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.…
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…
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…
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……
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…