Peppy decided to try to make Carol a card before she woke up. She performed under pressure and surprised her. Writing a lot of letters, but any real words are just coincidence so far. She is a fun little one.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
Since I have been a home-owner, I have been beckoned into some dark corners of our house that I would rather forget.
1.) The trash compactor: I had to get in there up to my elbows. Really way up behind everything… after carving pumpkins, someone twisted the compact knob and all that juicy pulp worked it’s way into the machine’s private parts. A few days later we had a tell-tale whiff of rotting pumpkin and I had to get to work. I found trash back there that belonged to the tenants before us. Yuck.
2.) The dishwasher: Our last machine suffered some mild ailments for a year or so before it eventually died. I didn’t realize it was dead and kept it in it’s spot while I tried more CPR. In the meantime it developed terrible moldy odors and trails of ants. Finally, we hauled it away, drooling disgusting liquid and fumes. Next time I’ll haul out the corpse as soon as possible. Blech.
3.) One of our recurring gross-outs is our sewer backing up. It’s not terrible when it’s erupting… just a bit of tidal gurgling in the basement. But to fix the problem I have to rent a sectional router, and wrangle the massive coils and black liquid for an hour or two. It’s disgusting. I hate handling the six 8 ft. sections of cable after doing the fix. Even after I wear gloves and disposable clothes, that distinctly greasy and putrid smell stays around. Foul.
I just finished doing the sewer fix for the 4th time. I feel lucky that it hasn’t even been needed every year. Plus, this time I had the time to deal with it, due to Spring Break. Tree roots in our sewer line are the culprit. Doing it myself saves me about $200, so I guess I get paid well for it.
Anyone else have some least-favorite tasks that you love to hate?
I celebrate, our overnight low is above freezing. That means snow & ice is melting while we sleep. What a thought. Looking forward to using the bike path again, like everyone. This winter has been a doozy. And Columbus, OH just got a dump of 20 inches of fresh snow over the weekend.
I attended a teaching technology conference last Friday. I picked up several interesting tidbits, but the one that I’m inspired by is this application called Scratch. It was developed by M.I.T. with the intention to make kids into media creators instead of media consumers. The program allows you to build animations or games by using a visual programing interface.
Ellie’s project which included her own monkey sounds.
Our kids jumped in and have been having fun with it right away. I like that they are tricked into learning programming logic, xy coordinates, and how to control visual elements with commands. I’m learning a lot too.
It’s a free program, and the things that you create can easily be shared on the web through the Scratch website. The sharing part is cool too, because you can download any project and view it’s scripts in order to adapt and use them. Open source programming for kids.