Lately, Meg has been complaining about how heavy her backpack is. Having picked it up a few times to hand it to her as we've been headed out the door to school, I agree with her assessment. She mentioned looking for a plastic turtle that I last saw in her backpack, while she was in an appointment, so this afternoon, while she was in an ( Read more... )

The kids have both been home sick for a couple of days, and one result of their illness is that I've had to do a lot of extra laundry. So this morning, even though Jess stayed home from work to help deal with sick kids, I still had a good excuse to skip going to school for my volunteer shift to help sort books for the Flower Mart book sale. But ( Read more... )

After school today, Bella had a meeting of her Brownie troop. The most important order of business was talking about selling Girl Scout Cookies. Since Meg is an experienced cookie seller, she came to the meeting and talked with the younger girls about it. This resulted in a much longer meeting than if I, as the Troop Cookie Manager, had been ( Read more... )

I've had occasion to walk past DARPA's new headquarters twice in the past month, and both times, I found myself wondering what organization was located there, because if they have any signs identifying the building, they aren't very visible. I'm guessing that they did that for security reasons. Unfortunately, security doesn't really work that way ( Read more... )

A few days ago, I was wearing a t-shirt I got from my local bike club. On the back, it has the club logo and says, in big letters, "Ride a Bike" followed by a long list of other things, in diminishing type sizes, including such things as "Save Gas" and "Be A Kid Again". One of the things in fairly small type is "Laugh at Cars". Nicky noticed it ( Read more... )

I was chatting with my friend Tony, who is the school librarian at my younger daughter's school. In previous school years, he was known to the students as Mr. Tony, and there was another faculty member that was referred to as Miss Firstname. Many of the janitorial and kitchen staff, in the rare instances when the students actually knew their ( Read more... )

To the very clever driver who decided to lecture me about where I *should* be riding my bike ( Read more... )

A couple days ago, I was on Facebook and the feature where it suggests "People You Might Know" had the picture of a guy who lives on my block. We don't share any mutual Facebook friends. I only have one Facebook friend who lives in the neighborhood, and she doesn't have any other Facebook friends who live in the neighborhood. The guy whose ( Read more... )

I walked into the living room to find Nicky (age 6.9) reading some text on the iPad. Not recognizing what she was looking at, I started reading over her shoulder to see what she was up to. It turns out she had clicked on the Help button of one of her games to look up troubleshooting hints for when the game crashes.

So this afternoon, I tried to order some items at the Ace website for delivery to my local store, since I knew that they didn't have a couple of the items in stock. I needed 3 fluorescent light bulb tubes, a couple of fluorescent light bulb starters, and some 2" brads for my nail gun ( Read more... )