Weblog » Archives » October 2003

  • This is not our front door.

  • My Mother the Octopus I've always loved Halloween. When I was a kid, I couldn't wait to get my costume. My dad has this thing about holidays: no one is allowed to prepare for, or even talk about, a holiday until the fir…

  • Halloween Hangover Last night while we were watching TV, the cats were in the kitchen acting like maniacs, as cats will do. When I went in there to get something to drink, I realized that they had found a small bag of …

  • I was just watching the news and they spoke to the brother of one of the news anchors. He was calling from San Diego to talk about the California fires. He described how he had to evacuate his house, and how it felt to b…

  • Last Friday night for Alex's school's Fall Festival, Alex dressed as a zombie cheerleader, and Mack went as a pirate. Tomorrow night Mack is going to school and then a friend's party dressed as a lightning victim. She pu…

  • I'm almost done with the redesign. Not that I can take credit for it. It's a skin that I modified, and thus far I'm really happy with it. I just need to fix all that old text (the em dashes and curly quotes and such, tha…

  • I'm working on a redesign, and a lot of the text on my site is a bit wonky at the moment. I should have it all fixed in the next day or so. Meanwhile, if you're trying to read older entries, it might be frustrating. Anyo…

  • I'm inspired by red_dirt_girl's blog from the other day, so here's the story on one of my kids. I actually wrote out the whole story of Mackenzie's birth the day after it happened; will see if I can find that and post …

  • My sleep is screwed up because of the time change. I fell asleep during The Practice and woke up at 4:45 this morning. I'm sure I'll be doing this for a few days until I get adjusted. There's not a lot to report--layed …

  • I slept 11 hours, and feel quite a bit better. I'm still going to play some tennis today, but will also do a fair amount of nothing. I was thinking about taking all our clothes to the Laundromat because everything is pil…

  • I'm not feeling quite like myself today. I got up early this morning and went to hit tennis balls against the wall at the elementary school. We're having incredible weather and I want to take advantage of as much of it…

  • Well, I lost some subscribers with my tennis story. Coming tomorrow: never-before-seen photos of my blender! My demo racquets are here and I couldn't be happier. Now I just need good weather so I can test them properly…

  • I had tennis tonight. I felt a little less “in over my head” than last time, except when we had to serve 16 serves and I only got two of them in. I’m not the worst player in the class, by the way. These two women in the …

  • My new tennis class started tonight. I’ll have the same teacher as last time, but she’s away this week so we had a substitue. He worked us hard, we hit a lot of balls, and he didn’t talk too much. It was because of my te…

  • Not much to report today. Went to two soccer games. Neither of my kids played particularly well, but who cares? At Alex’s game, the sun was out and everything felt perfect, and I took a little nap in my chair (don’t tell…

  • RE xTools:Is anybody else having trouble getting spaces between their paragraphs? It took me as long to format the last entry as it did to write it. And I'm still not sure it's right.

  • All kinds of things going on here. First, I’m going to take a page from Garic’s playbook and forget last night’s game. I’m not going to spend any time wondering why Pedro was still pitching in the 8th, when our bullpen h…

  • New York 6, Boston 5. Wait ‘til next year.

  • Mr. S doesn’t know how to use a computer. My hunch is that he doesn’t type well and finds the whole thing intimidating. He has some understanding of the technology, but it’s hard to get him to even look at a computer scr…

  • My car died on the way to drop off the kids this morning. It wasn’t running great last night, but I didn’t expect it to die like that. We were at a busy intersection. Mack and I pushed the car off the street with Alex tr…

  • Mr. S is the worst packrat I’ve ever known. The office is filled with stacks of papers, old phone books, boxes, maps, and so on. The man never throws anything away. In one of the closets he has boxes of old phone bills—l…

  • Boy, the xTools are screwy today.

  • We had a mother of a thunderstorm yesterday. It was a little odd because it was only about 55° (about 13° for my metric friends, according to some conversion site--I don't really know), and I usually associate thunder an…

  • The Red Sox took the first game of the American League series. Wahoo! Mr. S has been working on a project at home and has barely been around all week. Another wahoo! I didn’t think I was going to be able to get i…

  • Did you ride a Greyhound (or other long-distance) bus in the 1970s? Do you know what a ticket might have cost back then for travel from west coast to east? Would it have been possible for, say, a 12-year-old to buy a one…

  • Final Score: Oakland 5, Boston 4. 12 Innings. I'll bet there are a lot of tired, cranky people in Boston today. The game ended at around 3:30 this morning on the east coast.

  • Why, oh why, do I cast my lot with the Red Sox year after year?Because I love them, love Boston, love Fenway, love the Green Monster. God help me, I do. I sat down here to report their 4-3 win over Oakland in the pla…

  • Today I went to the Booktique, a used bookstore run by the local library. A lot of their stuff is overpriced, but if it's not a recent book you're after, you might be able to get it for a pretty good price. I've been wa…