I thought this was cool, but I didn't get to finish my profile. Yeah, like I have time to do that.

Hey, here's a shout out to the man I live with, what a dream. I came home today, after our friend Julie took photos of Adah and Ranen, with a head ache (5 hours of sleep will do that to you) and a yard project on my plate that was time sensitive (I had rented tools to return). Christopher offered to take on my project while I took a nap (and watch Adah when she woke up). I got 1.5 hours of sleep!! Ahhh...

*

I'm currently reading the new Douglas Coupland novel, JPod.

*

Nothing. Else. To. Post.

In preschool this week, Adah has been working on a section about families. They talked about who was in your family, what your house was like, what you did with your family members, and so on. Adah brought home a packet called "My Family." As I was reading through it, one of the fill-in-the-blank statements on the first page was, "My family likes to ________." She answered, "...stay inside and watch scary movies." Ha! I laughed out loud. I am truly glad she has a teacher who has ten years experience with preschoolers. I can only imagine what kind of fun info these kids share.

For the record: I love to be outside and I never watch scary movies. Adah thought the Muppet movie was a scary movie and told us that she never wanted to watch another muppet movie again.

Here's another page from her My Family book (a transcript from Adah, no less).

***

Ranen is still doing the upward climb of mobility, both physically and metaphorically. Uhh..yeah. When I put him down to play, he has started grabbing my leg and fussing until I sit down and play with him. Time has evaporated (he'll be 7 months in 4 days), so I'm spending the time on the floor. Laundry and dirt on the floor piling up.

***

I'm getting a lot of grey hair. Coarse and crazy. I'm debating over how to handle it...I thought about going with a Rogue look and half-heartedly embracing the white.

In case you want a really nice, not too heavy, chocolate treat, I highly recommend indulging in Ghirardelli's chocolate muffin mix. It was a BOGOF at Publix, so I decided to try it. (I don't usually buy boxed mixes, I like to bake it from scratch.) Now, I didn't expect much since muffins and chocolate, in my mind, do not go together. I have a rule: no chocolate before lunch. Muffins are for breakfast, if not, they are called cupcakes. Well, we had muffins for afternoon snack and, dang, they were good. So, take my word for it (as a chocolate snob), they are yummy!

If you're looking for a fresh shot of espresso, all I have tonight is a cup of day old drip coffe; reheated in the microwave. It's funny how motherhood can do that to you. I remember (in the days of old) tackling sewing projects, paper projects, cleaning projects, writing projects, etc. in the late hours of the evening after Adah went to bed. Not anymore; I just don't have the energy. I don't really have the energy to be blogging right now, but since Ranen (6.5 months old now) is a freak of nature who can't seem to sit still, I'm forced to add to posterity the crazy things he is doing of late:

• He seems to be fully proficient in all things crawling. Speed and articulation have improved quickly. Too quickly. We got the gates down from the attic yesterday and now all of us will be perfecting our high jump for the next six months or so. (Well, Adah will be improving her climbing skills.)
• He is now experimenting with the possiblity of climbing. He put two hands down on Adah's step stool, then lifted his legs onto the stool while reaching for the higher summit (the bath tub). For this reason, the crib mattress was also lowered.
• His bottom two teeth have finally begun their ascent into his mouth.
• He's still not all that excited about eating, so pray about that one. He blows all these calories with his acrobatics, I was hoping for a little more enthusiaism in the solid food arena.

Christopher and I are watching Avatar thanks to a loan from our friend Blake. It's an American made anime. Huh? Yeah. I know. It makes me laugh, though.

I'm also in the process of re-doing the flower bed (though "flower bed" doesn't do the size justice) along the rear of the house. This will be the third time I've dug up weeds and tilled soil this summer: no more!! This is my last time. I might post a graph paper scan of the landscaping plan soon, if any of you gardeners want to give me your $.02. Please do.

We stumbled onto a new Chinese restuarant on Saturday: Tan's Asian Cafe. It was so tasty that we took Rob and Anna to eat there today after church. Now, the restuarant is your typical Chinese hole-in-wall (albeit a rather nice wall). There are maybe five tables, and the menu is stock take-out menu that you see everywhere (although, they also have Sushi). The food is excellent and everything was very fresh. I'd like to write a real review of the place, but my primary intent is to share with you The Best Fortune Ever.

Why don't we have stuff like this domestically? Thanks for the link Vance!

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.' My remark was strictly pious and proper; confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comment the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.