Sep 12, 2011

Yesterday I was watering plants and Opal was hanging out. I asked what she was doing. "Just eating oregano" she said, accurately.

Tonight, I asked her to go pick me some oregano. After a surprisingly long time, she returned, with spearmint in one hand and chocolate mint in the other. "You didn't say which kind!" she explained. "But these are mint! I sent you for oregano!" She ...

July 31, 2011

Opal and I had a quiet day yesterday, at her request, but it was really a bit too quiet and she was pretty hyper last night and bad-tempered this morning. So today we took a picnic to the park, and spent nearly four hours. She is now well worn out, and I am sorely missing ibuprofen (to which I turn out to be nastily allergic). We had contemplated adventure, but instead went to a ...

July 30, 2011

The treehouse is rather variable. It turns out it has a swimming pool, with tropical fish in it, in the basement. You get down to it by sliding in a tube, and there is an elevator to take you up. The swimming pool is square, and 3.5 times the largest dimension of our house (the largest dimension of our house is smaller than an olympic-sized swimming pool, but the 3.5 multiplier ...

July 27, 2011

When Opal has trouble falling asleep, particularly when she's feeling nervous, we talk about her treehouse. It's her imaginary safe place; it changes a lot but the decorating themes are constant (rainbows and purple) and she lives in it with a lot of pets of various kinds. There is a secret door (at one point she went shopping. To the hardware store to buy supplies for her secret ...

July 9, 2011

Opal and I have been collecting check marks and stars recently. (She has noticed that there is an unfair part of our system; she gets to pick a prize when she gets 100 stars, but I have no defined prizes). We collect these in Chore Pad HD (which is the best star tracking app I found, but has some issues -- in particular, it hates me and frequently crashes when I try to look at my ...

The other day, I was listening to Radiolab, in particular to You Are Here and had one of those moments of sudden epiphany. The world changed a bit.

You see, I always thought that those moments, the moments when you are are in some familiar environment, you stop paying attention for some ...

May 4, 2011

Opal's at camp, but I have a recipe from her. I'm not responsible for any results, particularly because she doesn't specify what it might do, but here is her recipe for "Fairy Magic":

ingredints:

• pencil shavings
• grass and sompthing to hold it with
• a few flowers and a grader
• cilender and a pot of water

grade the ...

Look, I know there's no point in fighting language change, particularly if you're arguing for specialist uses of terms that have escaped into the wild.

But sometimes, you just have to do it anyway.

Not every bad thing that can happen is "phishing". If you gave away your password and account name to evil people thinking they were legitimate people, congratulations! You were phished. Be less ...

Mar 23, 2011

It rained the other day, and Opal's class had free time inside, so they raided the scrap paper box. Opal found a piece of lined notebook paper with the top cut off, and decided to write a report. First, she felt that the two holes left in the paper were unsatisfactorily asymmetric, so she drew two more to even things out, and colored them in. Then she wrote the following report. ...

Mar 19, 2011

It's spring, and the lambs are out on the hillside with the rest of the flock. Isn't that cute? Wait, let me show you the wider view of their rural surroundings.

...