My comment was so long I made it into a post of it's own.

This post will only really make sense if you've read Rachael's post first.  If you haven't, I'll probably call you a loser behind your back but we'll still be friends.  No worries. 


I'm sooooo annoyed I didn't bring home any peanut butter cookies (from Rachael's house).   Or my peanut butter for that matter.  (Lately when Rachael wants me to come over, I force her to make me a yummy baked treat as a thank you/reward/incentive for me hanging out with her.)   Crafting was fun today.  I thought it was interesting how we didn't really talk, or look at each other since my back was to you (Rachael) the whole time but it didn't matter cause I wasn't at home doing it by myself.  Oh and hey, I've come up with a new idea.  Rolling Pins.  With colored handles.  Hanging on my wall in the dining room.  Can you imagine it?  Do you approve?  Cause if you do, you (Rachael) may need to babysit next week so I can add to my collection of one.  And it's on my ledge.  And I may need to get some cookies tomorrow.  But I may be having a flare up of the same medical condition you (Rachael) have.  I'm pretty sure I was suffering from it this morning when I laid in bed until...Wait, this is public, I can't say it.   I wouldn't want to be mocked and scorned for reverting back to my teenage days.  Let's just say it wasn't technically morning anymore and you know what, this has gotten so long I'm just going to copy and paste it and post it cause it will look better over there on my blog.

(Done.  Copied, pasted, and slightly revised to make a little more sense.  And carrying on....)

I loved how well Aubs and Soph played together too.  Their picnic was stinkin' adorable but it broke my heart when Sophie asked why her tummy doesn't look like Aubs.  Counseling here we come.  And the branches?  I cannot wait to have a set, or two or three of my own.  I'm not really kidding.  I want a set for Sophie's room, my room, and the dining room.  Obsessive?  Nah.

And lastly, the train ride.  One of the highlights of the trip and some of my favorite pictures came from that time.  It probably has something to do with the fact that we were outside, sitting, all gathered in a relatively small area, perfect setting for pictures.  Especially that one where we all realized that I look just like dad.  Minus most of the facial hair.  

By the way, your floors do look great but I'm not really sure about that whole "I'm not gonna clean up one more time bit" because I'm pretty sure in the 4 hours or so that I was there, I didn't see you clean up at all.  But hey, even cleaning up once can seem pretty major so I'll leave you alone.


And now my comment/post is now done.  In all of it's randomness.

Taking a Break

I've cleaned two bedrooms, vacuumed said rooms and the hallway, did the dishes, two loads of laundry, cleaned off the kitchen countertops and the island and stupidly sat down at the computer. Nothing breaks a cleaning streak like sitting at the computer. But hey, I passed by it on my way to cleaning the table and I could hear it beckoning me.

So, I'm pretty much in love with my iGoogle home page. It has everything I need. Email, news, recipes, weather, t.v. listings, and most importantly, yellow sticky notes. Electronic yellow sticky notes are the best. I never lose them, I don't re-write them because my handwriting was too sloppy (not that I would ever do something like that with real ones), the sticky strip never gets fuzzy, and they expand when I need them to.  I recently added a second set of sticky notes because my first set takes up over half of my screen.

Which leads me to this post.

Rachael and I were just on the phone together discussing the usual- my house, her house, our blogs. We were discussing the lack of humor we think exists in our own writing.   I of course was reassuring her, and she was reassuring me. We are soooooo lame. Anyways, she was telling me that she's surprised at some of the things I don't blog about and listed a few of them. I laughed and told her that I've written them down (on my electronic sticky notes), I just hadn't blogged them yet. Which led me to think of my sticky notes and their ginormousness. Which is why I sat down at the computer instead of tackling my table, therefore breaking my cleaning streak. But hey, I suppose I can claim that I'm 'cleaning' up my igoogle page by finally blogging these random events.

Cleaning streak not interrupted after all.

So, here's a few of the journal worthy conversations that have happened over the course of a month or so.

First up is me. I was so impressed with myself for this one that I wrote it down.

I was talking on the phone to Lisa while eating a brownie for breakfast.  We were discussing the adorable look of multi-layered tops over skinny jeans tucked into boots.  Mid mouthful of brownie the following statement fell out of my mouth in between crumbs of chocolaty goodness:

"I wish I didn't have such big thighs."  Oh the irony.

Next up, Carson.  He was up really late one night with me and Jason since he had fallen asleep at 5:30 that evening.  Jason was in the kitchen making brownies (insert fat joke here) and I was desperately trying to convince Carson to go hang out with him instead of sprawling all over my lap.  I told him that Jason needed something and he needed to go see what it was.  He walked into the kitchen and said, "Dad!  What you need?"
Jason replied, "All's I need is you babe."
Carson walked out of the kitchen, looked at me and said, "Mom!  Dad need you.  Dad need babe!"  Nice.  According to Carson my names are Mom, Amy, and Babe.

Sophie has been full of funny stuff.  It's definitely her age.  One day on our way to her real pre-school she started talking about her not-real preschool.

"Mom, you should come to my Shining Preschool.  It's over there (pointing to the water towers).  There's a rope that you climb up with."

Another morning she said, "Mom, I don't want you to get burned by the hot lava.  There really is some by our house, I saw it at my Shining Preschool when I walked." 

In the car on the way to Rachael's I told her she was right about something.  She looked at me super seriously and said, "I know.  I know everything about everything!"

And then there's Spencer.  Since he's six, and also thinks he knows everything about everything, conversations with him aren't always classified as entertaining or amusing, they usually fall under 'annoying'.  Besides, most of his talking is in the form of whining/asking/begging for more computer time, or X-box time.  However, on our way to my parent's the other night he started telling me about the day him and Colton went hunting with my dad.  He's little voice was so animated and yet serious at the same time.

"When we were hunting, I got to hide with Grandpa.  Colton decided it was too cold so he was in the truck with Grandma.  I went with him because I know spies don't ever quit, even when its cold out.  And you have to freeze like this, and this, and this...(demonstrating the way you hold still when you hear/see some ducks)."

Spies don't quit, even when it's cold out?  Maybe next time he's rolling around on the floor telling me he can't clean his room I'll pull out the "Oh yea?  Well spies don't ever quit, even when they have to clean their rooms."

I suppose I shouldn't forget to feature Jason.  His classic lines aren't always nice or supportive but whether I like it or not, they always make me laugh.  Even when I try really hard not to.  A few days after I hung up my crib mattress bulletin board thingy (not an original idea, btw, saw it on a blog) he was in the bedroom looking at it and said, "Hey, I never noticed this before..."  Curious, I stupidly walked into the bedroom to see what it was that he seemed impressed by.

Straight faced he said, "Look.  There you are, right between your two highly successful friends."  And then he laughed.  Really hard.

Yup.  There I am.  Right between my two highly successful friends.  I think in the spirit of revenge I need to hang up some younger, thinner Jason pictures next to a current, not so thin Jason.  Though I suppose he could do the same thing right back to me.

Annnnddddd some pictures...
Who needs snow?

Interviews with the Artists

Graycie's Interview:
Tell me about your project-

 Um, I dunno (nervous laugh).

What parts are there?

There's dinosaur heads on the back, on the front there's like bones and another dinosaur head on one bone, there's three bones, one in the middle and two on the sides.

 

What is it called?  Do you have a name for it?

 I'm calling it a museum.

What is it made of?

 Dinosaur bones and glue.  Oh yea, and a box.

 How did you make it?

 I made it with my imagination.

 What do you like best about it?

 The outside.  Because it looks cool how the bones are.

How long did it take to make?

 A couple minutes or so.

 What was the best part of making it?

 Planning it.

 What happened after you made it?

 I got a blister because I touched the hot glue.

 Oh yea?  Tell me about that.

Jason put hot glue on a lid and I touched it.

 Was that very smart?  

 No (giggle).

Spencer's Interview:

What is this?

 They're ships.  If the big ship explodes they can either go on a zipline or go on the edge of the boat and jump onto a ball and they could get away.
How long did it take you to make it?
It took awhile.

 What was the best part of making it?
All of it.  Building it.

How did you build it?

With glue and wood.

There's a tether ball for playing and a flag.  There's a plank with a gun on it.  This is the treasure chest, these are people, and this is something, i don't know what it is, it could be like a weapon.  Can I be done now?

They built for an hour and a half.  Graycie said it was the best night of her life.

Holding on to Hope

It's little things like this that give me hope for better days.  Better days that better show up SOON.

Just last week I thought they were the funnest two little people.  This week, not so much.

Confessions of a Nerd

Subtitled: Finding answers for my dad and I about Watson, the Super Computer

Last week I asked my parents to DVR this weeks episodes of Jeopardy for me.  Wow.  Does that scream nerd or what?

The day before I asked them, I found myself stuck with an de-programmed remote control and therefore was stuck watching PBS, the channel that had been previously viewed that morning.  I was pretty grumpy about it but soon found myself ignoring the book I was reading and watching a documentary on the intelligence of animals.  Feeling prideful, I refused to put my book down, not wanting to admit to even myself that I could enjoy PBS more than whatever prime-time shows were on.  After learning about dolphins and the parrot named Alex, who had the intelligence of a 5 year-old when he died, a show called The Smartest Machine on Earth came on and I hate to admit it, but I put my book down and called Jason to tell him to hurry home and watch it with me. 

Jason has taken a few computer programming classes and so I was .001% familiar with a few of the terms they were throwing around.  Nonetheless, I was intrigued and fascinated at what it took to build the machine that played on Jeopardy this week.  The Smartest Machine on Earth.  I watched the final episode with my dad last night, and my only regret was being so in to it that I didn't realize Carson had flooded my parents bathroom.  Sorry, Mom.  I was in full geek mode at the time.  My apologies again.

My dad and I had a few questions during the episode and I tried to explain to him what I had learned during the documentary.  I didn't come close to making any sense at all.  But hey, I was super excited when I found this article today written by Ken Jennings.  It answered a few of our questions so I thought I'd post it here for my dad.  Cause he religiously reads my blog. 

 Excerpt from this article:

"The IBM team had every reason to be hopeful. Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing—the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. Jeopardy! clues cover an open domain of human knowledge—every subject imaginable—and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned—yes, it learns—to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word "Blondie," it's very good at figuring out whether Jeopardy! means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match:  The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words.  It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.....

Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the "thumbs" is an electromagnetic solenoid triggered by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn't be beaten on speed."


Ahhh.  So interesting to me.  I am such a nerd and I recommend watching the documentary to anyone else who's willing to embrace their inner-nerd.

Surprises

I've had a few memorable, blog worthy surprises in the last few days.  Some I stopped to document with photos, some I laughed about, some I yelled about, some I'm ignoring still.

In Random Order-

Surprise One-A 
Realizing after I hit publish and saw my post in google reader that I had misspelled Surprises in the title.  Classic.

Surprise One-B

My license expired Sunday, on my birthday.  On Saturday I remembered and tried to renew it online.  At the end of the process, it said I owed $100.  Renewal fee $25, Reissue fee $75.  I was baffled and mad.  I looked up the fee list and the only $75 one was for reinstating your license after a suspension.  I start to panic, wondering if I've been driving with a suspended license for an undisclosed amount of time. After 18 attempts to speak to someone and a 20 minute hold time, I was told that I had a suspended license in 2008 for not paying a ticket on time.  Apparently, between me paying the county and the county reporting it, I had a suspended license for two weeks.  Three years ago.  $75.  Not happy.

Surprise Two

This surprise came at 5:30 am Tuesday morning when I realized that my 2.5 year old was up all by himself, hanging out in the kitchen.  I have no idea how long he'd been awake.  I yelled at him to get in my bed or get a spank.  Two hours later when I got out of bed I found this...

Surprise Three

Happened last week.  Spencer was home from school sick, on the couch playing XBox.  I had a headache, took some meds and decided to lay back down for a few minutes, thinking he would help watch Carson.  Apparently I fell alseep and woke up about 25 minutes later to a mess that resembled the previous one only this one contained broken noodles, cans of food, 4 broken eggs, the milk jug on the floor and the refrigerator door wide open.  I recognized that it was my own fault and barely yelled.  It was a remarkable moment for me.  Not in a good way.

Surprise Four

Monday, on Valentine's Day, I kept teasing Jason about not bringing me home anything.  I say 'teasing' because I told him Saturday night while we were getting flowers for other Valentine's that I would just pick out my own this year.  He of course thought it was a great idea.  Less for him to do.  I finally teased him enough and he went to the cupboard and pulled out a box of chocolates, proving to me that he did buy me something.  I took one look at the box and started laughing.  I told him it didn't count if he'd already opened them.  He started laughing in surprise.  He had no idea he had bought a box that had already been opened.  I started listing off all the things that could be wrong with them, you know, classic candy poisoning, shards of razor blades hidden inside, anthrax.  He promptly popped one in his mouth and walked away.  I turned to see what all the gagging noises were and he started laughing.  I thought he was gagging out of disgust, he was pretending to choke.  What a loser.

  
Surprise Five

I'm ignoring this one.  Sorry, no full disclosure today.