation with Neal and Ryan Coonerty. Santa Cruzans and those who follow the plight of independent bookstores need no introduction to the Coonertys. Neal and his wife Candy motored into Santa Cruz in 1973 and bought Bookshop Santa Cruz from its previous owner. They proceeded to turn Bookshop into not only a popular store, but an anchor of downtown Santa Cruz. I remember before I lived in Santa Cruz I came here for two reasons: Bookshop Santa Cruz and India Joze. India Joze is long gone (though I had Joze’s cooking at the Avant Garden Party recently), but Bookshop is still going, now under the leadership of Neal’s daughter Casey. [Read my article here.]

Independent bookstores are the anchors of many a community, but they are dying a slow, agonizing death. First, it was the chain stores, which used their buying power to be able to offer books at lower prices and artificially inflated large inventory. (Ask me about my experiences as a publisher with Barnes & Noble sometime!) Then, it was the Internet.

Amazon.com poses two problems to outfits like Bookshop: First, they can offer things at lower prices. But this is always true of big guys vs. little guys. Bookshop outlasted Crown across the street (in fact, Crown went belly-up after their attempt to put Bookshop out of business). They are co-existing with Border’s down the street. (Hey, Border’s was my local bookshop when I was a kid!)

But Bookshop can’t get away from the tax problem. Yes, as a local bookstore, they have to charge sales tax. And these days, that’s about 10% of your bill. Amazon.com, as a Washington-based company, argues that they don’t have to charge sales tax. And so they don’t. And no one seems to care.

Except Neal and his family. And all the other independent booksellers who are attempting to compete fair and square with a competitor who not only can offer everything, but is being allowed to do it tax-free.

So here’s the thing: I went to Bookshopsantacruz.com. I searched for the book in question. They had Biochemistry on the shelves, and said they could get Electricity in 1-5 days. I ordered them both for free shipping if I pick them up a the store. Their software, yes, is a bit idiosyncratic. (Our friend who designed Amazon.com’s software makes sure that nothing he does is idiosyncratic. It works. You don’t notice it. That’s why he got paid the big bucks to do it.) But their software worked, and my order got submitted.

Within seconds, I received a nice e-mail:

Thank you for your web order. We currently have Molecular Biology on hold for you at the Information Desk. Manga Guide to Electricity has been ordered and should be here late Friday afternoon. We will call you when it arrives.

We REALLY appreciate your support!

Clytia

Bookshop SC

And they really mean it! How do I know? Then I got a phone call. I don’t know if it was Clytia, but she was very nice and she told me that my book was in (the one they had on the shelves). I pointed out to her that a second book was on order. “Oh, yes,” she noticed. I told her I’d pick them both up when they were both there. “Cool!” she said.

The Santa Cruz experience. No one at Amazon.com is going to call you up. They aren’t going to say, “Cool!” as if you just executed a rad move in the surf.

We live in a place. We chose this place because of the place it is. In order to keep it the place that it is, we have to do a few things. One, we need to pay a little bit more to the people who own our local businesses. Two, we have to deal with a bit of idiosyncrasy. Three, we need to love our idiosyncrasy.

As the Bookshop Santa Cruz t-shirt and bumper sticker says:

Keep Santa Cruz Weird

And, I would add, Keep Santa Cruz Local.

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