The Littlest Rock Band

Last night, John wanted to play Rock Band, but Hannah was already playing Sims on my laptop and I was sewing, so he had to play with himself.* He didn't have a preference for a particular instrument, so Hannah picked for him--singing, which he hardly ever does. He made his way through some Nirvana, Wheezer, Fu Fighters, and Blue Oyster Cult, and then for some unfathomable reason, he chose a French song. Since we have the German version of Rock Band, we have some additional tracks in German, and apparently this one in French. It's a catchy song, except since none of us actually speak French, we have no idea what is being said. You can have a peek at it here, Manu Chao by Les Wampas.



It's a rather fast song, so even if John could read the French, the words were flying by so quickly on the screen he would barely have been able to sing along (which also happened on the Fu Fighters track). He ended up basically making up words and singing in a horrible nasal tone that was supposed to approximate French; Hannah and I laughed so hard I thought she might wet herself. And to top it off, when his score came up and he had a chance to add his name to the high-score list, he was perturbed to find that he was only number six, since none of us had ever done that song before.

I think Hannah is the only one of us before last night that has played Rock Band alone as a singer, but I never payed attention to the avatars while she was singing (which is basically the only time you get a clear look at them without the guitar/drum line in the way). The only reason I payed attention last night was that I had recently read that Courtney Love was pissed about the way the avatar for Kurt Cobain had turned out for Guitar Hero.



Hannah has always commented on the appearance of the avatars--"Get a haircut, hippies!" (I think she's channeling Richard Nixon)--but I just noticed that one in particular bears a strong resemblance to a character from The Dark Crystal:



"Hi, I'm a Gelfling!"



Uncanny, no?

Post number 2 for October

As promised, I blogged our trip to wine country over on my travel blog. I can't imagine that I will be able to keep up this level for the whole month, but who knows--there are still lots of trips we made last year that never got blogged. That should take up several days of work/writing.

Enjoy!

National Blog Posting Month

I decided to bite the bullet and join NaBloPoMo, which you can find out more about here. If you were to judge by my recent posting, I am sure you would say, "Ha!" And you might still be right, but I am going to give it the old college try.

I was looking for something in my archives the other day and noticed that the number of posts I had up had decreased from one year to the next from when I started, and that disturbed me a bit. Recently, I have felt extra boring and reserved, which I don't find very conducive to writing chatty blog posts. I don't really want to be boring and reserved, and yet, that may be all I have to write about this month. Suffer, Popes!

Yesterday, I granted myself the leisure of surfing the Internet because I had gotten up and worked and taken a walk and just generally been righteous. I waswearing the Empire Strikes Back t-shirt* I acquired while in Louisiana, and spotting the NaBloPoMo badge above seemed like a good sign that joining was the right thing for me to do now. Also, Obi-Wan makes everything better.

Anyhow, this is my official first post, since I plan to blog throughout the month of October as my penance *ahem* project, but I thought I would give my victims a chance to run for the hills for the next month, if the mood strikes you that way.

I am much more likely to do something if I plan it out in advance, so I am cheating by writing this on the last day of September to post on the first day of October, but on the second day of October, I plan to put up a link to a to-be-written (not cheating!) post on my travel blog about our recent outing to the wine festival in Freinsheim.

*I wore this shirt the day before yesterday, too, but yesterday I layered it over a long-sleeved shirt. It is currently one of my woobie items and is in frequent rotation. It caused the pharmacist to have difficulties making change for me because she was mesmerized by Darth Vader.



Mesmerizing, no?

Then she told me about a Lego youtube video where Darth Vader orders a pizza, maybe like this one here:



I mean, what do you expect if you argue with Darth Vader about the pizza toppings? Sheesh.

Vampires R Us

A facebook friend posted this picture:



I love "the section formerly known as young adult", by the way.

Anyhow, I was telling John about it, and he declared that people's fascination with vampires and their perception of them as sensual is kind of dumb, because "no one goes up to a woman and wants to *withdraw* fluids from her."

(He thought this might be too tacky to post, but tacky R Us.)

Fall into Fall

Now that my balcony garden is gasping its last breath and my once-noble walnut trees look like sticks in a bucket,



I thought I would look back on the weeks of pleasure I got out of tinkering with seeds and dirt this year.

When I started out, I didn't have any grand ambitions, such as feeding my family solely from the fruits of my labors or opening a stand at the farmers' market; rather, I just wanted to see if the seeds Hannah and I had been collecting in the kitchen would sprout and/or thrive. I totally love cantaloupe, so I was thrilled to see that it took off



at first, but it was not to be. I started the seeds in the sunroom upstairs, but after a certain point, they just pooped out, even after I moved them outside.

Fortunately, my pepper plants didn't follow the lead of the cantaloupe.



I just threw a bunch of seeds in a couple of pots and ended up with a ton of plants putting on bell peppers and hot peppers. Luckily, most of them survived our absence in August, so I came back to lovely fruit:



and



I've since stringed up the peppers to dry, which may or may not be successful since it has been cool and a bit damp recently, but I would like it if my gardening efforts lasted longer than the warm weather here.

I also had cilantro sporadically (sorry, Jooge), which we loved for making guacamole when we could get decent avacados, and some basil that just wouldn't die but surprisingly didn't bolt, even though we heard August was hot while we were gone.



I also made compost, despite John's protests that it would stink and attract flies.



I found some lovely grubs in the soil we bought, so I tipped them into the compost and they cheerfully slithered their way down into it. *shudder* Lovely! I had been trying to turn the compost regularly, but while we were in Texas stuff started to sprout in it. So I came back to a pot full of mystery plants.



I swear a lot of them look like tomato plants, but I don't recall putting tomatoes in there. Oh, well, they'll be dead soon enough when it finally turns cold.

Next year I would like to get more food plants to grow, although I don't have any specific ideas of what I want to plant, just not more bell peppers, although they are pretty easy.

My other gardening love is our row of window boxes. The house we live in has some typical southern German gingerbread trim, complete with window boxes, but it pained me to pay hundreds of dollars to fill them with equally typical hanging geraniums, so I have been buying packets with mixes of seeds to pack in there. What I like about them is that the mix invariably includes early and late sprouters, flowers that like the heat and flowers that like the cold, tall and short, and a variety of colors. In the spring and summer, there is nothing I like better than to get up and get a cup of coffee to take onto the balcony and survey my little seedlings in the early morning sunlight that is special to that time of the year. Sometimes I have an interesting guest



or two.



Mostly I enjoy trying to figure out what is going to bloom next. It is always a pleasant surprise.



Yesterday I trimmed all the dead plants in the flower boxes and moved them to the floor of the balcony and then swept up all the dead leaves for the compost. After Xmas I will start sorting through my already purchased flower seeds and planning how I want to arrange them so I can see them through the kitchen window after the spring equinox. I'm looking forward to it.

Feel the Burn

I seem to have developed an aversion to the blank page. A strong aversion. The kind I normally reserve for flan



or Carrot Top.



It's that bad. I find myself opening MS Word and then closing it or even getting up and leaving the room. Same thing with my notebook. I carry it around the house with me but don't actually open it.

I guess I should just suck it up and post what I have, but I can't promise anyone will enjoy it. Here goes:

Title: "The French Braid of Life"

Most of the time, I am pretty dextrous when it comes to keeping all the hairs under control while I weave them into the 'do of life, but lately more and more strands are slipping out of my hands and making a snarly mess of things.


...and that's all I had. After I wrote it, I realized it sounded horribly melodramtic. Mostly I was thinking about how the act of cleaning Hannah's room led to a bunch of other tasks. For instance, I went through Hannah's closet and got rid of the clothes she had outgrown. She refuses to part with almost anything--"the memorieeeeeees!" (shades of her grandfather)--so I just went in while she was otherwise occupied and sifted through her closet. A lot of clothes went to charity, but she had ripped the knees out of all her jeans, so they weren't donate-able. I couldn't see throwing away 5 pairs of jeans, so I cut them into strips



(the whiskey cannister became the spool for the finished "thread" later) and crocheted them into a rag rug for my kitchen.



That was a whole day of work.

I managed to talk Hannah into giving away her dress-up clothes (heads up to Lil Sis and Jooge: she wants them to go to your little ones), but that meant sorting them and packaging them to go in the mail, whenever that happens. That also meant that I had now freed up two shelves in her closet.

She wanted me to convert her tall play bed into a regular low bed, but first we had to figure out where to put all the stuff (so.much.stuff) that had been under the play bed. Four days of cleaning and sorting resulted in a low bed and a half-empty room, plus a yard-trimming-sized bag of garbage plus 5 other shopping bags worth of garbage. Plus a bunch of mini-electronics (I hate you, McDonald's) that had to go to the special recycling center instead of the garbage can. Plus the rest of the play bed parts that had to be wrapped up and put in the cellar.

Once we had her room under control, it was time to go shopping for a desk to go in it. We headed down south to the opposite end of town from where we live, where we:
1. bought 2 months worth of cat litter,
2. bought a desk and chair and sought in vain for something else for Hannah's bed,
3. bought a mixer, a blender, a kitchen radio, and an MP3 player (I lost mine in Texas, probably on the plane on the way there), and
4. bought corn chips.
As you can see, we have to take advantage of the long trek to do several errands at once.

I put the chair together that night and the desk the next day. Of course, I put it together wrong on the first try (damned unlabeled parts) and had to redo part of it. grrr... Then I had a big pile of cardboard to get rid of, also at the special recycling place. The whole project felt like dealing with the Hydra. And now that I've written it all out, I am almost as tired as when I actually did it. Actually, I just finished the last thing (trip to the recycling place) this morning, so I guess I have a right to feel that tired.

And on that note, I'm off to bed.

Dipping a Toe In

(Yesterday, upon discovering a Tupperware of pistachios in the fridge):
Me: What are your dad's nuts doing in the fridge?
Hannah: Um, that didn't sound good.
Me: Ye-es, I could have put that better.

Ewww!

Ok, lady I passed yesterday on the street--I know I am not exactly a fashion plate myself, but we have to talk. About your tights. I know you probably think they are kicky or something, but I have to tell you that you look like you were holding a breast-fed baby that then had an ass-plosion all down your legs. Please, for the love of all that is holy, save the tights for at home. Thank you.

Pinkie

The weather held out yesterday, and Hannah got cut loose from school early, so we went to the pool. I am not a pool person, but I had promised John I would take her if the weather was good, so I found myself waist-deep in cold water--well-water cold--at 4 yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, I only remembered to put sunscreen on my body (50 SPF, baby!), so I had to get out quickly (I wasn't complaining!) and slather up my face. Hannah said I looked like Jasper the Ghost. When I explained it was Casper, she complained that she couldn't be expected to know American culture when we dragged her over here, etc. etc. But then I pointed out that various Casper movies had been on German tv, and that to my certain knowledge she had watched them, and that the name had not been changed. Well, ::bluster::. Sometimes my child is a bit of a blowhard. I hope I am not modeling that kind of behavior, but maybe.

Anyhow, ten minutes of sunscreen-free pool-standing, and now my face is a bit pink. Not even really uncomfortable, but when you are as pale as me, ten minutes is all it takes.

Holding down the fort

John is off learning Gaelic in Scotland, so I am holding down the fort with Hannah during her last full week of school. Today she is supposed to do the dialogue for two characters from the Nibelungen; I have no idea what the project is, but she's been practicing her lines and figuring out a way to indicate she has changed characters--jacket, no jacket. I wonder if Siegfried would have worn a tank top?

After weeks and weeks without a tv, and almost as many weeks of Hannah hounding us to please please please buy a new tv, we spent John's last afternoon at home tv shopping. I must say, the mall-like shopping center is much easier to survive on a Friday afternoon than anytime on a Saturday. I wasn't even actively craving death when we left! Of course, we dropped a large chunk of my recent paycheck for teaching 2 courses last semester, but we walked out with a 37-inch flat-screen tv (plus 5-year warranty), a week's worth of groceries for me and Hannah, a water-proof jacket for John, and two new non-stick pans. (Oh, yeah, also about 100 pounds of cat food and cat litter.) So if it was squeaking close to 4 figures, you can imagine why. Anyhow, we came home and set the tv up, and it is great. There are enough connectors in the back that we can have the DVD player, VCR, and Wii hooked directly to it and still have space for one more device and a computer (if we had the right cable for that). Hannah has figured out how to work all the most important functions, such as changing the screen size and switching between Nick and the Wii, so I think we are all set up now, and with a minimum of pain.

John and I used to have a daily routine like this: get up, fix Hannah a snack for school, dodge the minefield of Hannah's emotions at 6:45 am, make coffee, and settle in for some CNN and coffee. Without the tv, we had to resort to talking with each other. The horror! Now that we have a tv again, I tried out the CNN morning routine, but it just wasn't the same without John here. So I flipped around and watched some German news instead, but that was too depressing, so I decided to get to work on my stack of editing that is waiting on me.

Not that I am, but soon, Grasshopper.

I promised John that I would take Hannah swimming if the weather was good, but so far, no luck. On Sunday, it would pour rain for an hour, be miserably dark and wet for a while, then we'd get ten minutes of full sun, just enough for you to wonder if it would be possible to go swimming, at which point it would start to rain again. Yesterday it didn't actually rain, but dark clouds chased each other across the sun all day. Plus, Hannah didn't even get home from school until after 4, and she won't today, either, so that is not so conducive to eating dinner and going to bed at a normal time if we were to try to stuff in swimming, too. And yesterday I was totally wiped out. I almost fell asleep on the bus and didn't even care, I was that tired. I came home and found a spot under the window that got whatever sunshine there was available and took a nap for 2 hours. I feel like I have the tiniest smidge of a cold, which I wish would either do its thing and go away, or just go away, because it is getting really annoying.

Hannah and I have a date with Harry Potter on Thursday (cheap ticket day at the theater). I've heard good things about the film, with the caveat that it is not the film Potter-fanatics would wish for. Fair enough. I didn't even go see the last Potter film; I let Hannah go with some friends, but I wasn't really in the mood to see the latest mangling of the story.

I don't know when I can expect to hear back about my thesis. The whole process was a long string of deadlines, but they don't tell you what the deadline is for the professors who are evaluating your thesis, probably to keep people from harrassing them once the deadline is up. Not me. I am kind of afraid of what I'll get back, so I am actively avoiding them. Oh well, one of them lives in Northern Germany most of the time, so I doubt I'll just run into her at the grocery store, but the other one lives just up the hill from me (we use the same bus stop), so the simple act of taking the bus can be nerve-wracking, wondering if he'll say anything. (Please, no.)

After re-fixing a known crack in the kitchen sink, I discovered that there was a new crack, one that I didn't manage to fix and that was still leaking water. The sink was out of commission for 2 days while I let the silicon dry, and the dishes piled up, and then I had to go and do it all over again for the second crack. Needless to say, when the crack leaked after all that effort, I wanted to cry. But I have finished the piled-up dishes and will take another stab at it while there are only 2 of us generating dirty dishes (and 1 of us is away from home all day).

Another post-thesis project was cleaning my filthy, filthy house. I haven't quite finished in the kitchen (still need to mop), but I think I have managed to get the level of filth to "everyday wear and tear", down from "health hazard." I even scrubbed the tile in the shower, which is not for the weak of heart. All in all, I am enjoying being done with my thesis and having time for a normal life again, even if it is rather boring in a conventional sense.

The Dead Have Arisen!

I announced on Facebook that I had finished my thesis, but I couldn’t bring myself to reveal the full extent of my dumbassery to my quasi-friends on Facebook. I mean, most of those people barely know me, so why should I disabuse them of their notions of me? But here, in the bosom of my true compadres, I can tell my tale. It is a tale of dumbassery and academia, so it is not a new tale, but it is mine.

My deeply ingrained habits of procrastination were almost my undoing, once again. The research part of my thesis was very labor-intensive, and I started so late on it that it ate into my time for writing. During the two weeks leading up to the due date, I had been working steadily but slowly, blowing off family outings and such to have more time to work, but going to bed at the normal time. John was very supportive throughout, but I am perverse enough that supportive doesn’t actually motivate me. Once he started to express doubts that I could manage to get it done and in on time, though, *that* is when I started working with the single-minded determination of Paris Hilton looking for a Greek-shipping-magnate boyfriend.

I started getting up an hour early and working until a couple of hours past my bedtime. And in the run-up to my deadline, I pulled an honest-to-god all-nighter, basically writing non-stop for 29 hourse before hopping into the car—dumb, I know!—to get my thesis printed and bound here in our village and dashing into town to deliver it. I was all Run Lola Run, minus the cool red hair and life-saving mission, as I dashed from the car to the administration building. I got it in on the stroke of 12 and went home.

Then, I had to write up a summary of my thesis in German to go with it, due the next day. That led to another fucked-up day, with me running from place to place to get that done and turned in, to proctor an exam, and to grade two presentations in a special class-session.

Then, I had to put together a presentation on my thesis for a workshop in the English department on Saturday. I made a PowerPoint presentation on Friday, tweaked it a bit first thing Saturday morning, and gave it a few hours later to general approval. My thesis may have been wobbly, but I can always nail a presentation. That gave me back some of my confidence.

It has taken me a few days to get my sleep and eats back on schedule. During the last week or so of writing, I subsisted on the contents of our fruit dish, boiled eggs, coffee, and teddy-bear vitamins, so eating real food during regular meals has been quite a treat.

John was preparing a conference presentation and finishing up a book translation during the same period, so poor Hannah was basically neglected for a while there. And our house—John suggested that when the semester was over, we should embark on a round of cleaning, prefereably via firebomb. I like a clean start, and maybe the neighbor across the street will loan us the flamethrower he uses to kill weeds growing up from the cracks in the sidewalk.

While John used his post-semester weekend to chillax, I had the workshop Saturday morning and grocery shopping Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, I woke up at the unheard-of-for-me-on-the-weekend hour of eight and started to clean. I was really intending to sort through the stack of library books I have out, but I did enjoy the freedom to jump around from one thing to another. As it turned it, I managed to balance our checkbook (the first time since early June), wash dishes, clean under the kitchen sink (which is leaking again), water all my plants, wash 3 loads of laundry, and scrub out the silverware drawer, all before leaving in the late afternoon to watch Night at the Museum 2 and eat out. All in all, I woke up this morning generally satisfied with life. I will write more about my thesis later, probably on my writing blog.

Dental Update

Hannah's activator was hurting her over the weekend, so I sent her to the orthodontist with John today to have it checked out. The doc was able to adjust the activator, and she was very pleased with Hannah's progress. Her bite on her left side is already almost in place! Hannah also lost her last baby tooth last week, and the doc was pleased with that, too. So maybe Hannah won't be wearing this thing for a whole year. Yay!

Stress

I've been rather stressed lately. (I wonder why?!) I noticed that I've more or less permanently developed creases beteen my eyebrows. Even if I don't think I'm feeling stress at that exact moment, the creases are still there. As a matter of fact, I got a little sunburn over the weekend, and I noticed today that I have white lines inside the creases. So I have to keep frowning until my sunburn clears up, or I'll have 2 white lines on my forehead.

So tired...

Well, now I'm home from Hannah's big party day. Her birthday was last week, but today we took her and 4 friends to Pizza Hut, out for ice cream, and to see the preview of the Hannah Montana movie. John skipped out on the last part, but sitting in a dark theater with 5 pre-teens is something I thought I could handle alone. And the movie was cute, not nearly as wacky as the tv show, which I feel has an excess of wack.

I must say that the party with 12-year-olds was the easiest so far. They all managed to get themselves there and home, and they chatted smartly amongst themselves during lunch, negating the need for John and I to entertain them. Basically, we were the hosts/wallets, but otherwise we were extraneous. Oh, well. I guess I don't mind too much.

Bulwer-Lytton again

Well, it's that time of year, when I send in an entry to the Bulwer-Lytton contest. And here's the (auto-?) response I got:

"Your submission has arrived and will receive the treatment it deserves."

Bahahahahaha!! What a great response for this contest.

Cast Update

Hannah got the shoulder-to-hand cast off yesterday, which was a relief to her, but the skin on her inner elbow looks like she has road-rash.



Hannah tried to wash her arm after the big cast came off, but the skin was tender and it still hurt at the site of the break, so she was only able to do a cursory job of it.

When the doctor discovered that it was still hurting, he ordered us back to the cast room to get a different type of cast on her lower arm. I guess it is like a splint—the nurse made a hard form for the top side of her arm and then used a bandage to wrap it on to her arm. She’ll wear it for another week, and hopefully by then the healing will be far enough underway that she won’t need the cast anymore.



(You can see the cast under the soda bottle.)

So now she’s had a blue, a white, and a pink cast. If anything else happens, there’s only yellow left, and then she’ll have had the full assortment available at our hospital.

Activated!

Hannah got her activator last Tuesday, and I thought people might be interested in how that is going for her.

The activator looks like what we used to call a retainer. It is removable, with wires that hook onto her teeth and smooth plastic pieces that fit against her palate on top and under her tongue on the bottom. Hannah picked clear plastic with glitter for her activator.

The purpose of the activator is to pull her lower jaw forward, thereby stretching the jaw muscles and training them to hold her jaw in the new position. This is to correct for an overbite, or as the orthodontist explained it, her teeth don’t match up properly. Each top tooth should sit on the crack between two bottom teeth underneath it. Mine do; Hannah’s don’t.

In addition, her jaw was popping. It doesn’t pop with the activator in, though, so that is one area where we can see an immediate improvement.

So without further ado, here is her profile without the activator in:



And here is her profile with the activator in:



And here is the activator in her mouth:



As she says, all she needs to do is sharpen those prongs, and she’ll give herself a tongue piercing! (And no, I have no idea what they are for.)

She is on school vacation for 2 more weeks, so she is wearing the activator most of the day at home. When school starts again, she won’t wear it to school, but she should still be able to get in her 12-14 hours per day. It doesn’t really look all that bad, but she drools something terrible. (You do not want to know about the time she sneezed with it in.) It also affects her speech, as her Aunt Kee discovered on the phone the other day.

Then tomorrow she gets the cast off her arm. Hoorah! She can finally get wet all over, and I have threatened to lock her in the shower and pour shower gel on her over the top of the locked doors if she doesn’t do it herself. Today she thought she had gotten cracker crumbs inside her cast (how?!), so tomorrow’s uncasting may be quite unpleasant. Wish us luck!

My Girl is Growing Up

Hannah turned 12 yesterday. She says I should remember to enjoy this time, because next year she’ll be a stinky 13-year-old and probably sleeping a lot, eating a lot of pizza, and smoking and taking drugs. I don’t know how many 13-year-olds she knows, but I can’t imagine that describes many of them.

She woke us up the first time at 5. I only went to bed at 1 because I had been reading, so I was not ready for her to be jumping on the bed, all “wakey, wakey!” and “where’s my loot?!” We sent her away, and she watched some Nick Jr. for a while. On her next attempt, I told her to go boot up my computer and surf amazon, since she got a gift certificate from her Aunt Kee and fam. Finally, it was 8 am, and we couldn’t put her off any more. We let her carry her gifts downstairs while we dragged our carcasses out of bed. Only, John poured coffee grounds all into the water reservoir in the coffeee maker, so that caused a further delay while we got it cleaned out. But never fear, she got her loot:



She got Swedish and German books, some movies, some video games, a model wind-mill, and some Blendy Pens. She put the pens to use right away:



She spent the afternoon watching new movies and playing with her new games, but then disaster struck—the tv finally stopped working, after years of things breaking on it one-by-one, and months of the picture flickering out on occasion. So the new Wii game and the 4 new movies—unusable. Except, then I got a brilliant idea: I went online and found a code to change her American portable DVD player into a region-free DVD player. She’s still tethered to the power converter for it, but at least she can watch any of the DVDs we have.

I had run out of flour on Thursday, so Friday afternoon I had to run down to the store to get the last of the supplies for a birthday cake. Hannah was totally patient about it, so yesterday evening we finally had cake.



And in this last picture, I don’t know if you can tell, because of the way she is standing, but Hannah is now officially as tall as I am.

Spamalot

Ok, I don't normally check my spam box, which is why there are 800+ messages in there now, but I am expecting something in my email which hasn't arrived yet, so I had to go check. And I must say, the spammers' kennings are quite impressive, to whit:
PORKSWORD

I think I am going to start using this one: "Hey, Honey, why don't you and your porksword come over here and..." Or, "Is that a porksword in your scabbard, or are you just happy to see me?"

Hmm... I may need to add a hyphen, because after a few readings, it starts to look like porks-word, and that doesn't make any sense.

Sometimes you feel like a nut

...sometimes you feel like throttling your entire family, down to the last cat. I call those times "PMS". John and Hannah have been looking at me askance and laughing half-heartedly at my lame jokes that send me off on laughing jags. Oh, well, if you can't please everyone, you should at least please yourself.

Yesterday we stimulated the local economy. *Five hours* of economy-stimulation later, we made it home in one piece and still speaking to each other, so I think it was a banner day. Hannah has a birthday this week--hint, hint, family members--so we had to do some birthday shopping, plus we were down to the last of the cat litter, and we had to replace a lamp and buy some more potting soil, so we hit the mall, the pet store, IKEA, and the Lowe's-like store. I swear, every time we go to the IKEA is worse than the last time, crowd-wise. It occurred to me this morning that we should have just ordered the damn thing online. I'm making a mental note of that for next time.

This morning I got up and started using the new potting soil to transplant some seedlings and to start some herb seeds. I've already got cilantro, but soon we'll have parsley, basil, and chives. I've got to find some more recipes calling for cilantro before more of it starts trying to put out flowers.

Hannah gets her activator after school on Tuesday, just in time to kick off her school vacation. She will be out for 2-1/2 weeks. Yikes! It looks like there are lots of pre-teen friendly movies coming out over the vacation, though, so maybe I will pony up for movie tickets a couple of times to get her out of the house, otherwise she'll be glued to the couch.

Now I am off to spin the chore wheel--dishes, stairwell cleaning, laundry, editing, Latin tutoring, or thesis writing? What to do, what to do...