It’s sad. There are two things you need for a blog post: time and topic. But any time you have a topic, it means your life is busy and you don’t have time. Conversely, whenever you have time, it’s often because your life is boring. Granted sometimes you lack both time and topic, but that stings less.
Ah well. This past week has been a paucity of time and a plethora of topic. This leads to a blogging style of bulleted vignettes. So, without further ado….
I just wrote a birthday party invitation to Grey’s girlfriend. She apparently likes Star Wars. I approve of this as girlfriend criteria. Also, he pretends to die whenever he sees her — on the rare occasions he doesn’t run away. He seems extremely satisfied with his relationship.
I’m always surprised when I’m the biggest geek in a room. I mean, in my social life I hang out with video game developers and people who go to Gencon. We had Talk Like a Pirate Day at work today, with costume contest and scavenger hunt. I won “best Piratical attitude” and the scavenger hunt, and some people were shocked by my geekitude. You have no idea, folks. And these were programmers!
Camping boys
Camping with the boys was awesome this past time. Thane’s fixation on cars makes him much easier to manage. Granted, he attempted to drown himself about every 2 minutes while we were swimming, but that’s pretty much standard operating procedure. The boys were fun, the weather was great, we actually could relax and read, and I love Kindles. We got Grey a set of mostly wordless comic books called Owly and I got complete wish-fulfillment as he sat glued to them and reread them multiple times.
What Grey thinks of camping (from school)
I’m reading Herodotus right now. We’re reading it for our humanities book club. It’s like 600 pages long, so I kind of thought a head start would be a good idea. I’m also attempting to read project management books, a book on Kelso vs. New London Development Corporation (it’s weird to read a book about people you know in a place you know at a time you were there), and Owly. (Hey, you have to keep on top of what’s up in your kids’ life!) At least I finished the one on the strategic importance of Field Service.
Ooh! Ooh! I got to do actual code this week at work! Java on struts with Hibernate handling the data connections using ANT for builds with Subversion managing the codebase in the Eclipse IDE. My contractor was explaining all the ins and outs of the system I’ve managed the building of. It was very exciting. It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve lost all confidence that I know what to do around code.
The Red Sox have given us an awesome season, given their constraints, and would be winning the AL West. They’re still making it fun to follow the games. I’ve also decided to become a football fan this year. Um, go Pats?
I made another batch of plum jam. This was spiced plum jam, which is totally different. In many important ways.
Finally, I met a new person last Friday. He wasn’t very talkative, but he was pretty awesome. I see us having a long and fantastic friendship. Listening to singles' ads
Brenda currently lives in Stoneham MA, but grew up in Mineral WA. She is surrounded by men, with two sons, one husband and two boy cats. She plays trumpet at church, cans farmshare produce and works in software.
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4 thoughts on “Grab bag”
mm, share recipe for plum jam? costco has plums on crazy sale and that might be a nice introduction into making (and canning) jam… next step: acquire canning jars. Hardware store, right?? 🙂
The recipe is in the Certo box. Certo’s the pectin I use… it’s usually high up on the top shelf in the baking aisle, near the yeast and other ingredients not that many folks use. It has freezer jam, jam and jelly recipes. I make the jelly. Right now my grocery store has a big display of canning stuff (cans, lids & rims), but hardware stores are also good locations. Don’t underestimate the sugar — it takes the better part of a bag of sugar to match a batch of jam!
My Truant Pen 
mm, share recipe for plum jam? costco has plums on crazy sale and that might be a nice introduction into making (and canning) jam… next step: acquire canning jars. Hardware store, right?? 🙂
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The recipe is in the Certo box. Certo’s the pectin I use… it’s usually high up on the top shelf in the baking aisle, near the yeast and other ingredients not that many folks use. It has freezer jam, jam and jelly recipes. I make the jelly. Right now my grocery store has a big display of canning stuff (cans, lids & rims), but hardware stores are also good locations. Don’t underestimate the sugar — it takes the better part of a bag of sugar to match a batch of jam!
Call me if you have questions!
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I should think that either death or running away would make the birthday party difficult!
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Excellent post given the inverse relationship of time and topic. Life is filled with ephemera.
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