Easter

Yet another holiday, and as is the habit of six-year-olds, Nimue was wound up and crazo. She left a carrot out for the Easter Bunny on Saturday night, and woke up bright and early on Sunday -- around 6 am, I heard her piercing voice say "Maybe I was so good, I got all this!" "All this" included a bunny that I crocheted for her in addition to the loot that the EB left for her, because she has been good.


After leisurely toast and coffee, Chad hung up our new birdfeeder and the strawberry basket I planted earlier in the week, and then we headed off to Todd and Sarah's on the tandem for brunch. A fine pagan spring celebration including much good food, egg hunting by the small, and mimosa imbibing by the not-so-small ensued.




Todd was presented with a bunny costume that his daughter Cathryn made for him, so he had to be the Easter Bunny and hide all the eggs. (Chad's just lucky that Nimue didn't think of making him a costume....)

Happily, there was time afterwards to collectively sit in the sunshine in the back yard full of blooms and read/nap, before enjoying grilled mango-coconut shrimp for dinner. And more CHEESECAKE for Monster Ma.

Oh -- You look like Monster Ma!

As you all know, my birthday was last week, and I haven't posted anything as it's been a slow-developing event. A few musings:

1. Nimue greeted me with the title of this post sometime during the day. It seems appropriate given the comparison of my old drivers licence picture (taken shortly after I started grad school) and the new one I just got. The two pictures are clearly of the same person, but it appears that in the last 10-15 years I have made the transition between looking like Bambi (Sarah's description) to Monster Ma (Nimue's). Chad made a very diplomatic comment about the general evilness of DMV photography, but if I extrapolate from the two existing data points, the next picture will portray me as a demented hag.

No, I haven't gotten a strange dye job, just bad lighting....)

2. Nimue presented me with a lizard flashlight. If you press on its back, its mouth will open and shine light. Monster Ma has a new familiar. (insert cackle here)

3. The planned ride up Mt. Hamilton: You don't need the gory details. Suffice it to say, the tire gods, who had been mercifully ignoring me through the rainy part of the cycling season decided that the morning of April 10 was the time to turn their baleful eyes in my direction. Ride rescheduled to later in the month when it's likely to be warmer anyway. Monster Ma thwarted. Grrrr.
(Chad and I did get a mellow ride into Palo Alto for lunch, where we had delightful panini and cake at the Prolific Oven. Monster Ma mollified.)

4. Cake. Mmmmmm. Monster Ma like CHEESECAKE. Monster Ma HUNGRY!! Monster Ma GET cheesecake !!!!! Monster Ma satisfied :)

Ginger And Bubby

Ginger and Bubby have had they're wedding.
Me and my Famliy did not get to see it.
They're Honey Moon is inside the cabnet with the placemats and
napkins.

Nature

It's been pretty quiet around here and I always look outside and look at the plants. I like playing
in the yard and help Ma with the gardening. It's so much fun!

Chess Club

Nimue's school lets out the kids third grade and under out at 12:45 every Friday. I hate this, as it leaves me such a short block of time free compared to the rest of the week. Fortunately, if you are on the ball, there are a number of after-school activities throughout the year that one can sign up for, conveniently scheduled to fill in the gap on those early dismissal Fridays.

For the last couple of months, this was a science program about space and rockets, which Nimue naturally had a lot of enthusiasm for, given that she's been obsessed by space since about the age of three. Alas, that ended at the end of March.

Several weeks ago, Nimue came home with a piece of paper advertising the next session of activities: Friday afternoon chess club. Despite the fact that I was dubious about it (I personally find chess to be tedious, and was worried about Nimue getting frustrated and thus having howling fits), I decided to sign her up anyway because she seemed really excited about the idea. And as I already mentioned, it gets around the early dismissal problem.

The information sheet said that there were 100 spots that would be filled on a first-come first-served basis starting at 8:15 out by the flagpole in front of the school on one particular day, so I figured I'd just hang out after dropping her off and sign her up. Clearly not a task that should take a long time, right?

Wrong. It's a really good thing that she and I usually ride into school early enough to avoid the nasty traffic mess (we usually get there around 7:55). After locking up the bikes I headed over to the flagpole to find a line of about 35 people already waiting. By the time 8:15 rolled around, there were 120 parents in the line -- more than the open number of spots. For chess club????? Weird. The line moved pretty slowly, and no one gave up after seeing how long the line was, meaning some people were there waiting in that gigantic line for probably at least an hour just to get on the wait list. For chess club??? The mind boggles. I got to the head of the line after about half an hour and was lucky that there were still spots available for her grade level.

I mentioned this to my friend Sarah, and she made a good point: at this age and stage chess club is pretty fun because it is an opportunity to hang out after school and play games with other kids. Particularly for an only kid like Nimue, this is a good thing :) I've been happy to note that the people running it have kept it all pretty non-competitive, at least in the beginner room where Nim is, so it's really all about learning the game and having fun. As Nimue put it: "Who cares who wins? It's fun!" Good girl.

Of course, she comes home and wants to play chess here too, but happily, Chad is quite willing to sit down and play with her once in a while. (I'll play Scrabble, or one of the rail games, or any number of card games instead.)

First Rose of the Season

Our first rose of the year opened up over the weekend -- I noticed it while I was out planting tomatoes, herbs, and strawberries in the side yard.

Saturday Morning Sloth

Nimue quite enjoys burrowing in the big pile of fleece pillows I made for the family for Christmas and watching gentle cartoons on PBS on weekend mornings. This allows us to sleep in .... until 8am ....

She also regularly finds a channel on which to check the weather report, which is sometimes useful. I would have had no idea it was going to rain this week without her warning, as it has been acting like the land of eternal sunshine lately. While we need the rain badly, the selfish part of me hopes it's all done and gone by Friday for my annual almost-on-my-birthday ride up Mt. Hamilton.

Tanny

Fun at work

One of the more jolly things I've been doing at work lately is accumulating a series of Gigapan pictures of the Guadalupe River for us to use in classrooms to study parts of the river that the kids don't get to see on the field trips. For those of you not familiar with Gigapan, it is a robotic camera mount that allows one to take a set of several hundred photos in a full 360 degree panorama and stitch them together into a single image that one can then explore in great detail. I finally sat down to figure out how to embed them into the teacher blog at work, so you get one too...


Double-click on a part of the panorama to zoom, drag it to move around, or click on one of the snapshots at the bottom to see where it is located in the bigger picture. (Be warned, this only works well if you have a fast web connection -- i.e. not dial-up....sorry....) If you want to see more of mine from work, go to gigapan.org and search on "biosite", or just look at all the other cool images that others have taken!

I should mention that I found out about the Gigapan from Chad, who is peripherally involved with this at NASA.