Bowling? Who goes bowling anymore?

We took the kids bowling recently. I remembered my camera for once, and took a few pictures. The only one I liked was one of Yamaraashi-chan, but Kouryou-chan took a photo of me and damn if I don't look like a dork in this picture.

( Pictures after the cut )

It's Discardia!

It's Discardia!. I hit my 200 hour limit at work and so was required to take some time off, and so I took a week off more or less at random. Omaha needed me to take two days off to watch over the girls while she went on some press trip, she being a journalist and all now with legitimate creds, so I took this whole week off. That's one of the reasons the website is getting updated. It's a part-time job all on its own.

I don't practice Discardia with quite the relish of Metagrrrl, but I do pratice it with a certain amount of ruthlessness that tends to dismay Omaha. The first step was to clean up the office, haul down my metabox of junk from my workstation upstairs (which is just the living room couch-- one of the disadvantages to wifi is that your work sprawl tends to, well, sprawl away from its traditional radius about one's desk. That is, if you even have a desk. My father had a desk; I don't believe I ever saw him use it.

Rat's Nest!
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Still, the secret to getting anything done is getting started, and I've done that. While I was cleaning up this weekend, I snapped a photograph under my desk. Check out this mess: that's the cabling for the router, the hub, my desktop, the ASDL modem, the VOIP modem, the VOIP to POP interface, plus power and data for all of the peripherals: speakers, scanner, headphones, joysticks, even a turntable for Thoth's sake. And this is less that it was two weeks ago, when I finally drilled a whole through the wall and routed the wifi bridge's cable through the utility room rather than along the floor here and out to the hallway, where it ran along the floor until it terminated in the bridge's mounting under the steps.

Pumpkin Carving!

On Friday we took the girls pumpkin-hunting. Although it was cold and the rain had briefly sprinkled as we were on our way to the farm, when we got there it was clear enough that the girls each picked out a medium-sized pumpkin of their own. We also ran through the corn maze they had there which, while nothing like the Carpinito mazes we've been to in years past, was much cheaper and just as much fun for the girls. I don't think they cared too much about the scavenger-hunt style mazes; they just wanted to get lost and found again, and that maze was the perfect excuse for it.

Sunday, Omaha left for Washington DC to attend a convention there, leaving me to watch over the kids. I think I did a good job making sure they were fed and clothed and generally kept safe. I tried to limit how much visual entertainment they had. They've both taken up knitting with some kind of vengeanance. Kouryou-chan is braiding something on her fingers; she says it'll be a scarf for the cat. I've never seen something made that way, it's fascinating. Yamaraashi-chan is much more disciplined, making a tight-knit little bag with knitting needles.

Kouryou-chan.
Hosted on Flickr!

After lunch it was time to carve our pumpkins. I have one of those "safety saws" for pumpkin carving and I allowed the girls to do their own cutting. They took turns with it, trading it back and forth as they sawed off the opening in the top. Kouryou-chan was fastidious and wanted to wear latex gloves while doing the "icky part" of scooping out Jack O' Lantern's brains.

Yamaraashi-chan.
Hosted on Flickr!

Yamaraashi-chan wasn't quite clear on the concept of cutting at an angle, but I managed to keep her from dropping the lid into the pumpkin. As she scooped out her pumpkin's innards, I set Kouryou-chan to drawing her pumpkin's face on a sheet of paper.

When they both had clean pumpkins and drawings of what they wanted, I had them draw their design on the pumpkin with wet-erase red marker, and then they set to cutting. Each took a turn, and both did a good job. I only gave advice on how to open up the openings so that more light would come through the small eyes and noses they were giving their Jack O' Lanterns. The one on the left is Yamaarashi-chan's, the one on the right Kouryou-chan's. Kouryou-chan's eyes show more skill, but Yamaarashi-chan did wonderful job of getting a whole lot more light of out the face.

The results!
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

My disease has a name!

Like a lot of my friends, I've been struck with a lack of energy and a general inability to stay conscious throughout the entire day. The tendency to pass out has been most prominent around mid-afternoon. There have been no other noticeable symptoms: no stuffy nose, no cough, no fever.

It has the perfect name now: Emo Flu.