Adventures

Manipulation

This is a somewhat long article on a blog written by a bunch of linguists (the blog can get a little dry, if you know what i mean). Anyway, i thought it was interesting, because it describes ways in which news reports are manipulated by the news outlets themselves to give certain impressions.

Language Log: Audio photoshopping at NPR

Hide and Seek

After Sofia took her shower tonight she still had about 15 minutes of playtime before bed. She and i played hide & seek, and had she not coughed, i might not have found her:

For those of you in my Flickr friends & family lists, here's the link to the whole series.

Quiet

I guess being on vacation means i don't feel like blogging either. Here's a rundown of the last few days:

On Saturday, Andy, Sofia, and i drove up to Gainesville to visit Andy's second cousin, Alan, and his wife Patricia. Alan is a retired chemical engineer who used to work for Coca-Cola, and the couple now live in a beautiful house on Lake Lanier. Andy's parents, Levon & Mary, were there, as were Levon's brother Jeff and his family (wife Ann and daughter Nicole). Alan is the nephew of Grandmother Martin, Andy's feisty grandmother (and Levon's mother).
We had a great time taking short trips on Alan's speedboat, which Sofia LOVED, and we had a fantastic dinner, prepared by Ann & Jeff) on the pontoon boat. Sofia got to steer the pontoon boat on the way out before dinner, and she took it very seriously.

That night, Sofia slept in her grandparents' room, and she woke us up on Sunday by playing with Lego and Matchbox cars on the wood floor right outside our door. Unfortunately, most of Sunday was spent indoors due to the smoke that had drifted up from the wildfires that have been burning in south Georgia for a month. Just going outside for 5 minutes made my throat start to hurt. We left on Sunday afternoon, and Sofia was disappointed not to be able to go out on the lake again.

On Monday (Memorial Day), the three of us did some more house cleaning. I re-organized the cupboards in the laundry room while Andy tackled his library. That's his highbrow name for his home office, and it resembled neither an office nor a library before he got started. Sofia worked on putting her books away (she has a lot of books).

After a stop at the park that evening, we had dinner at a restaurant named Feast. It opened last summer, but Andy & i never got a chance to go before i left. The food was really good, and the service was great, too. Andy & Sofia split an order of beef chunks in orange barbecue sauce, while i had pan seared tuna. The tuna was exactly the way i like it, and the portions were good.

We had considered going to Jake's, our old standby ice cream place, for dessert, but our waitress at Feast deftly pointed us to their dessert case. Who wants plain old ice cream when you can have tiramisu, creme brulee, or bread pudding in white chocolate sauce? No one, that's who. We rolled out of there quite a bit plumper than when we rolled in.

Today involved another trip to the park (just Sofia & me while Andy worked) and a trip to downtown Atlanta to pick up Andy's FlexCar membership materials. He is returning the rental car that he has been using since the end of April and using this car share service instead. They will normally mail the membership stuff to you, but Andy wanted it sooner rather than later. We will take the rental back tomorrow, and i will pick up my own rental car to use for the rest of the time i'm here (only a week left).

So, you see, things have been really too exciting around here to allow for any quality blogging time :)

Photo credit: terraprints

Wonder Twin Powers: Activate!

Our matching engagement rings arrived yesterday, a whole week before the estimated ETA from the manufacturer. They are titanium with a carved heart design (but not too girly).

In case anyone's interested, we got them from Titanium Era. In case anyone doesn't get the Wonder Twins reference: Wikipedia entry.

Spring cleaning

Yesterday was a little rough around Andy's house. We set Sofia the task of beginning to clean up her bedroom. I say beginning, because, well, there actually wasn't any floor space in there (we're talking about at least 2 layers of stuff here). It would have been impossible to clean everything up in just one afternoon, but that's what her 7-year old brain translated the request into, causing her more stress than was necessary.

She got pretty upset at one point when chastised (by Andy, not me) for not respecting some of her possessions - things that she claims she cares about yet has a lot of trouble actually caring for. Make no mistake, though, she wasn't angry, she was sad that she had disappointed her father. One of the things i love about Sofia is that she doesn't hold a grudge. After this little episode, she was happy enough to keep working, albeit a little more tired.

At the end of the day, she asked me to show her how to do something on her computer, saying, "I just want to do something fun. Today has been a hard day for me."