We had a blast

I had a blast! The trip was fantastic, the weather was gorgeous, the people were amazing, the sights were beautiful. It was good. And now I am moving, slowly, through jetlag and enjoying so very much being home. I will have pictures, probably, eventually, that I will probably, eventually put up on my blog. I seem to have grown disenchanted with this writing. Maybe I will grow to enjoy it again, but it seems more time than I have at the moment.

Must go look outside for a cat. Linnaea doesn't want him out in the dark. I'll see what I can do.

Tetris

The other day Linnaea said "Our family is like a game of Tetris played by a really amazing player, we fit together so well."

Whenever I think of Tetris I think of a girl I knew at university. She changed her name to Kat and she wore a chain with a lock on it in honor of Guns and Roses, I think. She was really good at Tetris, she and her boyfriend who at some future point became her husband had a Nintendo 64 in their little apartment. They had a cat and I housesat for them. While they were gone I played on their Tetris game and their Mario games and any other games they had while smoking cigarettes and drinking coke. When they got back she got angry at me for playing Tetris. She said it was the one thing she was good at and she didn't want me to take it from her. That jealous moment hung itself on Tetris and the two are inseperable in my mind.

The weather outside is delightful

And I have branches and bramble and things to break up for a bonfire tomorrow. Also have to make sure there are no hedgehogs hiding in the pile. I'm sure last night was too nice for them to be hunkering down in our piles of garden waste.

I loaded a bunch of pictures from the camera that I took around Linnaea's birthday. I was playing with some of the settings on the camera which I've never really explored before.

I took a bunch of pictures of this beautiful bright full moon. Most of them suck. Most of them are like this one:

I couldn't hold my hand steady and I don't know where my tripod is and I couldn't really be bothered to look for it in the middle of wanting to photgraph the moon. I did get this one though:


It's the best of the lot. I had to zoom into the moon and set the light meter and then pull back out while holding the take a picture button halfway down. What would the term be for the take a picture button. Sometimes the way words elude me feels like Simon trying to tell me about a fire engine when he was 2 and I couldn't quite understand what he was saying. In the end he said lights truck and I got that. I feel like I keep saying the words "lights truck" over and over when fire engine is what I'm looking for. The shutter release. That's what it is. I looked for a diagram and just before I pulled it into a larger image those words rose out of the poor neural processing I seem to function with into my consciousness. So that's cool.

A couple of weeks ago the weather was gorgeous. Just before Linnaea turned 9 and up to her 9th birthday. Lots of time outside. Like today. I'm going soon. Just so you know.

Linnaea's wearing my shirt there. I bought it at the Gold's restaurant just for me. But I share quite happily with her.















I liked that series. Linnaea wanted to go biking with David. His bike needs to be fixed, possibly the free wheel mechanism is broken or needs tuning up. My bike needs new tires as they are shredding. Linnaea doesn't like her bike anymore. So we have to go explore the world of the bike shed/shop up the road to Mulbarton and see what the man in the overalls has for us. We stopped the other day but he had a row of bikes going to prison for crimes against humanity. No, really, they were going to prison but to be fixed up and shipped off to countries in need of bikes from the UK.

We went down to the fishing ponds the other day. I got a few pictures. There were Canadian geese in pairs all over the pond. We got to see and hear a fight. Boy are they loud when they are pissed off about territory. And the invaders worked themselves up. They kept talking to each other, honking and swearing and justifying and all that before they rushed the two on the territory they wanted and ran 'em off. The defending two hadn't psyched themselves up before the invasion.


I like that picture. Partially just because Simon is in it. I don't get lots of Simon pictures. I like that he looks kind of dopey, too. I like that he and David are both sitting there in their non-baseball themed baseball caps.

I like the way Linnaea wears her trousers. I can't wear mine like that. Mine have to firmly fit around my waist or I get all flustered. That isn't quite true. I get a little flustered. She's wearing another one of my shirts, too. I bought that one in Australia. It's good though, 'cause I just have to buy more clothes for me and I've got her clothed as well. Actually I gave that one to her when she outgrew her Animal t-shirt that she got in Australia. So, I'm just pretending to moan about my 9 year old stealing my clothes. I love that she likes what I wear and wants to wear it too.

Simon didn't do much fishing at the ponds. He whittled. I like that he was carrying his pocket knife just for such a thing. It's such a halcyon days of yore sort of thing. Of course pocket knives with a certain length blade are illegal in the UK when you are under such and such age. I'm well informed of the details you can tell.



Oh I was going to stop, but then the Flickr photo stream reminded me of the cake balls. Through Pioneer Woman I found Bakerella who makes cake pops. Linnaea didn't want a cake for her birthday so I made cake pops.



I couldn't get red velvet cake mix. The boxed cake section of a UK grocery store has about 3 different boxed cakes. All are chocolate. I could have made my own cake, but I wanted to follow the instructions relatively closely. They are really yummy. I recommend them. We used pocky sticks for the lollipop stick so that you could eat the whole thing. The pocky sticks aren't quite strong enough, so some of them broke in the night and there were heads rolling around on the foil covered styrofoam box. That was funny.

I have others I want to post, but I have to re-find how to do a slideshow and I want to go break up sticks more and put them in a pile so that tomorrow we can burn them and clear a patch in the garden for beetroot and chard and all the other seeds I've got.

Hello

It's been almost 2 months, well a month and a half, since last I posted. I just don't quite feel like spending the time writing these days. That isn't quite true, but it is part of it.

Life is relatively good. I have fewer down moments these days, although last week I had serious panic attacks. I'm going to go outside in a few moments and scatter onion and chard and beet seeds about in the flower beds and hope that in a little bit they'll begin to sprout. There isn't really a vegetable patch at this house, it is all roses and berries and a pear and an apple tree. Oh and rhubarb. I've made a scrumptious rhubarb cake already this year.

Anyhow, I will try and get back into the writing thing. I always enjoy going back over the things I wrote so long ago and seeing what we did back then. It is a wonderful record. And now to being outside in the tentative sunshine.

Tag

Ginger tagged me for a happiness game. It is referred as the "Hooked On Your Blog/What Makes You Happy/6 Random Things" meme.

So, 6 thinks that make me happy. I've been enjoying small things lately. Actually I enjoy small things all the time. Those little moments that fill you up. The more I see them the more there are.

So here's my list of small things that make me happy.

1. Hearing an owl call when I was out in the hot tub with David and Linnaea. The hot tub may have seemed the bigger thing, but really it was the background noise of the owl to the foreground joy of being with David and Linnaea that made my cup runneth over.

2. Homemade crisps (chips are french fries, crisps are chips) made from potato peelings. I'm totally loving these things. I've also really enjoyed homemade sweet potato crisps. Those are seriously tasty.

3. Skype and Sandra Dodd's on-line live chats. I've had so much more connection with people in the past couple of weeks because of both of those internet amazing services.

4. Itunes and podcasts and Mary Gold all in one for the joy that music at my fingertips and science and car talk are bringing to me. Thank you again Mary for the song. Simon was so very happy.

5. Walking the dog.

6. The sun. It's a massive thing, but so constant it feels less something to be happy about. But it makes my step lighter and my day more joyful to get to spend time glorying in it's Vitamin D inducing rays.

I'm not tagging anyone. I have spent too long at the computer this morning, and now it is noon. I am going to go prepare meals for me and Simon and Linnaea nad then go around the house iwth a bucket of bleach water and try and get the mold out of the window sills.

I really do like my life

That's what Sandra wrote at the end of her most recent blog post. I'm feeling that same way today. We went to see Madascar 2 at the Kids' Club cheap time today at the Odeon in Norwich. We haven't to see a movie for ages. Going there was fun and we all chatted in the car. The movie was fun, I cried during part of it and laughed during some of the other parts. I was wrong about who played the Lemur King, I thought it was Mike Myers but it was Sascha Baron Cohen, referencable as AliG or Borat. Afterwards I walked to Morrisons to get oil and chocolate and gum and cream and maybe, if I have enough butter, I'll make profiteroles today. I don't have a squeeze thing for filling the balls with cream, so they'll look a bit more like chocolate covered scones filled with cream. And then we drove home and had more fantastic conversations.

I really, really like my life. And I thought I would share that little bit of what keeps me happy here.

I posted all that and then realized that there was more. Last night David had the hot tub running, we haven't used it for ages. It was so lovely and so hot. I got to skype with two friends yesterday. The sound card on this computer is out, so it's all typing and no talking, but that didn't squash the joy of chatting. I got a couple of fun looking recipes in the recipe exchange e-mail thing I'm doing. One for how to make pulled pork with an accompanying barbeque sauce recipe that I am so going to make.

As I'm writing this I'm also reading the newspaper. I am terrible about staying on task. There is an article in The Telegraph called Money can buy happiness. The article is about how money can buy experiences that give you memories of being happy which tends to bring you to happiness with greater frequency. It has people of some renown listing the best money they've spent the last one is :

Vanessa Feltz, journalist and broadcaster, CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN (cost: £36) "The home-use chocolate fountain is my greatest bargain investment of all time. It transports the entire family back to the scene in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Willie Wonka shows the golden ticket winners the river made of pure liquefied chocolate. Greedy Augustus Gloop falls to his knees and starts scooping the delicious nectar into his rapacious maw. We do exactly the same. We pretend to immerse strawberries, raspberries, schnozzberries and any other berries you care to invent. Really, though, it's all about the chocolate. Earthly bliss with those you love for a mere £36 is so emphatically, engrossingly satisfying all thoughts of the ticking obesity time bomb are swiftly obliterated."

Pigs and school

The other night we watched Jamie Oliver's show about pigs. It was a very protectionist show with him talking up the importance of buying British because the Europeans, and the Danish in particular, treat their bigs so badly. Also because by supporting Brits you are supporting Britain, which disturbs me, maybe a bit because there are strikes in the UK over a company hiring an Italian firm to do the work.

In his show Jamie Oliver says bored pigs will fight and sometimes kill each other as evidence of how awful the care of pigs can be, and he showed a video of pigs raised on an indoor farm fighting. And I thought about school. Children fight alot at school. They are forced into constant and close proximity and the friction that exists seems to cause explosions. I'm sure boredom and frustration play a role. But Jamie Oliver doesn't see that children are being treated like these poorly amused pigs in school. Damien Hirst might, however. His piece at the Lever House in New York, "School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge" certainly suggests a factory farm production. But maybe that's just my personal bias. Ooh, do you think the budgies are like the canaries that miners carried down into the mine?

Haircuts

They both went under the scissors today. Simon's hair is so groovy, and Linnaea's is so curly. I'm just putting the after pictures on.





Oh, and Linnaea's hair wasn't long enough to be sent for wigs, Simon's is and will be. Just to let you know.

Positive contribution

A couple of days ago I filled in an on-line Home-education consultation that the UK government is running. It irritated me. It also got me thinking. One of the questions was whether or not I believed Home-Education would produce grown children who would make a positive contribution. All the questions were equally vague and useless, that one stopped me for a second. Maybe in part because it is such an unattached question, positive contribution to what? compared to what? Also because it got me thinking about the contributions that both of them have chosen to make lately.

For Christmas this year Simon and Linnaea gave each other a pound from their weekly allowance to foster an animal. Simon is paying to foster an orangutan for Linnaea and Linnaea is paying to foster a tiger for Simon. They both thought that those were the best presents that they got. They play with the Xbox 360 more, but they like that they have these animals, these donations that they are working to make.

They have both decided to get their haircut short. I mentioned that if they cut off enough they could donate it to Locks of Love (there aren't any charities in the UK that make wigs for children). They loved the idea. They will chop off a minimum of 10 inches of hair to donate to wigs.

We went roller skating the other day and a boy we hadn't met before was there. He was shy and Simon and his friend Angus and Linnaea spent time chatting with him and playing with him. Simon held his hand to help him skate.

These are children who are growing up in a nurturing environment. They like to feel good, and sometimes reaching out to someone else or helping some creature in need of assistance is a good route to feeling good. A postive contribution, yes, I believe that my home-educated children will achieve making a positive contribution.

A little something for your amusement

Although last night on a 3 Minute Wonder someone said amuse meant not to think (something which seems obvious when I think about it, but I'd never noticed before). This isn't about not thinking, so amusement is the wrong word, entertainment maybe...

Anyhow The Telegraph had this in it this morning and I wanted to share it with all y'all.



Tomorrow we're going ice skating, a bad back at the moment will keep me from blading about, maybe I'll play with depth of field and autoshoot a few scenes.

Kapla

We've had a brilliant Solstice. We were planning on celebrating on Christmas, but my mom and her husband were unable to come, unfortunately, do to health concerns. All is well if unknown for them, but it made them and us nervous enough that cancelling was better than continuing. With nothing to connect us to Christmas, no religion, no family gathering, we celebrating the nadir of the sun instead. We had wonderful presents and food and were finally over the most miserable of flus, or largely over the most miserable of flus.

Among the gifts was a box of Kapla blocks. I think David and I have enjoyed them the most, although I don't imagine that will last.

Here are some of the builds:

While I'm at it

Here's a video that I found after reading an article about a different video.