kayray.org

Henry and I went to the zoo today! We left at about 10:40 and zipped down there — almost no traffic, amazingly — and got there are 11:20 or so. First we walked through the reptile house and visited the komodo dragon (Henry’s favorite today!) and then through the lovely new monkey exhibit, which was built last year to replace the ancient monkey house. It’s one of those beautiful modern exhibits, with two levels of walkways between large airy mesh enclosures, so you can see what’s going on at the top of the forest as well as the bottom. It feels lush and spacious, and the monkeys have huge natural-looking homes filled with live trees, branches, climbing ropes, hiding places, rock pools, etc. We spent a long time watching a family of Wolf’s Guenons. The little one was performing amazing feats of acrobatics while the mother worked and worked to try to crack open a walnut. After about 20 minutes it slipped out of her hands (or maybe she dropped it in disgust) and the father sprinted for it and grabbed it. He took it away to the top of a tree and eventually got it open. They were wonderful to watch.

We wandered through the new exhibit and reached the Gorillas, and spent a lot of time there. Saw two gorilla moms with little infants riding on their backs :) Then down to the bonobos, and then Chloe called (we’d invited them to come and meet us) and we headed back to the beginning of the monkey trail to meet them. Meanwhile they headed down a different trail to the gorillas to meet us :) But we finally met up, and walked all the way back through the monkeys, taking the lower trail this time and encountering lots of interesting wild pigs on the forest floor. Then we popped back to visit the kkomodo dragon again, then took the Sky Buckets over to the polar bears. We watched them for ages. One was rolling around, and the other was chewing on carrots. Arctic carrots, I guess.

Then we went down the hill and past the raptors to the pandas, and watched the 15-month-old cub cavorting with his mom. Because the pandas are so rare and secial, they have a zookeeper sitting near them all the time. She fills the crowd in on their personalities, histories, behaviour and other interesting facts. Neat.

And then we headed home at about 3 to try to beat the rush-hour traffic. It was slow for a while but wasn’t all THAT bad.

So tired now, so tired. But it was worth it! We had a perfect day :) And I have a tub of Trader Joe’s Pfeffernuesse here that needs my attention.

Whoa, I just noticed that our Zoo has little guided-tour podcasts for some of their exhibits! Each episode tells about one of the animals or plants. Check out this link to the podcast for Monkey Trails! http://www.sandiegozoo.org/podcast/monkey_trails/monkey_trails.xml

You can paste that link into your podcatcher and learn about our Flamingo Lagoon, Mandrills, Wolf’s Guenons, Wild Pigs, Bog Garden, and more! So cool. We’ll load some guided tours into our ipods for our next visit! Here’s their main podcast page: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/podcast/

Went to the zoo!
Jeeves and Wooster

046 – The Battle of Crecy

worked on subtraction with borrowing
started writing out big multiplication chart on the white-board
Greenwitch

It’s hot, 89 degrees Fahrenheit in Oceanside right now.  And dry, too. Bah.  Where’s winter?

Got up, fixed oatmeal with raisins for everyone, took Dan to his eye appointment, came home and got our voting stuff, went to the polls.  I made them give me an actual fill-in-the-bubble paper ballot, but Dan says the Diebold electronic thingy was better than last year (well I mean the way he described it sounded better than the machine I used last year, which was wretched). It printed out a paper slip showing his votes. The machine kept the slip, but at least he got to see that it was recording his vote correctly.
Came home, fetched Henry (he’s recovering from a sore throat so we stayed home from Karate this morning) and went grocery shopping.  I wish I could say I “did the marketing”  or that I “went to the market”  but I was raised saying “grocery shopping” and it’d be weird to change.  One of the guests on Loveline the other night was talking about “going to the market” and it just sounds so nice and old-fashioned.

Anyway, did the shopping, got the mail (new Macworld, yay, and the car insurance bill, boo), came home.  Henry hauled the groceries in and I put them away, and then we did  little bit of subtraction together and started writing out a big multiplication chart.  Then I made lunches for people, then I read for a little bit, then I drove out to pick up a package for Dan that had been delivered to his work.  It was nice to get out by myself for a bit.

Then home, more house chores, email etc.  Then piano student, who seemed actually to have practiced last week! Yay!

It’s hot.  I really need to vacuum the whole house but it’s too hot, so I’ll do it later when the sun goes down.

Chloe invited me to go to a band rehearsal on Thursday so I’m all excited about that!  I hope I don’t get Henry’s sore throat before then.

Three chapters of Story of the World — Byzantium, medieval India, beginning of Islam.
Looked at Hagia Sophia and Ajanta caves online.
Greenwitch

045 – The Battle of Sluys

Last night as I was getting ready for bed Dan said he had found the most awesome website ever. I hurried to see, thinking he’d found some hilarious video or something. What he showed me was http://kiva.org. Although it is not hilarious, it is truly amazing.

From their “about” page:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

But this is a very dry description and doesn’t convey the happy feeling of working with Kiva. When you go to their site and click the “Lend” button, you’ll be taken to a list of entrepreneurs in developing countries who need a small (and I mean small) loan to help improve their businesses. For instance, a fellow in Mexico might need $500 to improve his grocery store. You can sort through the businesses to select a certain kind of business, or a certain country, or whatever. You’ll see a photo of the business-person, and a description of his or her plans for the loan. You’ll see how much money has been donated toward the goal, and how much is still lacking. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the names and locations of people who’ve helped with that loan.

Click the “Lend” button and you can pick an amount to lend (as small as $25) through PayPal. PayPal does NOT take a cut! This is the first non-profit to get this special treatment from PayPal.

You’ll create an account with Kiva, and you’ll have a portfolio showing what you’ve lent, when it will be paid back, etc. You’ll also have a Lender Page, like ours, that can be viewed by other Kiva participants. If you click Carolyne‘s name at the bottom of our page there, you can see that we were the first to lend to her business last night. By morning, the entire amount of her loan had been raised! As we were browsing around on the site last night, we kept an eye on her page and it was so exciting to see other lenders joining us to help her!

I think one of the most important aspects of Kiva is that it’s so much fun. Dan and I stayed up WAY too late last night poking around on the site, choosing businesses to lend to, clicking the profiles of other lenders. That’s how we found our second lendee (is that a word?). We clicked on the profile of “Jim“, the second lender to Carolyne. We saw that he’d lent to Peter, and that that loan was not yet fully funded, so we lent to Peter too. There’s a nice sense of community. Also instant gratification — the amount you lend is reflected immediately. Also the pleasure of being able to see a photo of the person you’re helping — a real live person, not some impersonal faceless charity — and to feel that your small donation can really make a huge difference!

The site is a little bit slow right now. Frontline did a story on Kiva a few days ago, and the resulting rush of lenders took their servers down :) They’re still working on improvements to handle the increased load. Here’s a link to the Frontline page, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/video_index.html

And an easy guide to getting started with Kiva: http://kiva.org/app.php?page=about&action=how

(Or just look in my sidebar for the Kiva banner and click the photo!)

More info: Wikipedia: Kiva

Dan went out to his friend’s house tonight to do helicopter stuff, and I stayed home and worked on LibriVox stuff.  We just finished the “Princess of Mars” podcast so I had to set up a new book in the xml file.  I decided to send out “The Importance of Being Earnest” next week and then a delightful-looking book called “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town” by Stephen Leacock.  Somehow I missed out on recording any of it, but I’m really looking forward to hearing it!

Dan brought home Chinese food for dinner so I didn’t have to cook.  We’ve been watching the money lately so we haven’t been eating out at all, so it was a nice treat.  Except I should have followed Dan’s advice and ordered broccoli beef instead of veggie lo mein.  My veggie lo mein was just sort of dryish naked noodles, with one hunk of broccoli in it.  Not much “veggie” involved.  Sigh.  Not very good, and I was really in the mood for a big pile of yummy Chinese vegetables. Oh well, at least it was food that someone brought to me and that’s always nice :)

While we ate we watched last Tuesday’s episode of House, and then Friday’s The Soup, which was a fantastic episode.  We were cracking up!  Highlights were Tyra Banks screaming “PANTY PARTY!!!” and a super-psycho-freakout from a tele-novella.  Lol.

There’s an election coming up on Tuesday. I just spent a long time doing online research on the candidates and issues. I found http://www.smartvoter.org/ and http://www.igs.berkeley.edu/library/ to be very helpful resources, particularly for the various Propositions. Propositions make my head hurt, but I think I was able to come to a good decision on most of them. Being able to see which organizations and individuals contributed to some of the campaigns made it quite easy — for instance, Prop 86, a tax on cigarettes to fund healthcare programs, was supported by the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Association, and opposed by Philip Morris and The Retail Tobacco Dealers of America. Tough call, eh? Ha. But most of the time it’s difficult to decide how to vote. I don’t want to make things WORSE. Often, as in the race for Senator, I feel I just need to choose the lesser of two evils. As much as I disagree with Dianne Feinstein, I think I’d better vote for her in order to prevent Mountjoy from coming to power. Bah. What a system. I feel pretty good about Phil Angelides for Governor, though.

044 – The Battle of Bannockburn

One of our butterflies hatched out a few days ago.  When he started crawling around his box and flapping, we decided it was time to let him go.  Henry took him outdoors and he flew away!  Beautiful. The other butterfly is a “special needs” butterfly.  Her wings developed oddly.  They’re sort of rolled to one side and funny-looking, and she can’t fly.  We took her out to let her go and she just fluttered down to the ground.  We decided she doesn’t have a ghost of a chance in the wild and that we’d better keep her in her box, so yesterday Henry and I bought her some nice cantalope to live on, so she can have a nice indoors life anyway.

The time change is still messing me up, so last night I stayed up late and took 2mg Lunesta in an attempt to get back on schedule with the rest of the world.  It worked!  I slept until 8:30 or so and I don’t feel that time-change disorientation anymore.

Today I helped Henry practice writing numbers and we did some math, and then we played WoW for an hour or two.  We took Zinny and Animala to Tanaris to slay ogres. Fun :)  Then I took him to his dad’s house and stopped at the grocery store for molasses and sour cream and things.

Hey, Rockola is going to perform the entire Rubber Soul album (plus more Beatles) on November 25th, at the beautifully restored Steven and Mary Birch Theater in North Park!  If you’re a Beatles fan you MUST buy tickets.  They always put on an amazing show, and the Revolver show a few months ago sold out!  So buy tickets early!

Subtraction
multiplication
drilled 2 and 3 times tables
practiced writing numerals
drawing

Bayshore Art
Bayshore Science (Prisms)
Bayshore Spanish
Greenwitch
Finished Samhain cake

043 – Robert the Bruce and Bohun

042 – The Hammer of the Scots

041 – The First Prince of Wales

040 – The Little War of Chalons

039 – The Story of the Poisoned Dagger

I made Stuffed Peppers last night for dinner, and Dan loved them.  I kinda made up the recipe, so I’d better write it down:

 Stuffed Peppers

• 1 Package (a pound?) fresh ground turkey
• 2 cups cooked brown rice
• An onion, chopped
• 2 stalks of celery, chopped
• two or three tomatoes, chopped
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp dijon mustard
• 4 to 6 red bell peppers, depending on size

Heat a little oil in a nice big pan.  Cook the onion and celery until it starts to soften, then add the turkey.  Cook until the turkey is done, then add the rice, seasonings, and tomatoes and cook everything a little while longer.  Cut your peppers in half lengthwise, scrape out the seedy parts, and cram them full of the mixture.  Bake in a tightly-covered baking dish for 40 minutes at 375 degrees.  Serve with sour cream or plain yogurt.  Yum!