Miss Bee's class invited me to come down to their room and watch something "they had practiced". Sometimes I go down to watch a song or poem, but this time it was all the kinders saying congratulations and giving me a card!


Miss Bee gave me a big blue heart, and everyone in the class wrote me a letter. They had no idea exactly what was going on, but the enthusiasm was terrific! I hung them up on a bulletin board in the empty room next door.

"Julie and Julia" clip:


Promo for Julia Child as the French Chef:


I enjoyed the greater bulk of "Julie and Julia", particularly the black and white clips of Meryl Streep acting out famous French Chef scenes.

Also, "no paella for you" on finding the Seinfeld clip. You can read the script if you google Seinfeld Paella, but why bother? In lieu, here's a somewhat stupid, I mean frenetic, mashup of Seinfeld one-liners. Just in case you don't have the 9-disc set. Sucker.

*In between writing the rest of this post and posting it, a week or so passed. We are now done with The Wire.*


Michael Johansson's brain seems to work like mine. I love how the "puzzle" comes together like that. Have a few more look-sees at his website. Hat tip to the newest winner of my Subscribe to RSS Feed award: Things Organized Neatly.

Please note the new share buttons at the bottom of these posts. While they exist for no discernible purpose, as this blog is in a state of disrepair from which I can only hope that it will recover, they are in fact there and may be used for sharing this post with your "friends". Social media and all that.

Almost done with the 5th season of The Wire, almost done with my Master's.

I found a couple of pictures of my own things organized neatly, including our Macintosh computers:


And my old classroom:

Perhaps soon I'll take a picture of my new room. My desk is much cleaner - less cluttered, anyways.

Grandma Betty organized the shoe boxes in the downstairs cupboard. Once upon a time, I looked like this:



Here's our nice picture from the beach at Saco Bay - me, Miss Bee, and Chrysanthemum.

"Being the owner of dachshunds, to me a book on dog discipline becomes a volume of inspired humor. Every sentence is a riot. Some day, if I ever get a chance, I shall write a book, or warning, on the character and temperament of the dachshund and why he can't be trained and shouldn't be. I would rather train a striped zebra to balance an Indian club than induce a dachshund to heed my slightest command. When I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes. He even disobeys me when I instruct him in something he wants to do."

We are 34/40 = 85% done with the school year. Oddly enough, that places us on Spring Break this week. So far, that has amounted to multiple episodes of Law and Order: SVU, some significant allergy issues, and a large amount of Dim Sum.

I wrote two 1,500 word papers this week, plus some detritus, and consequently finished two of my online classes. Therefore, I am 8/12 = 75% done with my Master's.

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My new MacBook Pro (middle) includes a 500 GB hard drive among other amenities. The wireless Time Capsule hard drive/wireless router I also got is 1 terabyte (not pictured, but awesome).

The Time Capsule has enough capacity for both my new hard drive plus Miss Bee's (on the right, ). My MacBlack is too old to sync wirelessly (OS X 10.4.11 Tiger), but I can connect to the files already on the drive.

My old machine (three years and two months) has not been shut down for 31 days. Not bad for a computer out of warranty.

I am approximately 80% done with the "transfer of computing activities to new laptop" process.

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Chrysanthemum is 0% able to procreate, according to a signed document from her veterinarian as of today. Pictured is The Wild Mumpus herself, three days before surgery, enjoying her first boat ride. She actually did seem to enjoy it.

Paws will now recuperate for the next 10 days or so. The pain pills are scheduled to last 3.33 days, with one pill taken per 8 hours. Her next scheduled dose occurs at 2:00 AM.

She is moderately disoriented, with spurts of activity followed by long breaks of idleness. Which, incidentally, is not terribly different from her normal condition.

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2009 League Champion Diamondbacks are 1-2 so far this season. Not too good.

Chrysanthemum watches her father closely during the games (after going 0-3 in the first game, I'm 5-5 with a sac fly the last two weekends).

Good story: in our first game, we are losing by 6 runs, with a 10-run rule in effect. It's the last inning, so we bring in a new pitcher, who turns out to be a right-hander who has injured his right shoulder hiking. So he pitches left-handed, which is impressive.

His accuracy was much less so, however, and he walks 6 guys in a row. Now we're down 9 runs, bases loaded, nobody out. So they bring me in - if the man on third comes in, we lose. I run the count to 1-2 and throw my first curve ball. The batter hits a weak grounder to my left, which I manage to snare on the move. I spin and fire to the plate - and overthrow the catcher. Game over.

I had been meaning to blob this before, but the New York Times Sunday Book Review (!) galvanized me to action:

Peter Bognanni's book The House of Tomorrow is on bookshelves (and Amazon) now.

I ordered my copy today (belatedly, as Mark posted the Boston Globe's review like two weeks ago) and I'm excited to read it. Peter's web site is here, with lots of reviews and information about the book.