Hashtag Chiberia

Dining room ceilings across Chicago protest the
Narnian winter.

First it looked like this.

Frustrating. Water drip, drip, dripping through bubbling paint on the dining room ceiling.

I poked holes in the puffed out layer of paint, and yellow water streamed out. We positioned buckets under the leaks, and pressed on the separated paint layers to push the remaining water out.

But releasing the water did not solve the problem, and a few days later, we heard a loud PHHHHHLLLUUMMMPHHHHH. Mr. Peevie and I ran out to the dining room to see layers of plaster and insulation coating the table and floor. 

It was quite impressive. For a little while the hole looked like this: 



But Mr. Peevie kept looking at that uncollapsed corner and saying, "I think this is gonna go, too. Stay away from this corner, guys. It's gonna go." 

I admit I made fun of him for his pessimism--and then about a half hour later--PHHHHHLLLUUMMMPHHHHH! Down it came. Sometimes pessimism is another word for "I told you so."

Fortunately, Mr. Peevie did not listen to my Pollyanna outlook, and he had prepped for the second collapse by putting down tarps and bins, which caught a lot of the debris. We have made the first-ever claim against our homeowners' insurance policy since we bought our first house about twenty years ago.

We went through a similar experience with the water dripping through the dining room ceiling five years ago-- And guess what?

The last time Chicago recorded a high temperature below zero was Jan. 15, 2009 -- exactly five years ago. 

"The bitter temperatures follow several days of snowfall," the article reports. Almost twelve inches of snow fell at O'Hare that week--and almost nine of them in one day, breaking the record from 2005.

Apparently, this phenomenon is caused by ice dams that form on the edge of the roof, forcing melting snow back under the shingles, where it creeps in and leaks out inside the house. And it's not just happening at the Peevie homestead, either. It's happening all over Chiberia.

Five years ago, though, the winter was less Narnian than this interminable, tenacious, entrenched season that continues to break records. When I started writing this post, we had marked 75.5 inches of snow so far this season. then later that day we received another batch. To date, our snowfall totals have exceeded 80 inches--80.6 to be exact-- which obliterates the '69-'70 record (77 inches) and wags a warning finger at the '77-'78 second place record (82.3 inches).

I don't think we're going to hit the all-time snowfall record of 89.7 inches in 1978-79, which is a little bit sad since we've come so far. All we'd need would be another 9.2 inches of snow. 

Come on, snow gods! Sock it to us! Let's crush that record!

(BTW, in light of my previous post, the source for these snowy stats is the NBC-5 weather blog.)

Drastic Measures

If you have ever met me, you will know that what I am about to tell you is completely and utterly unexpected, out of character, and insane.

We are going to homeschool A. Peevie for high school in the fall.

I KNOW.

I sense a whole bunch of blog posts in my future about this decision--which, BTW, just became final this very evening.

As you may recall, we are not satisfied with the experience A. Peevie has had at the little Lutheran grade school he's been attending since kindergarten. I'm sure that most of the teachers and staff are well-intentioned--but that place is almost as inflexible as the character of the Almighty himself--only not in a good way. 

For a kid like A. Peevie, who does not have a typical learning style, and who thinks so far outside of the box that he doesn't even know there is a box, it is a prison of random, painful tortures.

One problem is the rules. They love rules, those Lutherans; they love making new ones, and allowing no exceptions to the existing ones. Even about things that really should not matter. Midway through the school year, for example, we learned that his teacher had banned the wearing of hooded sweatshirts. This was well before Geraldo Rivera infamously blamed Trayvon Martin's death on his hoodie. The reason: Hoodies make kids feel too comfortable, too relaxed.


Seriously, Ms. Lutheran School Teacher? You believe that feeling relaxed is a deterrent to learning? For A. Peevie, who lives in hoodies and finds comfort in their relaxed fit and warmth, this was a terrible blow.


This teacher is very young--which is sometimes a good thing in a teacher. But she appears to have no clue how to relate to adolescent boys. Day after day, A. Peevie would come home with a story about how she embarrassed one boy, spoke harshly to another, or teased another. This is the last thing a boy needs to deal with, when he's already trying to figure out how to navigate the scary, hairy, testosterone-fueled world of male adolescence.

Remember those unseasonably warm weeks of early spring in Chicago, when the temperatures reached the 80s on eight days in March? The principal was unwilling to allow exceptions to the rule on the books that stipulates "no shorts before April 1," and even punished kids who wore shorts on those days.


Mr. Peevie requested a special dispensation, and even offered a script for how this rule exception could be presented; and the response was, "The students will be able to wear shorts on March 23 for Fun in the Sun Day. What a blessing we have with this warm weather!" 

Predictably, and ironically, Fun in the Sun Day turned out cold and rainy.


But these are not really the reasons we are quitting school. Our reasons have to do with the random boxification of education. Everything is boxed up, planned, and rigidly controlled; there is very little room for exploration, imagination, or inspiration in a traditional educational setting. Some kids still learn and thrive and grow--possibly in spite of the boxification. 


But a kid like A. Peevie does not flourish in this kind of environment, and this is the reason we are contemplating turning our lives upside down.

Random Things In My World

1. A guy walked across the intersection in front of me when I was stopped at a red light. He was young, probably in his 20s--but he was wearing a geriatric beige V-neck sweater; and--get this--he wore black rubbers over his brown dress shoes. Adorable.

And even more adorable? As he crossed the street, he gave a little skip. And then another one, clearly picking up his pace in order to not hold up traffic. He appeared to be totally un-self-conscious--which, how rare is that?!--and it made me want to give him a hug.

2. Toilets are getting smarter. Today I met a toilet that offered two flushing options: one for poop, and one for pee. Allegedly, sending pee-pee to the sewers takes less flushing power than sending poo-poo to the sewers. Who knew. So there were instructions next to the flushing lever: For liquid waste, push handle up. For solid waste, push handle down.

3. Here's an interesting psychological situation that my children and I have observed many times on the way to and from school. A woman takes her brushes and sponges and buckets and brooms outside and cleans the sidewalk and street in front of her three-flat. Yes, you read that right: she sweeps. The street.

If it has recently rained, she'll sweep water into a bucket, and then carry the bucket off and empty it somewhere. If it's dry, she sweeps leafs and sticks and even dirt into a neat pile, and then brushes the pile onto a dustpan, which she then empties into a bin. Sometimes she even crosses the street and sweeps the gutters on that side.

I think this must be some sort of OCD, because there is no practical purpose to her sweeping. She's not cleaning the drains to prevent flooding. She's just sweeping up tiny bits of lawn debris--sticks, leaves, even dirt. It's THE GROUND. There's SUPPOSED TO BE dirt.

It reminds me of my across-the-street neighbor, who used to spend hours on summer days lying on his stomach, plucking clover from his front lawn. Hours. I told my friend the therapist, Dr. Paradigm Shift, about him, and she said, "OCD. Off his meds."

I think there must be an OCD epidemic in my zip code. Hope it's not contagious.

4. We were driving home from church the other day, and Civil War by Guns N' Roses was playing on the radio. The kids recognize this song from the first note, which is not actually a note but the voice of Strother Martin as the prison warden in Cool Hand Luke famously saying, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

We listened to the song for a minute or two, and then M. Peevie, who thinks deeper thoughts than most nine-year-olds, asked, "Mom, how can war be civil?"

And then we had a whole discussion about what "civil" means, and C. Peevie pointed out that many others in history have asked that same question, and I said, but not many nine-year-olds have asked it, and ultimately none of us really knew the answer.

And there you have it. Four random things from my world. Bet you're wishing you were me right now, aren't you?

A Clever and Heartwarming TV Ad. Not.

Have you seen the Leona's TV commercial? It's sort of disturbing in a Why-is-this-restaurant-endorsing-felony-assault kind of way.

It goes something like this:

Heading: Leona's Clever and Heartwarming Anecdote #328

A Leona's spokesman starts telling the clever and heartwarming story of the Leona's waitress who encountered a rude drunk and handled him with aplomb and tiny bit of brutality.

Rude Drunk Guy tosses his credit card and the check on the floor and tells the waitress, "You're so stupid you probably don't even know how to run the card through the card reader. Let me know if you need me to show you how to do it."

This pisses off the waitress, who punches the guy in the face and knocks his glasses flying.

The on-camera spokesman is all chuckles and avuncular head-shaking at the feisty waitress' spunk--as though she had cleverly one-upped the guy instead of committing an actual crime.

Then he continued the heartwarming anecdote, which someone in an advertising agency somewhere felt would be exactly the thing to bring in new customers to the restaurant: "I was upset," the waitress said, "because when I hit him, I felt that didn't hit him hard enough -- so I hit him again." More chuckling and sympathetic head nodding from the spokesman and his colleagues.

And the television audience is left wondering: WTF? How is this story supposed to bring customers into the restaurant? Are they specifically trying to increase the solve-your-problems-with-hitting crowd? Or are they just trying to discourage rude drunks from thinking "Ah! Leona's!" when they have a hankering for mediocre Italian food?

It makes me wonder, if they don't like you, are they going to send the busboys out to key your car?

Please, enlighten me if you understand this better than I do.

A Little Rant About Fair Wages

I check Craig's List almost every day for writing jobs. I've found many good leads there, a few of which turned into paying projects.

But sometimes what I see there cranks up my irritability to PMS levels. For example: This ad for a customer service process documenter for a downtown IT company requires a fastidious, skilled and detail-oriented writer who can generate well-written reports based upon the data she collects, and who can also interact comfortably and professionally with customers on the phone.

They are paying minimum wage ($8 per hour) for this communication maven--which basically means that they're looking for someone just out of high school. A Starbucks barista makes more than that ($8.80 per hour). So does a receptionist ($9.18 - $12.46 per hour), a clerical assistant (up to $12.33 per hour), and a babysitter who is still in high school ($10 per hour). The IT company probably pays more per hour for its janitor.

What is up with employers not valuing a skill that most college graduates don't even have? If someone who pours coffee, taps a calculator, answers the phone, cleans toilets, or watches TV while your kids sleep makes more than what you want to pay your writer, then, let's be honest, you are not really seeking a candidate with "exceptional writing skills."

Phew. All-righty, then. I feel better.

Solving the CTA Crisis

I suspect that the CTA problem is more complicated than it looks on the surface--but it seems fairly obvious that the CTA union bosses are not helping their members by insisting on keeping their raises in place and disallowing unpaid furlough days.

Even other major labor leaders have urged the CTA union to give up the raises in order to save the jobs. Almost 1100 CTA workers will be laid off to make up for a $95.6 million budget shortfall. I bet many more than just the guy in this article would be happy to give up their raises in order to keep their jobs. The omnipresent Father Pfleger stood by CTA union workers asking the union to back the smack off.

It stinks to not get a promised raise, and it's rotten to have to take unpaid furlough days. But that's what many of us are going through these days. Many of us not only have not had raises, but have experienced economic hardships in the form of less overtime pay, fewer clients, lower wages, and unpaid vacation days.

I'm confident that CTA management is not without fault in the matter. As of a year ago, according to the Chicago Sun Times, 150 CTA managers make more than $100,000 per year. The head of marketing makes almost $200k. The CTA union president claims that the number of managers at each bus garage has increased from five in 1994 to 20 today. I have not been able to verify this claim, but if it's true, or even mostly true, then it does seem like bloated management is a big part of the problem.

Meanwhile, it's not just the 1000 laid-off workers that are paying the price. So are students and commuters across Chicago; and in some cases, minority and low-income communities are feeling the biggest hurt. Six of the nine eliminated express routes serve low-income neighborhoods on the South and West sides.

Here's my idea: Get an independent arbitrator into the room with the CTA bosses and the union bosses, with a table but no chairs. No one sits and no one leaves until the problem is solved.

I volunteer. I will need lots of Diet Coke, my brother (who can help me understand and crunch the numbers), a dry-erase board and markers, a bunch of yellow pads, and several boxes of multi-colored Ultra Fine Point Sharpies.

Story Slam: My Destiny

I got to tell a story on-stage at Martyr's last night, at the Moth StorySlam.

The room was sold out, standing-room only. About 30-40 story-tellers who wanted to tell a story on stage put our names into a hat. The atmosphere was fraught, because only ten people get picked. When host Brian Babylon mispronounced my name, I prayed I wouldn't trip going up the stairs and entered my Destiny.

The theme was Neighborhoods. My neighborhood is one of the whitest neighborhoods in Chicago. "It's whiter than this crowd," I told the StorySlam audience, which appeared to be approximately 97 percent white.

My neighborhood is so white that your car radio automatically tunes itself to NPR when you drive into it. It's so white that brown rice feels uncomfortable here. But that doesn't mean my neighbors are racist, I told the crowd. My neighbor will tell you: he has a friend who's black.

But this guy is a real piece of work. He didn't pay his water bill, and then the water got shut off, and his tenants had to come to my house to take showers. They moved out, and the house was vacant for six months.

In late summer he told me that he had a prospective renter looking at the house. "She's Caucasian," he said.

"I don't care if she's Caucasian, east Asian, or Martian," I said. "I'm just wondering if she'll chop down the NINE-FOOT TALL WEEDS in the backyard." Yeah. He doesn't want a brown person renting the house because they might not keep the property looking nice. I heart irony so much.

Anyway, after this intro, I adapted my story about this guy stealing my water in the middle of the night.

Certain female and gay male members of the audience cheered when I mentioned that I was watching Angel DVDs in the basement when I first heard the squeak, squeak, squeak of the felonious water-stealers.

"Yeah," I said. "I might be twice as old as you guys, but I'm not dead yet. I can totally appreciate a TV show in which David Boreanaz takes his shirt off."

I only scored 7.1 from the Moth scoring teams, but boy, I had a blast. I'll be back--and maybe next time, I'll actually prepare a story more than five minutes before I walk through the door.

Nothing Ever Happens on My Block

Did you read this book in your erstwhile youth--Nothing Ever Happens on My Block? OMG. I LOVED that book. And then it sort of disappeared from my life, and I didn't think about it again until I had kids. In searching for information about the book, I came across this cute blog that highlights vintage children's books.

Meanwhile, in only-sort-of-unrelated news, The Crazy Lady on my block got taken away today by the entire police department and half the fire department of Chicago.

I was sitting on my couch, minding my own business, watching People's Court (I have a girl-crush on Marilyn Milian), when I noticed a squad car out in front of my next-door-neighbor's house. Not the neighbor with the jungle, the neighbor on the other side. So I peeked out the window from behind the sheers. There was not just one squad car, but three!

Two police officers were standing on the walk in front of The Crazy Lady's house--and BTW, I mean no disrespect to TCL, who suffers from schizophrenia or some other fairly serious mental illness--and as I peeped, another officer went tearing around the side of the house, down the gangway to the backyard.

Well, being the responsible homeowner that I am, I felt that it was exactly the right time to take out my trash. (I'm not proud of this impulse to gawk at another person's private demons being brought out into the light of day--but it's in me. I wasn't the only neighbor with this indecorous inclination. Other neighbors were not just peeking over back yard fences, but actually walking down the street to get a closer look.)

I went out the back door with my Hefty Bag, and as I crossed the deck, I could see two officers restraining TCL and trying to talk her into accompanying them to the squad car. She resisted them, hollering and flailing. Eventually, four officers carried her around the house and stuffed her as carefully as they could into the back of the squad car.

TCL was still yelling and flailing, and the officers called for back-up. Within minutes, three more police vehicles showed up, including a paddy wagon (are they still called that?) and an SUV. The officers unloaded TCL from the back of the squad car, and re-loaded her into the paddy wagon.

She was not pleased, and she started clawing at the wire mesh. I think she was starting to hurt herself, because within a few minutes the officers extracted her again, two of them peeling her fingers from the doors and two holding her legs to keep her from kicking. Once they got her extricated, they gently plopped her on the street, where she sat, hand- and ankle-cuffed, rocking and occasionally yelling at them not to touch her (they weren't) and that she needed to lock her doors. She was surrounded by officers, and once or twice she started butt-scootching along the pavement, but each time an officer stepped in front of her.

In a few minutes, the six police vehicles were joined by one more squad car, a fire truck, and an ambulance. The paramedics, wearing thick rubber gloves, loaded TCL onto a stretcher, covered her with blankets, strapped her in, and wheeled her off.

TCL has been dealing with obvious mental illness since before we moved into the neighborhood, but she has also had periods of calmness and lucidity. Lately, however, her crazy had been escalating to the point where she was making threats to neighbors and generally acting in a threatening, unpredictable way. She tried to run over one neighbor with her car recently, and she has thrown rocks at children.

Last week when A. Peevie and M. Peevie were playing in the backyard, I went out to check on them. "Mom," A. Peevie said, "That lady is saying B-I-T-C-H over and over again. Really loud." He couldn't even bring himself to say the word in reporting it to me.

M. Peevie came over and told me the same story, and we had a little object lesson in mental illness. "She can't help it," I told them. "There's something in her brain that makes her act that way." I told them that if they felt uncomfortable, or if she directed any of her scary talk directly at them, they should come in the house for awhile.

So the neighbors reluctantly went to court yesterday, and hours later the entire fleet of emergency response vehicles showed up. TCL is currently being held for observation somewhere. It's all very sad and disturbing. The neighbors didn't want to make police reports or go to court to have TCL picked up; but they felt it was the responsible thing to do. Mental illness is absolutely horrifying, and I truly feel compassion for TCL and her husband.

But nothing ever happens on my block.

Flarp, Luigi and Smelly Cheese

"How will I know what's going on if you don't post?"

This from Mr. Peevie, who actually lives in this household. The rest of you, who live several zip codes away AT LEAST are probably FREAKING OUT by now.

So, in a lame attempt to jump-start my blogging mojo, and in order to get everyone up to speed on the Peevies, life in the Windy City, and Everything Else That Matters--here's what's been going on lately:

1. C. Peevie got his giant cast sliced off and replaced with an adorable, below-the-knee red cast. When I drove him to school that morning, I noticed that the car had an odor of old, smelly CHEESE. It was his leg. Gross.

2. It's three days before Halloween, and my kids don't know what costumes they're going to wear yet. This happens every year. I start trying to get everyone going on costumes in mid-September, we plan to get great deals on Ebay, the kids change their minds, we go shopping at the costume stores, we don't find anything, and here we are--three days to go, and no costumes.

One year A. Peevie employed his vivid imagination and his apparent lack of peer influence, and came up with a homemade costume he cleverly called Box Head With Knife and Gun. He cut a narrow slit in a regular cardboard box and put it on his head; and he held a rubber Bowie knife in one hand and a gun-looking sort of metal thing in the other hand--and that was his costume.

Lately he's been wearing Flarp on his hands and arms for no apparent reason, and I suggested that he could be Blob Boy, with Flarp covering his exposed skin. Of course that suggestion was met with much ridicule, and A. Peevie is back to wanting to be Luigi, his first choice. But of course it's too late to buy the costume on-line, and the stores are out. Anyone have any size 12 overalls, green turtleneck, and a green beret?

M. Peevie has gone from wanting to be a karate girl, to a ninja, to a detective. So now I have to find a Sherlock Holmes hat, brown pants, a trench coat, and a "real magnifying glass."

3. Tonight I saw my first preview for Season 8 of 24, that train wreck of a TV show that I love nonetheless, with its hot mess of a main character. I will be posting my predictions soon for S8, but just to titillate your TV taste-buds, here's the first one: Spawn (Kim) will be in DANGER sometime during the season.

And here's a bonus prediction: Spawn of Spawn (SoS)--Jack's granddaughter--(I KNOW!) will be in DANGER sometime during S8 also.

4. Someone stole one of our pumpkins right off our front steps last week. I mean, come ON. We live in one of the most densely-cop-populated (ooh, ouch--that almost came out wrong!) neighborhoods in the city of Chicago, and my PUMPKIN is not even safe on my stoop? SERIOUSLY? People are just rude.

Another Weird Neighbor Story

Here's something weird and...well, just weird. I have a weird life. Weird neighbors, weird relatives, weird colleagues. Maybe that's just the human condition.

Anyhoo, here's what happened tonight, just now, at midnight: I'm down in the basement, switching back and forth between Angel DVDs and Saturday Night Live, and suddenly I hear "squeak, squeak, squeak!" It sounds like the faucet on the outside of the house.

I get up and go upstairs to the front door. I open it quietly, step outside, and peek around the corner. Lo and behold! A garden hose snaked its way from my own outdoor faucet to my neighbor's backyard.

Huh.

Seriously. Who hooks up a hose to their neighbor's faucet in the middle of the night, to fill up buckets of water on his back deck?

My neighbor, that's who.

Shortly after I wrote about his backyard jungle, his current girlfriend showed up. She was hacking down the two-story weeds in his yard. By herself. At night.

"Hey, girlfriend," we said, introducing ourselves. "Where's The User?"

"He's home. Sick," she said, chopping down a 40-foot Giant Hogweed with a chainsaw.

"Wow," we thought. "How does he keep finding girlfriends to do his manual labor for him? He does not look like he is all that."

So now the weeds have been manicured, but apparently, he still needs assistance cleaning out the rental property. So he showed up tonight with a couple of friends and helped himself to our water. They filled up buckets of water and carried them indoors in the wee hours like confused vandals.

Not that his taking our water actually costs us anything. In Chicago, we still get semi-annual water bills based upon a nebulous and mysterious figuring that does not relate to the amount of water we actually use.

But still. If you were going to hook up a hose to your neighbor's house, wouldn't you at least ask them for permission first? I'm not so much of an Obamocialist yet that I don't care whether my neighbors are helping themselves on my property without so much as a how-de-do, you know?

Strange.

As I watched from my darkened kitchen my neighbor and his pals fill up buckets with contraband water, I wondered what I should do. Should I confront the nefarious water-stealing neighbor? Because I will totally confront dudes in the middle of the night. When C. Peevie was a tiny, sleeping baby, we lived in a neighborhood where people thought it was appropriate to drive up to a house and honk their horn in the middle of the night. I would get out of bed, throw on my robe, stalk across the street and accost the idiots who did not realize that the simple act of getting out of the car and ringing the doorbell would allow a sleep-deprived new mother to avoid going INSANE.

Mr. Peevie was sound asleep, getting his beauty rest in advance of running the marathon tomorrow. It didn't seem like a true emergency, so I let him sleep. I watched my neighbor for a few more minutes, but I decided in the end that it was just a case of Neighbor Lacking Appropriate Social Boundaries, rather than Neighbor Doing Nefarious and Harmful Bad Stuff; and I let it go.

It's very strange and boundary-crossing, don't you think?

Backing the Bid. I Think.

I know that loyal Green Room followers (we're up to 16 now!) are eagerly waiting for this blog to weigh in on Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics. No time like the present, because the announcement comes in a little over a day.

At first, I was completely gung-ho in favor of Chicago's bid to host the Olympics. I mean, how great would it be to have The Olympics HERE, in our own backyard? Think of the glory! Think of the excitement! Think of the infrastructure improvements and business opportunities!

Then I started reading more about the bid, from both opponents and supporters. Now I'm all confused and undecided.

This recent opinion piece in the Tribune from Edward Snyder, Dean of the University of Chicago School of Business, superficially suggests that the Games will "result in lasting value for generations to come." Setting aside the barren cliches and repetitive phraseology (the more degrees a person has, the more his writing suffers!), Snyder asks one relevant question--will investing in the Olympics "create lasting value" for the city?--but does not supply adequate proofs for his affirmative answer.

Chicago2016.org persuasively argues that Chicago is a great place for the Olympics in terms of venues, convenience, beauty, and accessibility. But the real question is, will hosting the Olympics hurt Chicago financially in the long run, or help it--and there is substantial disagreement on this point. The 2016 Committee, of course, asserts that the proposed operating budget is realistically in the black.

The Civic Federation's analysis found that the Chicago 2016 proposed operating budget "provides adequate protection for taxpayers" at the same time that it recommends strategies for managing the real financial risks. The International Olympic Committee called Chicago's financial plan "ambitious but believable" with "an extensive sponsorship program."

Our city council voted unanimously earlier this month in favor of a "full governmental financial guarantee" for the city's $4.8 billion bid. I don't know whether the alder-creatures' full support makes me feel more secure about the financial risks of the bid, or more nervous. After all, these are the people who put the parking meter fiasco in motion.

On the opposite side of the bid, we have Chicagoans for Rio 2016, a satirical look at some real reasons to take a pause about backing the bid. CfR2016 even offers an online store selling shirts, bags, mugs and magnets emblazoned with the Chicagoans for Rio logo, featuring a runner dropping the Olympic torch. We love satire here at the Green Room.

Plus, my Edison friend Matt Farmer has been a one-man media blitz, posting his opposition more than once on Huffington Post and even tunefully opposing the bid with a YouTube satirical melody.

No Games Chicago attempts to make the case that we face an either/or choice between creating better hospitals, housing, schools and trains versus hosting the Olympics. I really don't get this argument. Are the nabobs saying that if we don't get the Olympics, the city will spend more on those items? Are they saying that if we get the Olympics, they will suck money away from schools and housing?

Some think that the Olympics will have the opposite effect: The Chicago Tribune recently suggested that "the games represent what could be [Mayor Daley's] best chance of overcoming the financial troubles that have made his job increasingly difficult." As in Snyder's piece quoted earlier, however, the reporter doesn't back it up.

As I said, I'm conflicted. I really, really want to be on board, to welcome the world to Chicago in 2016. I just don't know.

How's that for fence-sitting? And what do you think?

UPDATE: I'm sure you've heard by now that Chicago lost in the first round of IOC voting. I felt like I got kicked in the gut. My heart wanted the Olympics here, even though my head said it would probably end badly for Chicago taxpayers and (many) residents.

Now I'm just pissed off at the people who are using this as yet another opportunity for Obama-bashing. But I guess that's a blopic for another day.

Garden Variety

In spite of our weird, rainy, cold summer, my garden is producing prodigiously.

Every day I pick a dozen or two sweet, ripe grape tomatoes from a single plant. This plant is so eager to thrive that it crawled up the side of the garage, pushed its way through the slightly open garage windows and started producing tomatoes inside the garage.

I don't know what variety my larger tomato plant is, but a couple of the fruits are the size of small pumpkins. I'm trying to figure out how long to let the larger tomatoes ripen before I take them off to give the green ones a chance to start their ripening process.

The Farmer's Almanac suggest that the first frost generally occurs around October 26 here in Chicago, but it also warns that the dates it provides are averages. There's a 50 percent chance that frost will occur earlier, the almanac warns, and with the cold summer we had, I'm betting it will.

I found a useful wiki article on how to ripen the tomatoes that have fallen off the vine before they are quite ripe enough, as well as the green tomatoes inevitably left behind like Tim LaHaye protagonists. I'll also be interested in your green tomato recipes, if you've got any good ones.

My salsa pepper plant has thus far produced about 20 large (6"-9"), firm, shiny green peppers that are perfect for salsa, vegetable salads, guacamole, and other uses. I froze a bunch, and gave away a bunch, and of course, I cooked with a bunch.

And remember the jungle next door? The guy doesn't just have steroidal grape vines and out-of-control weeds; he's also got watermelon vines as thick as garden hoses creeping across the yard, complete with huge yellow flowers and one little watermelon the size of a large lemon.

Somebody, probably one of my children, spit a watermelon seed over there last summer, and now JungleDude has inadvertently become a watermelon farmer. My kids and I are now kind of hoping that he postpones getting a yard service, so we can watch the baby watermelon grow.

You know what they say: When life gives you lemons, make watermelons.

Or something like that.

Urban Jungle

This is what my next-door neighbor's yard looks like.


This is the view from my deck. It's an urban jungle. The weeds covering the backyard are literally six feet tall. See the grape vines that seem to be covering a building? They are. They completely blanket the coach house and have crept over the fence and started making themselves at home on my garage. They are tightwalking across the phone wires from the coach house to the main house.

God only knows what animals are moving into his yard and building condos and having babies. Raccoons, possums, rats, squirrels, bears, lemurs, meerkats?

The owner used to live in the coach house and rent out the house that's attached to the deck on the right side of the photo; but both have been vacant for about two months. He made it impossible for the tenants to continue to live there. I heard both sides of the story, as well as the prior tenants' similar story; and I'm inclined to believe the tenants.

Their side: he didn't pay the water bill, and their water got shut off. Twice. (I know this is true because they asked to use my shower. It also happened to the prior tenants.) They paid his past-due water bills in order to get the water turned back on.

His side: He always told me what terrible tenants they were, but never gave me specifics. After they moved out, he told me he had to spend $3,000 to repair walls and doors and other things. They "trashed the place," he said. (I was in the home many times while they lived there, and every time the home was spotlessly clean and neat, with no visible damage anywhere.)

Anyway, back to the back yard. So I saw him--or rather, I heard him moving around behind the wall of grape leaves on his tiny coach house deck.

"Hey, JungleDude," I called through the vines. "Is that you?"

He popped his head through the labyrinth. "Hey, E. Peevie!" he said cheerfully. "Long time no see!"

"Yeah, Dude," I said. "What are you going to do about that jungle?" He assured me that he had a guy coming in at any moment to give him a quote on hacking down the nature preserve and doing regular maintenance. And, he said, he had a prospective renter coming by to look at the house.

"She's a teacher at the high school," he said. "And she's Caucasian!" he added happily.

I looked at him. I blinked.

"Whut?" he said defensively, "I'm allowed to like my own kind!" Then he non sequitured, "I like myself! I'm allowed to like myself."

I looked at him. I blinked.

"Hey, my best friend is Mexican!" he said. "But I'm also allowed to be happy to get a white renter."

"Well," I said, irritated. "It doesn't matter to me whether your renter is white or not."

"It's starting to matter to me," he said, officially breaking the law. "I'm just sayin'."

"Look," I should have said, but in the interests of keeping things neighborly, I didn't, "shut your racist trap about your Caucasian renter, and just get somebody out here to get this jungle under control!"

I find it ironic that he has no qualms about putting his offensive opinions about racial preferences and prejudices out there, and neither does he make any apologies for keeping his property in a nasty, unrentable condition. Like, he's so much better than those non-white people--but meanwhile, I'm living next door to an abandoned property.

If he's going to discriminate, shouldn't he at least make an attempt, at least superficially, to appear to be a better neighbor than the people that he's trying to keep out? I suppose perhaps his brain is so clogged up with rationalizing and other-bashing that he doesn't have the mental energy to appreciate the irony.

But I do. I appreciate irony. And for that, JungleDude, I thank you.

City Girls Make Nice-Nice with Nature

Not only did M. Peevie and I survive in the woods, with the ticks and poison ivy and bears, we thrived. We dipped deep into our personal wells of fortitude and pulled out full buckets of Hey! This Nature Thing Isn't So Bad After All!

Except for sleeping on a plastic mattress supported by (and I use that term "supported" so lightly that it is practically floating off the page like a magician's assistant in a levitation act) an ancient metal cot with tired springs that hammocked to the wooden floor when I laid my substantial rear end down.

And except for the bathroom being 50 yards away, up a steep, be-rooted path, in a wooden structure that housed four sinks (three in working order, one encrusted with bits of nature), four toilets in plywood stalls with no doors, some outhouse-esque odors, and a variety of peeping tom insects that clung to the wall directly in front of my face as I sat on the pot.

I felt like a regular outdoorswoman as I crawled, shivering, into my rated-for-20-degrees-Fahrenheit sleeping bag and waited for sleep to take me to a warmer climate. The mercury dipped to 48, and I wore long pants and several layers of shirts, plus a polartec vest--but still I shivered. Not enough body fat, probably.

My little city girl did way better than I did. She felt no cold as she slumbered in a pair of thin PJs in the platform tent, and she even swam in the lake, not seeming to feel the icyness of the water. I think maybe 8-year-olds don't have nerve endings.

The first night I stayed up until almost 4 a.m. talking to one of our camp husbands. The girls had gone to bed hours earlier, and one by one the moms gave up and went to bed also. But NatureDad had some interesting stories to tell, so he poked the fire and talked while I asked questions and listened.

I was almost ready to call it a night when NatureDad asked me where I grew up. "Northeast of Philadelphia," I told him.

"Really? Where?" he asked. "Where were you born?"

I was born in a hospital in Abington, I told him, but my family lived in another suburb.

"Abington Memorial Hospital?!" NatureDad asked, amazed. "You're kidding me! I was born in that hospital, too! My mom worked there for years!" All of his stories had been about growing up in Florida, so I was not expecting this small town connection. (As of the 2000 Census, our little suburb had a population of just over 31,000.)

Then he asked me what town I lived in, and when I told him Warminster, he almost fell right into the fire. "Shut UP!" K-Daddy said. "That's where I lived until I was nine!" I am about ten years older than my camp husband, but we had similar memories of running wild in the woods, catching crawfish in the creek, and going to the same Dairy Queen for Buster Bars.

"I have never met anyone from Warminster before," he said; and neither had I in the 32 years since I moved away. I finally crawled into bed at around 4 a.m.--and then my tentmate woke up and talked for another half an hour.

When reveille sounded less than three hours later, I thought I might actually die. And yes, they really did have a VERY LOUD recording of reveille that sounded like the bugler was standing right next to my pillow. I almost said a bad word.

But being the good Girl Scout mom that I am, I hoisted my tired self up out of the Cot of No Support, got dressed, grabbed a cold Diet Coke, and went to breakfast. After French toast and sausage, M. Peevie and I went boating on the lake. She chose a rowboat, and we zigged and zagged our way across the tiny lake to a small island, where we explored, peed in a crouching position, and discovered dozens of snail shells, some empty, some occupied, on the beach.

I opted out of the free-time hike in the woods, and instead took a free-time nap. I slept right through lunch, but got up in plenty of time to watch M. Peevie enjoy archery, horseback riding, and tie-dying. Later, the girls gathered at the lodge for dancing, games, and make-your-own-sundaes, while the moms and dads wall-flowered and sipped adult juice boxes.

Again with the late night fireside chats on Saturday, this time until 2 a.m. with another mom from our troop. Most of the moms are way younger than I am, but I can put the youngsters to shame when it comes to burning the midnight oil. Just don't ask me to look like a supermodel the next morning. I look more like Maxine.

I was having a conversation with Nature Dad, who built and tended our campfire that first night. He loves everything nature-y, and hopes to escape the city and return to the mountains where he can get Colorado Rocky Mountain High. "Don't you hate the city," he asked me, "Don't you get tired of all the concrete, pollution, noise, and everybody being so close together?"

"No," I told him. "I love concrete."

He thought I was kidding, but I was glad to get home to my neighborhood, my sidewalks, my city, and especially my own bed. It builds character to make nice-nice with nature now and then; but I'm a city girl in my heart of hearts.

How about you?

Chicago High School Woes

The process for getting into one of Chicago's top high schools continues to attract investigation and criticism. Mr. Peevie, my VP of Information Management, sent me this article from the Chicago Tribune about the "complicated and secretive" selective enrollment process.

If you click on the link on the left you'll get to this graphic which charts the admission stats for each of the nine selective high schools. It indicated that anywhere from 3 percent to 9.9 percent of applicants earned one of the approximately 3,000 coveted slots. Jones College Prep, where C. Peevie will be attending in the fall, enrolled 3.1 percent of its applicants, the second lowest percentage of all the selectives.

Some complain that the federal desegregation guidelines essentially punish high-performing white students who lose out to minority students with lower scores. The guidelines stipulate that 15 to 35 percent of a selective enrollment school's students can be white, and the rest must be minority. The 2000 Census indicates that nearly 42 percent of Chicago's population is white (I wonder if that percentage has declined in nine years?), which might indicate an unfair distribution of scarce educational resources. But the mandated ratio is based on the fact that less than nine percent of Chicago Public School students are white.

The girl in the story scored in the 90th percentile "on her middle school tests," which I assume means her standardized tests. That could be one of the factors that kept her out of Payton. Most of the kids I know who are going to the top four schools (North Side, Payton, Jones and Whitney Young) scored in the 98th or 99th percentile in both math and reading.

Also, it's not clear what the Trib reporter meant by "aced the selective enrollment high school entrance exam." Does it mean she did really well? Or does it specifically mean she received all possible 300 points for her test performance? This is a critical distinction when thousands of students are competing for a couple hundred slots.

All this is not to say that things are hunky dory in the Land of Selective Enrollment. It's not right that thousands of Chicago high school students and their families have to settle for fewer educational opportunities because many, if not most, CPS high schools can't offer the kind of focus, community, and academic challenge that the selectives (and the IB programs, as well) offer.

I'm grateful that C. Peevie has essentially saved Mr. Peevie and me about $40,000 in private high school tuition by working hard enough to get into Jones. I don't really have a point in this post, except to acknowledge that many, many other kids also worked hard, and didn't get in. They'll end up at schools like Amundsen, where only 24% of students meet state minimum standards and where students average 43 absences per year; or Clemente, with a 13% dropout rate and an average ACT score of 15.5; or Marshall, where 4% of students meet state minimum standards, only 40% of freshmen graduate in five--yes, five--years, and students average 95 absences per year.

It's a sad situation, and I don't know what the solution is. Do you?

Jury Tales

We could be done on Monday, the judge said on Friday. We could be deliberating by Tuesday. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to tell you the whole story on Wednesday. If I live that long. The secrecy is killing me, as I have mentioned before.

But I can tell you some stuff. At one point on Friday, in the privacy of the jury room, one of the jurors said, "Well, all that's left now is deciding how much."

I looked at her in disbelief. "Lalalalalalala!" I singsonged, holding my fingers in my ears. "You cannot talk that way, Juror L," I said, "You have to wait until ALL the evidence is in and we've heard from ALL the witnesses."

"How come?" she said, crunching down on a malted milk ball. "It's clear to me who's at fault."

"You don't know that," chimed in my buddy, Juror F. "What if they show us a suicide letter?"

"There's a suicide letter?!" she screamed.

"No, no, no!" we said in unison, and then JF continued, "but you don't know what else they might tell us or show us. You have to wait to make up your mind!"

JF and I both want to be the jury foreman, and he is positioning himself quite well for the job. He is young, smart, and determined, but also sweet, funny and friendly. He's had a tough life, and yet somehow, he has envisioned a future for himself that is quite different from the one his circumstances might have predicted. I have no doubt that he will get there; and along the way he might write a best-selling memoir that I will buy and ask him to autograph.

"'Jury Foreman' would look good on my resume," said JF optimistically.

"Sweetie, a hiring manager would not care," I refrained from saying.

"You'll get my vote," said Juror L.

"What?!" I objected. "What about me? Why won't I get your vote!"

"You'll get my vote, too!" she said, proving herself to be a true Chicagoan.

The rest of the jury has not indicated any interest in being foreman. They might be too polite, or maybe they really don't care for the job. Or maybe they are biding their time, waiting for the right moment to present their credentials.

We spend our time in the jury room trying--but not succeeding--to NOT talk about the case. When Deputy D. pokes her head in, she looks around suspiciously. "You're not talking about the case, are you?" she says.

"Oh, no," we all say, "We're just talking about the lawyers." We have fond names for them. The lead counsel for the defense has a very pink face and pure white hair. Juror B nicknamed him "Oompah-Loompah," although I don't think the colors are exactly right, and he's not short.

Juror J., or possibly Juror K., suggested, extremely charitably, that the lead counsel for the plaintiff looked a bit like George Clooney, so that's what we call him. He would be very flattered, I'm sure. He's good looking, but not THAT good looking. I could see him being played by Greg Kinnear or Craig Bierko, except Bierko is too tall.

He's fierce in the courtroom, for sure; and I would certainly put him on my short list if I needed a personal injury attorney. I think the plaintiff, the widow, has a little crush on him.

One more thing: I tell Mr. Peevie things about the case, but I'm very careful not to give away any details that might let him know what case it is. (Even if I did, he wouldn't pursue it. He has too much integrity and character to do so. He is packed with all sorts of annoying ethics.) But the other night, as we were talking, I almost--ALMOST--let the name of [large company] slip out. In fact, I did let the first syllable slip out. Twice. Oops.

But here's what I think: a likely scenario is that the defendant originally tried to settle the case with the plaintiff, but the plaintiff (and/or her lawyers) were not willing to settle for the amount the defendant offered. Perhaps the defendants knew they did not have a strong enough case to actually WIN the lawsuit, but they are taking a chance that the jury will award less money than what the plaintiff's lawyers are holding out for.

Hmmm. We shall see. Maybe Monday's testimony will turn things on its head, and render these speculations sheer idiocy.

I can't wait to find out.

Voir Dire

You know the expression--I think perhaps Dave Barry coined it--"too stupid to get out of jury duty"? Well, I think a more accurate description is "too honest to get out of jury duty."

As you know, I have the honor of serving on a jury for a Very Big Trial for the next two or three weeks. I'm totally going to lobby to be the jury foreman, because I love 12 Angry Men (both versions, although the original is the best) and my middle name is Process--and of course, process is what reaching a verdict is all about.

During voir dire, it was very clear to me when someone was lying or scamming to get out of service.

One guy was rambling and not answering direct questions about whether or not he could award the plaintiff a reasonable amount of money if the evidence showed that the plaintiff, a large company, was at fault. He was blathering about the scales of justice and how the whole thing is a crapshoot, and how people sue big companies to make easy money, and I thought to myself, "Scales of justice, my ass. More like scales of bullshit." He knew if he seemed biased against large monetary awards, he'd be excused; and he was.

Another woman, a suburban grandmother, was telling the judge that she cares for her granddaughter while her daughter works, so she really can't be available for jury duty. "Your daughter will have to make other arrangements, ma'am," the judge told her.

"Well, your honor," she tried again, "I'm just really uncomfortable taking the train downtown and getting around in the city. I live in the suburbs, and I never travel to the city, and I'm just really uncomfortable with it." Aww, poor thing.

"Ma'am," the judge said patiently, "I'm guessing many people in the jury pool feel the same way. I understand that it's uncomfortable for you, and inconvenient, but everyone has to do it."

Then they asked her questions about her ability to find in favor of the large corporation, sending the widow home with nothing. She saw her opening, and she took it. "I just don't think I could send a widow home with nothing," she said.

"Even if the evidence shows that [big corporation] had no fault?" the judge pursued.

"No, your honor," she said, shaking her head. "It's hard not to feel sympathy for the widow." The judge rolled his eyes.

"Your honor!" the plaintiff's attorney squawked.

"Dismissed," said the judge, and the bailiff walked Lying Grandma Liar out of the courtroom.

Why is it so easy for some people to lie? How do they justify lying to get out of doing something that they don't want to do? This really, really bugs me.

In the jury room we were talking about the voir dire process, and how we could tell when folks were lying, and one woman said, "I thought I could lie to get out of it, but when it was my turn, I just couldn't do it."

So our jury consists of a fireman, a dressmaker, a bar manager, a guy who just finished college, two office managers, a special education teacher, a trader, a freelance writer (me!), and five others, including two alternates. We have ten women and four men; ten white and four black.

We are going to be very tight by the time this is over. I can see a reunion in our future.

Summer Value, Simple Fun

My 8-year-old Peevie Child and her 8-year-old pal M. Black Hair and I put together our metal frame and vinyl pool in about an hour last week. (That's how easy it is.)

This little pool (which takes up most of our typical Chicago back yard at 10' diameter and about 3' deep) has served us well. Every year it gets a little more off-kilter, and it currently doesn't have a working filter (kilter, filter--it rhymes! I'm a poet!), and the vinyl is bleached, and we had to plug a filter hole with a sock--but this pool was the best summer entertainment value that I ever purchased. Assuming we get through this year with the pool still functioning, I think the cost works out to about 16 cents per hour of summer fun or less, not including the cost of filters, chlorine, pool toys, and other accessories.

They're running about $129 at Target this year*, but when we bought ours three years ago, it was $99, including the water filter, plus about $50 for the chemical kit. The filter gave out during the season last year, but we continued using the pool without it. I also stopped buying expensive pool chemicals, and just started using regular old chlorine bleach to kill the germs; and I used a skimmer net to skim off the leaves and dead animals that accumulated on the surface of the water.

(I still used the testing supplies to make sure that the Ph and chlorine levels were appropriate. It vastly amused me and made me feel like a mad scientist when I dripped the yellow and red solutions into the test beakers. But then again, I am easily amused.)

So for the first two days that the pool was up, M. Peevie spent great chunks of time in it--even though the temperature has barely reached 70 and the water temp is probably just shy of icicle. She floats on hot pink inner tubes, swims laps around the perimeter, practices holding her breath under water, and generally splashes happily for hours on end.

The good thing about having this pool in our tiny Chicago backyard is that it's fun for our kids and their friends. The bad thing is that sometimes I become slightly irritable at the parade of kids needing food, drinks, bathing suits, towels, sunscreen, and Band-Aids tracking watery footprints through my kitchen.

At this moment I have an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old, and a 10-year-old floating on inflatables and telling stories in the pool. It's sweet, innocent, and simple, and it makes me happy and grateful for my life.

*I saw the pool on sale for $99 again yesterday.

Magical Moments

Have you ever had one of those moments when time slowed way down and you felt like you had entered a magical alternate dimension where you were eternally young and you were surrounded by happy children, friendly adults, sounds of laughter and cheering, and there was cake, too?

Me neither.

However. This week we came pretty close to that moment. The eighth-graders challenged their parents to a softball game to celebrate their emancipation from grade school and to demonstrate their "superior" athletic ability.

We creamed them. It was awesome.

But wait: let me backtrack for a moment. First of all, we (and by "we" I mean Poor Man's Ricardo Antonio Chavira (PMRAC), who is a 4th grade parent; yay, PMRAC!)) reserved a field at Thillens Stadium for two hours on Wednesday night. Thillens Stadium is an iconic part of Chicago history, where generations of Little Leaguers played under the lights, and Jack Brickhouse announced the play-by-play during the 1950s.


To play under the lights at Thillens is to be a part of something bigger than yourself. To play third base at Thillens as a 48-year-old, mini-van-driving, capri-pants-wearing mother of three, against about 40 eighth-graders and their younger siblings and schoolmates, and to throw your own son out at first base* in a slo-mo-replay moment, is to make history that will never be written, but will also never be forgotten.

After we shut the kids down in the first half inning, we grabbed our bats and took the kids to school. I put myself first in the grown-ups' line-up because I got there first, and the dads were too polite to object. I smashed a single between the cocky teenaged infielders, who were no doubt thinking to themselves, "Sink in, boys, sink in; it's just C. Peevie's mom; she can't hit!"

I rounded the bases when Eddie "The Babe" sent one into orbit, and crossed home plate gasping for air and begging for the paramedics to administer oxygen. "I need a defibrillator!" I wheezed, and Mr. Peevie said, "You need a work-out program." Like I have mentioned in the past, he has a bit of a mean streak.

Since there were little kids playing on the kid team, we let them have five outs per inning. We let them swing until they got a hit, and we "accidentally" fumbled the ball in the field. See, we wanted the little ones to have fun and success, but we had no such concern for the big kids.

O-Daddy and I formed an unbreachable wall covering third and short. I think he took one look at my out-of-shape self and thought to himself, "Oh well, it's just a game." But then! Then I fielded a short-hopper to third and threw to first with precision and grace (if I do say so myself), and O-Daddy's jaw dropped to the ground.

"Wo, Momma!" he said with admiration. "You got some mad skilz!"

"Yes, O-Daddy," I said. "I may look like a zaftig, past-her-softball-prime mama, but when I'm in ready position in the infield, I am still 17!"

The rest of the Mamas and the Papas did great as well, recalling the skills of their lost youths ("yutes," for those of you who are fans of My Cousin Vinny, one of the funniest movies of all time), some of them more lost than others.

The bleachers were filled with additional moms, dads, siblings, and friends who opted to watch the game in the comfort of their blankets (yay! Chicago in June!), coolers, and snacks. I joined them after the first game, having already caused enough damage to my so-called muscles and joints to keep me sore for three full days.

We beat the kids soundly in the first game, and then we sang "Happy Birthday to" C. Peevie because it was his actual b-day, and then I served homemade sheet cake, passing the slices around the bleachers and to the players on the field. The playing, the talking, the trash-talking, the celebrating, the remembering, the laughing, the hanging out in a truly cool locale--these were all gifts of grace and beauty in a troubled world.

It was magical. In the Presbyterian sense of the word, of course.

*My son remembers this differently. In his version, I bobble the grounder, and he's safe at first. But he's been known to have a distorted view of reality.

High School Drama: The final chapter

Saturday morning the phone started ringing with calls from C. Peevie's 8th grade buddies.

"Did you get your letter yet?" his friends asked. "Where are you going?" Many of them had gotten perfect scores on their entrance exams, and had garnered the full 1000 points in the selective enrollment horse race. C. Peevie did not have a perfect score, but he's a bright boy and he had worked hard. We were optimistic that he had a good chance of getting accepted at several of the schools where he had applied.

We waited...and waited...and waited. The phone kept ringing with more happy news from classmates. The mailman kept not showing up. We waited some more. It was like giving birth, only without the agonizing abdominal cramps.

Mr. Peevie and I had plans that night, and we were hoping to be out of the house by 5:30...but still no mailman. Some days our mail doesn't come at all, and we started to figure that this would be one of those days, on the worst possible day.

Fiiiiiiinally, at 6:10 we saw the U.S. Mail truck on the street. We hovered by the front door, waiting as he slooooowwwwly delivered catalogs, bills and other extremely unimportant mail three doors down...two doors down...next door. AHA! We met the letter carrier at the front door, hands outstretched. He probably only gets that kind of reception from fat guys in wife-beaters waiting for the new Victoria's Secret catalog*.

I was ready to rip into the letter the moment we identified it in the packet of third class junk-- but Mr. Peevie rightly held me back. "Let C. Peevie open it," he said. "He's been working hard, and he deserves to be the one to open it." Oh, fine. Be mature.

One letter, four high school choices--three acceptances. I am proud and happy to report that C. Peevie was invited to attend his first choice selective enrollment high school, Jones College Prep.

It's challenging (read: nearly impossible) to find real stats on the number of kids applying for the selective enrollment high schools, the number of slots available, and especially the number of applicants for each slot in a particular school. One blogger and parent of a successful selective enrollment applicant (who also happens to be NY Times best-selling author James Finn Garner) suggests that "CPS keeps a lid on [the real numbers] because the system would look even more ridiculous and unfair than it already does."

This Chicago-based "elite educational coach" reports that only 7% of the 5730 students who tested for 214 slots at Jones were invited to attend. This compares to 6% at Northside, 4% at Walter Payton, and 8% at Whitney Young. The Coach sources her information from Chicago Board of Education, but I could not find a primary source online. Here's another really interesting post about the selective enrollment admission process last year, including a transparent discussion of the role of race and other preference statuses (scroll down to the February 29 entry).

C. Peevie was also accepted at Lincoln Park IB and Lane Tech. Now he just has to decide if his first choice is still his first choice. I asked him about this the other day, and he said that one reason he was leaning toward Jones was that he'd get to ride the train with his dad every day. Since he can't make a bad choice here, I'm thinking that that's a pretty sweet reason to choose a school.

Anyway, we're breathing again, now that the high school drama is over. When you see my boy, give him a high-five.

In three years, we'll be doing it all over again.

*Did you really think I would link to that? Gotcha!

You can read the first two chapters of High School Drama here and here.