The Attack of the Mad Axeman

Monday was orientation/schedule day at the Options school for home-schoolers, a school which is itself an interesting development. See, the longer we homeschool, the more convinced I am that the primary function of schools was originally intended to be preventing parents from eating their young. It was really only recently that they morphed into their current primary function of marxist indoctrination.

Well, these Options folks have figured out that most homeschool parents (out of the unschoolers) are actually over-parenters - a bizarre malady where you insist that the childrens be with you at all times, so much so that their mere presence begins to grate on your nerves and throws you into oscillating bouts of depression and anger until the idea of eating your offspring, common in the hamster world, and, apparently, also the porcine world, beings to look like not such a bad idea after all. But lo, the options people swoop in with a one-day-a-week program where they teach things that are reasonably specialized enough that many parents couldn't easily teach the matter, but not so specialized that you actually need some sort of professional degree to understand. And, as an added bonus, even one-day-a-week qualifies the school for the federal per-pupil money that they wouldn't get if your kid stayed home every day and you ended up eating him or her.

Now, I'd just like to say for the record that I am sitting here eating cheese balls from a 2-gallon bucket of them from Sam's Club, and I can't imagine how any child could taste anywhere near as good as this giant bucket of cheese balls does. But, then again, I'm at work most of the time, and the homeschooling thing wasn't really my idea, so maybe, just maybe, I'm not the one you should all be worrying about.

Nudge nudge. Wink wink.

MaxieC will be starting one-day-a-week kindeygarten. HannahC, on the other hand, will be something like a 4th grader. (Yeah - I don't actually know. How suck am I? Clearly, not an over-parent.) And she got all her classes.

One of those classes being guitar. This is, of course, a very touching thing given how her daddy is an accomplished guitarist.

If by "accomplished" you meaning taking twelve years of lessons but not remembering how to play any song whatsoever from beginning to end and whose greatest accomplishments as the lead guitarist of the tumultuous "Flo Jackson" were, in order of importance:

1. Naming the first album (never recorded) "Go with the Flo"
2. Firing the lead rhythm guitarist
3. Quitting

So we had to run right out and get her a little mini-Marshall MS-2 amp and a 3/4-size Squier mini Strat copy. Now she wants me to teach her how to play something. I figured something that is just the standard I-IV-V progression (a staple of both rock and folk) in D would be just the ticket. So I'm teaching her this.