School Project: The Map Of Doom

So the boys are out of school today, and Firstborn has a project due Thursday. I am determined to have this project finished, y'know, today.

The assignment is to read a book involving a journey -- they're reading The Hobbit in his class -- and then create some sort of interactive 3D map, which he can use to give a presentation. Now, I had ideas for how we might approach this. I favored using Martha Wells' excellent The Cloud Roads, in no small part because the book doesn't include a map of its own. So on the one hand, we'd have to build the map based on the text, and on the other hand there wouldn't really be any wrong way to do it. Plus, it would have been fun to build some of the locations in that book.

But Firstborn had decided to work from one of his Minecraft books, specifically the one that's... I don't know... number fifteen or sixteen in a series. So I committed myself to reading it. And it's... To be fair, I can see why he enjoyed it. But the books are intensely first-person stream of consciousness, so there's probably two pages of explanation/digression for every page of plot advancement. Plus, the author is clearly writing a serial: the individual books aren't very long, but they're part of a single, unbroken storyline. The result of these two factors is that the book I read simply didn't have enough locations (or events, for that matter) to fill in the required Seven Important Locations that we needed for the map.

Y'all, I have now read four of these books, digressions and all.

But we have now gotten enough information together to start building the map. We're building it in layers, out of cardboard, so that each location will be a little cut-out square that you can lift up to see information about why it's important and what happens there. This will involve spray paint, and white glue, and printing relevant text in blocks that will fit underneath the removable squares. It will absolutely not strain my concentration to the breaking point or leave me frustrated, drained, and questioning my worth as a parent and as a human being in general.

But just in case, send more whiskey.

It may be old-fashioned of me...

...but I miss having a president who spoke in sentences.

Music: Fuck All The Perfect People

Chip Taylor & The New Ukrainians, with a song that seems quintessentially New Orleans to my somewhat jaded tastes:

Music: Valentine's Day

A bit of Trout Fishing In America, to help you celebrate Valentine's Day:


Alternatively, if you're taking the other approach to Valentine's Day, here's some nice, crunchy Godsmack for you:

Back on Schedule-ish

I kept Secondborn home from school yesterday and took him off to see the pediatrician. (He's been grumpy and out of sorts for about a week now, and at one point told that he thought he maybe had Strep again. So, y'know, doctor visit.)

The Strep test came back negative, but the doctor put him on antibiotics anyway because his lymph nodes were swollen enough to warrant it. Apparently the stuff tastes pretty horrible even with the flavoring in it (or maybe because of the flavoring in it, who know?) but that's where we are.

A day at home with his father seems to have done him a world of good, even if it resulted in taking Yucky Medicine twice a day, so now I'm back at work and trying to get everything back on schedule. Also, I'm exhausted and out of sorts myself, so I think tonight it's going to be early bedtimes for everybody.

Hope the rest of you are doing well.

It's the little moments that make it all worthwhile

So being a parent is, you know... And, I mean, it's also kind of... Plus, you get to...

And then there are those moments when your younger child, who hasn't been feeling very well the last several days, comes to you because he's sad that his grandmother -- your mother -- is dead. And you have to comfort him, even though now you're unexpectedly sad all over again too. And he wants to go visit her grave, which is a good two days away by car, and really only slightly less by airplane.

Yeah. I don't know, maybe we can work something out for this summer.

Meanwhile, send whiskey. I'm about to deplete the supply.

A Season of Ugh and Yuck

That's either the title of my upcoming YA novel, or it's an apt description of the family this weekend: a lot of stuffy sinuses, lack of energy, and general inability to focus, but nothing pronounced enough for me to say, "Aha! We're sick!" (Plus the weather has turned dreary, gray, and cold - at least, Texas cold.)

Secondborn, meanwhile, has been watching these family-produced shows on YouTube in which the kids engage in Nerf battles with their parents, each other, and occasionally secretive masked villains who are very definitely not just their parents wearing costumes. This has been a lot more of a problem than I would have expected. For one thing, it had him weirdly out of sorts last week (admittedly, some of that may have been this weird quasi-illness thing, too). For another, well, apparently the shows have introduced him to the concept of pranks, and now he wants to start pranking his brother.

It has not gotten off to a good start. His first attempt was to leave some lotion on his brother's bed, in the hopes that his brother would lie down on it and be... I don't know, smooth-skinned or something. Unfortunately, he couldn't find anything to hold the lotion so he finally settled on an old children's book from Beautiful Wife's childhood. Fortunately, the child's about as subtle as an elephant walking on airhorns, so his older brother immediately spotted the lotion-covered book. (Perhaps more fortunately, I was able to clean the lotion off the cover of the book.)

So this prompted some extensive discussion of how pranks work differently in real life than they do when you're essentially creating a TV show and everybody knows what's going on. It also prompted some discussion of how we treat books.

I don't much hold with pranks myself. I think that in far too many cases it's just a barely-disguised form of bullying, and that it sets up situations where it's really easy for something to go unexpectedly wrong. So tonight we'll be having that conversation, too.

So that's pretty much where we're at.