What's going on here? My first fumbling attempts to introduce Role Playing Games. On the morning this was taken, Daughter finished up a math worksheet and then said "Could we get some new board games? I'm tired of the ones we have." So I sent her for some Littlest Pet Shop toys to be adventurers, grabbed some dice, and sketched out the entrance to a dungeon. The best I could find quickly for monsters was some puffballs. We didn't have much time before school but we got through a couple rooms and a hallway. And we overcame two Rats, two Dustbunnies and one Big Orange Troll! And recovered three jewels from the dungeon.

Guest Photographer

Daughter talked me into letting her take the (older) digital camera to school with her for a recent field trip to a local farm. She didn't have to talk too hard, I'm quite excited about this development.

Bookishness

Being a bookish sort myself I was sort of hoping that my kids would like books too. They do, of course, but not enough to actually cut into time set aside for basketball, dancing and (ew) computer games. Here we see Daughter has picked up The History of the United States, published around 1920, which I keep on a bookshelf more-or-less decoratively. I grabbed the camera, she grabbed my glasses ....

Back in Action!

I've been frustrated in my blogging by a bug somewhere between Picasa (the program) and PicasaWeb (the service) and Blogger.com --- all Google properties, so one might hope they would play well together. When I first took up Picasa it was great: I could select some images, click on one button and it would resize them all, upload to Picasaweb, and open a blog post editor. For a year or more, though, this workflow has been broken. I've been searching for alternatives for a long time. Finally yesterday I realized that by replacing the very limited (and limiting!) Picasaweb, I can almost recreate my workflow, using free and Open Source tools! I'll be using mapivi to select images; and simple shell script (that I wrote) to resize the images using ImageMagick; and scp to copy them to a webserver where they'll be accessible to blogger.com. The script will also print out a snippet of HTML that I can cut-n-paste into the blogger.com post editor - this is the only step that's not as shiny as the old Picasa-based workflow but I can live with it. Long live Open Source!

Seven Years

We recently celebrated Son turning Seven. We do these things up right, with usually a whole week of festivities between family, school and friends. The first few images here are from the family dinner party, then we switch over to the friends party at Pump It Up, a party place with lots of giant inflatable stuff to romp around on. Even Son's parents got into the act a little, tho mercifully I omitted those pics. (I'm trying not to be so photo-obsessed lately, but sometimes I can't help myself: I apologize for the quality of the images :-)
p.s. Do you like the new square image format?

Cat Missing, Found Again

We have a cat, a fun and patient black-and-white. We got her from Bonnie Hays Animal Shelter the day after we moved in January last year, and we've been keeping her an indoor cat for her health and safety. She doesn't agree with us on this point, and tries to sneak out at every opportunity. She's succeeded a few times, once for a few hours. That time, I found her a couple houses over walking along without a care in the world.

Yesterday she got out again. As before, the back door was closed but it didn't latch. When we noticed the door ajar, we turned the house upside down to make sure she wasn't inside, then walked around outside calling her name to no avail.  At bedtime, Daughter was very worried but did settle down to sleep. Feeling guilty because I'd been the last to use the door, I stayed up late in case she came back, but eventually had to go to bed.

I woke up about 3:15 for no reason that I'm aware of. I slipped out of bed, crept downstairs, and opened the front door "just in case". To my astonishment, there was Cat! She immediately walked in past me. She was trying for nonchalance but I wasn't deceived, she was relieved to be back inside.

I need to be more careful with that door!

Gainful Again

Okay, okay, mea culpa for not posting more frequently, you know how it is. If you want to hear more from me, comments are always encouraging --- even if as brief as a "keep going"!

At any rate, my last post (months ago!) noted that my job and in fact the whole company had expired. This time I get to say I'm gainfully employed again, much closer to home. I'm back at my old company, this time working directly on a production, a short 20 min commute from home. I get to have dinner with my family every night!

I enjoyed having a few months off between jobs, to reconnect with the family. I plan to continue to walk them to school every morning, as my production has a late "call time" of 9am --- I really enjoy this part of the day. Between wake-up and walk, though, can be challenging, as both kids want to spend the whole time on Netflicks or over electronic entertainment, which I'm coming to consider a scourge. Any suggestions for some sort of daily "curriculum" would be appreciated, since the school doesn't send nearly enough homework with them.

One final observation for this post: I think of myself as a pretty independant, non-joiner, self-fulfilled type of person, and yet I noted a distinct feeling of relief and belonging when I got my company desk and login and cardkey with my picture on it. It's a little disturbing how strong that need to belong is ....