Year: 2011

Scouting for food is one of my favorite scouting activites.  Combine a beautiful fall morning with a morning walk and collecting food for the food pantry and doing it all with friends make my heart sing. Poor Ruby got voted to ride in the wagon while being pulled by a bunch of nine year olds. She was not excited.

Edda had a great time walking with the boys.  Or at least starting the walk – the boys rapidly outpaced her. but she really loved being outside in the sunshine – lots of smiles and laughing.  It reminded me and Jeremy that we need to take more outdoor walks with Edda even though it can be a pain to get us all up and outside and actually walking.

Donuts and hot chocolate for everyone.

Boys with their papas.  And the butts of our two doggies.

So we are fullfilling a little dream of ours (OK, maybe really Jeremy’s).  We are installing a geothermal heating system in our back yard.  I don’t want to go into the lengthy years-long decision process for installing a new system because really, if the old (well, actually relatively new) system was sized correctly and installed correctly, maybe we wouldn’t be doing this, but here we are – enjoying large earth moving equipment in our backyard.

I got to spend a few hours on Monday afternoon with Caroline and her mom, Marta. It was so nice to go to our local park and spend a few hours swinging back and forth in the bucket swing with the fall leaves all around us. Caroline reminded me so much of Edda when Edda was small, I called her Edda at some point in the afternoon when I was cuddling her in my arms.

If you know us, we are a die-hard PC family. Jeremy worked for years at AMD which supplies chips to only PC makers and I feel like Apple has advertised it’s way into people’s hearts, making them spend more $ than they need to on computer equipment. I don’t like it that Apple feels a little cult-like and the long lines that form outside an Apple store on the day something is released just makes me uncomfortable to think that there is nothing better to do than to wait in the cold and dark for a little shiny object.

Anyways, all this doesn’t mean we aren’t immune to the allure (we did buy an Apple TV for Edda, which was one of the best birthday gifts ever for her), especially when you have a little brother who always happens to be an early Apple adopter.

Donald surprised us with his old MacMini when he upgraded, which Jeremy promptly added to our little electronic family, Lifehackering it into a little space underneath the kitchen cabinets. As cosmic computer karma would have it, that same night the MacMini came on board, one of our PC laptops died. Sigh.
 

Halloween was a success (of course). How could is not be a success? Actually, at the dinner table last night, we were trying to think of costumes which would top the bacon/egg combo and we don’t really have any good ideas. Jeremy told me that I need to revel in my success as costume-maker and not immediately worry about what I have to do to next year. I took only one photo of the trick-or-treat mayhem – we had the dogs with us and ran into many neighbors which meant that I had to be on the lookout for poop/other dogs/Vince running away with his pals/Edda not being too cold or unhappy. Anyways, my one photo has both the bacon and egg (and chef and a wizard friend) framed in the light of a doorway. Not too shabby.

Our annual sort – KitKat is the clear winner. Jeremy’s favorite, SweetTarts, had a poor showing.

I am in bed with Edda on Halloween night.  This is her “real” costume.  I was still sewing it as of yesterday morning.  We made it down the block so we could show off our themed costume of bacon, egg and chef to a few of our neighbors.  Now Vince and Jeremy are out on the massive candy run.  Vince plotted out the route this morning on Google maps.  I wonder if they will make it home before nine.

On Friday, I volunteered at Edda’s school for the Halloween parade/party.  Edda’s special ed class is slightly less (or more?  I can’t really figure that out right now) that 1:1 ratio and they really needed people to come in and help out as the special needs kids are dispersed within the typical classrooms and really need 1:1 attention.  I failed to get Edda’s “real” costume done in time, so I grabbed an old Snow White outfit to pack into her backpack in the morning.  Edda really has a 6th sense about parties – she seems to know when they are coming and instead of being overwhelmed, she often decides that it’s a good time for a nice, long nap.

I did manage to wake her up to walk the whole parade route (which was up an incredible number of stairs and across a grassy knoll and down a long, long ramp), but she was grumpy and really wanted to be sleeping soundly.  This parade always makes me feel a little grouchy.  I want Edda to like more “fun” things more, but you know – Edda has different priorities and marching around in a Halloween parade doesn’t seem like one of her top priorities.

Back in the classroom, there were several crafts we (I guess I should say I) mustered through, mainly with Edda sleeping soundly against my shoulder.  I really wanted this Halloween mug that I could decorate myself, but I didn’t want to be hogging the orange and black markers from a bunch of 2nd graders, so I made mine Christmas colors instead.

I took the kids to a new pumpkin patch last Friday – the kids had off school (apparently the teachers were headed to Ocean City for the annual Maryland Teacher’s Association meeting) and it was a beautiful day!  We went to Summer’s Farm in Fredrick, MD which is not a farm I’ve been to before, but I really wanted to do a corn maze and this seemed like the closest one with a good size maze. Vince had a play date and neither boy wanted to go to the corn maze, they all wanted to stay inside and play video games, but being the cruel, uncompromising mother that I am, I dragged us all out to the un-fun corn maze which was amazingly fun 5 minutes after we pulled into the parking lot.  Edda had a great time – laughed and was awake, which is ringing endorsement from her.  I forgot to pack her off-roading wheelchair, so it was a bit of a comedy routine with the boys running ahead and then me and Edda and Denise chasing them and then calling them back to help Edda get unstuck from the muddy patches.  As I said, a good time.

Vince wallowed in a huge pile of corn. 

And everyone picked a pumpkin and the rule was that they had to be able to carry it to the car because there was no way I was going to be hauling anyone’s pumpkin anywhere.  I think Vince ended up rolling his to the car.

Our desktop computer died last week and Jeremy went inside to operate on its guts. I started out this marriage handier than Jeremy, but now I suspect he might be handier than I. In the past two days, Jeremy has not only fixed the computer, but he has also fixed our heater by spending $11.94 on a fuse at Home Depot. I had spent about an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with the damn heater and I think it took Jeremy only 15 minutes to figure it out. I defend myself with the fact that I don’t understand anything about electricity. I am suspicious of anything I can’t see and feel. Also the juxtaposition of electricity and magnetism always throws me for a loop.

Jeremy might have spent an extra 5 bucks or so to buy a Deskstar hard drive over the absolutely cheapest model. I used to make these hard drives for IBM, before Hitachi bought them out – was a process engineer for the HSA, the head stack assembly, the part which swings back and forth across the disks to read the data. When I was making them, they retailed for more than $800 for much less storage, but this one was $45? maybe $50?
 

The backup restore got hung up a little – it told us that it would finish in 70 years or so!

I kind of want to do this: