Actually I'm over there

I'm comparing features of wordpress.com and Blogger (neither quite does it for me, actually, but I don't know how to build a website from scratch so I'm stuck using one or the other for now) and, for now at least, I'm over there, not here.

http://myimaginaryblog.wordpress.com/

I swore I wouldn't have the same dots template as everyone else,

but that was before I saw the other options. (Of course, I have high hopes to make this all pretty and original, but, that's all still just in my imagination.)

More on Googly Eyes

Dean: "You know what I hate? The backs of googly eyes are made of plastic instead of paper now, so they won't stay on. They always come off."

Zina: "I have some craft glue that would probably work better, but I'd have to supervise the kids when they use it."

Dean: "They should be able to use white glue."

Zina: "You're passionate about this."

Dean: "I am, because I have many happy memories of playing with googly eyes. There was a craft store on the way home from school in [I've forgotten which of the many places he lived as a kid he named] and we would stop and buy googly eyes and pom-poms,* and I spent many happy hours making little pom-pom creatures which we had fun playing with. We would also take them to school and try to sell them."

Zina: "That's why you're rich now."

Dean: "Yeah, that's when I decided that selling things wasn't a fun way to make a living."

*I did not note whether he said pom-pom or pompon, and of course you can't determine a person's spelling of googly eyes from hearing them say it.

Rose stands on the bathroom scale,

and says, "Let's do thirty dollars! See, I'm thirty-eight."

A lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part, unless I'm too sleepy to discern the nature of the emergency

Dean abruptly awakens me from very sound slumber: “Isaac has to turn in his display board for his science project this morning, and I didn’t know that." (How could he not have known that? I knew that, and I'm not the one who's been doing the science project with Ike.) "We need a glue stick or something.”

I stumble downstairs, struggling my way out of my dream. (We had moved into an old house, and the hugely overgrown yard gave us a bumper crop of volunteer vegetables, including a lot of jicamas (they were small cactus-like vegetables, and although we had a lot, we were discussing whether they were worth keeping, since you had to do a lot of cutting off of prickles to obtain a small edible portion,) and, to my delight, about ten large artichokes. Dean had spread all the harvested vegetables on the lawn and we were discussing allowing members of our student ward to bring baskets and take away our excess. Meanwhile, a stranger wandered into our backyard, eating an artichoke the wrong way, starting at the base and taking bites of it like it was an apple. She had purple artichoke flakes around her mouth. I tried to tell her the right way to eat it, but she said she always eats them this way, and she’d even written a book about artichokes. (I was trying to decide whether it was meant as a humor book.) There was also a less-pleasant part of the dream where I asked Dean to help me put the rain cover on our tent and he refused, saying I always made him do that and we didn’t need the rain cover anyway, so I did it myself and he said, “See, I knew you could do it by yourself,” and I said, “But I wanted your help.”)

Arriving downstairs, explaining that I used to stash glue sticks but that they always dry out, I blearily start rummaging and find some clear gel glue and some removable poster mounting squares, as well as three petrified glue sticks.

Dean: “Could you start gluing these on?”

Me: “I just barely woke up.”

Dean finds the Tombo adhesive roller thing in my desk drawer and starts using it to mount Isaac’s various charts and graphics.

Me: “That doesn’t hold very well.”

Dean: “It’ll do for now.”

Me: “What do you mean ‘for now?’?”

Dean: “Well, it’s not like kids are going to be trying to pry papers off the display board. Where are those pictures I printed for Ike?”

Me: “I saw them on the desk a couple of days ago. They’re probably under that huge pile of papers somewhere – Isaac, this is why I’ve told you guys not to use my desk – all these papers here are just from this week-end.”

At the bottom of the pile, Isaac finds the pictures and he and Dean put them in place. Dean grabs some packing tape and the copper pipe that’s going to go on the right side of the display board and they leave, Dean saying that they can finish up in the car in front of the school (the experiment uses three different copper pipes, actually, but Dean says they'll "just put one on for now.") I ask if they want clear packing tape, but Dean opts to bring the type of packing tape that has long fibers running through it lengthwise.

I don’t know whether they brought scissors.

Sudoku will not, if you were wondering, necessarily increase your quality of life, or at least not the quality of your real life

Isaac bought a little electronic Sudoku device at Harbor Freight Tools. It doesn't have a back-lit screen and is very hard to see if there is any light reflection off it at all, and also hard to see if it's dark, so wherever you're sitting there's usually only one place and position to hold the screen in which it's visible. This means that when you play you get to take your pick between being physically comfortable or being able to see the screen.

I've spent much of today frying my brain trying to master the rules -- this is the first time I've played. I'm trying to regenerate some verbal brain function so I can get some kid stories told before I forget them all:

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This is how Rose greeted Dean when he came back from shopping yesterday:

"Hi, Daddy! You're so big and tall! Thank you for buying all the grocery stores!"

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I have a cold, and this morning I tried to sleep in, with little success since every 2 minutes Rose kept begging me to let her watch TV. (On any other day I'd have gladly acquiesced, but I was trying to hold to our rule, which is that after church sometimes videos are okay, but before church we don't allow any form of TV.) I finally got the bright idea to ask Mabel to play with Rose, which she did, and that brought the interruption level way down to maybe only every 10-20 minutes, which gave me long enough stretches to fall asleep and have fitful dreams that my kids were making huge messes downstairs. When I got up, I told the kids that I'd been dreaming about them making messes, and Mabel said, "Your dreams came true!"

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[This one will only make sense if you're pretty familiar with the old PC game "Worms2," which is enjoying a revival at our house.]

The kids had gotten the doll house people out and Isaac told me, "I made paper weapons for all the people -- except for the grandpa. His weapon is the grandma." Me: (Stares blankly.) Isaac: "Get it -- she's an old woman?!" Me: "Oh, yeah." Isaac (proudly): "That was Mabel's idea."

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I really should take a picture of this (maybe tomorrow, but I'm not making any promises,) but the kids spent the afternoon making a family out of pom-poms* and googlie eyes (I find that I can't spell googlie today -- I'll blame it on the Sudoku -- but I did try to capitalize it, so there's your Freudian slip for the day,) and then they built a paper house and furnishings for the pom-pom family. The family all have names, too, but I'll have to wait until the kids are awake to ask the names, or I'm sure I'll remember them wrong.

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Today Rose was singing:

"God the Builder! Can he fix it? God the Builder! Yes he can!"

[I find myself wanting to capitalize the "he" in those sentences.]

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*I just spent five minutes trying to decide how to spell pom-pom. Dictionary.com seems to prefer pompom, but allows pompon and pom-pom, and pom-pon was my first choice but also seemed less common. I even tried to consult the packaging the pom-poms came in, but the top label must have gotten lost or thrown away when the bag was opened. (Actually, it's probably buried under the rest of the mess in the family room (the mess I dreamed of.) And anyway the packaging probably said something like "Yarn Craft Balls."

(You'd think while I was doing all that research, I'd have looked up the spelling of googlie eyes, too . . .)

So, now that I have real-life imaginary blog,

I'm out of ideas of what to do with it. Well, not really -- I have lots of ambitious ideas, which is probably why I haven't done anything more with it. Which (stagnancy) I am sure will rapidly become its usual state.

Also, I both got in a sewing mood AND actually sewed. (You can tell I've been sewing (or been sick, or been busy, or been web-surfing, or, or or,) by the state of my living room floor (as in, by how exciting and colorful its topography is. Right now it's exciting.) (I wonder if there's a correlation between the lateness of the hour and the prevalence of my parenthetical thoughts.)

(That's all.)

I Crack Myself Up, Part 2

Here's a riddle:

A Lane Bryant employee went a whole day without seeing a single fat person. How did this happen?


Answer: She didn't go to work that day.

I Crack Myself Up, Part 1

We have a light in our garage that comes on automatically when you enter the garage, but it takes some effort to trigger it: you have to take a couple of steps into the darkness before the light comes on. And I realized that this is a metaphor for my spiritual life--

because sometimes in your spiritual life, your husband installs something in your garage that just doesn't work very well.

Q & A (Miscellaneous questions, some pertaining to fish.)

Q. If you are taking your family of six to a Japanese restaurant, and you are offered the "private booth," which does not allow for seat-belted high chairs, should you accept?

A. Yes! Nothing adds excitement to your dining experience like having a 15-month-old run 50 times around the table, falling loudly on about half his revolutions, intermittently grabbing and throwing handfuls of cabbage and rice. For added drama, order dishes that will burn the baby’s hands if he touches them, so you will have to keep moving them out of his reach every 10 seconds. For even more fun, bring along a 3-year-old who won't stay in her place for more than thirty seconds at a time, and a 10-year-old who reads a book the entire time and refuses to eat even plain rice.

Q. What about the 7-year-old? Will I also wish I left her at home?

A. She might get in an adventurous mood, try everything you order, and decide she likes sushi. You will have a new favorite partner for Japanese-food outings.

Q. Do betta fish like whole wheat bread?

A. This is a great experiment to try if you are three years old, since it gives you the additional learning experience of seeing how quickly your Mom can grab a net, dechlorinate a small pitcher of water, get the betta fish out of the bowl and into the new water, and then change out all the betta's bready water. Bonus: You can also find out whether wheat bread kills bettas.

(Results of experiment: 1) The fish will eat as much of the wheat bread as he can before your mother intervenes; 2) Your mother will demonstrate astonishing speed at fish-rescuing; 3) Although the ultimate fate of the fish is unknown at publication date, so far he is still behaving like a normal, living fish.)

Q. If on Wednesday you are invited to sing a duet with your daughter in Sacrament Meeting the following Sunday, should you accept?

A. Yes! This gives fate the opportunity to play a fun trick on you when you come down with sneezes and a sore throat on Thursday.

Q. Could you go on writing fake questions and answers all night?

A. Yes, this is why I now have a blog. But I'm also (as aforementioned) sick with sneezes and a sore throat, so, actually, no.