Super!

Penny's class put on a play yesterday -- well, a series of skits. They played superheroes and supervillains. The whole thing was adorable. I think my favorite characters had to be No Homework Man (surprisingly, a villain) and Bubblegum Boy, just for sheer inventiveness.

Penny was in two skits. In the first, she was a tourist in Hawai'i, calling for help when aliens invaded and threatened to eat everything. Luckily, Ice Girl arrived! In the second, Penny was the Secret Service agent protecting the President. The bad guy in that one had hypnotic powers, and put her into a trance so she'd hand the President over. But Bubblegum Boy saved the day!

Bubblegum Boy attacked with a can of silly string, and now Penny really wants her own can of the stuff. We had a chat this morning about where, exactly, silly string could be used. (Namely: outdoors.)

After the plays, there was an "Academy Awards" ceremony, at which each child was presented with an award and got to give a speech of thanks. Penny's award was for "Most Intimidating Secret Service Agent", and she thanked her family, her parents, and her teachers.

Today she's got a class party to say farewell to the student teacher who's been helping out for the last few months. Penny's being a bit maudlin about it, actually. I'm glad there's only another month of regular school left -- she's actually looking forward to daycare summer camp this year, so that won't be a struggle for us, at least.

Exoskeletons and Platypi

Penny and I were talking about the various classifications of animals in the car this morning. In her school science class, they're currently working on the five classifications of vertebrates (birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, for those of you who haven't had biology in a while) and she really seems to have latched onto this as being worthy of her attention in a way that most of the rest of the year's science lessons haven't.

I'd say that I need to read up on my science so that I can answer her questions, but her mind is like fireworks -- a single cluster of information can explode in so many different directions that it's impossible to precisely predict where she's going to go.

This morning, over the duration of about a fifteen-minute drive, we discussed:

• Whether whales and dolphins are the only mammals that live entirely in the sea. I eventually came up with porpoises and manatees, but couldn't immediately tell her the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin.
• That sharks are fish.
• Whether snakes are slimy on their bellies (she had been misinformed by an older child, apparently).
• That worms can be slimy, but they are not snakes, but a sort of bug, since they aren't reptiles and don't have any bones.
• How bugs can stand up and walk if they don't have any bones. I got to introduce her to the word exoskeleton, which is an excellent word to know.
  
• How crabs and lobsters, despite living in the ocean, are more like bugs than like fish.
• The various obvious characteristics of reptiles (air-breathing, scales, egg-laying). She knew all this on her own -- the discussion was in how she got to present this to her class.
• The various obvious characteristics of amphibians (gills as young, lungs as adults, egg-laying, smooth skin).
• That birds have feathers, though on some birds (e.g., penguins) they're tiny and hard to see. Also, that all birds have wings, though some (e.g., penguins and ostriches) can't fly.
• The platypus, which I told her was the only mammal that lays eggs (though apparently I was mistaken, as some poking around on wikipedia reveals that echidnas are also monotremes). But since we'd reached school by this point, I pulled up a picture of a platypus for her on my iPhone while we walked up to the school so she could giggle at it.

How does one prepare for that kind of breadth of subject? You really can't, especially since a kid's level of interest can spike and then disappear to be replaced with something else entirely different. You just thank the gods for the internet and its wealth of informative sites -- and quite suddenly realize why your parents bothered shelling out for a set of encyclopedias, back in the pre-'net era.

Oh Mama

I had a super long weekend.

Friday, after I got the kids to school and did a couple of little chores, I went down to Chesapeake to have lunch with KT and Jess. We ate on the restaurant's porch, which overlooked one of the gazillion little waterways in Norfolk that they use to keep the river delta from flooding the roads, and there were about two dozen or so turtles in the water. Which served to captivate Jess so KT and I could actually talk. Though we were nearly as distracted by the wildlife as Jess was. There were a pair of geese with two fuzzy goslings, and a pretty black bird with red spots on his wings, and even a white heron for a little bit.

After we ate, we went shoe shopping, and I wound up buying three pairs of shoes. Which is actually kind of good, because I don't have any sandals for the summer. Well, I didn't. I do now -- two heeled/dressy pairs for work and Events, and one ugly-but-comfortable pair for the weekends.

Then I stopped at Target on my way home and picked up a couple of short-sleeved cardigans (an excellent way to make my assortment of tank-tops into a viable alternative for work) and a shirt and a skirt that were on clearance.

And then I got home to find that Matt had sent me flowers for Mother's Day. What a sweetie!

Saturday I got up early and met Vicki and her friend Anne at the Williamsburg Farmers' Market. Vicki and I wandered around for the better part of an hour, taking pictures of all the flowers and things.

Vicki had found a cool hack for taking macro (extreme close-up) pictures without a macro lens, so we played with that, and both of us got some cool shots. (It's not the easiest setup, and if you're not careful, it can actually be bad for both the lens and the camera body, but it's a nice way to see how interested you are in macro photography without having to invest in a macro lens right off.)

I took this with my regular old standard kit lens.
I messed with contrast and such in post-processing, but did not crop it at all.

After we'd finished taking pictures and buying tasty treats to take home (I got some bread and two quarts of fresh strawberries) the three of us went to the Blue Talon for breakfast, which was a lovely treat.

That evening, Jennie and Brian and Braz came over, and we ordered out Thai for dinner, and once the kids were in bed, we gamed.

Sunday morning, being Mother's Day, Matt got up with the kids, and they "woke" me (I'd been awake for fifteen minutes or so, and even if I hadn't, Alex made lots of noise coming up the stairs) at 9:00 with breakfast in bed: waffles (well, Eggos) with sliced fresh strawberries and syrup, and coffee, and a banana. How awesome is Matt? Not only did he make coffee for me, even though he hates even the smell of the stuff, but he also added the banana to the menu at the last minute in order to give Alex something relatively low-risk to carry up the stairs for me.

Everyone sat on the bed with me while I ate, and then followed me downstairs to open my presents -- Penny drew me some lovely pictures and a card, and had made me a necklace and bracelet out of clover, which was both clever and adorably sweet. (I wore it for a bit, but the flowers were starting to dry and were scratchy and brittle, so it didn't last long.) Matt gave me the Order of the Stick pre-prequel and a gorgeous multi-rope turquoise necklace.

After Alex's nap, we went down to John and Sam's for dinner. We gave my mom a framed set of pictures of the kids, and some roses that Penny had picked out, and a silly card that I'd picked out. The card had to do with nuts not falling far from the tree, which is relevant because -- hysterically and entirely without planning -- my brother had got her the exact same card! I'm still giggling about that one.

Dinner was awesome -- grilled chicken and pineapple with fruit salad, and raspberry cake for dessert. And Matt took on the bulk of chasing the kids around so I could take pictures and talk to my family, which was great.

So, all in all, extremely awesome weekend. Lots of relaxing and fun stuff, lots of friends, lots of family, lots of good food.

I'm so not ready to be back at work today. But tomorrow is Penny's class "Superhero" play, and then Thursday is the Jonathan Coulton concert, so there's plenty to look forward to.

Sleepy

I had the hardest time dragging out of bed this morning. I wasn't up particularly late last night, and I slept well, but the alarms going off this morning were murder.

I'm still half-dragging, despite having taken Penny to school, taken Alex for an ear checkup (all good), gotten my allergy shots, taken Alex to school, and then come in to work. I've been up for almost four hours, and my brain still refuses to wake up. It's shuffling around the house in a bathrobe, nursing a cup of coffee and flipping TV stations without even bothering to register what's on.

Forcible downtime after the whole proposal thing, I expect. Though I'm going to have to get some work done today at some point. Luckily, I have a whole stack of low-brainpower tasks waiting that should take care of today, and then tomorrow I'm taking the day off. Nope, I still don't know what I'm going to do with it, though at this point, it's looking like I'll drop the kids off at school, then go back to bed for half the day.

Looking forward to the weekend, though. Gaming Saturday and Mother's Day on Sunday, and the weather looks fantastic.

End

The end is in sight. The proposal gets delivered today, and then I can go back to a normal life. Though I only worked until 7:30 last night, which is better than I expected.

What's normal, this week? Well, let's see...

Today, we've got a bunch of corporate bigwigs in the office for a project review. I'll be at the meet-and-greet, but that's about it. Thank goodness. It being Cinco de Mayo, I'm making taco salad for dinner.

Tomorrow morning, Alex has an appointment to have his ears checked again. He hasn't had any real troubles with them, so I suspect that will go fairly smoothly. Since I've got oodles of extra time charged for the week and Matt has his bi-weekly Big Meeting, I'm the cinch to take him for that.

Friday, I'm taking the day off from work. I have no idea yet what I'm going to do with it. I just know that I'm going to make up for the weekend I didn't get.

Saturday, Vicki invited me to go with her to the Farmer's Market in the morning to be a photography nerd. I need to figure out if I can do that or not. And that evening, Jennie and Brian and Braz are coming over and we'll have dinner and then game. (Or else, y'know, we'll just sit around and talk a lot. However it works out.)

Sunday is Mother's Day, so John and Sam are hosting dinner for us and the parents. I'm supposed to bring a fruit salad.

And that's about as far ahead as I've thought. Now it's time for me to go make those last-minute proposal updates.

Madness

Cranked up with stress over the proposal and everything, I decided I wanted to go to Rock Band night last night, so I could hit something with sticks and not, you know, get arrested.

It was just Braz and me to start out (Vicki and Elizabeth being at the pool league tournament) and since I didn't really care what the music was as long as I got to play drums, I gave that choice up to Braz. So naturally, he put in Beatles Rock Band and decided we should do the entire Abbey Road album. Vicki showed up two songs in, so we got her a beer and a guitar and started over.

Once that was done, we broke for snacks and beer. Braz checked his RSS feed, and showed us some pictures. We talked about the totally awesome Nerf sword and battleaxe Braz had seen at Target, and we all agreed that we needed to own these things. Braz put Super Mario Brothers in, and he and Vicki played a level.

And then he decided he needed to try out Mad World, which he'd picked up on super-sale from Amazon and hadn't played yet. This is billed as an ultra-violent game. There's really no story. Just a dystopian post-apocalyptic environment, black-and-white graphics that really want to look like, say, Sin City, but kind of fall short, and lots and lots and lots of different ways to kill guys. Nothing wrong with that, mind -- sometimes, you just want to hit things with sticks.

Shamus Young did a Stolen Pixels comic about it which is, actually... kind of accurate.

Anyway, Braz was impatiently tooling through the opening dialogue and trying to get to the play portion of the tutorial while Vicki and I watched. "Look at the guy's ass," I told Vicki. I couldn't tell if they were trying for jeans or leather or what, but the guy's pants were low-riders that hugged his ass so tight you could practically count the hairs. "There's no way those pants have enough room in them for the jewels."

"That's why he's so pissed!" Braz suggested. Finally up to the action parts of the games, he started generating mayhem.

"Bitch!" accused one of the bad guys. Vicki and I busted up laughing.

"Who's your daddy?!" the game demanded. I tweeted something about how Vicki and I were watching Braz play the game and analyzing its homoerotic subtexts for the amusement value. (Only, you know, because I was laughing so hard, I wasn't nearly that erudite about it.)

Then it started getting into items, and the usable items that weren't phallic were all made of rubber, and it stopped being a subtle subtext.. Suddenly the entire thing ceased to be an ultraviolent killfest and became a poignant glimpse into the designer's deeply closeted fantasies.

We may well have ruined the game for Braz, but it's been a long time since I laughed that hard.

When It Rains

Like flipping a switch, as soon as May arrived, the weather decided to become summery: highs in the 80s and 90s, lots of sun, great outdoors weather.

So, naturally, I spent the weekend at work, trying to get this proposal cleaned up and ready to deliver this week. Well, half of it, anyway. My friend Alexis is in town to conduct a training class, so we had her over for dinner last night, and that was a great break.

But I spent seven hours Saturday and four hours Sunday in my office's freezing conference room, rewriting a 45-page document line by line to try to make it read smoothly and compellingly, while making sure we also covered all the requirements and used the same language the customer was using, and... like that.

The weird thing is that, aside from the whole working overtime on the weekends thing, this is the part of the job I actually really enjoy.

We didn't finish, by any stretch, but what's left is work that only needs one person to do -- there's a few sentences to write, and I need to make sure we're defining all our acronyms before we use them, and update a few graphics, and then do a final scrub on the formatting to get everything pretty and neat.

I've got today and tomorrow to do that. I'm relatively certain I can get it all done in that time without having to work overtime, depending on when the last pricing spreadsheet comes in. (Translation: I'm a ridiculous optimist, and will probably be here late Tuesday.)

Of course, none of our other work has stopped in the meantime, so I've got other documents to review, spreadsheets to update, meetings to attend and hold...

So, quite naturally, I noticed last night as I was getting ready for bed that my throat felt a little sore. And this morning it's noticeably worse. I peered at it with a flashlight, and I don't see those telltale white spots you get with strep throat, but whatever it is, this is the Wrong Time for me to be getting sick. So I shall be roundly ignoring it and pretending it's just allergies until Wednesday or Thursday.

Wish me luck. It's time to grab some coffee and dive into the document.