I can die now

...that I have found the Muppet Wiki. Yay!

Word of the Day

catsturbation: when a cat rubs itself on any available inanimate object--the edge of the coffee table, on a stack of DVD cases--in lieu of a pet from its cat-parents


This is actually my coinage, after watching Eliza satisfy herself this morning. John was impressed and entertained (by my new word, not by the cat).

I love opening email from the Wordsmith

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves.

-John Danforth, priest, ambassador, senator (b. 1936)

And the lameness lives on

Hannah had an earache and sore throat this morning, so we let her stay home from school and sleep in. I feel like I have an incipient cold, but have felt that way for a while now, so I got a little extra sleep, too, and took it fairly easy today. I did have a proofreading job come in, and I got through half of it before I had to start dinner and make Hannah get online to study her Latin vocabulary. After dinner, we played Scrabble, and John won, but Hannah was a close second, with my assistance. Tomorrow is Friday, and Hannah is going to school no matter what, and maybe I will manage to finish the proofreading and the syllabi for my 2 courses that start next week. Too tired now to think of anything else...

Free from the tyrrany of class-parent-hood

I went to the meet-the-teachers evening at Hannah's school and stepped down as classroom parent. I don't know that I was all that helpful as the number 2 person, but the replacements (#1 also stepped down, but she is a full-time teacher of disabled first- and second-graders and has 3 children, so it wasn't unexpected) only have one year ahead of them because the kids will get sorted into new classes next year. So I don't feel like anyone is getting taken advantage of because I stepped down.

On the way home, I was reading The Joy Luck Club and almost missed my stop. Oops. The meeting had run over, as usual, so it was 10:30 when I got off the bus.

This morning, I got up and got Hannah off to school, then I lay down on the couch and went to sleep for 4 hours. This afternoon, John lay down for an hour or two. We are two lazy--or perhaps slightly ill--people. At least Hannah still seems healthy.

Busy bee

I got up and screwed around for a little while on the Internet this morning before helping John get out the door. Then I washed a whole pile of dishes, which is no fun because we still have that leak in the kitchen sink and therefore have to do dishes in a large plastic bowl that came with pancake(?) mix from Costco or Sam's back in the day. But, our landlord came by (only a week later than expected--huzzah!) and measured the sink and promised to get a chrome replacement for it. Right now it is out of some mystery substance that is an unpleasant brown--very 70s--so chrome is a definite improvement. If only he would replace the dishwasher, too, but since we have never brought it up, the odds are not good. Oh well, it is probably eco-friendlier this way. Maybe.

Then I threw some towels in the wash--oops, gotta go take those out--and headed out to the grocery store. One place we shop is a discount store: they have a certain amount of stock (food) that is always there, but every week they have specials on non-food items or specialty (often foreign) foods. I found some stuff for Hannah's bed I had been looking for a few weeks ago when I blew our budget on some kitchen appliances, so between those things and the shopping, I had a hell of a lot to carry up to our top-floor apartment on my very own (Hannah was at school and John at his office). Oof! Hannah got home just as I was carrying the last 4 bags up the last 2 flights of stairs--she's got that uncanny sense of timing from her dad's side of the family--so she helped me put away the groceries and complained while I ate some tuna salad. While she ate lunch and studied Latin, I put together the new support system for her bed. The American-style box-spring is unknown here. Instead, people use a Lattenrost, a slatted frame that fits into a bed frame and on top of which the mattress is laid. Hannah's looks about like this:



Her old play bed just had a simple arrangement of slats that are nailed directly to the edges of the frame but have no spring to them. Since she is bigger than me now--i.e., grown-up sized--it was past time for her to have grown-up back support.

I also got a mattress pad for her bed, but it is rather thick and cushy, so it is almost like a pillow-top for her mattress. She seems pretty happy with the new set-up so far, although she hasn't slept in it yet. If she falls out tonight, I'll have to go back and pull out the old slats that are still nailed in place under the new system. I really don't want to do that, though, so I hope gravity gives her a break near the edge of the bed.

Now I am a bit stiff and sore from the lugging, sitting on the floor putting the Lattenrost together, and yesterday's turn at cleaning the communal stairwell. Since I have to go to a parent meeting later this evening--which I can't skip because I am one of the classroom reps, oi--I will now go lie down somewhere and veg out.

Last Minute

I was sitting there eating dinner--homemade pumpkin soup, which Hannah refused to eat--and realized I hadn't posted yet today. It would be rather lame of me to lose steam of day 5 of my month of blogging, so here I am while Hannah plays Animal Crossing.

We spent the last 3 days making our way through The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. I can't help myself thinking of The Very Secret Diaries whenever we watch it, though. Highlights: Aragorn--"Still not king." Legolas--"Still prettiest." Everyone: "Sam will kill him if he tries anything."

And that is the lame end to a rather lame day 5.

A Little Bit of This and That

John got all Mr. Fix-It recently and fixed:

1. the toilet seat in the downstairs bathroom, which had been sliding off the rim to the left every time we sat on it, for ages.

2. the light switch in the upstairs bathroom, which had a bit of it snapped off.

3. the light bulb in the car's right headlight.

I was Suzy Homemaker and sewed:

1. a cozy for the new kitchen radio after spraying it with powdered sugar. John mocked me for making a kitchen cozy, since in his experience only grandmothers sew cozies, but when our radio is still clean, functioning, and dust-free in 5 years, he will thank me for it.

2. hems on 2 new pairs of pants I bought in the States.

3. 2 still-secret xmas presents.

4. the second bench cushion, once I figured out the proper sewing machine needle to use on the upholstery.

5. and generally fixed a few things in need of repair, sewing-wise.

Hannah has joined the drama club but skipped the first meeting. She has promised to attend the next one this week on pain of death or loss of Animal Crossing, whichever would pain her more.

She tried to go to the movies today to see a German teenie film called Gangs with her classmates--girls only because the boys acted like "idiots" the last time--but it turned out to be a big event because the cast was there to give autographs, and half the group, including Hannah, couldn't get tickets. Hannah swears some girl shoved the person in front of her in line out of the way and swiped her ticket, which I doubt, but it does sound like it was crowded and crazy. She and her friend came back to our house and are watching Clueless now.

I am finding my laptop super annoying right now. The space bar doesn't always work, and now that I am managing to get in more typing, that means more times for the space bar to annoy me. grrr...

Our camera has crapped out on us, and I don't know when we'll have it fixed. The pictures look smeared, and a little research online shows that it is probably a part that Canon will fix for free, if we send it off to a Canon shop to be repaired. Now we just have to figure out where we can send it. That means I will not be able to inflict new photos on you. Luckily, I have a hard drive full of old photos. bwahahaha! Maybe later.

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!