Recap of the last few days

Friday evening: A trip to the library (since the boys were there) resulted in me bringing home a book called Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56, which I read on Saturday.  More about that later.  My brother came over to play Spore, sure that he had a new strategy.  The results seemed pretty even across the board though.  At least we weren’t “ganging up” on him anymore.

Saturday: My dear husband worked.  Boy #1 tried his hand at mowing the lawn for the first time.  Not bad results.  Then he headed off for a day at his friend’s house.  Meanwhile, Boy #2 stayed home and spent entirely too much time playing Spore, which he also posted about.  I spent the day doing dishes and reorganizing the boys’ room, and beginning to straighten up the library, so that we can move the bookshelves and books (yay!) in.

Sunday: Worked 6 hours overtime, then went to see Wall-E.  It was an excellent love story (my husband is a lot like Wall-E, and as such, I am his Eve), with some great laugh-out-loud moments.  Payday and a surprise child support check (they gave me his economic stimulus!) resulted in a splurge of a few more Munchkin expansions… Munchkin Impossible and Super Munchkin.  We played a game, but were too exhausted to finish, so went to bed.

Today: Working, working, working, then home to my loves this afternoon.  This evening the boys are spending the night at Grandma’s and my love is not working, so we’ll have to figure out what child-less thing we might do… perhaps something exciting like grocery shopping!!

The Wonder Blog, and some links

Not much to report for today.  The boys had a field trip to a Honey Bee Farm, in which they learned about honey bees and brought home some honey and honey candy.  Boy #2 was inspired by this enough to begin a blog, called The Wonder Blog.

Tomorrow the boys have another field trip to a recycling center.  They have some crushed cans they have collected up to submit for cash.

Also, Grandma and Grandpa M. brought home some plain looking rocks from their trip to New Mexico, and the boys discovered that the rocks were actually geodes when they cracked them open with hammers.

Some links of interest…

• 25 Things That Are Not What They Seem
• Space Bubble Real Estate
• Books as home decor items
• Seasonal Ingredient Map

Memorial day post

Quick update… been off line pretty much since Wednesday…

Thursday night we went to see INDY!  It was awesome, and I highly recommend it to all.

Saturday night my brother came over for movie night.  We watched SuperBad, which we have seen before but he had not.  It’s quite hilarious, though extremely vulgar (for those of you who don’t dig that sort of thing).

We threw a little barbecue on Sunday and had some folks over for brats, hot dogs, and burgers.  It was a success.  Today we spent the day with a friend, playing Scrabble and chatting, and lit up our new fire pit for the first time.  Again, a success.  Tomorrow… laundry day and then back to work on Wednesday.

And here are a couple of links of interest, dear readers…

• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
• Floral Patterns on Bare Concrete Floors
• When Bodybuilding and Steroids Go Too Far
• Staircase Bookshelf

Wednesday morning

Not much to report since last post. Had a quiet dinner at an Irish pub last night - a delicious meat pie. I ordered iced tea and it came sweetened (@#%$!), and it also had the rim salted a bit like a dacquiri, which was interesting. Slowly made it in to the office, had a lunch meeting with some co-workers, and here I am now waiting for the real work to begin this evening.

A few links of interest:

• 10 Books that Screwed Up The World
• 100 essential jazz albums
• a book on sex for adolescents from 1948
• NNDB mapper lets conspiracy theorists connect the dots between powerful people
• 100 Must-Read Books for Manly Men

The weekend

Yes, we finally found Peanut, our lost kitty.  Specifically, Boy #2 found it.

Saturday night we had over the ‘rents (as my husband lovingly refers to his parents), my brother, and a friend for lasagna.  The ‘rents brought Clue (and caramel apple pie!), which we quite enjoyed.  I was greeted with a game of it Sunday morning as well.

The lasagna, I must say, was quite good.  The only problem with it was that it didn’t stick together terribly well but I think that is because I didn’t let it cool long enough before serving.  It was a standard lasagna - noodles + sauce + ricotta / shredded cheese+ ground beef, except that I alternated using alfredo sauce and marinana sauce, and used several different cheeses.  Mmmmm.

Sunday, we stopped by Barnes and Noble.  Boy #2 was an angel, sitting in the kids section reading Calvin and Hobbes while I wandered for something inspiring to read and Dad read comic books and sci-fi.  We settled on a sci-fi short story collection and a country living type book, and Boy # 2 got another Calvin and Hobbes book (surely he must have ALL of them by now!) and a Cookie cook book (he is an aspiring chef).

Update on pain:  seems to have subsided completely, aside from some residual soreness.  I’m going to give it a week and then see the doc about switching to Zyban.  Meanwhile, I am still a smoker.

Update on the “new regime”:  seems to be working pretty well.  We are all more productive and spending more time with each other, and the boys are behaving better.

Postsecret - bookstore sin!

This is pure evil.

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.

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.

20 Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life

The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life

1. Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Shelley
2. The Time Machine (1895), by H.G. Wells
3. At the Mountains of Madness (1931), by H.P. Lovecraft
4. I, Robot (1955), by Isaac Asimov
5. The Dispossessed (1974), by Ursula LeGuin
6. Kindred (1979), by Octavia Butler
7. Wizard (1979), by John Varley
8. Consider Phlebas (1987), by Iain M. Banks
9. He, She, and It (1991), by Marge Piercy
10. Sarah Canary (1991), by Karen Joy Fowler
11. A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), by Vernor Vinge
12. The Bohr Maker (1995), by Linda Nagata
13. The Sparrow (1996), by Mary Doria Russell
14. Cryptonomicon (2000), by Neal Stephenson
15. The Mount (2002), by Carol Emschwiller
16. Perdido Street Station (2002), by China Mieville
17. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), by Cory Doctorow
18. Pattern Recognition (2003), by William Gibson
19. Newton’s Wake (2004), by Ken MacLeod
20. Glasshouse (2006), by Charles Stross

I’ve only actually read I, Robot.

via io9.com