Oh, look, there’s Becca on the monkey bars.
Oh, look, she’s hanging upside down with her knees and her hands.
Oh, look, she’s hanging upside down with her hands.
Oh, look, she’s hanging upside down with one hand.
Oh, look, she’s not hanging upside down any more.
She stood up, brushed the leaves out of her hair, and grinned sheepishly at me through the kitchen window.
Today, I turned three linear feet of knitting books, cookbooks, and miscellaneous adult fiction (I never did get around to reading _House of Leaves_) into a store credit and two linear feet of children’s fiction.
I consider that a job well done.
[Spider eggs](http://www.sunset.com/sunset/food/article/0,20633,785587~1449310,00.html)
: Use black olives to create spiders on top of deviled eggs.
Kids are such quick healers. Becca’s elbow is all nice and–granular, granularizing, granulated–scabby.
A perfect October day. Not a cloud in the sky, a brisk breeze, an almost-empty park, and a trailer full of bicycles. We rode around the loop twice with the baby in her trailer; afterwards, the kids raced around an empty parking lot tracing lazy figure-eights and swerving between curbs. But then Marcus had to up the ante and instead of following the gradual path down the hill, he rode straight down the side screaming with glee.
And where Marcus goes, Becca must follow, only faster. As she stood at the top of the hill–out of earshot and unwilling to listen to common sense, regardless–I remarked to Matthew, “This is going to be spectacular.”
I hate being right.
She skinned her elbow and her bike helmet is a write-off. It bounced off the asphalt at the tail end of her fall, so we’ll destroy it and throw it out and get a new one. It saved her noggin, that much is certain. She made it most of the way down and only flew off the bike at the end of the run where her path crossed the concrete. A shower, some peroxide, and a cup of tea later and she’s recovered enough to wish she could go back in time and undo her actions.
Maybe she learned something this time, but I’m not really counting on it. Her ballet teacher was already impressed with Becca’s black eye and scraped up face from the incident involving the rope swing, the tree root, and Marcus, where blame is evenly distributed between the two of them.
That said… it was pretty darn spectacular.
P.S. Bike helmets save lives. Right now, she’s drinking her tea in the kitchen while teasing her brother.
Last night I was up in the wee hours moving a client over from Movable Type to WordPress. Easy peasy. She has 3477 entries and 8534 comments and 29 categories and I absolutely did not want to break her URLs so that meant writing a custom script and doing some @.htaccess@ fiddling as well. In the past I’ve seen WordPress’s import utility hang on @mt-import.txt@ because of the out of memory issue, forget categories, and fail to move over basenames, so I did this in chunks of 500 with PHP and SQL within the same database. (And I’d like to chime in that converting from PST to GMT is boring. And annoying. And I never want to do it again. Unless I’m hired to do it.) I kept the code; doing a plugin with it would not be a bad idea. In my copious spare time. Right.
To do today… Nine o’clock and I already have a list. Dishes, laundry, send the kids outside to play, another WordPress installation, and more tweaks for this one. Busy, busy, busy!