Berry Busy Day

BERRY GOOD: Our streak of several sunny 80-degree plus days has pushed berries to the point of ripening.

I love that we can grab a bowl, wander down to the alley and pick a strawberry (or maybe even two!) and lots of blackberries, all organic and definitely locally grown.

I'm also glad that the kids consider a bowl of blackberries and strawberries as tasty a dessert as ice cream.

PIRATES AT THE PORT: This morning, while still horizontal and before I had even one eye open, I was being peppered with questions by Mr. CeeJ.

"What's 'a pirate'?" he asked.

I moan something along the lines of "you know what a pirate is." Peg leg, eye patch, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum - and all that pirate-y crap.

"No, a pirate - like a game you copy and do something to," he clarified. "Oh, software piracy," I say, now semi-awake. So CJ and I had a conversation about stealing other programmers' work and infringing on copyrights before 7 this morning.

We came downstairs and as he's awaiting a Pop Tart for breakfast (yes, I know, I know, they're bad, but they're oh-so-good) CJ asked me about "porting."

I was immediately back on the high seas, thinking about pirate ships porting at a dock in a place they were going to pillage. CJ said, "No, porting. With computers."

Silly me. I should have known it would be about computers. At first I thought it was connecting one computer to another via a cord plugged into the computers' ports. Seems reasonable, right? But I wanted to make sure I had a correct definition for CJ, so I hopped online. Good thing I did. Thanks to the All-Knowing Wikipedia, I learned that porting "is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed. ... The term is also used in a general way to refer to the changing of software/hardware to make them usable in different environments."

Ah, no wonder CJ wanted to talk about 'porting.' He spends some time online every day studying videos of how people have "ported" games, adapting them to work on different gaming systems.

Fascinating stuff.

MORNING MALLETS: When she rolled out of the rack around 7:30, Annabelle staggered straight to the couch and upon sitting down she immediately began hammering out some songs using her glockenspeil mallets and a "Xylo-fun" book.

The neat-o book has a built in xylophone and "sheet" music - its notes are on a staff, but they're also color coded, corresponding to the correct note on the xylophone. We got it at Goodwill for $2.99 awhile back. Damn good deal.

Bee plunked out "Happy Birthday," "Old MacDonald" and several more songs throughout the day.

I'll be glad when their Musikgarten classes start back up come September.

SCRIBES: I wanted to make sure the kids did some writing today. It had been way too long. ... We turned to a sure-fire winner - Scholastic's story starter "machine."

CJ spun the wheels and was tasked with writing a newspaper story about going camping with a lion who liked to play in water.

Interestingly, when Annabelle spun the wheels, she, too, was supposed to write to about a water loving lion. She chose to accompany her writing with a picture - I'm told it's a heart/Valentine with comic effects.

DYEING TO CRAFT: As I mowed our cliffside - er, yard - today, I contemplated a craft project I could do with the kids this afternoon.

My mind drifted to coffee filters (naturally), and I began to think about things we could do with that. Making flowers seemed like an easy, obvious choice.

So, when I came in, I got out the coffee filters, some bottlecaps, some rubber bands and some bowls filled with water. I let the kids choose two colors each they wanted to use as dye (we used my hardcore cake and cookie food coloring).

We put two coffee filters together, one atop the other. Then we put a bottlecap in the middle, and cinched that with a rubber band. At that point, our "flowers" looked a bit like ghosts.

We did two dyeing sessions - first the flowers' centers. After those dried, the kids dipped them again.Here's what they looked like after the second color bath. The colors kind of flowed together, but that was an expected and good thing.

Tomorrow, we'll fluff 'em a little bit and add stems. Annabelle was very pleased with the project so far.

GO-TA YOGA: After 5 days of 3-hour long yoga classes last week, the kids both thought today's 45-minute yoga class seemed very short!

Their teacher will be going away on a month-long trip to New York, so the kids will have a sub for the next few weeks. That should be interesting. ...

BIRTHDAY WISHES: Today we (virtually) signed a birthday card for President Barack Obama. In doing so, we were also reminded that Obama's b-day is on Aug. 4, the same day as Grampa R.