Zatera Ul

We went to the garden store Saturday to get some herbs. Boy, do I have a yearning to have a garden of my own now! So does OLC, apparently: after helping her dad plant some seeds in little pots, she twice got into the dirt and seeds and made a mess all over the dining room table and carpet.

Somewhere in the Old Testament a while back I came across some verses that said (paraphrasing) “Plant your fields first, then build your house.” We’re still in the planting season, figuratively. This does remind me, though, that I do have some other things to do today offline.

That is what I told my husband the other day, when it was nearly 90 degrees indoors. It is not quite so bad today.

The children are both napping right now after a busy day of running around; quite a blessing because I am all tired out too.

TLG is starting to try to learn to roll onto his tummy.

Rixa had a good post on postpartum bodies and feeling frumpy. I’ve been faithfully doing my Pilates exercises, and am nearly back to the level I was at before I had children. So I feel a lot lighter than I actually am. Which is better than being smaller, but feeling fat, I suppose.

Several times in the last two days, I’ve come across OLC turning the pages of a book and “reading aloud” by telling herself a story that she makes up as she goes. There are two recurring characters, Pippi and Peter. (I suppose Pippi comes from Pippi Longstocking, and Peter is the name of a dog that she met last weekend.) OLC supplies dialogue for them:

“Oh!” said Pippi.

“Oh, Pippi!” said Peter.

That’s the only part that I can write down verbatim, but there was plenty more. So far I have overheard Pippi and Peter going for a walk, and going to get the mail. It is very funny.

We had a church picnic yesterday, and OLC had a ball eating under the trees: wander in, mooch some hamburger or watermelon, wander off again. The problem is that she does the same thing indoors at home, and I keep finding dried-up little morsels in odd places.

….but when i tried out Bing and searched for “foofy”, my blog came up on the second page of results, and his didn’t even make the top fifteen pages. (He did have the very first result for “foofiness”, though.)

In case you are wondering, around here “foofy” is not a variant of “frou-frou”. Poodles with poodle haircuts are frou-frou; a poodle driving a miniature motorcycle up a ramp and jumping it through a flaming hoop would be foofy.

Recently online:

Barbara at Mommy Life has a very good post: As Obama deconstructs, what can we do? 10 ideas. I can’t think of anything to add to the list except, perhaps, to consider the possibility of leaving. While packing up and moving to another country is almost unthinkable to me, I know that most of my great-grandparents came across the Atlantic, to a new country and an unfamiliar language, in search of a better life. Also, plenty of people in my church have gone (or currently are) overseas to serve as missionaries.

MaxedOutMama always has the sanest and most sensible economic analysis (but not without a sense of humor). Fascinating to watch a superior intelligence at work.

As for not-so-recent reading, I was thinking about how little I retain from some books. All I can remember about A Brief History of Time is that Carl Sagan takes a snipe in the foreword, something about how you can be sure now that there is no God, because they looked for him and couldn’t find him. The rest of the book I can only guess about–it’s Stephen Hawking, so there are probably black holes in it, and from the title, it probably also includes the Big Bang…. Beyond that, I have no idea at all, and I know I’ve read the book at least twice.

A Tale of Two Cities: I remember knitting, guillotines, and a guy sacrificing his life at the end. Also I remember that the second time I read it, I was able to follow the plot; in early high school, I read all the words, but didn’t catch the thread of the story. Most of the other stuff I read in high school was science fiction and fantasy from the library; I usually had read everything interesting in the reading/English literature textbook by the end of the first week. (This reminds me that I’m way behind on keeping up with Daniel Pinkwater’s books. I did read Superpuppy recently [nonfiction], and highly recommend it if you’re ever planning on getting a dog.)

Lost book: An old children’s book that my grandma read to me. It had a rooster on the front cover, and the pictures were pretty much solid red, yellow, and blue.

Found book: I remembered very little about Donkey-Donkey, another book of my grandma’s, until I found a copy (of the 1940 edition) at a rummage sale. Maybe the part where he tore his ear on a nail, but that was all. I’ve found a few other books that she had, most of them I remembered just enough about to be able to recognize them when I saw them. Being able to actually read them again was wonderful; it felt like getting my childhood memories back.

Through Get Rich Slowly, I found this “personal financial ’stress test’”. Interesting to run the numbers and see that we’re doing sort of ok. Until the car dies, anyway.

I wrote a while back about how the county was putting $900,000+ worth of solar panels on a county building. County Commissioner Jeff Johnson (the black sheep fiscal conservative on the board) has bestowed a Golden Fire Hydrant Award on this project, and notes that it won’t pay for itself in energy cost savings until at least 2070 (very, very optimistically):

The Public Works Solar Panels? Well, after some explanation to me about how this project is not “all about the bottom line” I learned that they cost about $900,000.

Yes, these solar panels will begin to save the taxpayers of Hennepin County $15,000 per year in 2070. My 5th grade son, Thor, will be 71. I will be dead. And I’m willing to wager that the Hennepin County Public Works building in Medina will be long gone.

It was also interesting to learn that the county’s annual budget is over $1 billion dollars. (The county includes Minneapolis and suburbs; population about 1.2 million.)

I think I would like my dollar for the solar panels back, please.

Pro-life activist Christina at RealChoice on the Tiller murder (she’s been tracking abortion deaths for many years; at least one of Tiller’s patients died needlessly from a “safe” quasi-legal abortion):

To those who don’t get it, imagine that your job is to “turn” enemy spies, to get them to become double agents who give you vital information that saves tens of thousands of lives. Imagine that one of those enemy spies, who has access to all the enemy’s most vital secrets, had been your target for 35 years. If you could turn him, it would be a mighty blow to the enemy, one from which they might never recover.

And then some dillwad went and shot that spy, in such a time and place as to score a huge PR coup for the enemy and to set back your work at least ten years.

THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO PROLIFERS TODAY.

I figured out how to bend my glasses back right, and all of a sudden I’m really seeing in stereo again! Last fall OLC got hold of my glasses while I was napping and bent them all up; after TLG was born MFH accidentally knelt on them. Plus I think my habit of reading in bed while lying on my side (and occasionally dozing off with them on) has not been all that good for them either. Turns out that the mounts for the nose pad things needed bending back as much as the earpieces did.

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We’re definitely in the sixth-week growth spurt: TLG nurses to sleep, when he’s finally really out I set him down to go deal with OLC, and five minutes later he wakes up insisting that he’s hungry. (Whoever decided that six weeks was the right length for a maternity leave was no friend of little babies.)

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I started a new project of making a skirt from a round tablecloth, one tiny step at a time because of the growth spurt.

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This morning I decided that Pilates are addictive because they loosen you up, then overnight you get into even awkwarder sleeping positions and get more kinks that stiffen in by morning, then you need to do more Pilates to loosen up again. (Speaking of awkward sleeping positions: by the end of her nap yesterday, OLC looked like her spine had dissolved and she was oozing off the mattress onto the floor.)

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The other day I figured out our family’s social class: upper lower middle class.

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Some of the local creation science fans have discovered that I’m a Ph.D physicist who believes in Jesus and a young Earth, so I’ve been getting tapped to look into a few things, like these guys’ ambitious theory of practically everything. Wish that I had time to try to follow their math through. Anyway, this is definitely exposing all of the gaps in my physics education. There are plenty of areas of physics where a layman could read a book or two and know more than I do. I do have the advantage of knowing more math and more of the fundamentals of physics–helpful when MFH starts inventing new theories of optics and things like that.

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I’m working on writing a book or two, and MFH is working on a couple of photo books, children permitting.