Random

Some cotton yarn I purchased came in the mail yesterday. I LOVE the blue, persimmon, green, and yellow, and I love them all together. I bought them to go with the orange, which is too flourescent for my tastes. I'm going to try it in small doses for a project I've had on my mind for some time now (hence, the online spree), but I have my doubts! The charcoal and chocolate and black with the camel color in the back row are much closer to my personal palate aesthetic, so who knows how this other thing will turn out?

The sun was back yesterday, a beautiful autumn day with a high sun and a low breeze and I enjoyed every moment of it. When I headed out back to check the garden, I found some actual storm damage! It was so exciting! Like a real farm! A whole section of one of the tomato plants and an entire arm of the biggest basil bush had snapped off and were laying in the dirt.




I pulled the green cherry tomatoes and stripped the basil leaves off their stems. I've had no time to deal with much in the kitchen. I have banana nut bread I need to make, salsa I want to make before my few tomatoes go bad, and now I'd like to make some pesto with this basil. Hopefully the green tomatoes will turn red on the counter. I don't usually do it that way, but I know people do.



Have you seen this TV Guide channel? There's usually an info-mercial or some celebrity gossip thing running in the background, while a channel guide scrolls very slowly at the bottom?

When we went to see Gram on Sunday, Tommy was trying to find a cartoon channel. They don't have our cable system in her rehab room, so he couldn't just flip through a menu like we do at home. I showed him this channel, and how he could see what was on by watching the scroll at the bottom. If you catch the scroll when it's showing you channel 3 or 4, and are hoping to see what's on a channel in, say, the fifties, it can seem like an eternity to wait for it to scroll through. Especially if you are nine years old! As I watched him, he put his right index finger on the screen, and started 'flicking' it up, and away from him.

I watched him do this two or three times, and then I realized that he was trying to change the screen like you do on an iPhone, or anything with a touchscreen, where you can see what's on the bottom of the page by moving your finger around on the screen! Oh, it just tickled me!

I did some work for a district in my area, training some teachers in, what else, math, and they had a keynote speaker that day from Apple. I enjoyed her stories quite a bit, and one thing that she said in particular stuck with me. Now, she's talking to about 500 teachers. Teachers are sort of notoriously low-tech, or tech-resistant.

[Example: I work at schools where you can't send staff updates or bulletins by email because, despite the fact that the schools are all fitted with wireless internet connections and the district provides both web-based and machine-based email options, there is a good percentage of teachers on staff who "don't know how" to check their email. To check email! Imagine!]

This thing that the keynote speaker said, was that technology is something that didn't exist (or, more precisely, the technologies weren't popularly available) when you were born. Hmmm...so interesting! That means to kids, even a kindergartener, computers aren't technology! Internet access is not technology! Isn't that a funny way to see things? For my mom, ATMs are technology. For me, remote controls are technology. But for my kids, it's things like touch-screens and embedded multimedia, 3G networks...

Tommy had an idea the other day on how to use air harnessed from windmills to make a hovercraft. Holy cow.