The Incompetent Housewife: The typewriter.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The typewriter.

I freecycled an old typewriter today. I think it was originally my sister Beth’s, so in 1986 it was a high-quality, Smith-Corona model. It even had the fancy auto-correction tape. I remember buying it with Mom and Dad at the office supply store before Beth went to college.

Brother-in-law Mark just yesterday forwarded the annual list of things that date the incoming class of college freshmen. One was that the World Wide Web has been a tool their whole lives.

So I suppose they’ve never used typewriters either.

A real estate agent saw my listing on Freecycle and came by to pick it up. Addy wanted to know why that lady came over. Her next question: “What’s a typewriter?”

It was surprisingly difficult to explain.

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You know you're a homeschooler when:

yet another person asks how you do it all, and you think about the mountain of laundry and unintentionally green things in the fridge.
you figure the kindergarten teacher will teach your shoelace-troubled child how to finally tie shoes, then realize, "Wait! I AM the kindergarten teacher."
the internet repair worker walks into your living room and announces, "Oh, you run a daycare." You don't.
when your child is teased that there are poisonous snakes in the hole she fell into, her calm response is, "That can't be. There are no poisonous snakes in our state."
your 6-year-old hears you discussing something involving numbers and wants to know, "How would that look in a pie chart?"
you hear loud crying, so you rush to the front yard to find your 3-year-old has fallen off the porch bottom-first into the bushes. Turns out she is not concerned about the pain. She cries, "I knocked the honey out and how the bees can't come!" (She thinks she has knocked all the pollen off the bushes.)
your 5-year-old says she heated up her silly putty and you fear she put it in the microwave. When you ask how she heated it, she replies, "Well, just with my carbon dioxide." She means she breathed on it.
your daughter sees a piece of art you painted before she was born. Her first question is, "And how did you FEEL while you were painting it?"
your husband is curious why the Unifix cube are all over the floor—again—and you tell him you were playing a math game. Your daughter says no, it was just a game, not math, and insists, "We didn't ‘do school’ today.” Yes, honey, that’s exactly the point.
where others see an empty oatmeal box, you see a project waiting to happen.
you can't cut into a piece of fruit in your house without the kids examining the seeds and begging, "Can we plant them?!? Can we?"
there are tadpoles swimming on your kitchen counter, right there between the cutting board and the coffeemaker.
said tadpoles are in a glass bowl from your china cabinet.
over by the china cabinet are butterfly chrysalises you don't want to throw out because they're just so cool.
your child expresses interest in going to the public school. Your muscles tense as you carefully ask what interests her about traditional school (Are you ruining her life by keeping her home?), then relax as she tells you, "I just want to know what it's like to ride a school bus."
you shout, "Ewww!" because you find a half-eaten bird in the garage. Your daughter scolds you by saying, "Not ewww ... Cool!"
your daughter is supposed to be changing into her pajamas, but instead she stands in front of the mirror with her t-shirt hanging off her head because, "I look like one of the kings of Egypt."
your daughter is looking for a way to light the back of the closet and says, "Mom, do you know where a flashlight is, or should we make one?"
your daughter drapes a towel over her head after her shower and asks, "Hey, do I look like an Israelite?"