Breast Cancer Awareness month

My letter back from the Breast Health Center says I'm clean! Woohoo! This year my child's friend's Mom is recovering from an aggressive cancer of the breast, and my son's former classmate's mother passed away from breast cancer in late August. Considering my mom and aunt died of cancer, I'm tickled PINK to be clean.

Keep taking the cholecalciferol, Northwest women! Keep eating organic! Keep exercising! Knock back that cod liver oil!

Nobel Prizes for Literature and Canada

Just once, by Canadian-by-birth Saul Bellow in 1976, did Canada have any connection with a Nobel Literature Prize winner.

What's wrong with our literature? Austria, Chile, Sweden can produce winners, why can't we? Nobel Prize for Literature winners, according to Wikipedia.

Does sending my kid to public school in Seattle make me a bad mom?

She: "We really want to buy a home next year."
I: "Buy mine."
She: "I want to send my child to a good school though. We've considered private school."

I have nothing against private schools -- it's true some children do better in them. It was the suggestion that my kid's school isn't good, or there aren't good private schools where I am. If she phrased it as:"my child is gifted and doing really well in her school, and we'd like to buy a house to stay within the neighbourhood" I'd be all for it. It's too early yet to tell how well my kid is doing academically -- he's in an advanced reader group, he's in a math group with his best friend, but he's nowhere near gifted. The truth is that the schools in my area are the best-performing schools in the city.