Today I opened Google Reader and saw a new entry from a blogger who hasn’t updated in a while. Her husband cheated on her, and she’s dealing with the aftermath as well as she can. She sometimes reads this blog, so here’s a message for her.

E, if you’re reading this, I just want to say I’m sorry.

I haven’t seen much of the Internet in over a week because of flaky access. Verizon says they’re working on it. Strangely, aside from the inconvenience of not being able to pay my bills whenever I feel like it, I haven’t missed it all that much. There has been much less reflexive checking and rechecking of work email / Google Reader / Facebook and much more of… well, everything else. I cooked, cleaned, read books for work, did some cross stitch (more on this later), and watched Kung Fu Panda with the kids a bajillion times.

My life is fine. I have nothing to complain about.

Categories: memes
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Here is Angelina enjoying a teething biscuit. That’s the only thing she has enjoyed from the first bite. She hated plain rice cereal and shuddered visibly at her first taste of sweet potatoes. But we persevered, and now she can polish off a third of a jar of sweet potatoes blended with a tablespoon of rice cereal at dinner.

She can sit up for short periods of time and move with alarming speed, having gotten into her older siblings’ Legos several nights in a row, despite their barricades. Right now her crawl involves mostly upper body strength with only minimal use of her legs, but she has started pushing herself on to her knees, so she’ll probably figure out the knee movement soon. Meanwhile, we really need to move the Legos off the floor.

Categories: angie, memes
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Yesterday I worked from 9am to 6pm, came home, had a quick dinner, then worked from 7pm until midnight. Yes, I’m tired. No, I still don’t have this work-life balance thing figured out.

These bell peppers are the sole survivors of our gardening experiment this summer. They tasted good enough that we might try again next year.

The kitchen remodel is going well. All that’s left are 5 more cabinets, the vent hood, and the drawer and door knobs. Installing the vanity panels and the flooring and buying accessories for the cabinets will be icing.

This was Angie’s Halloween costume. I think she looks great in orange.

Here’s Angie with her friend Payge who is 4 and a half months older. Payge is small for her age and Angie is big for her age, so they end up looking the same size.

In other news, there’s something screwy with our internet service. Our access has been spotty on a minute by minute basis, and we haven’t been able to get it resolved because every time Kevin calls customer service he gets cut off about 20 minutes into the conversation.

The strangest part is that for about 3 days Google kept redirecting us to their United Kingdom page. Tonight it redirected us to their German page.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t post a Nablopomo entry yesterday. Apparently I was in Germany.

Categories: angie, gardening, home improvement, memes, work-life balance
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Our new President, Barack Obama, was born in 1961. This puts him on the older end of my generation, Generation X.

A common stereotype of Gen X’ers is that we’re pessimistic and lazy, and yet Obama’s campaign message was one of hope, and as one of our country’s youngest Presidents and the first African-American elected to this office, he’s hardly a slacker.

Another stereotype is that Gen X’ers are cynical. I don’t think that’s true; we just tell it like it is. In his acceptance speech tonight, Obama talked about all the work still ahead for the country, and I appreciated his honesty. I don’t know that 4 years will be enough to fix everything, but at the least it will be a start.

Categories: memes, politics
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This year Ana was Belle and Alex was a pirate. Ana’s not all *that* into the princess thing, but she likes it when people tell her how pretty she looks. Alex was totally in his element. I doubt I’ll be getting my skull-and-crossbones bandanna back from him.

We tried something different this year and went to the local city Halloween festival instead of the usual door-to-door march. It was packed. There were, no joke, close to a thousand kids there. There was a massive line for the ho-hum petting zoo and pony rides. There was an enormous line for the too-scary-for-a-four-year-old haunted house. There was a line for everything.

After about 20 minutes of wandering around and playing carnival-esque games to win candy, the kids pronounce it lame and ask to go trick-or-treating instead. It was all good. The kids and I had fun wandering up and down our block extorting the neighbors for candy.

Categories: food, kids and parenting, memes
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