Happiness is...

... a gluten-free chocolate eclair from White Box Pies. Hand delivered by family members, no less. :D

Holiday weekend omnibus post

Mr E and I went to see Wanted on Friday (Kid A was off at Silverwood with friends). Big, loud, hyperkinetic, and bloody, AKA my kind of movie.

Then we checked out the gluten free selections at Huckleberry's. Bottom line: they have a slightly better variety than Yokes, and for some products the prices are lower.

Maximum force family togetherness on Sunday; went shopping with mom and sisters, while Mr E and Kid A hung out with Cousin D (who needs to eat something! he grew six inches and looks like stretch armstrong). Amazingly enough, I'm a size 8. Whodathunkit? Then dinner at Mom's -- big T-bone steaks and all the fixin's (except for the French bread).

Role Reversal

I really love ThinkGeek . I get regular promotional e-mails from them, because I love knowing what the latest nerd toys are.

So, I just got their Father's Day promo e-mail, and it's chock full of stuff that makes me go "oooh, pretty". However, Mr. E's reaction would be more like "meh". Funny old world, eh?

The Ides of May

It's our twentieth wedding anniversary! w00t!

We're going to go out to dinner with the fruit of our labor, aka Kid A. (Who, when I said "fruit of our labor" to her, replied, "I think you did most of the work".) It'll be a combined anniversary / happy 4.0 GPA party. :D

Edit to add:
We went out to The Melting Pot. Ordinarily I like to avoid chain restaurants, but the idea of a fondue dinner was irresistable. Ended up running $50/person, so it's not something we'll be doing very often, but it was a fun night and quite filling. :D I discovered that Hemingway drank mojitos for a reason... whew.

I gave Mr. E a Munchkin expansion pack (#4, Need for Steed) and he gave me a 2GB Swissbit, in the airplane-friendly no blades configuation. I'll be putting the 512MB Swissbit stick into it and passing it on to Kid A. I'm also converting the Car Wars design spreadsheet (that I did for our 10th anniversary) into a web app. Hmm, guess #20 is the nerd anniversary... of course, for us that also applies to #1-#19. :D

You weren't using that bandwidth for anything, were you?

And now, a video from Kid A:

Snow day!

I have the only teenager in the western world who is upset when they cancel school because of snow... (she was hoping to work on some things for Destination Imagination).

First day of high school!

... I keep singing "Sunrise, Sunset". :D

You know you're raising a nerd when...

... you get your daughter Halo 2 and the cutest pair of cat earrings for her 14th birthday. :D

Timing is everything

Why did I start counting calories right before my sister arrived in town for a 2-week visit? I know I won't be good... how many calories are there in a margarita, anyway? ;)

It is still, however, all good. :D

Netflix

We're giving Netflix a try, and I find that I'm much more likely to slap a movie I'm not sure of into the queue than I was to pick it up at the rental place. I think it's because there's no immediate expense when I queue up a movie at Netflix, so it reduces the perceived risk of renting something I don't like.

(So far, we're happy, but it's only been, what, a week? I'm sure we'll find *something* to kvetch about.)

edited to add: now, if we could get a combo Netflix/Gamefly membership? *That'd* be nerdvana for sure.

We won (mostly)!

With much grumbling about Microsoft and how this would be so much easier in Linux, my compatriot J got the wireless network running. Our main technical difficulty: The used router I got back in '05 really wants to be connected directly to broadband, and we're running dialup through one of the PCs. So we had to go static IP instead of DHCP, just to get things up and running.

And, for some reason, the NIC on the motherboard on the PC with the dialup doesn't even show up in the BIOS, so it's talking to the router wirelessly. I found an old 10/1o0 card in "the pile", and may whack it in there.

But, by the end of the night, all the PCs we had on were able to see each other, share the internet connection, and share the printer. Victory! And the multi-player in HoMM III (the whole point of the exercise) looks like it'll run happily over TCP/IP.

End of an era

Today is the kiddo's last day of middle school... we've already received her schedule, booklist, and summer reading assignments from G-Prep. (Oh, and the payment schedule *flinch*) Big changes are a-coming, and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. (Weird, ennit?)

Insert Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show here

I'm sure we could have a wonderful and enlightening discussion about education here, about the pros and cons of year round education, pedagogical variants and techniques, differences in learning styles, heck, how the schools have to serve neuro-diverse and neuro-typical alike...

But I'm going to kvetch about my daughter's schedule. Yeesh! She's in the last two weeks of middle school, and I swear, they've got something scheduled every night until we reach sweet, sweet summer vacation. As a family, we've always sought to avoid overscheduling (it doesn't look very fun for anybody involved), and now the school district is doing it for us! (One could call that service, I suppose... )

Gotta admit, though, the bands sounded really good. It's so nice to not dread the concerts... ;)