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Brain Food podcast (Science)
karate
reading
mythology
grammar
theater
math games

Had a nice trip to the library today, filled the backpack and then some. Felt good all day. Tired now but I did a lot of stuff. We just watched the first episode of the second season of Green Wing. Bizarre and entertaining, hope they’re making a third season. Oh, just looked it up, they’re not, oh well :)

Library
reading
math games (1.5 hours!)
karate
The Grey King

Somehow I got enough sleep last night and I felt good all day and got a lot accomplished! I wish I knew why I slept well so I could recreate the conditions and sleep well on other nights. Not only did I sleep well, but instead of waking up suddenly way too early, wide awake with no chance of falling back asleep, I woke up slowly and drowsily around 9:30. So that was a very nice way to start the day. I made a nice late breakfast for Dan, and then he went off to the RC aircraft field and I stayed home to get things done! I did two more LibriVox recordings and got all four recent ones edited, proofed, tagged, and uploaded AND got Joy’s 43-file collection of English Fairy Tales cataloged, AND did the Wii fitness test for the first time — fitness age = 57, lol. And I practiced baseball for a while too. I stink at Wii baseball.

Dan took me out to dinner at Anita’s, a nice casual Mexican place down on the coast. I had a great thing made of corn tortillas layered with cheese and beans and chicken with sour cream and guacamole. Usually I just have a few sips of Dan’s margarita, but tonight I ordered my own — not fruity, not blended, the way I like it. Except I’ve never drunk an entire restaurant margarita before and I really felt it, bleah. I need a child-size one next time ;-) It was a lovely dinner! I couldn’t finish, as usual, so I brought half of mine home so I can finish it before bed.

And now we’re watching TV while I compute and Dan works on his helicopter — last Thursday’s episode of The Office (Michael is back from Jamaica). Oh how I love that show. And the Soup Awards episode, very entertaining as usual. And a dull episode of South Park. And now a re-run of the Office, “The Convention” (for the third time, heheheh, that show is good over and over and over).

Oh my god, we’ve been watching Survivor: Australia on my laptop in bed at night — it’s great relaxing bedtime TV. Last night was the episode where Michael fell into the fire and was airlifted out. Man. We really liked him, too. How can you not like a man who chases down a wild pig with a knife and stabs it to death to feed his tribe?

Now I’m nice and sleepy and Dan is going to bring me my leftovers and then we’ll go to bed and maybe if I’m very lucky I’ll sleep well again. Cross your fingers.

Dan took this photo of me a couple of weeks ago:

Shows off my enormous teeth and knobby nose to great advantage. :)

If you were watching TV commercials in the 70s, you probably remember this wonderful stop-motion Levis commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBYgbeT6ciI

(I’d really like to embed that video but youtube’s “embed” code breaks my blog. Can anyone give me a hint?)

The song has been popping up in my head every so often ever since I was a child. I remembered every note; the visuals not so much, but they’re still familiar, especially the bit with the tag travelling around the pocket seam. Is it odd that watching a 30-year-old commercial fills me with so much joy?

Handwriting — thank-you letter
Zelda
math

Math at aleks.com
built card-stock castle!
The Grey King
grocery shopping
Zelda

Woke up before 6, couldn’t get back to sleep, so it was a tired day and I didn’t get much done.  But I read two chapters of Story of the World to Henry, and encouraged him to do a bit of math.  And beat the second dungeon in Twilight Princess (I have 6 4/5 hearts!).  Henry’s got a little sore throat.  Dan’s tired too so we’ll watch an episode of Survivor Australia and go to bed early.

Aleks math — finished assessment, worked on addition
drilled 4-times table
Story of the World: Islam
Story of the World: Islamic Empire
Guitar Practice

Vacation is over — back to Regular Life :) Normal busy Tuesday morning — fixed yogurt-banana-strawberry smoothies for breakfast, got Henry up, got to Karate in time, then over to Bayshore for our consultation with Karen. We told both Michelle and Karen all about our Wii, heheh. It’s the most awesome console ever! Forgot to mention that on New Year’s Eve we visited Bob and Chloe again and took the Wii with us so we could all bowl some more. Bob’s parents showed up right before we left and Bob got them bowling and playing tennis and they were laughing and having a great time. That’s one of the amazing things about the Wii — middle-aged non-gamers are able to jump right in to the sports games with a minimum of explanation and demonstration, yet it’s still tremendously fun for us experienced gamers (I played tennis against the AI for quite a while yesterday, two kayrays against two random players, heheh). And Twilight Princess is good beyond belief. I worked my way to the miniboss in the second dungeon today and was constantly amazed by the creative new twists I ran into. I’m taking it kind of slow on purpose — I don’t want the game to end. Hooray, Nintendo!

Yeah so anyway on the way home from Bayshore we stopped at the Mailbox place so Kevin could notarize my request for a new copy of Henry’s birth certificate. Not taking any chances when we head back to Canada. Got home, sifted through the bills, fed Henry, read email, fixed librivox problems. Then we called Grandma (my Grandma, Henry’s Great-Grandma) to chat and thank her for the present she sent — one of thoe felt roll-up puzzle-keepers, very handy. I took snapshots of Henry on the phone with her, and then we went down to Kinkos to get a print made and tucked it into a package with a little late-Christmas gift for her — a copy of LibriVox’s “A Girl of the Limberlost” on 10 audio cds (which I made yesterday while the guys were at the flying field), then mailed that to Grandma and an embarrassingly-late Christmas card to Hugh and Christine (which was actually meant to be a thank-you card after our last visit. Talk about embarrassingly late…)

Then home again and time for some Zelda! Henry watched and advised me. Then I made a simple but tasty pasta dinner — stirred chunks of leftover New Year’s Turkey into the sauce. And now I’m blogging while Henry plays his guitar and Dan takes his bike apart and puts it back together :)

Karate (Tiny Tigers)
grammar (prepositional phrases)
4-times multiplication drills
science program about the sun
Castle

Kri suggested that we librivoxers with blogs get accounts at technorati.com so we can all find each other. I’m supposed to post this link: Technorati Profile

Here’s where you can find the LibriVoxers: http://www.technorati.com/blogs/librivox+blog

I got such a nice email this morning:

Dear Kara,
I wish You a Happy New Year! You don’t know how grateful I am, when I listen your works on sound books. I have to tell You, your pronounceation is much more clear and familiar to me than others. I’ve just began to listen The Secret Garden, while I go to run. Every second week I check the new realesis on a Librivox homepage, and I collect in my PC the worths. Thanks for again, and I hope, your life is so succesfull as your precious job. Best wishes from Marianna (hungarian fan)

So sweet!  Happy new year, everyone!