Cold Spaghetti

Here’s your chance to be a hero!

Don’t tell me that the error means EpiInfo can’t handle it! Tell me how to make it work. It SHOULD work. The Syntax is correct. The error is telling me that the program can’t handle this much information/this many variables. (Wha???) I’ll share the dataset with you, if you like, but please — for heaven’s sake — make this damn thing work. Or teach me another command that will make it work.

Yesterday morning, the Abeona kids trick-or-treated down Oak Street — which was great. Shopkeepers, almost all in fantastic costume (note: if you aren’t wearing a costume in New Orleans on Halloween, no matter who you are or what you do, you are the one who looks out of place). Many of the shopkeepers went ALL OUT with the kids’ gift bags: soaps from The Livin’ Oak, paintable puzzles from one of the home-goods stores, free gelato for everyone from Pazzo, even cool color-changing cups from a Chiropractor’s office! Plus, of course, edible treats. The kids had a great time (parents, too!)

Below are some moments of Will during his Oak Street Trick-or-Treat…

We went to a Halloween party for about an hour as the sun set and then came home to trick-or-treat. There were many more kids out this year (much more than in previous years) and we went around to where neighbors were gathered on common porches having parties. (Paul and I refused the parental offerings of frosty beverages along the way.) The kids came back with plenty of loot — even with Kate giving back a piece a candy at every house. (They’d give her something, she’d give them something — and insist they keep it. Since at least half of the givings were chocolate pieces smooshed in the wrapper by her hot little hand, we didn’t consider it much of a loss and she’s cute enough to get away with it.)

Kate did well last night and even slept for most of the night. We think that her cold turned into a mild case of croup somewhere in the last day or so. She still has the barking cough, but it is more a nighttime thing than a daytime one and her energy is back. No fever since yesterday morning… so she’s back to school today. (Thank goodness!)

UPDATE: Emmy has some school pictures up!

We carved them on Saturday with my parents. Paul carved the awesome skull on the left, I painted the face on the right (it fell yesterday and got a little messy) and carved the heart. My Mom and Dad helped Will with the “light bright” pumpkin — Dad held the pegs while Will beat them into the pumpkin (along with PapPap’s fingers).
Will’s glowing face, above.

Paul’s awesome skull. We didn’t really have the right tools for this type of carving, but took out some of my craft knives instead. It took awhile. Paul was not interested in doing another pumpkin once this was done.
Initially, I was going to stick with painting the face and putting it on this pumpkin to make a pumpkin snow-man. Little known fact: I am very allergic to the innards of pumpkins and squash… if I dig out the insides with bare hands, they swell up and I break out in horrible hives that take weeks to fully heal. Really, it’s true! So I don’t dig out pumpkins. I did, however, want to try the scraping technique (I wanted to do a more involved pattern but we didn’t get a chance to do another pumpkin). The heart above was my playing around with the technique, which was fun! It’s tricky to get deep enough for the light to show through and not break through the shell. (Paul did a fantastic job!)

Ding-dong!

“Trick-or-treat!”
“Oh, my! You are the CUTEST Robin Hood I’ve ever seen!”
“No, I’m PETER PAN and Katey is TINKER BELL.”

She’s off to Neverland!
“First star on the right, then straight on ’til morning.”

Looking cute, but still needing haircuts. (Kate could have almost been Cousin It for Halloween.)

Pete laments the loss of a hat (a causality of his kissing Kate on the cheek) while Kate sees if she has enough time to destroy Dad’s pumpkin before he can reach her. (She didn’t.)
Happy Halloween!

Our first Halloween in New Orleans came with us full of delight — all three of us wore costumes and sat on the porch sweating (it was a hot, humid night) waiting for the hundreds of trick-or-treaters to descend upon us. A family friend had been surprised at our stocks of candy, “you won’t need them,” he said, “no one trick-or-treats on Halloween in New Orleans.” I thought he was kidding, or just mistaken. I knew there were a ton of kids in our neighborhood, so of course they’d be out.

Wrong.

We were shocked. Just a few kids came by. And even more, most of our neighbors, who on any given night have porch lights and holiday merriness shining through the night, turned off porch lights and tightly sealed their doors. We hesitated going to trick-or-treat, hanging out on porches with a few neighbors who, like us, were spending the night outside.

Except for the Halloween after Katrina, when we went to a Halloween event at Children’s Hospital and wondered whether any children were in town (there were very few, as schools and daycares were not yet open), we have always had candy ready to go. (I later regretted not doing it that year. There were a few kids we saw out on that Halloween and I felt badly not showing our support for them during such a tumultuous time.)

Halloween is (predictably) huge here. More events than one can imagine. Thrills and chills for all ages. Next year, there will even be a Halloween Krewe (Krewe of Boo), who started organizing this year for their 2008 debut. It puzzles me that with such a huge event happening all over the city, that something so strongly connected to the holiday (the trick-or-treat) is not done to a similar scale.

I was going to send a note around to our immediate neighbors, asking them for participation this year — requesting a common 30 minutes where we all could be outside, let our kids walk house to house with a parent, and re-affirm our relationships as neighbors. The fact that we live so close by each other means that we, house to house, share in a special protective force — we are each other’s best protection. The more we use these special kind of neighborhood holidays to be with each other, the stronger a force we can be. I wanted to try to say this and see if we could get some kind of group participation (maybe even convince one of our musical neighbors to play outside for a short while) for a short block-wide trick-or-treat…. but with Kate’s illness (more on this later) and our lack of sleep, and this incredibly work-busy week, it didn’t happen.

So, I ask, what IS it about Halloween in this city???

Is it so much of an “adult” holiday here that the kids celebrate it in school and on weekends and are left at home Halloween night with a babysitter? Is it so much of a party night that everyone is in private homes, partying the night away with no one answering the door? I could sort of see, if you live alone and are ill, or vulnerable in some way, being a little afraid of just opening your door to anyone all night long. But homes with families? I’m just unsure of what it means.

I have heard of at least one very tragic event several years ago on Halloween (a grandparent assaulted while trick-or-treating with his grandchild had words with a dangerous driver, who stopped the car and seriously beat the grandfather). This is enough to bring a little caution to the night. But are there other stories that I don’t know, things that are scary enough to keep people in their homes, locked up tight, until the morning? This IS the country’s most haunted place… so is that the living should just hunker down and let the spirits have the city for the night?

If someone out there has any insight, it would be appreciated. Right now, it seems that the creepiest part of Halloween around here is that homes are so closed toward the holiday.

On Saturday, Paul and I visited Ecole Bilingue for their Fall Open House. One of my department’s faculty (with whom I’m relatively close) has been involved with the school since it’s opening — her husband, a Board Member, gave us a guided tour of the entire main facility. Wow. It’s a really good school. We really, really, really thought it was fantastic.

We know that Will would do great there. I mean, he’d do fabulously great there. One of his teachers is a juggler Paul knows from Juggling Club (and a male teacher — we think that would be a great influence, too). All of the teachers are fantastic (they are all professional teachers from France who are hired abroad and come to NOLA to teach for a few years). The pre-K, K, and elementary education seems to be quite stellar. If money were no object, there would not be too much more to consider.

The toddler program I was a bit more iffy over. I think this is largely due to the fact that the school is based on the French educational model, where children start school at age 2. So there is sort of a feeling that they just aren’t equipped to handle the varying levels of baby to toddler needs. For example, toddlers have three rooms separated by age levels… but the first class (which begins at 18 months) don’t advance into the next class until they are potty trained. Will wasn’t potty trained until after he was 3 years old… does that mean he would have been in the room with 18 month olds? And what happens if a child regresses back into diapers? Or has a lot of repeated accidents? (Note: Will has had three accidents in the last week… it’s been a rough week.) Hmmm. It makes me wonder about whether or not it would be a good place for Kate? (The teachers seemed fantastic, however. And the parents were thrilled.)

The school is $6,900 a year (Kate, if we decided to keep them at the same school and put her in the toddlers program, would be $400 cheaper for two more years). That cost does not include after hours (school ends at 3:30) or summer programs. Tuition is paid upfront — with extras for tuition insurance (in case you have to unenroll your child mid-year) and more if you want to space out your payments monthly. Paul and I could not pay for it without continuing to work multiple jobs, as we’re currently doing to pay for daycare. Doable, yes… but paying for elementary education is still a major hurdle for me to accept. The school is definitely more diverse than others but does not have the kind of diversity seen in the public schools.

What I love about the school: it combines what I feel is most important about early education. Strong socialization, exposure to multiple languages (it is 100% complete French immersion — the kids are bilingual by 2nd grade), and nurturing environment. The fact that all of the teachers are French and many of the children are also from French families give the school a neat European flare. These are all really important to me. One of the reasons we like living in NOLA is that we have the options for immersion education into other languages. It’s the next best thing to living abroad, which is how we initially thought we would help give our kids the gift of language comprehension. (This has always been a core value for us.) But, in NOLA, you can get language exposure in other schools… just not necessarily as early as Ecole and not necessarily in as small and friendly an environment.

Just one more thing for us to consider. We will continue to look at schools in the next few months (application deadlines are coming soon!)

We found out that Elmo was in town over dinner with friends on Friday night, a few hours before my parents arrived to spend a weekend with us (read: see the kids). Based on that information, our weekend should be pretty obvious. We saw Elmo — LIVE.
Kate spent 95% of the pre-show, show, intermission, second act, and walk to the car in my Dad’s lap. She’s eating a hot dog above as he whistles in her ear. (Aunt Emily: I wanted to point out Kate’s tights just especially for you.)
Kate was pretty jazzed up. We heard the word “Elmo” a lot.
Eventually, the Little Red Menace came out. I was disappointed that the show has no actual real Sesame Street people. Gordon (who, like Oscar, we refer to as “Chrome Dome”) was in town for Boo at the Zoo and we thought maybe he was with the show — so that was a little of a bummer, die hard ‘Street people that we are.
But the show was still quite good (better than The Wiggles, according to my parents) and the kids LOVED it.
Yup. Granna and PapPap bought the kids an Elmo balloon to share… at least for a little while before it untied from Granna’s purse and flew to join a few others at the arena ceiling (which is much higher than it looks).

Here is everybody (the empty seat is mine.) We played musical chairs throughout so that we all could be near the kids. Will sat on my lap for major portions of the show.
In the end, Will told us he liked “Jenny” (the “person” in the show) and he liked Cookie Monster. He also said that we should make an Elmo pumpkin for Kate.

The downside of consignment shopping.
Sometimes I cannot resist the $4 splurge on Hokey Pokey Elmo. Will has got the moves down… Kate is just fascinated with figuring out how this moving Elmo works.

Big stresses are not what will finally, in the end, drive me to insanity. It will be the culmination of the little things that finally pushes me off the ravine upon whose edge I live so perilously close.

These little things, things that should be easy but somehow aren’t, are most commonly presented in my life in the form of Stupid Programing Issues made in the statistical packages with which I am sometimes called to use for my work. Most of these packages (STATA, SPSS, SAS) are incredible expensive and call for both the privilege of access to them and then climbing the learning curve required to know how to use them. (Understanding what those numbers actually mean is a serious problem within the sciences themselves… poorly trained social, behavioral, and medical scientists, lack of good theory and critical thinking in higher education programs… I could go on, but this rant is about software.)

There is one free package, made by the CDC. It is what statistical software should be in public health: free, amenable to operation in older systems, fairly easy to learn, have access to standard comparisons of health/nutritional indicators. It is commonly used in the field for the reasons listed above. But it is not particularly powerful in analysis. Although it is not hard to manipulate for basic information when you’re set up in it, getting to the point where your data is in the system and correct is difficult — the software is not user friendly. Paul keeps telling me that we should write a grant to fund him making a new package. Something that would offer more statistical power but be a bit more intuitive in its interface. This does not sound like a good idea. If we did this and people found out, I fear our doorstep would be darkened daily by strung-out graduate students seeking vengeance.

And right now, I’m beating my head against the wall because the damn thing won’t read my run files. Don’t get me started on how many times this thing has crashed. It is insisting on a click-by-click dummy entry of things and just making my life really suck. It would take all day to recode half of these variables without a run file. I am ranting only because I decided to chuck the version and download an updated package and need a vent while I wait. I could do these things in STATA so much faster, and have considered changing the data and studying it elsewhere and then loading it back to Epi Info, but I think I need the practice here. I’m trying to write a lab assignment and need to be able to test that these things work before unleashing Master’s students on it (they are already nervous and unsure about the whole “lab” thing).

What is really firing me up is that these are REALLY SIMPLE sort of things I’m struggling with. User error is always a factor, although the same command that works in one second is full of syntax errors in the next. Wa…? Unfortunately, the “HELP” aspects of the software are miserable.

Which brings me to a point: if I am having problems here, in my cushy home, with all the resources around me I need to figure out a solution, how can we rely on this in the field? Shouldn’t a profession like public health, with such important implications in surveillance and data survey, have truly excellent caliber software — free for use — and widely available? And if Epi Info is our current solution to this issue, then for heaven’s sake… why isn’t it available for Mac OS (in the least) or Ubuntu?

Anyone out there a big data geek who knows Epi Info and is ready for some questions???

Some reflections on a recent conversation with a Very Trusted Professor, Mother, and Parent (with experience in private, charter, and public schools in NOLA):

“If I could afford it, I’d put all of my children in private school. It’s not the academics (although I do think they are just a little better in private, they are really comparable with the best public charters) — it is the personal attention. In public schools, your child is a number. If there is a problem, you hear about it on the report card. Not before. There is no specialized attention, nurturing, or shaping the learning towards your child’s needs and interests.”

This really made Paul and I stop and think. Because even though we went to some of the country’s very best public schools, we agreed that we were numbers within them. Private schools offer half of the class size as public schools. She had a real point that is turning us on our heads. We are back into not having any idea what to do with our children. Are we looking at a life of sacrifice to pay for the best schools we can afford? Is this what we should do?