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Thursday, July 02, 2009
~~ 10:40 AM ~~ New They Might Be Giants album for kids -- Here Comes Science -- drops September 1st. Pre-order yours today!! I hope it is still planned to include "The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma", their amended, corrected and re-imagined followup to "The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas"! Comments () | link
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 ~~ 9:51 PM ~~ I'm back! Did you miss me? We took a nice little road trip back to where we went to college (and lived for quite some time after -- long enough to graduate, get semi-real jobs, get married, and have Alice). We spent a couple of days kicking around our old haunts, and mourning the haunts that have passed into memory. Here's another batch of pictures. If you're wondering why I'm posting them so often, it's because I'm trying to catch up -- this batch is from May of 2008. I guess I should have made that more clear: These are last year's haircuts, body sizes, etc. So yeah, I'm trying to bring you guys up a little closer to the present day here... Comments () | link
Saturday, June 27, 2009 ~~ 9:00 PM ~~ Small batch of pictures up. I need to take a couple days off from blogging and stuff. See you around the middle of the week!! Comments () | link
Friday, June 26, 2009 ~~ 5:40 PM ~~ As usual, Ray Smuckles speaks my mind, this time as concerns the death of Michael Jackson. Comments () | link
Thursday, June 25, 2009 ~~ 8:50 PM ~~ So hey, picture comments are broken again, but they're broken in a new and different way! So that's exciting! Yeah!! In other news, wow, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, huh? Wow. Neither of them held a particularly important role in my life, but they were always kind of there in the background as I grew up. Props to both of them for doing what they did, artistically speaking. Comments () | link
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 ~~ 9:19 AM ~~ So yeah, the script that Anth wrote to allow browsing of pictures with captions and comments seems to have come down with the script measles or something. Anth (a.k.a. Tech Support) was saddened but not surprised to hear that people can no longer leave comments on the pix (although comments here on the blog still work just fine!). This is not the first thing that has gone horribly wrong with that script recently -- just for fun, try going to the picture link I shared in the last post, then hit "index" at the top. Nice new format, huh? Bleh. Anyway, please enjoy the pictures and comment here if you'd like to, otherwise I'll just assume that you're all out there enjoying. Anth says he needs to move the script to a different server, but I'm not sure when he'll have time to do that. I did finally get all caught up with pictures yesterday, so as long as we stop taking pictures of any sort, we will be fine from here on out. To change the subject, I wanted to quickly recommend a book that Alice & I just finished reading: Girls Against Girls: Why We Are Mean to Each Other and How We Can Change, by Bonnie Burton. Here's the review I posted on Facebook this morning: This book, written for girls of middle school age and up, gives a clear and concise explanation of all of the ways girls are mean to each other (like the silent treatment, gossiping, and boyfriend stealing), why and how we do it, what to do if it's done to you, and how to keep from doing it yourself. The text is broken up into short chapters, easy to digest, and peppered with quotes from famous women reflecting back on what they know now about women and women's friendships, and what they wish they'd known when they were still in school. I recommend this book highly for all girls, and am thinking of buying a resource copy for my daughter's middle school teachers.Comments () | link
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 ~~ 3:07 PM ~~ Sammy had her (slightly delayed due to insurance transitions) 7 year checkup today. She's perfectly healthy, 42 lbs (10th percentile for weight) and 49¼" (72nd percentile for height). I looked back at my records and she's got 1 lb and more than 2" on 7-year-old Alice. Also, I posted some pictures. No pressure, honest. Comments () | link
Monday, June 22, 2009 ~~ 12:39 PM ~~ Alice and I (with Sammy in attendance) are slooowly healing from last week -- 5 days of (fun but intense) full-on social stuff for all three of us, and then Alice and I had a (fun but looong) Bar Mitzvah to attend on Saturday. Yesterday we did things that Daddy finds fun, so that means driving around on half-paved back roads and ending up at an obscure little restaurant where we ate raspberry jalapeno wings and drank lambic by a creek. Today we had the option to head back to the site of the movie camp in order to view the first screening of the movie. The kids and I went back and forth and back and forth about this -- should we go, or should we stay home and relax? There was no clear answer. I finally flipped a metaphorical coin and said, ok, we're going. So I got everyone dressed and fed and I printed out the directions and it was almost time for us to go, and then the neighbor kid ran past with something shiny and both kids ran out after her and were gone for 20 minutes. So yeah, not going after all. Okay. I am diving back into dealing with pictures these days. This was spurred by the 1000+ pictures I took at movie camp -- I winnowed these down to about 400 and put them up on a passworded site for the cast to enjoy. That process reminded me of all of the pictures I haven't been posting for the past year or so. Honestly, we never did post the pix from our trip to Chicago in 2007, nor did we ever finish processing the pix from our trip to the beach last summer. At this point I want to just say that we will never post those pictures, but Anth says, "let's just post highlights" which I honestly cannot face because that is over a gigabyte of pictures and I just can't imagine diving in there and picking out the best. I am having a small existential crisis about it all -- if we take thousands and thousands of pictures over the course of, say, a year, but we never do anything with them except store them on a hard drive somewhere, do they have meaning? Part of me wants to post pictures regularly, but part of me thinks it's a pointless and narcissistic exercise. Not to be all passive-aggressive, but hardly anyone leaves comments when I do post pictures; of course, not that many people leave comments when I post, either, so again -- why do I do this? Do I blog and post pictures just to sound my little barbaric yawp, not caring if anyone is out there to read and view? Or am I only in it for the comments and the feedback, in which case everything I do should be subject to read poll? Like everything else today, no clear answer, and my metaphorical coin seems to have evaporated. Hm. In less wishy-washy news, there's a new recipe up. Comments () | link
Friday, June 19, 2009 ~~ 7:01 AM ~~ Today's the last day of movie camp, hooray!! It's been really really fun but exhausting (especially for Alice and, by extension, me). I'm so behind on everything that requires me to have spare time and energy, like laundry or reading. The brownies that I made last night to bring today don't want to come out of their pan, but I'm bringing them anyway; we'll figure something out, I guess. Hopefully the final scene has at last been written, because we have to shoot it today. That's show business!! Comments () | link
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 ~~ 8:31 AM ~~ Update on the pictures: at the urging of various Facebook friends, I tried (with two different programs) to recover the deleted pix. I got back maybe ¼ of them -- mostly Anth's pictures that were already on the camera when I took it yesterday (whew! glad my idiocy didn't affect him), plus a few of mine. I recovered a lot more files than that, but they are corrupted. Anth seems to feel there's a possiblity we could uncorrupt them. I'm pretty fine with it either way; there were about 3 really good pictures that I took yesterday, and I did recover one of those. The other 178 or so were only fair-to-middling, so whatever. I've learned a lot, not only about how to recover deleted files but also about never touching Anth's camera ever again. Heh. Comments () | link
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 ~~ 6:19 PM ~~ Day 2 of movie camp went less smoothly than day 1, but it was still fun. I took a ton of pictures that I accidentally erased just now. *sigh* On the upside, I just baked a pan of oatmeal scotchies. Yum. Comments () | link
Monday, June 15, 2009 ~~ 5:49 PM ~~ I'm finally facing this apparent truth: While everyone else in her family is a very strong introvert, Sammy appears to be an extravert. When we got home today (from day 1 of movie camp, which was really a lot of fun for all of us), I was so worn out from being social that I couldn't even speak for 30 minutes. Alice plugged in to a video game as soon as we walked in the door in an effort to decompress from the effort of being around people all day. Sammy called the neighbors to see if she could come over because she wanted someone else to play with. *boggle* In other news, I brought Tollhouse cookies to share today and they were a huge hit. I tried just now to make these to bring for tomorrow, but they turned out much too fragile to take anywhere. Half of them crumbled on their way out of the pan. Delicious, but useless for my needs. Comments () | link
Sunday, June 14, 2009 ~~ 9:30 AM ~~ This coming week we are doing a "movie camp" thingy with a bunch of homeschooling friends. It's pretty much a "hey kids, let's put on a show" sort of deal for the new millennium (i.e. making an amateur movie about sassy pre-teens reimagining the Cinderella story instead of staging a rousing musical in Mr. Wilson's old barn.) I predict that it will be neither the traumatic disaster that my pre-teen is pre-dicting, nor the rousing success that we all would hope for, but at least it'll get us out of the house. And we'll be out of the house a lot, because it's 10-3:30 every day this week, at a house over 45 minutes away from us. So yeah, of course everyone we know is trying to plan playdates and visits with us, and everybody's schedule is only open for this week, which is the only week we've got booked up in the whole dang summer. *sigh* In other summer news, we've given up on the idea of buying pool passes this year. Looks like it's gonna be July before it gets hot enough to swim again. (I'm a wimp, and my kids have no body fat, so we really need it to be over 85° for a good stretch of the day before we can go swimming without turning blue.) Whenever it does finally get hot, we'll definitely go as much as we can, but it's a certainty that we won't go the 16-18 times necessary to make the pool pass a good buy. It sucks a little bit, but on the other hand we were having a really hard time deciding which pool to commit to this year, and now we don't have to choose. Hooray for wishy-washiness!! Comments () | link
Thursday, June 11, 2009 ~~ 7:26 PM ~~ In no particular order, but numbered anyway because the <ol> has always been one of my favorite HTML rags:
Tuesday, June 09, 2009 ~~ 6:43 PM ~~ Sammy slept off the worst of her fever overnight and woke up feeling much more like herself today, thank goodness. Unfortunately, she (and the rest of her family) woke up today at 6:15 a.m. when a massive thunderstorm blew through and shook the metaphorical rafters. I'm definitely feeling it now. When's bedtime?? Comments () | link
Monday, June 08, 2009 ~~ 9:07 PM ~~ Apparently Sammy's party was a very fertile breeding ground for more things than just innocent youthful hijinks. One guest (so far) has head lice, and Sammy is currently sporting a fever of 102°F. We had super happy fun plans to go berry picking with some friends in the morning; so much for that. Bleh. Comments () | link
Sunday, June 07, 2009 ~~ 6:37 PM ~~ Sammy's party was great, but exhausting. I was on my feet pretty much nonstop for about 8 hours between setup, party, and cleaning. I am so sore today. Ow. Comments () | link
Saturday, June 06, 2009 ~~ 8:16 AM ~~ At 2:00 EST today, 12 little girls will descend upon my house. I am trying to resist the overwhelming wave of dread that threatens to engulf me when I contemplate this fact. *shudder* Allow me to restate my firm commitment never to allow such a large guest list ever again, and to host all future parties at an external venue. Please tell me if I'm being naive here, but I'm hoping that we can fill 3 hours mostly just running around in the big backyard, playing in the sprinkler, doing face painting and tattoos, and eating -- we'll have chips, pretzels, Doritos, Capri Sun, pizza, a big fat homemade chocolate cake w/chocolate marshmallow icing and a rainbow made out of semisweet mini M&M's on top, vanilla ice cream, and rainbow Jell-O (6 flavors layered in ROYGB(I)V order). Then there's that little 5-stop treasure hunt towards the end, for the goodie bags. I'm hoping Anth can get some good pictures of the cake and the Jell-O, because they are lovely. Almost too pretty to eat, if I do say so myself. Comments () | link
Thursday, June 04, 2009 ~~ 6:28 PM ~~ How to know your child had a good birthday: You come home after the all-day celebration, and there's a message on your machine from your credit card company, making sure that all of those charges were legitimate. Heh. Comments () | link
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 ~~ 12:04 PM ~~ Hey remember when I used to post pictures? I did it again. I'm back to being a year or so behind. *sigh* Comments () | link
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 ~~ 7:43 PM ~~ As Maud is my witness, I swear here and now that I will scrimp and save and plan as needed to make sure that next year we can hold Sammy's birthday party somewhere other than my house. I am getting so aggravated and aggrieved preparing for this thing on Saturday -- at least 11 (possibly as many as 13) little girls, including Sammy, fully my responsibility for 3 hours. Will I have enough snacks? Will I have enough cake?? Will they be so bored they swear never to return??? Augh!! Comments () | link
Monday, June 01, 2009 ~~ 8:21 AM ~~ Free Root Beer Floats 8pm - midnight on June 3 (this Wednesday) at participating SONICs!! Comments () | link
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