Once Upon A Time...

Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows

2012-01-24T13:23:00.000-08:00

It was interesting seeing this movie, but it's god-awful boring. There's a cinematic style issue where they dissect every action scene in slow-motion with every option played out as a voice drones. Then the action occurs, and it's not a surprise.

Basically, about 3/4 of the way through the film, I turned to Norm and said, "I wish Moriarty would just kill him so we could go home."

There was a plot. Holmes must have done some deduction during the film but I swear I don't remember any. It might have been the fact that Holmes was juiced up on coffee and coca leaves. The dog in the film had more personality. I felt sorry for Dr. Watson who was tagging along for the ride.

I mean, if you're going to see a movie about one of the most brilliant deductive reasoners in literary history, you expect a movie that should challenge your mental status more than a 5-year-old's. Not spoon-fed pap.

But the explosions were fun.

Etiquette for a Church Supper

2011-12-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year when there are lots of events at the church. One of the popular activities is the time-honored potluck supper. It's a fun way to hang out with some amiable people.

Here's my whimsical set of 'rules' for a potluck:

1. Show up a few minutes before the official start time. It takes a bit of time to set up a crock pot or serving dish. You want yours to be on the line before the crowd starts queuing up.

2. Remember serving utensils for your dish. The church might have some, but it never hurts to be prepared. Serving mac-n-cheese with a plastic dinner spoon is awkward.

3. It always seems that either a potluck is heavy on main dishes or heavy on desserts. Doesn't seem like there is a middle ground here.

4. Once all the food is in the line, sit back and wait with the rest. Talk to your neighbors.

5. The meal won't start till after the prayer.

6. After the meal is over, remember to take home your leftovers. Dealing with a dozen unwanted containers is overwhelming to a group of volunteers.

7. It's like Scouts --wipe up your table. Leave it neater than you found it.

8. Everyone loves praise about their dish.

9. Meet someone new. Laugh a bit.

Kindle Fire review

2011-12-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

So, I bought a Kindle Fire for a good friend. They're quite addictive to play with for any length of time. And not surprisingly, my friend's oldest son won't leave it alone since it plays a variety of fun games. He's 5.

I like the Fire, but won't get one for myself. It weighs about a pound, and it's glass. Definitely not as 'tippy' as my iPad, but still not what I want to drag around in my purse so that I can read books. It's a nice size, has a beautiful screen image, and is perfect for viewing videos or playing games. The Kindle App is embedded in it, so you can read books on it.

But the reason I got my Kindle Keyboard is that I didn't want lurid romance book covers laying around the house. On the Fire, that's suddenly a problem again.

Why? The Kindle App shows the book cover in full detail. And if that wasn't enough, the Carousel that is the home image for the Kindle Fire shows thumbnails of what was open last in order. So, if you've been using the Calculator, checking a website, playing an app, and reading "Molly's Hot Secrets", then what shows in your Carousel is "Molly's Hot Secrets" book cover with the app played just behind it and the website viewed in thumbnail behind that and the Calculator last.

Suddenly, the Kindle isn't quite kid safe. If I let my kid play with it, I have to be prepared to have all that material on view for her eyes. I'm not comfortable with that.

There's an app now that lets you lock out some content, but I haven't played with it. It's called "Kids Place - With Child Lock."

The second big gotcha with letting the children play with this is that you can purchase things in apps. The game apps are infamous for this behavior. If you want something unlocked, you can pay an extra fee by clicking a button. Supposedly this behavior can be turned off for apps, but one click purchasing can't be turned off for books and other materials purchased from Amazon.

I'd be ok with turning off the in-app purchases and still allowing book purchases for my own kid (she's 8). She's pretty good about letting me know when she wants to purchase something. But still, for younger kids without any impulse control that could be a deal breaker. To get it to work in a child environment, I'd have to register an account for my child separate from my own so my archive isn't visible to her, then shut off in-app purchases without a password, and give only a gift card for Amazon for purchasing (not link a credit card).

And let's face it, if you get this the kids are going to play with it --unless you don't have children.

For me, I don't actually consume a lot of music or video. I'm really a heavy consumer of printed word, though. And since my consumption patterns are skewed so heavily to text, a Kindle Fire is heavy and uncomfortable to use while reading for several hours. And LED screen reading tires my eyes more quickly. I really like eInk for reading. And my Kindle Keyboard is light in comparison.

I Quit.

2011-10-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

There's something that I haven't mentioned in the blogosphere. A few months back when I took the trip to Europe, I quit my graduate school degree.

There were numerous reasons for quitting that I told myself:
Amelia needs more Mommy time.
I need more time at home without the stress of schoolwork.
I wasn't cutting it (actually, I was doing well).
By the time I'd finish the degree, I'd be old enough that it wouldn't matter.
I hated the subject (at least that was honest).

The real reason is more complicated and yet very simple. I want to write. If I'm spending all of my time writing for a class on subjects that I hate I won't be writing stuff I love.

I started throwing out craft stuff too, because it gets in the way of writing.

And I've found that, interestingly, now that I cleared the decks to write, my voice is mute. I can't seem to force my writing past a half-page. And the half-page stinks like three day old fish.

The block has gone on for years now. It has to end. I just don't know how to end it.

Iron Chef Brownie

2011-10-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

So last weekend Amelia and her father went on the Girl Scout camping trip for the Iron Chef Brownie weekend. Iron Chef Brownie is an event for the area Brownie troops where the girls get to learn a bit about cooking over campfires.

Amelia had a good time, but got really hungry because she just won't eat real food. And the mixed pasta with Velveeta and peas and hot dog pieces just wasn't her cup of tea. Neither was the Peach French Toast made in a dutch oven. And she even passed on the tin foil cooking even though she made a packet for herself.

Norm managed to get a small amount of food (plain pasta) into her on the trip so she wasn't quite desperate. Frankly, love her as I do, a little desperation would have gone far to push her into trying some new foods. Our current limited menu is becoming a real problem.

And why was I at home for the event? Well, Norm is our troop's certified camper so he had to go. Amelia was signed up. But there were enough Moms, so I wasn't needed. (Frankly, I should have been there as another First Aid person. Never can have too many of those.) In fact they didn't want extra Moms on the trip. So I wasn't invited. I stayed home and cleaned the house instead.

The girls had a wonderful time even with a few food woes. And somehow, in literally one day and one overnight, they managed to have socks that took on a life of their own. They reeked so much that I made the dirty laundry from the trip stay on the porch until I could empty the washer and wash them. Eeewwww.

Goodbye, Spider. Godspeed.

2011-09-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

We had to put Spider to sleep on Sunday morning, 1:00 am. He was in terrible shape and just not recovering at all. Norm and I have been very sad this weekend.

Spider had problems with allergies. He developed allergies to most cat foods. Over the past 3 weeks, he'd finally developed an allergy to the hypoallergenic cat foods also. (Hill's Z/D, Royal Canin Hypoallergenic) There was literally nothing left to try.

Massive doses of steroid weren't giving him any relief from the itching. He had no hair left on his head --it was just raw oozing mess. His eye wasn't healing at all after 3 months of intensive care. And finally, this weekend, he developed blood in his urine again.

We made the decision to put him down on Saturday. It was wrenching, but I couldn't stand seeing him in that much pain.

Kitty Eye Injury Update

2011-06-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Spider is doing better. He's getting antibiotic drops every 4 hours. The vet also added blood plasma that was drawn from him. The red cells were spun out of the vial and the plasma was poured off. I use a pipette to draw a drop out and bathe his eye with it every four hours (about an hour after the antibiotic is given). The blood plasma has a healing effect on his wound. Since it's drawn from him, there isn't a risk of reaction to foreign proteins.

The hypoallergenic food is quelling his skin. Quite frankly, he's a different cat these days. I've been letting him hang out with me in the evenings on the couch.

I missed my Birthday Camping trip, but getting my old friend back has been worth it.

Kitty Eye Injury

2011-06-25T09:52:00.000-07:00

Spider is stable, but not much better today. Not getting worse, but not improving very fast despite the hourly drops of antibiotic in his eyes.

I won't be able to join everyone for the last evening at the campground because I'm still going to have to give him drops every hour for the next 2-3 days.

At least he's not anywhere near as itchy as he was. And now that he's using a litterbox I've let him come out to visit me in the rest of the house on his own terms.

The good news is that if we can keep that eye from ulcerating, then he might still be able to see out of it. There will be a large dark pigmentation patch on his cornea, but he can peek around it.

Birthday Camping -- sort of

2011-06-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

For my birthday this year, I picked our camping destination. I chose Caledonia State Park in Pennsylvania. It's pretty. It has hiking trails. It has a pool. It's one of my husband's favorite camping sites but I've never been up there.

Getting ready for the trip was exciting. We got the camper ready to go out with the new truck. We made up lists of things that we'd need for the first trip out in a year. We packed clothes. I took a couple of days off of work so that the weekend could be extended.

Spider, our oldest cat, has been having some health problems lately. He has thyroid and kidney issues. He's also allergic to most of the planet, as far as we can tell. But at 17 1/2 years of age, he stopped using his litterbox completely and instead picks different spots around the house to do his business. He's in such bad physical shape with his itchy, scratchy allergies that we actually discussed putting him down as a mercy. As a last ditch effort, before the camping trip, I took him into the vet to see what we could do and board him for the weekend. I suspected a urinary tract infection (UTI) might be causing his litterbox avoidance.

Unfortunately, he was in worse shape than I thought. Not only was he itchy and scratchy, but he had a raging UTI and had managed in his misery to claw his left eye. It wasn't visible to me, but our superhero vet picked up on that eye and found that he'd managed to claw the cornea. Suddenly it wasn't just try to clear up his allergies and UTI so he uses his litterbox again --it was heroic measures to try to keep the eye from infecting so we don't have to put him down.

Someone has to give him drops in his eye every hour over the weekend. That someone is me. So I'm missing my Birthday Camping trip. I didn't want the weekend ruined for everyone, so I stayed home with the cat and sent everyone to have fun.

I'm working from home today so that I can take a few less leave hours. I'm getting up and cleaning up a part of the house every half hour or so. (At work I'd be stopping to do some sit-ups or stretches. Sitting non-stop just hurts.) I've managed to almost catch completely up on the laundry including the several loads of fussy things that have to each be done separately. When I'm done working tonight I'll mop the floor in the kitchen.

I'm so lonely that I can't stand it. But trying to save Spider is worth it. He's going to lose the use of that eye. And his other eye has a clouding cornea, so it's likely that he's going to go blind.

But in just 24 hours I see a difference. He got a massive dose of injected antibiotics. We changed his cat food from the prescription kidney disease diet (Hill's KD) to a hypoallergenic diet of rabbit/potato (Royal Canin Hypoallergenic). I'm giving him drops in his eye hourly. And for a while until the allergy reaction dies down I'm giving him a tablet of triamcinolone daily to calm his skin. We've got him in an elizabethan collar to keep him from clawing at his eye.

He started using his litterbox. He's calmer. The skin isn't clear, of course, but a lot of the raw patches are suddenly healing. He's sleeping quite a bit, but he's still pretty miserable. He's also suddenly really hungry and has eaten through two full cans of rabbit/potato wet food in a day. I'm feeding him extra right now if he'll eat it because he'd lost so much weight.

I miss everyone and have been calling to check on the camping trip. It rained but stopped long enough for them to pitch the camper. It rained again last night. Amelia went swimming today and is eagerly waiting to see if her friend is coming up this weekend to join them. It's beautiful up there.

I've been told that there are other weekends we can go up. Norm is making a list of the prime spots so that we can choose a decent spot later.

But, bummer.

Birthday Gift: Kindle 3 with 3G/Wi-Fi - A review

2011-06-06T10:52:00.000-07:00

Norm got me a Kindle 3 for my birthday. I'd been looking at book readers for about 2 years now, but the price and features always had me on the fence.

What I really wanted was something to read books on, and maybe surf to read some blogs. I have an iPad and a Motorola Xoom that I use at work. They're great if you want to open a document on Google Docs, surf some web pages, and watch videos. But not so hot for reading books because they are too big to hold easily and too heavy.

I thought about getting a Galaxy Tab until I tried one out at the Verizon store. It was slow and clunky. And really, I don't like to spend hours staring at an LED screen because it hurts my eyes after a while.

So, armed with that information, I made a decision to take a chance on a Kindle and had Norm order one from Amazon. After all, if it was really a bad choice, I'd just send it back.

It's not going back. I love it.

It's light. I can hold it in one hand. And the 3G network on board has me surfing web pages though I don't do as much of that as reading with it. It opens up the ability to use the Kindle as a poor man's tablet, though.

Here's a list of what I've managed to do with my Kindle:

1. Read email. I can log in, view the message list, and read entire messages. I can't send a reply back from it, though.

2. Log into some work sites with it and actually do some work. This is limited, but if I was on a trip this could be a handy thing. I can't view Google Docs with it --the browser is not that sophisticated. I can see the doc title there, but I can't open it.

3. Take meeting notes. I create a .txt file with the meeting name and agenda if I have an agenda. Then I just use the annotation feature to write notes in the file. When I'm done with the meeting, I connect the Kindle to my laptop and download the notes from My Clippings and clear the My Clippings file.

4. Listen to some songs. It plays songs in the order added (though sometimes it will just insert one in the list randomly), so it's a bit like loading an audio CD into your car CD player, but I've found that it's decent enough when I wear headphones. I haven't found a volume control and the volume setting is what I'd set for my 8-year-old. But I can read and listen to music at the same time. Nice. (Oops, just found this as I was writing. It's on the bottom of the player. I was expecting the forward and back buttons to work as volume controls.)

5. Read. I've found that since it's so light, I toss it in my purse. And that means that I read at odd moments while waiting for other things. So I'm reading more.

6. Rediscover. I subscribed to a couple of Sci-Fi magazines that I used to read all the time but didn't once I became a working adult. I fell in love with Sci-Fi all over again and started downloading and reading more.

7. Look it up. Sometimes while reading Sci-Fi, I find that I need to look up a word. Rare, but sometimes I find one. There's a built-in dictionary that's decent. I can look it up and get back to reading without losing my spot.

Would it replace my print books? Not entirely. I still like holding a book. But it just might further on in the future. I like the ability to shift the type to a larger size on whim. It doesn't tire my eyes like an LED.

I'll often read until I get sleepy at night, then put it down and turn out the lights. Evidently reading an LCD screen can interfere with sleep. I know that I've had a difficult time winding down after working on an iPad and watching a video. It may just be that watching a video jazzes me up more than reading, but I do like reading until I'm tired.

And with an 8-year-old, not having explicit romance covers laying around the house is quite necessary. So my romance/paranormal reading is moving to Kindle, and I'm ditching print books.

Reading on it with an 8-year-old is also good. I downloaded a few titles for Amelia to entertain her when we're somewhere and she's bored. (A "Thank You" to Susie for the idea of using this in Church when we can't possibly expect her to understand the sermon for the adults. I found some decent kid's Bible stories.) I monitor what she's opening so she doesn't stumble into my labeled collections.

Things I'd like? A shuffle mode for the mp3 player. A password protect mode for some collections --with an ability to set that on only some collections. The ability to reply to email, but I can see how that might cause my data usage to go up.

But I'm happy with this little device. I've read more than I have in years. It's discrete. And no one can tell whether I'm reading Like Water for Chocolate, War and Peace, or a trashy-covered romance novel. I'm just reading the device.

Memories of Venice

2011-04-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

Venice is by far the most beautiful city in my opinion. Our time there was well spent even if we only saw a couple of highlights.

We stayed at a fabulous hotel, the Hotel Ala Best Western, which was about 5 blocks from the Plaza de San Marco. I can't say enough good things about that hotel. I brought one small child and two older adults that were cautious about traveling abroad. I scheduled the child in at the last minute, and the hotel was able to accommodate us in a "family" room that slept four people. It was a lovely large room that had a window onto the canal.

The service here was above and beyond expectations. They accommodated our family on short notice. The staff offered us information about a great free boat ride to a glass factory on Murano (don't buy anything if you don't want to do so). When we purchased watercolors on the street, the staff helped me find a flattened cardboard box and packing tape so that I could protect them on the way home. I used the free internet terminal several times during the stay. This is definitely a place that I recommend. If you go, pick this one that is five blocks from San Marco square rather than the Best Western that is on San Marco square --this one is quieter at night. My friends are going to schedule a stay there later this summer based on my experiences. I wish I'd taken a photo of the hotel front.

Breakfast at the Hotel Ala is memorable. They really lay on an amazing spread of coffee, juice, rolls, fruit, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, yogurt, dried fruit, fruit salad, fruit and cream tart, cheeses, sliced meats, croissants, bagels, and donuts. There's a toaster and lots of cream and milk for tea and coffee. Every time I thought I'd scouted all of it, Dad would show up at the table with something new that I'd missed. The coffee was absolutely fantastic even if it was served in a brew pot instead of made single serving. I still dream about that coffee. We tended to really load up on food at breakfast. For me, that was a major factor in picking this hotel because I'd heard the breakfast was good. My food allergies preclude many basic meal choices (can't have bread). Eating well at breakfast meant that there was a lot of lead time to scout restaurants for possible gluten-free choices.

Italy understands gluten-free, though:

Venice is meant to be seen by water. And that we did. The water taxi from the airport to the hotel stop was our first taste. The free boat ride to the Murano glass factory was the second. Our gondola ride had its own memories. And the water taxi to the train station was our last view of Venice by water.

Here are some of our memories:

The Plaza de San Marco is the big tourist draw. The Basilica itself is quite lovely and covered in gold. Amelia was fascinated by the clockwork men on top of the bell tower. Even more fascinated when I told her that one of the clockwork men killed a workman in the 1600's or 1700's by knocking him off of the building. After that story, she always wanted to see "the evil men" strike the hour if we were near the square.

Venice could have done without the "Bridge of Sighs brought to you by Toyota," though. What fiendish advertising exec thought *this* up?

Yes, that's the Bridge of Sighs surrounded by blue sky canvas with Toyota's logo plastered all over it. It was irritating.

Around the corner in the square, Amelia tried her hand at coaxing pigeons to sit on her hand:

And she found a very old stone lion that needed a friend:

Mom, of course, snapped a lot of pictures:

I spent a lot of time watching my charges wander around with stars in their eyes and gelato in their hands. We fell in love with Venice. I'd go back for a visit anytime.

Vacation!! - End of Italy, Beginning of Britain

2011-04-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

The first day in Rome, we did manage to get over to the Vatican to see the Pope address the audience from his study window. His message was in Italian on the Transfiguration of Christ, but after the sermon he talked briefly about the war with Libya. Italy declared war on Libya the day we all arrived in Italy. The Pope expressed concern for the welfare of the Libyan citizens.

Our last day full day in Rome was our day at the Vatican Museum.

The Vatican tour wasn't left to chance. I wanted to get a pro to lead us through what was the highlight of our trip in Italy. I loved my guide for the Vatican tour. I hired one from Context tours. We got a private tour with a guide because we had a child with us. That's a challenging tour for any guide, but we got Linda Nolan who was spectacular:

Linda led us through the Vatican Museum. She took pity on me and let us go to the little coffee shop in the Vatican museum where I downed 2 lattes and an orange juice in as many minutes to try to cut through my tired haze. (It worked) I took my sleeping meds too late the night before and I was barely functional the first half hour of the tour. She rose to the occasion valiantly.

The tour was beyond my expectations. Saint Peter's Basilica is quite simply the most beautiful sacred space that I've ever been inside. The Sistine Chapel was bigger than my imagination and full of lovely color and movement. I took very few pictures during the tour because I can't do it justice and it was just too lovely. I did get that snapshot of our lovely guide though.

That evening we all had dinner at the hotel which was lovely. The food was excellent. The host entertaining. All in all, it was a lovely way to end our visit in Italy.

The next day we nipped out to see San Clemente church with it's ancient Mithraceum and 4th Century church under the main church floor. We got back just in time to catch our bus to the airport for our flight to England.

Once in England, I bid goodbye to Mom and Dad for a while. They flew to Manchester to visit with the English family members. I got picked up by Sue for a short stay in Castle Rising.

The village of Castle Rising is always peaceful and lovely. It amazes me every time how quiet and dark the village is at night. This was my last visit there as Sue and the family are leaving to return to the U.S. (probably) in August.

We did all nip out for a day trip to Brugge, Belgium during my stay. The ferry ride from Dover to Calais was a first for me. I got a chance to see the White Cliffs of Dover for the first time.

Brugge is a lovely lace-trimmed painted chocolate box of a city. With beer. And canals. We took a boat ride on the canals and had lunch in a great little restaurant with hot cocoa after the meal. Then we prowled through chocolate shops, lace shops, and one lone needlework shop before catching the bus back to England.

Here are Lily and Amelia with the famous swans of Brugge:

And we all took a boat ride:

After the few days with Sue, she dropped me off at the hotel near London Heathrow airport so that I could spend a day in London with Amelia.

We spent our day at the Tower of London. We joined in on a tour with one of the Beefeaters. He enthralled the audience with gory stories of beheadings and lost princes. Amelia was both terrified and enraptured. She slept in my bed that night.

But I think she really enjoyed London.

What a great trip!

Vacation!! - Italy, England, Belgium

2011-04-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

The family just got back from a trip to Italy, England, and Belgium. Norm couldn't go with us this trip, but Amelia and I traveled with Norm's parents. It was a spectacular trip. The pic above is Amelia and I visiting my friend Sue and her kids on a day trip to Brugge, Belgium.

We started in Italy. Venice was our first stop:

Venice is lovely. It's best to sight-see by water. We spent two days clambering over bridges and canals, hiking around San Marco, and just drinking in the sights.

We had several adventures, but one of the most memorable was our gondola ride with the Wicked Gondolier.

Mom loves a bargain. But don't try to cut rate the Gondoliers for a ride. Mom bargained for an 80 Euro trip instead of the 100 Euro trip. The gondolier accepted, but when we got in the boat, he suddenly lost the ability to speak English.

Not only did his English vanish, but suddenly his ability to pole under bridges without knocking my head into the side was diminished. I caught on to the game quickly and moved to kneel in the center of the boat to minimize the impact. He then started tipping the gondola a bit far to make it uncomfortable. That continued until I shifted my weight suddenly to catch him off-balance and tip the boat even further. After that, he behaved, but it was a silent tense ride. Mom and Dad were happy and oblivious to the tension, though. That's all that matters.

Next stop was Rome. I don't know if Amelia enjoyed Rome:

We visited every gelato stand and there were tons of them:

Along with the gelato stand tour, we also saw the Colosseum and the Roman Forum.

At the Roman Forum, we hired a guide named Antoinette. Antoinette made that tour memorable. She knew her facts but they flowed out of her a mile a minute. If you interrupted the flow with a question, she got startled and couldn't pick up the thread for a minute. I thought she was just flustered about being an unlicensed guide in the Roman Forum. That's her picture above.

Ah, Antoinette, our bi-polar guide. Antoinette was a sweet older woman who dyed her hair black and was originally from Hershey, PA. She started the tour by pulling out the folder with drawings and renditions of what Rome looked like at several eras. And started talking a mile a minute. And the volume increased. And the talk was littered with dates (she did know it all) and eras and lots of discussion about how the area had been buried under a cow pasture. Got that. Asked her about one of the buildings and she said, "I am Getting to that but you NEED to know the history first." And then buried us under figures and dates. I was less agitated at that point and starting to get highly amused. It was quite obvious to me that she's bi-polar and off her meds. (Would someone please explain to me why they always are drawn to ME? No. Don't answer that.)

I found that I could steer her conversation in the right way if I started her walking in an area and talked soothingly. We passed a tour group. She stopped to let them pass, stared fixedly at them, and hissed, "Barbarians." I was surprised so I ignored it. She refused to go in the areas with the tour groups, but I thought that was due to her non-official guide status and some sort of rule. Nope.

She was flat out batshit crazy.

The tour began near the Temple of Saturn where the Roman treasury was held. We discussed the Temple of Jupiter that was gone that had been in the distance on the hill. We discussed the Julian Basilica where the law court was. A few tourists passed close to us, and she hissed, "Barbarians!" again. This time, I said "What?" And she told me, "don't they look like Barbarians to you? They have that same bovine look. Like cattle." No, I said, I just can't see it, sorry. We walked on and discussed the Temple of Castor and Pollux and the possible Temple of Minerva behind that. We passed more tourist groups and I swear she actually pulled her scarf up so that the trailing end wouldn't touch anyone and stared at them like they had sprouted basilisk heads. We talked about the Temple of Vesta and the Virgins and the Sacred Flame. And we got to the steps to the House of the Vestals and she pulled aside and said, "I won't go in there. All those people tramping around like cattle in that sacred space. Men even. They'd never have been allowed in that area. It's only been open to the public a year and should have been left closed." Oh, I said, and nodded and walked past her up the steps into the House of the Vestals.

She followed me into the sacred house.

And it *was* clear that she'd never been in there. She completely missed the actual original temple excavation in the corner and walked to the statuary. She was upset that there was no inscription for one of the statues that actually had a head on it. She told me that the statue was of a very old woman and "had immense power. There's a lot of energy in that statue." Yes, I see, I said. I walked on to another headed statue. Antoinette started reading the Latin inscription and talked about University professors at Catholic University and how she wouldn't pay attention to anything not said by a University professor. Oh, I said. I asked her what the large building was behind the House of the Vestals. "I don't know. It's a building from Hadrian's time." (It was the addition done to the Circus Maximus around the time of Hadrian, yes.) And then she started talking more about the Vestals. And was quite excited. We wandered out of the house and on the road and there was a set of marble cornice blocks that had bulls' heads carved in them. "Oh Hi, Genevieve!" she said. Excuse me? I said. "That's Genevieve. That bull's head there. I named it that because Genevieve and Allain saw it upside down and Allain turned it upright because it looked sacriligious. It has so much energy in it."

Oh, I said. And then she noticed another group and said, "The world is going to end in blood and fire, and they're all going to look like that with that bovine look in their eyes." I nodded and said, "Look at the time. We've kept you. Antoinette, it's been fascinating, and we'll remember you." I paid her and then she gave Amelia an orange and some stickers. Amelia liked her.

I do love memorable guides. She was definitely memorable.

I'll continue the vacation travelogue in another post.

Mango and Allergy

2011-02-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

I've been sucking down a lot of green smoothies lately. That's green veggies spun up in a blender with fruit to make it palatable. One of my favorite things in smoothies is frozen mango. It makes the mix smooth and creamy with a tangy bite.

I've noticed a lot of heartburn lately. I thought it might be something in the smoothie, and started checking different veggies and fruit.

It's the mango. I'm having some sort of allergic reaction to mango. It's making my mouth feel raw and swollen, heartburn, and some wheezy shortness of breath for several hours after I eat it. Before I figured out it was mango, I had started taking a benedryl every night for the reactions.

It turns out that mango is related to poison ivy and poison oak. The sap from the plant has the same oil. If mangos themselves weren't so tasty, we'd get rid of the trees.

My smoothies just don't taste as good without mango, but at least I can breathe.

Disney's "Shake It Up" and other Inappropriate Conversation

2011-01-26T14:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, the Senior Center Woman's line about dancing in her birthday suit was over the line for a teen show. But there are so many references and bad dialogue and set ups that I hardly know where to start. The only positive note is that this show is banned for vulgarity and not for the constant arguments that got "Suite Life of Zack and Cody" banned from our life.

Disney has earned that permanent lockout.

Here are some examples on this show for the few episodes that I've seen. There's something in every single episode, it seems:

Episode 3 - Give It Up
----------------------
Not only do these episodes have some of the most dubious titles that I've ever seen, but this episode was one that caught my attention and started my hunt through the other episodes to see what it was that Disney is peddling to the 6-11 year old crowd.

I didn't go any further than this line of dialogue that occurs in the first few minutes of the program:

Girls finish a dance number at a senior center.
Older Woman at Senior Center: "You call that dancing? I did better than that when I was a Vegas Showgirl....And I did it in my birthday suit!"

Episode 2 - Meatball It Up
--------------------------
CeCe: "Uh oh. I see clouds rolling in. And that means it's time for …."
Rocky & CeCe: "Rain!!!"
Girls proceed to throw money in the air and dance in it as it falls. Stripper style.

CeCe's mother comes in while they're doing that and joins them. Then makes a comment about being 29. Which could explain a Lot about her parenting since the girls are supposed to be 13.

Episode 7 - Party It Up
-----------------------
The whole sneaking out premise was tasteless and nothing about their comeuppance managed to do anything to salvage the situation. It was a typical "Sorry we got caught" scene. And here's a sample of dialogue:

CeCe's Brother: "We need more boys in this house. I'm outnumbered."
CeCe's Mom: "Hey, don't look at me. Factory's closed."

CeCe: "Whoa. You look like….old enough to get into an R-rated movie."
Rocky: "You look old enough to have a driver's license."

And that tasteless "water torture" scene when the Mom interrogates the boys about the girls' whereabouts.

Episode 8 - Hook It Up
----------------------

Cool nick name for the backup dancers - "The Rear Ends"

Cece: "Do we get dressing rooms?"
Chicago Dance Leader: "Right here" Points to a wall beside the stage with coathooks and bags.
Cece: "We get hooks. What happens if we have to change clothes and there are boys around?"
Chicago Dance Leader: "Oh come on. We're dancers. There's no shame here. Our bodies are our instruments."
Rocky: "Yeah, well my banjo prefers to stay in its case."

CeCe: "You know what else is coming up? My gym pants up my butt!"

Tinka: "Ah. We always knew CeCe was a very dirty girl!"

And the entire bit about the "Doo-Doo Girls" complete with the butt waggle dance.

There are so many references to "pee", "butt", "poop" that it is just too impossible to list.

Enough is enough. There won't be any more Disney programs allowed without full parental screening. And given that I've heard about a "Phineas and Ferb" episode that may contain a very rude word used by a crowd, well, it's under scrutiny too. Given that our family adores "Phineas and Ferb" that's a serious hardship. Right now, we're taping episodes from the Disney channels so that I don't have to drop the lockout so that we can watch. But I'm screening them first to make sure that the rude word is really legendary and not real. I'm thinking that maybe someone mistook "Curse you!" for something more offensive.

This is not "tween" material. It isn't even suitable for 16-year-olds due to the vapid subject matter.

Disney's "Shake It Up" and Inappropriate Conversation

2011-01-25T07:44:00.000-08:00

I'm a pretty mellow Mom. There are a lot of things out there that don't bother me. But this weekend the Disney Channel, of all things, finally tripped my Mom-censor.

Shake It Up seems to be a fairly new show. I haven't quite gotten the basic plot line, but it seems to involve girls dancing a lot.

This weekend, my daughter and her friend were watching Disney Channel in the background while the adults were having coffee and chatting. Suddenly, I heard *this* snippet of conversation between two characters:

Girls finish a dance number at a senior center.
Older Woman at Senior Center: "You call that dancing? I did better than that when I was a Vegas Showgirl....And I did it in my birthday suit!"

I immediately got up, walked over, and turned the TV off. I've seen some dubious things, but HOW did that get past Disney's quality control? The answer has to be that it was deliberate to add a bit of shock value and further Disney's goal of making it cool for teens.

So, let me get this straight. Disney thinks it is OK to glorify strippers in its teen programming????!!!!

That's not OK. They just lost two families and probably more once I get the word out to the rest of the parent circle. Disney just earned a lockout on our parental control, and all Disney programs are going to either be eliminated or pre-screened in our household. Disney is mixing preschooler programming with PG-13 programming now. That lockout is going to stay until she is at least 14.

I'm not a letter writer. But I'm writing a letter about this incident today to Disney. This episode was called "Give It Up" (series 1, episode 3) aired on Sun Jan 23, 2011 when we saw it.

Vacation Dreaming

2011-01-11T07:34:00.000-08:00

We've been quietly planning out the year at home. Vacations typically get settled out a year or two in advance, and this year is no different. Well, a bit different because the end of the summer has some uncertainty in it. Since that's one of the best times of year to vacation because the little one is in school, I'm planning mostly close-to-home simple vacations.

I'd love to go to Spain. But it's not in the cards this year. After summer, I can see if it will be in the cards next year. I've got a feeling it will be 2013 before we can go. Norm's not very keen on traveling outside the US borders, and it's also a money/planning thing. Anything on the Eastern seaboard within a half day's drive of D.C. is ok, but outside of that I'm frustrated. Even Ohio and the Great Lakes verge on too far to travel.

Branson, Missouri, of all places, came up last night. I know we'd like to do Gatlinburg at some point. Branson, however, is turning into a combination of Nashville and Atlantic City with a bit of Orlando thrown in for good measure.

Did you know that they are building a castle in Branson? Not a replica made of plaster and timber, but a real stone castle using authentic techniques. The estimated time to completion is something like 20 years. I can just imagine the glee of thousands of medievalists at the thought of a real American castle. Every SCA member is probably giddy at the thought of a feast in a real castle.

Years ago, in the Kingdom of Atlantia, I belonged to the Ladies' Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. The "Terrorist" part was no more sinister than the plotting of the overthrow of the Kingdoms of Drachenwald or Trimaris. However, I do remember that since I put SCA and the associated groups down on a security form for the government, I spent about an hour trying to explain what it was that the Ladies' Society *did* with such a provocative name. What did we do? Well, hand sewing and embroidery of garments was popular. Half a dozen of us spent time (and gained a lot of arm muscle) knitting chain mail. And working ways to make the Barony of ?Columbia? (I think that was the name) the most feared on the battlefield. So, more chain mail knitting.

A castle. Really. With medieval workman and everything. Ooooohhhh. Maybe we have to give Branson a look-see.

On the Season

2010-12-30T19:03:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is the final day of the year. This year is finally drawing to a close with a very happy ending despite some rather rough water that was navigated. In January I enter a new job with new people in a new office and am thrilled to be able to work in a group where we are actually helping faculty further the goals of the University. The best part is that helping faculty bit, but the icing on the cake is that I'm no longer on the same 24/7/365 schedule that I've been on for the past 3.5 years. Oh, there is some rotational on-call work with this, but it's nowhere near the same level of stress. I can actually sleep at night.

And I think I've re-learned how to sleep at night. I wasn't doing that for a while and in the summer it hit a real peak of not sleeping. Forty minute catnaps that end in a sudden heart-pounding jolt awake are not fun. To finally be winding into a job where that level of anxiety is no longer necessary is a blessing.

My daughter started really swimming this year. She's not got the strokes yet, but the next couple of swim lesson sessions should begin rounding that out. However, she keeps her head above water as she flounders across a pool.

Amelia started wearing glasses this year. At first they were a real fashion accent, but now they've drifted into a chore to wear. I was hoping the fashionable feeling would last for a couple of years, but I was wrong. Poor kid. She inherited my Dad's eyes, I think. He had terrible eyesight.

I don't usually talk about Norm in my blog. But we've had a tough year as a family, and he's been my anchor point. Being able to catch my breath and lean against his strength is bliss indeed. I'm absolutely bowled over by him as always.

Christmas was rather chaotic and joyous this year. We've had a few of them so far and two more to come. Christmas keeps recurring for us in the form of family dinners and gaiety.

Wishing your families a brilliant New Year.

On the Avoidance of Writing

2010-12-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

I'm avoiding my writing again. Oh, not this blog or witty correspondence or anything that is pretty much meaningless.

But the heart and soul of me thrown into narrative form, *that* I'm avoiding. I can't seem to show anyone anything that I write. Ever. That need to keep all writing under wraps is beyond the little bit of a personality quirk and has gone deep into ritualized phobia.

I can't write. Because if I write then it follows that I have to show that written narrative to someone else. Even if I just hide it in a drawer, it can be found. And it's a risk that I can't bear on some unconscious level for some unconscious reason.

So, I make up stories and tell them to my niece and nephew and daughter. I'm not writing them, I'm just telling them. Fairy tales that hold them spellbound when I start the tale and throw in an embroidery of darkness and light with the hero always winning in the end. I've engaged them in the story, getting them to answer in unison when I pose a question. Original bits with elements straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

I sat down a few weeks ago and did some goals work. This time, I assigned time frames and a concrete road map for getting to the goal. There are two that are important to me, but I can't seem to start. One of them is my writing. And in the agony of sitting and trying to write and staring at blank pages, I have to confront what it is that is blocking me from the writing. And I'm not sure that I can do that alone.

Asheville and David Wilcox, of course

2010-12-21T20:24:00.001-08:00

Norm wants to go to Asheville to see the Biltmore mansion during the Christmas season. "Sure," I said, "and I'll check to see if David is playing over the season in Asheville."

He isn't playing --he's heading to California and Canada for some winter concert dates. But while searching for anything close to home to satisfy my deep longing to hear his voice again, I found notices for a weekend with other Wilcox fans. Most of them attending are musicians, but not all. It's a weekend of music workshops and fellowship with other fans. And I want to go more than anything.

Not everyone is a musician. And a weekend in the mountains watching other artists work on their art, well, catnip I tell you.

For those who read this blog and don't know who David Wilcox is, he's a folk singer and a poet. I have loved his music since I found a cut-out album of The Night Watchman in the 1980's. I've followed at a distance over the years, going to concerts and picking up albums. Every fan I've ever met was a lovely person. I think David only attracts lovely people around him.

So, fate has shown me the Kanuga weekend. I'll go to Asheville this week with a happy heart.

And I'll leave you with a link to David. Please explore his site. David Wilcox radio

That's David. I dare you to take him for a "Spin."

Redefine It

2010-12-06T06:43:00.000-08:00


Actually the goals from yesterday fit into 4 overarching 
goals:

1. Lose weight and increase fitness
2. Declutter the house to peaceful calm
3. Write the story of my heart
4. Turn my job into one that brings me peace

So, looking at these 4 goals, let's see how all of the 
smaller discrete goals fit into them:

1. Lose weight and increase fitness
  A. 4. Find the time to start twice weekly family dinners. 
        Put on calendar.
  B. 5. Work on Amelia's diet.
  C. 12. Complete 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week. 
         Put on home calendar.

2. Declutter the house to peaceful calm
  A. 2. Do a hot spot declutter session every other day.
  B. 3. Do one declutter session (15 minutes) per week. 
        Put on home calendar.
  C. 20. Unpack the garage.
        --a) Install Amelia's playhouse outside.
        --b) Unpack one garage box per week.

3. Write the story of my heart
  A. 1. Complete 15 minutes of writing daily.
  B. 10. Submit one item to a publisher - journalistic 
         articles count!
  C. 19. Enter one writing contest by April, 2011.

4. Turn my job into one that brings me peace
  A. 9. Work on Drupal and PHP knowledge.
  B. 13. CISSP certification.
  C. 14. PMP certification study.
  D. 15. Work on application for a different Graduate 
         degree 

There are some miscellaneous things which I can place 
into a 5th goal:  

5. Nurture me and my family

  A. 6. Enjoy Amelia's 2nd grade school year.
  B. 7. Finish 3 items in any craft technique.
  C. 8. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom. 
       --a) Basic greetings.
       --b) Present tense sentences [simple ones]
       --c) Food vocabulary
  D. 11. Update will by March 2011.
  E. 16. Do one task a week to keep up my friendships. 
         This is flexible.
  F. 17. Do something special for Norman weekly, and 
         a thoughtful thing every other day. 
  G. 18. Complete 1 needlework pattern entirely.

There's something so peaceful about all of this activity 
this year.  I feel like I can accomplish these.  (Maybe 
it's finishing the house earlier this year?  That was a 
huge accomplishment.)

Last night, I signed up again for Grad School classes 
in a Technical Management degree.  I think I'll make 
it through next semester with those two classes.  One 
semester at a time.

Goals list 2010

2010-12-05T17:48:00.000-08:00

This is several months late, but at least I'm getting it in place before 2011.

A lot of stuff got finished last year. It was a busy spring that culminated in the completion of the old house renovation and its sale. A sad time for me --I hate goodbyes and especially to the house where I first felt like I lived in a home.

I made some sweeping changes to my professional goals. I'd eliminated many of the certification goals, but I've shifted my direction and focus completely. This is quite a surprise to me. I'm changing my career this year from 24/7 operations to a role with instructional design while still using many of my core skills.

So, here's the old goal list:

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate. This is DONE!!! The house was sold in April 2010.
--a) Complete the painting, tile work, fixture installation in downstairs bathroom.
--b) Complete the touch-up painting, caulking, blind installation in the upstairs bathroom.
--c) Complete the post repairs and painting of the stairs.
--d) Complete the painting of the hallway.
--e) Complete the painting, floor refinish, and closet installation in downstairs bedroom.
--f) Complete the touch-up painting, trim painting, and radiator painting in the master bedroom.
--g) Complete the carpeting of the upstairs hall, walk-in closet room, and master bedroom.
--h) Complete the painting refresh of the kitchen.
--i) Complete the painting refresh of Amelia's old room.
--j) Complete the painting refresh of the wrap-around porch.
--k) Fix the outside stairs and walks.
--l) Paint the walls and radiator of the walk-in closet room.
--m) Paint the trim in the small bedroom (attached to walk-in closet room).
--n) Fix the windows that need it.
--o) Make window treatments.
--p) Stage the house.
2. Do one Chinese activity with Amelia every 14 days. Put on home calendar. We haven't done this. Chinese is in limbo. Amelia is old enough that she will have to have an interest to get involved.
3. Do one declutter session (15 minutes) per week. Put on home calendar. This is perking along. Many areas in the house are clearing up.
4. Find the time to start twice weekly family dinners. Put on calendar.Still struggling with this one.
5. Complete 15 minutes of writing daily.Ditto. You think this would be the easiest one to accomplish.
6. Enjoy Amelia's 1st grade school year.Done.
7. Finish 3 items in any craft technique.Done.
8. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom. This one I'm working on still.
--a) Basic greetings.
--b) Present tense sentences [simple ones]
--c) Food vocabulary
9. Finish business plan & incorporate.Goals changed.
10. Submit one item to a publisher - journalistic articles count!Fail.
11. Update will by September, 2009.Failed here too.
12. Complete 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week. Put on home calendar.Really failed, but in the new year I'm trying.
13. Microsoft certification - first 3 classes.
14. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
15. Work on application for a different Graduate degree
16. Do one task a week to keep up my friendships. This is flexible.
17. Do something special for Norman weekly, and thoughtful thing every other day.
18. Complete 1 needlework pattern entirely.
19. Enter one writing contest by April, 2010.
20. Unpack the garage.
--a) Install Amelia's playhouse outside.
--b) Unpack one garage box per week.Some of the garage boxes were unpacked.
21. Unpack one basement box from the move every week.Completely went through all basement boxes!!
22. Bring in more bookshelves to house to accomplish #21.

Now we'll look at the current year's goals (1/2 a year to go, really)

1. Complete 15 minutes of writing daily.
2. Do a hot spot declutter session every other day.
3. Do one declutter session (15 minutes) per week. Put on home calendar.
4. Find the time to start twice weekly family dinners. Put on calendar.
5. Work on Amelia's diet.
6. Enjoy Amelia's 2nd grade school year.
7. Finish 3 items in any craft technique.
8. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom.
--a) Basic greetings.
--b) Present tense sentences [simple ones]
--c) Food vocabulary
9. Work on Drupal and PHP knowledge.
10. Submit one item to a publisher - journalistic articles count!
11. Update will by March 2011.
12. Complete 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week. Put on home calendar.
13. CISSP certification.
14. PMP certification study.
15. Work on application for a different Graduate degree
16. Do one task a week to keep up my friendships. This is flexible.
17. Do something special for Norman weekly, and thoughtful thing every other day.
18. Complete 1 needlework pattern entirely.
19. Enter one writing contest by April, 2011.
20. Unpack the garage.
--a) Install Amelia's playhouse outside.
--b) Unpack one garage box per week.

Planning the Escape

2010-12-02T06:19:00.001-08:00

There are days that mark choices which turn a life in a different direction. This week, I had one of those days.

I've had a health problem for the last three months that stopped me in my tracks. My doctor has given a strong recommendation to relieving stress in my life. A worthy goal for anyone, but my life is a wound-up string of stressful activities. My job, which has defined me for over 2 decades, is no longer feasible in this new life.

After agonizing about the needed changes, I took matters into my own hands. I did a lot of internal work about what I wanted to do with my life if I couldn't do what I'm doing now. The answers surprised me. Once I had those answers, I spent quite a bit of time planning a road map to the goal.

Monday I approached one of the directors at my workplace with a proposal. In a moment of true serendipity, he was searching for exactly that puzzle piece for his organization. The solution is simple and elegant. It will take some time, but I am moving from one organization to another. And I'm saying goodbye to 24/7 operations.

I can't continue in my current work path. I know that with every fiber of my being. Yet it is so hard to begin closing this chapter. The new life is waiting for me to finish my last tasks. Today, I'm fleshing out a transfer of duties, and beginning the changes needed to make this happen.

It took guts to make that approach to our director. It took faith. And I know that I will give him what he needs from me to make the organizational goals succeed. It's as perfect a fit as it can be, and I'm content.

September is here

2010-09-10T04:29:00.000-07:00

Just a short Haiku of mine to liven up the day.

Autumn smears edges
Bringing Summer to a close
With its Harvest breath.

The Company of Women

2010-08-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling almost desperate to talk to adult humans these days. I've moved into a shared office environment at work which was designed to foster communication but really just depresses communication. None of us want to talk in the cubicle area for fear of disturbing the others. And since I gave up my office near my other work group people, I don't talk to them either.

I realized today that I really haven't talked to much of anyone other than my husband and 7-year-old in two months. My conversation has devolved down into bullet points of project updates (work) and food wheedling (home).

I'm getting impossibly lonely.

So tonight I came home, grabbed a snack, and went out to the Wednesday night knitting circle. I don't knit, but a friend invited me to come a while ago with her. I take my stitch/sew project of the week, and then go hang out with the knitters.

My friend wasn't there tonight, but several others were. And I made new friends. And at some point I began a stand-up routine about the joys of pregnancy (one of the knitters is 7.5 months gone and is rather miserable, poor thing). I had several people practically convulsing on the floor when we were in discussion about how the Poor Thing managed to *dislocate* her shoulder in her sleep, her doctor's fix for it, and her husband's stoic method of dealing with it in future.

I sat next to a spinner who had brought her wheel and was Navajo-plying yarn. I worked on my Serbian Cyrillic alphabet blanket for the cousins. I got a chance to pet several sweaters in the making and an adorable crocheted pet thing. I talked to several new ladies. I met the new owner of my old favorite yarn shop.

I talked until I was hoarse from using an unused voice.

And I've come home happy and dead tired. Good night all.

NTSC to PAL

2010-08-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

I managed to do it, but it was a total pain. And the video is still not as smooth as I'd like. Modern DVD players do automatic interpolation, so quite frankly, this was a waste of time. Easier to just get Mom a new DVD player.

I ended up using a very weird homebrew of Bit Ripper to pull the DVD into an AVI, Goldware to pull out the WAV audio track, BeSweet to do the audio conversion, and TMPGenc to encode the video. It worked, but too late to pass on to Mom before she left for Serbia. And I found while doing this that BeSweet will not work on my Windows 7 computer even in compatibility mode. I at least got BeSweet to open on my Mac running the Windows XP virtual machine, but it wouldn't open files. I ended up down on my basement computer, which is still Windows XP, encoding audio.

NTSC to PAL conversion and "Good Deeds"

2010-08-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

I don't want to believe that statement, but I can't help but think it rings true more often than not.

It started innocently. My sister-in-law dropped by our house with an exercise video that she picked up for her mom. But her mom lives in Serbia where the TV runs in PAL. "Can you convert this to PAL for me? It's like the best video ever."

(See? It really does not help one to have a reputation in the family for video editing and weird audio format things.)

SURE! I said. No problem. I'll just run it through one of my packages like Adobe Premiere Pro and set it for PAL.

Boy. Was I in for an education. Premiere does convert, but it ends up with choppy video because it does the conversion very crudely.

Why the issue in the first place? PAL is 720x576 line size at 25 frames per second. NTSC is 720x480 line size at 29.76 frames per second. Premiere simple resizes the frame lines and tosses out every 6th frame. That leads to very choppy movement. The human eye registers 30 frames per second, so that missing frame is noticeable.

So then comes the murky waters of the conversion process blogs. They all mention products that are old and dusty. I have several of them for my Asian drama habit since I subtitle all the time.

I'm in hour 7 now. I still haven't figured it out completely mainly because I have to convert the audio file and just figured out that my favorite tool doesn't work under Windows 7. I'm working on getting that tool to work under WinXP mode in Windows 7. Once I figure it out, I'm going to post the steps here in the blog. I'm about halfway, I think.

Frenemies no more

2010-07-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

Ah, the blessings of uninterrupted time with a Frenemy. Amelia now thinks that Kristen is the best friend ever. See what a week of Pony camp will do to knit a pair together?

Amelia is now in week 2 of summer, Gymkana camp. That's a lot of tumbling and jumping and a daily swim. She gets into the car after camp and falls asleep on the ride home. Deep asleep. Then wakes up and immediately informs me that we should go home and barbeque an ox, but do it quickly, mind you. I've watched her fall on dinner like a starving wolf. Then she *asks* for a bath (they don't get a shower after the daily swim at the pool, so the chlorine is probably itchy). An hour or so of play, and she's ready for bed.

Wow. You can't ask for a better camp. I've watched the kids in action and as far as I can tell, they spend the whole day jumping up and down. With the occasional juice break. Her lunch looks like it got left in a field of hungry locusts, too.

She doesn't know anyone in Gymkana camp, but she separates off and just runs into the group --which is an excellent sign. There's 3 weeks of Gymkana camp scheduled this summer. And this morning on the way into camp Amelia declared that "This is the most AWESOME summer EVER!! But I do miss school too."

Strategies for Creating Time out of Nothing

2010-06-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

The following is something I posted on the Weaving Today forum about 'Slow Cloth':

I never realized how much time our family really had until our young daughter had a tantrum and threw her doll into the flat-panel TV in the living room. Suddenly, there is no TV in our house. And there won't be for a long while because we want the point about behavior to sink in. (Believe me, it has sunk in. Without the parents having to resort to anger/frustration/or any other negative emotion except disappointment in her behavior.)

And suddenly family life blossomed. My 7-year-old daughter is learning to sew. We're playing board games. We are playing card games. Reading has become a favorite activity. She wants to learn how to weave, so we're working on a small table loom with a scarf for her. We're working ahead on her math times tables by singing silly songs made up with them. Somehow, even family meals are better.

Wow. *I* should have thrown a doll at the TV years ago.

Which led me to think, how much time do we just lose? I like some TV shows occasionally too, but I can't say that I miss them. I'm finding time to weave, time to play, time to organize, and above all, time to share. When you have a pair of working professionals that work as many hours as we do, that's precious. And as for the work, I've started re-evaluating why I work that much and the cost-benefit analysis. It's a pretty poor ratio.

Jim Ahrens wrote a fascinating article on an old issue of Prairie Wool Companion (one of the very early issues, 7 or 9 or something like). He mentions that his loom business was thriving until one peculiar day in 1955 when the phones stopped ringing that afternoon and never picked up that volume again. It was the day that broadcast TV launched. And suddenly, the world stopped living their lives and started watching other people live instead. Jim re-designed his business to deal with the sudden precipitous drop.

I'm not advocating pitching your TV. We'll buy another one in a few months after we've saved for it. But try experimenting with turning it off for a week.

I've found a time diary has become invaluable. I am writing down how much time I spend on things that I do each day. I highly recommend trying it. You'll be amazed. I found that I take long showers and spend a lot of time getting dressed. I found that I spend quite a bit of time in the morning organizing everyone else's articles for the day: lunch, lost shoes, homework, library books, etc. I found that I spent very little time talking to my family. I found that at work I spent a lot of time in meetings but little planning time carved out (which leads to 50-hour work weeks).

Knowing those facts, I could start re-arranging my schedule. And finally scheduling in time for me. And my loom.

Want to know some horrifying facts? The national average of the amount of time that you spend talking to your kids a week? 28 minutes. How many of those minutes are positive talk? 7 minutes.

Look for the negative 'tall poles' in your time diary and figure out strategies to shorten them. Increase time spent on family/friend sharing. Everyone around you benefits.

Summer Camp and Frenemies

2010-06-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

So, summer has now started in earnest now that school has let out. Amelia's summer is busy and varied. We decided not to put her in the 8 week summer camp run by parks & rec. Instead, we selected and let her pick through a variety of camps.

This week was a short-notice camp. The school closed a week early because of construction timelines (they're tearing out half the school to expand it). So, we suddenly had to scramble to find a camp for her for this week.

The solution? Pony camp at the local equestrian center. (Most expensive day camp ever)

Pony camp is in day 3 --pizza party and water play day. She is having a major blast. So much fun in fact that when a hole opened in our summer schedule, we are enrolling her for another week of Pony Camp.

She must be having fun. She's coming home covered in grime. I swear, one of the activities must be to have them lay down at one end of the riding ring and roll them to the other end and back. That's the only way that I can account for the half cup of sand in each riding boot, the caked on grime, and the dust-laden hair. Every evening I've taken one look and agonized whether to strip her in the foyer and pop her into the bathtub or just take her out behind the house and hose her down.

We slather 50 count sunscreen on her, and she's getting really brown. They stay out in the sun all day, for the most part.

They ride twice a day. And they do crafts. And they learn about basic grooming for the horses with try-its. And Amelia's gotten to help wash the ponies every day. She's learning to mount the horse and learning to post when the horse is at a trot. She's gone on a 'trail ride' where the instructors led the ponies into the woods trail.

Gee, why can't *I* go to Pony Camp?

Amelia's friend Kristen is in the camp with her. They've been frenemies for a long time. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's a combination of friend and enemy. At this age, you see it a lot. "You're my best friend ever! I love you! You're not my friend anymore! I hate you! You are so awesome! You're my best friend ever!"

Erf. Kristen and Amelia rub on each other a bit much and the friction produced by those two rambunctious kids is trouble for us grown-ups. This week, they are finally getting some quality together time and they are blossoming. The mothers are really glad, of course.

Amelia has a couple of other Frenemies too. And a few friends.

My Daisy Bridged to Brownies Last Night!!!!

2010-05-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

As soon as I have photos, I'll post them.

Our cluster had the best time last night. We really do have one of the best Girl Scout clusters in Maryland, I think.

The youngest girls bridged first after singing two songs. One was the "make new friends" song that talks about new friends as silver and old friends as gold. Then they recited the Girl Scout Promise and sang a second song about keeping something in their pockets --a great big Brownie smile!

There are 17 Daisies in our troop that bridged last night. You couldn't really hear their names being called from the crowd as each girl went over because everyone was cheering and clapping so much. One of the Brownie troops was greeting each girl as they crossed, and each of our little girls got a daisy.

Then, three Brownie troops bridged.

The Juniors are the largest segment. Our cluster has 3 troops of Juniors, and they are certainly the largest of the groups. There were about 10-15 girls in each crossing into Cadet status last night. I've seen quite a few of them on the Cluster camping events, and our Daisies just adored these girls.

The Cadets became Seniors --there were about 15 of them in total. Cadets are 8th & 9th grades, I think. They all looked like young women but still had that giggly coltish look about them.

The Seniors start in 10th grade. In 10th & 11th you are Seniors. In your 12th grade year, you become an Ambassador. We had 3 girls cross into Ambassadors. At this point, none of our girls look like girls anymore. These are young women, and we're really proud of them.

And one lone scout crossed out into Adult. She was such an impressive girl. Honor student, flute player in the orchestra, going to be in the Engineering program at the University in the fall, large amounts of community service, and of course, she had earned the highest award that Girl Scouts gives, The Gold Award. She was pinned last night.

And then there was CAKE!!! (because everything is better with cake)

I spent some time catching up with every girl that I remembered seeing on the camping trips and thanking them for their help with our Daisies. And catching up with some of the other cluster moms. I'm beginning to grow some friendships there. We're an awesome group of ladies working together. And I'm seeing a couple of them once a week at a knitting night that's held at one of the local eateries (Panera Bread).

The girls had such a great time together. And when we got home, we whisked through Amelia's homework, then a quick bath ("Don't wash my hair, Mommy."). Amelia then set up a camping bed on her floor. I helped her re-arrange some things (she'd rolled it out on top of her shoes, for example), and let her sleep on the floor. I added a warning that if she came to our room in the night, then when I walked her back I'd put her back in her bed. She stayed in her own room all of last night without bothering Norm and I once. (Hmmmm, maybe this should be considered more often.)

Sherry Thomas and her book His At Night

2010-05-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Sherry Thomas has a new book coming out on Tuesday, May 25. The title is His At Night. You should buy it.

The author is one of my new favorites. Her second book, Delicious, has taken a spot on my Favorites bookshelf with my eclectic grouping of books like Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book, Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, Chris Moriarty's Spin State, and Colleen McCullough's The First Man in Rome among others.

(and Yes, for those who are wondering, the only book that really isn't a romance above is The Doomsday Book.)

Delicious had elements of fairy tale and Babbette's Feast and Like Water for Chocolate rolled into one book. But the main character stands on her own, and that book had voice.

I loved Sherry's other books too. All of them are excellent reads. So Tuesday can't come fast enough.

Buy it. Buy it. Buy it. (I'm picking up my copy at Borders, most likely)

Started a New Blog - Interlacements

2010-05-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

I've got the bare bones up of a crafting blog, Interlacements, on Blogspot.

I'm tucking more craft talk in there, though I don't know if I should pull it out of this blog or not. It's an experiment.

Still Suffering

2010-05-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

Rotavirus hasn't let go yet. I'm recovering now --since yesterday, but my stomach is still a bit sensitive.

I'm drinking a lot of tea, eating rice cakes and bananas, and wishing the virus to Hades.

Everyone I work with is sick too. I've been using Lysol wipes to try to keep my own germs from infecting them, but there seems to be quite an on-going infection pool besides me. The bathrooms are probably toxic because Rotavirus is very hardy and manages to hang onto surfaces even when they are cleaned. Washing hands helps, but doesn't eliminate risk.

Unbelievable. This has been 10 days now. 8 days of really feeling rotten.

Amelia bounced back fast. I think her immune system has been exposed to this variant before. I don't know why my immune system hasn't been exposed with her unless she got it on one of my trips away from home. Norm's not suffering either, so perhaps they both were exposed before. It's definitely a new bug to me.

Between Pollen and Rotavirus

2010-05-17T11:41:00.001-07:00

...there just isn't much life left.

Rotavirus hit our house full force this week. At least, that's what I'm calling it based on its behavior. Amelia spent a miserable day with a bucket next to her. She bounced back fast, though her appetite has been off.

I, on the other hand, have had 6 days of on-and-off misery. It hits whenever I eat something and usually lasts a few hours. No vomiting for me, but the intestinal distress is evil. It lasts long enough to make me wish that I was one of the moth species that doesn't have to eat.

And I think the pollen has made us all unusually sluggish. I'm falling asleep on the couch around 7:00 pm (if I slow down to sit on the couch). Part of it probably that I don't want to deal with the utter disaster that is our house. We're slowly making in-roads on the disaster, but really, the answer is to just start pitching.

What We Want

2010-04-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

--Linda Pastan

Ugh. Spammers Cracked My Account

2010-04-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how, but the password from my Gmail account got cracked. Probably more than 60 days since I changed it. I haven't been paying as much attention as I should have to things online.

But, the account was hacked and sending out pill spam, evidently. If Gmail didn't shut down the spam from being sent out, I highly apologize. There are about 10 of you that got noted.

Now, of course, I'm making sure that that password isn't in use anywhere else. I don't think it is, but there's always the off-chance that it's somewhere on something that I think is innocuous but really isn't.

Working on my novel

2010-03-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

It's not NaNoWriMo this month, but I'm hopeful that I might finally complete this hanging-over-my-head goal this year. I want one of my manuscripts completely finished.

But it isn't anything like the movie in this trailer:

(No, this isn't one of the artsy lesbian movies despite the provocative still picture to start it. It's a spoof.)

Must Be Close to Baseball Season

2010-03-24T03:47:00.000-07:00

The flowers are starting to bloom outside. There's mud all over the lawns right now.

And I'm listening to Trace Adkins "Swing" so it must be spring.

What is it about that song? I think it's the tongue-in-cheek baseball references to a group of guys in a bar hitting on the prettiest girl in the place. She's never described. In fact, she's almost not even referenced. It's very cleverly done.

The video unfortunately is not quite that understated, but it's funny too. Here's a link to the Capitol Nashville video for that song. If you just listen to the song without watching the video, you'll see what I mean.

Yup. It's Baseball Season.

Orioles Opening day for Home is April 9th.

Spring Cleaning 2010

2010-03-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

It's Spring Break here. And I have been working to get the downstairs of the house clear enough so that I can work on other things this week.

It's now straightened up enough downstairs on the main floor to invite people over again. The upstairs studio is about half cleaned out.

One of the cats has found one of Amelia's pony beads on the floor and is having a grand time batting it around and chasing it from room to room chirruping as he goes. Occasionally George (the cat) lays down next to the silent bead all proud of his 'kill.' Then he'll get up and pounce it in that straight 4-legged up-in-the-air pounce that leads to a mad chase around the kitchen, hall, and dining room.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

2010-03-09T04:02:00.000-08:00

One nice thing about having the house done is that I suddenly have all of this free time. It's not really free because I have to budget in time for my family, but it feels pretty free to me.

I'm working on the goals list today. Certification has come front and center along with the book projects. Amelia has a school project due at the end of the month. The 1st grade is making toys out of recycling materials. It's a re-use project to make a toy. I gave her a quick run-down of some recycled toys that we could do together. Tonight we'll talk about it more.

I'm rooting for the recycled cardboard doll house. ;-)

A Quiet Day

2010-03-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

It's been a quiet day here at Chez Moi. Our family hardly knows what to do with itself without the old house to work on every evening. If I never see a can of paint again....

And we all know that that's not true. In fact, I've been sketching madly to build sets of cardboard furniture. I want to make 13 pieces in 13 weeks. Along with the cardboard art, there's that interest in shoe building that I have started noodling about.

I solved the missing shoe parts issue yesterday evening. If I can't buy the parts, I'll make them. I'll simply cast them from urethane resin --very hard and durable, sets quickly, can mold into anything, and can be dyed into any color. It's a win.

I've even figured out a theoretical way to cast the feet so that I can build my own lasts to use in the shoemaking process. All that needs is testing.

Today, though, was all about Amelia. She got a lot of parent time and a lot of kid time. She played with Helen (and Helen's little brother Connor), Ella, Irene, and her cousins Phillip and Mia today. And had lunch with Mommy and Daddy that included a treat of ice cream afterward. And then later got to play with Sydney, the younger girl next door for an hour. Dinner with parents, an evening of the Muppet Show on DVD, and then it was bedtime with book reading. Basically, I'd call that a stellar day if I was 6.

It was a quiet day for me. I played or watched or ate or chatted dutifully. Later I ran a load of clothes in the washer, a load of dishes in the dishwasher, assisted with dinner, cleared clutter from downstairs, and finally got to read my new polymer clay technique book.

Now I'm logged in and finishing up the load of my computer at home so that when I work from home I can do so peacefully. Unlike the popular concept, when I work from home, I really work. And the day starts an hour or so earlier than usual and often runs later than my usual quit time. So, no, I don't do it often. I like to establish firm goals of what I'll accomplish when I start the work-at-home day. Plus, I always sleep with my cell phone near my ear and my laptop booted up and in sleep mode. That way when the emergency pages come in, I can get them a few minutes quicker. No, I never relax. And that's enough about work. I do like my job, just that often I wish that I could get away from it for a few days.

What I'd really love to do is to run off tomorrow to the Natural History Museum for the day. This morning I'd gotten Norm psyched about it too, and Amelia was positively breathless at the idea of seeing the "gold and jewels." She told me that she wanted me to make sure that they gave her some gold. Well, I said, you know that I'd like that too but I didn't think that the museum was handing out its gold to visitors. They like to keep it for themselves. Disappointing to the little one, but she looked forward to seeing the gems and dinosaurs. And then we found out that there's a family dinner planned tomorrow afternoon, so going off to the museum isn't going to be feasible. Rats.

I'm planning a day off for myself just to go down to the National Art Gallery. It's been a few years since I took off and spent a day at a museum. Literally, years. There's 10,000 other responsibilities to face and never enough time. It's probably why my creative side has been going bonkers lately. I'm knee-deep in projects and drawings. I haven't had this much fun in a long time. I'm flirting more with Norm and laughing more and enjoying every minute of family time, even if it is sometimes slow and kinda boring. And I've noticed that I don't want to enter the old house even to fetch mail. I'm closing the door on that chapter pretty firmly.

So, a slow day. But satisfying still. And tomorrow it will be lovely to see the family. Tanja's parents are back in town. Man, I need to keep practicing the Serbian though without a conversation partner, it's really hard to maintain.

The Cobbler's Kids

2010-03-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

My feet widened when my child was born. It's a common occurrence. But finding high heeled shoes that fit wide feet with any degree of comfort is not common.

My thought was to try to make a pair of shoes. After all, I'm a pretty crafty girl.

I discovered that to make shoes, you need certain shoe parts. Since there are basically no cobblers left in the United States, finding these shoe parts is possibly harder than finding shoes that fit extra wide feet.

And I also discovered that searching for these parts on the internet quickly launches you into some of the more "interesting" corners of the web. For instance, did you know that men can't flex their feet more than about a 45 degree angle? No? Neither did I. Women can evidently flex their feet 90 degrees. So a 4" heel on a man with their foot size is equivalent to a 1 1/2" - 2" on the typical woman. But going above a 4" heel is practically impossible for a man. Like me wearing 6" heeled boots. (I had a pair once in my youth. I teetered on them like I teetered around in pointe shoes.)

Yes, shoemaking in the US has been slowly devolving down to the high end custom shoe market and the fetish market. Personally, the fetishists have fun shoes though a tad high and extreme for me.

Cinnamon Craving - The Spice of Life?

2010-02-23T08:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why, but I'm craving cinnamon. Not just a "gee, it would be nice to have something hot and cinnamony" craving, but a "man, I want CINNAMON" craving.

This has been going on for three weeks now. I've been spiking tea and even coffee with large amounts of cinnamon. Sneaking cinnamon rolls even though I'm allergic to wheat. (that's counterproductive) Dreaming of making big gluten-free cinnamon pastries loaded with a thick layer of cinnamon, butter, and sugar. Hey, I can even hold on the sugar. Let's just put cinnamon butter in the pastry. About a 1/2" thick layer. I even bought a container of cinnamon at Costco, of all places, which means that the bottle is the size of a shampoo bottle.

This isn't normal. I crave items occasionally. Then I have something with the flavor or texture, and the craving goes away. Not this time. If anything, it's getting worse.

And it's been consistent.

So, I googled it. And found that it seems to be a common thing in dieters. Interestingly, cinnamon controls blood glucose and cholesterol levels, boosts anti-inflammatory response, and has anti-microbial properties.

Hmm. One of the medications that I'm taking right now has dropped my appetite. To the point where I just don't eat for hours and hours because I don't feel hungry. I also feel achy, probably from the medication too. I've dropped through 3 clothing sizes so far from a size 22 to a size 16 again (since September, I might add. That's rather rapid).

But cinnamon is really non-harmful. 1/4 teaspoon taken daily lowered blood glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol in one study with Type 2 Diabetes patients.

And evidently 1 teaspoon of cinnamon has 28 mg of calcium, 1 gram of iron, 1 gram of fiber, and vitamins C, K, and manganese. Perhaps it is the iron or calcium or, more likely, vitamin K. Celiac disease has a tendency to make you vitamin K deficient, as well as mess with calcium absorption.

I'll just go with it for a while. I'm thinking of whipping up a simple pastry tonight using a gluten-free baking powder biscuit recipe that I occasionally make (cut butter into gluten-free flower with baking powder and baking soda in it. Then add a bit of milk and because it's gluten-free, a 1/2 teaspoon of white vinegar to make it rise a bit more without the gluten). I figure that if I make two batches of biscuit dough, I can roll it out and put the cinnamon and butter filling between. Maybe a tad of sugar, but it isn't sugar that I'm craving. It's just the cinnamon. This is kind of a simple bear-claw style pastry without the icing and almonds.

Or just spread cinnamon butter on a fresh biscuit. That would be good too.

It Is Finished.

2010-02-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

Really. Norm and I finished the work on the old house. Completely. With the help of Mom & Dad and some hired contractor services, of course.

Done.

Complete.

Wanna see?

Here's the downstairs bedroom. We used to call it the Blue Room.

The living room looking into the dining room.

Here's the main hallway, completed.

The upper hall and main bedroom got new carpeting. Here's the view from the upper hall looking down the stairs.

And more photos of the carpet:

The kid's room at the top of the stairs.

The built in bookcase in the kid's room.

And the closet room just off of the kid's room.

The main bedroom upstairs.

The second bedroom upstairs.

I am so happy that it's done.

Whew. The Snow Missed Us.

2010-02-15T17:46:00.000-08:00

The Alberta Clipper swept through Ohio and West Virginia dumping 10" of snow, then the edge of the storm brushed against us in the Mid-Atlantic leaving just a dusting of snow (not even an inch worth).

Yay!!!!!!

The storm is now turned north and is heading for Massachusetts and north to Maine to dump 10" or more there. Probably more because the storm will drift out over the Atlantic gathering more moisture as it goes.

Hey, anywhere but here.

More Snow Expected - The Clipper

2010-02-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

An Alberta Clipper is coming. The storm should hit Monday, Feb 15 (President's Day) until Tuesday, Feb 16. Best estimates so far of expected accumulation is 4"-8" across the Baltimore region.

Isn't that what they told us just before the Snow of Doom nailed us with 8"-24" of snow? Yes, yes I think it is.

I'm thinking of investing in a salt company.

Snow of Doom

2010-02-13T09:50:00.000-08:00

A few days after the Super Storm 2010 hit us with 24"-38" of snow, another storm came up on the radar. This one was supposed to be 5"-6" more. Then, it was 6"-7" more. Then it was "uh oh, batten down the hatches again" upgraded to 12"-18". The local radio station started calling this snow the "Snow of Doom".

And what we got ranged from 8"-24" depending on where you lived. The storm started Tuesday, Feb 9th around 4:00 pm and ended on Wednesday, Feb 10th at 7:00 pm. Our house got about 8"-10", but it's kinda hard to tell how much. The snow was blowing during the storm and it got upgraded from a winter storm to a blizzard because of the blowing.

The plowed road disappeared again. All one lane of it:

One of the neighbors actually tried to leave during the storm:

Well, sort of:

The sidewalks got covered over again. No one bothered to even look at them during the storm because the wind was blowing drifts around. No point in shoveling.

And the sidewalks aren't the only thing that look rather like someone iced the whole cake of a neighborhood. Take a look at the icicle curtain on our neighbor's house. They're over 6' long.

Yeah, we're all really tired of snow here.

The Super Storm 2010

2010-02-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

We've been hammered by a major snow storm that started Friday, Feb 5 around 11:30 am and continued through Saturday, Feb 6 around 6:00 pm. The storm dumped 24" in areas around Baltimore, but our neighborhood got about 34"-38". The local government was having trouble plowing all the snow because there were also a lot of downed trees in the neighborhoods. We didn't see a snow plow until Monday morning, Feb 8, at 5:30 am.

Here are some photos of what that much snow looks like.

This is what the storm looked like Saturday morning while it was still snowing.

This is what our road looked like on Saturday morning:

Saturday evening, just after it stopped snowing, this is what our street looked like around sunset. Yes, there's a road under there.

Several of us neighbors banded together with our snowblowers and shovels to clear the driveways. We found that we couldn't move the snowblowers through the road because the snow was packed down and really tough. The wind-blown drifts were also almost impossible to cut through and had to be chopped vertically with a snow shovel edge. But most of the snow was light and fluffy like sugar. Since we couldn't move the snowblowers on the road, we cleared all the sidewalks in our area of the neighborhood so that we could get the snowblowers from house-to-house.

Sunday, the plow still hadn't come. Here's what one small cul-de-sac did so that the occupants could at least get out and walk about the neighborhood. That narrow walkway in the photo is the road.

Not many of the sidewalks in the neighborhood were clear. The teens were stir crazy after two days inside, but there wasn't anywhere to walk except our rut of a road.

Sunday morning, the roads:

The corner of two local roads. Inviting.

The cars kept trying to drive the road, but only the larger vehicles with high clearance under the carriage were managing. Not that that kept a lot of cars that had no business being on the road from trying. There were stuck cars all over the neighborhood, annoying the rest of us and blocking emergency access. Our family and the neighbors cleared a couple of pull-offs on the road to give the cars somewhere to go if two cars were coming in opposite directions.

Rescue finally came on Monday morning early. Our roads are plowed finally. What I found amusing and tragic is that one of our nearby neighbors was insisting that she wanted to go to the mall yesterday. Their car wouldn't make it out through the road, so they stayed home.

We're cleared off (as of yesterday) and ready to roll:

There's more snow due on Tuesday night. Another 5"-6" according to the news.

The Worst Decade Ever

2010-02-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

So, this particular clip struck me as hilarious. It highlights some of the funniest political moments caught on camera from both major parties.

I've been giggling over it for hours now. Hope you enjoy it too:

Christmas 2009: T-2 and counting

2009-12-22T18:33:00.000-08:00

I'd like to say that I've got Christmas handled, but no, we don't. There's rumor of an ice storm on Christmas Day.

The East Coast just got through a blizzard that dropped 24" of snow on our house in about 36 hours. The snow at 11 am on Saturday morning was pouring down so fast that Amelia and I were watching our footsteps in the snow fill up before we got across the yard. My biggest regret is not taking a picture of our street during the storm. It was lovely.

Schools in the area just closed up for the holidays early. It's a two week vacation for the kids.

Can I share the fact that my sewing machine has shipped and will be here in 2 days. That's either going to be Christmas Eve or Boxing Day. Color me happy. Norm's Christmas present to me is making me really giggly and girlish. Now, just when should I tell him that I used his credit card to buy my new sewing machine?

Also, I recalculated the number of sewing machines in my house. With the new one, it's 7. Yup, seven. One good Janome embroidery machine, one broken Bernina embroidery machine, one workhorse Janome mechanical sewing machine, one Janome semi-computerized sewing machine, one 1916 Singer treadle machine in cabinet, one 1900's vintage hand-crank sewing machine, and this new Brother sewing machine.

Norm is going to make me burn over this if I don't unload some of these fast.

Amelia went to see the Princess and the Frog today with her friend Tessa. I'm eager to hear how it went. And I hear there is beef stew to be had at home. I think I'm going now.

Went on Holiday, Fell to Pieces, Trying to Sew Them Up

2009-12-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

The subject about says it all. I took summer vacation, came back to some awesomely bad news at work (not "You're fired" --they actually like me though we all needle each other constantly kinda like family) but furloughs and departing coworkers and change of office environment of a type that I don't talk about in a public forum. Too many changes.

I kinda went dormant for a while. I dropped about 25-30 pounds since Sept (mainly in Sept/Oct), and haven't been really hungry since. I've been incredibly sad in waves of sad that don't make sense to me. Given that I have an idyllic life overall, and that my sad started to affect my 6-year-old, I hied myself to my general doctor toot sweet and asked for something to adjust the moods. Since I'm allergic or very sensitive to most of the types of drugs that they can prescribe, I ended up on one that is very expensive, very new, but is working out really well. I'm kind of amazed how well it's working.

I'm kinda coming back to life. I had to basically just try to breathe for a while. I'm still in fear over the environment change at work, but I think I can manage it.

It's been terrible, but I think we're past the worst. My daughter was spending a lot of time cleaning her room and then showing me so that I'd see that she was 'being good' and that mommy would now not be so sad because her daughter was being good.

(And that's why I got to the doctor as fast as I could get an appointment. Because things like this rub off on kids, and they can't understand that they didn't cause it. Kids still think they're the center of the universe.)

Christmas is coming. All of the women in our family are just drained this year emotionally, and we couldn't face the gift-buying. So all of us agreed to just buy for the kids. The East Coast also got pummeled this weekend with 24" of snow in one big two-day blizzard, so school has been off for the last couple of days and Christmas vacation is so close that at least one county just threw in the towel and closed until January 4. Our county is closed tomorrow, and then we'll see about Wed, the last day before the holiday break.

I've been half-heartedly cleaning the house. I need to finish soon. I'd like to do some Christmas baking. And something more fun.

I broke down and ordered something decadent for myself. A Brother XR9000 sewing machine from Costco.com. The machine has a lot of stitches, a couple of needle positions, and was $200 with express shipping.

I feel wicked.

It's not like I don't have two sewing machines and an embroidery machine. But my favorite old workhorse Janome, the MyExcel 4014, has to go into the shop to be cleaned and tensioned. It's gotten wonky enough that it's almost impossible to sew with it. Yet when it's cleaned it's a great little machine. It's about 12 years old now, and has been through a war and a couple of teenagers, so I don't expect it to hold up without a cleaning. It deserves a sewing machine spa day.

Then I have the other Janome that I bought refurbished from an online company just this spring with high hopes. They didn't pan out. The machine doesn't hold tension no matter how I adjust it. It loses tension in the middle of a stitching session and requires constant fiddling for just straight stitch and the little back-stitched locking stitch. I sent it in for cleaning to a non-Janome shop, but they took my money and sent it back basically the same. Worked for approximately one hour.

I need to take my machines to the Janome shop. But the best one in the area is in Towson and is only open during the daytime, not evenings. It is open on Saturdays, but I can see a lot of trouble getting the machines there and back.

And, dare I say it, I am lusting after some new stitching features that are on the one I bought. I'm hoping that the tension is good. Since I bought it from Costco, if it isn't, I'll return it. I hope it works out though, since it's cheap.

Here's a picture:

Obama's Amazingly Consistent Smile

2009-09-29T02:28:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan coined the term "cardboard cutout" to describe this video of shots of the president with leaders at the UN summit this week. The clip is hilarious:

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Tomorrow's 50th Anniversary Celebration

2009-09-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is my in-laws' 50th Wedding Anniversary Celebration.

50 years. That's awe inspiring. I can't seem to do the same thing for 15 minutes. I've been happily married to their son, though, for almost 10 years, so I guess I do have some staying power.

Our entire family has been consumed with preparation. I still feel unprepared. Today I realized that the dress I was going to wear probably needs laundering.

Unprepared, I tell you.

Dear Zachary

2009-09-22T19:23:00.000-07:00

Don't you just wish sometimes that you could be six again and everything could be solved with a simple note of apology?

A Girl. A Serbian-English Dictionary. And a Grammar Book.

2009-07-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Mix all of the above together with a few very poor language tapes, and what do you get? A very broken understanding of a language.

But the language itself is not one conducive to learning once one has left the cradle. And I left the cradle long ago.

For instance, there are 7 cases conjugated for nouns.

I'm grateful --Finnish has 15. No wonder the Finns have the highest suicide rate other than Sri Lanka.

I'm slowly beginning to sight read Serbian Cyrillic. Not to be confused with Russian Cyrillic or Slovak Cyrillic or Ukrainian Cyrillic. This is coming along as nicely as "Thhhheeeee caaaat ....isss jump....ing on the caaaar ....hooooooo...d."

Charming.

Cmnd-F5. Alex and my patience.

2009-07-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

Mac computers are very friendly. Sometimes, though, you stumble into something that truly makes your scream build in your throat as you climb upward on the first car of the roller coaster.

Alex is my roller coaster this morning.

I ran an update on the Mac yesterday that got stuck in spinning wheel mode. It was still spinning its wheels this morning, so I had to turn it off. (So locked that I couldn't reboot it.)

When it came back up, the Universal Access voice of Alex was turned on and saying every mote that was typed or moved on the screen. That was amusing for about 20 seconds. Then it was excruciating. And impossible to turn off because the Preferences screen wouldn't come up. After rebooting the computer, I managed to find Alex's OFF switch, and laid him to rest.

Thank goodness. After a few minutes of Alex reciting every URL, keystroke, and folder that I touched, I was getting agitated enough to throw a brick through the very pretty screen of this iMac. It disturbed my ability to focus, concentrate, think, or find anything. No wonder I was thinking of smashing things.

What to Do on a Day Off?

2009-07-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

I've got the next three days off before the Romance Writers national conference in Washington, D.C. this weekend. I'm planning on getting some shop time in the wood shop, but also in spending some time doing other things. I'd hoped to have the house immaculate for this week so that I wouldn't fret over cleaning, but that didn't happen. Instead, I'm settling for a few areas neat, and I'll get to the rest.

Amelia isn't happy about going back to summer camp this morning. She's had a week of total attention with parents and loads of cousins, and that's hard competition for the summer camp. Plus, she's worried about her 'ex-boyfriend'. I kid you not. She's six. But she decided that she had found 'True Love' with one of her summer playmates, and then 'broke that love' the same day because 'I knew you wouldn't like it, Mommy'.

Sigh. Why do I have to deal with this now? I thought I had a handful of years before having to deal with the Romeo & Juliet thing.

Really, the true story is that she's in summer camp with two other school friends, and they have chummed up together leaving her out. She's struggling with that clique-mentality and trying to find new friends. However, it seems that even at 6 if you play with someone of the opposite sex then you have to 'love' that person. (Ick.)

So, let me stop procrastinating now and go inventory my wood projects. I need to finish a bookshelf/clock that I started. It's made of jarrah (Australian cypress that's reddish in color), dark walnut, and curly maple. Quite striking, but I think that I need to widen one of the panels. And glue up the base panels. And figure out how to create the clock box on top of the bookshelf.

Plus, I've got the bathroom cabinet to complete. And the transition piece from the bathroom to the hallway needs to be planed down, refinished and cut to size.

I want to do about 2 hours of writing today on one of my projects. And I'd like to spend some time working on getting my studio in shape to make it comfortable.

Virginia Vacation

2009-07-12T19:50:00.001-07:00

We had a lovely 4th of July vacation with the family in the mountains of Virginia. Norm's parents, brother, and cousin came down with their respective families.

There's an indoor/outdoor waterpark there at Massanutten, so we spent a few days playing with the kids there. This is what happens after you've been at the waterpark most of the day:

That's me with my various craft projects on my lap. I brought far too many this time, but I just couldn't decide. So Norm graciously let me pack up all of them and bring them. When we weren't out swimming or trotting up the mountain, I was usually caught with a needle in my hand.

On the first full day there, I finished a blanket for Alex.

Here's the blanket folded so that you can see the nice space-dyed blue No. 5 perle cotton that I used to stitch the edging. I really liked the effect of these blues on the edge of the blue and white blanket.

Here's a closeup of the stitched names in English and Serbian. Yes, I misspelled the Serbian, but I did fix it later. The last Serbian Cyrillic letter should look like a lower case Latin 'c':

On the next day there, I finished Phillip's blanket edging. I also started a small bag for Phillip's leapster that I'll post later because it isn't finished yet. By the 3rd day, I finished Phillip's blanket. Originally, Phillip was going to get the blue Pooh blanket, but he's outgrowing Pooh rapidly. So, I gave Pooh to Alex, and found Phillip something a bit more colorful:

I bordered the edging with a space-dyed No. 5 perle cotton also in yellow and peach. But it doesn't show up very well. Here's a photo of the blanket folded to show the edging:

The reason that Alex got the Pooh blanket is that I'd misspelled Phillip's name in Serbian Cyrillic and had to re-stitch it. It took me a while to get motivated enough to fix the mistake. By that time, Phillip had outgrown Pooh. But, I finally got it spelled the right way:

On the fourth full day there, I got a bit crazy. I brought my sewing machine down. That day, I skipped the waterpark because I was sunburned, and stayed home to play with my crafts. I attached a linen piece to scrollbars for my needlework stand --something that I'd been wanting to do for months. And then I started and *completed* 3 identical dresses for the 3 girls. The dresses were simple things --just a tube of the smocking fabric with ribbon straps. But the girls loved them. Except Regan, the other cousin who isn't into 'girlie' dresses. I kept her dress and traded it for a shirt for her that I picked up at Luray Caverns on our way home. I think Lily would adore this dress, so I'm washing it and tucking it into an envelope to mail this week.

Amelia adored her dress. It was hard to get it off of her.

Mia also adored her dress and insisted on wearing it. However, she doesn't like posing for pictures, so we had to chase her down to get a couple:

Getting a picture of both Amelia and Mia together in their dresses was almost impossible. We did manage to snap this pic while Amelia wrestled Mia down:

All-in-all, it was a great relaxing vacation. This is the view we had from our mountain cabin:

On the way home, we visited Luray Caverns with the whole clan. Then we all went our separate ways back home. Norm and I took the scenic route through Skyline Drive. It added an hour or so to the trip, but it was worth it. (Hint: if you are given a choice to take a scenic route that you are rarely near, do so.)

While driving in the Shenandoah National Park, we saw a mother bear and her cub crossing the road in front of our car. Norm slowed down so that I could snap a couple of pics of them, but most of my pics are too dark to see them clearly. I have a good angle of Mama, but it's blurry:

The cub was ranging pretty far from Mama --about 10 feet or so away from her. Mama was about the size of a German Shepherd dog, but rounder. Baby was the size of a small Cocker Spaniel. I got one pic with both of them in the frame, but it's hard to make them out. Mama is the dark shape in the center of the photo. Baby is in the lower right side, but the most visible thing is his ear --light brown outlined with black fur.

Home seems tame in comparison with only 3 desperate cats craving our attention.

Just What Does This Say About Your Approaching Day?

2009-06-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

This sight was seen this morning while driving my daughter to her summer camp:

Yup. That's an American vulture making a meal out of what appears to have been a raccoon. When I passed it, it was shoulder-deep in the internals tugging away. Yuck. When I came back to snap the picture, I startled the bird a bit. He was eyeing me up as competition.

We're a few days from our summer vacation in the Virginia mountains with the family. I'm looking forward to having some time to relax, hike, swim at the pools, and probably see more vultures. After the vacation, I'm also looking forward to spending a half-week at the Romance Writers of America National Conference in Washington, DC. It's time to get past this silly phobia about showing my work, and I'm taking steps to do just that.

This past weekend was spent working on the downstairs bathroom in the old house. We laid tile, put the first coat of paint on the walls, and installed the new toilet. There were a few snags. First, here are pics! (Yes, I finally learned how to get photos off the camera and resize them this week.) While we do have 'before' pics, they're on a different computer. I may do a collage posting at the end of the house prep to show the differences. Basically, when we started, this bathroom was bright lemon yellow with 1970s-vintage peeling linoleum tile in white with gold trim. The sink and medicine cabinet were faux French provincial white with gold trim. Unappealing.

Here's what the bathroom looked like after the first day. The tile was mortared down, but no grout applied yet. The walls are primed for painting.

Here's what it looked like after the second day. The walls got their first coat of paint. The floor had grout applied. And the toilet was installed:

We were going to paint the old sink base, put on new handles, put on a new faucet, and put it back in. However, when we started examining it to paint:

The view from the front. It looks ok. (This picture was taken after I'd removed the door frame and doors for painting. The picture of the door frame and doors is here too.)

However, the back of the cabinet was clearly no longer sound. The board that makes up the cabinet floor had gotten waterlogged. Since it is only 1/2" melanine, it basically exploded.

Hmm. The entire cabinet is very simple construction. The hardest part of a cabinet is creating door frames and doors. I have those intact and sound. I decided to build the cabinet again myself. It's a non-standard size, so buying it would be pricey. I have the materials to do this myself. I'll let you know how it goes.

In closing, here's a close-up of the tile that we put down in the bathroom. This is a full bathroom, but it is also the guest bath for visitors. I like the small, bright tile. It's cheerful and makes the room look bigger. The walls were painted a very pale yellow cream color in a semi-gloss. It works well together as the photos above show.

Channeling Berit

2009-06-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

So, Wednesday afternoon my daughter Amelia comes skipping out of drama camp (the only summer camp for that week that I could get her in at short notice) and informs me, "Mommy!! Guess what?!! Tomorrow we get to do The Little Mermaid!"

Every day in drama camp is a different movie/play where the kids learn two songs and sing in a little performance at the end of the day for the adoring parents. Amelia's next plea was for her Ariel costume that I'd promised her.

Ok. I can do that. Berit, Susie's mom, used to whip these things up all the time. How difficult can it be to sew a simple elastic-waist skirt and attach something at the bottom to resemble a fin? In fact, since Amelia's best friend is in that camp too, I decided to make two of them so that there would be no fighting.

Amelia and I stopped by the fabric store where I picked up a couple of yards of green tissue lame and some gold brocade. I had a .5 yard remnant of gold sequin cloth too.

After dinner, Amelia went to bed, and I started sewing. First, I had found the blanket that I've been stitching for my niece, so I finished it while dinner was cooking to relax a bit.

Here's a close-up of the stitching of the name and the hand-stitched blanket stitch on the edges:

Then, I started on the mermaid costumes. The first thing I did was have Amelia lay down on a piece of newspaper and traced around her lower body. Then I took a measurement of her waist. I added 2" to half of her waiste measurement and found the center of the tracing. I basically cut the tracing in half after sort of extending out that piece to a half-skirt line. That way I could cut on the fold and have identical pieces. Plus, grain lines are simple to find on the fold.

The green tissue lame was transparent. So, to bring up the green color, I bagged a lining of hunter green lining fabric that I had left over from a skirt. I then created the skirt pieces, and made 'tail' pieces of out the gold brocade with iron-on interfacing to stiffen them. I sewed a hem on the brocade all around the tail to cover the raw edges, sewed each tail piece to the front and back skirt pieces, and seamed everything together. The peplum (that little ruffle at the waist) was done just before I sewed in the elastic band in the waist. I cut 4 pieces of gold sequin cloth, trimmed them to the same shape, hemmed the raw edges, and stitched them to the waist. Then fold down the waist to form a channel for the elastic, stitch the elastic in, and we're done.

I think they look fine for a costume dreamed up and created in one night. I finished them around 5 am. (I would have stopped at 3 am and gone to bed, but I was getting so close. I decided to just finish them.)

Proof that I did the second one too.

She seems to be happy about the costume and the quick turn-around.

But of course, we must make a silly face.

And you know what? This actually satisfies Goal #7 for the year! Not that I'm going to stop there. In fact, I think this year I'll keep a list and a picture of each finished craft item and do a collage of them at the end of the year.

Really. I do finish stuff. I know that it's hard for some of you to believe.

Goals for 2009-2010

2009-06-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm late in updating this. My 525,600 minutes are over for the year. I have to update my list and set the goals for the next 525,600 minutes. I've decided to start the minutes at 10:00 am on June 22 rather than June 1. The day after the longest day of the year seems like a good break point.

One thing I've decided is to have a lot more smaller discrete items on the list. The lofty goals are nice, but if it's smaller, I might have a prayer of crossing something off of the list.

Here's the last updated list with commentary. Several of these things on the list were fairly small, but didn't get time assigned to them. I may try assigning a time to see if I can get them done this year.

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate. - We're still not done with the house. This past weekend we completed the tiling of the downstairs bathroom, so we're finishing it slowly. It's just taking forever. It's like a hobby gone mad. I'm going to break this down to the final list of things to do.
* 2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia - (found a Chinese class)The Chinese class didn't work out. I'm still hopeful, but it's getting hard to find a class in our area.
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
* Main floor done
* Spare bedroom done
This is ongoing. I'm taking it off the list. I've now done every room except the basement and garage, but we need to begin on some of them again.
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.This one is close to my heart and makes me weep that we haven't done it yet.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.There's a reason that this one doesn't happen. I am absolutely terrified to let ANYONE see my finished writing. It's phobic. The phobia freezes me cold when I write --especially when I write anything that might be controversial or raise eyebrows. If you can't talk about it in front of the Kindergarten, I can't write about it. I think I need to take baby steps to eliminate the fears because until I do, this goal won't happen.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year. Done!
7. Weave 3 items. Once again, I did not weave this year. But if I change 'Weave' to 'Sew', then this one is in the bag.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum. The work on the old house did this one in. It is hard to get anything done other than basic life and that house. It really is the hobby gone mad.
9. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom. I need to work more on this. I've learned enough to annoy Tanja. Now I just need to practice. But Serbian is like Russian. And I would have failed Russian in college if I hadn't dropped it. My pronunciation is appalling.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate. We put this one on hold because of the old house. There's no time to be split among competing interests. Norm is working with me on this one. We have made some baby steps in this direction.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures. Actually, I did on one. Very slight. Don't want to talk about it publicly yet.
* 12. Finish the patents that I'm working on. - (abandoned)
* 13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness. - (abandoned)
14. Submit one item to a publisher. Sigh. This isn't done and goes hand-in-hand with #5.
15. Update will --again. Not Done.
16. Work on regular fitness routine. Not Done.
17. Programming - database and web routines Not Done.
18. MCSE - first four exams OR MCITP Not Done.
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security Not Done.
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA Not Done.
21. Work on that Graduate degree - 6 of 36 credits completed - (abandoned) At least for now. I found that I loathed the degree program. It didn't fit my style, goals, or personal abilities.
22. Work on keeping up my friendships - Done!! And this is going back on the list for next year with more specifics.
* 23. Do something special for Norman - Complete. Do another now.
24. Complete 3 needlework patterns for publication/sale
* Norm's Cafe
Also working on the Rumi marriage sampler, Let There Be Light sampler, and the two Krishna pieces. Darned old house taking up my time.
25. Negotiate licensing Haven't done this yet. The biggest issue here is that I don't know how to go about it from the 'I'm buying your artwork for a purpose' end rather than the 'Sure, I'll let you have my artwork for that' end. And they are different approaches. Plus, I'd like to have the company up and running to shelter this goal.
26. Enter one writing contest See #5.
27. Unpack the garage Not Done.
28. Unpack all boxes from move Not Done.

The new goal list. More specific. Requirements to put things on the home calendar. A lot of lofty stuff removed.

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
--a) Complete the painting, tile work, fixture installation in downstairs bathroom.
--b) Complete the touch-up painting, caulking, blind installation in the upstairs bathroom.
--c) Complete the post repairs and painting of the stairs.
--d) Complete the painting of the hallway.
--e) Complete the painting, floor refinish, and closet installation in downstairs bedroom.
--f) Complete the touch-up painting, trim painting, and radiator painting in the master bedroom.
--g) Complete the carpeting of the upstairs hall, walk-in closet room, and master bedroom.
--h) Complete the painting refresh of the kitchen.
--i) Complete the painting refresh of Amelia's old room.
--j) Complete the painting refresh of the wrap-around porch.
--k) Fix the outside stairs and walks.
--l) Paint the walls and radiator of the walk-in closet room.
--m) Paint the trim in the small bedroom (attached to walk-in closet room).
--n) Fix the windows that need it.
--o) Make window treatments.
--p) Stage the house.
2. Do one Chinese activity with Amelia every 14 days. Put on home calendar.
3. Do one declutter session (15 minutes) per week. Put on home calendar.
4. Find the time to start twice weekly family dinners. Put on calendar.
5. Complete 15 minutes of writing daily.
6. Enjoy Amelia's 1st grade school year.
7. Finish 3 items in any craft technique.
8. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom.
--a) Basic greetings.
--b) Present tense sentences [simple ones]
--c) Food vocabulary
9. Finish business plan & incorporate.
10. Submit one item to a publisher - journalistic articles count!
11. Update will by September, 2009.
12. Complete 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week. Put on home calendar.
13. Microsoft certification - first 3 classes.
14. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
15. Work on application for a different Graduate degree
16. Do one task a week to keep up my friendships. This is flexible.
17. Do something special for Norman weekly, and thoughtful thing every other day.
18. Complete 1 needlework pattern entirely.
19. Enter one writing contest by April, 2010.
20. Unpack the garage.
--a) Install Amelia's playhouse outside.
--b) Unpack one garage box per week.
21. Unpack one basement box from the move every week.
22. Bring in more bookshelves to house to accomplish #21.

45

2009-06-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

I woke up today thinking, "Wow. It's my birthday." Followed immediately by the thought, "Rats, I have to go renew my Driver's License today."

Nothing says Happy Birthday like a visit to the Maryland MVA.

The MVA overlords were quite sweet and smiling today though, and I managed to get in and out in about an hour or so. (New rules say that you need to present your SSN and proof of residency. That's done.) The picture is lousy this time around. Bummer. I really liked the last one.

I'm still croupy, but I'm on my feet this week, and that's a huge improvement. If I hadn't been absent all last week, I'd be taking today off and doing something fun. Ah well, if it can't be fun, at least it can be productive.

The goals list update is overdue. I'll update it in a while.

Plus, I need to post the pics from Amelia's 6th Birthday party at Jump Zone. Quite a crowd and an event.

The Root Canal

2009-06-18T20:45:00.001-07:00

I am such a baby. The root canal is done. I'm fine. My jaw is going to be sore for a while, but I made it through without too much pain.

The endodontist used a different anaesthetic on me tonight. I didn't have the violent spasm shakes that I get about 10 minutes after the shots with the other, and this pain killer lasted most of the way through a difficult procedure. I have tiny nerve channels, it seems. It took three separate canals to get to all of the roots. I only started to feel sensation at the very last.

In the beginning, Dr. Ali was checking the tooth for nerve involvement. When he started to prep the cold pad for the tooth, I casually asked him, "So, do they teach you waterboarding too when you learn that?" He laughed. I laughed. (Yup, the cold pad hurt.)

I'm still somewhat numb, but it's wearing off. I could feel about 20 minutes after he finished up. I just haven't got full feeling back. Soup for the next couple of days. I may get measured up for the crown tomorrow. It looks like there's enough to do a crown, though there may be a post under the crown.

But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd feared. The guy getting the root canal in the room next to me had them do a full I.V. anaesthetic that knocked him cold. His moaning had me sort of not too happy before my procedure started (and his took forever tying up my doctor). I ended up getting my cell phone out and calling just about anyone that I thought was up and about to chat so that I wouldn't think about it.

After my procedure started, you could hear the team next door trying to wake the guy up to go home. I was over and done with before he even got up from the chair. Quite frankly, I'd considered doing a full knock-out because I'm such a needle-phobe. But after that show and my own procedure, there's no way I'd ever do the I.V. anaesthetic for a dental. Well, unless they're reconstructing my entire jaw or something.

The needles weren't that bad. I did the "pah!" thing of breathing out and relaxing into it while they were pushing in. Worked like a charm. I took about 6 shots without a problem. Not even much pain from those, and I didn't have the local topical gel anaesthetic before the shots were applied. The hardest part of that procedure was not giggling while listening to the frustrated tech and doctor next door trying to wake the big baby I.V. patient. It was hilarious to hear.

Look up. I just said "The needles weren't that bad." Hmm. That's certainly different.

Going from Bad to Worse

2009-06-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

I knew this was going to happen soon. I just didn't want it to happen while I was sick.

I broke part of one of my teeth today. How? While eating a spoonful of Dove Toffee Caramel Moment ice cream. It is NOT the ice cream's fault.

No, this tooth has been on its last 'legs' for a while. It finally snapped off a piece near the top along the line of the huge filling that fills up 1/2 of the molar.

Oh, it's Root Canal time for me, for sure. And I can't stop coughing to add insult to injury. I'm going to argue against a bridge and ask for either a crown (probably not enough left for a crown) or a post and fake. I have an appointment for 6:00 pm tonight with the evening dentist, and I'll probably be getting that root canal this evening.

I'd lay down and cry, but well, I'm already doing that. I'm trying to hold back the sick horror of having to deal with pain drugs tonight. I am NOT a good patient, and the anaesthetic always wears off before they finish leaving me unhappy.

And, I have a new problem to handle. Amelia was scheduled for Vacation Bible School next week. It lets out at noon each day. Mom and Dad were going to pick her up, but now they can't. I can't really take another week off of work after being out sick for a week. It just isn't shaping up well.

Desperate for Tea

2009-06-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sick. Really sick. I went to Urgent Care three evenings ago, and they agreed that I was sick and gave me antibiotics. That aren't working. (Jury is out on that still. I'm giving the erythromycin one more day to start beating the sinusitis before I beg for something else to kill it. Wish I could stop coughing.)

I ran out of half-and-half a few hours ago in my last mug of tea. Since waking up a short while ago tea-less, I am less than happy. I'm running out of P&G pyramid bags too, but the lack of cream is the current emergency. I've already run out of Splenda and switched to Stevia packets.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I remembered the Christmas baking and ransacked the pantry for canned milk. I found a can of Evaporated milk from Evaporated cows, but no opener. The can is taunting me with its promise of cow-y goodness that I can't reach.

Finally, I took the nut pick and started trying to poke holes. No good. Searching for the can opener to just take the lid off, I found a Church Key (for those of you that don't know what that is --it's a bottle opener with a triangular can punch on the other end). Hallelujah!!

Mmm. Tea. At last. It has a glorious canned cow taste underlying the tea, but my sense of smell is pretty much gone at the moment, so I don't care. I don't know why I just don't like the tea as well without milk despite the fact that I'm taste-agnostic right now.

The New Obsession

2009-04-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Cardboard Furniture and Gomi Styling.

(my poor long-suffering husband...)

I really don't know where this burst of creativity is coming from. For several months, I feel like I'm burning up with the need to create. There are days that I'm so exhausted that I get home from work and collapse asleep on the couch. But on nights that I can, I'm working on projects. The house is a total disaster zone because I'm so fixated on this creation.

Is it because last year was so miserable? Now that I'm really happy at work, it's like someone pulled the cork out of my creative bottle. I'm spending more time with my family, but also working on the old house to get it finished for sale.

And somewhere in that drive to finish the house, I started creating this standing artwork out of it. I've been running the color choices for the rooms, and creating moods from drapery and furniture. I don't have a lot of furniture to work with, so I started saving every cardboard box from every new server that comes into our workplace. And the polyethylene foam cushioning inside the computer boxes. I'm building a bedroom set and other assorted furniture pieces. No, I'm not kidding. A bedroom set.

I've become the wonder of the office. My room at work is filling up with foam and cardboard. I'm hunting every single computer box down for my newest mania. I'm filling the attic up with supplies at the old house. I'm sure that several think that I'm collecting the polyethylene cushioning to create my own padded cell. Hey, I'll have the most environmentally friendly padded cell when I'm done.

It all started with this site in Germany. And the work of Eric Guiomar.

It's cardboard furniture, but it doesn't resemble the brick-and-board bookshelves of our college-age past. It's whimsical, sophisticated and smart. I'm able to jump to a dozen designs that I'd discarded because they simply aren't as easy to create in wood. But in cardboard, I can get fluid lines.

Let's just blame it on the moon, shall we?

70 of 100 Books

2009-03-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

Facebook has been passing around one of those lists. This one is the 100 Great Books.

So, I've read 70 of these over the course of my life. And there are several notable books missing. And no, I can't remember all of them clearly. Several of these books are required reading in U.S. high school English classes. Several of them are books that you couldn't pay me enough to make me read them again (drunken dwarves {shudder}).

Susie says: "The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. (I can’t verify this statistic)."

I have no idea, but in my definition, a good book is one that haunts you in corners and makes you remember the emotions that it brought up while reading. Or something that was so lucid and novel an idea that it changed your thinking. 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell fits my definition of that easily.
'Enders Game' by Orson Scott Card is another.
What about Euripedes and his plays like 'The Trojan Women' or 'Iphigenia at Aulis'?
Sophocles' 'Antigone'?
Homer's 'The Illiad' and 'The Odyssey'?
Colleen McCullough's 'The Thornbirds'?
Nassim Taleb's 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable'?
John Berendt's 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'?
Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?
'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes
'House of the Spirits' by Isabel Allende
Maya Angelou's poetry
Pablo Neruda's poetry
Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' or even better 'The Martian Chronicles'
Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time'
Machiavelli's 'The Prince'
Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'
Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' - though this is another that I'll never willingly pick up.
Douglas Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'
and,
Werner Heisenberg's trilogy of papers that form the basis of quantum mechanics (1925 - Sources of Quantum Mechanics, 1925 - On Quantum Mechanics, 1925 - Sources of Quantum Mechanics [the 2nd of this title]) though my math has never been good enough to parse these papers. Instead, I've read watered-down laymen versions of them.

Sigh, so many good books. And those are just the heavier reads above. There are a lot of less weighty fun books that make an impact too.

Here's the original Facebook list and my reads marked:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ( )

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x )

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)

6. The Bible ( x)

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ( x)

8. 1984 - George Orwell (x )

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ()

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ( x)

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (x)

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (x) -

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (x)

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x )

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)

19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (x )

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( x)

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (x)

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x) --on and on and on..I slogged through this one and Anna Karenina

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x)

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( x)

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (x)

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ( x)

34. Emma - Jane Austen ( x)

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen ( ) --hmm, I don't actually remember. I went through an Austen phase

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x )

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - ( ) -

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x )

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ( ) --good lord, why is this here? I can't slog through a Dan Brown book at all. I certainly don't think it's one of the best books ever. I can't get through more than 4 pages of Brown's writing before it irritates me to the core.

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)

44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ()

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (x)

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan ()

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)

52. Dune - Frank Herbert (x)

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x )

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (x ) --this one rivals War and Peace for world's longest book. The ending irritated me, though I understand the heroine's logic.

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ( x)

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x )

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ( )

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ( x)

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( x)

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (x)

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )

68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ()

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( x) --though like all of Rushdie, it was pretty much impossible to get through.

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x) -

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )

75. Ulysses - James Joyce (x) --kind of. I really tried. Joyce is an acquired taste I think. Every time I hear the title my mind flashes this image of a drunken dwarf in a wooden keg. Maybe you really need to like drinking to be able to read Joyce

76. The Inferno - Dante (x)

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )

78. Germinal - Emile Zola ( )

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (x )

80. Possession - AS Byatt ( )

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker (x)

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (x )

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x )

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (x)

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (x)

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (x )

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x) --Hey, if you read the complete works of Shakespeare, wouldn't this be included?

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x)

Drawrings

2009-02-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

Well, the creative well has been tapped once again. I started sketching another original needlework piece last night after consulting about 4 separate painting/drawing books that I own. I'm trying to draw a human figure.

Yup. Not content with just doing cute little sketches of Mediterranean villages or Venetian street scenes or Moroccan walled cities, I've now started the ambitious project of drawing people in my work. I thought it might be trying, but it's been a bit harder than I'd even imagined. I end up after 3 hours of putting lines down, erasing them while looking at the figure and thinking, "Are the feet really that big? Maybe that butt is too small and the curve in the back too defined? There's no chest definition. How do I draw that hand? How big is a hand anyway? Whoa, a hand is almost the entire length of the forearm --or maybe I just have freakishly large hands? The head shape looks wrong. Doesn't mine look like the alien heads in Alien Nation?"

Erase, erase, erase. Hours. Simply hours. And I'm just not happy. I'm finally happy with the feet and lower legs. But the upper body is just grotesque at this point. And I have a squarish flipper for hands because I want to get the pose in before starting to worry about the hand details.

And this part has to be in place before I start drawing in the rest of the pieces above the figures.

Looking at my amateur attempts always makes me cringe. My mom could draw beautifully, but I wasn't in that league. I did try when I was younger, but it got to the point where I hated art class because I could see the differences. Now that I'm older, I know that there's more than one type of artistic definition and style, but back then it was full realism or nothing. I've liked my little landscapes, and liked them even better once I started embellishing them beyond the mere sketch.

All of this for needlework. A craft that is falling by the wayside next to knitting or the other heavy yarn arts. But I love needlework beyond any reasonable way to define why I do it. Yes, I know that it is tedious for some. But it's soothing to me. I find the repetitive nature a nice backdrop. I think about the stitching for a couple of minutes, then I think of something else for a bit and can really chew on the thoughts. Or not think at all beyond the meditative counting.

The creation of my own needlework patterns has led to some internal tension. One of the joys of working on other people's patterns is that the design is fully formed. I don't have to think so hard about every stitch. I do modify many of the patterns that I stitch to suit me or the person for whom I'm stitching the piece, but the modifications are less intensive. In my own designs, charting software only goes so far with creating the right color blends on fabric. I end up changing out about 1/2 of the colors as I go when I'm stitching one of my patterns. I tend to have a lot of sloping edges in my designs and that's hard to chart. So I end up constantly evaluating when I'm stitching one of my own. It's rough and can break the meditative nature of stitching.

And yet, I'm happy with "Norm's Cafe" --the mediterranean village piece that I did. And the Venetian piece is going well. The newest design is for a wedding, and I don't know if I have the talent or time to pull it off. But hey, there's no harm in trying.

Tooth

2009-02-02T08:02:00.000-08:00

Well, that tooth is gone. It fell out about 2 days after the injury , and I've shrouded it for the future Tooth Fairy visit. The Tooth Fairy would have come earlier, but Amelia wanted to keep it to show her friends and teacher at school. I've been holding it back because items that go to school never return home.

So maybe the Tooth Fairy will leave one of the gold dollar coins tonight.

Friday evening was the Girl Scout sleepover event. That was a huge success and very fun for the girls. The Daisies did not stay for the night, but came for the badging activities and then left as the rest of the girls were settling into sleeping bags. There was an option to stay, and I may have done so had Amelia not gotten a very poor behavior report from school on Friday. I told her that she could do the activities, but the sleepover was forfeited because of her behavior report. That was traumatic (poor baby), but it did impress her with the fact that potty talk (current favorite is shouting out 'dirty underwear!' when she's frustrated with a task), laying down on the floor and not moving, and disruptive talking in class is not going to be tolerated. It also linked the fact that what happens in school IS known at home.

There was some backlash behavior on Saturday and Sunday, but it calmed down by Sunday night. Monday morning has been difficult. She was terrified to go to school, I think. And that drove her to be a lot more obstinate than usual, climaxing in a bout of tears in the car when I buckled her into her car seat because I 'hurt her feelings.' Sigh.

This too shall pass. Like all of the phases, we're probably at the zenith. Our family has already been given the 'cut direct' by the families that see her as a contagion, but we still have friends. Amelia is a bit more disruptive in class --we're going to have to see if it is frustration with tasks or if it is hyperactivity disorder blossoming. She really has trouble sitting for any length of time. But, when I see the other students in her class in other settings, she seems to be exactly like most of the other girls her age--no, actually, she's a lot like many of the boys her age --always moving and similar levels of listening.

Teeth

2009-01-24T11:20:00.000-08:00

What you see above is not the grainy shot of the extended teeth of the alien in the Sigourney Weaver movie "Alien," but a panoramic view of Amelia's teeth.

You see, Amelia knocked one of her baby teeth loose on Thursday (2 days ago) and seriously wobbled a second one. How? We have no idea. Amelia says she 'fell on her backpack.'

After the hoopla, we found an excellent emergency dentist and these X-rays were taken. The nice photo that the tech gave us unfortunately was taken by the dentist and he walked out of the room with it never to be seen again. He pulled a new photo for us when I begged, but it isn't as good because he doesn't work the equipment as often.

The line of Amelia's teeth is in the center. Unfortunately, the loose tooth is not really visible in this shot because it's in the middle of that dark spot (and the picture was scanned into a pdf file by Norm, then converted to a jpg by me, leading to huge losses in data). But you can see the small central line of her teeth. And those tooth-shaped white shapes under that line are her adult teeth waiting to come in. In the good pic, you can see that the adult upper front teeth have the same distinct gap between them that Norm and his Mom have. Unfortunately, you can't see it here.

But, after seeing this pic, I am certain of a few things:

1. The costume designer for Alien was closely related to a dentist. The resemblance is too striking to be otherwise.

2. Amelia is her father's daughter. There's more of him in there than me.

3. Children fall down and hurt themselves no matter how many 'safety' measures that we build around them.

Amelia will be ok. The tooth she knocked out (almost --it was hanging by a thread but now it seems to be firming up again) will just have to come out on its own. She didn't damage the permanent teeth beneath, and she's taking amoxicillin to be sure that there is no infection.

Updates

2009-01-24T10:58:00.001-08:00

I haven't been online to blog in a while. Every time I think, 'I should update the friends list with that' then I remember that I haven't said anything about Christmas, or New Year's, or any other event. And that stops me from writing anything.

Sigh.

So, here's an update:

Christmas: The server upgrades kept me tense until about Dec 28th when I was done and everything looked good. Needless to say, it was an issue during Christmas. In fact, it got so bad that the 'can't make decisions about anything else' feedback loop that happens when I'm concentrating on one thing only kicked in and made the final Christmas shopping sheer agony. I just couldn't figure anything out this year.

So I told Norm that he'd have to handle everyone this year. That didn't go over so well.

Christmas day was fine, but I spent it still chewing my fingernails waiting for that upgrade.

New Years Eve/Day: The power went out at the brother's house that day, so they came over to our house around 6:00 pm on New Years Eve. I was delighted to have them over since I'd wanted to ask them over for New Years for ...years. But, the guest room wasn't guest ready, so there was about 2 hours of scrambling to make everything right. We got the kids in bed around 9:00 pm, Amelia in bed around 10:30 pm, and dinner served around 11:00 pm. Then we watched the ball drop together, and I drank about 7/8 of a bottle of white wine by myself. Steve and Tanja went to bed and Norm and I watched George Carlin till Way Late. Then Norm poured my giggling, bed-spinning self into bed at 2:30 am where I was out cold until 6:30 am when the twins woke up and started rampaging.

New Years Day: I woke at 6:30 am to the twins up and heading downstairs. I got up to prevent them from waking everyone (read that as Amelia) up. I made pancakes for them and put on a TV show. Steve got up at one point and got the twins to go 'wake up Mommy.' Which meant that they woke up Amelia too. And then Steve and Tanja packed up and left pretty quick after that.

Inauguration: Amelia stayed home with me and wore her new Easter dress, pearls, tights, and fancy shoes for the swearing in while sucking on her stuffed dog Otis curled up next to me. It was festive. We talked about respect for the office of the President.

There. All caught up.

Well, I do have this stupid cold again. And I've crossed a couple more items off of my grand goal list.

Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T05:37:00.000-08:00

And finally, yesterday afternoon, I got an answer to the problem plaguing my server upgrade all week. I can relax a bit about it now. I hate stress.

The task of the day is to madly clean up the house for the break. It's a disaster. But, underneath the skim of clutter, there is decent organization now, so we should have it cleaned up in a few hours.

Tomorrow, the family will come over for brunch. Norm's planning pancakes, ham, and probably large amounts of sugar for the children. Nothing says Christmas like opening up all the toys that you've been drooling over for a year and then not getting to play with them because you have to go spend the day at other people's houses.

Last night, Santa came screaming by on the fire pickup truck and threw candy canes at the neighborhood kids. We were putting up the Christmas tree and decorations, when I heard the sirens from a distance. I rushed Amelia into her shoes, coat, hat, and mittens, and we all went outside. Did I mention that I'd already put Amelia in her pajamas for the night and that it was about 9:00 pm? We stood out there and heard the truck go down every side street in the area before it reached us 20 minutes after we went outside. Lots of cold kids because the nights have been about 18 degrees F lately.

After Santa left, we went back inside. Norm stayed out to finish hanging the outside lights. I finished the rest of the tree cleanup, and the radio was on one of the classical stations. About 15 minutes after coming in, the radio station announced a ticket giveaway for caller #11, and so I called. I was #4, so I dialed back, and WON!! Two tickets to the showing of the Bolshoi Ballet's performance of The Pharoah's Daughter at the Charles Theater on Dec 28th. This is a filmed version of a performance of a 'resurrected' ballet. The Pharoah's Daughter was created in Russia in 1862. It fell out of favor and hasn't been performed since 1905 until the Bolshoi reconstructed it in 2005. There is a review about it here.

Yes, how can you go wrong with a ballet whose main plot crux is opium smoking? That and the blackface on the dancers that are supposed to be Egyptian slaves (love the reviewers quote of 'unfortunate'), well, should be an interesting evening. I suspect that the filmed version used the best of the principal dancers to pull it off because it sounds like there are sections where the technical dancing is going to be rough going for anyone without stamina. There's a darn good reason why certain languorous moves are peppered throughout a scene. Most dancers can't handle non-stop leaping without some sort of breathing space.

And no one does blackface anymore. Why in the world would you? Even for historical purity reasons, it's just tacky. Very 'unfortunate' artistic decision, that.

But I'll love seeing the dancing.

Christmas, T-2 and counting down

2008-12-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

I love the 'getting together with family' and 'a few days off to relax' parts. I simply don't care for the getting ready for Christmas part much at all.

No, I'm not ready this year. Typically I've finished gift-shopping, and at least have the basics of a plan for the decorations and activities. Not this year.

Nope, the best that I can do is that gift-wise I have a couple of loved ones covered, and Norm is getting a tree today.

This year has stressed me out. To the point that for the very first year, I've abdicated on the gift picking. Completely. I've got a major upgrade project at work, and a house that we're prepping for market. The last thing I feel right now is Christmas-y.

In fact, I feel like I should be listening to the Melodic Metal Dreams For Christmas album and taking a harder drug than just the Sudafed to handle my Christmas sniffles. No, nothing quite says 'Christmas' to me like a video shot in a concrete block dungeon with a leather-clad vampire dancing on your coffin. Yup, quite Christmas-y. If you never outgrew your Goth phase.

Partibrejkers

2008-12-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

I was rootling around in my desk today looking for something to listen to in my CD collection, and found the Partibrejkers cds that my sister-in-law brought me back from Serbia.

I'd asked her to find the CDs from them if she could. She found two albums that were recorded in the late 90's and early Naughties, but not the one I was hoping for. The ones she found are not bad --they sound like bad boys that grew up a bit. But the early stuff that I was hoping for sounds like the boys schlepped out of bed to the recording session after a hard night of drinking after doing manual labor all day. Screaming and angry but with this odd bluesy guitar and a harmonica, of all things. I would describe it as 'punk rockabilly' in Serbian.

My sister-in-law was non-plussed when I asked her for the recordings. "How do you know about the Partibrejkers?"

Hmm, good question, that. There's a summer that's kinda missing for me after I graduated from High School of hard clubbing and lots of music. I was dating a musician. We were all experimenting with sound and noise and style. And we were trading music with others from unknown places and sources. One of those traded vinyl records was by the Partibrejkers. And that album was my favorite. Not mine, and I don't even have a recording of it. When I broke up with the musician, I lost custody of the record too. Shame that.

This is the record that I'd love to hear again.

But YouTube has everything, and here is a copy of the recording of '1000 Godina' from that first album. I've been told that's '1000 years' in Serbian and the lyrics are busy screaming (because the original screams and I remember more harmonica) that even if the singer could live 1000 years he wants to do it all in one night.

Good times.

I leave you with videos. The first is a remake of 1000 Godina. Shot grainy. Probably not listen-able.

Um, this sounds more like the original 1000 Godina. I suspect someone took it off the first album and just cut in video clips and pics.

Partibrejkers & Johnny Depp -- Guess Depp was in Belgrade. (Probably in 1987-88 timeframe, because Cane looks a lot less beefy and Johnny still has that cherubic 'Jump Street' face and haircut.)

Winter Planting

2008-12-16T07:11:00.000-08:00

It's been unseasonably warm here between the cold snaps of freezing days. Last Thursday I went out around 9:00 pm at night after Amelia went to bed and planted flower bulbs until midnight. It was lovely and warm and very still. I managed to get 240 bulbs put in quickly in the flower beds in the front of the house. Just as I finished, it started raining, and the temperature chilled down to the upper 30's for a few days.

Yesterday again you could walk outside in your shirt sleeves. I got home from work, got Amelia in bed, changed into work clothes, and headed outside (without dinner). I got another 240 bulbs in --this time in the back yard where the soil has never been turned. It started raining the minute I stepped outside with the tools, but I decided that a little rain wouldn't melt me. In the process of planting a lot of muscari and Siberian squill in the backyard, I discovered some overgrown crocus bulbs that needed to be dug up, pulled apart, and reburied in a larger area. I also found what appeared to be oriental lily bulbs in an area where they couldn't possibly be doing well (lilies need a decent amount of sunlight and don't do well under tree cover). I mixed them with the oriental lilies that I've transplanted from our old house. I also finally found a good spot to plant the lilac sprouts from our old house. It will take about 7 years for them to bloom, but it's important to me to transplant those.

Norman and I started dating in lilac season, you know. That old lilac tree in the front of the old house is very dear to me. I can't bring the lilac to the new home, but I can bring its offspring.

At some point, I intend to bring cuttings off of the blue hydrangeas, most of the Lily-of-the-Valley that I can find, and a few of the Carolina spicebushes from the old house. There are also some very vivid magenta tulips that I'd like to find this spring and transplant.

I really do miss having flower beds in sunlight. I wasn't always good at weeding them in the high summer, but I do love seeing the spring/summer show. My favorites are lilies (all varieties), lilacs, tulips (especially Greigii and lily-pointed), hydrangeas, daphnes (odora variety), Carolina spicebush, and dianthus. Crocus are also favorites --I'm beginning to experiment with fall-blooming crocus.

I'm babbling on-and-on about flowers, but I've been gardening deprived. And the new house yard is mostly in deep shade. Shade gardening is not my favorite type of gardening. I'm hoping that at least some of my flowers live. Or I'll have to take over the 2' strip between the sidewalk and street and turn it into a big planter.

When a Group Project goes horribly wrong....

2008-12-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

Well, three weeks ago I dropped my graduate classes at UMUC. I haven't withdrawn from the degree program entirely, but I will soon.

We were finishing up the group project in one class, and I was going over the edits with the group. The group all was enthusiastic about the project, and everyone (but me) thought it was the best thing ever. I did try to stop the train wreck and at least clean up the most objectionable things and the point-of-view errors.

Let's give a small sample, shall we? To put this in perspective, this was a training manual for managers of a foreign office. We were to maintain professional third-person point-of-view. (I can't get screenshots from this connection now, but I'll edit them in for the text quotes later.)

This is the press release.

The following has been developed for release to the Japanese media:

Group 4 Telecom is an intellectual workforce organization utilized by our customers that assigns the right person to the right position promptly and professionally. Because of its position as a world leader in the telecom industry, Group 4 Telecom has Japan to be our first partner in our effort to globalize.

Did you know that "our" and "your" are third-person? No? Neither did I. And the mythic company is a world leader even though it 'has Japan to be' the first global partner.

(editor's note: 'your' doesn't appear in the project slide above, but it littered the presentation on other slides.)

The following slide is just surreal. Granted, we are answering one of the questions asked in the Organizational Theory requirements of the project. However, it does beg the question, 'Can I work in your organization if I'm a Christian?'

Rites and Ceremonies

Rite of integration: creating a common bond and good feelings among employees and increase commitment to the organization
Ceremony - Office holiday party

Rite of enhancement: creating a stronger social identity and increasing employees status
Ceremony - Annual awards night

Rite of renewal:reflects training and development activities that improve organization functioning
Ceremony - Organization development activities

Norm saw this slide and said, "It sounds like you all dance naked in the woods on the full moon. That's team-building."

And last, I'll provide the slide that put the nail in the coffin of that M.S. degree from UMUC:

Managing cultural diversity

Telecom treats all of our employees with the utmost respect. We believe that if we use our diversity to generate multiple perspectives, problem definitions, ideas, action alternatives, and solutions, then we; as a organization, will function effectively together

By recognizing differences, establishing a vision, equalizing power, creating mutual respect, and giving feedback, we can manage our employees better by using their insights and experiences because it helps the creation of new and better ideas that will help our organization grow, decrease effectiveness, stereotyping, communication problems, and stress

Oh. My.

Words just fail me here. I asked the group several times, "Have you READ this slide? No, really, DID YOU READ IT?"

Oh yeah. They read it. Thought it was wonderful. After all, there we were as a group functioning effectively together by using our differences to decrease effectiveness, stereotyping, communication problems, and stress [SIC.] It makes sense in a surreal sort of way.

But I simply can't go on with this degree program. I can't imagine 3 years of struggling through this degree in class after class just like this one. This isn't grad school level English (or reasoning, but we'll leave that out altogether). In fact, it isn't even high school level. I'm having difficulty believing that someone could make it through a Bachelor's degree with language skills that are this poor. I could pass it. But I'd never give it more than the absolute bare minimum to pass the course. The material and interaction does not inspire me. And getting a bare minimum in this dreck? Oh no.

The game isn't worth the candle.

Runaway Bride

2008-12-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

(Oct 31, 2008)

Halloween has come and gone. But we have photos!

Amelia was a Bride for Halloween. She made a nice one.

Her friend Sophia was a cute Bunny.

The Color Blanket

2008-10-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

It's Level I - Part 3 - H in the Handweavers Guild of America Certificate of Excellence in Handweaving ratings program. It states:

Weave a color blanket, minimum size of 12 inches by 12 inches, in balanced plain weave, incorporating no fewer than twelve hues of the color wheel. Warp colors are to be repeated in the weft in the same proportions at least one inch per color. Show the yarn colors by finishing with fringe.

No problem. I warped this warp (about 8 years ago) using colors from the Lunatic Fringe color gamp kit in 10/2 mercerized cotton, with a few UKI colors thrown in from here and there to even out the spectrum where I chose to differ. Lunatic Fringe uses the cyan-magenta-yellow color base. I warped up a blue-red-yellow color base warp. So, there are a couple of different shades that I blended in.

I've been pretty sick for several days. I woke up feeling halfway decent today, and in the mood to weave. Since I haven't actually *woven* anything in 9 years, that is shocking in and of itself. (All of these looms just sitting idle for so long. It's been sad.) I sat down at the loom with the color blanket and realized that I had a twisted warp thread. I cut off the tie-on, and re-tied the warp on the loom after fixing the thread. Then I started weaving the first color in. And hemstitched the first edge. And got really excited. The feel of throwing a shuttle just makes me feel better.

I found that the second set of yarn from the same supplier is a different dye lot. And the dye lot colors are radically different.

Oh no.

That's a real problem. If I can't get matching yarn, I have to pull this warp off, toss it, and start again. And I can't get matching yarn.

So, since this warp is a loss, I'm going to practice a bit on it and then take it off and weave a shawl.

No Caribou Barbie

2008-10-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday driving down one of the major roads in the area, I ran across one of those boxy Scions sporting

No McGrumpy. No Caribou Barbie

written in white fingerpaint on the back window of the car.

When we were side-by-side at the traffic light, I motioned to the guy driving, we rolled down windows, and the conversation went like this:

"Excuse me, but I noticed the Caribou Barbie on your back window."

He said happily, "Thanks!"

"I wanted you to know that that term is very offensive to women. It boils her down to just a pretty face and ignores any other quality."

He said heatedly, "Well she IS just a pretty face! She doesn't have any other qualities!"

"But we don't need to say it."

At that point the light changed and the car drove away with the man probably thinking "There's nothing wrong with it." He's very wrong.

Just because the Democratic Party nominated a black man for President does not mean that the rest of the supporters get a free pass on these discrimination issues. Do you understand? No?

To boil a woman down to just looks, appearance, or sexual possibility is gender discrimination. If that man had been driving around a car with a mild racial slur painted on it like that then the general public would have pulled him out of the car and beaten him with his own arms. Yet, to just toss off a comment like "Caribou Barbie" on the back of a car window shows that the person does not understand how demeaning it is to ALL women, not just Palin.

Does Obama really *mean* that commercial where he says "I want my daughters to have the same chances as your sons"?

If so, why is that offensive title being bandied about for Palin? Take her appearance out of the argument, folks. It doesn't have a place here. Drop the Caribou Barbie and the even more offensive 'MILF'. The lipstick on a pig comment was bad enough.

That set of gender slurs saddens me. The individuals making the comments don't even see the damage they are doing. When Hillary Clinton was being attacked for her abrasive mannerisms, there was an outcry.

Why is everyone silent about this? Where are the feminists?

Gerard Depardieu

2008-10-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

I sent my friend Margit a link to a blog entry about one woman's pain in learning how to count in French.

In return, she sent me this little gem from Flight of the Conchords.

I'll be muttering "Gerard Depardieu" in a bad accent for a month.

Thanks, Margit.

Goal List Checkpoint - 339,780 minutes

2008-10-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

So my year of minutes is ticking out. At 10:00 am EDT on October 8, I'll have 339,780 minutes left in my year of goals to complete. Let's see how I'm doing. Here's the list:

My goals to complete before next June 1, 2009 at 10:30 am:

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year.
7. Weave 12 items.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum.
9. Learn enough Serbian to annoy Tanja.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures.
12. Finish the patents that I'm working on.
13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness.
14. Submit one item to a publisher.
15. Update will --again.
16. Work on regular fitness routine.
17. Programming - somewhat better understanding
18. MCSE - first four exams
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
21. Work on that Graduate degree (sigh)
22. Something special for Norman that I won't put in a public list.
23. Work on keeping up my friendships

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate. - we're working hard at this. The bathroom is done, the painting is almost done, the floors and some other cosmetic work are still ahead. We're on target to have this done around January, 2009.

2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia - this one was supposed to be easy. It's not. I have a friend who has offered to do simple stuff with Amelia, and I signed Amelia back up for classes at Hope Chinese School on Sunday in College Park, but I don't want to overwhelm her with schoolwork.

3. Complete the declutter of our new house. - the main living floor has been decluttered (so far). My studio isn't bad. But the rest of the house and the packed stuff is still ahead.

4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners. - this happens about once a week so far. I'd like to increase it to at least 4/wk.

5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum. - (snivel) No. I'm pathetic. And I've started yet another unfinished manuscript, but I'm hopeful that I'll get that one done soon since there is some energy going into it.

6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year. - 6 weeks in and we are not enjoying it, but we're enjoying a lot of quality Amelia time.

7. Weave 12 items. - I'll settle for 3 items. That's more realistic this year.

8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum. - This actually might happen in the winter/early spring.

9. Learn enough Serbian to annoy Tanja. - I think I'm there already, but I haven't learned enough to hold a conversation with her mom yet.

10. Finish business plan & incorporate. - No. -ahem. Get moving on this. Now. Really. I mean it.

11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures. - No.

12. Finish the patents that I'm working on. - No, but it's fun working on them.

13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness. - No, but you should see the rough drawings. Hysterical.

14. Submit one item to a publisher. - No.

15. Update will --again. - No. We're pathetic.

16. Work on regular fitness routine. - No. (she says, reaching for her donut)

17. Programming - somewhat better understanding - No. I should have finished the database and scripts by now.

18. MCSE - first four exams - No. I should have at least 2 down by now. C'mon, the networking one? That should be a cakewalk.

19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security - No.

20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA - No.

21. Work on that Graduate degree - Yes. 9 credits more taken this semester, if I live through it.

22. Something special for Norman that I won't put in a public list. - Yes.

23. Work on keeping up my friendships - Yes, but barely treading water here.

So, most of the things are outstanding still. Changing the list slightly and adding the needlework patterns that I've been creating:

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
* Main floor done
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year.
7. Weave 3 items.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum.
9. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures.
12. Finish the patents that I'm working on.
13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness.
14. Submit one item to a publisher.
15. Update will --again.
16. Work on regular fitness routine.
17. Programming - database and web routines
18. MCSE - first four exams OR MCITP
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
21. Work on that Graduate degree - 6 of 36 credits completed
22. Work on keeping up my friendships
* 23. Do something special for Norman - Complete. Do another now.
24. Complete 3 needlework patterns for publication/sale
25. Negotiate licensing
26. Enter one writing contest

That's a lot. But if I finish even a part of it, I'll be happy. And it's fun checking things off the list.

Taller

2008-10-07T08:36:00.001-07:00

Amelia has been talking a lot lately about taller. We thought that she meant height when she said, "I'm the smallest kid in the class." But she isn't the smallest --she's squarely in the middle of the pack of Kindergartners in terms of height.

Then the 'taller' phrase became even more important for her. She is obsessed by it. She touches other children to see how 'tall' they are. She talks about her frustration with writing letters (hey, Kindergartners are still developing the hand motor skill to handle pencils) and that she's small today. She talks about growing up to be tall and being able to 'boss' others around.

Oh.

This isn't about height at all. It's about status. She doesn't see herself fitting in, and somehow, she's transferred that set of fears and frustrations to a child's eye view of height differences. The adults are tall, so they're the 'boss'. Kids are short, but some kids can be the 'boss' of others and be taller. Kids are taller than cats, and they definitely are the 'boss' of the cats.

Take the social veneer off of all of us, and we adults are no better than this Kindergarten view of how things should be. There's a disturbing out-of-the-norm number of CEOs that are tall. We are all shaped by that child view that the person that you look up to is the one that is best suited to call the shots.

My challenge, though, is to convince my own small one that every person has talents to contribute, but to contribute we must let go of the obsessive desire to be 'tall'. I am struggling to find a path to help her understand that small kernel of truth. Because it is way too adult for her to 'hit' someone that is not cooperating with the 'understood' point of view to make herself taller.

The New Cousin's Name

2008-10-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

The new cousin's name is Alexander Reese.

Thank goodness.

Clear Air

2008-10-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

It rained so hard last night that the toads crawled out of the hiding places in the grassy lawns and hopped into the street, possibly looking for earthworms that had done the same.

The rain's best effect is that whatever was in the air that was making everyone sniffle has abated. It's cooler today than yesterday with the rain clouds still lurking and making everyone feel chillier than they really are.

Amelia and I went to the local fabric store yesterday and bought polar fleece to make a blanket for the newest addition to her cousins. Still no word on the official name of the newest bean yet. That means the parents are probably still duking it out. (Or that it's not important enough to anyone to bother relating the info) I'm going to start calling him "Terrence" for real. I'm sure that his brother Phillip will approve.

While we were there, I bought sock yarn. They only had 4 possible colors of sock yarn and is it me or is sock yarn rather pricey for a skinny wool/acrylic blend? The bamboo/silk yarns were cheaper! Plus, I think I need roughly 2 skeins for these socks I'm planning as the sock yarn only had 166 yards in each skein.

When I got home with the goods, I put the sock yarn with the wool that I'm planning to use as either warp or weft. I'm thinking now that I'll use the sock yarn for warp, and the shetland wool for weft. A 4-shaft diamond waffle weave on the leg tube, and a simple twill for the foot tube. The heel gusset might be possible on the loom also, but I'll have to sample. I'm sampling with straight shetland warp and weft, with a small sample of shetland warp/sock yarn weft to examine shrinkage issues and elastic memory of the yarn blend.

Last night, though, I went into my studio after I'd managed to get Amelia bathed and in bed, and found that I was so tired that I was swaying in front of the warping board. I bagged the project for the night. I can't do warp calculations when I'm that wiped out.

Today is Rosh Hashanah

2008-09-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

To all of the Jewish friends, Happy New Year!!!

Just a reminder...if you haven't registered to vote in your state, do so soon. Many states close voter registration next week. If you don't register, you can't cast a ballot.

(There. That's my only political viewpoint. I'm a true purple undecided right now. I'll decide before the day, but right now and always, the only thing I'll say in public is that "I don't care who you vote for, but take your part.")

(And the other thing...if the ad you hear is 90% about the other guy, then it's a negative ad. I really hate negative ads. It makes me think that you don't have anything to say. Are you listening? Yes, you know who I'm talking about out there.)

The weather has been crazy here. Cold enough that we turned the heat on in the house for 2 nights, then warm and humid enough that we needed the air conditioning. Everyone has a slight sniffle. Parts of me hurt. And I have this uncontrollable desire to pet yarn and stitch. It must be the turning of summer to fall.

And I'm WEAVING!!!!! Not much, but a little bit last night. Ah, that familiar excitement!

Nephew Update

2008-09-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Our new nephew has a name: Alexander or Alexandar, whichever spelling prevails in the sparring parents war. I'm hoping that it is Alexander because otherwise people are going to assume that his parents were illiterate. No one (in the USA) is going to realize that he's simply got the Serbian spelling of the name.

Maybe we can get the parents to just drop the "ander/andar" part and call him Alex instead?

Alex is doing fine at the hospital. He's still in Neo-natal ICU, but a few more tubes have been removed. It appears that all of his major organs and systems are OK. He's just really, really small. I really want to see him, but I've been swamped with school.

Remember those 9 credits of graduate classes? I tried to drop one 3-credit class. And found out that I would owe about $1300 if I do drop it.

Um, ok. Looks like I stick this out.

Basically, I only really care about the passing grade. I've got about 6 irons in the fire right now, and no time period to spend in the leisure of study. However, on Sunday, after finishing more tasks for school, I spent about one hour when Amelia was put to bed doing some needlework. I've almost forgotten how. ;-)

A NEW NEPHEW!!!

2008-09-25T08:38:00.000-07:00

Well, he came this morning. He's 8 weeks early (week 32), only 4 pounds, and in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit for at least the next 10 days.

We don't know his name yet.

But he's here. And Tanja is doing well after her C-section. And all of the family is very grateful that he didn't arrive at week 26, when the first episode happened.

Out of my Mind - Part 2

2008-09-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

I finished the 3-page paper and 3/4 of all the reading last night, posted to conferences, and basically patched up what needed to be done. There's a 5-page paper due tomorrow, so I'll be doing that tonight. And 2 new conference posts today. Took me something like an hour last night just to find and print all of the reserved reading for the two classes.

I did it though. I'm holding my head above water. In a week I'll be doing a bit more than just paddling in these seas. One thing that I spent a few minutes on last night was pulling the reading for the next 3 weeks together and crafting a reading/study schedule. (Thank you, Fly Lady) I'll be ok if I stick to it.

The only issue is that I find it hard to come down from a long night studying. We're in gender/racial discrimination/diversity issues in the reading, and it's all hot-button type issues that are designed to keep you up at night.

Amelia called me last night while I was studying at work to tell me that she loved me and that I was the most wonderful mommy in the world for making sure that her favorite dresses were laundered so that she could wear them to school. It made me *feel* like the most wonderful mommy, even if I just don't think that I am most of the time.

Norm took Amelia to the Daisies meeting (Girl Scouts) last night so that I could study. It went well, and the scout moms even threw in a few he/him's to make him feel included in the group. ;-) (We have such an awesome neighborhood.)

Realistically, this class schedule is pretty insane. But I don't have a really big choice if I want to finish the program. When Norm starts his program, I will have to stop. We can't afford to have more than one parent in school at one time. To finish, I will need to do 9 credits in Spring, 6 credits in Summer, and 6 credits in Fall, 2009. And truthfully, I just want it over with.

Out of my Mind

2008-09-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

Really. I am.

I signed up for 9 credit hours of Graduate school classes. One 6-credit management class (Intro to Management I & II combined) and one 3-credit Project Management specialty class (Conflict & Negotiation).

I am right now 3 chapters and two papers of assigned reading behind. I've managed to do all of the posts in the conferences (these are online courses), and worked on part of the group projects, but I have two papers due this week. A 3-pager tomorrow, and a 5-pager on Wed. Not a huge amount of writing, but I wanted them done by now, and the reading load tripped me up. (I'm under the delusion that one should read all the material before trying to write a paper on an assigned topic.)

My coworkers are taking bets on how long before I crack under the pressure. I'm betting that I'll make it. It's not that bad, but I need to start setting up a reading schedule with my daily routines. Thank you, Fly Lady.

The house is still clean. Even Norm is pitching in on the routines. I plan on rewarding myself with a bit of stitching time in the new, bright living room once these papers are written.

Let there be Light!!

2008-09-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

We broke down this weekend and bought two cheap 150 Watt floor lamps at Home Depot. I put one together, liked the effect, so I put the second one together and placed them at either end of the living room.

Suddenly, the dark cave-like room has become bright and inviting. I sat and did needlework on my favorite chair late last night for a short bit.

Blessed, beautiful light.

A Couple of Days Off

2008-09-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

I took Tue & Wed off to enjoy some of the crafts and things that I've been missing for over a year. The problem with taking downtime away from work is that I barely know where to start when I've got a huge list of things that I'd like to do and no set order to do them in.

I finished putting my loom parts together on the Louet David 90. Now I just need to tune that loom before warping it.

I put up the white board and pictures in my office/studio space that I've been trying to get up for a year.

I still haven't found my cables yet for my computer, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, I'm bringing up the new toy server with Fedora 9 Linux and VMware Server for linux. After that, I'll load in the Windows 2008 Server and AD and Exchange as virtuals on the network. But having it to poke at will go far in getting me boot-strapped back up to speed. It feels great to get my hands on something besides Mirapoint/FreeBSD internals. I have a sheet-fed scanner at home that only works with a Mac (that's what I had that had enough firepower at the time to run the editing software). I'd like to virtualize a Mac so that I can run the scanner, but we'll see how that goes in a few days.

The living areas of the house are still clean and uncluttered, the studio is getting less and less cluttered all the time, and I'm searching for good lighting so that I can start using the needlework stands and looms in the living areas of the house. We have the worst lighting ever in this house, and I have been struggling with eye strain since we moved in.

Amelia is still stressing over Kindergarten and the new rules, poor thing. She is being reprimanded often for 'touching' other children. She tends to hug whenever she wants to show approval. Actually, she's a really touchy-feely child (so totally unlike me, but very like her father). She's been waking up in the middle of the night and coming to 'cuddle' in bed with me. I think she's desperate for some approval right now. Norm and I agreed this morning after she left that we're going to curtail any reprimands/punishments for behavior at home for a few days and try to work to make her feel more secure (her incredibly bad behavior on Sat at the restaurant lost her 'snack' money for school (dessert after lunch treats, basically) and her princess movies for the week). In fact, I'm going to pop out early today and go pick her up now.

A Lovely 95 degree (F) Fall Weekend in Maryland

2008-09-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

This weekend passed in a blur. I'm over the moon happy about how life is straightening out, priorities that have long been neglected are coming to their rightful place, the house is reflecting the serenity and peace that is reigning.

I muttered to Norm on Thursday that that it feels too good to last. He just laughed and said, "You always do this. Peace and calm really stresses you out, doesn't it?" Well, I can't help but hold my breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. God, I love that man --he knows all of my worst secrets and traits and still loves me.

It was really, really hot here. I wonder if Hurricane Ike to our west pushed all of the warm air East of the Mississippi directly over the Atlantic coast? It's 85 degrees today (Monday) and going to be 72 degrees tomorrow.

Tonight is the Back to School Night at the school. We're going, of course. I need to find out if Amelia should go or not.

By the way, on Friday evening, I bought Girl Scout cookies from a couple of neighbor scouts. Amelia was arriving at that moment, and she was really upset that I was buying cookies from them and not from her little Brownie self. (well, not really a Brownie but she doesn't seem to understand that yet). The outrage that she telegraphed was just funny, but I treated it with deep seriousness and told her that I'd always buy cookies from her too.

I have two days off of work on Tuesday and Wednesday. And the house is still clean. And school work will be done by tomorrow. And basically, I'll have two days to really work on stuff that I have wanted to do for ages. :-D

Sunday in Peace and Quiet

2008-09-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

Sunday was lovely. We woke up late, had lunch, and went over to the old house to wash down the drywall dust on the walls (next step is priming the walls...YAY!!!). After working, we came home and enjoyed a few hours without Amelia. While we were getting showered up (covered in drywall dust), our doorbell started ringing and ringing and knocking. We thought it was one of the neighborhood kids selling stuff for school, and I figured we'd catch up with him later --no need to bolt downstairs hurriedly dressed and dripping soap. Turns out it was the parents, Steve, and all of the kids coming by (probably to drop Amelia off), and it's a darn good thing that we didn't open the door. It gave us 2 more hours to relax before we picked up Amelia. After we did get Amelia and got her put to bed, Norm and I watched some TV together (that's rare).

I've really enjoyed having the house back in shape. The routines are back in place to keep it clean, and we've been trying to modify our mail dropping habits. Really, newspapers, mail, and recycling stuff are the pieces that chip away at my clean intentions. It's a delight to have the kitchen clean enough to just invite people over on a whim.

Saturday's Restaurant Disaster

2008-09-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Saturday, we got up late, and met the parents and Steve and the kids at Sakura for lunch. That's a Japanese steak house that does the little show on the grill at the table. It's one of Steve and Tanja's favorites, but I dread going because Amelia does not behave there. I don't know why that restaurant is so bad, but the kids are terrors. Last time, each of the three kids took turns taking all their clothes off at the table. I have to walk Amelia outside for a change of venue and a short talk every single time we go there. This time was no exception. I think that Mia (the 2 1/2 year old cousin) was grumpy, and Amelia had trouble getting her attention. And Grandma was busy attending grumpy Mia, so Amelia was getting very little attention. (I was seated across the table from them. I doubted the wisdom in this, but was told not to worry so much.) Amelia began the running around the table, pouring water into Daddy's food and her own plate, throwing silverware, and generally acting out for attention.

I finally took her outside for a bit, and while I was talking to her, Norm came out. He walked out with, "Hey Amelia, there's a phone call for you!" and handed her his cell phone. I saw it happen, tried to intercept, Amelia grabbed the phone and hurled it down the concrete sidewalk, as I shouted "NO!" helplessly. (Norm needs to learn that you don't give expensive things to angry pouting children. He seems to get that now.) That was it for us. I took Amelia to the very hot car which Norm opened with the clicker, and told him to pack us up, we were going home. He went back in the restaurant as I put Amelia in her car seat and sat back in the front seat. She hurled her shoes (the sparkly pink princess slippers, no less) at my head, so I collected them and put them in the back of the car and told her that they were now Daddy's shoes and that she'd have to ask him permission to wear them from now on. And we sat. And we sat. 15 minutes. Boiling hot. All car doors open, no key, no cell phone to call. And Norm finally comes out. We go. And I get home from the restaurant and have a very strong gluten reaction that knocked me out till about 5:30-6:00 pm. Norm took Amelia over to stay overnight with the cousins, and we planned to work on the house, but I literally could not rouse for hours.

Norm went over around 7:30 pm to work on the old house, and I had recovered so I worked on my Grad school classes. He got home around 1:00 am, just as I was finishing. I'm taking 9 credit hours this semester - two classes. The introductory management class and a Project Management class on conflict negotiation. If work wasn't doing well, I wouldn't be able to do these, but I'm ok. And looking the syllabus for each class, it's heavy, but I can manage it as long as I keep it scheduled. I just want to get through this degree as quickly as possible.

Friday's Popcorn Movie Night

2008-09-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

I called Sonia's mom on Friday morning after Amelia got on the school bus. Sonia is in Amelia's Kindergarten class and rides her bus, and I've been trying to set up a play date forever, but the work on the other house just gets in the way every weekend, and through the week we're all too busy. Hina (Sonia's mom) said that Sat and Sun were booked up (see? We're not the only ones. American life gets crammed into two days a week.). But they were free Friday evening (that night). I mentioned that Amelia had just gotten the movie "Barbie and the Diamond Castle" and that she'd been dying to see it so we had a popcorn movie night planned. But would Sonia like to come over to see it too? Yes, indeed. And Hina and her husband and the kids would all come over, let the kids see the movie, and hang out and talk. I was thrilled. We agreed on 7 pm so that everyone could eat dinner first.

Until I hung up and realized that the house was a wreck. Really. Not. Good. I eeped, and mentioned this to Norm who was getting ready to leave for work too. We agreed to come home early and just get the downstairs in shape. I wasn't sure how --the dining room table in the formal dining room (10' x 3') was literally 2 feet deep in mail, catalogs, books, and other stuff stowed from the kitchen table when we needed to eat there. There were boxes of books in the living room where I'd been unpacking for 5 months, and general clutter on every horizontal surface.

Amazingly, it went off well. We met at 1:30 pm, ate something (now it's 2:30 pm), and Norm took the dining room and living room, and I took the entry, kitchen, and family room. And I mixed up a quick cake mix (non-egg, non-dairy), and threw it in the oven while taking swipes at the kitchen counter. We met at the entry after de-cluttering everything at 5:00 pm. Then I scrubbed down the bathroom fixtures while Norm swept and mopped the kitchen, finishing with a mop of the bathroom. All done. And with both of us working on the hopeless case that was our house, we managed to finish with enough time to make a dessert and tea, and take showers and change clothes. Amelia came home utterly excited and pretty much unable to eat a thing at the idea that Sonia was coming to a movie. She ran outside three separate times and screamed, "SONIA!!!" down the street. It was charming. The kids were all lovely together (I must get that picture of them for the blog), and everyone had a great time. I haven't relaxed with friends and chat in quite a while.

My Day Off

2008-09-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Tuesday, I took a day off of work to just stay home and do fun stuff (and go coax Amelia to try the hot lunch at the school).

This is the second week of classes here at the University where I work. Unlike the last four years, this Rush season has been Quiet.

It's been so quiet that I felt really ok in taking a day off. We're past the vacation freeze for Rush. And I completed everything outstanding on my desk so that I could take a day and not feel like there was pressure.

I was so excited on Monday that I couldn't sleep. I looked at 20 different things that I wanted to do that have been shelved until I had more time and less stress. Now that time is here. And I couldn't sleep till after 2 A.M.. I feel like there is an amazing pressure off of me --giddy and light.

The next morning I got Amelia off to school, went upstairs to my studio, and .......

I had trouble deciding. In fact, it was so difficult deciding what to tackle first that I couldn't. I went downstairs again, cleaned the kitchen and the kitchen table, ran a couple of loads of laundry, worked on getting the recycling ready for Thur morning, made coffee, read a book for a while, went upstairs finally to the studio and stitched on a needlework project for a bit, then decided that finishing the Louet David loom fix would get me furthest along. I worked on threading up the heddles on the harness until it was time to go to the school and get Amelia to eat.

It's been a long time since I was in a school cafeteria. It seems smaller when you're an adult. When Amelia realized that I was buying a hot lunch for her, she yanked her hand out of mine, bolted from the line to a table, opened her lunch and started cramming it down as fast as she could. By the time I got there, she told me that she was finished eating lunch. Then came the battle to eat "Just One Chicken Nugget." That lasted until the cafeteria workers called for snack (cookies are made available for purchase in the last 5 minutes of the 20 minute lunch period). Amelia begged for a cookie, so I got her one in exchange for an eaten nugget. She ate three altogether with that deal, and got her treasured cookie. I cleaned up her hot lunch, and headed on home.

I stopped at the grocery and picked up chicken, green beans, and fruit for dinner. My friend Margit came over for dinner last night. (Hi Margit!) I threw it together in the slow cooker, set the beans aside, and...took a nap.

Then it was time to pick up Amelia. When I picked her up, there were Scouts heading to a meeting, so I let her join them. (The previous post) Margit came just as I was heading over to pick up Amelia at the school. I picked her up and headed home to finish dinner. Margit and I just talked and ate and finally it was time for her to head back (I felt bad to take her away from sculpting time because she needed it, but it was wonderful to have the company).

I gave Amelia a bath, and continued cleaning the kitchen and laundry. I finished up around 2 am (deja vu), and headed to bed, to find that Amelia (who was sleeping in our bed) had wet the bed. She hasn't done that in an age, but the timing couldn't have been worse. I woke her up, cleaned her up, changed her into clean pajamas, and put her to bed in the guest room while I stripped our bed, scrubbed the mattress with special cleaner, and blotted up the stain. Our bed does not have a waterproof liner, of course. And this had soaked the mattress pad. I slept in the guest room with Amelia.

Now that the house is clean, I want another day off. I'm really feeling post-stress letdown. I'd like to finish clearing my head.

Kindergarten Musing about Brownies

2008-09-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Amelia started Kindergarten. My big girl is really excited and involved in a dozen activities already. One that I'm having trouble establishing in Howard County is a Chinese class for her. Who'd have thought that that would be a problem in Howard County? They're typically well ahead of the curve.

Last night was the first Girl Scout (Brownie) meeting. We missed the info meeting for it because Amelia has already had a stomach flu and then later a viral cough in the first two weeks of school. Amelia had a great time, really enjoyed herself, and by the time I picked her up was talking about uniforms, cookies, and the Girl Scout oath.

And the Scout Mom pulled me aside and said that she'd figured out that Amelia was 5 and in Kindergarten. And that means that she can't be a Brownie for two more years. Instead, she can be a Daisy but they haven't organized yet. Amelia can't come back to the Brownies.

Sigh. How do I explain this tactfully to Amelia? I can't.

Norm mentioned that we should recruit all the little girls in our neighborhood and form a Daisy gang. We can take over the outings and make it cool and fun to be a Girl Scout instead of lame. If we start early, they'll be entrenched. We can have our Daisies earning their petals on recognizing tree species and animal tracks and colonial history and camping basics like raising a tent. ;-D

The Butternut Thieves

2008-09-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

(this is from Aug 30, 2008)

The butternut tree in the front yard of our new house is finally dropping its butternuts. Well, the husks aren't quite ripe, but the squirrel army that descended on the tree are busy gnawing them up.

An army of squirrels. Literally. I have seen about 30 or so of them run up that tree, gnaw off a branch with a butternut cluster (they come in clusters of two at the end of a branch), and then either gnaw open the husk to get the nut, or run down the tree with the large leafy branch in mouth to another tree in the neighborhood.

But being squirrels, they tend to gnaw open a husk and then drop it out of their paws. There are so many butternuts that they don't bother to go down to the ground to find it. They just pluck another.

I've been picking up these dropped butternuts and bringing them inside. I tried gathering a handful and putting them on the porch while I gathered more, but the greedy little rodents found them on the porch and stole them while I was 15' away in the yard hunting.

I have managed to gather about a 2 quarts of nuts (sans husks). I'm hoping to have enough to bake a butternut cake (gluten free, of course), but we'll see.

I love butternuts myself, and understand the squirrels' delight. The nuts look like tiny walnuts and the husk smells a bit like a mild walnut husk (spicy and green). The nuts taste like a lighter, sweeter, milder version of walnut --like a cross between a Brazil nut and a walnut. Butternuts used to be easy to find up in Patapsco state park, but the butternut trees are dying of a fungal blight that destroys their bark. Our tree is not blighted yet, but it does have a problem with anthracnose blight on the leaves. I'll spray it next spring/summer for that.

Cougar caught!!

2008-08-04T07:35:00.001-07:00

And it's not a cougar. A surveillance camera caught it on tape, and it's a big, roaming Savannah Cat. One of the wild breeds that I mentioned in the last post (though I put up a picture of a Golden Cat instead of a Savannah yesterday, silly mistake as Goldens haven't really been crossed with domestic kitties yet).

Late this afternoon, a Department of Public Safety surveillance camera observed a large feline at the edge of the same wooded area where the two previous sighting of the suspected cougar were made. A search of the area was conducted and the feline was also observed at close range by a university police officer. Images of the feline were viewed by personnel at the MD Department of Natural Resources and they have confirmed that the feline that we observed and recorded is not a cougar.

The markings and size of the feline do appear consistent with a type of cat called a Savannah Cat. This is a hybrid of a Domestic Short Hair cat and a Serval, which is a larger African feline. Savannahs can grow to be as large as 35 pounds and can be a great deal larger than normal domesticated cats. They have been referred to as the Great Danes of the cat family.

At this time, the feline is still loose. University police will continue their efforts to positively identify the animal. If you should observe this feline, please do not approach it; call the university police and report the siting.

Mystery solved.

I do have a few things I'd love to say to this cat's owner though. Savannah's need special handling and if they are allowed to roam outside, they do tend to go feral quicker than a normal cat. Why would you pay $2500 for a pet only to dump it outside to roam? People 'adopt' cats that are found outside. Roaming cats are also picked up by the local animal control, and they get put to sleep the same as any other stray animal. Whoever you are, you are a total inconsiderate idiot of an owner. I hope the cat ends up in a good home, but not your home. You're the type of person that is going to end up getting laws against wild breed cross ownership on the books in this county.