Movies, Mommying, Miscellany

We watched Galaxy Quest last night. That’s always fun. It’s one of the movies I want to own on DVD, but we sor­ta need to get a DVD player.

Katie is doing her math, then she’s going to fin­ish read­ing A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream—she just picked it up out of curios­i­ty, and she’s lov­ing it. I fig­ure that since she’s def­i­nite­ly get­ting the jokes and can describe the plot and char­ac­ters, she must not be hav­ing any trou­ble at all with the lan­guage. sam­bear rent­ed a video of the movie ver­sion yes­ter­day and we’ll all watch it tonight.

We’re try­ing to find a not-oner­ous way to keep up with all the stuff Katie does online, like the NY Times Dai­ly Les­son Plan, that is edu­ca­tion­al but isn’t a book/worksheet/paper/etc. She’s try­ing to just keep a log with dates and URLs and notes, but I think there’s got to be some bet­ter way to do it.

I have to admit that I’m enjoy­ing hav­ing time with just Katie and Sam. While G & R are 10 and 13 years old, they require a lev­el of super­vi­sion clos­er to what I expect of 5/6‑year-olds, and they gen­er­ate a LOT of stress and con­flict when they’re here.

The dog woke me way before my med­ica­tion wore off this morn­ing, so I have the migraine thing hap­pen­ing again. Ugh.

I’m read­ing all the week­end recaps in my friends’ LJs and real­iz­ing that I have an awful­ly bor­ing life. It was­n’t always like this, real­ly. Maybe it’ll be more inter­est­ing again if I can man­age to shake this dan­ged depression.

You know, I’ve got­ten SO spoiled with the whole peer-to-peer net­work­ing thing. Most of the time when I see a ref­er­ence to an unfa­mil­iar song in the news or hear it in con­ver­sa­tion, I go down­load the song and lis­ten to it. Some­times I’ll see a ref­er­ence to some­thing unfa­mil­iar in the “now play­ing” part of one of your entries, down­load it, and then look for more by the same artist if I real­ly like it. (Yes, we do buy CDs for the good stuff.) But I don’t think Katie will ever under­stand that Bil­ly Joel lyric about “there’s a new band in town/but you can’t get the sound/from a sto­ry in a mag­a­zine” since she down­loads songs by any­body she reads about, too.

We were giv­en a 486 by some­one a cou­ple of weeks ago. It’s sit­ting down­stairs and does­n’t want to talk to its hard dri­ve. I thought we’d just pass it on to Good­will (Free­bytes does­n’t want any­thing that isn’t at least a Pen­tium), but now we’re think­ing of putting a new hard dri­ve and con­troller in it, installing Lin­ux, and turn­ing it into a ded­i­cat­ed MP3 box.