Pong

Last week's assignment in the Python class was to make Pong. It was a little tricky, but I did it! Whee!

Nerd arts & crafts

Well. A more accurate title would be "Arty-crafty projects related to my current nerdy obsession, which is, of course, Doctor Who." But that's significantly less pithy.

But you know me. I like to make things. It's fun! So in the past month or so I've:

Awesomeified my purse a bit


And patched some jeans

But it's been a while since I made any custom shirts for the kids. As a matter of fact, I'd never done one specifically for Eleri before. So last week I sat down with her and asked what she wanted me to draw. We went through some options, looked at stuff on Google Image like I usually do with Soren, and she ultimately decided that she wanted this:

(Artist credit here)

Well, I told her I'd see what I could come up with. Naturally, as soon as Soren heard us talking about it, he decided he wanted one for himself, too, so I agreed to make him one as well. Just finished them today, and I think they turned out rather smashingly.

El's


Soren's

Seven years!

Happy anniversary, Tom. :)

Evening Parade

We went to this kind of crazy event Friday night. Tom mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he could get tickets to a "Marine Corps Evening Parade" thing and thought that the kids might get a kick out of it. The Marine Band and the Drum & Bugle Corps were going to perform, and there would be battalion drilling, including the one unit that does their drill without commands (they go through the whole thing completely silent...ah! Here's a video, from last year, but it was basically the same.). So I said sure, sounds neat. Then a week or so ago, he got the official invitation and sent it along saying, "Huh, looks like this is a fancy thing! Opportunity for Soren to wear his kilt!" Uh, yeah, fancy attire, and the parade doesn't even start til 8:45pm. And runs til 10.

So I was HIGHLY skeptical about this being a good idea. Eleri has been..oh, let's just say fragile...lately. Extra fragile. Major freakouts when she doesn't get her way, just horribly unpleasant 3 y.o. behavior. Especially if she's tired and/or hungry. So yeah, fancy-dress event starting almost an hour past bedtime and involving a considerable chunk of time where you have to be QUIET? This did not sound like a good idea. I told Tom maybe he and Soren should just go, and he thought Eleri would probably be fine but conceded that maybe it would be too late in the evening for her after all. In the end, we agreed to just see how Friday was going, see how her mood was by the early evening, and go from there.

Friday I made the kids take it easy in the afternoon, hoping no one would get overtired. El had a bit of whining before dinnertime, but one we sat down at the table, she plowed through all of her food like a champion and was in a perfectly pleasant mood. Like, charming and happy and calm and smiley and cute. So...I figured we were go for launch. So we all got dressed up in our fancy clothes. We drove into DC. We parked and got escorted to our seats...which were in the VIP section. We were seated two rows behind the event's host and guest of honor (Sen. Claire McCaskill). And it was not a spot from which we could very easily make a quick getaway if things were to turn south. Welp, here goes nothing!

And no kidding? The kids were amazing. They were AMAZING. They were all smiley and enthusiastic and sweet and well behaved. There were a few instances of quiet talking when we were supposed to be, you know, not talking, and had to be reminded to whisper, but no one yelled. No one cried. No one got upset or made inappropriate comments or rude noises. And we stayed for the WHOLE thing. All the way to 10:00. The lady sitting in front of us turned around at the end and told Eleri what a wonderful job she'd done, behaving so nicely through the whole thing. It seriously couldn't have gone better. I was flabbergasted. And happy to have been proven wrong. I'm glad we went. It really was quite cool, and everybody had a really good time.

Snippets

Soren's BFF is Star Wars obsessed. Consequently, even though neither or my kids has seen any of the movies, they end up "playing Star Wars" a lot with A. And now they've started occasionally playing it with each other at home. This afternoon I heard Soren informing Eleri that he was a Storm Trooper last time and this time he was going to be Princess Leia, thank you very much. Hehe.

* * *

I'm taking this free Python programming class online right now, through Coursera. Each week we have a mini-project, a little program to write. So far (three weeks in) they've all been under a hundred lines of code. But the focus of the course is on learning to build simple games. Last week it was "Guess the Number" and this week's was a stopwatch game (try to stop the clock exactly on an even second). Anyway. It's fun, and I'm really enjoying learning a new skill.

* * *

Eleri is kind of like Tigger sometimes. She just sproings around, hop-hop-hopping her way from place to place. Tom took her grocery shopping last weekend and said she hopped her way all through the store. She's a silly one. And she's going to have nice strong leg muscles if she keeps this up.

* * *

It's been rainy off and on, this week. But warmer. Basically the perfect springtime weather, as far as I'm concerned. We've had enough dry periods for the kids to play outside at least a little every day (or nearly...I think they may have been stuck inside on Monday), and the warmer temperatures have spurred little bits of thunder & lightning here and there. I like it.

Just keep writing!

I need to put something up on the blog. What should I write?

I dunno, I'll post something later.

Okay. Yes! Later.

*days go by*

Erm...oops.

Soooooo yeah. For weeks and weeks and weeks now I've been saying that I wanted to get seeds started for this year's container garden. One minor problem was that I could NOT for the freaking LIFE of me find our seeds from last year. Couldn't find 'em. Anywhere. And even though we moved and a bunch of stuff is still boxed and stashed at the tops of closets, there really weren't all that many places they could have been. So that was frustrating. But then my friend Carlota gave me a bunch of herb seeds, so I had no good excuse not to at least get those started and STILL weeks went by.

Is anybody sensing a pattern, here?

Finally, though, finally today I decided that enough was enough and we were going to take advantage of the beautiful afternoon and plant those seeds! And on a whim, I decided to check one last box in the spare room, which I was pretty sure was full of letters and cards and pictures but NOPE. I found the vegetable seeds. They'd been right there all along, in a box I'd passed over time and time again. Ha. So we got out the seed starting tray, filled the little cells up with dirt, drew up a planting diagram (so we could remember what we'd planted where) and got those seeds in.

Alphabetically, we've planted:

• Basil
• Calendula
• Carrots
• Chard
• Cilantro
• Jalapenos
• Lavender
• Mustard
• Nasturtium
• Rosemary
• Sage
• Tomatoes

Not bad for a start! Hopefully at least some of them will take. I've had a really poor success rate with cilantro in the past, so I'm not holding my breath on that one, and last year we really only got basil, jalapenos, sage & chard, despite planting a bunch of other stuff. But hey, at least we've made it past step one. Seeds are in the trays. Woo-hoo!

(And another post is on the blog. Go, me.)

Little things, sometimes

Yaya would have been 80 years old, yesterday. It felt a little weird to not be calling her and making a big deal out of it. Hmph.

Things I have watched while Tom's been away

• Doctor Who Confidential cutdowns from Series 2
• The Series 2 finale episode, with commentary
• (Twice)
• Series 2 special features, deleted scenes & outtakes from the DVD box set
• (Basically, it's been a Doctor Who party up in here, as predicted.)
• Takin' Over the Asylum

Two Three tickets to Paradiso

Tonight the kids and I went out to dinner with a friend (whose husband is also out of town this week) and her kids. There's a restaurant just up the road from our place called Paradiso, and we've been meaning to check it out for ages. They have what is perhaps the most brilliant thing ever devised - a fully supervised kids-only dining room. The kiddos are in there with their dinner, a movie and an attendant, and the adults can eat in relative peace and quiet on the other side of a window. So great! The weasels had a fine time eating cheese pockets (ravioli) and visiting with their friends, and K & I had a nice dinner as well. Win!

Start small

Time to dust off this blog, people. Well past time.

Hello! Did you miss me? I missed me. Which sounds odd because I've got myself all the time, but it's still true.

It's too daunting to try and catch up with two months' worth of adventures right away, so I'm starting small. I'll try to write at least a little each day. ("Try" being the operative word, there. But really. I will.) Because I like having a record. I miss it.

Tom left this morning for a week-long business trip out of state. It hasn't really sunk in yet that today is anything other than an ordinary Monday, but we're approaching evening now and I suspect it'll become real fairly soon. He goes out of town for work so rarely that I'm very much not accustomed to doing the whole single parent thing. Especially for a whole week! But we'll manage. Bedtime is about a billion times easier than it was even a year ago, and the kids entertain themselves and each other well enough during the day that I get little breaks now and again. And I'm looking forward to watching a bunch of Doctor Who DVD special features and commentaries and behind-the-scenes things after the weasels go to bed. (Tom is not such a big fan of such things, so I have grand plans to make the most of my TV monopoly this week. Muahaha!)

And now it's time to get dinner started. I promised myself a short post before dinner, and here it is. But now there's risotto to be made.