It’s taken nearly 4 years and a fairly massive investment of time, affection, and research dollars, but we finally have the fully autonomous self-regulating automatic cheese grater* we’ve always wanted.
* note: cheese grater is not fully autonomous, particularly self-regulating, or remotely automatic.
Today being so miserable and cold (-15º Celsius or -22º with the windchill), Nora and I took her balance bike off to an undisclosed indoor location with wide hallways for some good, old fashioned indoor bike riding. Please don’t tell anyone that we did this.
This past Monday was MLK day so Nora’s school closed and I got to spend the morning playing with her. We observed the holiday and Dr. King’s memory as I believe he’d most have wanted; we went ice skating. Nora’s friend Salomé reluctantly gifted these spiffy little skates to her last May when she and her family moved away. This was the first time we’ve gotten to use them and they fit absolutely perfectly. Unfortunately, I was too busy holding up a giggling, wriggling mass of hysterical Nora to get any photos or videos on the actual ice. We both had a wonderful time, laughed until our faces hurt, and then gorged ourselves on hummus and pita while watching professional figure skaters practice on another rink. Great fun.
Apparently these days kids wear bike helmets and use PVC walkers to hold themselves up when ice skating!?? I call bullcrap on this hyper-overprotective behavior. Kids are *supposed* to fall down and go too fast and bonk their heads and cry and get up and do it again. Am I the crazy one?
Nora and I started a weekly swimming class this week. This “class” was carefully chosen because it is the one with no ‘instructor’ or ‘lessons’. It’s really just an hour every week when we get to go play in the pool. Turns out, though, that the swimming pool in Tappan middle school is freezing. There were other kids there in neoprene bodysuits and these were not completely ridiculous. Nora’s lips turned solidly blue but she was still crushed when we had to get out of the pool (shivering and crushed).
In this photograph, Nora has lulled me into a false sense of security and is apparently reading my e-mail. This would be fine if she’d also reply to it and do whatever stuff needs to get done because of it.
Sunday, January 16th was Nora’s 3.14159265th birthday. We celebrated by going out for Buddy’s Pizza with Granny and then coming home to cuddle and watch the Muppet Movie*. Here’s a shot of me and the birthday girl watching Kermit & friends (and a shot she took of Kermit).
*Actually, this is a miserable lie. We did these things, of course, but I’d completely forgotten the occasion was coming until Danny reminded me it had passed. I’d planned to bake a pie and put a candle in it and sing but, luckily for Nora, I got busy with grad school and forgot. Oh well.
The moment *after* I turned off the camera Nora informed us that Jen is the pig’s father. Congrats, Jen!
I presented a really boring poster at this year’s Linguistic Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh. I mean this thing was *dull*. I could barely stay awake through it and I wrote it. Nora found a far, far better use for the other side of the paper.
The editorial staff here at rubberducky.org have fallen behind on posts and will, I swear, have a batch of really great Christmas stuff to share at some point relatively soon (graduate school is hard, what can I say?).
We recently gave Nora the computer that Jen had in her dorm room in college. It’s a Macintosh Color Classic with a blazing 16Mhz processor, 8 megs of RAM, integrated 12″ CRT monitor, a processor direct slot for hardware emulation of an Apple IIe, and a 60 MB hard drive that all. still. totally. works. This little beige darling was the iMac 5 years before there was an iMac; It’s a thing of beauty*.
* though I think the little toy robot in the background might have a faster processor and more RAM.