So there were just shots fired about 100 feet away from where we are. From what I can piece together from neighbors there was a carjacking at one end of our condo unit. The guys were trying to flee the scene when another car was pulling in to park and blocked their exit. The robbers fired two shots (another neighbor says she heard two quieter shots and two louder ones) then fled. The people who were shot at are fine, they chased the guys in the other car until the police told them to back off.

Damn that's scary.

This is Rhiannon's last year in the comfy cocoon of our local neighborhood charter school. Next year she starts high school and we've been trying to decide what we're going to do about it. I say "we" but really Thomas has pretty much dumped this all on me. We rent so we could move but here's what I'm working with.

The local public high school pretty much finished at the bottom of the list for Georgia schools which probably makes it one of the worst in the country, or at least that's its recent history.

Right now there is ONE decent Atlanta Public School high school. It used to be a magnet school and you could weasel your kid into it. They stopped that a while ago and the past couple of years people have either been moving or paying to send their kids to the next town over's school which is small and well liked. Atlanta (intown) really desperately needs another good public school.

Many of the neighborhood parents who have had kids in the charter school are now working hard to improve the school. Some of the kids who left the middle school last year are there now and the high school is actually operating out of a different school building while their usual campus is completely overhauled/rebuilt. Last year at Isadora's IEP (special ed thigie) meeting, a woman who is in some leadership position for Atlanta's special ed program said she felt like Jackson (the local school in question) was in the position Grady (the one decent public high school right now) was 10 years ago and improving quickly.

Now we could move to the burbs. There are good schools north of town. They're also very white and very Evangelical. I tried talking myself into this option. We could buy a bigger house there when we're ready to buy. Crime is lower. I don't actually take advantage of living in town all that much and Thomas's job is up that way anyway. I tried. I really did. It just really rubs me the wrong way.

I want to stay here. I want my kids to stay in the same neighborhood they've basically grown up in. I like the density and the diversity. Sure there are class and race issues here but at least they are there to encounter, deal with and discuss and not out of sight and ignored.

It's just scary to have what feels like such a major decision resting on my shoulders.

Yesterday I ordered enough linen yarn to knit myself a top. Never in my life have I spent that much on a shirt and it's definitely my most expensive knitting project so far. I picked a pattern that looks fairly manageable (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/bottoms-up) and also like something I can adjust to work with my figure. I really hope it comes out ok. I guess if it doesn't I can always rip it and knit something else but ugh.

We have to move next summer. The high school Rhiannon would be moving into is ranked like 375/399... in Georgia. So it's possibly one of the worst high schools in the country. Whee. The neighbors are working hard to improve it but I don't think it's going to make dramatic improvements that quickly. On top of that we really need a yard for Jack and Thomas loathes having to haul all of the groceries up to our third floor kitchen. Can't say I blame him.

So our intention had been to move somewhere to Marietta (*cry*) or possibly Decatur (if we could find something reasonably priced) and rent for a few years and then maybe buy but as I was thinking about it last week the less I wanted to deal with moving again, ever. If we put our tax refund with Thomas's bonus and save up a bit more I think we'd have more than enough for what I'm reading is a fairly normal downpayment % these days for a house in the general price range I'm considering. And when I looked up our credit score it wasn't nearly as terrifying as I expected it to be. I think if we work on improving it over the next year we should be in pretty good shape by house hunting time.

The idea though is terrifying. Roots, man. Roots. And roots in suburbia. While I'll keep it on my list, I doubt we'll find what we need in Decatur. It's possible but unlikely. The only decent school districts for high schools in town are incredi-fucking-expensive or at least out of our one salary range. So yeah that makes me sad but really it's not like I leave the house to ever take advantage of living intown and some of the districts near Marietta are actually pretty close to Thomas's job (the city there also being well out of our price range) and the schools are great (most of them).

I think it's good though that I'm giving myself plenty of time to get used to the idea, get over my terror of home ownership and educate myself.

Finished watching the very bleak Año Bisiesto this morning. It's basically the opposite of last night's film, Midnight in Paris. As usual I read reviews for the film when I finished to see what other people made of it and was not shocked to see a lot of one star "ugly and spiritually depressing" type reviews from the non-critics. I found the movie hard to watch. It was slow, quiet, ugly, depressing, bleak and desperate but I don't think any of these things made it a bad film. I wish I had a better vocabulary for what makes a movie good or bad. I think it told a story very effectively. There was no artificiality. Like with Straw Dogs (the 70's version) it was a movie I had to stop and start repeatedly.

Anyway.

Jack is still sick. I thought he was better because he barely ran a temp yesterday but this morning he wouldn't get out of bed and when I checked his temp was back up to 103.6. I really don't want my kid to be sick for Christmas. Again. Thomas may end up hauling him back in to the doctor tomorrow on the day when he's supposed to be finishing up Christmas shopping (just a few things but they're spread out all over the damn city).

Time to find something fluffy and pretty to watch so I can scrub my brain clean while I figure out how to make pompoms for this ridiculous baby hat I knitted yesterday.

Went with the Becks to see Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer at the Puppetry Arts Center and then to lunch at Ikea. The second part was what wore me out. Ikea on the weekends is probably modeled after some level of hell.

Yesterday we went to mom's so the kids could do their gingerbread houses. Friday we had our annual Christmas shopping day where apart from scoring $180 of The Body Shop stuff for $35 we got not an awful lot done. Jack's presents are all purchased though and that's really what we needed to get done while he was with Grandma. The girls stuff we can get during the week.

Tomorrow Thomas has to get up at 5am to make sure the kids are at school by 5:30 for a three day trip to Jekyll Island. Insanity. He's taking the week off work so he can crawl back into bed and we can sleep till Jack forces us up. It should be a fairly peaceful week of basking in the glow of the Christmas tree and watching fluffy tv shows with maybe a bit of Christmas shopping. I'm looking forward to it.

My mood has been good. I've made peace with people not being who/what I wanted them to be and am moving along. The depression has been mostly staying away and I'm enjoying the season. Yay.

Went to the studio and threw for a while today. Got some help from the owners with my technique. It's always amusing having them help me after one another because Luba will tell me to do it one way then Eric will come in and tell me 'no no no, do it like this'. I didn't feel great about the pieces I made (just four bowls) but I think I improved my pulling a good bit. I think I'll bring them home after they've been trimmed and try to do some slip decoration on them. One of them might get carved into a yarn bowl.

I'm supposed to go see the new modern art exhibit at the High tomorrow with Tamara but we forgot when we made plans that the Pride parade is also happening then so I'm not sure if we're going or not.

Starting my Tess shawl
Originally uploaded by danuv.

I seem to be replacing WoW with knitting and cooking. Chicken stock is going on the stove to be turned into soup later today and I started work on my biggest knitting project so far. Fingers crossed that it turns out ok.

I've been using my old BPAL more lately but had been sticking to my usual summer favorite of Kumiho, Embalming Fluid and the occasional bit of Snow White. Tonight after my bath I pulled my bigger box out and was disappointed to find that Scheherazade's lid had gotten loose at some point and it had evaporated and/or spilled. Fortunately my teeny sample size bottle of Storyville that I'd gotten in a swap was still full and it fills a similar smell need plus has the added bonus of being whorish! Yay.

I stepped down from guild leadership yesterday and made a post on the forums letting them know I was quitting WoW. That was more difficult than I expected it to be but it's time to move on.

Of course now that I don't have WoW to fill in my idle hours I'll have to actually do something like read books again (actually one of the big reasons why it was time to quit). I've been hankering for a particular sort of trashy novel for a while now and when I started to rattle off to Tamara what I was looking for, "sort of love triangle with at least one of the guys being morally ambiguous/evil but still redeemable, supernatural element and lots of 'fate'" (I did say -trashy-) she immediately suggested the Amelia Peabody series by Barbara Mertz/Elizabeth Peters which looks interesting. She did say all the sex in it is implied which kinda lowers the trash factor I was looking for but somehow I'll survive. I'll order a few up on Friday. She also recommended the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon which I've never read. I was able to find those on the newsgroups so I guess I'll give them a whirl first. Quitting WoW is going to end up costing us more money in reading material.

Last week I started on a project that's been percolating in my head for years. I just call it The Wall. Basically it's just note cards of all the artists, patrons and socialites I've been interested in over the past decade stuck to a large wall in my living room. I'm organizing them in some basic grouping mostly by location and artistic movement right now (the Parisian dada group, the Berlin dadaists so on and so forth) and then I'm going to start making connections with various colored strings, 'influenced by' 'in relationship with' 'close friendship' 'patron' and make webs. It's fun for me to see how all of the people I love learning about from Belle Époque Paris to the Abstract Expressionists of New York all connect together. It's also a way for me to reinforce my shaky memory, fill in my swiss cheese brain and find gaps where I could learn more. Apart from that it's fairly pointless but entertaining to me.