The good, the bad and the ugly of children's books

There are an awful lot of childrens books out there. Just visit any library and you'll see what I mean. Even the space dedicated to the children's section in a Borders or Barnes and Nobles seems to rival the square footage of our house. And you can pretty much find every book ever written for kids. From Baby Einstein books for the babies to potty training for the toddlers to learn to read books for the Kindergarteners. Some of them are great - classics even - like The Hungry Little Caterpillar, Good Night Moon and all the Dr. Seuss books. Some of them are so-so, like picture books with captions under each picture that just don't flow well (and leave you wondering, which caption should I be reading next?) And some of them are just plain BAD. I won't go into any specifics here, but any parent with little kids knows what I'm talking about. Those are the books that leave you wondering how they ever got published to begin with. Well it was those thoughts after reading one of those books that led me to begin my next project (yeah, like I don't have enough stuff going on now, right?) But I'm sick of reading B these stupid stories night after night, so I've started writing one for him.

I don't know how it's going to turn out yet, or if I'll even finish it. Writing has never been my strong suit (sj can attest to this fact thanks to that year of Honors English we took together in high school which she loved and I detested!) Receiving one assignment after another to come up with essays, poems, short stories, etc. - UGH! I prefer to write on my own time and on my own terms. And somehow I've managed to keep a blog going for about a year now so hopefully I've gotten better at getting my thoughts down on paper or Word or notepad or whatever program I'm typing in that day. I'm not the most articulate person in the world, but I do try. With that said, I doubt anyone will ever see or hear this little story except for J and B. And maybe my FunnyGal friends who I'm sure could offer plenty of constructive criticism on my grammar and some literary insight for my literary-challenged, techy brain. If it turns out to be pretty good, I might even post some of it here. So far I only have 2 pages, but last night B asked me to read the first page twice. So apparently someone likes it! I'm not going to give away the plot here, but it's definitely leaning towards being a fantasy. Oh and it involves a little boy and a tree house.

A few more house pictures

Here are some photos of the most recent updates around the house. The new front deck is beginning to take shape. What you see here is cedar boards surrounding the pressure treat frame. I just love the grain on the board that makes up the side of the steps.

The back of the garage is just about complete thanks to all the shake-staining we did last week. The last items left here is to install a flood light at the peak and replace the pane of glass in the middle. You can't see it in this photo but the existing one has a huge hole in the bottom of it.
Along the short side of the garage - more shakes.
The back deck is getting demolished to make way for the new deck.
The masons have been working rather quickly to put up stone on the far side of the house. This is going to take quite a bit of time - they have 3 stories to cover!
Over this past weekend we installed one of our new lights on the front of the garage. Copper...of course!
And it looks awesome in the dark!

The infamous Googlewhack

I have been spending quite a bit of time this morning googling oracle functions. I'm having a problem with one I created and it's bothering me that there isn't a lot of info out there about my particular issue. Well it might also be due to my strategically placed double-quotes to filter out some of the hundreds of results that get returned when you google anything with the word "oracle" in your search phrase. One particular search yielded one and only one result however. I thought - great... Not much help here. And then it hit me - I've just experienced a Googlewhack! Well actually it wasn't a true googlewhack as it doesn't fit into their 2 word with no double quotes restriction, but it came pretty darn close. That triggered a memory I had from my grad school cryptography course. One of our assignments was to come up with 2 unique words that, when searched in google, would return only 1 result. I have no idea how that fit in with the whole cryptography lesson, but I do remember spending HOURS trying to come up with a combination that worked. I think I finally found one after I pulled out my old Biology 101 textbook from my undergrad days to search for new words. Hmm...maybe there was a reason why I started my undergrad as a bio major before switching to CS... Who knew a bio textbook would come in handy during a graduate cryptography course!!

So if you happen to find yourself with a few extra minutes/hours/days (not to mention have an extraordinary vocabulary) try it for yourself. And if you do happen upon that rare singular result, be sure to record it in The Whack Stack

The dangers of home improvement...

Before leaving work on Friday afternoon I spent some time planning out my weekend (like I almost always do.) And this weekend was no different than the others - a mix of chores, house stuff, more staining, some down time with friends, etc. And things got even better after I got home on Friday to discover that our carpenter went ahead and stained the remaining boards which I had planned to do first thing on Saturday. Whoo-hoo! One thing down, 50 million more to go... So I spent Saturday doing chores, groceries and getting the house ready to entertain my sister-in-law and her boyfriend later that night followed by some friends and their kids Sunday for lunch. While I was doing all of that, J was busy outside hanging lights on the front of the house. Things were going great all weekend. Saturday night turned out to be a fun dinner and movie night with a chinese stir-fry and homemade eggrolls - yuummmmyyy!!! Sunday started out with a hike with a few friends and their kids followed by sandwiches, salad and cookies at our house. Poor J - we inundated the house with 4 women and 6 kids ranging in age from 11 to 4!!

Everything was going great until I saw one of the cats outside and decided to bring him in for the night. As I walked outside, a nasty smoke smell hit me and I looked over in the front yard to see a rag on our carpenter's bench just smoldering away. What the!?!? I ran to the back deck and got B's sand bucket (that had been sitting there for a while just collecting rain water) and threw the rag into the bucket. (Now that I think about it, picking up a hot smoldering rag with my bare hands probably wasn't the smartest move, but I was in emergency mode at that point.) My first reaction was - who lit this on fire?? All the kids were playing outside and the masons were busily working on the house, so there were plenty of bodies to potentially accuse. But after pulling the rag out of the water, it dawned on me - this thing lit itself on fire! It was soaked in stain and had been all wadded up on the workbench. The perfect recipe for spontaneous combustion according to any label on a can of oil-based stain. Thank god I caught that on time. Our nice newly stained boards were lying right next to that workbench. To say nothing of the nice newly wood-sided front of the house!

So from familyhandyman.com - ^Start Public Service Announcement^
CAUTION: Spread out stain-soaked rags and let them dry (or better yet, soak them in water) before disposing of them in a waste container. Piles of damp stain-soaked rags are a spontaneous combustion hazard. ^End Public Service Announcement^

Marathon staining week and adorable B pictures

I know I haven't been around much at all in the past week or two. But I have very good reason (or excuses, whatever) for not posting or being online much at night (sorry to my Myspace friends who look for a nightly status from me) or sitting down and watching any TV, you get the point. All I can say is it's a good thing I'm not into any of the new fall TV shows cause I would have missed most of the episodes this month. Although I do have TiVo...so I guess I don't have much of an excuse there, huh? Anyway....I'm going to blame last weekend's weather for this week's non-stop craziness. Because had it not been so rainy/humid last weekend, I could have gotten a lot more staining done then, rather than spending every night (until 9-10pm most nights) trying to keep up with our carpenter. But thankfully 4 boxes of shakes were completed in 3 nights! That's a record for us! And what's even better - WE ARE DONE with the shakes! Which is great because those things are a real pain in the arse and take hours to stain. I swear - it takes more time to stain than it does for our carpenter to nail them to the house. I think we went through about 11 boxes (and it takes about a gallon of stain per box) in total (with about 200 shakes in each box) just to cover the back and 1 (very short) side wall of the garage. Heaven forbid if we were doing the entire house with those things. I'd have to hire a crew to stain all that! But all of our hard work paid off because it looks great. I'll take a few pictures tonight to post up later.

In other house news, the masons are quickly working on the last part of their job - the far wall of the house that is a full 3 stories tall thanks to the walk-out basement. We're hoping they finish up before it gets too cold outside (can wet mortar freeze??) We have also been discussing the front and rear decks with our carpenter and decided to go with Brazilian redwood for the decking for both including the gazebo in the back. I'll have to see if I can post the plans on here so you can get an idea of what the back deck is going to look like. But basically, the retangular portion of the deck will be the same dimension as the old one, but on one end we are incorporating a large gazebo to provide some shelter from the sun since the it hits that area of the yard from about 11am until sunset. That will work out great for outdoor entertaining during the summer. The only downside to all of this is the fact that we will have get rid of a gorgeous japanese maple tree and a very overgrown but pretty white azalea bush. We were initially thinking about uprooting both and replanting them somewhere else, but I think they might be too big for that. It will be sad to see them go, but I think the sacrifice will be worth it.

Ok - now for some B news - he has been very much enjoying his Pre-K and Jr. K classes thus far despite the fact that he's caught a bit of a cold already. He is already writing out most of his name and has even started to read! It's amazing how quickly he picks things up.

Here's a picture of the rascal performing his latest trick. This is what happens when he's too lazy to get a glass and fill it with water...

Yup - you got caught mister!

Summer may be ending but the house stuff continues

My little boy is officially back in school! Since he's a full-week student, we enrolled him in a combination of PreKindergarten and Junior Kindergarten this year. So hopefully he'll be ready for Kindergarten next year. Although I think this year is going to be more challenging for us than for him since we're the ones who have to keep these class schedules straight! So far we had to attend 2 welcome day celebrations and 2 parent orientation sessions. By the time B is done at this school he will have attended almost all of the classes that they offer!

The long weekend enabled us to do some more work on the house. Three coats of cherry stain and three coats of varnish later and the front door almost matches the red windows. And you can see the supports are now in for the new front deck.

The masons worked on laying the bluestone on the front steps of the kitchen porch. It was so nice to finally cover up all that concrete!

And I absolutely love our new side door into the garage. The hinges were salvaged from a junky screen door that we're throwing away and the handle was the original one that went with the previous door. Two coats of black paint on the hardware and voila! It looks wonderfully medieval! Now if we can only find garage doors to match this, we'll be all set!

Fun with widgets...

I found this fun little widget on another blog today. Check it out!

Get this widget!