Really, I have a good reason for playing around with this

So I don't usually edit my photos much, other than to correct the lighting and crop them to be all artsy and stuff. But once in a while I have a chance to monkey around with my low-tech version of retouching pictures, and it's fun, even if it's not perfect.

Exhibit A: A shot of Jason and his father, cropped but unretouched:

Exhibit B: Same shot, with contrast changed and most of the little red dots deleted:

It's not bad for the primitive technique I use - I copy a square that's the same color as what's under the dot, then paste it over top (which is why Roger's fingers look a little wonky - I didn't want to spend two hours pasting 400 little squares to get the shading exactly right).

Not bad, considering it only took about 10 minutes ... which is why I don't do this with every photo I post. Only the ones Jason has to take to work for a "guess which coworker this baby grew into" game at a retreat they're doing on Friday. Fun, fun, fun!

holy cow, I'm consistent

I'm in the process of downloading the photos from our vacation to Colorado this past week (You didn't really think I was just hibernating, did you?), and I noticed that I took 271 shots. Well, I kept 271 shots and videos, since I filled my card on Thursday and had to delete a few duplicates so I'd have room for Friday's activitites.

Pretty much every vacation I can remember, I've returned with the equivalent of 10 rolls of exposed film. This time? Ten rolls (because a 24-exposure roll actually has about 27 shots on it).

I'm good.

More on the vacation once I've had a chance to write and edit. Until then, here's my perspective on Seven Falls in Colorado Springs:

Damn, I miss naps

Liza is napping for the first time this week.

Thank you, Higher Power, for giving me 90 minutes of solitary splendor. It's a nice change from the kid's daily afternoon meltdown followed by giddiness followed by inability to listen to even the most basic directions. Apparently sleep is necessary for basic rules of public conduct to apply, things like, "Don't throw the seat cushions from the restaurant's patio chairs over the railing and into the gigantic river gorge it juts over." Yeah, that was a great dinner, let me tell you.

Anyhoo, I have a ton of stuff to catch up on, and with the ongoing lack of naps around here and some Lazy Mama projects that are increasingly time-constrained, it may be all quiet on the Mind Flush front for a few days. I'm (probably) not dead or institutionalized, just busy.

Stuffed animal overload

Liza never plays with her stuffed animals, but since most consignment stores won't take them - and most of them were gifts, anyway - we're accumulating quite a morass of stuffed stuff underfoot. There's a really useful way to corral them and use them as a chair, but the $60 price tag was a bit high for something that was going to be used to store something we don't use, anyway. But Liza has been lusting after her friend's bean bag chair, so I thought we'd try a little self-help.

Found a free pattern online, found enough fabric in my stash and another one of my mother's free zippers, carved out enough time to sew by parking the kid in front of a seemingly endless stream of the same two Blue's Clues episodes over and over again. This morning, it was done.

You can tell she hates it. It's a traditional bean bag chair, only instead of tiny little styrene balls, it's stuffed with that giant dog I knit for her and some polar bears and Blue and whatever else we had laying around.

It would be cooler if we had the clear windows to help locate the contents, but since she never actually uses the contents, who gives a flying fig where any particular animal is located inside? As long as it's not poking you anywhere when you sit on it, one place is as good as another, I suppose.

If you're not crafty and don't have the fabric laying around, it would probably be easiest and cheapest to just go buy a vinyl one at Wal-Mart and throw out the liner that has the beads in it (or stick that part in the attic to use once the stuffed toys are outgrown or smashed flat).

Not quite what I had in mind

I planted two eggplants seedlings this year, and as they both put out a steady stream of lavender blossoms, I dreamed of a summer of caponata and baba ganouj and eggplant spaghetti.

Instead, I got this.
That's it. One eggplant that is, strangely enough, the size of an egg. Yum, that'll make about a teaspoon of baba.

Here's hoping there's an eggplant growth spurt before the first frost. Which will be in like, a week.

Much more fun than picking apples

On this episode of, "Who Wants To Be A Migrant Worker?": Raspberries!

Usually Daddy is at work when we do these sorts of enriching activities. He was thrilled to come sweat with us today. Really. He barely complained at all.


So proud of herself!
Look at the form! The concentration! The quart of berries she's picked by herself!**
Some berries couldn't agree on whether it was time to be ripe yet.

Our haul ... so, anyone have any good raspberry recipes they'd like to share?

**She picked pretty much continuously the entire time we were out in the fields, and most of the ones she picked were ripe and actually made it into the basket instead of her mouth. She'd probably still be out there picking if we hadn't filled out baskets and told her it was time to go get a quesadilla. The girl is a berry-picking machine.

Photos taken at Rosby Berry Farm in Brooklyn Heights, OH. If there's a less likely place to find a raspberry orchard than Brooklyn Heights, I don't know where it would be ... but the place is great.

She loves that tomato plant a little too much

Last night was awful, sleep-wise. After the fifth time we had to go into her room (all after 3am), we gave up and brought her into our bed. Since her usual mode of sleeping in our bed involves snuggling with me while kicking Jason in the crotch, he elected to sleep in the guest room. I still ended up several hours short of "enough," and Jason has apparently been sleepwalking around work all day.

This morning I was apparently dead to the world, since I didn't even notice when Liza got up. Usually she's all about dragging me out of bed, too, but for some reason today she didn't bother. And while her room has a kid-proof lock on the inside**, ours doesn't. Liza had the run of the house for a while until I finally awoke from my stupor.

Eventually she woke me up, though, and things proceeded as usual for a weekday morning. While I was downstairs getting her breakfast ready, Liza was sitting at the table looking out the back door.

"I forgot to close the screen door all the way when I checked the tomatoes this morning."
"That was last night that you checked the tomatoes, sweetie, and it was probably me who left the screen door like that."
"No, I checked them this morning."
"Are you sure? You unlocked the door and went outside this morning?"
"Uh-huh. There aren't any more ripe tomatoes."
"Wait, show me how you got the door open."

And she hops up from the table, flips open the lock on the sliding glass door, and heaves the door open. Which she's never managed to do on her own - the screen door, yes, but she's never had the muscle to get the glass door open.

Son of a bitch.

Guess we're going to be using the extra lock at the top of the doorjam from now on, although if she sees me use it she could reach it if she climbed up on one of the dining room chairs. And we're going to have to investigate getting a new lock for the front door, too, since there's no reason she can't open that one if she feels like it.

And we're going to have to get a spare child-proof lock for our bedroom door, I guess, because this whole "hanging out by herself for god-knows-how-long in the morning" thing is not acceptable.



** Apparently, this makes us both evil and negligent parents, at least in the view of quite a lot of moms over on cafemom.com . Their thought is that the kid couldn't get out of the room if there was a problem like a fire or something. Apparently, keeping my child safely contained in her room makes me one step above somebody who chains their dog to the back step in the middle of winter. My thought is that there's more chance of something catching on fire if she's wandering around the house on her own. And if there's a fire or something, she's not going to have the presence of mind to try to get out of the house anyway, and since it's only on the inside of her room it doesn't slow us down getting in there. Plus, it prevents this whole morning wandering thing from happening every morning, since she wakes up at erratic times and I would literally have to wake up at 4:30 to be sure I was always awake before her. And if I had to do that, dying in a fire would be the least of her worries, trust me.

I am the most brilliant parent EVER

Okay, so my daughter has atrocious table manners. Won't eat, throws tantrums, leaves the table before the rest of us are done, whines, wants to sit on my lap for the whole meal, interrupts any conversation that doesn't involve her but won't participate in any conversation in which we try to include her, etc. It gets REALLY bad when she goes on a food strike and will only eat like one meal a day, such as, um, the last two weeks. We've tried distraction, rewards for good behavior, coloring books, ignoring her, time-outs, just about everything short of beating the living crap out of her, to no avail. It had gotten to the point where I was actively dreading trying to eat dinner as a family, she was being so unpleasant.

Then in the library yesterday I had a total brainwave - the easiest solution to this problem EVER.

Kid-appropriate audio books.

I mentioned to her today at lunch that we were going to listen to stories at dinnertime, and at dinner I racked up the CD and told her she only got to listen if she stayed in her chair and behaved herself.

For fifteen blissful minutes, all we heard was a story about a kid detective finding a friend's missing drawing. She sat still, she listened intently, she didn't fidget, she didn't interrupt, she didn't throw things, she didn't whine, she didn't ask to sit on my lap ... nothing.

The only time she spoke was to ask for more of her dinner after she had cleaned her plate. True, we had resorted to serving her miniature waffles with (all fruit) jam sandwiched between them, but still - she NEVER asks for seconds of anything other than candy or juice.

********

If you're going to try this for your family, try to find a book that's got several short stories on one CD, so you can tailor the playlist to fit how long you want dinner to last. Otherwise, you'll get sucked into the whole "just one more chapter" thing, and that NEVER ends well. This might also work for older kids who complain about having to sit through the whole meal instead of calling their friends or whatever - pick a longer book where they'd miss important stuff if they leave early or miss dinner one night.

Also - your mileage may vary, since my child is obsessed with books and stories and regularly forces me to tell her the same "fairy getting lost" story EVERY FREAKING TIME WE DRIVE FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES.

Yarghh, how awesome is this?

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=fp_feat_10&listing_id=15233947

Too tired to rip off, er, post the photo from the listing - trust me, it's worth the effort to click through.

How awesome would this look on the wall of Jason's office in Corporate Paint Company Land? Like, over the door so that you couldn't see it from the hallway, but it would be staring over your shoulder if you were sitting in the visitor's chair in his office? Oh, the coolness.

Anybody got $900 they want to give me?

Vocabulary

She dumps a huge handful of Tinkertoys on my desk while I'm trying to find out whether she has school today (please, god, please let there be school today).

"I want you to make me a gigantic, glorious, glorious flower!"

Usually I can trace the big words back to which television show or book they came from ("a beautiful dress that sparkles and shimmers" is her term for her dress-up dresses, and it comes verbatim from a version of The Nutcracker we've been reading since last Thanksgiving). But I have no idea where "glorious" came from.

J - any clue? Because it's not exactly something that comes up a lot in casual conversation.

Prediction:

Either a) my mother hasn't read the previous post yet, or b) she read it and passed out, clonking her head on the desk on the way down, and my father hasn't found her yet.

Because I haven't received the phone call in which she will tell me every single thing that could possibly go wrong with the trees, the roof, the insurance, the repair, the neighbor, the basement, and maybe a few other things I haven't thought of yet. I let her handle all the doom and gloom, and I focus on things like "Since our neighbors across the street have had no power since 6pm yesterday and we're babysitting the salvaged contents of their refrigerator, how many groceries can I snitch from their stash without being noticed? Not that I would, of course, but how many slices of cheese would it take to go from a 'Huh, didn't I have more than that?' to a 'Damn, you can't trust anyone anymore'?"

Now, if they'd just get the power back on at Liza's school so I can get her out of my hair for a couple hours, things would be peachy-keen around here. Except for the giant yardsale sign that's nailed and duct-taped to my roof, of course, and the huge pile of debris that used to be my side yard.

Dear Hurricane Ike: Fuck you.

Howling wind all afternoon from the remnants of Hurricane Ike.

Splinter. Bang. Thwump. Crash. What the fuck was that?

Oh.


Good thing that didn't hit the house - it's the diameter of a dinner plate at the splintered end. So what made the crash?

Oh.



Good thing it didn't damage the roof.

Oh.

(that's after it was patched with a piece of metal ductwork we borrowed from our new neighbors and a wooden yard sale sign - thanks again for those, Dad!)

Well, it's just the one hole, right?

Oh.

Thanks for the present, Ike. It's been a while since we've had to deal with insurance companies and roof problems. And lord knows, there's nothing I enjoy more than dealing with shingle patching that will leak right on my head in bed if it isn't done right. Thought I was done with that when we sold the house in Avon back in 2004. Guess not.

At least there aren't any other branches left on that tree to fall on our house. Now, if I can just ignore the neighbor's 15 other trees that overhang our property, I'll be fine.

Thanks to a dream that Jason had last year in which a branch from one of these trees crashed through the roof and killed both of us in our sleep, leaving Liza to starve to death alone in her room (nice), we're all sleeping in the (below ground level) guest room tonight.

And no, this was not an oversight on the part of our tree trimming company. This is the entire fucking top half of a tree that (was) entirely on our neighbor's property. And it's healthy, as far as I can tell, it was just overbalanced. Shucks, no lawsuit there, I guess.

Yet another fun way to drop $20 on etsy

It's decals to make your toilet tank look like an aquarium. I sooooo totally need this. Liza think's it's hilarious. Jason thinks it's stupid.

In case you agree with me and Liza, here's the link: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=13634543

It's funny how this appeals to me, but the results I get from a search of "toilet seat" on etsy just don't, um, move me. Except maybe this one, because really, who can resist sparkly trim and beads?

Our newest obsession

I think this was the best $3 garage sale purchase of all time. My mother was going to go out and buy a new one on Monday in preparation for Christmas, but this was a little bit of a better deal. And the kid loves watching the marbles go through ... she can only make tiny little towers on her own, but heck, I love the building part, so it's kind of a good collaboration for me to build and her to run the marbles through. Liza doesn't even mind waiting while I build - she takes off the little paddles that spin around when a marble goes through, pretends they're flowers, and makes up stories that involve me being a bad witch who comes and takes away the mommy flower and all the little flowers are sad, so I end up not being able to use any of the spinners and half of the marbles fly out of the turns that are supposed to have spinners, but it's all good.

Now, if I can just resist the urge to see how many sets it would take to run marbles from Liza's bedroom to the basement, we'll be fine.

Now THAT'S customer service

Our local parents' group is sponsoring a stay at the Kalahari ** waterpark that's about an hour away from here. Since the group discount is close to $80 and it brings the price of the room and four waterpark passes down to an amount that's close to what a regular hotel room costs, I was all over that.

When I called today to make my reservation - have to call to get the discount - I was on hold because all of the reservation folks were busy. After two or three minutes on hold, a person came on and took my name and phone number so they could call me back.

What an extraordinarily great idea. Someone explain to me why nobody else does this?

It was so nice to NOT be on hold for 10 minutes, and instead get a bunch of other stuff done while I waited for the call. And when my cordless phone died in the middle of the registration, they had my phone number and called me right back ... same person and everything so I didn't have to go through the "let me find your record, oh, you don't have a record, let's start over again" bull.

Such a refreshing change from most customer service phone lines or reservation lines. Way to go, Kalahari!



** Now if someone could just explain to me why they named a waterpark after a desert, I'd be perfectly happy. With that naming logic, their next property is probably going to be Gobi Waterfront Villas. Or Botswana Beach. Sheesh.

Excuse me?!?!

"Okay, if you're not going to take a nap, please go get dressed so we can go to Target."
"I don't want to go to Target. I want to swing."
"That's nice, but we have to go today. You have your dance class tomorrow, so there won't be time to do it then."
"But ... you could go to Target while I take my dance class. Is that a good compromise?"

"Um, it would be, but Target is too far from the dance studio to make it there and back before your lesson is done. Nice try, though."

****
Since when? Say what? Huh?

Sorry, I'm having a few problems adjusting to the Teflon Wonder Child, who seems to have temporarily replaced VelcroBaby.

Now what the hell am I going to blog about? A month of houseplant photos? Cat puke I've discovered this week? What I had for lunch?

Bah.

Once again I am the last person on the planet to discover a cool website

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Totally addictive (at least for those of us with large vocabularies and/or good reasoning skills).

No drama, no trauma

Immediately before her first half-class of preschool:

When I came to pick her up an hour later:

Notice the complete absence of tears, whining, crying, wailing, clinging, throwing things, banging things, and otherwise making a nuisance of herself? Yeah, me too.

She loves her pencil box! And her cubby! And her bag! And she (says she) gave her teacher a hug! And there wasn't a craft, but tomorrow they're supposed to paint! And she thought school was really, really fun! And she wants to go back tomorrow!

(Gretchen swoons)

Behold the awesomeness

See what I done designed and knit all by my lonesome? A hat with stripes that swirl away into nothingness at the top. It will be for sale in the etsy shop as soon as I get some good photos of it ... in the meantime, you can just meditate on its mesmerizingly incredible awesomeness.

Guess who starts school tomorrow