Christmas and Chaos

The desktop computer's hard drive died about a week and a half ago. The same day the cold water tap wouldn't run in the morning and the day before our first significant snow of the season. And Daddy Geek was in California for the week. But, we don't think the pipes burst (cross fingers) and Daddy Geek's Christmas project is to install a new hard drive.

But Santa came by on a fire truck! Here's the decorated and music-blaring fire truck going one way down the street -- see Santa in the upper left corner.


And coming back down after turning around in the court. Fireman walked alongside handing out candy canes and fire safety reminders.


This is what happens when Geek Girl (with a little help from her friends) has free rein of the empty basement bedroom. Just a little bit of chaos.


And here she is on Christmas morning, playing with her new HexBug nanos and Zoobles.


Happy Holidays everyone!

Brrrrrr....

25.5 deg F with a wind chill of 17 deg F. I think it's okay to drive Geek Girl to school instead of walking. Dear Canada, you can have your cold winds back.

Rant: Fairness

If you spend any time with 7-year-olds, you'll know that fairness is an important concept. Unfortunately, life is not always fair. But it really gets me frustrated when unfairness is due to the thoughtlessness of another adult.

When a kid has a birthday, they often bring treats to share with their classmates at lunch. This is easily done since the kids sit together by class. Well, today a kid in another class must have had a birthday and brownies were brought in for the class. I don't know if what happened next was by design, or spur of the moment, but then the mother in question proceeded to dole out brownies to kids in the other six classes, if they rode the same bus as her child! That means that some of the kids in Geek Girl's class received brownies, and most of them didn't. Excuse me, what are you thinking lady? If you're going to hand out treats to a table, you hand them out to everyone at the table.

Four hours later, the first thing my kid says to me when I pick her up after school is that something not fun happened at lunch and proceeded to explain to me what happened. Part of me wants to complain to the school or hunt her down, but I'm hoping maybe this mom just wasn't thinking. So, thank you for allowing me this chance to vent and now it's time to move one. (Well, I'll have to complain to one more parent tomorrow and then I will move on, promise.)

Fun with tile grout

What do you get when you mix one part paint to five parts Elmer's tile grout? Frosting! Or at least, something that looks like frosting.

Geek Girl and I went to the National Gallery of Art on Sunday for one of their Family Workshops. We had fun looking at and discussing Wayne Thiebaud's painting Cakes.

Then came the fun part. Icing and decorating a cardboard "cake".

Here is Geek Girl's masterpiece. I helped a little with the icing, but she did all of the decorating herself. Doesn't it look yummy?




We were both pretty hungry after the workshop. Luckily we had Halloween candy waiting for us at home. Where was Daddy Geek? After driving us in he went for a little 11-mile run home. He had a little bit of Halloween candy too.

Halloweens Past and Present

I can't resist posting old photos of Geek Girl. At the end of the post you'll see that after many easy years of creating costumes, we actually put some effort into this year's costume.

Eight months old and a happy elephant. (Thanks Jen!)


One year later and the head still fits!


Okay, 2005, let's be a Chinese princess.


2006 was a rough year. Geek Girl was an American Girl in Florence, Italy.

In 2007, Geek Girl wanted to be a friendly ghost.


In 2008, we were in Zürich, and she was Sleeping Beauty.


Last year she was a pirate fairy.


And this year she decided to be a dragon. Thank goodness for the internet. I found a cool pattern here. The whole family was involved in creating this costume. I cut out the pieces from foam board and cardboard and glued the easy bits. Daddy Geek and I worked together to glue the head (thank goodness for hot glue guns). Geek Girl did most of the painting with a little bit of help from me. I think it turned out pretty well, what do you think?



Geek Girl has been anxiously waiting for trick-or-treating all day. We had an afternoon ice skating birthday party to distract her and an early dinner. By 6 pm she was very happy when her good friend next door finished dinner and came over to start trick or treating.

Walking on liquid

This past weekend was the first USA Science and Engineering Festival. How lucky are we that we can just take the metro in and "celebrate science at over 1500 fun, hands-on science and engineering activities?"

We made inheritance bracelets (Daddy Geek and Geek Girl can both taste PTC); used maggots to spread paint around and create works of art; used licorice, toothpicks, and marshmallows to model a DNA molecule; built a catapult; and had to drag Geek Girl away.

The highlight of the day was running across a non-newtonian fluid -- if you step on it slowly you'll sink, but if you run across it, you won't.

Geek Girl will demonstrate.

Scrambled States

Last week was the book fair for Geek Girl's Elementary School. One of the books on her wish list was "The Scrambled States of America Talent Show" a sequel to "The Scrambled States of America." We've checked both books out the library, but she was excited to get a copy of her own. While Geek Girl was at soccer practice, I helped out at the book fair, and when I mentioned to the organizer how much Geek Girl liked the Scrambled States books, she suggested the Scrambled States game.

So on Saturday we open up the game and play. Then we decide to test how many U.S. state capitals Daddy Geek and I can remember. Back in the day, I knew all of the U.S. state capitals. I'll have you know I was on the Academic League too! However, all those old bits of trivia seem to have been replaced by new random facts, because I could only name 29 state capitals. Daddy Geek, on the other hand, remembered all of the state capitals except for Bismarck, North Dakota. Maybe that's why he can't learn new tricks?