How much is a million?

BB: "I run a lot faster now den I did when I was two."

PS: "You do run faster."

BB: "Dat's because now I'm three and a HALF."

PS: "That's really big."

BB: "That is SO big. Three and a half is as big as... a MILLION!"

Random bullets of narrative development

• Everyone is back at school now. Baby Blue is still quite frightened of "the mean kid" in her class, but has started interacting with some of the other children there, so I guess that's progress, somehow.
• She'd still rather play with older children, or by herself, though.
• We were talking about the beach one day, the way you do when you find a bathing suit in a drawer and think it's funny because you can't currently imagine going outside without donning 15 layers of wool first. Baby Blue told me that she doesn't like going to the beach, because other people sometimes splash her. I said, "Well, if someone splashes you, you could say to them, 'Hey, stop splashing me! I don't like when you splash me.'"
• She looked at me, blinked several times, and then sighed, like one does when explaining something for the fifth time to a particularly dense audience. "Mama," she said, "I can't do that, because I don't like talking to people who aren't in my family."
• "Oh," I said, chastened. But then Baby Blue brightened. "But I could say, 'STOP!'" she said. "Or 'RED LIGHT.'"
• There are a lot of people I would like to say "RED LIGHT" to these days. Let's just say that there are lots of unbloggable local political dramas roiling the family Scribbler-Blue at the moment. (Unbloggable both because, well, it's all very dull if you're not personally affected by it, and because I don't really need to be pinpointing my address to the entire Google-enabled world, you know?)
• In other exciting news, LG really seems to like his OLPC. I'm hoping to get him to write a little review of it for y'all.
• He would enjoy it more, though, if it wasn't quite so buggy. Some of the issues he's had with it are things that are supposed to be features, not bugs -- things deliberately designed with the OLPC's target audience in mind. For example, there's no CAPS LOCK button on the keyboard, nor any keyboard shortcut that achieves the same function. I get that CAPS LOCK has limited utility if many of the computers are going to countries that do not use the Roman alphabet. But I'm glad we didn't get one for his sister, whose chief computing joy is in typing out names and words in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.
• There's also an issue I haven't figured out how to resolve involving the word processing program. The OLPC doesn't have any ability to connect to a printer, on the grounds that children in developing countries won't have access to either printers or paper. OK, I buy that. But when I try to transfer LG's precious Write files to my own computer for printing via a USB flash drive, they open as code-cluttered XML files. Why, I don't know. The Write program on the OLPC is AbiWord, and I run Open Office on my MacBook, so there shouldn't be huge compatibility issues. But there are, and LG is quite bummed that there is, thus far, no way to print the Magic Tree House chapters he has laboriously typed into his laptop.
• By far the most irritating issue, however, is the trackpad. It has a tendency to jump the cursor back to the right corner of the screen when the user is trying to move it elsewhere. Given that the OLPC has a desktop-type "frame" that jumps onto the screen whenever the cursor moves to the edges, that means that the poor kid (or his extremely irritated mama) finds himself completely unable to continue whenever the problem occurs. (Which is frequently -- not quite at every session, but pretty close to it.) I've tried several different fixes suggested by people -- recalibrating the trackpad, updating the OS -- but none of them have solved the problem. Which suggests to me that it is not going to magically get better. Alas.
• On the topic of other things that I hope will magically get better, LG had his Very First Allergic Reaction the other day at dinner. We will bring him in for testing and etcetera, but our educated guess is that the culprit was one of his favorite foods: pineapple. We had no warning -- one moment he was happily chomping away at the pineapple pizza he had made himself during our weekly make-your-own pizza ritual. The next minute he was broken out into hives.
• I know there are plenty of more worrisome allergies one could develop, and I know that hives are not half as scary as swollen lips or breathing difficulties. But given the sort of alarming family history -- my maternal grandmother died of an allergic reaction -- I spent some quality time this weekend freaking the hell out about it.
• Also, the poor kid cried when he realized he wasn't going to be able to eat pineapple again for awhile. There are a handful of other fruits that he will eat, but pineapple was by far his favorite. He has been known to eat an entire can of cut pineapple at a sitting. Sigh.
• Well. At least it wasn't one of our Three Dietary Staples: wheat, tomato sauce, and cheese. The allergic powers that be had better keep their swollen, itchy little hands off those foods. That's all I'm saying.
• How's 2008 treating y'all, anyway?

Political commentary from the dinner table

LG: "I would rather the Yankees beat the Red Sox a million to nothing than have Mitt Romney become president."

----------------------------------------

BB: "Daddy, dat George W. Bush, is he a bad president?"

MB: "George W. Bush is a terrible president."

BB: "Den let's FIRE him!"

Not kosher

The scene: Phantom is looking over LG's "December Book," which came home from school today. LG has drawn pictures with captions to illustrate Hannakah (um, that's a new spelling, and not one that the transliteration supports, methinks), Las Posadas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, St. Lucia Day, and, last but not least, Christmas.

LG: "You can see that I didn't draw Santa."

PS: "Yeah, I see that."

LG: "Well, you know, Santa isn't really kosher."

Happy new year!

I spent the last six months of 2007 more or less squandering all of my bloggy social capital, and I'm not making any resolutions to try and win it back in 2008. My resources these days are limited, and my priorities are probably going to remain elsewhere for awhile to come. Daily blogging is not on the agenda for 2008. But trying to figure out some way to make this space continue to be useful for me -- that is on the agenda.

I am very grateful for the new friends I have made in Blogland in 2007, and the older friends I've continued to connect with in this space and elsewhere. Thanks for being there for me even when I haven't much been here myself. Y'all are the best.

Happy New Year!

Meet the newest member of the family

LG's final Hanukkah present arrived an hour ago. We, uh, haven't worked out all the kinks yet, particularly when it comes to internet connectivity issues. But it sure looks cool.

Any other OLPC owners out there who want to trade tips and tricks?

Low-content Friday

Because this reminds me how profoundly grateful I am not to be working retail or other service jobs this holiday season:



I love how the waiter sketches always end with either Grover or the customer fainting dead away. Really, wouldn't life be so much more entertaining if falling to the floor was considered a proper response to certain situations?