Do you see what I see?

There it is. (Also, holy color shift, Batman!)

Today I cleaned the fridge, helped the girls get their lunch components prepped for the week, and bandaged Madeline’s thumb — such an awkward thing to bandage.

Abby had puppy kindergarten and socialization this morning. It was Harper’s third Saturday and she finally played with her classmate Winnie. Both puppies were utterly tuckered by the time their play session was over.

I sure hope that the season of trees violently flinging their reproductive materials into the air ends soon, because I don’t think I can take much more. I ran my wipers this morning to clear the glass and a cloud of green dust was dislodged from the windshield. The dogs came into the house with fronds of… stuff… dangling from their paws. The kids take (nay, demand) their morning allergy meds and are still a snorting, sniffling, coughing disaster by the end of the day.

Hopefully the rain tonight will help clean things up a bit.

Mom came over this afternoon and we went to Madeline’s D.A.R.E. program graduation. The kids did indeed sing a sappy song (Madeline’s description, but clearly she is my daughter), a few students read the essays they’d written about what D.A.R.E. meant to them, the deputy who taught the program read her essay, and then the county sheriff gave a speech and also performed sleight-of-hand magic tricks. It was one of the more interesting kid-related things I’ve attended.

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I’m pretty sure the dogs have Mom trained to give tummy rubs and not the other way around. (That’s unfolded laundry in baskets around her. Mom is the universe’s answer to entropy.)

This was also our first evening at Thursday puppy kindergarten class. Harper knows “sit” like a pro and has almost gotten “down”. She is also totally devoted to Abby and it shows whenever we have to do something like blind recalls or loose-leash/no-leash walking.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow — my hammock is supposed to arrive! My watch also tells me that I’m finally starting to wind down from the last couple of weeks of work. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute of it, just… tuning out and turning off for a bit is really welcome. Upgrades are like spaghetti — sometimes the noodles align nicely on your fork, and sometimes you end up covered in sauce.

Madeline stayed home sick today so while she slept and watched videos on eater.net about building an 8-bit computer from scratch, I worked on decluttering my office.

Every day, the little girls come home from school with a folder full of stuff. I pick out anything that needs immediate parental attention and put the rest of it into a pile. The pile grows. It develops strata. The occasional geological event occurs when they decide that something they said wasn’t important actually is. Mail gets mixed in, because I pay bills online but companies still insist on sending a paper bill anyway. Mom says I should OHIO (only handle it once) but I haven’t quite developed that habit.

I hope there is less paperwork in middle school.

Harper kept me company by deciding that a briefcase was a perfect dog bed. Never mind the other two actual dog beds designed for the comfort and happiness of dogs in my office.

Marcus sent me an image as he came into the house of a large black runner warming itself on our brick porch. I give you… snek blep.

In happier news, the new pump for the dishwasher is finally here so I may have a working dishwasher tonight! It stopped washing on Thursday and my kitchen has been a mess of disassembled dishwasher and unwashed dishes as we ordered and waited for first an inlet valve, and then (after figuring out that there were more problems) a water pump to arrive. I hand-washed dishes every morning and evening and still never quite caught up. Six people make a lot of dishes.

After one last final no-really-I-promise commit so early this morning that it practically didn’t count, I am on sabbatical. I got a few errands out of the way and then went out with Mom for lunch at a local Greek restaurant. Cheese is best when it is on fire. (The cheese is also not in the picture because Mom and I ate every last bit of it while it was hot.)

Madeline’s pi-top arrived this afternoon and she spent the evening debugging her first breadboard project. I spent the evening going “mmm-hmm” and “why don’t you Google it?” because that a-ha! moment is so much more precious if you arrive there yourself.

The title of this post may be overly optimistic but I do what I do now (except when I am trying very, very hard not to do it — again, sabbatical) because a long, long time ago, in the land of frames and pixel GIFs and marquee tags, I built a web site. And then another one. And then I started an online journal and the biggest debate was over whether journalling was spelled with two l’s or one. A hand-rolled Perl script was involved in generating previous/next links and an index page.

And then I got super fancy and figured out how to install Greymatter and got a little bit wrapped up in getting it to generate W3C-valid HTML and it was downhill from there.

Back then, there were no blogs — and now, I can’t imagine life without them.