that time of year

maura @ 10:20 pm

Gus’s birthday is coming up, and this year he wants a bowling party. Absolutely! Good for everyone: we don’t have to clean the house, and Gus gets a party.

The bowling alley gave us invitations to send to his friends. Check out this blast from the past:

So awesome! We can’t figure out if they’re intentionally trying to attract the parents who love those fabulous ’70s fonts, or if these invitations have actually been around for that long.

backwards through the megaphone

maura @ 10:39 pm

I had thought we were finished with Pokemon, but one of Gus’s pals brought a game magazine on the bus the other day, and Gus read a review of the new Pokemon game Black and White (out now in Japan, not til the spring here in the US), and now he’s hooked again.

It’s not that I hate Pokemon. I do think there are lots of great things about the game, both the video and card versions. There’s memorization — the characters have endless stats and attributes — and organization — in this case, the Pokedex, which indexes all of the creatures you find. There’s math (especially in the card game) since the basic mechanic is 2 characters battling and the one with higher hit points (which can, of course, be added to with powerups and the like) is the winner. And there’s lots of reading, too.

But I do feel like the Pokemon universe is, well, thin. And based more on accumulating stuff in the physical world than many other games. He has a giant pile of cards that he never, ever uses anymore. Indeed, the card game is much more complicated than the videogame, and when he was young enough to want the cards he couldn’t really grok the gameplay. But of course he begged for them when he was into collecting them, endlessly poring over them and strategizing trades with pals.

The videogames, too, encourage real life consumption in a way I don’t like all that much. Often multiple versions of essentially the same game are released simultaneously, and sometimes they only differ in color (e.g. Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire) and a subset of creatures. So even though you’re collecting creatures virtually, your kid will still beg for more than one version of the game.

I guess we have time to deal with this, since the new game isn’t out for a while. But I’m sad that the newfound knowledge of this game has pushed him back into the Pokeverse. His birthday is coming up — maybe one of the new games he gets will drive all those Pokethoughts right out of his head.

the wagon, i have fallen

maura @ 8:17 pm

Yes indeedy, I fell off that NaBloPoMo wagon. I really did *mean* to blog last night, but then I fell asleep right in the middle of reading my RSS feeds. And woke up at 5am again today, huzzah! Who needs sleep, anyway?

But I’m not TOTALLY giving up. Except for tonight, when I am, because I have a pile of student research paper drafts to grade and no helpful teaching assistants to helpfully assist me. And suddenly – bam! – I know what to ask for from Santa this year!

field trip

maura @ 11:01 pm

Today I took the day off so I could go on a field trip with Gus’s class. This is the field trip I’ve wanted to go on forever, the one where they get to celebrate building the wigwam in the park and do all kinds of cool ancient Native American things like try to make fire with a firebow.

I had completely forgotten that I suck at field trips. I haven’t had as much free time the past couple of years as I did when Gus was younger, so I don’t really know as many of the other parents + kids as I used to. Gus tends to be not on his best behavior when I’m around in a school-like setting, alternately clingy or not listening/paying attention. I never know quite what I’m supposed to be doing, and end up standing around feeling like an awkward extra appendage, not really talking much with the other parents.

There’s also the transport issue: often they get a bus to shuttle them to and from trips, but today they couldn’t so we took 29 fourth graders on three (3!) subways to go 2.8 miles. In rush hour! By the time we got there I was already exhausted. Luckily I had forgotten to bring hot chocolate (not entirely my fault! the pre-field trip directions were unclear!), so I had to walk a couple of blocks over to Dunkin Donuts and get 2 big boxes of it. Which was a great opportunity to purchase supplemental coffee (yay!).

I was also a little bit disappointed that I couldn’t get the kids to split up into groups nicely to do the skulls, skins and tracks matching activity. They were real skulls, so I got all zooarchaeological. Some kids were into it, and some were not. Gus was able to ID the skull, skin and tracks of the beaver (big front teeth!), so that’s something.

I shouldn’t complain: we were finished early enough that I had time to hightail it up to City College to finish the last of my 2 student interviews for my research project this semester. And Gus was happy to have me there. And no one barfed in the subway station.

(When Gus was in kindergarten I went with his class on a trip to the Whitney museum on the Upper East Side, 20 kindergarteners on 2 (maybe 3?) subways! It was intense, and there was no coffee when we got there. One of his classmates barfed as we were walking through the subway station to change trains and we just had to leave it there. I felt so bad, but what could we do? The group was moving forward, and we were far from a booth with a subway employee. A friend later told me that she knows a parent who brings a small plastic bag full of cat litter on every field trip for that very reason.)

wigwam field trip tomorrow!

maura @ 9:44 pm

Also student interviews for my research project. And a billion other things. About which I will write more then.

Because tonight I am tired. Among other things, today we went to the zoo and ogled 6 adorable tiger cubs. And you can ogle them too! Right here.

(Seriously, click the dang link! They are ridiculously cute, you must see the video.)

clean and sparkly

maura @ 10:37 pm

The bathroom is finished! Well, that’s a tiny exaggeration: it’s about 99% done. The contractor has to come back on Monday and install the shower rod and do a couple of other minor things. But we’re almost there. It’s very, very pretty — I know this is awful, but I almost hate to turn it over to Gus and the cats now. Maybe they should use the other bathroom and Jonathan and I can use the new one.

Today we spent most of the afternoon cleaning and other final renovationy stuff — Jonathan painted the back of the door and put grout sealer on the floor and shower walls. I’m completely pooped, but it’s really nice to have all of the renovation dust gone and the house (mostly) back to normal. Gah, why is renovating such a dusty business? The tops of the ceiling fan blades were a horror.

I was going to be all super crazy cleantastic and vacuum the books, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I must be deficient — we have a real vacuum and a little handheld thing.* Each has multiple attachments and I tried a couple but just couldn’t make it work any better than a dust rag.

* I find it equal measures fun and sort of offensive that our handheld vacuum is bright yellow. Fun because yay! fun colors are fun! But offensive because I suspect that the manufacturers made it yellow to try to attract the male market: “if it’s yellow, it’s like a tool, and guys like tools!”

Gah, books collect so much dust. So. Much. Dust. I am still sneezing, even hours later! Which is making me think about doing another book purge. I feel kind of guilty about bringing some of my weird, semi-out-of-date archaeology books to the public library to drop them off, but I’m not sure what to do with them otherwise. But really, I work in a library, why do I need so many books in my house, too?

and this one’s from the phone

maura @ 10:26 pm

Gus makes fun of the cat.

lunchtime poll

maura @ 10:23 pm

Gus had no school today, so he and Jonathan came to have lunch with me and visit my new office. Everyone liked the two old globes (there’s a second one on the desk in the workshop room right outside my office) and the fantastic old fashioned switches + fuses that came from one of our engineering departments (I’ll have to get a photo of them soon).

We went to a Polish diner for lunch, which I often forget exists because I typically bring my lunch. Pierogi FTW! I’d warned Jonathan that it wasn’t as good as some of the East Village joints, but now I’m not so sure that’s true. J ordered a Polish specialty we’d never had before — lazanki — which was egg noodles, sauerkraut, ham, and mushrooms. The plate came out and he said “it’s Polish yakisoba!” Which it totally, totally was. And delicious, too. Here’s a photo.

Then tonight I realized why I’ve been jonesing for Polish food. A place opened up a couple of blocks from our house called Polish Bar. When the sign went up before the place opened my heart leapt: why of COURSE, who wouldn’t want to sit on a barstool and eat pierogi and pickle soup? Sign me up! But, sigh, it turned out to be just another nail salon. I’ll take sauerkraut over a manicure any day of the week.

last week we feasted

maura @ 9:13 pm

…on delicious pizza. And because it was my turn, I wrote a few hundred words about it. But not here. Elsewhere.

dear universe

maura @ 11:03 pm

Seriously, what do I have to do to get some more time in the day? Who can I bribe to make sleep unnecessary? I’m working on lots of super interesting things right now, but I may be just a tiny bit overscheduled. A smidge, perhaps. And my child, despite apparently being overly fond of negative numbers, has not yet built me a time machine. Which I feel is kind of a rip-off, actually. I mean, what is the good of having those small, agile hands and that boundless energy if not to build me a time machine?