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.

Powered by ScribeFire.