talking to grandma bop

ellen getting ready for bed

confessions

I'm afraid i'm not very disciplined at all. In fact, I have no real self control. I've read a few of my books a bit prematurely. I still have papers to write, I have no new baby yet, but I've read through both shopgirl and digital fortress. (i suppose if i'm completely honest, i knew there was no way i'd actually wait. my self control exists only outside the house. if i decide to quit drinking soda or eating sugary things then they need to stay outside of the house. i don't buy them. if i decide to quit watching tv for a while - it goes in the garage. out of the house. so it really was rather silly of me to buy these books now, thinking i'd hold off for an entire month. i guess maybe i should put the rest in the garage? but the others aren't really novels so they're not as enticing. well, except for the anne of green gables series and the chronicles of narnia. but those are both boxed sets wrapped up in plastic wrap so you can't just read the first chapter really quick while waiting for ellen to wake up and then end up staying up all night to finish it) I'd have to say that i like both of them. for a while shopgirl was rather depressing for me, but it redeemed itself in the end. and digital fortress was definitely a page turner (dan brown seems to have that aspect down) although there were a few predictible plot twists. (like strathmore and hale's involvements) but definitely nice fun frivolous reads. good recommendations bryan and jill. (anne - i ordered the books before i read your recommendations, so i'm saving those for my next ordering frenzy) on another note, i'v been increasingly interested in learning more languages lately. it has always struck me as rather arrogant to never learn another language, but i've never really done anything about it. and then after reading through some of the comments on anne's blog (i think it was anne's) i was reminded that some people actually do something about it and set out to learn a few . spanish seems to be the most logical first choice. so i'm considering ordering a program - rosetta stone language something or other - that is supposed to be really good. it's fairly expensive (200 something dollars) but it seems that a class would be just as much and i've never really been satisfied with the results of a language class (granted i've only experienced high school spanish, but still). it's possible we could get it financed through dave's job since they would like him to be bilingual, so maybe I'll actually get started soon. :)

here are a gazillion more park pictures

ellen swung! and liked it! she had one requirement....

we all had to swing together

ellen actually went on the slide!

this baby daschound (did i spell that even close to right?) was the hit of the playground. he was so small we were worried about ellen stepping on him.

i was pleasantly suprised to see that we have daffodils. (If you have been to our house, you know that we need to do some serious yard work - but I haven't touched any of the bushes or shrubs in the yard yet - one of my excuses has been that I want to see what blooms and what there is...)

MY order from Amazon has finally arrived!!! i'm thrilled out of my mind. it is with great restraint that I'm not reading any of these until i finish my papers. (well, alright, actually i did start reading shopgirl - but that's so small...) Thanks for the gift certificates!

here's just a small amount of the plumbing parts dave is using for his latest fish tank project. the good news is he went on monday to install the new filter and so we have most of the living room back.

another beautiful day for the park. ellen was fascinated with the basketball players. she also tried her hand at climbing up the bars and things after she saw the big kids do it, but i decided that the camera was best put away during that time.

this was ellen when i came home from school this week. dave said when she woke up she kept asking for certain animals to hug and this was the result.

ellen loves her yogurt...she calls it "mess" (as in you're making a mess!)

going for a walk after dinner...

ellen practicing her tongue-sticking-out skills (hear napolean dynomite)

dave borrows ellen's dog for a quick nap in between shifts at the restaurant

ellen loved her valentine's day frog (fok!) stickers (thanks kim!)

she spent the better part of the day sticking them on herself and then onto various walls of the house. ( she pushed up her own sleeves and put these on herself, by the way)

we had an absolutely gorgeous sunset the other day

ellen really really loves her new doll. she loves to hug it and give it its bottle and feed it her food. she's just discovered that it's clothes come off. and if she tries really really hard, sometimes she can actually get them off by herself.

storytime and going "fas!"

last night when i was putting ellen to bed, i decided to tell her a story. so we talked about noah and the ark. but i said boat instead of ark. about half way through the story ellen started getting pretty excited talking about the boat, asking where did it go?(di' go?) and saying it was "fas!" (fast) and talking about how bouncy (bounsh) it must be. as i was trying to figure out why she was so thrilled and trying to get her to calm back down and trying to think of how to tell her where in the world the boat went, I realized that the only boat she knows anything about is the boat in finding nemo and that she was in fact talking about that particular boat as it raced nemo away to his new home in the dentist's fish tank. today at nap time i told her about adam and eve and how they got in trouble and had to leave the garden they lived in. again, she latched on to a particular word and got pretty excited. in this case, she had recently been "in trouble" for hitting me. as soon as she heard adam and eve got into trouble she sat up and said "no no. no hit mama. trawble." (implying adam and eve really shouldn't have hit me) it's pretty funny to me the associations she has for words that i forget about. ellen has also recently become insterested in being "fast". she tries to walk really fast and tries to get us to do the same. the funny part is that every time she walks fastthe only difference is that she swings her arms vigorously at the same time. we're not sure where she got that from - maybe one of us does it with knowing. i tried to get video of it but it just doesn't show up well. plus once she sees the camera she's really only interested in watching the video we just took.

this is a picture taken in one of my classes. i put it up only so you can see how very pregnant i am feeling.

book review(s)

I'm attempting a book review in the spirit of bryan's movie reviews. sorta. i just finished reading dan brown's angels and demons. i'm afraid i didn't really think it was very good. while the action was interesting and fast paced, it didn't pull me in and make me believe it could be true - and that i'm afraid is vital to my enjoyment of a novel. once i come out of the "this could be true world" i start reading critically, noticing all kinds of little details or things that seems off. the idea that the motive for all these crimes/action was that the church and science are enemies and will do anything to crush each other just seemed a bit much for me. his statements that the church feels mortally threatened by the advances of science and that there is really no way the two can co-exist (i'm definitely paraphrasing here) were too extreme for me to find it believable. (i think i should add a post script here - or mid script - I realize that there are certainly groups of people in the church who feel this way, and certainly scientists who feel the same. But Brown's statements felt as though he was including all of christendom...that there may have been a few enlightened priests and church goers, but the church as a whole was overwhelmingly against science as a whole....hmmm - i thought i had bookmarked that quote, but i can't seem to find it right now. i'll have to reread the book sometime)2-12-05 of course, i may have been more wary of these kinds of statements because i took a class at seminary a couple weekends ago about his other book, the da vinci code. and of course anything a seminary is going to tell you is going to be opposing brown because he writes so negatively about the church. but i was most struck by brown's tactic of including a fact page - giving the appearance that his research has some credibility. but when you research those facts, historically speaking, they're bogus. like for instance the priory of sion - he says its a fact that it exists (and was established in 1099). and that documents proving that da vinci and others were grand masters of this organization were discovered in 1970something. he says this is fact - well...sorta. the actual words, gramatically put together are true i think. (i don't know that much about english grammar structure). the priory of sion did/does exist. but it wasn't established in 1099 (since that's set off in commas does it sorta exclude it from the sentence?) in 1095 a mothers and fathers of sion was established in jerusalem to try to convert jews. but no priory, and none with a militaristic bent. but the "priory of sion" and the documents that were discovered in 197something were created by a guy named Pierre Plantard - and the part he leaves out is that they were established to be fraudulent in a french court. Apparently some (modern day) guy named Pierre Plantard created them and hid them in research libraries. he got in trouble with the law when he included himself in jesus' geneology, insinuating that he was the rightful heir to the french throne (or something like that - again i'm paraphrasing). so he got taken to court and admitted he made it all up. supposedly the majority of europe would recognize this hoax pretty quickly. A lot of what he says is totally bogus - and i'm speaking strictly from the historical perspective. I haven't been able to find any scholarly people that back up much of anything he says. One guy does agree with some of his "historical information", but interestingly enough that guys another novelist. not a historian. he's the author of holy blood, holy grail, (the book brown got a lot of his ideas from). there's tons of other examples too that fit into his fact catagory (he says everything he writes about documents and rituals and other stuff is all true...this includes most if not all of the historical aspect of the novel.) anyway, the point is, i don't think brown is naive to this. he could have just left out the fact idea and it would just be a novel. but to say these are facts, when in actuality they aren't, seems intentionally misleading and like he has an agenda against "the church". so that's what i think.

ellen loves to read go dog go

ellen in her flaming soccer ball pajamas. here's some trivia for you - this was the first thing we bought when we found out we were having ellen