It's not my fault!

Last night I clicked over here to put up a last-minute blog before bed and got this:

Service Unavailable

Error 503

So blame Blogger that I was a day late in passing on some of the most positive news I've heard for the future of our nation in quite some time:

"A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" beats "A Very Gaga Thanksgiving" in TV ratings.

An auspicious beginning to the Christmas season

For the first time in several years, I knew exactly where both my Christmas earrings and my Christmas music CDs were the day after Thanksgiving.  You don't know how many times I've only found one or the other after the 25th.

Time in flight

Quick: What's the shortest month of the year?

No, it's not February, calendrical evidence notwithstanding.  It's November.  It seems Halloween is barely in the rear-view mirror, and already Thanksgiving is over and Christmas (too) fast approaching.

Of course, it all depends on your perspective.  Today Eric was complaining about how far away Christmas is and how long it's going to take to get here, even pulling out his calendar to show me how long it is until Christmas.  (It's on a whole other page than Thanksgiving, it turns out.)  Honestly, I remember those days.  The school weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks used to seem like years.  (The existence of end-of-semester tests just added to their unpleasantness.)  That's the difference between having nothing to do but anticipate Christmas and being the one responsible for making Christmas happen.

We had a pleasant afternoon here and got the Christmas lights up outside the house today.  The tree is put together and in the window, too, but by the time I got done stringing lights outside, I didn't feel like dealing with the ornaments the same day.  That will be our job tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Eric just came up to me tonight after his bath and told me, "You're the best mommy ever.  You know, even when you make sins, God still loves you.  And you do that, too."

Thanksgiving Eve

I'm farther ahead in the Thanksgiving game this year than I was last.  I got two pumpkin pies baked this evening, and they're already cooled and ready to go into the fridge overnight, instead of just getting out of the oven at ten o'clock like last year; and I have the battery for the power drill plugged in.  We cook our turkey breast on a little electric rotisserie, and finally last year I found a way to put the spit through the breastbone that doesn't involve breaking the plate underneath or driving it into Tommy's palm (both of which have happened previous Thanksgivings).  Last year, after trying to bore through the bone by hand, it finally occurred to me to use power tools!

Entrepreneurship and names

Today we made our first visit to the Five Guys Burgers and Fries that opened up several months ago up the street from us.  Found that the hype was not entirely without substance.  Faith decided that she wanted to open up a restaurant when she grew up and call it Five Hogs Burgers and Dogs, since she prefers hot dogs to hamburgers.  Eric said he was going to have a restaurant called Eric's Restaurant of Spectacular.

Career Day

Eric's ambition

Another reason to despair of Western civilization

It's been a while since I made fun of "Parenting" magazine, right?  The December/January issue suggests Little Critter's The Night Before Christmas on the basis that it "offers a modern spin on the original's archaic language."  Archaic?  Really?  This isn't Beowulf or Chaucer.  It's not even Shakespeare.  And to make matters worse, the example given is that the book changes "Not a creature was stirring" to "Not a critter was stirring."  So "creature" is an archaic word that kids won't understand, while "critter" is "modern," as opposed to, say, dialect.  Who knew Elly May Clampett was so progressive in her speech patterns?

Having a ball

Now that the kids are signed up for basketball, Tommy had to go buy them each their own ball to practice with

The Sporting Life

Faith and Eric have two more weeks of swim lessons before the holiday break.  Eric jumped into the pool without holding his teacher's hands for the first time yesterday.  He was very proud of himself.  Also last night, they both went in for their evaluations for Upward Basketball at our church this January and February.  Neither one have ever played before.  Eric managed to get one ball in the lowest basket and did fairly well at dribbling with his right hand; Faith shot one basket from either side on the medium basket.  Just as we were leaving, her best friend Alyssa came in for her evaluation, so hopefully they will end up on the same team.

I'm so there.

January 13, 2012, as a short before the 3D re-release of "Beauty and the Beast."

Chuck and Tangled

Ever since we saw "Tangled," we've been hoping for in-jokes in the final season of "Chuck," as Zachary Levi plays the titular character and voiced Flynn Rider.  I was really looking to see Chuck fight off some bad guys with a frying pan.



Haven't seen it yet, but in last week's episode, Captain Awesome was left at home alone with his baby daughter for the first time when Ellie went back to work.  She leaves at 9 AM, and we see a montage of Awesome cleaning house, feeding the baby, cooking, working out, etc.  Then he looks at his watch and says "9:45?  AM??"  And I can't help but wonder if it's a sly reference to the opening song in Tangled:




7 AM, the usual morning lineup
Start on the chores and sweep 'til the floor's all clean
Polish and wax, do laundry, and mop and shine up
Sweep again, and by then it's like 7:15...

Building a reputation

I was working children's church today, so Tommy had to stand around out in the corridor until all the kids got picked up by their parents and I was free to go.  Faith's Sunday School teacher came by and told him something that had happened in class this morning.  Every week, they send home a little tear-out worksheet for homework that has some little activity or puzzle or something on it that the kids are supposed to bring back the following Sunday.  Honestly, most of the kids don't even bother taking them home with them; they're always left all over the classroom after children's church.  So, after handing out the worksheets, the teacher asked, "Who's going to bring back their homework next week?"  And a classroom full of second- and third-graders answered, "Faith!"

Playing favorites

A page in Faith's grammar workbook on capitalization (of titles, to be specific) asked for her favorite book and movie.  She wrote that Dinosaurs Before Dark is her favorite book, although I think it's really The Boxcar Children, and that "Doctor Who" was her favorite movie.  (Technically, it's a TV show rather than a movie, but she only watches it on DVD so I can understand the mistake.)  She asked what my favorite book and movie were.  The Count of Monte Cristo was an easy pick for favorite book, but I had a hard time coming up with a favorite movie.  I finally said "The Cutting Edge."  Although it's hardly in the same league with Monte Cristo artistically, it's the movie I can sit down and watch almost any time and thoroughly enjoy even though I know exactly what's going to happen and in fact have most of it memorized.  I'd say it's a guilty pleasure, except that I don't feel at all guilty about liking it.  Now I want to go watch it now, actually....

How others apparently live

Can't remember if I've mentioned it here before, but Faith has been going to a weekly class for homeschoolers on Friday mornings at the zoo this fall.  Eric's been staying with my mom, and instead of driving back and forth and spending more than an hour in the car, I go to the McDonald's I frequented during zoo camp this summer and sit with a Diet Coke and free refills to read the newspaper and magazines for a little less than three hours.  Or at least, that's what I normally do.  Today, a mom and her two young-adult daughters sat at the table next to me and talked about planning a resort wedding.  Learned more than I ever wanted to know about prices of resorts in Barcelona vs. those in Mexico and if you have to wear a wristband (why?) and whether they all thought they could each save $2500 in six months to pay for travel and board. Tried to tune them out but couldn't.  Didn't get much reading done this morning.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

So I'm really falling down on the blogging thing this week.  The closer to the end of the year I get, the worse job I'm doing.  I think it's a combination of blogging fatigue and the fast-approaching holidays.  Our church has a daily schedule for Bible reading, and I kept up with it all last year until the week of Thanksgiving, at which point it just all ended until I got back to it with the good intentions of the new year.  So far this year, I'm about 4 days behind on it, all of which has happened since Halloween.

Halloween is the archway with "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" inscribed on it in the calendar.  From there, the final two months of the year just turn into a avalanche which gathers speed until it deposits me, stunned and breathless, in January.  Have to buy a turkey; have to make pies; have to shop; have to clean; have to decorate; have to wrap presents sometime before Christmas morning; have to find the Christmas music (the last three years, I have never found my crate of Christmas CDs until after Christmas); have to buy Christmas cards, then have to get them mailed.  And this year, I never even finished thank-you notes from my birthday eight months ago!  And I haven't answered e-mail since Valentine's Day.  And I haven't mailed anyone a birthday card since April when I could never get my hands on photos of the kids, cards, a calendar, and my address book all at the same time, and when I could, there was so much piled on the dining room table, I couldn't even sit down to write them until I cleared it off....

2011.  Tough year for getting things done.  I'm taking the next two weeks off homeschool (except for minimal reading and math to keep them from regressing) and will try to get some of the above conquered.  I will pay with tears when I have to get them back into the daily lesson rut afterwards, but I need some time off.  More importantly, I need not to waste the time off I take.

Upgrade

I type from a new laptop tonight.  My old one got a bad infection several months ago, and while I was able to recover from it, the audio never sounded right afterwards so we had to use Tommy's computer for watching movies or listening to music.  So when my backspace key popped off and the retaining clip broke while I was trying to put it back on, I just decided to upgrade.  So, yeah, I bought a new laptop because a key came off.  Doing my part for the global economy!

Sneak Reviews

Faith had her friend Alyssa over on Saturday, and we took them and Eric to see "Puss in Boots."  It was pretty lame, and that's coming from someone who still has some latent affection for Antonio Banderas' Zorro and thus is willing to cut the movie some slack.  It's astonishing to what extent Pixar has lapped the field in children's movies, even second-tier Pixar like "Cars 2" and "Monsters, Inc."  (I know critics loved it, but I include "Ratatouille" in the second-tier list, while putting "Cars" and "A Bug's Life" in the first-tier slot.  Go figure.)

The game of the century!

So they're billing tomorrow's LSU-Alabama football game matching the #1 ranked team in the country against the #2 as "the game of the century."

Really?  The game of the century?  The game of the year, I'd buy maybe, although even then you're going to end up with another #1 vs. #2 in the BCS championship game, so you're kind of underselling that already.  But at this early point in the century, they're already willing to go out on a limb and say there will not be a comparable game at any time in the next 89 years?  I guess I can stop watching college ball on TV for the rest of my life then.

"I'm a count, not a saint!"

Love little in-jokes in shows, along the lines of Rick Castle's space-cowboy Halloween costume and the way he learned to speak Mandarin "from a TV show I used to love."  Tonight's "Person of Interest" had one -- maybe, anyway.  Reese and his "number of  the week" were hiding out in an apartment where a high school student was reading The Count of Monte Cristo.  Just as he was saying "Edmond's cool," they cut to a shot of Reese giving a little smile in the corner.  Jim Caviezel, of course, starred as Edmond Dantes in a very fun film version of the novel almost a decade ago.  The episode ended up referencing the plot of the novel before it was over, so maybe it was just a coincidence, but....

Oh, and Keith Mars in what looks to be a recurring role!

...and Eric's takings