Batteries

My "gym" is a free one - no down payments, no monthly fees - and it is open 24/7, including each and every holiday. Of course, the lighting and temperature are set by the management and I get no input on the environmental settings whatsoever.

Yeah, I like to do my walking outside. This morning, I took a pretty long one, just me and my mp3 player. While I was walking, I noticed that someone had tossed a AA battery by the side of the road. I really hate litter and stuff like batteries which have specific disposal requirements really irk me. I picked up the battery and continued on my way. Would you believe that I found four additional batteries during my walk this morning? Yep, five AA batteries, left to rot on the side of the road.

Finding these batteries got me to thinking about why people would just toss them out a car window instead of disposing of them responsibly - especially since it is so easy to recycle them properly. This got me to thinking about where to deposit used batteries and that led me to the local library.

Libraries aren't just places to do research or to borrow books. Most libraries these days, in addition to their wealth of books, also subscribe to a variety of newspapers and magazines. They have collections of audio and video materials - often in tape and digital formats.

Besides the stuff you can check out to bring home with you, libraries offer all kinds of concerts, movies, plays, cultural events, classes, reading groups, clubs, and services such as stocking IRS forms at tax time.

And they have a collection container for used batteries.

Two pansies and a samara

Neatnik and I joined a classmate and mom at a local garden this morning. The roses there smelled heavenly and we even saw a couple of bunnies. I didn't take as many pictures as I had envisioned that I would, but here are a couple of pansy pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Check out the bee in the lower right corner
(you might want to clicky to embiggen)

Blooming where your seed has fallen

In our own yard, we have a couple of mature maple trees. This little helicopter fell to the ground last week.

Of course, we all know that four-leaf clovers are lucky. How about three-winged mutant maple samaras?

It's a two thing

Neatnik and I have had a very busy day today. Allow me to update you in a Tuesday Evening Bullet Post fashion...

• I was downstairs, providing early morning sustenance to the Neatnik, setting out the morning medicines and vitamins, and relieving the dishwasher of its cleaned cargo. Number Guy entered the kitchen, freshly showered and all dressed for work. Or so he thought. Poor guy was wearing a pair of pants whose back seam was hanging on by a frayed thread. Thankfully, stitching a simple seam is not beyond my capabilities and I even had the right color thread.



• Something which is apparently far beyond me is the ability to count to two reliably. Yes, I know that this sounds funny and unrealistic. After all, I have succeeded in calculus, probability, discrete mathematics, and advanced number theory. Perhaps it is just that in the limit, for very large values of two, things tend to go awry.



• Oh, I suppose I should explain how I discovered this appalling lack of enumeration proficiency. I was merrily moving right along with the Pink Panda String Bag this afternoon, multi-tasking while supervising Neatnik at the playground/spray park. I was wrapping up the 18th round, the one where you pull the whole thing together in preparation for hooking the handles. There weren't enough spaces. I was two short. I counted the preceding rounds, working backwards to locate the point at which I departed from the pattern. It was half a dozen rounds back, in the round where you double the number of spaces from 64 to 128: instead of each of the spaces getting two triple crochets, two of my spaces had only one triple crochet each.



• It's a two thing.



• I am seriously considering renaming this project as The Incredibly Inane and Unending String Bag of Summer.



• But that sounds rather depressing, doesn't it?



• Getting ready to leave the park, I noticed this window sticker on the minivan parked next to us.
  
  
  Gary Gygax, were he still with us, would have been so proud


• I'm not sure which is worse: the fact that someone pasted this sticker to their back window or the fact that I got the joke.

There was a pile of other errands and things today like some School at Home, an oil change and car wash, a trip to the pharmacy and the grocery store, a post-dinner visit to the pool, and some scooter lessons for the Neatnik. All in all, a busy, yet very satisfying day.

Except for that two thing, that is.

SABTC: Update #1

I promised last week when I announced the Second Annual Box Topapalooza Contest, that on Mondays I would post our current Box Tops count, and so I shall do just that. As of this afternoon, there are now 75 Box Tops in the Box Tops collecting box in the kitchen of chez trek.

If you are participating in the contest, please leave a comment on this post with your count, so that we can egg each other on encourage each other and cheer wildly as the numbers continue to grow.

If you are not yet participating, please visit the contest post and leave a comment there. Please, please, please. Also, please tell everyone you know that you are collecting them so that they will give your theirs instead of tossing them into the trash can. I am now collecting Box Tops from a friend whose children are no longer in grammar school - I collected for her kids for about 12 years, now she is returning the favor. Pay it forward!

# # #

Yesterday afternoon, we visited a nearby town where friends of ours were rehearsing for a choir festival. The festival is a huge annual event in this town, so we ended up parking quite a few blocks from the auditorium. During the walk from the car to the rehearsal venue, we had the good fortune to see something very cool.

Antique hitching post

More hooking around

We stopped into one of the big craft stores this afternoon. I had heard that some of them are now carrying higher quality fibers, so I decided to visit the yarn aisles. The funniest thing happened: a woman asked if I was a knitter and then proceeded to ask my advice on string bags.

How apropos that I had just started this string bag minutes earlier. I won't be finishing this one, though. This one I started for someone else who was having an awful time trying to get around how fiddly this is to get off the ground.

Nice blue color, isn't it?

The pink and white one isn't finished: it is still in progress and is now living in the minivan for pool crafting hours.

I seriously have to get back to my knitting. Perhaps at knitting night tomorrow?

School at Home Report
Writing
While the plan was to do two letters a day, it isn't starting out that way. That's okay: we still have more than 26 days before school recommences.

I saw 18 bunnies on my walk tonight;
most just sat still, but some bounded.

Reading, writing, and arithemetic

School at Home Report
Mathematics
I had to buy more math workbooks this week. Our Neatnik loves her numbers. Some of her favorite math concepts are carrying/borrowing, adding up columns of numbers, money problems, and time.

Her all-time favorite math thing, though, is word problems - just like her parents.

Science
I also scored a map workbook. After our last road trip, Neatnik requested that I teach her how to read maps. This acorn fell not far from the trees.

Reading
The leftover phonics pages were finished ages ago (there weren't that many). I didn't buy new phonics workbooks because Neatnik has that stuff pretty much nailed. Instead, I decided to work on getting her to read some longer books instead of the quickie 60 page numbers with big fonts.

Our local librarian is really helpful with pointing us towards books that are of an appropriate reading level but still "safe". This is a definite pitfall to having a child reading above grade level.

The library continues to keep us pretty well supplied with books for Neatnik. Her current new title count for 2009 is 88.

To accompany the new clock in her room, we selected a reading lamp. Now we can tell her she can read in bed for a set amount of time before lights out. Similarly, if she wakes up before seven in the morning, she isn't to wake up Mommy and Daddy but can read in bed. This is working out pretty well so far: on the first night, I told her lights out was nine o'clock. I came out of the shower and her light was off. I asked her if it was nine already and she sang out, "It's 9:01, Mommy!"

Writing
Neatnik started working on cursive writing this morning. The plan is to do one letter in the morning and one letter in the afternoon or evening until the book is finished. In addition to the twenty-six letter pages, there are two fun pages at the end of the book. A nice two-week project.

Mommy "steered" for the first sentence
but the second one was all Neatnik.

In which trek stops before Blogger eats the post again

Today was filled up with a variety of miscellaneous tasks and errands which needed my attention. The random nature of my morning and afternoon segues rather naturally into a Thursday Afternoon Bullet Post.

• If you haven't yet signed up for the Second Annual Box Topapalooza, hop over to the contest post now and leave me a comment with your intentions. I'll wait.



• Glad to see you back! :o)



• At the first PTA meeting of each school year, our Box Top coordinator reminds the parents that every Box Tops tossed into the trash can is throwing away a dime.



• Something is wrong with the weather here. It is 68°F right now. This is not summer weather.



• If we are not having summer weather, why did I invest in four ribbed tank tops this morning?



• Because hope springs eternal, obviously.



• And they were on sale for six bucks apiece.



• Neatnik is wearing a pretty white/pink/green floral sun dress today - with a blue t-shirt underneath. Refer back to Bullet #1.



• It wasn't quite this cool yesterday, so we were at the pool.
  
  
  I love the bright color contrasts here:
  blue/white, red/white, green/blue


• I am currently reading a book which Number Guy loved as a lad: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I saw it on the pool's book swap shelf the other day and just had to snag it. I really like the clever plays on words.



• Have you ever seen it? Read it? If not, you might want to give it a try.



• Remember the lost dpn? Reinforcements arrived today from Simply Socks.



• Their arrival is a very good thing: I caught myself yesterday thinking that while my raspberry socks were in their equipment time-out, maybe I could retrofit a couple of pairs of Neatnik's school socks. Then I remembered that they are knit from the same yarn as my raspberry ones and that meant that I didn't have the right needles then.



• While the socks have been stewing in the project bag, I have made great progress on the string bag. I am currently on Round 13 of 18 of the bag's body.



• I have to wind some more navy sock yarn since I promised Neatnik more school socks.



• This isn't purely altruistic on my part, sad to say, since it will reduce the yarn sock laundry frequency during the school year.



• Most moms do not worry about yarn sock laundry frequency do they?

Most moms just have to worry about clean underwear and fresh shorts and tees for gym days.

It's just a burden which we knitting moms must bravely bear - much like bloggers throughout the world having to endure blogging software which eats huge chunks of their post just before they are ready to push the Publish button.