jennifer.blog

Category: Live

  • Teeny Super Gal

    She came down the stairs shouting, “I am Super Becca!”.

  • Vice Versa

    I’ve just finished my shower and I’m on my way to my room when I stop to check on the kids, who are _supposed_ to be cleaning their room. Rebecca is in bed under a blanket whimpering. Marcus is frantic, jumping up and down.

    “Mom, Mom, Rebecca bumped her head on the dresser!”

    “Oh, dear. Okay, Rebecca, now tell me what happened.”

    And she crawls out from under the blanket and it is pretty obvious that at this point, the shock of the initial injury is past and the whimpering is just looking for sympathy. “Mama, I was walking and I couldn’t see and I tripped and fell and hit my head on the dresser.”

    The lights in their room are on. Every single one.

    “Rebecca, why couldn’t you see? Were the lights out?”

    “No, Mama, I was wearing a pillowcase on my head.”

    “Rebecca, we put our head on the pillowcase, not the pillowcase on our head.”

  • Stuck Up For You

    Today, Matthew came home with some French double doors and a double-hung window for the shed. Someone was having a yard sale and apparently had them out for sale. Total spent: $40.00. Having French doors on a shed? Priceless.

  • Delayed Reactions

    “Mama, what happened to the wheel?”, Marcus asked.

    “What wheel?”

    “The wheel at the park. The park with the fire truck. The wheel is missing!”

    “The wheel on the fire truck?”

    “No, Mom, the wheel that you climb on and go around and around in circles and I fell off sometimes.”

    “Oh, that wheel. They replaced it with the plastic playground for babies.”

    “But… that’s not _fair_. I liked the wheel. Why did they take the wheel away?”

    “Because they probably thought it was too dangerous.”

    “But I only fell off sometimes! And it was fun!”

    “Marcus, sometimes people are so scared of kids getting hurt that they take fun things away.”

    “Mom, can we build a park in our backyard with a wheel in it?”

    This wouldn’t be such a completely bizarre conversation if we hadn’t visited the park in question _yesterday_, and he started up at the top of his lungs frantic about the absence of the merry-go-round _today_. I guess it took awhile to register.

  • Five Things Of Note

    1. There are currently five tadpoles living in the kids’ room. Tadpoles!
    1. With the help of Elie and Laura, we finished framing two walls of the shed. Progress!
    1. I have another two hundred lines of code to go in order to implement search functions for the campaign database and optional notification emails and the eventual mass emailing of sponsors and bloggers and handling blogs that drop out of the Blogathon. Code!
    1. Rebecca had uneven red-eye in a photo from last night and now Matthew has me in a state of constant worry over whether she has a blood clot in her eyeball that will lead to an aneurysm. Panic!
    1. I may eventually have time to design a site for myself. Possibly.

  • Utterly Charming

    My [older younger sister](http://www.athenasbanquet.net/) is wicked and evil. I have great hopes for smiting her come Christmas.

    Rebecca is quite taken with the facehugger. Really. Hug it and squeeze it and call it George, indeed.

  • Doldrums

    I turned 26 on Monday in what has to be the largest heap of a self-pitying funk ever heaped by a human being. I spent the day frantically coding a backend for the ever-worthy project [Blogathon 2005](http://www.blogathon.org/) and reading Harry Potter spoilers on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) because UPS saw fit to reschedule my book delivery for the 19th, which as far as I was concerned was about 3 days too late.

    So, things. Things are decent. I was ganking some of my old pagination code from [Globe of Blogs](http://www.globeofblogs.com/) and noticed that when I coded it, I’d apparently never heard of LEFT JOIN and other useful things like um, running a SELECT on more than one table. I think it is more a failure on my part to grok the sorts of queries that make multiple SELECT statements obsolete. That might explain some of its issues, which really means that I need to review the codebase and otherwise fix it. Go, me!

    I still need to order the kids’ curricula for the next year of homeschooling, which is annoying (I hate talking on the phone, period), but well worth the effort.

    The air conditioner motor finally bit the dust–closer inspection reveals that it is probably the second motor for the unit, and replacing it isn’t that difficult. The oil reservoir sponge was completely broken down. Cost of a new blower motor? $74.04. Spending three days in July waiting for it to arrive? Fracking annoying.

    Really, the unit is _not_ in bad shape. We disassembled the blower and Matthew went in and cleaned the cooling fins and you know what? It worked. It did not cost $2200 to fix. It cost a bit of sweat equity and some skinned knuckles (mostly Matthew’s), but really, the whole culture of “it’s old and looks kinda dingy, let’s throw it out and get a brand new one” is wearing on me.

    (And just now, I checked the estimate and the line item for “blower motor and capacitor” says $584. What the frack. Even with installation and labor, what the frack.)