why i love the interweb...

such a mundane reason, but here it is: I love the interweb because I can order a new part for my bread machine by simply doing a yahoo search on "breadmaker parts" and then ordering. If anyone's interested I ordered from Goodman's and I recommend them to anyone. Now who would have predicted the facilitation of purchasing spare parts for kitchen appliances when the internet was being invented?

I wanna be a geek!

i love being wireless; it means I can post blogs more often (usually between commercials :-).

So, have you seen the show Beauty and the Geek? If not you haven't missed anything; I've seen maybe 5 or 10 minutes of two episodes and I was disgusted each time. Yes, it's ANOTHER reality show (when are they going to go out of style??? I can't wait...) but it teams up a bunch of male "geeks" with a bunch of female beauty queens. The men are all extremely smart (doctors, lawyers, etc. etc. etc.) but not so successful with women, and the women are all very attractive but not so smart.

It's truly embarrassing.

I don't mind the idea of teaming up "beauties" and "geeks" but why do the men have to be the smart ones? I wanna be a geek! I actually looked at the application form, but you have to be american citizens to apply. oh well... just another example of our society portraying being smart as equating with being male/socially inept/unattractive. Way to go, people -- I'm sure that the teenagers watching this show are going to get the "right" message (yes; in case you weren't sure, that was sarcasm).

farm animals

There's a nice cryptic title for you!

I had a thought, the other day (inspired by Dr. Runte's posting on "Thinking Outide the Box") -- I've often wondered why farms and farm animals play such a big part in toddler toys and learning. For example, there's "Old Macdonald had a Farm"; board-books of cows, pigs, and chickens, toy farms with toy animals and so on. This seems to be universal to our culture too; it's not just in more rural areas (where it would make more sense) but in cities where a cow is a VERY rare sight. My best guess is that they tend to be very recognizable (a cow is a cow is a cow) whereas other "easy" words in our culture (e.g. car) can have many different variations. That's my best guess, anyway. I wonder, does this carry over to other cultures? In China and Japan are animals and farms a common theme for toddler learning? I don't know, but it might make an interesting study.

Note: I would have posted this in Dr. Runte's comments, but it wasn't working at the time.

ugh, dell

as little as I like to advertise for Dell, I thought that some of my more artistically inclined friends might be interested in this: design a laptop cover, win a dell laptop. Might be fun...

a fence, some heat, and a whole lot of bugs

So it's HOT here... we hit 31 celsius this afternoon, and it's 27 Celsius in the house. BUT we have a fence, yay! There are a few gaps in it, and we are still working on the gates, but it is 90% done. Unfortunately every time we take a step outside we hear the whine of low-flying bomber-sized mosquitoes, and we have to take evasive action. Well, *I* have to take evasive action; not only do the kids not seem bothered by them but they don't seem to get bitten, either. Me, I have welts the size of oranges on my legs. I'm not complaining, though; I know not to scratch (and luckily they don't really itch that much). Our friend's daughter looks like she has recently recovered from the chicken pox because she snuck outside one afternoon without any bug-spray on her. And it is HARD to keep a 5 year old (or younger) from scratching -- short of tieing (tying? how is that supposed to be spelled?) them up it's virtually impossible.

I had every intention of getting out to do some clean-up and yard work today; I don't really know what I'm doing with the gate-building so I'll leave that to dh, but I thought I could do some other odds and ends. Between the heat and the bugs I gave up after about 20 minutes. Oh well; it isn't like the grass will suffer from not being cut for another few days :-)

it's good to be home...

I have to say it again -- it's good to be home. I walked in the front door, and immediately all sorts of stress rolled off my shoulders. It's not just having a husband again (although that's AWFULLY nice :-), and it's not just that I love the house we're in -- although I definitely do. It's more of the little things, like the smell (isn't it weird how there's a distinctive smell that says "home" that we never would normally notice?) and the way the light hits the walls... and the fact that when I feel like baking a cake I damn well bake a cake! Or die (I mean, dye -- freudian slip, there) my hair, or rearrange my plants, or whatever.

I have WAY less free time, but when you're away even "free" time is never really and truly free to do anything you want. Don't get me wrong; I had a wonderful working vacation, but as I said before: it's good to be home.

A little piece of irony for you (although I'm never sure if I am using that word in the right way): I was very much looking forward to having my kitties around again, and snuggling up with them at night; however now that I'm home it seems that my cat allergy (which was fairly minor to begin with, and non-existant in the past few years) has resurfaced. Dh did all sorts of cleaning to welcome us home, and I've had to redo most of it to get rid of as much cat hair as I can! Sigh...