Summer Bash

It was a good, if somewhat tiring, weekend.

Saturday was the Summer Bash. A lot of the people we invited couldn't make it, and it turned out to probably be just as well, because we barely fit everyone in the house as it was.

The kids (Penny, Jess, and Ray) played in the pool and then made a small wreck of the green room -- but they more or less confined themselves to the green room, Penny's room, and the deck, leaving the grownups free to sit and chat without being interrupted every three words, which was really nice.

Alex was on his very best behavior -- he napped for the first hour or more of the party, then woke up happy and cute and sociable; he didn't get overloaded and cranky until fairly close to his usual bedtime anyway, and then went to bed with relatively little fuss. Just about all that could be asked of a six-month-old!

Of course I have pictures!





More pics over at flickr, of course.

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We spent Sunday recovering and doing the usual chores. Karen came over after dinner, so we got to chat with her some more before she headed back home.

Of course, Penny started leaking goop from her eyes that evening, so she's going to the doctor today to make sure it isn't pinkeye and/or get a prescription to deal with it. ...Assuming she isn't on a field trip. I'll have to call and check up on that.

It's a short work week, of course, with the 4th on Friday. And half my office is taking Thursday and/or Monday off to extend the holiday to a 4-day weekend, so things are pretty quiet.

Despite being halfway through my run of antibiotics, I've still got fluid in my left ear and can't hear anything on that side. If it doesn't clear up soon, I may make an appointment with an ENT specialist. Though someone suggested that my persistent cough might be caused by (or at least worsened by) the smoke in the air from the peat fire in North Carolina -- if that's the case, then I'm probably stuck with both the cough and the lack of hearing for the next month. Whee.

At any rate, I've decided I don't want to wait for the ear to clear up to go back to swimming; I really missed it last week. So I'm going back tonight, and sometime this week I'll find some time to go looking for earplugs to protect my ears once I'm done with the antibiotics.

At least, that's the plan. If Penny's doctor holds us up too late, I might just go straight home afterwards, and I can't really go swimming with her in tow.

Guess it's going to be a play-it-by-ear afternoon...

Teach

Every so often, I consider giving up my job to become a teacher.

I enjoy teaching. I tutored for extra cash in college; I assistant-taught in grad school; I taught math at a business college before I landed my first programming gig.

I like building the lessons, I like coming up with new ways to explain and illustrate ideas, I like being in front of the class explaining and answering questions. I like that it sometimes forces me to consider my topic from unusual angles. Grading is tedious, but even that is scattered with occasional rewards. ("Parallelozoid" was the surprise gem of my grad school days.)

It's been my fallback plan for more than five years, if I were to lose my job -- there's always a shortage of qualified math and science teachers, and I have a master's degree. It wouldn't be too hard to get picked up by one of the local school systems with a qualification conditional. (That is, they'd hire me on condition that I meet the qualification requirements within a certain timeframe.) This isn't speculation; I actually looked into it at one point when I was particularly unhappy with my job.

It would, of course, cut my salary cleanly in half, and that's pretty much the only reason I haven't already done it. We could manage if that's what happened, but we'd have to budget a lot tighter, and some of our luxuries that we've grown used to would probably disappear.

So I was really thrilled last year when I got tapped to teach a process course for my company. Not just to the people in my office, but across the business unit. The slides I was given to teach from were pretty horrible, and I enjoyed the struggle to get them into shape. I liked teaching the class, and the feedback forms, when they eventually made their way to me, had some very nice comments and excellent suggestions.

Of course, having taught the course once, I am now apparently the go-to girl for it. When the training schedule came out in March, I was right there on it. It's extra work, but I was still happy.

I spent yesterday completely re-working the slides. From scratch. I pulled a few individual slides from the original presentation, and used it for reference so I wouldn't forget anything critical, but the experience of teaching from those slides showed me that they'd been beyond reform. I really like the new slide deck I've come up with; it's half as long and -- I think -- explains the core concepts much more clearly. It's less cluttered -- I'm doing less reading and more explaining, but it's all there in the notes section, for people who need to come back to it later. The biggest suggestions I got from last year's course were to involve the class participants more, and to provide more examples, and I think I did that.

In short, I've been having a blast. The class itself is next week, and I can't wait. Most of the trainers look on these courses as a chore, a necessary interruption of their "real" work, but for me, this is fun. The company doesn't have a dedicated teaching staff (our training staff concerns itself with scheduling, administration, and upkeep of the online training hooha), or I'd request a transfer. Too bad. At least I'll have this to look forward to every year.

Tuesday

So yesterday was Alex's six-month checkup. He is fine and fit and fat, being just a smidge over 26 inches tall (though height/length measurements are a bit suspect until they can stand on their own) and solidly eighteen and a half pounds.

(Another pound or so and I'm going to not be able to carry him in the baby seat without using both hands.)

He got one oral vaccination (which apparently is very tasty; he was giving the nurse his best "more food now" baby bird face). And he didn't cry at all for the first shot -- he just startled and blinked. The second and third, alas, apparently hurt more. But he calmed down fairly quickly, and yay for assorted nasty diseases he won't have to worry about, eh?

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I was walking down the hall at work and I saw Becky in Matt's (not my Matt, another Matt) office and she waved and smiled and I returned both as I continued on my way. I got about four steps further and then turned around and went back.

"Tonight is Book Club night, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Wow. I keep thinking today is Tuesday, for some reason."

Matt piped up, "Hey, yeah, me too!"

"And it's weird," I said, "because I spent all day Monday thinking it was Tuesday, too."

Matt said, "I did, too! How weird is that!"

"That is weird... Well, apparently, this is Tuesday Week."

Me meme

I love memes, I love about-you surveys, and I love photos. How could this not be perfect, then?

(Especially since I need to leave in 10 minutes to take Alex to the doctor for his 6-month checkup...)

First, the rules:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search.

2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image.

3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

The questions:

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your favorite food right now?

3. What high school did you go to?

4. What is your favorite color?

5. Who is your celebrity crush?

6. What is your favorite drink?

7. What is your dream vacation?

8. What is your favorite dessert?

9. What do you want to be when you grow up?

10. What do you love most in life?

11. What is one word that describes you?

12. What is your flickr name?

And now, the results:

Support

Glory and hallelujah, both kids managed to sleep last night from the time we put them to bed until almost 6 this morning. Now, if they could just keep doing that...

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Ray (the kid next door) has been gone for a week and a half, on vacation with his mom, who is a high school teacher and therefore gets things like spring break. Penny has asked nearly every day they were gone if she could play with Ray and when was he coming back?

Sunday evening, just after dinner, the doorbell rang, and there was Ray.

He came bearing gifts. He brought Penny a sparkly pinwheel with Spider-Man on it, and a toy trumpet. I'm not sure of the provenance of the pinwheel, but Ray's mom told me that she'd taken him to a fair and he won two trumpets, and immediately announced that he was going to give the second one to Penny.

Could that be any sweeter?

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Yesterday, as I was writing my blog entry and chatting on the interoffice IM with Alexis, I got a call from Penny's teacher. "Um, we have kind of a problem. I was getting ready to do Penny's BG before breakfast, and we don't have the stick thing. It's not in the bag."

Somehow, I'd managed to restock the bag with extra lancet cartridges, but missed the fact that the lancet itself was still sitting on the dining room table. And my weekly meeting was going to start in ten minutes. And even if I skipped the meeting, it would be half an hour before I could get up there. "Okay, um... just dose her for breakfast as usual and don't worry about the correction factor, and I'll make sure you have the lancet in time for lunch."

As I sat in the meeting and pondered the best way to get the lancet to school and then get to my lunchtime appointment, it occurred to me that one of my errands for this week was to return the breast pump to the hospital -- which naturally has to be done by appointment between 9 and 3, making it totally inconvenient to do on the way to the Y or to pick up the kids. As soon as the meeting was done, I called the HME office. Much to my surprise (because I usually have to leave a message) the lady picked up.

So I managed to turn that "oops, I fucked up" panic errand into a way to avoid having to take off time on Thursday (which was the last day I could return the pump without being charged for another month's rent).

Whoo!

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A girl in Penny's class at school told Penny recently that superheroes were for boys.

When Penny told me that, I was filled with indignation. "You can tell Miss Prissypants that if she wants to miss out on half the fun things in the world just because they aren't pink and bubbly, then that's fine for her, but there's more to you than lipstick and sparkly eyeshadow."

No, I didn't really say that, at least not in those words. But I wanted to. I love the way that Penny doesn't see anything remotely unusual or amusing in crossing Batman with My Little Pony, or wearing her Superman pyjamas with sequined Hello Kitty sandals. I know that our society will eventually force her to recognize the gender divide, but I want to stave it off as long as possible.

Assorted Stuff

I make no promises about coherence today.

Penny and Alex slept until 6:30 this morning. :-D

...Of course, that's probably because Alex spent from 3 to 4:30 whining and crying, and Penny got up three or four times with minor crises. ("I had a bad dream..." and a nose bleed and "I can't sleep." and...) :-(

Before that, I had an earache for half an hour or so, and then it finally drained a bit, which was even more painful. Once it stopped, it felt much better, but I probably lost an hour's sleep there. :-/

Yeah, I think the cold has grown to include a sinus infection -- one eye is all red and weepy, but it's not puffy or crusty enough to be pink-eye. And my left ear has so much fluid behind the eardrum that I'm almost completely deaf on that side. I always have trouble hearing when I'm not paying attention, but right now even if I am listening, I'm having problems. >:(

At least the decongestant is working. I decided since I'm down to nursing Alex only twice a day, and not pumping at all, that the "drying up" effect that decongestants have wouldn't really be a problem (and, in fact, something of a boon). :-)

But I think I'll probably have to skip my swimming this afternoon. Putting my sinus infection in the water to share with others is just rude. :-(

I'm going to miss it, though. The tight schedule fit is problematic, but I like the swimming, and I'm seeing obvious improvement already. Friday evening, I managed 7 laps. :-)

(When I told Matt, he misheard me as having managed 7 naps. Wow... How awesome would that be?)

We had biscuit pizzas for dinner last night, and as I went to wipe down the stoneware baking sheet, I realized that the bits of loose cheese that had fallen directly on the sheet weren't burnt; they were just browned and nicely crisp. So instead of washing the sheet, I experimented with making cheese crisps, and they turned out amazingly good. And since one "serving" of cheese makes about 8 crisps and has only 1g of carbs, they'll make a good treat for Penny from time to time. (Unfortunately, I don't think they'll keep for more than a day or so without getting chewy and stale.) :-)

100 Things

I am fascinated by the 100 Thing Challenge.

I don't know if I could do it, but I love the idea. I'd have to think about it in stages: Could I get down to 100 items of clothing? Probably; I had less than 50 in my maternity wardrobe, though by the end I was pretty damn sick of re-wearing the same clothes all the time.

Some stuff wouldn't be hard. I could probably get down to maybe 25 books pretty easily; I've already started trimming down my collection to make room for Matt's, and I don't re-read books nearly as often as I used to. I'd have no problem at all dumping every CD I own -- if something happened and I lost my entire music library, there's no way I'd spend all that time ripping all those CDs again anyway. Our 300-DVD cabinet is slam full, but most of the movies are Matt's, a healthy chunk are Penny's, and I'm fairly sure I could cut "my" movies down to 10 or so pretty easily.

Some stuff would be more difficult. How do I count scrapbooking gear? How do pictures waiting for an album count? How many sheets of paper count as a "thing"? What about scraps? Stickers, pages, cutting tools...

What about all the random kitchen and dining stuff that is technically "family stuff" but that Matt would pretty firmly label as "Liz's" -- like the zester and the chopper, or even all the china and silver that I inherited from my grandmothers?

And most difficult of all -- how would I get the rest of the family to play along?