Coolest. Fabric. Ever.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/spider-silk/

The mind boggles.

Butter and weaving and dulcimers, oh my!

I've been plotting all month to drag my family to the Cedar Valley Settlers Celebration and Music Festival, which was held Sunday at the local metropark. I was not going to be deterred by minor setbacks like a grouchy toddler, a husband who was watching the minutes tick by until football started, or a crippling sinus headache. No, sir! We were going to see square dancing and we were going to have fun, dag-nabbit!

I believe Liza's heels actually left furrows through the parking lot as we hauled her to the gate.

And then she saw the "paint your own leaf stamp t-shirt" booth, and all was right with the world. Add to that some butter churning that resulted in getting to eat your own butter on cornbread that had been baked in a real dutch oven under hot coals, mix in some overachieving music teachers who didn't mind humoring a 4-year-old, add a splash of "sure, you can have a Sprite," and it was apparently the best trip ever.

Who's the cutest little fiddle player in the world? Liza, that's who.

She was oddly creeped out by the whole fiddle experience, and she couldn't wait to put it down. Something about having to hold it with her chin? Or maybe the lady was just freaky up close. I don't know, but I don't see Suzuki lessons in our future.

And who's that trying to beat a dulcimer into submission with a credit card for a pick? Liza, that's who.

Mr. Musically Inclined helps Liza get through a rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that caused dogs to howl in three separate counties:

Liza loved that dulcimer. I don't know if it was the fact that it seemed more familiar because she knows how guitars and banjos work, or if she liked being able to read the notes on the chart and play along with other people, or she just liked the song, but we had to pretty much drag her out of that tent. And heck, for $60, we can buy a beginner one of our own! Much cheaper than getting a quarter-size violin, that's for sure.

One of the activities they had for the kids to try was a full-sized loom they were using to make a rag rug from strips of old t-shirts. Liza wanted nothing to do with it until she found out that if she helped weave it, she could put in an entry to win it, at which point she was practically knocking people out of the way to get to the contest entry forms. I persuaded her to let me sign up for the contest, as I didn't feel like waiting for 15 minutes for her to write her name just so on the little card. With hundreds of people there, it's not like we were going to win, anyway.

At 5:30 Sunday I found out that we won The Ugliest Rag Rug In The World. I had to scrape Liza off of the ceiling, she was so excited that she had won, especially when she found out we had to go over to the Nature Center to pick it up. So she got to visit the birds and the turtles and the frogs and the fish and the crawdad and the snakes and the spider, and I got to get my picture taken with TURRITW. I'll have to link to the photo if I find it - my hair was sticking straight up, I had on a shirt that I (ahem) may have recycled from the day before, and I wasn't wearing makeup. But next to the rug, hell, I look like a supermodel.

So, how was your day?

I woke up with my side of the bed looking like an abattoir, on day 3 of The Sinus Headache That Laughs At Medicine While Bludgeoning Me Between The Eyes With A Cricket Bat, to a child that has done virtually nothing all day but drag her feet, whine, and defy me. The stains did not come out of my pajamas or my sheets. I have about 40 books checked out of the library, and she refuses to read anything by herself other than a Baby Max and Ruby board book.

We have no bread or juice or soda or chocolate or decent alcohol in the house, and I'm not about to drag Little Miss Positive with me over to the grocery store at rush hour.

I have 40 tiny rows left on my first ridiculously hard lace project, and The Child will not leave me alone for half an hour to finish them. I'm not sure why I'm in such a hurry to finish it, since it's a bad match between pattern and yarn and it's going to be 8' long after I block it, but I feel frustrated all the same.

And I have "Proud to be Aborigine" stuck in my head.

For Leah and Lindsey

We got to have our own experience with Pablo today at the natural history museum ... only there it was named Polly and was a lot less demonic than your version.

Yes, that's an opossum wandering around the museum with my daughter. Polly the Opossum was there as part of today's "meet the wildlife" experience, and the handler was pretty confident that she wasn't going to go all feral and make a break for it. Given that she's been raised by humans since she was still in her mother's pouch, I'd say that's a pretty safe bet. Still, she doesn't look exactly trustworthy, does she?

More like "batshit insane" than "trustworthy," but she was a total sweetie. We were able to pet her, see how she used her tail to help with climbing in trees (and down her handler's legs), check out her little hands, and even examine her pouch. Plus Liza got to get some photos that I plan to enlarge and randomly hide in Lindsey's room if she ever annoys me, so tell her she's on notice :)

Watch, I can make her grandmothers' heads explode with one photo!

I swear, the child is afraid to watch any Disney movie because the bad guys "have scary voices," yet she will happily climb/scale/scramble up any uneven vertical surface she's near. And usually, I'm just negligent enough to let her. And possibly take pictures of it.

Maybe I should be thinking about climbing camp instead of circus camp?

Swinger

My daughter has learned to use monkey bars by herself, with no parental involvement beyond hands-off hovering to make sure she doesn't plummet to her death from way up there in the air. O. M. G.

Today at a friend's house Liza nonchalantly climbed up the ladder, grabbed onto the first bar, and before I was even over there to help her she was halfway across the set of bars, swinging hand-to-hand like a freaking monkey. To say I was surprised would be the understatement of the week. As far as I know, she hasn't even tried the monkey bars anywhere this summer other than at the friend's house, and there it's always been this big angst-filled whiny entreaty to helllllllppppp meeeeeeeeee moooooommmmmmmyyyyyy.

I believe I may have said, "Holy crap! Tabitha, get out here, you've got to see this!"

And then today Liza went back and did the bars on her own two more times, followed by a complicated trapeze/ring routine that involved her winding the trapeze around and around and then letting it spin her in circles, then flipping upside down on the trapeze, sticking her feet through the rings, and hanging by her knees from the rings, then managing to extricate both legs and her giant feet before all the blood rushes to her head and she has an anurysim. Truly, it was awe-inspiring. And more than a little scary, especially when she was hanging by one ankle and a couple fingers ... but she didn't panic, and she didn't fall, and she didn't even act like she had done anything particularly impressive.

I am totally sending her to circus camp next summer.

And I am totally retrofitting our swing set so that the rings are separate from the trapeze - the way they were when I was a kid - because it's a hell of a lot harder to do skin-the-cats when the rings are attached to a trapeze that doesn't twist when you flip over and keeps trying to grab your feet when you flip through. Ask me how I know this (I say, brushing mulch out of my hair)... And since she's already got shoulders and arms so defined she looks like she's flexing most of the day, and she loved tumbling classes mainly because she got to go on the uneven parallel bars, we might as well assume she's going to be like I was and spend half of the next ten years flipping upside down on the swingset.

From bedtime tonight

Liza: Can we see God?

Jason: We can't see God, but we can see all the beautiful things around us that He made.

Liza: He made all of that, didn't He? He should put his name on the back of everything so we know He made it.

I am being very, very strong.

The designers at Playmobil are conspiring with the local upscale toy shop to make me part with huge wads of cash. It's not fair.

First we walk into the toy store and my child - you know, the one who has watched the volcano video about 400 times - comes eye-to-eye with this:

Why yes, that is, in fact, a Playmobil volcano with real exploding action, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. And here I am with no major holidays in the foreseeable future. Damn. I had to start on the whole "You can put it on your Christmas list for Santa" ruse already, and it's barely September.

After I pry the box out of her cold, dead hands, I turn around to put it back on the shelf. Little old me (the girl who loved Playmobil stuff so much she managed to convince her parents to buy her one of the first pirate ships ... when she was in college) managed to walk away from Playmobil dinosaurs and exploding volcanoes.

And then I came eye-to, er, kneecap with this:

Son of a bitch. Fine, take two of my favorite things in this world - Playmobil and ancient Egypt - and combine them into $104 of all kinds of awesome. And then I saw that it comes with a tomb robber ... I went weak at the knees.

No. I am not going to pay $104 for a Playmobil set that will be just as unplayed with as the other sets we've gotten for the kid. And I do not have room to display a 2' square pyramid in my home, much less room for the pyramid plus all the cool subsets, like this one:

Dude, it comes with canopic jars. And camels. And tomb robbers. And it's only $40. Swoon.

Did I mention that according to our homeschool curriculum, we get to study ancient Egypt in a couple weeks? And this would be good for all kinds of role-playing, and would be Very Educational, and ... damn. I'm not convincing anyone with this, am I?

Yeah, so I carried the tomb around the store for quite a while before it went back on the shelf.

But, god as my witness, I will possess this before the end of the year:

I've got a birthday coming up, and Christmas, and if I just happen to need an extra $8 on my Amazon order to get the free shipping, well, who knows what might happen to fall off the truck and into my cart?

Berry cute

Sorry, couldn't resist the title.

She was still totally into picking raspberries, although this year a lot more ended up in her mouth, and she was much choosier about which ones she picked. The farm had a LOT more berries this year compared to when we went last year, and it was almost ridiculous how quickly we filled up our three quarts of berries. Half an hour, maybe? There were some parts of the row where I swear I think I could have held the basket under a branch and shaken the berries off without having to pick each one individually. If it hadn't been for the bumblebees, I totally would have tried that.

Oh, dear

While I work on making a mermaid tail for a customer, Jason and Liza are downstairs playing homo erectus, living in a cave and using "torches" (orange scarves rubber-banded to tinker toys rods) to scare away the wild animals. If I'm hearing correctly, Jason erectus has just invented tinker toy caltrops to help keep the aligators away from the cave.

See, this is why we're homeschooling. Bet they don't play cave man in public school ... and they certainly don't teach Caltrops Assembly 101 in kindergarten.

Next up - cooking your own steak on a stick over an open flame! Just kidding ... I think.

Busy little beavers

Our experiment in homeschooling has been keeping us busy around here. Realistically, we're probably not doing much more reading/crafting/field-tripping than we normally would, but the fact that it's all channeled in one direction makes it seem to add up quicker. In the past few weeks, we have ...

- read in our history book about everything from the creation of the Earth to homo habilis.

- made a timeline of what we and our friends and relatives did every day for a week.

- made a timeline showing the important holidays and events for our family for a year.

- made a papercraft volcano that's so wonky, it appears to be shooting lava out at a 45 degree angle to the ground.

- made a papercraft lizard that actually looks like it's supposed to (and is so easy, I think Liza could have done it herself, if I'd let her hold the sharp scissors).

- did an experiment to see how bones became permineralized to form fossils.

- watched way too many Bill Nye videos on evolution, the Earth's crust, fossils, dinosaurs, volcanoes, amphibians and mammals. And then we watched them again. And again.

- looked at maps of all the continents and read stories from or about each of them, then painted pictures to go with the stories (or colored in the map with the addition of Liza's signature rainbow-colored butterflies).

- read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out loud.

- read the first couple of chapters of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle out loud.

- traced pictures of dinosaurs from a book.

- went to the natural history museum to see the fossil collection (and visit the otters).

- read several poems, including some limericks that are unfortunately not the adult versions I remember learning on the bus in junior high.

- memorized the poem "Happiness" by A. A. Milne and recited it to our next door neighbor.

- made a kitchen volcano out of an empty yogurt cup, some baking soda, and some vinegar.

- painted countless pictures of volcanoes, dinosaurs, volcanoes AND dinosaurs, and rainbow-colored butterflies.

- made and painted clay sculptures of dinosaurs, tree ferns, bushes, a nest, and eggs.

- turned a Costco Special-K box into a dinosaur diorama with clay sculptures of dinosaurs and blah blah blah.

- went on a field trip to the river near the beaver pond to check out the rock layers on the sides of the valley (and try to catch some minnows, which we learned have very good hearing/vibration sensors and are even faster than a 4-year-old with a jelly jar).

- practiced handwriting by writing a poem and labeling the dinosaur tracings.

And I'm sure there are some other things, too, all of which probably involve either watching the damn volcano video again, or painting something with watercolors. She's painted so much, we've run out of green. In the past two weeks. But she's getting really good at using nontraditional colors, so we've got lots of red dinosaurs frolicking next to purple volcanoes.

It's all good.

The family that crafts together ...

... may stay together, but their dining room table is likely to suffer from all the non-washable paint and Super Glue it's exposed to.

That's Liza painting the little sculptures she made for our dinosaur diorama, me in the empty chair taking a break from painting the outside of the diorama box, and Jason gluing little laser cannons (or something) onto his Warhammer figures. Aren't we just the picture of geeky domesticity, or what?

Guess who?

Guess who ...

... got up five times last night because she "couldn't sleep?"

... came to sleep with me when Jason got up to go to work?

... slept until 11am, then rolled over and threw up all over Jason's side of the bed?

Hint: it's not me, or one of the cats.

Guess we're not going to the grocery store today, after all. I knew there was a reason I had so many Bill Nye videos checked out from the library.

Also ... I love the fact that I can now satisfy the "I want you to sit right here next to me while I watch this video for the 14th time" requirement and still post on my blog. Love it oh, so much!

Greetings from the couch!

More details later, but suffice it to say that I am happy happy happy with my new toys.

Best turkey ever

Gee, I wonder what I'll put on the front of the postcards we send out for Thanksgiving this year?

Baby's first poem

When I suggested the other day during our homeschooling work that she could practice her handwriting, she said, "Sure! I'll write a poem!" And while I rummaged around for more practice paper, she made this:

I'll have to see if I can get our own little Beatnik to perform this on camera, because it really is too priceless. According to Liza, the correct reading of this is (descriptions mine):

Picnic! (very excitedly)

Mmmmm ... (like Homer Simpson)

Oh! Oh! (like uh-oh, only with two ohs)

Rain. (disappointed)

(I believe "rain" got written at the top because she ran out of room at the bottom of the paper.)

I hate being confused

Damn, I hate shopping for electronics. There are approximate 473 choices to make on the spot, and I always have the sneaking suspicion that 470 of them will perform virtually identically when I use them. Add to that the need configure new equipment with new service plans, and it's enough to make my head explode.

For example ... I hate my computer. It's a desktop, and it's as slow as molasses in January. It can literally take 10 or 15 minutes to get from pushing the "on" button to the point where my internet browser is open and functioning. Do you have any idea how annoying that is? I've left a permanent forehead-shaped dent in my desk, if that's any indication of my level of patience with this paperweight of a computer.

Okay, so it's time to replace the computer. Right now I've got a crap computer and a 10-year-old printer and a DSL connection through AT&T that I'm not even sure how much I'm paying for it because it's lumped in with my phone service charges. I'd like to replace this whole shebang with a laptop with mobile internet access. And I'd like to keep the old crappy one around and be able to connect it to the internet occasionally, just as a backup for when the 4-year-old ruins the laptop and I have to send it in for service. Can you say, extended warranty that covers everything except acts of God?

There are about 100 different models of laptops at Best Buy, all with different combinations of processors, memory, screen size, and battery life. I can pay anywhere from $200 to $2000 for a laptop, and any of them would probably work better than what I have. Whatever I get is going to require a $100 wi-fi thingus to convince my current modem to be all wireless and shit, and getting the whole mess set up so that it works with both computers will probably involve a visit from the Geek Squad. Basic Wi-Fi is included in my current DSL package, but that pretty much only works at McDonalds and Starbucks, so if I want to work at the library, that's $20 a month more to get the premiere wi-fi access on my account.

So, for an average computer ($600) and a wi-fi thingus ($100) and premiere wi-fi access ($20/mo plus I'm probably paying $30 a month for the internet itself) plus Geek Squad setup for the home network ($150 ish, I think he said), we're talking about $2050 to buy the sucker and operate it for 2 years.

On the other hand, I could go with mobile broadband access instead of wi-fi. That's about $60 a month and includes the little USB broadband hardware dingus for free (I think it's built into the computer). That lets you connect anywhere you can get a cell phone signal, and it can't be hijacked by freeloaders (ahem, MATT) the way that a wi-fi signal can. It can also just be unplugged from the laptop and plugged into the desktop when I want to use the internet on the old computer (or there's a $100 device I can buy if I want to have the broadband on both computers all the time, but I wouldn't get that right away). As far as I know, I don't need any help to get the broadband set up, although without the home network, I would be stuck plugging in my old printer with a cord when I wanted to print something (or buying a new printer with wireless printing capability).

There's a deal right now on some laptops and notebook computers where they're cheaper if you sign up for mobile broadband when you buy them. So an HP with an average amount of memory but half as much hard drive space and a 14" screen (instead of the 16" screen on the one I talked about before) is only $500. That, plus $60/month for broadband, means that it would be about $2040 to buy and operate for two years.

Yeah, so price? Not so much a deciding factor here. Even if I go with the same exact computer and just compare the wi-fi vs. mobile broadband, there's only $100 difference over two years.

But wait! There's more!

Wi-fi is cheaper per month, and depending on the level of DSL I've got (who knows which one I'm paying for? Not me, at least not until I call India on Monday) it may be faster than mobile broadband. But ... it's limited to a certain range from whatever modem is powering it, so once you get far enough away from McDonalds, you lose the signal. Mobile broadband is a little more expensive per month, but it's continuous coverage - anywhere Verizon goes, so does the internet connection. And from what I can tell, the mobile broadband is more secure than wi-fi, which requires increased vigilance about SSLs and encryption and firewalls and all that. That's important, since I just spent waaaaay too much time setting up all of our bills so they can be paid online. I'd rather not share all those usernames and passwords with the world, thank you very much.

But wait! There's more!

Currently we have our phone, internet, cell phone, and television all through AT&T. I hate my cell phone model, and it would be the same price or cheaper if I had an equivalent plan on Verizon. So that's another dozen pieces of electronics I need to decide between (flip? slide? QWERTY? grrrrrrr). We hardly ever use our landline, and we've been talking about getting rid of it for months now. That would probably save us $40 a month or so (again, it's lumped with the internet on the bill, so I'll have to call to get the actual figures).

But ... if we get our DSL through AT&T without a landline, the price for the DSL goes up. Express DSL when you have a landline is $25 a month; the same speed of DSL with no landline is $35/month. So if we cancel our landline, we save $40ish and spend $10 more for DSL. And that means that DSL with premiere wi-fi is about $55 a month (plus the wireless router and whatever it costs to set the whole mess up) and mobile broadband is $60 a month with no extra costs.

Yargh.

*********************************************

Well, that was refreshing, wasn't it? I need to write down these in-depth benefit analyses more frequently, because I think I've convinced myself that mobile broadband is the way to go. Anyone who has it and hates it, speak now or forever hold your peace :)

Doing the math

Let's see ... 6"x8"x1" = 48 square inches, but this is a triangle not a rectangle, so it's only 24 square inches of cake.

Seriously - Wild Mango, I love your cake, but I don't love it that much. Cut back on the portion size, mm-kay?

Nostalgia strikes at the oddest times

I was driving home from the movie theatre around 10:30 Friday night, cruising from stoplight to stoplight with the windows down and the radio up. After a long stretch of muggy nights, it was finally cool enough to raise goosebumps on my arms. A car pulled up next to me at a light, packed full of teenage boys goofing off ...

... and I'm 17 again, cruising Concord Pike with my version of Lloyd Dobbler after going to see a movie. We're in his mother's Celebrity, listening to the radio and talking to the other misfits on the CB he bought with the money he earned working as a grocery store bagger. I'm wearing my only "sexy" outfit, which was a tight-fitting black t-shirt (with a neckline low enough that my black bra would peek out if I wasn't careful which way I stretched) and a pair of jeans with a really cool black leather belt from Banana Republic. I can faintly smell the perfume I dotted on behind my ears, and the chill from the night air is raising goosebumps on my arms. He's holding my hand as we pull onto the twisty roads in the valley, back to the reservoir and the one-lane bridge where you have to flash your lights before you go across because you can't see the other side, and all the other landmarks I could never find on my own. We're getting lost and getting sort of found and realizing that it's 15 minutes to curfew and somehow we ended up in Toughkenamon and oh crap we'd better find a phone booth so I can call my parents.

Last night, almost 20 years after cruising Concord Pike and the valley, I drove home with the windows down, taking the longer way home on the road that winds down into our own little valley. I turned the radio up and drove with one hand on the wheel and wondered what had become of the grocery store bagger.

And I vowed to throw out that damn belt from Banana Republic, because really, 20 years is too long to keep an accessory, and in retrospect it wasn't that cool to begin with.

Since Jason is home now, I can post these

Jason went to GenCon for four days, and I went a little crazy at the hair salon ...

It feels good to be short again ... it's been a while.