The school librarian, Mary Ann, was teaching a reading group in the library which included Ellen. She was trying to elicit descriptions of character traits of a book they were reading about a ditzy woman.
Mary Ann: Can anyone name any character traits for this woman?
Ellen: I think she has short term memory loss.
Mary Ann: So, are you visiting us from the high school, Ellen?
My scary little 6 year old, at play.
We’re watching TV, me in my office, Kim in the living room, and a commercial for that awful Italian “restaurant”, the Olive Garden comes on. Their tagline is “When you’re here, you’re family.”
Kim pipes up from the other room: “Yeah, but as soon as you leave, they disown you.”
This article in the Guardian is a very cool idea. Basically, Lycos has a screen saver that’s sort of like the SETI project, but in reverse. Use extra bandwidth to thwart someone, instead of helping. It’s a shame that the bandwidth needs to be used this way, but if the sites that hire the spammers stopped, the spammers would too.
Follow the money, always.
There’s no link there yet, but when there is, I’ll post it. I think it might be makelovenotspam.com, but there’s nothing there as of yet.
Every night (or nearly every night) for the past several months I’ve gone for an exercise walk. It’s usually about 4 miles, and usually runs around 1 hour (for those of you inexpert with math, that’s 4 MPH…)
Anyway, my typical procedure is to wander at high speed in a direction, looking at my watch every so often so I know when I need to start heading towards home. Usually around 25-30 minutes, obviously, I start figuring out a route home. I don’t get exactly an hour, but I try not to be 45 minutes away from home after 45 minutes of walking (because, for those math-challenged, that yields a 90 minute walk–which is more than an hour).
Today, I decided to brave this VERY steep hill a bunch of blocks away and then instead of heading down it, I just followed it down the other side. I had NO idea where I was going, but came out somewhere I recognized anyway, which I figured I would, eventually. However, I had no idea what time it was, or how far out I was (I wear a pedometer) and just figured I’d get home eventually.
I walk through the door, sweaty, tired, and worn out from the walk. I look at my watch…59:27. I was only 33 seconds off the hour with a totally random walk! I look at the pedometer:
4.00 miles. Exactly.
I’m going to buy a lottery ticket. The Infinite Improbability Drive must be active around here somewhere.
This morning saw this exchange between Kim and Ellen, as Ellen sat in her room in the morning, attempting to get a comb through her rat’s nest of hair and mostly spacing off:
K: You might want to try using a brush instead.
E spaces off.
K: Ellen, you might want to try a brush…
E: Oh. OK. (she disappears to go get one)
E (from inside of her room): Thanks for the advice!
Our pleasure.
Today, I was watching Ellen ride her bike, and it just seemed like she was getting bad habits with her training wheels, so…poof! Off they came. We took them off and I ran up and down the street with her, holding the handle bar, helping her balance as she rode a two wheel bike for the first time. She was bursting with pride when we were done and it’s a wonderful thing to see. Got some nice video and it’s one of the great reasons I’m glad I have this blog–years from now, I want to remember when this was.
Go Ellen!
My parents are willing to babysit for the day and into the evening and we can’t figure out what in the world we want to do. It’s saturday, we should do something fun, but there are no good movies and we don’t want to go shopping the saturday after thanksgiving.
Damn, we need a hobby. Actually, I guess we gave one…they’re called kids. Ooh, maybe we’ll go look at the new line of Yamaha digital pianos and see if an upgrade came in for the one we have. We have 2 years to trade up, and meant to go look.
There! An idea, if not a great one.
Interaction between katie and ellen, while watching the thanksgiving day parade:
Katie: Batman came to our school. The real Batman.
Me: Did he take off the day from fighting crime?
Ellen: Mr. Incredible took over for the day.
Katie: But Mr. Incredible isn’t real!
Me: And Batman is real?
Katie: Yep.
Me: How do you know he’s real?
Katie: He can take off his gloves.
This followed with a fight over whether Mr. Incredible was real or not.
Yesterday morning, just after getting up, I’m lying in bed still and Kim comes and opens the blinds to look out the window. Much to my horror, she announces that there is snow on the ground. The kids, standing there listening, start jumping up and down hooting happily like a couple of owls. Ellen is yelling, “It snowed! it snowed! We can build a snowman” (there’s maybe 1/2″ of snow on the ground).
Katie wanders up to Kim with a wide-eyed look and says “Is it Christmas?”
I’m posting this mostly because I realized I never followed up with whether or not we got our kittens. Of course, we did, and they’re absolutely adorable. They’re about 6 months old each, apparently brother and sister from an obviously mixed litter, and as snuggly as you could get in a cat, I think. They just want to be petted, love being picked up, snuggling up with us, and will just purr contentedly for just about as long as we’re willing to do it.
We’re working on “No” with them, and they have a habit of jumping into our bed during the night to get petted.
In any case, we’re very pleased with them, and they seem to be having fun here too.
Ellen named them “Linus and Lucy”, which we thought fitted them quite well.