My Best Boy

Nope. It's simply not possible that this sweet stocking-stuffer was born five whole years ago. Somehow, he went from this adorable little munchkin:

To this big boy -- older now, in fact, than his sister was in the previous picture!

He's shown here with one of his birthday presents -- a toy 4x4 that you put together yourself with the toy drill/screwdriver/ratchet.

Okay, it's not really a drill. But it is pretty nifty. It's battery-powered, of course, but it has a standard direction-changing switch, and it came with three tips -- flat screwdriver, Phillips screwdriver, and a hex bolt ratchet. (I need to see if there are other toys you can buy that work with it, because the flat-head screwdriver wasn't needed at all for this set.) It took Alex a little while to get the hang of changing out the tips and figuring out which way to flip the direction switch, but he got it eventually.

There were a fair number of steps in the car assembly process.

First, you use the bolt/lugnut ratchet to put on the wheels. Then you switch to the Phillips head screwdriver to put the seats onto the chassis.

Then you put the main body on, locking it down with the spare tire in the back and the grill in the front.

Then you put on the hardtop, and finally, you're ready to ride! Alex decided the back of the car would be a good place to store the drill tips. Good thinking, Alex!

(And yeah, the directions do recommend putting the wheels on last, and we did actually did do it that way. My confession is that, in fact, I took these pictures while Alex was disassembling the car, in which process he left the wheels to the end.)

I admit that I was worried there were too many steps or that the use of the tool would be too complicated for him. But as I said, he caught on to the drill pretty quickly, and he figured out the vehicle assembly even faster. I helped him put it together the first time, after which he disassembled it entirely by himself, then put it back together with only one or two verbal hints from me (and help with one screw where the plastic threading is a little too tight for the tool's little motor).

And then, since Penny was watching a movie by this point and complaining about the noise, he took it into the playroom, where he completely disassembled it and reassembled it entirely without help.

And then did it again about half an hour later.

I don't know how much use he'll get out of this toy, especially once he gets his other birthday and Christmas presents, but it certainly seems to be a hit for today.

Happy birthday to my best boy.

Thus Begins

Haven't posted all week, have I?

That's 'cause I got sick and stayed home for a few days, and there wasn't much to talk about, really, except, you know, sick-people things, and that's not often terribly interesting. The short form: I was really, really positive it was strep, but it wasn't.

But when I got home from work today, I started the weekend. And -- you might ask -- how did I start the weekend, that prompts a late-in-the-day blog post?

Well, first I started it by turning on the house Christmas lights:

Then I opened a package that contained a new pair of shoes (the last of the things I'd ordered with my birthday money):

Then I inflicted a minor injury on myself:

It's a blood blister. Or, more precisely, a pair of them. On my pinky finger. Yes, it hurts quite a bit. I got it while putting up Penny's new curtains:

And now the boys who live across the street won't be able to watch her changing clothes any more.

And thus begins my weekend. Huzzah!

On Trees and Cheese

"Mom! I drew you a picture!"

"That's awesome, sweetie, thank you! Oh, what a really nice Christmas tree!"

"Yeah! I drew it with marker!"

"I see that. ...What's this on top?"

"It's a cheese! With a big bite out of it!"

"Um. Okay. Um. Why is there a cheese with a bite out of it on top of my Christmas tree?"

"Because I can't draw a star!"

Well, you can't argue with that.

Creepy and Cold (But In a Good Way)

I spent Thursday and Friday working from home in the hopes that Saint Nicholas-- wait, wrong hope. In the hopes that I'd get my heater/furnace replaced. But the company doing the repair had to reschedule me -- one repair scheduled before mine was running longer than expected, and they bumped up another one for a house that had no heating at all, not even emergency heat.

I suppose I can accept that. They're scheduled this time to come out tomorrow, so I probably will not be blogging.

Aside from that, I had a pretty busy weekend. I took a long lunch on Friday and went shopping, and knocked out almost all the rest of my Christmas shopping (I just have to order cards and my dad's annual calendar, and then take Penny shopping for a couple of her friends). I got some editing done, and made some Christmas gifts for the kids' teachers (except I need the kids to sign them before they're officially done, but I'll get them to do that tonight, and then I can wrap them and that's all done). I spent most of Saturday morning and a couple of hours Sunday night working on a book trailer for He Loves Me For My Brainsss, which is coming out in about a month.

Saturday afternoon, I went to KT and Kevin's for their Creepy Christmas Party. KT, being the music freak that she is, hired Jonah Knight to come and perform for her (I think it was part of a kickstarter, or some similar crowdfunded effort). I was expecting the kids present to be a problem, but aside from some in-and-out at the beginning, they were remarkably well-behaved. And the music was great, of course. I have a new favorite novelty Christmas song ("Bacon and Beer", which, alas, is not actually available for sale) and I didn't bring any cash with me to KT's party, but I will be sure to have some on hand at MarsCon. (And during the break between his two sets, Jonah agreed to let me use his zombie song as background music for my book trailer, whoo!) After Jonah finished singing, we had a Geeky Gift Exchange, in which the ring I brought was well-liked, and Greg kindly rescued me from the wacky wig I first opened so that I could go home with a fairly impressive Nerf gun. After that, all the ladies posed on the bed with Jonah (there was apparently a joke with his wife about groupies), and then we all went out to a Chinese buffet for dinner. Mm, Chinese buffet.

Pictures, you say? Why, yes, I do have pictures!

Sunday morning, I ran a bunch of errands, and then after lunch, I drove up to W&M campus to meet Elizabeth for a craft show. I'd forgotten about it being Grand Illumination night -- all of CW and campus were already swarming. It was insane. But I found a parking space over at Zable Stadium and walked from there (more or less in the break between the Old and New campuses) up to the Campus Center, where the craft show was being held. (Holy CRAP, am I out of shape... It's hard to believe that I once did that walk, and longer ones, several times a day, at top speed.)

The craft show was nice, though; I picked up a new necklace, and also stumbled across the most amazing handmade chocolate ever. It's made with, they swear, absolutely no sweeteners. At all. No sugar, no honey, no agave, no artificial sweeteners. Nothing. Just cocoa and salt. So the resulting chocolate is low in both calories and carbs. And unlike artificially sweetened chocolate, which tastes kind of like chocolate-scented wax, this stuff. Is. Amazing. And best of all: they have a physical store right here in Williamsburg. I bought some coffee spoons at the show -- I figure I'll split them between the kids' stockings (only instead of coffee, I'll give them warm milk to make chocolate milk with). Each coffee spoon is only about a third of a gram of carbs, which means Penny can pig out on all six of hers in one day if she wants!

I ended the day with some editing and some slouching about watching television, though I ended up staying up a good hour and a half later than I'd intended trying to finish the book trailer and get it uploaded.

All in all: an excellent weekend!

This coming weekend promises to be excessively busy, but it should all be loads of fun, so I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks Given

What a very weird Thanksgiving holiday that was. Some parts were fantastic, some incredibly frustrating, and some just plain weird.

There wasn't anything much happening at work on Wednesday, so I took my day off and headed down to Jenn and Brian's around mid-morning. The plan... the plan was that Jenn was going to ride with me, and we'd follow Brian to Blacksburg.

All was ready. The dogs were loaded in the car with Brian to drop off at the kennel, Jenn and I were in my car, and I turned it on...

...and the dashboard lit up with all kinds of lights and warnings. Most notably, the "Check Engine" light, which can occasionally be merely ignored, and the "Engine Hazard" light, which... probably should not be.

Well.

After some discussion, we decided we'd just all ride up together, and Jenn and Brian would head back home a day early so I could keep my schedule. Brian, who is a Car Guy, promised to check out a diagnostic computer from their local auto repair shop when we got back on Friday so that he could read the error codes and decide whether the car was safe to drive home or if we'd need to call AAA to tow it to the local shop and try to find a rental for the weekend.

Despite being a little fretful about the car, we had a good couple of days. Jenn's Aunt Jeanne and Uncle David are great people, and I got to meet her oft-mentioned cousin, Chris. We went for a hike on Thanksgiving morning (apparently a family tradition) that was quite nice, and then came back and had a really great dinner. We broke for a nap and then came back for dessert, and then wrapped up the day with a game of Cards Against Humanity, and inaugurated a homemade question card: "Thanksgiving is incomplete without _____." It would've been perfect if we could've played "Smallpox blankets" as the answer card. I forget, now, what actually won that one, but the game itself was quite fun.

As re-planned, we came home Friday. I have to admit, the drive was much more pleasant with friends in the car to talk to.

When we pulled into Jenn and Brian's again, I figured I should check my car again before Brian headed out to get the diagnostic computer. I started the car up and... the hazard light was gone. Just the check engine light remained. Which rather underscored my suspicion that the car had been pitching a hissy about an electrical hiccup having to do with plugging my phone into the DC power adapter before turning the car on, and made me decide I could risk driving home before taking it to the shop, at least.

So I turned the car back off and went inside to use the bathroom and let them know about my decision. I promised I'd call if I had any more problems, and then went back out... and this time, when I turned the car on, not even the check engine light came on. Nothing. The dashboard stayed dark, innocent as puppy eyes.

Apparently, the gods had just REALLY wanted us to all drive up to Blacksburg together.

So I came home and picked up the kids and life continued apace.

Saturday morning I started putting up our Christmas decorations, exciting the kids to a fever pitch. And that afternoon, we went down to my parents' for my family Thanksgiving, and that was great. Not really anything to report -- it was a pretty standard family gathering. Penny and Alex were pretty fantastic, playing together most of the time so I actually got to talk to my family a bit. Alex hit Maximum Fun Quotient a few times, but being Alex, cheered up again pretty quickly afterward.

Sunday morning at breakfast, a... noise came from the heater vent. A weird, rattle-y, shuddery noise. You know in Doctor Horrible, when the Freeze Ray fails and Dr. Horrible looks around at it and says, "That's... not a good noise"? It was kind of like that. The kids looked at the vent as if it might explode, and then the heater fan stopped working. I poked at things a bit, but eventually had to turn the whole thing off because a sort of burned-plastic smell was leaking from the vents in other parts of the house.

The rest of the day was better -- we got the Christmas tree up, and Penny befriended a couple of cats wandering the neighborhood who had decided to camp on our deck. (They were obviously not actually homeless, as they were well-fed and in excellent health, but she tried to convince me to keep them anyway, as they were very friendly and happy for her to pet them.) We generally had a nice, low-key kind of day, despite the slowly dropping temperature.

I didn't post yesterday because I was at home in the morning, waiting for the repair guy to come and fix the heater. Fortunately, the problem with the fan took him all of about ten minutes to find and fix. Unfortunately, while he was at it, he noticed a pretty nasty leak in the heater's innards that suggested some ugly things, culminating in the news that I need to have an entirely new unit installed. Shouldn't have surprised me too much, really, because this unit is 14 years old, and these things typically have a life span of 10-15 years, so... yeah. He called around and got some estimates, and the price he eventually quoted me is a lot less than I was afraid it would be... but still a pretty big chunk of cash.

So that's scheduled for Thursday. In the meantime, I've only got the emergency heat setting, which works, but draws a lot more power than the usual setting, so I'm trying to keep it set as low as I can tolerate (around 65), and remembering to turn it down to about 60 when I leave for work in the morning, and being grateful that the house's insulation is actually fairly decent, and hoping that the new unit will be more efficient.

Argh. All my stuff is elderly and starting to fail.

Too Much TV

I find myself once again in the position of doing three jobs instead of my usual two. Which is seriously cutting into my blogging time.

Also, it has several weird side-effects on my brain, which are probably interrelated, and can most adequately be summarized as: I'm freaking scatterbrained. Like, even more than usual, which if you've been around here long you will know is pretty damned scatterbrained. So I apologize in advance for the random, almost Joycian, tone of this post.

***

When I go home at night and am done with work for the day, I don't want to do anything remotely intellectual, so I end up watching a lot of TV.

As of this weekend, I'm all caught up on Sherlock. Still loving it. Can't wait for more. Which is fantastic because I generally don't like mysteries. (Yeah, I know, I watch Castle, but that's all about Nathan Fillion and the characters, not the mysteries themselves.) I think possibly my very favorite thing about Sherlock is how everyone, everyone, everyone thinks Sherlock and John are lovers. In my mind, it happened over a few beers in the writers' room:

"You know the entire internet is going to be shipping these two."

"God, yes. But I don't see any way to discourage it."

"Then let's not. Let's just run with it. Make it part of the show bible that everyone just assumes they're sleeping together."

"That's horrible. And brilliant. Do it."

It fills me with utter glee every time it happens, or every time Watson mutters under his breath about people talking.

(Do I ship them? Absolutely. But in a strange way, because Sherlock is very asexual to my mind. But the fact that John can't keep a girlfriend fills me with delight.)

***

Holy shit, I think I just linked Sherlock and Collin, a little bit. Because I'm a nerd.

***

Speaking of my being a nerd, yesterday I got restless and went out shopping, and I bought Christmas decorations I probably didn't need and also I bought a pair of shoes. They are simultaneously the hippest and nerdiest thing that I currently own.

Hip, because, well. They're Converse. Not even cheap knockoffs!

And nerdy, because the reason I got them was because I'm putting together my Doctor Who cosplay costume:

(The shoes are red in that picture, but he has an apparently unlimited supply of them in various colors.) Complete with working up a Doctor-appropriate (happily excited!) patter about a somesuch field that had been bombarded with thisorthat particles that must have caused a radical rearrangement of certain physical characteristics -- tall to short, thin to fat, and, yes, male to female. And yes, I did in fact order a sonic screwdriver with some of my birthday money. I need to hit up some thrift stores for a buttondown shirt and a tie, though.

So, yeah. NERRRRRRRD.

***

I'm only just beginning season three of the new Doctor Who show, though, which makes me wonder if I'll be able to catch up before MarsCon. I love it, but I find I can't watch more than about two episodes at a time. It's heartbreaking, even when I'm laughing hysterically.

But I just finished season three of How I Met Your Mother, which is almost as heartbreaking at times, but I pop through those shows like candy. It helps that they're shorter, I suppose. And that I know everything is going to end happily for everyone, no matter how painful it is to get to.

***

And now, my dear friends, I have rambled enough. Or possibly just a bit too much. It's hard to tell. But at any rate, I'm still doing three jobs and at least two of them are pinging urgently right now, so I'd best get to it. I'd promise to try to write more regularly, but... it's probably not in the cards for this week, at least. If I don't post before then, have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Best. Birthday Present. EVER.

Sometime last week, Penny asked what I wanted for my birthday, and I told her, "You know what I'd love? If you wrote a story for me, because you have such a great imagination."

I fully expected her to start writing, then forget about it and just make me a card instead. That would've been fine, really.

(And let me interject here that Alex wrote me a card. It says "I LOVE YOU MOM. TO MOM FROM ALEX" It's worth noting that a) he did not ask for ANY HELP in writing this; b) he spelled everything correctly; and c) he wrote all the letters and words in correct left-to-right, top-to-bottom order (which has been a challenge for him up to now). So that's a 100% awesome birthday card to receive from a not-yet-5-year-old.)

But Penny really did write me a story. And she made it into a little book, with pictures, and she decorated the front and back with lines that are obviously intended to make it look like it's a leather-bound book.

Real hand-drawn leatherette look!

And the story itself is beyond awesome, on many levels, for many reasons. So because I'm so ridiculously proud, I'm going to share it with you. With annotations.

Once there was a princess as beutiful as a rose and as fierce as a lion.(*) She was to be a queen. But she wanted to be a worrier(**). The king and queen kept telling her to act like a princess not a warrior. She kept sneaking out at night to practice to be a warrior. She was a complete warrior by 1202 June.(***) She was to get married in three days! What should she do!!

I know she said. I'll sneak out and "kill" my future "husband".(****) Her warrior friends took her with them on thier next adventure! They told her that they would have to take her to some friendly lion to answer a question. She loved the idia of geting to see some real live lions so she speed up to a run. She was so exited that she was there it twenty seconds.

She fell into a hole and spraned her ankle. She had hard time walking her companions helped her. Over a couple of nights they camped! In a couple days they reached the secret door that heled the riddle. It said fion - f + L and at the end s equals what? They said Lions and they could enter.(*****) They asked the question and then left.

A cheetah was waiting by the door. They could tell by the black tear marks near the eyes.(******) It purred at them to get on. So they did. It started to walk. Next it walked fast. Then it joged. Finally it ran so quick all they could hear were the leaves. They got back to the castle. She knew what awaited her.

She went inside and there wasn't what she expected. There was no prince no ring no suitors. She saw that the king and queen awaited her insted. The people gatherd in rows. She steped up to the queen and king. They awarded her to be the most brave, skilled, clever, and smartes princess there ever was. She got two swords a pet dragon and she was allowed to be a warrior.(*******)

* - Best opening line EVER. But I may be biased.
** - I've left in all her spelling and grammar mistakes, with this one exception: she spelled "warrior" as "worrier" all the way throughout, and while I knew what she meant, I've fixed it for you for the rest of this transcription, to avoid it being too distracting.
*** - I love this precision.
**** - No, I don't know what's with the quotes. Or the violence.
***** - Penny wrote a similar "clue" in the card she made me as to what my present was.
****** - This is a fact about cheetahs she read somewhere. But it's a real thing. Google "cheetah tear marks" if you don't believe me.
******* - Yeah, that's right. My girl wrote a story about a warrior princess that didn't marry a prince at the end, but instead got a pet dragon. (I admit to being a little relieved that she forgot to actually "kill" the future "husband", though.)

I can't even tell you how proud I am that my girl wrote me this story, or how pleased to have such a fantastic birthday gift.

I should also note that as soon as we got home, she started making a storybook for Alex. That one is about a puppy who is being teased by some other dogs and learns how to handle the bullies.

That's my girl.