Blink, blink, nose wiggle.

I am sitting at my computer (on the couch, in pjs), sick as a dog. I have been sick all week and the kids were sick even earlier (they are who made me sick). The husband got in last night from his week in Munchen, so I sent him off to the pool with the kids for Thing1′s lesson (he will swim with Thing2 while 1 is learning). I packed their bag, their clothes, their snacks, their water shoes, their cover ups and towels. I told the husband he needed to add his swim trunks and water shoes and have 1 euro for the locker.

He just called me from the swimhall to tell me he forgot his trunks.

What should I do? I tried teleportation, but it didn’t work. Crossing my arms and blinking hard didn’t work either.

(edit- I ran down in my pjs and gave him the trunks- I guess my suggestion of borrowing a pair from the Lost & Found didn’t fly.)

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Haben Sie einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr, or Happy New Year

I can’t believe how the time is flying. Already the second week of 2010, a whole new decade, and I can’t catch up with myself or finish the posts I have started.

So here’s a new one and I’ll get back to the others later. This is what the view from our window on Silvester was: We tried to wake the girls to watch, as the occasional rocket bounced off our windows, but they were too heartily asleep. Even when the German carried Thing1 to the window, she was too fast asleep to focus and had no memory the following day.

What I am reading: December 2009

These are a bit out of order as most of them were Kindle reads and already deleted off my list- more on a later post as to the Kindle itself:).

1. Already Dead by Charlie Huston- Amazingly good and a wion for Amazon’s practice of giving out free e-books in the attempt to get serious new readers addicted to authors they may have not yet read. Noir vampire in the city. Great, great stuff.
2. Anne of the Island
3. Anne of Avonlea by LM Montgomery– I now have all the Anne books sitting on my Kindle and expect I will have reread them all by the end of next month. I was distracted by The Five Little Peppers, though:).
4. Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe- I read this on the way to London, to get me in the mood.
5. Mossy Creek by Deborah Smith- Pleasant genre romance, short stories, wholesome.
6. All God’s Creatures by Carolyn McSparren- Took me right back to my childhood, when I read every vet book and animal book I could get my hands on. A little rough in the writing, but the “memor” style novel of a female vet’s life before female vets ere common, was interesting.
7. An American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson: This and the Harris below were the only books I actually purchased. Very funny and I have wanted to read this since I heard him discussing his life a bit on his talk show.
8. Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris- The next in Harris’ Harper Connelly series. I am enjoying the character and relationship development and the premise (that after being stuck by lightning, the lead can “hear” the last moments of the dead when by their bodies). This was a big and surprising wrap-up of a major series plot line. I’ll be interested to see where it goes after this because Harris could choose to use this as the series ender.
9. Murder Takes the Cake by Gayle Trent: Nice cozy mystery. I’ll probably pick up the next one if the price comes down a bit. I like to think of these as twofers- first one free, next cheaper than pb, makes two extremely gunstig books.
10. Once Bitten by Kalayna Price: I liked this enough to go out and look to see if the author had written others. Since she hasn’t, I’m a bit surprised that Amazon chose it as a freebie, but I enjoyed this well-written vampire premiere anyway.

I’ll try to finish all the other posts piled up in drafty mode, but gosh- it has been a crazy year end! And my Kindle addiction seems to have used up the time when I would normally be watching TV and blogging at the same time.

Steeleye Span…

If you know the name, they are celebrating their 40th Anniversary with a tour and I just can’t miss it. So I’ll be taking a quick 19 hour trip to London and back to see them at the Barbican on December 7th. The German will be taking the day off to watch the kids, so anyone who would like to see the show and meet up, or meet before or after, drop me a line. Even by myself I expect to have an absolutely glorious time.

Whew

Thing1′s fever has finally broken. It  reached 104.1, or just over 40C and it did not respond to Motrin all day so I was getting quite concerned. T2 had the same on Monday night, but it responded beautifully, so she never got over 103F and I never felt that I needed to call the doctor. Today the German spoke to him in the forenoon and I spoke to him in the late afternoon, at home (another of the good parts of the German versus American health care system) and the doctor was able to reassure me that the high temperatures would not hurt her, in and of itself. I’ve never had a child stay up at 104 for any extended period of time and it’s been quite frightening. I researched around and the new literature all seems to say that fevers in and of themselves will not be damaging, but it was very reassuring to have a doctor discuss it with me, offer to come over if I felt it was necessary, but explain why it wasn’t at that point. Some cool showers and Motrin and swabbing down later it seems that it may have broken on exactly the same schedule as T2′s. Looks like being on the waitlist for the H1N1 vaccine may no longer be as important. T2 back to kita tomorrow, if her health maintains and perhaps T1 can return on Friday.

Still in Blogger…

Here I am, back on the Blogger platform. I was able to restabilize my computer by de-installing the auto update of Firefox, then deleting all my preference folders and then re-installing (using Opera). Right now, all three of the browsers I was using during that trying time have become stable.

However, when I look at WordPress’ dashboard, it is showing me slightly more than double the posts that I see here in Blogger. So I am going to take (yet another) step back from WordPress until I figure that out. However, I miss the concept of pages, so I think that I will start to create page equivalents to enable an easier conversion when and if that occurs and I will continue to run these blogs parallel, as I have for yoinks. In that effort, expect to see me remove blogrolls and instead create a single post with links, remove my recipe sidebar and create a post with links and probably add a post that accumulates my monthly book reviews.

I am still having a problem changing categories and tags in WordPress and really don’t like what happened with the export, so anyone who would like to pint me at some way to handle that, I would be grateful.