Comparing Apples. Oranges Need Not Apply

We went to go check out the iPhones yesterday.

I walked into AT&T. "Can we help you?" they asked.
"I'm here about the iHype," I replied.

The guy gave us a demo, but he didn't have a real idea as to how to use it. Apparently they kept them secret until the very last minute. So the guy sort of appeared ham-handed on the thing. He wasn't sure if the calendar could issue reminders (it can) and he kept trying to tap the screen twice for every function. Good for Windows, bad for iPhones. He also took a couple of photos, but they looked terribly blurry. Hmmm...what, you need a tripod for this thing? I wasn't allowed to hold the iPhone. I was told it was a "security rule." What, like I'm going to dash out the door with it? I haven't been able to dash out the door of anyplace (including home) for about the last six years or so. I have two kids, mister. I don't dash anywhere.

Today we went to the Apple store. I got an email from a friend who stood in line to get an iPhone, and her words were, "It really is the second coming." (Bloggers are calling it the Jesus Phone.) So we thought it would be good to go to the source to check it out. The iPhone isn't perfect, IMO. Here are the most major flaws that I see:

• The browser (which rocks) doesn't support Java or Flash. This means I can't use it to pull up k12.com. It locks other users out of a lot of content on the web. (As if other phones CAN support Java and Flash. HA!! They don't.)
  
• The phone runs on the EDGE network. Legend says it's painfully slow and antiquated. I'm not sure I buy that, however. Doug's Blackberry (T-Mobile) also runs on the EDGE network, and he's had no trouble with it.
• The phone likes to try and predict what you're trying to type. It's almost impossible to REJECT those changes. Essentially, you can't use abbreviations. I want to type "SLSC HS Class," not "St Louis Science Center Home School Class," thank-you-very-much.
• You can set up repeating events, but not on a monthly basis that's not date-based. So I can't put in my Graphic Design meetings for the second Tuesday of each month, or my LLL Series meetings for the first Monday of each month. "Well, there are always software updates," says the rep. "There's a software update for that?" I ask. "Well, I'm sure there will be." Blink. ?!?!?!? WTF?

So those are the biggest obstacles that I see. Legend has it that version II of the iPhone will come out in January. I'm betting that a network upgrade and Java/Flash support will be on tap for that one, personally. And since I'm locked into a contract with the Treo (Sprint) until December, I get to cool my jets for six months anyway.

On the upside:

• OMG, it has a full browser! Wow!
• The keyboard isn't nearly as difficult as everyone makes it out to be.
• You can actively push email TO the iPhone. It doesn't even come close to a Blackberry in this respect, but it's not trying to. Still, you can tell it to go fetch your email from your personal account every X minutes, which is kinda cool.
• Um...it's an iPhone. Do you know how cool those things are?
  

We checked out iMacs while we were there, seeing as the living room computer for the kids is virtually useless at this point. It's hideous...it keeps crashing and dying on a regular basis, won't run their software, can't even handle some of the most basic web-browsing functions. You can't upgrade it at this point, either, seeing as you'd have to have a new case, new power supply, new motherboard, new CPU chip...you're down to buying a whole new machine. So we thought we'd look at a Mac for the kids. We're looking, but still not committed. Those things are pretty pricey. The sales rep also assured me that they had the "oomph" to run the new Adobe CS3 suite, which I consider to be a crock. The highest end iMac still took a good 30 seconds to even start to render some of the revolved objects I created in Illustrator.

While I was doing this, a guy stopped behind me and watched me draw for a minute, then started asking questions about architectural and landscape renderings on the Mac, and would you use Illustrator or AutoCad, etc. I was quite flattered, actually.

Leopard, the new OS for Mac, is coming out around October. They have a new finder which practically makes me cry with desire. Doug utterly doesn't it. "Ok, fine, it's cool, but what IS it about this thing that makes you so...?"
"Because it talks to me. I speak Eyes. It speaks Eyes. I don't have to translate. It's like finally getting a newspaper in your native language. Do you have any idea how many files I open just to see if they're the ones I'm trying to find? This...isn't disruptive. In one way it lets me think, and in another way it doesn't make me think. I don't have to stop and switch gears back and forth." What the heck is "speaking Eyes?" Watch this.

And finally, we took our iPod back to the Apple store and they exchanged it for a new one. I noticed this afternoon that the center button on the click wheel seemed to be sunken in more than it ought to be, and it wasn't quite as responsive. (And yes, those stupid things are made in China, too.) It has a one-year warranty, so we took it back and they quickly and painlessly handed us a new one.

Tired of Buying Complete Crap

As of yesterday, I've had it.

Does everyone remember the poisoned pet food, which claimed hundreds and possibly thousands of animal lives? Of course you do. This made me very leery of imports, especially imports from China.

Last week I got a notice of a recall on Thomas the Tank Engine toys, because the manufacturing of them has been outsourced to China, and golly, they decided to use lead paint. Never mind that the toys in question have been sitting in my kids' toyboxes for TWO YEARS without a word having been said. I found a total of five recalled items in David's box of beloved Thomas toys. Grrrr! Allow me to put in a plug here for a Missouri-based toy train manufacturer which does not outsource, nor do they plaster their wooden trains with lead paint: Whittle Shortline Railroad. They have a great history.

And then yesterday came the jump ropes.

How complex could a jump rope be? That's one of those classic, enduring, impossible-to-kill sorts of toys, something that every kid should have. I got two of them and brought them home.

By 4:15 p.m., I noticed that David's had started to unravel. ?!?!? He never took it outside, he never played roughly with it in any way. I checked the receipt. Purchase time was listed as 2 p.m. Take out 20 minutes to get home, and you have a jump rope which is literally falling apart in less than two hours after taking it out of the store.

Yes, I called the store. Yes, they'd be happy to exchange the darned thing. But...who in the hell makes a jump rope that falls apart in two hours? I checked the label for the answer: China.

Wait a minute. China had the tainted wheat gluten. China had the tainted rice gluten. China had the lead paint. I have some sense of pattern recognition...what's going on here?

Quite a lot, it would seem. According to the Washington Post headlines, "Tainted Chinese Imports Common." In fact, 68 percent (104 of 152) of all product recalls announced since January of this year have been for things made in China. Baby swings and carriers which break and cause babies to fall to the ground (and includes a skull fracture), swimming pool ladders which fall apart (21 stitches), Easy-Bake ovens that trap kids' fingers and burn them, cheap electric (oil-filled, under $50) heaters that burn houses down, circular saws with faulty guards that result in lost fingers.

It seems that lead is also an extremely popular manufacturing agent...one which China puts into many things, especially things for kids. Lunchboxes, little girls' eyeshadow and especially kids' jewelry all seem to be high in lead content. In fact, USA Today is reporting "China balks at lead limits on kids' jewelry." Now I'm concerned about Lauren's cache of junk jewelry...almost all of it comes from the Dollar Store, and I'm willing to bet $1,000 it was all made in China. How much is made with lead?

With all this in mind, I started checking labels at the toy store. Maybe I should simply avoid things made in China.

Almost EVERYTHING is made in China. A few things are made in Vietnam. A few from Germany. But almost everything is made in China. This journalist wrote about boycotting all products made in China for one month...not nearly as easy as it seems at first.

But is it worth it? Aside from the kids' products, what's the harm? Well....I bought a lot of kitchen towels from Costco and they shredded in the laundry the first time I washed them. And tonight I did a load of laundry...good stuff, too...and the dye from the clothes (made in India this time) came off and ruined a pair of pajamas and my favorite shirt and skirt set of Lauren's. Instead of the bright white they were, they're now splotched with purple. :-( Damn.

I don't know quite what the answer is, but I'm beginning to believe that it isn't continuing business as usual. I will continue to check labels, and avoid China when I can.

Yup, I changed the look of the blog again. Mostly because I can't put the sorts of photos in there that I really want to. I got another issue of Before and After magazine, which really inspires me to do some cool stuff, and I can't put in things like shadows on a grey background. So.

I still don't have all my photos in order (apparently naming structures between iPhoto on a Mac and your typical PC don't bother to correspond. Sigh.), so this is the best you get. The first one came about on a wet and warm Spring day when the Magic Puddle appeared on the street. Both kids absolutely had to get completely and utterly soaked. For some reason this was like cannon law. Once they get to a particular stage, you pretty much have to strip them off in the garage before they can go into the house. (Did I mention how incredibly neglected and hideous the house looks on a regular and ongoing basis?)



The second photo was taken at the Denver Aquarium, and this is Lauren holding a blue-tongued skink at the petting zoo. She thought the lizards were grand, but David wouldn't touch them. Odd behavior, especially considering that he's pestering us for a Chinese Water Dragon all the time. (No. They're lizards that grow up to be two or three feet long; they require big places to hang out in trees and swimming pools to fall into...they like to stay submerged sometimes for 30 minutes at a time. They look cute at PetSmart because they're six inches long.)

I actually do have LOTS of news to post, but since it's 1:20 a.m., I'd rather go to bed at the moment. I must say, however, that this drawing on the left is the latest project I'm involved in, and is giving me a much grander appreciation for the nuances involved in architecture. I mean...you know there's a lot going on there, both visually and structurally, but there's nothing quite like recreating an architect's drawing to make you pay really close attention.

This one isn't done yet (but when it is, it'll be scalable to any size (vector graphic) and the color can be changed to ANYTHING...heck, we could make it look like gold or silver wire if we wanted to), but you can tell from this much that all the windows and railings and balconies are reflections of each other. They aren't the same, by any means. But the lines in the roof are reflected in the balcony railings. The doors are all reflected in the windows, which are surprisingly different from floor to floor. You'd think they're all the same, but they really aren't. There's a lot of play going on here with size. When the bottom part of the building is complete, you can see a lot of reflections of curves on the bottom two floors rebounding off the curve at the very top of the building.

I read a wonderful article along those lines in my favorite design magazine about the visual design of the BMW Roadster (slobber, drool). If you pulled out line A from along the side and measured the length, you'd find it's exactly the same length but twice the curve of line of B, which is what makes it look so balanced, etc. I like it when they tear apart and analyze this stuff. I do miss some of the articles they used to print by Seth Godin, but he has a blog I can at least read. I'm also signed up to attend some Graphic Design events through Meetup.com which is fun.

Deep Impact

Today was another Science Center day.

David had a class there on the solar system. We haven't covered the solar system yet, and there's nothing that David dislikes more than being caught by surprise, so I scouted out some websites for him. F9 Kids has a good overview without getting too technical. NASA's Solar System Exploration page went over well; my favorite is Planet 10, which not only shows you the solar system from an ariel/overhead view, but also allows you to zoom in on a particular planet and watch it rotate AND compare the surrounding moons and planets. Very cool. Some of the sites have tidbits on them about the planets...how hot or cold they are, length of day, etc. I mentioned that Mars has two moons and you could practically hear his brain click. "Oh yeah! I founded the two moons at the thing at Sticker Grandma's!" Oh yeah...the Mars exhibit. There was a simulated landscape and indeed, you could find two moons if you looked carefully. He was shocked at Jupiter's 16 moons.

We looked at the websites for a bit and then left for the class. Lauren and I didn't do much of anything thrilling to pass the time; she spent far too long wanting to run into the gift shop and beg for water balloons and candy (?!?!?!?). We did see a neat demonstration with polymers, however. We picked up David and he had a solar system chart put together with stickers. I'd gotten him solar system socks and a bigger solar system model at the gift shop, which he thought was wonderful.

We went to go see "Boiling Hot, Boiling Cold," another science demo using water (at 212 degrees) and liquid nitrogen (at -320 degrees). This was very well received; they did lots of freezing and thawing experiments, contracting and expanding metal, and they blew the corks off several beakers...always a winner in David's book. (Will someone please get this boy some Diet Coke and Mentos? And if you haven't seen that YouTube video, please click on it and watch. This is a cultural given at this point, and pretty amazing.)

We also got to see another rendition of Science Goes Splat. We've seen the program before (on Pi Day), but this time the kids got to be in the front row, and David was picked as a volunteer to catch a bundle of scarves dropped from a height of about 60 feet. Joy!

We headed back home and put together his big solar system model. He chatted happily about what they'd done in class, and I read the planet names to him and the snippets they provided about each one while he punched them out of the cardboard. He was doubly thrilled to be able to read most of the planet names.

I gave up on dinner and got a pizza instead of actually cooking. When Dad came home everyone trooped into the backyard and played soccer while I took some tickets over to the neighbor's house...we're all heading over to the Superheroes exhibit next week, which should prove to be loud and chaotic.

When I got home, I got out a small sheet of paper that David had brought home, with a title along the lines of "Make a comet model and eat it." I put some evaporated milk, regular milk, vanilla extract, sugar and crushed Oreos into a sealed sandwich-sized Ziploc. I put 10 spoonfuls of salt into a gallon freezer bag, and put the bag of milk inside and filled the whole thing about 1/2 full of ice. I took it out on the deck and we took turns rolling and squishing it, tossing it, flipping it over the deck, and talking about what a comet is and how it's made of frozen dirt, dust and ice. When we opened up the big bag and took the little bag out, and kids were amazed and delighted to find ice cream had suddenly appeared in place of the weird milk mixture! " Four people with spoons quickly dispatched the model "comet."

We went back in and hung David's solar system model from the ceiling in his room.

Other than that, I'm trying to work out the details of a new ongoing layout deal with a newsletter, and figuring out how in the hell I'm going to manage to stay in Chicago for a few days (in July) without either killing myself or going broke. I'm about 50-50 on my options at this point.

Now I have to head out and buy injection needles for my idiot cat. It looks like we're out. Meow.

It's official.

Our little boy is getting frightfully Big.



He has now officially learned how to get started and keep going on a jungle gym swingset All By Himself. This is tremendous news, and is touted with much pride and enthusiasm from a certain short redhead. He also wanted to know when the heck we were going to go to Six Flags this year. ?!?! Um...not likely, since you guys are still a tad small, and tickets are outrageously expensive. (I think he keeps seeing all the ads on TV.)



I kicked Doug out of bed early ("early" being 9:15 a.m.) and got everyone down to the AMC Theater to see Surf's Up at the first showing of the day. (First shows tickets are $4 each) And a note to those with kids: movie theaters seem to be featuring a variety of ways to see free movies this summer. AMC Summer Movie Camp has free movies at 10 a.m. every Wednesday, and Wehrenberg Summer Series runs a set of six movies for $9.00 (covers all six) on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. (Hmm, I see some movies in our future!) David and Lauren both enjoyed the movie; it's an animation mockumentary about a penguin living in Shiverpool, Antarctica (ha!) who dreams of being a surfer, who eventually makes it to the ultimate surfing contest held at Pen Gu Island. My favorite scene was Geek teaching Cody how to make a surfboard...I chortled about that all through lunch. "That must be so...universal...between--"

"Fathers and sons, yes," said Doug. "If that wasn't like my dad..."

Well, yeah, but let's not forget that Doug does the exact same thing. HA!!



Doug mowed the lawn when we got back (nope, it STILL hadn't been done!) while I moved all the stuff off the lawn, clipped all the long grass/uber weeds around the jungle gym (where the mower can't reach), weeded the front garden, and cut down the tree (again!) which is insisting on trying to grow out from under our porch. Sigh. I also filled a couple of planters yesterday with some salvia and petunias. We'll see if they survive. (If I put things in dirt, they die.)



We had bribed the kids to agree to come home with the idea that they might be able to put on swimsuits and run through the sprinkler, so I had to get that set up after Doug mowed the backyard. This is indescribably fun...I wish I owned a video camera, it would've made for a great clip. There was much shrieking and cringing and tests of bravery and daring. I came back to two soaking, giggling children. They were cold by this point, so I put them into a warm bath and started watering the rest of the lawn as long as I was at it. Not that we have much grass, mind you. It's mostly weeds and clover. Which actually suit the rabbits that live under our deck just fine. We have rabbits everywhere. (David got a good picture of one the other day. I'll have to post it.)



We went over to the neighbor's last week to finalize a time for everyone to go over to the Science Center Superheroes exhibit. David's counting down the days. We also got to talking so long that said neighbor forgot to take cookies out of the oven before they turned into smoking black bricks. Oops.



Speaking of oops, I burned the living hell out of my arm. I was putting bread in the oven and accidentally touched my arm to something. There was a "pop" and sizzle sound, and an actual little trail of smoke (holy crap!) and it looked like something had melted onto my arm...sort of like something had heated up and caramelized, and dripped onto my skin, so I rubbed it to get it off. It was my skin. It had been utterly vaporized, and there was a perfect little oval-shaped hole in my arm. I put ice on it and then slathered Lansinoh over the top, covered it with a square of waxed paper and wrapped it up in an ace bandage. It really didn't hurt much after that...maybe rated a 3 out of 10, with 1 being "what injury?" I tried to clean it and dress it again only once, but the experiment pulled up the nice new layer of skin I'd spent two days trying to regrow, so I covered it again and vowed to leave it alone. (I'll have to try maggot therapy if this doesn't work. Yes, it does exist, and yes, I'd probably try it. I have a friend going through cancer treatments whose post-op wounds aren't healing. She has to pack and unpack herself with gauze regularly, and when the wound doesn't heal pieces of the flesh start to die. To "cure" that, they're talking about burning and scraping out the wound in hopes of revealing fresh, live flesh, which might actually heal. Are you retching yet? A possible alternative to the burning and scraping (which, as I understand it, is amazingly painful) would be to dump live, sterile maggots into the wound, cover it up, leave it for a few days and remove the maggots. They're supposed to eat ONLY the dead cells with the kind of precision that surgical instruments can't match, and with little to no pain. Dude. It all depends on what level of horrible you want to undergo.)



So anyway. It's getting late, the conversation is drifting towards repulsive topics, and I'm going to bed.

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Hey, Mac!

So I see that now Apple has released Safari (the web browser) for a public beta to Mac AND WINDOWS users. Now how interesting is THAT?



Apple Safari Beta for Mac and Windows



Fascinating, because I'd just gotten fed up with my current browsers. Firefox was running slow (I love the Open Source community, but web developers don't always share that same love. K12 takes for-freaking-ever to log in.), so in desperation I turned to the Dark Side...Internet Exploder. I should have known better. Sure, it loaded up fast and got me logged in (after the obligatory dance with the absolutely paranoid anti-virus blocker, that is), but as soon as I wanted to do something so mundane as OPEN a .pdf of David's homework assignment, it totally freaked out and...well, exploded.



Combine this with the work I've been doing recently...huge, HUGE graphics files, which are throwing the poor little laptop into spasming fits and making the downstairs workhorse hack a hairball, too. Snarl. The laptop has a gig of memory...according to Doug, even more than the downstairs computer has. The new Apple notebooks have THREE gig of memory. Drool. So I'm going back to Apple.com to confirm how pricey those laptops are and lo...here's Safari.



In fact, Apple is up to some interesting little tricks. Not only did they extend iTunes to the Windows platform (c'mon, they'd have to be stupid not to do that), but now Finder for the Mac looks just like the interface for iTunes. Hmmm. So if you're familiar with iTunes and can find your way around that, you'll feel right at home on a Mac.

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So Much for Mowing the Lawn...

It decided to rain today. So no lawn mowing allowed. This is the trouble with waiting for the weekend; now it means I'll have to mow the stupid thing when Doug's at work. Glory.

I had to get out of bed rather quickly yesterday morning...I woke up to two kids strapping on helmets and informing me that they were going bicycle riding. Wait! Wait! Not without me!

Of course once we pulled the bikes off the porch I realized we never fixed the problems we encountered last time we went riding. One of David's training wheels was further off the ground than the other, which not only scares him, but makes him ride as if he's got hip dysplasia. So David ran inside and got a pair of pliers and a wrench for me, and we realigned the wheels. I thought his tires were a little low, so we got out the tire pump and fixed THAT, and then discovered that Lauren is busy growing and she needed her bike seat raised.

Last time we focused on the fine art of identifying the beginning and end of the sidewalk, and how to find and make it to connecting sidewalks. This time we had to practice crossing streets (note to self: Be aware of small people making sudden stops), and then Lauren spotted something wonderful on the other side of the street and she stopped cold right in the middle of the sidewalk and caused a train wreck. "Lauren, you can't just STOP like that. If you find something interesting and you want to look at it, that's fine. But you need to pull over first!" She looked confused, then tried to ride her bike into the street, and then up onto the neighbor's grass, then tried to turn around. Oh. We have no idea what pulling over actually is, or what it means. So we went back to identifying the right and left sides of the sidewalk; I maneuvered Lauren's handlebars to show her how to move to the edge. I had her sit and stay and had David ride around Lauren, then pull his own bike over. Then I had Lauren start again, go around David, and pull over. We alternated with this five or six times, to make sure they got the feel for riding around someone stopped on the walk, and got the practice of pulling over themselves.

They got to ride through two lawn sprinklers (the water coverage was overlapping the sidewalk), and felt that they were quite Big.

After we got back the remembered that it was Saturday and that Saturday morning cartoons were on, so that took up a big chunk of time. We went to the mall and ate Chinese food, and we took the kids to the play area while we talked about the potential job offer.

We then went to Williams-Sonoma, and went searching for the here-all, be-all replacement for our two saucepans, which have become very sad. They're anodized aluminum, covered with a thin layer of Teflon. At this point, the Teflon has begun to flake off into the food, and I'm becoming rather alarmed at actually using said pans. (Yeah, technically the FDA classifies Teflon as an "inert substance" if you ingest it...but honestly, who wants to eat Teflon?) So we went with our Cooks Illustrated nearly-always winner: All-Clad. All-Clad is quite serious cookware, and quite seriously expensive. So this is our one, big, four-quart pan meant to do most of the heavy stuff (which related more to frequency rather than quantity). Cooks also has a "Best Buy" recommendation which is oodles cheaper: the Pinzon 3.5-Quart Stainless Steel Sauce Pan, which can be had for about $20 at Amazon.com. (We're going to get one of those, too.) We'll get to test it out later this week; I'm cooking a big turkey breast, the leftovers of which will go into a turkey soup/salad/fresh bread dinner.

David's supposed to start learning to tell time; if anyone knows of any good websites for teaching kids time, let me know....

Busy, busy week.

I have no right to have taken the night off, but that's effectively what I've done. It started off innocently enough...sorting mail. Which then turned into "Why are they sending me a replacement credit card?" which turned into a wallet-cleaning-fest, and then a great deal of time spent confirming and coordinating various events (a homeschool science lab, grand opening of a friend's photography studio, the local graphic artists guild meeting, etc.) and putting them on the Palm Pilot, sorting through the Amazing Mt Everest Stack O Crap on the dining room table. Then someone had the nerve to send us a Think Geek catalog, which is very dangerous and hilarious to look at. There are so many wonderful things listed in there....Clocky, for instance, an alarm clock developed by an MIT student who couldn't get up in the morning. Clocky has wheels. If you hit the snooze button, he leaps off your nightstand and runs off to find a place to hide, and screeches at you from across the room. You have to get up and track him down to shut him up. (Doug, do you copy? Over.) There are also clocks that show the time in binary, books titled, "Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things," marshmallow shooters, and T-shirts that say things like, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate." (And the one that I should have, which reads "Keep out of direct sunlight.")



This progressed to staring numbly at the GRC flyer which urged me to spend $400 on a 10-day summer camp for David; (Yeah, right) a calling from the St. Louis Science center to come see their display of dead and plasticized human bodies to be on display this Fall; and the new toy catalog from Hasbro. I see the new set of Transformers is coming out. David likes his single Transformer, but it's a little complex for him at the moment. I see that they're coming out with Super Heroes modeled in much the same way as his "Galactic Heroes" Star Wars figures. He LOVES Super Heroes...his favorite is Flash, and I think next in line would be Wolverine, despite his lack of knowledge on the subject. They do have a Yahtzee game out which is based on the kid-friendly version of the Super Heroes which I can see him liking...and Clue Jr. might ring his chimes.

I tried to get him back on track with school today, and we looked a little bit at the Anasazi indians, but he utterly failed to retain the name "Anasazi" or the term "pueblo," which was kinda the point of the lesson. (But he COULD remember and point out the Mississippi River, the Appalachian Mountain range and the Rockies, for which he gets credit.) I took them outside and handed them tiny buckets from one of their toy sets and told them they were going to be Anasazi builders, and it was their job to build a home for themselves and the others in their village. What do you do? They were pretty flummoxed, so we talked about making buildings out of adobe, and they dug up some dirt and a bit of grass from around the deck (we have VERY clay-heavy soil...good for adobe). I told David we needed sand, and to go find some. He ran to the sandbox and got a scoop of sand. And I'd filled a glass bowl with water and put it on the far side of the deck, and I told him to "run to the lake" and the get a bucket of water. We poured everything into another bowl (although, technically, the Anasazi would have mixed it in a hole in the ground) and smooshed it together, then molded it with the little buckets and made six tiny, adobe bricks, and set them in the sun to dry. So the upshot is that he can't remember the name of the tribe or what a village of adobe homes is called, but he can tell you what three ingredients go into making adobe and how to go about the process, what the homes were like (entrances consisted of a hole in the roof, accessed by ladders. He thinks this rocks.), where the Anasazi lived (southwest) and that the land is also populated by bugs, snakes, and coyotes...and he'll howl like a coyote for you, too. (We looked up and played recordings of coyote sounds on the internet.)

Today I got some laundry and dishes done, and a tiny amount of school squeezed in. Yesterday I managed to cook breakfast, scrub the foyer floor on hands and knees, do the dishes, wash out the litter boxes, balance the business account, bake bread, and start a new project for one of my copyeditor friends. The kids were insane by that point, so I took them and the laptop to Civic Park so that they could run and scream and be hideous pretty much without
consequence, and I could work more on the layout.

The project started off simply enough...as a pdf of some presentations, but it has since begun to morph and shows some signs of becoming the Project from Hell. So what started out as a simple pdf-ing project turned into a requirement for reformatting into an Annual Report sort of affair, which means moving data from one application to another. It would take a week to finish,
working 8 hours a day. (But I have to admit that sitting under a huge tree feeling the wind blow and watching my kids play…listening to the kids at the public swimming pool, the splashing of the water, smelling the pool…beats the living crap out of any other work setting that I’ve ever encountered. More than worth it.)

Speaking which, there's an enticing offer in the works. A consistent corporate gig with 15-20 hours per month (month, not week) of PR-esque layout and design work. Dude! There's something to be said about consistency.

And potentially another web design and marketing package for a condo's HOA board, which could be fun. I need to run a quote on that. My music store woman also REALLY needs her brochure redesign done, and I think my car detailing guy fell between the cracks...I haven't heard from him in a while. He just got married and is starting a new job, I think he probably has his hands full. I should ping him and simultaneously grovel little bit.

Oh, and a printing company (Monster Print) is apparently getting a hold of membership/client/advertising lists and soliciting folks off the list by telling them that the parent organization/company referred them! A local magazine is finding that someone is calling their advertisers saying that the magazine provided the names for the calls, and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce reports that the printer is calling Chamber members and telling them that they're co-sponsoring some project and trying to get members to pony up for a print run. Needless to say, the magazine and Chamber are both highly upset about this...I think it's amazingly unethical, and I'm going to run this trick by the local designer's guild and let them know about it so they can be sure to NEVER use this printing company. This is NOT a good way to win friends and influence people.

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