This March 30th is International TableTop Day! TableTop is a Youtube show on the Geek&Sundry network. There are some of the videos on the TableTop Day web page linked to the image at left.
It's hosted by Wil Wheaton and in every episode he and some geeky friends play a table top game. He gives a brief rundown of the rules and the shows are edited to give a sense of game play and strategy without having to watch over an hour of people playing a game. It's fun and a great way to find out if you think you or your family and friends might like one of the games.
To celebrate the end of the first season and the upcoming 2nd season, they have declared March 30th International TableTop Day! Check out the website for more info. Basically you're supposed to play games that day. But you can register your event at the site and get some stuff. Or you could check out the map of events and join others at a game shop or other event and make a social event of it. Apparently at some of these events they're giving away more free stuff, including some of the games.
Now my daughter's 10th birthday is March 30th. (Yes, her birthday is 03-30-03. And no, I don't use that for a combination for anything! Too obvious!) So she's all about this happening on her birthday. What's funny to me is she's only seen one episode, the Wits & Wagers Family Edition, and one promotional video about this, the one featuring Grant Imahara, and she's totally there.
We actually won't be joining any events because for her birthday we've booked a cabin up in North GA for some outdoor fun with her and some friends. But she's making sure to pack Wits&Wagers, Jenga, and some card games for the big day.
He was wondering if a guy like him (smart, academic rationalist) was in each of the four Hogwarts houses, what might one of their bookshelves look like? So he made shelves of books, took pictures and made lists of course, because that's what our kind of folks do, right? Now his list is pretty high-flown and leans toward the non-fiction as Mr. Galef is a philosopher type. And once you see the shelves you'll be all like, but Ron and Hermione would have completely different shelves!
Yes, but I don't think it's meant to be definitive. You can tell by his happy to response to new ideas in the comment section of his blog there. It was just a thought experiment he had great fun with and of course that's the great thing about lists. You can't help but start thinking about it and adding to it and it's just fun.
There are some of the things that struck me about this. One was, there are books I've read on all four shelves. And there are some titles that show up on more than one shelf. So that just goes to show that people are more complicated that the strict division of the "House" model would indicate. I mean, I'm sure we all realize that, but this makes it clear. There can be "good" Slytherins and "bad" Gryffindors (don't forget that Peter Pettigrew was a Gryffindor!) so there's a whole continuum, but the whole "brave," "witty," honest," and "sly" divisions help slant things a bit.
I've always thought I'd be more of a Ravenclaw, but found I'd read more books on the Gryffindor shelf. I know it means nothing, but there you go. Plus, this kind of thing gets my wheels spinning so I start wondering, well, what would be different about Hermione's vs. Ron's shelves? And then I'm off making book shelves for every character in the books...
Well, technically she's not ten until the end of the month, but we had the party this weekend for scheduling reasons. She wanted an overnight party so yes, we had six giggling girls ALL NIGHT Saturday night. Whew!
First they had to design and sketch out what they were going to do with the pillowcases (and pillows!) we bought for them to decorate.
Then they painted, markered, and ironed on all kinds of different things to their pillowcases for that personalized touch. (And to have something nice and quiet to keep them busy the first hour as everyone arrived.)
It didn't take long for the sugar and adrenaline to kick in, though! Here's all six playing music and coupling up for dance partners. This was not on the agenda but was one of my favorite moments.
Then they ate pizza and junk and listened to teeny-bopper music. Next up was the Wii Just Dance excitement. I got tired just watching this. But not those guys, no. Nothing made them tired!
After it got dark, the most exciting part was the Scavenger Hunt. As you may recall from last year, My Lovely Bride can go all out for these parties. This year she decided to reign it in, but still found a creative outlet with this hunt. They were given an envelope with a clue which led them to a box of personalized flashlights and another clue which led them all through the neighborhood (yes, we warned the neighbors) in a giggling frenzy for each clue and item. They ended up with stick on mustaches (I don't know why but it's a thing) and some stuffed monkeys (again, I don't know why but they loved 'em) and other stuff.
Yes, pink fuzzy mustaches. One girl made it her "unibrow." Yes, they're all that crazy and wonderful. Then we had a fire and roasted marshmallows and such. They started being pyros with their sticks and one girls said, "I can't believe you're letting children DO this!" Don't worry, it was safe. My other favorite line of the night was from another girl. When I said something about how they were already wearing me out she said, with a glint in her eye, "If you think this is bad, you're not going to make it through the night!"
But we did. We made it through the night and they even got some sleep. After the fire they jammied up and watched the Princess Bride. They even had peanuts for when the giant asks about peanuts. I know!
In the morning was breakfast and more music, gift exchanging and playing around outside until the parentals came to pick them off one by one. They all have iPods and text each other. In the middle of the morning I had this text exchange with my daughter:
We are cheeseballs. But yeah, while they were celebrating her birthday I was celebrating her having such fun, smart, cool and interesting friends.
Yes, Google is killing their feed reader. Sigh. So switching to Feedly.com wasn't a big whoop, but I'm getting tired of Google's crap, so I'm seriously thinking of slowly cutting the cord with them.
Here's a Lifehacker article from last year called Going Google-Free.
Yeah! Stick it to those Google-glass-wearing weirdos! (Those things seem just icky to me.)
The first step for me will be switching from Chrome. That will be slightly bumpy, but I've used Firefox and Safari before, so it t won't hurt. Then the one that will make me happiest is making my default browser something other than Google. I like Duck Duck Go and Refseek better anyway.
Just those changes will be enough, probably. But if I decide to go further, I'd get back into Zoho because they have free email, docs, wikis, and a dashboard kinda like the old iGoogle.
But will I ever stray from Blogger? And I don't think I can ever get away from Youtube...
Dammit, Google! Why can't you quit messing with my feng shui!
Daughter is unwell, so taking a sick day with her. Tried to call a bunch of people on the "sub line" but never got one. So my clerk may be on her own today. There's got to be a better way to handle the sub thing.
I've been in a minor reading slump. I read our 4th/th grade book club book for Friday's meeting and it was fine, but no fireworks. Then I gave my Guy's Read book club book it's best chance Sunday afternoon and got to about page 100 and decided to let that one go. The meeting is probably going to be on a night I have to work late anyway.
So yesterday I read a couple of short things to get me motivated. I read Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants which was just like a lighter-than-air meringue and a nice little treat. Then I read Stephen King and Joe Hill's Throttle, which was more like a an anvil to the head. It's their homage to Richard E. Matheson's "Duel" which if you haven't read, you may have seen the old Steven Spielberg TV movie version of. It's the one about a relentless semi-truck that is determined to run down and kill the protagonist for some unknown reason. In the King/Hill story, it's a motorcycle gang and they realize in the end that there was indeed a reason. Couldn't have been different than the Gaiman, that's for sure.
So now, between fluffing pillows, bringing juice and dispensing meds, I'll start something new and fun to finish off the TBR Double Dog Dare!
PS Thanks for all the comments and tweets about our weird nest. The mouse idea is interesting, but it really does look like a bird's nest and we've seen many birds in and out of there in the past. I'll see if I can ask an expert soon to see if anyone knows what the real deal might be.
We went out to the garage to get a new roll of paper towels and there's a bird's nest in there! This is confusing on many levels. First of all, our garage door, while open frequently (and most of the time on the weekends) is closed more than it's open so when did the little buggers do this?
I'm wondering if one of my kid's friends found the nest and shoved it in there? But it doesn't look that way. It looks like it was built in there. But I'm obviously not an expert.
I have seen birds in the garage many times but lets say one was trapped in there for a while. It's not like there's THAT much stuff to make a nest out of.
So any bird experts out there? Could a bird (or more than one) really build this nest here? Would they? And how long does it take them to build one?
We're afraid to disturb it and so haven't even got more paper towels out of there!
These were our last two read-alouds with my daughter. I think Chomp is the next book they're doing for the mother/daughter book club they've set up. Which is awesome, don't you think?
There's only one mother in the book and she spends the majority of the story stuck in China teaching English classes and only showing up as a voice on the satellite phone when it's needed in the plot. It's more about a son and his father. Of course the son has a female friend who is awesome and has major conflicts with her father, so there's plenty of that going on.
It's about a "reality" survival show coming to Florida to shoot an episode in the Everglades. They hire temperamental animal wrangler Mickey Cray to be in charge of the critters. He needs the job and the big bucks they're paying but he doesn't play well with others. That's where our more level-headed Cray, narrator Wahoo comes in. Yes, he's named after the fish and doesn't appreciate it. Neither of them like the pampered, idiotic and ego-driven actor playing the part of Derek Badger, star of Expedition Survival! Yes, he's an actor and knows nothing about actually surviving in the wild, about handling animals, or even basic interpersonal skills. On the way out to the shoot they pick up Wahoo's school friend Tuna (yes, another fish) who is on the run from her alcoholic and abusive father. When things go wrong in the Everglades, they go really wrong. They lose track of the star who is brain-addled from infection (he gets chomped by many things, but I think it was the bat bite that gets infected). Tuna's father shows up on the hunt for his daughter with a volatile mix of alcohol and a gun. Things get funny, crazy, touching, and just plain wild.
The main characters are great. Wahoo wrangles the adults almost as well as his dad can wrangle critters. Tuna is pretty level-headed herself under the circumstances and is a budding taxonomist to boot. Derek is wonderfully dumb. He affects an Aussie accent in honor of Steve Irwin, the Croc Hunter, but stays in hotels and sets up his animal "discoveries" more like Bear Grylls. Unlike Grylls, though, he doesn't even have the slightest bit of outdoorsmanship. He's the butt of most of the jokes, but Hiaasen gives him a bit of a reprieve at the end. It's easier to let him off the hook when a pure baddie like Tuna's dad shows up causing all kinds of havoc.
Speaking of havoc, John Scieszka ("rhymes with Fresca") grew up with a mom, a dad, and five brothers. Yes, the mom was definitely outnumbered by stinky boys. He says even the pets were all boys! Poor woman. This book is a bunch of random recollections of "growing up Scieszka" and all the various nonsense these boys got into. It's always one of my favorite go to time-filling read-alouds at school because there are many short funny chapters and the kids never fail to howl, then clamber to check it out (which does not happen often in the biography section, let me tell you).
Some of the wonderfulness includes their crazy uncle showing them how to make a firecracker mortar on a camping trip, the multiple times the brothers broke one of the younger one's bones playing a fondly remembered game called "Slaughter Ball," and of course his learning to cook because he hated cleaning up dog poop. Guy reading gold right there. My daughter and I giggled all the way through it while her mom rolled her eyes at us. Heh heh.
I read this as part of the Sword & Laser online book club. I bought it a while ago on the recommendation of this guy, a member of the online forum. He's one of the reasons I love the internet. So S&L started as a podcast (and it still is) but has also a video show as part of the amazing Geek & Sundry network. The hosts encourage much vier/listener feedback and this guy has become a genius at doing funny little whiteboard animations. He usually sums up an author's work or comments of some aspect of fantasy fiction in a fun and interesting way.
When he did a white board recommending the Bridge of Birds I went out and picked up a copy that weekend. If I find the video clip, I'll embed it in this post. It wasn't his best or funniest white board, but it was clear he meant that this was a great book and after being on this forum for a few months, I trusted his expertise. In fact, many members of the group did so it became the February pick and he became the discussion leader for this book.
I was not disappointed. It's everything he says and more. Actually, he didn't say much other than he loved it and considered it one of the best fantasy books ever but that was enough for me.
He did not, however, tell how supremely funny it is, and on many different levels. A word that popped up frequently on the discussion thread was Rablasian. But I am not familiar with Rablais. To me, it was most reminiscent of Candide, Jonathan Swift and a bit of Roald Dahl, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. But in ancient mythological China.
In some alternate, magical distant Chinese past, the children of a village are struck by a mysterious illness. Our narrator, Number Ten Ox, is sent to find a wise man to help. He finds the renowned Li Kao, the only wise man crazy enough to work for a pittance. He also, as he likes to remind everyone "has a slight flaw" in his character. It's never made explicit what exactly this particular flaw is.
They set out on a journey for a mysterious Root of Power (like a special magical ginseng root), with the 90-plus-year-old Li Kao leading the way, happily riding the back of our Dr. Watson-like narrator, Number Ten Ox. Their adventures get successively crazier and crazier, but they never lose sight of the importance of helping the children of the village (who unknowingly assist them in finding clues).
If you decide to read this and find it difficult at first, stick with it for a few chapters. For some reason I read many comments about folks having some trouble with the first chapter. But every detail comes into play and every bit comes full circle, so it's all important and pays off. In fact, I was surprised when I found out Hughart went on to write two more books because this one is so complete. I'll have to check out the other two some day.
The children's book closest in tone to this one is Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon which she has since followed up with Starry River of the Sky. Some of the same Chinese myths are repurposed in both Lin and Hughart's tales (but his Old Man of the Moon is scary while hers is cryptic and benign).
There's so much to talk about but there's so much I don't want to give away that I'll leave it here. I may have to get my real world book club to read it next year just to be able to discuss it more.
So we have a fancy schmancy color printer in the Media Center that I've never liked. It's expensive and a bother. And for my first two years here, the printing it did looked like poo. But I wasn't going to pay for expensive new cartridges out of my Media funds. I have too many books I need to buy. And since we hardly use it, I tried to convince the administration and book keeper that they should use some money out of a general education fund to fix it up. Problem was, I also wanted to limit who could print off of it because people (and by people I mean little kids, parents, teachers, everybody) were printing goofy things and wasting paper and ink. So they didn't want to limit it if they were paying for it for everybody and I certainly wasn't going to pay for it for everybody. Then I said look, anybody can use it, but they just have to email us their print job and we will print it for them so we can keep an eye on things. That worked.
It wasn't that big of a deal since there was a Teacher Color Printer in one of the computer labs that everyone could use anyway.
Well, now? Not so much. It's breathed it's last dusty printer breath. The computer guys came to me the other day and said they were opening up our color printer to the staff. I said that was a great idea if they just wanted to trash another printer, but maybe we should stick to the deal and let them go through the clerk and I so we can keep it under at least a bit of control. I mean we just spent a jillion dollars on new color cartridges for the thing earlier in the year, right?
The smirked and said fine (because they knew we'd be inundated with requests). Yesterday was Day 1 and yes, we got many requests. It wasn't too bad, but there were a couple "I gotta have this now!" things that always bug us, especially when they never come back to pick up their stuff!
So I sent the following email before I left yesterday and this morning my inbox was filled with "BEST EMAIL EVER" and "That was SO FUNNY!" type messages. I don't think it's that funny, but I guess the bar is set pretty low when you're coming into work at an elementary school.
Here it is:
From:Jim Randolph To: Staff Date:02/28/2013 05:16 PM Subject:Color Printing
Let's take a moment of silence to remember our fallen soldier, the Teacher Color Printer...
...Ok, now there is another color printer which the staff has access to, but there are a few minor limits.
It is in the Media Center and if you want something printed in color, you'll need to email the file (or bring it to) me or our wonderful clerk. It's best to e-mail "Media Center" so it goes to both of us and whoever is available will be happy to take care of it.
You'll also need to bring the right amount of paper for this print job. And sorry, no, you can't ask us to print it and "pay us back later." We don't get any more paper than any other classroom and after just one day of doing this, we've already been on the wrong end of a couple big print jobs.
Don't expect immediate turn-around. We have a million other things to do and checking e-mail for a new print job isn't always one of them. For now we will do this as the jobs come in and when we have a moment to spare. If it becomes too much, we may limit it to certain days like we do the laminating. Your patience is appreciated.
You may be thinking, "But why don't they just add the Media Center Color Printer to our list of available printers and let us do it all ourselves?"
Let's take another moment to remember the sad story of the Teacher Color Printer. That's why.
Thanks! Jim ________________________ "Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift." -Kate DiCamillo
The sunrise was particularly beautiful the morning I took this (earlier in the month). Pictures of sunrises never do it justice, though. I have a good drive in the mornings. I come down a hill facing just the right direction as I drive to school so if it is a beautiful sunrise I get the full effect. Well, until the time changes I suppose. What do you see on your mornings?
