For Those Martha Stewart Moments...

...when you feel crafty, but not quite defeated. These are from Subversive Cross Stitch, an internet shop which apparently specializes in such phrasing paired with classic cross stitch design. If it seeks to offend, it didn't work, I'm too busy laughing hysterically. (Does this mean I'm subversive and trendy yet? Yet? Anyone?) 

Tonight is New Year's Eve, and you will be able to find my subversive and trendy self at home. Usually we try to go to First Night, but last year is was way too cold and wet and we decided there was NO WAY we were going to try. This year Doug has a cold which is making it hard for him to go from one end of the house to the other without wheezing like he just ran a mile. (But does this stop him from working, and send him to bed so he can get rest and get better? Oh my no!) So obviously there's no way he can make such a trek, and I'm not about to go out alone with two little kids and try to navigate downtown by myself. Not as much fun, and so not worth it. 

So our plans are pretty simple, and surprisingly easy. The kids loved it last year. We all sat on the couch with a huge pile of various cookies, and used the PVR to call up all the photos we took from January through Christmas on the TV. Then we just flipped through the photos using the remote and/or keyboard. 

Happy New Year!

The Sound of Music

So I took the kids to see Alvin and the Chipmunks the other day (twilight show, cheapest rates). And...ok, so the Chipmunks are CGI characters, but their voices are EXACTLY how I remember them when I was a kid. Lots of songs (many recent, a couple of scary re-makes), lots of music.

Our protagonist is a songwriter. He hears a couple of notes and sets to work writing a song based on those notes. Movie goes through many images of him composing the music; testing it on the guitar, writing down the notes, etc. So I lean over towards Lauren and I say, "See there? He's writing down the notes to the song. He's writing down music."

"He is?"

"Yeah, he's composing music, he writes new songs...that's his job."

Lauren is enthralled. She's literally on the edge of her chair.

"Dat's how to write music songs?" she asks.

"It is. He gets a few notes in his head and tests them out, and writes them down, and plays around with the sounds until he's got a whole song worked out."

"Oh!" She sort of lights up and laughs; thinks the whole thing is just the greatest concept she's ever heard of. (She was really excited to go to church over the holiday. I asked her what the very best part of church was and she said, "The music!" Not surprising. She got a little keyboard for Xmas, too. Loves it, drives David out of his skull with the thing.) 

And, of course, since the movie is filled with various music videos, Lauren is sitting there in her seat, making the theater chair open and shut like a big clam in perfect time to the beat, complete with a giant, silly grin on her face.

Daily Grind

OK, so this is like the World's Fastest Update:

Got the car into the shop, Doug dropped off at work, the kids fed, David's math test taken, lunch brought back to Doug (since he forgot it), gas for the van, cat food for the cats, paid for the car repairs and picked up the keys. Went back home, picked up my list, went to the grocery store, loaded the van, drove home, unpacked the van, put away the food. Now all I have to do is find my recipe, cook dinner, load up the kids, pick up Doug, feed the family, and take everyone to go pick up the car and get the kids to bed. 

Oh, did I mention that I'm supposed to find a place for LLL to meet, write a letter to the state representatives on a particular proposed bill, clean up the kitchen, get the new Christmas toys in some kind of order, clear off the dining room table and arrange the bills so they don't get lost?

And now someone is in tears. Gotta go!

Missing Toof

Alright, I admit he looks a bit maniacal here, BUT...

Please note the missing space where the tooth ("toof") should be!!

We had tacos tonight, and sure enough, the hard shells knocked out that little tooth. But we're both a bit broken-hearted because...um...he ate it.

Apparently completely unwittingly, David ate his own tooth. He had grand plans to take it down the street to show his friend, and I had grand plans to keep that first, lost little baby tooth. And instead the kid went and swallowed it. Gurk!

Now we just have to worry about the Toof Fairy.

Tricksy Clothes Washer

Tricksy clothes washer. It wants too many repairs, My Precious, yes it does. It insists on a new motor now, impertinent washer, cruel washer. It sent us to the laundromat, My Precious, to sit among the stainless steel coldness by ourselves, it did. But we won't budge, will we, My Precious? Because the tricksy washer is worth more dead than alive, so says the Appliance Soothsayer.

Waaah!

Motor's burned out, it'll cost more to fix it than it will to replace it. That assumes we had the money to replace it, of course. We have the $80 we thought it would take to fix it, but not the hundreds required for the motor. If we get the motor replaced, he says it's likely that the timer mechanism would go next, and then this would go wrong and that would break, and personally he'd put the money into a new machine.

So I hauled my sorry, laundry-laden butt up to the laundromat to discover that they want $3.50 per load just to wash the stuff, and another quarter for each 10-minute increment of drying time. Insane! Of course, how on earth do you get around doing laundry? You know? So there you have it.

Scouts has been cancelled at our house for this month, postponed until January. (Which is probably good, considering that we're apparently going to be wading around hip-deep in dirty clothes for awhile!)

Saw an ad for this during Saturday morning cartoons today:

This is, believe it or not, a little girl's vanity. But it's also a castle. This is actually quite clever...and I'm willing to concede that point even though it's BARBIE. 

You can see the TV ad here. This is sized for Barbie, but the Barbie dolls don't come with it. Instead, it's just the vanity/castle, which is covered with secret little rooms and bits of jewelry. I'm wondering how this might be size-wise for My Little Ponies. I just might be willing to shell out for a combo Big Pony dollhouse/castle and vanity.

Lauren, by the way, thinks it would be great to have CUSTOMIZED Ponies. Like the following:

Hasbro doesn't sell this, you have to dye the pony yourself, re-hair it, paint it, etc. Mom wants to take bets on how soon I'll be making my own custom Ponies for the Pony Princess. ('Cause, yeah, that's something I'd NEVER do!)

Now I Ain't Sayin' She's a Gold Digger...

Hey, all!

Just read this on the NYT website...apparently women are expecting diamond earrings when they give birth now. And yes, men are being lead by the nose on this one...click on the link and read all about the so-called Push Presents. 

I have an opinion on that, but find it too cumbersome to embed a clip of the hip-hop song "Gold Digger" here, so if you know the tune, feel free to hum it to yourself now.

Along the same lines, this is also hysterical:

THIS APPEARED ON CRAIG’S LIST

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy.
I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

My vote for the best response is (in part) as follows:

I appreciate your honesty. At 500K a year, you've tagged your coochie at an astonishing $1,369 a day! But I admit, I'm still intrigued at what such an astonishing figure might offer, and would hate to miss out on what must be the best lay in the world. So I'd like to go for the daily rental plan to satisfy my curiosity before taking the big plunge on a nominal lease plan.

But before I commit to a rental though, a few questions, dear.

Having seduced and rented an embarrassingly large number of women, I must say you really need to explain your pricing. You humbly find yourself spectacularly beautiful, but really now, that just your opinion. As a man, I imagine my beautiful meter is far more subjective than yours.

So is it your sexual performance? Just in the last month, in Thailand and the Philippines I've paid $30 a night to at least half a dozen girls who could star in porn today. Are you 45 times better to command $1,369? Hmmmm.

Is your snapper gold-plated and does it shoot fire? Perhaps it magically changes transmission fluid, carries my golf bag, baits my hooks, and morphs into a different 21 year old every night? That might be worth something, I imagine. $1,369? Well...

Also, you seem naive to the game. Men don't pay for sex, we pay for the women to leave. It sounds like you expect to come back every day! Good grief!! The excitement of newness fades quickly, sometimes in an afternoon, so surely there must be some decelerating price scale as the days add up. Please advise.

---

Moving on....

My big and thrilling news of the day (do I ever have actual news? no.) is that the washing machine is apparently mad at me. I did a couple of loads of laundry and on the third one the washer filled up just fine, but when the agitator tried to move, it made weird ka-chunking noises and the lights dimmed just ever-so-slightly on each attempt it made. So I dove for the machine and shut it off, tried rearranging the stuff inside, and tried again. Same result. I took a few things out. Same result. I drained and spun the laundry. It did beautifully. I filled the empty tub on the smallest possible load (since it WILL NOT agitate with an empty tub) and ran it with just water in it...same result.

Crap.

Drained the tub, felt around for socks and/or obvious stray clothes binding the agitator, found none.

Hit the internet looking for advice. (Oh, what would I do without the internet?) Found lots of fun stuff along the way...my favorite handyman thread title was "Oven receptacles burned!" but let me just say that when you're skimming the page looking for something else and your eye wanders over that title, you read something else ENTIRELY! Kinda makes you backtrack to ask what on earth happened to make this man burn his 'eptacles, and what precautions you might want to take yourself, KWIM? I found plenty of lovely exploded diagrams of washing machines, read the repair boards, and pretty much diagnosed the problem down to either the clutch assembly or the agitator dogs. (No, those aren't junkyard dobermans. They're little "dog ears" that fit onto the clutch which catch the agitator to make it turn in the opposite direction, otherwise your agitator spins just one way.)

The dogs themselves run about $5 for a set, and the clutch itself is only a $25 part. So I'm thinking, hey, that sounds reasonable. Let's see if I can pull this agitator off and see just how hard this is likely to be. So I pull off the detergent cup and...stupidly, I can't get any further!! Well, a little more investigation starts talking about the need to loop a rope around and under the agitator and using a broom handle to leverage the whole thing out of place. So while I'm contemplating this, I remember:

Hmmm. I had a leaking sillcock last year (no giggling in the back row, please) and while RotoRooter decided to be something like a couple of hours late and want some insanely high fee to fix it, I called Service Magic back and they had me new names in almost nothing flat. The job was done totally right and it was MUCH more affordable! The guy was even here within two MINUTES of the time he said he would be. (Do other plumbers do that? I didn't think so!)

So I looked them up again and put in the trouble with the washer. Since this was an appliance repair I also got to thinking about the refrigerator...we keep finding the freezer door open and have been blaming the kids. Well...the other night we discovered that closing the fridge door will force the freezer door open, so the stupid thing isn't keeping the seal. Nice. So I threw that in there as well, submitted an online request, and went to empty the dishwasher, since I wasn't going to hear anything until Monday.

Imagine my surprise when the cell phone rang and it was one of the repairmen! At 10:30 p.m.!

We talked for a bit and he said it sure sounded like either a slipped belt or a clutch assembly. How does it spin?
Beautifully, no problem at all. It doesn't smell bad and there's no noise to speak of. It's just that the agitator makes a clunking noise, pulls power pretty hard and only spins in one direction.
He's going to bring a clutch assembly.
And he's coming tomorrow, on the weekend. Which I think is insane, but this is normal working hours for him. We also had an interesting conversation about washers, dryers, A/Cs and such. The EPA mandates for efficiency is going up by leaps and bounds...he suspects that in another 5 or 10 years you won't be able to FIND a top-loading washer since they're so inefficient with water. He owns a front-loading washer and says it'll wash a full load (6 pairs of jeans+) with 1.5 gallons of water and since the spin cycle goes at about 1,300 rpm, it takes SEVEN MINUTES to dry them in the dryer. I'm just stunned. He also has the name of a good "scratch and dent" place in Fenton where you can get these things for about half price with just a little "ping" here and there. We'd have loved one when we were setting up the house, but they ran about $800-$1,000 for a washer and there was no WAY we were going to spend that kind of money! I'll sure hit him up for information again, though.

Oh, and he'll bring an after-market seal for the freezer, to see if it'll fit. It's most likely losing of its plasticity. He says the factory issued ones can run about $100...I said for that much money, I'd just go get a child's safety lock for the fridge and use THAT to keep it closed! Sheesh!

Nothing really new kid-wise...we were supposed to read The Steadfast Tin Soldier to David and I figured he'd be maimed for life if I read him that story. Doug says, "I don't remember that one."
"What? OK, there's this little tin solider and he has only one leg, but he's ever so strong and brave, and he's in love with the ballerina on the musicbox because she's standing on one leg, so he thinks they have something in common. And through one thing or another he gets knocked out of the window and tromped on and sent down the gutter in a paper boat...everyone's just awfully mean to him, and he's finally eaten by a fish. And still he's so strong and so brave and so true, and the fish is caught and taken to the very house the tin soldier came from, and he's taken to the living room, where one of the boys picks him up and throws him into the fire for no reason at all. So the brave tin soldier can feel himself melting, and he's gazing at his love, the ballerina, and a door suddenly opens and she's blown into the fire with him and burns into nothing, and he remains steadfastly brave as he turns into a puddle. And the next morning the scullery maid finds only a lump of tin in the shape of a heart and the charred crisp of a ballerina spangle in the ashes."
Doug just looks at me. "Yeah, you'd have to pull him off the wall."

Um...yeah! I don't think he's been introduced to a sad story yet...didn't anyone else ever feel a little betrayed by a book which rewarded you by ripping your heart out of your chest and stomping on it? Where the Red Fern Grows did that to me in elementary school, in fourth grade, if I recall. I'd prefer that David not be scared of a book's ending before he decides to pick one up. He had enough trouble with that already.

Oh, and his friend's mom tried to feed him Peeps.
"What did he do?" I asked.
"He said, 'It's too cute, I can't eat it.' I said, 'They're not REAL. You know that, right? They make them cute so that people WILL eat them.' He didn't want anything to do with it."
"I keep telling Doug, this kid's going to get eaten alive in school."

I can only imagine what a group of non-sympathetic little boys would do with another boy who burst into tears at the idea of eating something "cute." I'm not sure if they'd delight in biting the heads off whatever foodstuff they had nearby or if they'd just try to rough him up a bit. Or both. Heck, even Lauren likes to bite into "cute" food to watch David's horrified reaction. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Loose change, loose teeth

OK, just a quick update then.

Mr. David hates "doing school." In fact, he told me today that "I wish I was four again. So I didn't have to do school." Well, kiido, if it weren't me, it'd be somebody else. You simply HAVE to go. Sorry!

But to make it a little more tempting, we got him the Legos Star Wars game. The deal is that once he's done with ALL his school for the day, he may play. There are other ground rules, too. No harassing to play ("Am I done yet? Am I done yet? Am I done yet?") , you have to quit when we say so, and you have to put effort into your schoolwork. No breezing through and failing simply to get to the game faster. It's only been three days, but he's much better about it already. He works well on goals.

Today we started with Math...and we reviewed "greater than" and "less than" and learned what "odd" numbers and "even" numbers are. To illustrate this they had a little video where they balanced butterflies on each end of a see-saw. If any butterflies didn't have see-saw partners, it was an "odd" number because there were "leftover" seats. Lauren watched this little demo and she was just stricken. She looks at me with huge, sad eyes and says, "But...but what happens to the butterfly who's ALL ALONE?!?" She's about ready to weep. "Ah...um...well...he'll just have to take turns on the see-saw with the other butterflies, that's all. I'm sure they'll all share and take turns." This wasn't TOTALLY satisfactory with her, but at least she thought it would do. For now.

Phonics was next. David hates Phonics. Today was the ending sound "-all" in words like ball, hall, call, etc. And then Lauren decided she just HAD to play with the letter tiles. So I ran HER through a lesson. At the beginning of the year they automatically switched David over to first grade Phonics. Which would be great if he'd gotten that far, but true to his little engineer nature, he hadn't. (In fact, he still makes his A's upside-down if he's not concentrating on it. His handwriting is atrocious, his spelling mediocre. On the other hand, he's just fine with four-digit place value and negative numbers.) So I called the company and asked them to switch us back. They certainly could, no problem...but they would send us the first set of Phonics materials. You can't get out of it, they just send it to you. No charge. So I figured what the heck. Let her try. She knew all the letters on sight except for "N" (well, in the set that I showed her), demonstrated the concept of "beginning, middle and end," and learned the sounds /t/ and /m/ at the beginning and ends of words. She was insanely proud of herself, but was getting restless toward the end of it.

History was about George Washington; we're doing early American history at a break-neck pace. You do an overview of some of the Indian tribes, and then hit on Columbus, the pilgrims, the Quakers, the American Revolution, Betsy Ross (and of course the symbolism in the U.S. flag), George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Paul Bunyon (huh?!?!?), Harriet Tubman, and I'm not sure after that. But it zips right along. Today was the story of the cherry tree, of course. (What else would a kindergartner be impressed with?) Sigh. Political commentary: So we go from "I cannot tell a lie," to THIS?!? Man, what happened?!? (I mean besides evil henchmen.)

David declared at lunch that his tooth hurt. I asked which one, and he pointed to the very front bottom ones. Later I checked it out and he apparently has his FIRST LOOSE TOOTH! This is probably the same one that was the first one to come in when he was four months old. (Lauren didn't get teeth until she was 11 months old!) David says that he deeply hopes the tooth fairy (which, yes, has been explained in its entirety) leaves him $100. I told him super good luck with that. We'll put that right alongside his request for an iPhone for each member of the family.

Oh! And neighbor friend down the street got me a super-fab gift...a reindeer!!! He's made entirely of spoons and forks, and I think I'm going to name him Olaf. I LOVE HIM!!!! I need an amazing thank-you, but I haven't worked out what that's going to be yet...

Heard on the radio that they're doing the Nutcracker. Realized after reading to Lauren tonight that she sort of has a THING for nutcrackers and then wondered if she'd think the ballet was tremendously cool or not. I hit the website to look at ticket prices and show times and such, and see that they have a (sold out) Sugar Plum Fairy Tea Party for the little ones. I KNOW she'd like THAT. So now I have to call them tomorrow and ask about availability.

Tonight I sat down and focused on working on Flash. I got a lot accomplished, I'm closer to getting a decent website up and running. I didn't think I'd be able to do the kind of animation I wanted to, but I was able to take an existing piece of animation and alter it to my liking. That's far more than I've been able to do in the past! Now if I can just integrate that particular piece into a larger whole...sigh.

Thought I lost my cell phone, when in reality it slid down between the car seat and console. Ack! Also thought I'd lost my coat but learned I'd simply left it at school. You know...I'm going to just start stapling things to my body. Less chance of losing them that way.

Progenitorivox

Freaking hilarious!



From here:

Consumers Union