Monday, October 22, 2007

Random Stuff

After a lengthy hiatus, it's time to fill you in on the happenings of our lives here.

New Coffee Pot
Well, more an old coffee pot revisited. Our 4 cup Mr. Coffee was taking approximately 40 minutes to make 3.5 cups of coffee. And that was after I gave it a good cleaning with lots of vinegar. We've been drinking more coffee here lately anyway, so we took out the Proctor Silex 12 cup behemoth. The result? Eight cups of delicious coffee in under 10 minutes. Now that he's been made redundant, Mr. Coffee is wandering the streets sporting dreadlocks and asking for spare change.

Back from Camping
I had a lovely camping trip to stargaze a week ago. It was soggy. Very soggy. But very, very fun. I'll put the report that I sent to my astronomy group up as a blog entry here in a bit. Elise is still convinced that I'm ready to go camping without her at the drop of a hat, but hopefully I can convince her otherwise one of these days.

Cat Litter
I recently tried to change things up from the Swheat Scoop we generally use in hopes of controlling odor. After less than a week, I can confidently state that Tidy Cat for tight spaces smells dramatically worse. Anybody else out there have a favorite?

Of Cats and Kids
Lately, I've taken to giving Flapjack verbal warnings using the voice of Groundskeeper Willy. "Ahm warnin' yeh!" Elise imitates it perfectly. Eerily perfectly in fact. It's hilarious.

We purchased some additional Duplo blocks to augment the collection that sees almost constant use these days. This set contained a cat. For those of you who want to know, the cat is now named Sarah and she gets into all kinds of mischief and is apparently working on inviting herself everywhere we go. She was quite well behaved at the coffee shop this afternoon, though, so I can't complain too much.

Elise has decided that she wants to be a cat for Halloween. I headed for eBay, not being as craftily inclined as last year. Unfortunately, I accidentally bid on the wrong one and won it. So then I bid on the right one and won that so we've just spent a lot to make our kid look like the cat she likes to pretend to be.

Flapjack does not like it when Elise hugs her. But Elise knows that hugs will make the cat go away so she can play with mommy without the cat always trying to sit/gnaw/lick on her stuff. Very smart girl. No word yet on how to get the cat to stop licking the doors in our house, though.

Rocks
Elise has been collecting rocks for awhile. They spend most of their time riding in her toy school bus. Brownie and Jimmy are clear favorites, and sometimes we make roller coasters for them out of legos. It's pretty creative, but we're starting to think that maybe it's time to get this preschool thing in gear so that she has some actual human friends. Rocks are nice and all, but since she connects and plays with any kid(s) she can at the park we're making the social life a bit more of a priority.

TiVo
When we first signed up for DirecTv, their boxes had TiVo DVRs. Ours busted in the move here, so we were given their "new" stupid buggy piece of cr@p to replace it. The last of many, many straws with this thing came when Elise and I were watching her favorite episode of Dora last week, and the thing suddenly deleted it WHILE WE WERE WATCHING. It was awful. To be fair, our settings are to only save 5 episodes at a time and a new one was starting to record as we were watching the oldest one we had recorded. But really, that's just sloppy programming. I was going to ditch the whole works and go to cable so I could get a real TiVo, but it looks like DirecTv has heard the masses and is going back to TiVo in the near future. Wahoo! In the mean time, eBay saved us again and we're getting a pretty nice looking actual TiVo receiver here very soon.

Preschool
A continuation of what I started up there in the Rocks section. We have a visit scheduled to a Montessori school tomorrow, and to another school in a week. Should be good stuff. I hope one or both of them turns out to be just the thing so that we can get this kid of ours playing with people instead of rocks. She's pretty stoked to get back to school. And given how sorely mistaken I was in my choice last time, I'll probably run it by all of you for your suggestions before I make any school decisions.

Letters
Last but not least, our girl is getting more intelligible! After a loooong stint of "l"s sounding like "y"s and "r"s sounding like "w"s, she's suddenly getting 'em right. And she looks at us for a laugh every time. Because she knows we're going to chide and tickle her for pronouncing these letters the same way we do. It's a lot of fun.

And, for those of you who like to get mail, the surest way to get an actual personal letter is to send one to Elise. She now loves answering letters. When we get a new one, we generally have to drop everything (even legos) to sit at the table and write a response using each and every crayon in our collection at least once. Then, we dash to the mailbox to mail it. (Even in the rain.) So, if you're in the mood for some colorful artwork, you know where to send your inquiries...

*****
Well, that's probably a lot to read. Congratulations if you made it all the way here without your eyes glazing over. Tee hee. I haven't been in a blogging state of mind lately, so my apologies for the longish gap and then the too much info all at once. I need about three more hours in a day...

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