Postsecret - bookstore sin!

This is pure evil.

Sim City 4

Oh yeah, and this weekend we all played Sim City 4.  I think I probably played for four hours straight at one point.  Sim City 4 is the DEVIL!  It’s a good thing it’s not on my laptop (yet!) else I’d get fired shortly.

Monday, Chantix Day 7

So, the week of Chantix has been filled with feeling wired but exhausted, getting sleepy at the wheel, being moody and even sad for no good reason, and generally feeling blah. The cigarettes I smoke… I tend to only smoke half of them, and I sometimes forget to smoke.

Meanwhile, had a relatively uneventful weekend. I did something sometime to my foot and have been walking with a limp. I’m getting old.

On Saturday, we celebrated Earth Hour by turning off all of our lights from 8 to 9pm. The boys surprisingly did not complain, and rather enjoyed reading by candlelight. We spent the hour finishing up The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Teaching like a librarian

Here’s another homeschool/unschool nugget of wisdom I ran across:

“Instead of seeing myself as a “teacher” needing to find lesson plans and curriculum, I came to see myself more like a librarian who was helping my children to find the resources they needed. This empowered our family to move outside of my “schoolish” mindset and encouraged my children to pursue their passions. During this process, I began to learn to trust my instincts concerning how children learn.”

via Unschooling Voices

 

Horde of Unschoolers

Here’s an interesting article about unschoolers who play World of Warcraft.

When we started out homeschooling the boys, we took a very rigid, curriculum based approach.  As time went on, we realized that these boys just don’t learn like that, which is one of the reasons they aren’t in school anyway.   These days we have more of an unschooling approach.  Sometimes, I see their breakthroughs in learning and their curious questions about different subjects and fill with pride.  Other times, I think we should remove all electronics from our house and make them read more!

Anyway, after reading the above article, here’s the part I gleaned the most from:

“If that sounds like a full-time proposition for parents - it is, and it should be, asserts Dr. Mike Sacken, a professor of education at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. “Boy, you can’t be casual about this!” he exclaims. “If someone wants to be able to do this, they need to be available full time, guiding the child’s inquiry-based learning. It’s not like you can leave a child alone most of the time and at the end of the day, you can do reflection with them and they’ll have discovered physics. You have to be with them all the time.” “

Of course, I work full-time, and sometimes go to school in the evenings, so I personally cannot be with them all the time - their grandma or dad is doing that.   My insight, based on this, is that when I am with them, after school, on the weekend, etc… I need to spend more time BEING with them, and being less of a lazy parent.

My Garden’s Hero

I’m working on my plan for gardening this year (quick! it’s almost spring!) and I ran across this beautiful garden. This garden is my garden’s hero.

Here are some garden plans based on it.

Galactic Questions

I just ran across this blog called The Galactic Question Center, which posts hypothetical / ethical dilemmas / questions. Some I find interesting:

• You can have the ability to speak and understand a hundred languages, on the condition that a person chosen at random dies one day earlier than he would ordinarily have died. Do you accept this “gift”?
• God says, “I will eliminate the emotion of your choice so that you will never experience this emotion again.” What emotion do you choose?
• Would you rather see a rabbit pulled out of a hat or a hat pulled out a rabbit?
• You are assigned to spend a year in service to others. To what region of the world would you go? Why? What is the most worthy humanitarian pursuit you can imagine?
• You have ten years left to live. You can finish out your days consecutively, if you choose, or be frozen in time and resurrected at will, for a year each time. How lengthy a gap would you choose between resurrections? If complete annihilation of the species and/or planet occurs during one of your hibernation periods, you’re done. How far in the future are you willing to plan your final year?
• What kinds of things do you want to learn before you die?
• You are about to write the greatest novel the world has ever read. What is the first sentence?

Reading

I recently finished World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a collection of interviews from after a zombie apocalypse. The first parts were good, getting into the details of what civilization was like, but as the book drudged on, it felt like a worn-out war story.

I love zombies, but this one really didn’t do it for me.

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Currently, when time permits, I am reading The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (various authors), which I actually bought my husband for his birthday a week ago. I <3 time travel.

Morning links

• 9 People Who Did It Anyway - a list of people who were worse off than you or me, but persevered and prevailed to accomplish great things, which reminds me of the below quote…
  

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
– H. Jackson Brown

• The Black Button: Would You Kill a Stranger for $10 Million if You Couldn’t Get Caught?
• Neat business card
• HOWTO knit a Wonder Woman sweater - if I ever learned how to knit, which I have a vague interest to do but not enough time / motivation to actually pursue, this is what I would make!

Chantix Day 3

So today begins my third dose of Chantix.  I had my first restless night - trouble falling asleep and continually waking up all night.  I’m not terribly tired today, but already someone at work said I looked tired.

So far the effects of Chantix on me are a bit like speed or caffeine.  I’m jittery and wired during the day and by afternoon, I crash and am very tired.  I took a short 10-minute nap yesterday afternoon, and when I woke up I was wired again.  Probably didn’t fall asleep til 11 or 12 (my preferred normal bedtime is shortly after 9!).

I’m also taking a vitamin along side the Chantix, since I have to remember to take something anyway.