Raking in the fall.

I love fall weather. I love the glorious blue skies, crispness in the air, swirling leaves, and disappearance of gnats, mosquitoes, and flies.

Raking those swirling leaves, however, brings out my inner procrastinator. While my neighbors industriously rake those leaves onto tarps and bag them into 30+ brown sacks each week or landscape crews make quick work of the chore with their major-league blowers, I stare gloomily at the rising tide and think of lots of other things I need to do instead.

I'm not alone. Evidently, a lot of people try to come up with ways to make the chore easier, or at least more interesting.

I have wide rakes and hand rakes; bag-hold-em-openers and a wet vac that supposedly will suck up leaves (not); High School Girl, College Guy (occasionally), and Campaign Guy to join me in the "fun" and  an electric blower to help move the mass onto huge tarps.

I sure miss the weekly leaf pick-up where we lived in North Carolina - you just blew and raked everything to the curb and a single truck would vacuum everything up.

A human-powered alternative to those smelly, loud gas-powered backpack blowers blaring across Dunwoody throughout the fall.

No matter what I try, I'm still raking leaves every week through Christmas. When I order pine straw from DHS' Cross Country team, it's knowing I'll have to store it until all the leaves are off the trees. The Troop 764 Boy Scout pine straw sale falls nicely in the spring to cover the comingled leaves and pine straw left after winter storms drive the remaining leaves down from the trees.

Okay, enough whining about the leaves. The yard is well covered and needs raking.

After I do the grocery shopping, laundry, and carpool duties. Is it going to rain? I need to wait until the leaves are dry. Wait, I need to bake for the Marching Band end of season cookout. So maybe I should wait until next week.

Yes, you can knit. It's easy. Really.

I highly recommend this video for those who want to learn to knit:

"We're not making mistakes. We're making experiences."

"Come on, man. Just buy a scarf."

Sublimely hilarious.

What about the schools?

One of the most critical considerations for anyone moving with a family from one community to another is the quality of the schools. Dunwoody is blessed with great schools that thrive in spite of lackluster central office leadership, strangled budgets, self-protective personnel policies, and education pedagogy that change with the whims of state and county administrations. 

All those woes are well documented in DeKalb County School Watch, a blog that serves as watchdog and gadfly for our local system.  If you're a parent, you should read it. Knowledge is power.

For awhile, there was a grassroots effort underway to consider turning Dunwoody High School and all its feeder schools into a single Charter Cluster. I don't know if the steam has run out of that effort, if the folks engaged in the foundational work have turned to other issues, or where things stand today, but I hope the concept finds new energy in the near future.  Fulton County Schools are considering charter status, one of many school systems and clusters willing to tackle the massive documentation, research, and development work required to satisfy the state's evolving requirements.

DeKalb Schools has a new superintendent. Maybe she's a rainmaker and something good will finally come out of that dysfunctional nexus. We have an outstanding School Board representative in Nancy Jester, who is often the lone voice of pragmatism in a group of people who seem to add to our problems rather than solve them. Georgia is requesting a waiver from the illogical No Child Left Behind paradigm and trying on yet another measurement tool that ignores the realities of student capabilities and inconsistent parent support. Our state level elected representatives would have to change state regulations and budget limitations that prevent Dunwoody from having greater control over our schools. There are lots of obstacles (costs are #1) to having our own school system. But there are many, many positives to having our cluster go charter.

By the time the education juggernaut changes direction, my kids will likely no longer be in Dunwoody's public schools. But I'll still be a taxpayer, homeowner, and passionate booster of this community.

Schools are relevant now and for the future.

Sure is early.

It's nearly 7:00 am and the Knitternall family's morning has been underway over an hour. We rise and stumble at 5:30 so High School Girl can catch her bus to the Fernbank Science Tools & Technology program. No complaints from her ... all that science is nirvana to her rationalist soul. (Oh, the philosophical and faithful discussions we have had ...)

Once the fog of sleepwalking in the dark lifts, I'm glad I'm up so early. I'm at my most productive during those brisk hours before mid-afternoon, after which I slide into a stuporous, slow blinking half attention for late afternoon and evening meetings and deadlines (fair warning). One of my clients is at full charge around the time I head to bed, which means she's texting me at a time I can't think straight. We've worked out a system where she sends stuff to me well past midnight, then I tackle them a few hours later. Deadlines met.

Good morning, Dunwoody.

Hello, Mr. Smith, the preternaturally alert and cautious school bus driver who rises at 3 am, makes his rounds in Dunwoody, then delivers his teen-aged passengers safely to Decatur each day.

See you tonight, Campaign Guy, as he leaves for another busy day bridging work and Dunwoody visits. We'll meet again over dinner.

Have a great day, neighbors leaving the house with one hand on the wheel and the other flexing a coffee cup to lips in the dark of the pre-dawn work day.

Sssshhh, lawn care companies starting power mowers and blowers before 9 (actually, at 7:15 one recent morning). I know you have a long day ahead, but please don't break the morning peace so abruptly.

That's enough, Fox News, CNN, and other cable news shows relying way too much yelling at each other rather than the calmer BBC method of simply reporting the news.

I'm on it, much valued client texting a desperate "can you get this by 10 am today" plea for writerly attention.

Just a minute, hyperactive Scooter the Wonder Dog. You don't really need to go to the bathroom - it's that chipmunk family under the front steps you're really keen to check on.

Have a great day!

Volunteers do it for free.

What makes Dunwoody truly great is the limitless capacity of friends and neighbors to volunteer their time and talent for causes near and dear to their hearts. 

In the past few weeks, I've had the privilege of working with volunteers at Dunwoody High School, Dunwoody Nature Center, Campaign Guy's energetic yard sign brigade, the DeKalb Master Gardener program, and St. Luke's Presbyterian Church. As I've shopped, carpooled, and run errands, I've also encountered volunteers like the firefighters collecting for Muscular Dystrophy, a sweet woman staffing the gift shop at Scottish Rite, parents loading and unloading instruments for the Friday night Marching Band performance, a young mom carrying a bag and picking up trash as she walked her child to Austin Elementary School, bloggers spreading the news about community events to Dunwoody's virtual neighborhood, the Young Professionals of Dunwoody planning a spectacular block party benefiting the DHS Band program, and .... well, frankly, seeing volunteers isn't just an occasional thing in Dunwoody. It's a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-'em, integral part of life in this It's a Wonderful Life town.

John F. Kennedy gave us all an echoing call to volunteerism, asking us to give, not receive; to look for opportunities to serve, not to benefit.  The Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity, and other world-changing volunteer organizations are a legacy of my childhood, that era when a passion to change the world preempted practical considerations like retirement funds and keeping up with the Joneses. Dunwoody is well represented by volunteer service organizations like the National Charity League, Dunwoody Woman's Club, Rotary and Kiwanis, faith groups, medical-focused charities, and others.

As this economy makes all of us look over our shoulders and fret over savings and expenditures, volunteers are even more critical to the quality of life we enjoy.  According to The Nonprofit Times,

"(t)he total estimated value of volunteer service in 2010 reached $173 billion with the proportion of volunteers serving more than 100 hours increasing from 33.2 percent in 2009 to 33.8 percent in 2010."

My unsubstantiated guess is that the percentage of Dunwoody volunteers serving that 100+ hour mark is even higher.

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 draws near, remember. And do something. Honor our men and women in uniform by using the freedoms they fight so hard to defend. Including volunteering your time and talent to enrich our community. Check with Dunwoody's own Pebbletossers,  Hands on Atlanta, and the City's volunteer opportunities board. Grab a trash bag and talk a walk around town - there's always windblown trash in natural areas and rights-of-way. 

Volunteers do it for free .... and from the heart.

Tough enough.

My morning routine (while waiting for High School Girl to catch her 6:15 am bus) includes reading the AJC online, scanning emails to prioritize my day (deadlines change by the hour), and checking into Ravelry, my favorite knitting virtual world.

This morning, I saw this:  Tough Gals: Do They Still Exist? 

Women are girly. Again.

Don't believe me? The proof is in the blogosphere: Women who blog about cupcakes! Women who blog (okay, rant) about gardening, Hello Kitty, and knitting! Even BUST magazine is sponsoring a Craft Fair in NYC. Women who blog about cats! And then there are cats who blog, but let's not get into that just now. Don't get me wrong, these are all lovely blogs, smart and entertaining. And some blogs, like the wonderful Jezebel, keep us on our toes pointing out what a long way we haven't come, baby (like in this piece on how female superheroes are sexualized). But.. seriously... cupcakes?"

Oh, bless her heart. This one-dimensional thinker has mistaken women's hard-won choices for copping out. She implies that the things men do are preferable to "girly" activities such as running a cupcake business, knitting for relaxation between working all day/tending to family needs, and wearing high fashion as we wage business wars.

So women can only be feminists if we act like men, work like men, look like men, and do "manly" things?

Ridiculous.

One commenter said,

"Perhaps women are girly again because finally we can be, without being thought weak. The hard work of a generation of feminists who felt they needed to be ball busters in order to be taken seriously has yielded this fruit: women who are not afraid to show their creative side, women who have been able to turn passionate hobbies into successful careers, women who are REAL."

There are trace elements of men who still patronize women in the workplace. Women have learned to deal with them deftly, moving around them or bowling over them when necessary. But bloggers like this, someone I believe is a young woman, are simply unfathomable in their snide superiority and complete lack of understanding that the success of the women's equal rights movement isn't a manly paradigm ... it's the opportunity to be women, in all the wide diversity of the gender.

As for the knitter the Huffington Post blogger "dissed," the Yarn Harlot has garnered over $1 million in donations to Doctors Without Borders. While knitting. And talking about knitting.

I am knitter. Hear me roar.

Les Mis

When Campaign Guy and I honeymooned in London, we saw two theatrical productions. Somehow, we chose Andrew Lloyd Weber's Starlight Express rather than Les Miserables, which had opened at the Barbican and was still in full production while we were there.

Seriously. Starlight Express.  Actors singing disco while wearing roller skates.

Through the years, I shrugged off the thought that the French Revolution could be interesting enough to warrant theater tickets.  And, because I'm somewhat plebian when it comes to live theater, I couldn't reconcile the high cost of the tickets.

I was wrong.

I have enjoyed the PBS' airings of the 25th anniversary celebration of Les Miserables in Concert at the 02 ... repeatedly. Fortunately, it's the darling of the fundraising campaigns, so I've been able to catch it four different times. Since I'm rarely sitting long enough to see an entire movie, let alone the multi-hour Les Mis, that means I've now seen it from start to finish. Alfie Boe is mesmerizing as Valjean, Nick Jonas surprisingly effective as Marius (it's sweet the way Katie Hall, the actress playing Cosette, keeps patting him on the arm reassuringly after one of their duets). And I love Norm Lewis as Javert.

I wonder if the Fox version next April will be as good? There's a lot to be said for being close enough to see the actors' expressions ... the Knitternall budget-friendly cheap seats in the Fox provide a panoramic view of the stage, but not the nuances of the emotions within the songs.

The lovely, silver lining to my late discovery of Les Miserables is that it's a fresh experience that I can appreciate much better now than when we were honeymooning. Thanks to advancements in filming, staging, sound, and today's digital media, I get to enjoy it at home ... repeatedly.

If you haven't seen it, catch it next time PBS airs it during a fundraising campaign. It's a splendid incentive to support the arts via public television.