Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Yesterday was a full moon. And it showed.

Yes, there was a full moon yesterday. And it showed from the very moment I got up.

Started off waking up at the usual time. Was kind of thinking of just letting myself stay in bed until 6. I didn't. But I wanted to (and I never want to). Got myself up but was horribly distractible. Like really, really distractible. Couldn't get anything resembling work done. Finally got myself dressed (that alone is unusual--I'm usually dressed and ready by 6am and today it was 7am and I'm going, "Hm, I'm driving my daughter to the transit station; I should really get dressed").

My husband seemed more tired than usual, although we both had decent sleeps.

My daughter got up and was visibly tired.

She and I left for the transit station. The radio reported all of the accidents. One accident is pretty common for that hour; there were 3 reported yesterday morning and one of them was a 5-vehicle collision. Oh-kaaay...

I dropped her off, came back home, mentally telling myself I'll get work done on my French lessons website. Nope. Took care of other stuff today, but was just mentally all over the place.

My son woke up. Visibly more tired than usual like the rest of us. Didn't feel physically as well as the previous day; his cold had seemed like it was going away. He informed me one of the cats had vomited on his guitar case. I got to clean it up. He ate, then we got to work. Or tried. We sat down and had barely begun when the phone rang. My mom. I answered. We got back to what we were doing. Then we headed to the TV upstairs (a Smart TV) to watch the BBC version of The Merchant of Venice on YouTube. "This video can not be played on this device," or some message like that. We tried the PlayStation. Same thing. Fine. He decided he'd watch it on a laptop later on. We decided to head back downstairs to do some math and science. But the phone rang before I even got to the stairs. The repair guy was on his way. Okay, good.

Of course, because the repairman was on his way, we had barely pulled things out for school work when he arrived. The dog barked FURIOUSLY after the doorbell rang, but then was so ridiculously excited to see the repairman (he'd been here twice before) and seemed to think he was going to play with her, she was running for toys and just bouncing all over the place. OMG.

The repair guy started doing his thing at the stove and I went back to math with my son at the table. My son, whose brain seemed completely incapable of processing math stuff yesterday. "What?!" Not sure how many times I heard that. We quit math early.

Then the repair guy informed me that the part ordered for the stove wasn't the right thing. That it might be a more recent version of the part, it doesn't fit.  Given how the day was going, it really didn't surprise me. lol. The dog, of course, was very excited to have him move back through to the front door and seemed to think she was going to get to go somewhere, too. Oh man...

He left and my son and I got working on science. That actually went smoothly. 

It was 1-1:30 pm by this point. My son hadn't eaten lunch. He was going to watch 30 minutes of The Merchant of Venice on the laptop while eating lunch, and while he was finding it, I was checking to see if the library had a copy. Yes, they did--at the library I was at on the previous day. Told him he could hold off; we'd watch it together.

I decided that I was DONE. Yes, 1:30 pm and I was DONE. I let my son off the hook for everything else (although he did choose to do silent reading). I just wanted to do something fun, distracting, although I thought I could maybe try to work on my French lessons website since I'd gotten nothing done that morning, so I went upstairs to put on Back to the Future and work on my laptop while watching. But, I wanted popcorn. So, I started to heat up the machine (it's a small professional machine next to the TV), but the dog started hacking and acting like she was going to throw something up, which she did, and I wanted my son to get her out the door except that there were workers out in our yard looking at our window well. So, we left her inside and I cleaned up the hack she did on the way to the door.

I got the popcorn into the machine. While things were starting to pop, the doorbell rang. Gah, really?! My son doesn't know how the machine works. I went to the door as I told him to turn it off when it was done popping. It was the window well guys, saying it doesn't really need to be redone, that it's almost at the siding and some such and if I was fine with it, just to initial. Meanwhile, the popcorn upstairs was done and I could hear my son's voice going, "How do I turn it off??" Yes, some of the popcorn got burnt. And the other cat escaped while talking to the window well guys.

I finally managed to get upstairs and settle in front of Back to the Future. I didn't get to do the marathon on the 21st, so that was my motivation for putting it on yesterday. I kind of watched and sort of worked--and then fell asleep with the laptop open on my legs. I woke up about 5 minutes before my daughter texted me, asking me to head toward the transit station to meet her. Getting there, it seemed like it could be iffy in terms of getting home and her leaving for work and getting there on time, so I just drove her directly to work.

On the way back home, the longest line up of cars I've ever seen at the 4-way stop near my house. I couldn't believe it. Went back nearly 2 blocks. That, fortunately, seemed to be the end of the weirdness for the day. Phew. lol

How was your Full Moon Day? Anything weird? :D

Friday, October 9, 2015

Friday Recap--Illness and More Illness

Both my son and I came down with viruses in September. Mine seemed to go away and now I have something new. He just seems to be going and going and going, like the Energizer bunny, with the same thing that just doesn't want to leave him. To the point I'm not sure if this makes 3 weeks straight he's been sick or 4.

What to do? When it's just a couple of days, you take some time off school and recover. But this 3-4 weeks business... In a year where there are things we have to cover, so each day off is a day behind...

Physical education was one of the courses I kind of let go. He's still coughing up a storm, and I'm now coughing up a storm with a sore throat, but I said, "Screw it! The weather's good, let's do something." So, we went on a 30+-minute bike ride today. I'm out of shape; he told me it was kind of slow, but I really couldn't give it more without feeling like I was overdoing it.

We've got a bit of math done this week. He's on a trigonometry unit. I keep thinking he's way behind, but the lessons are set up differently from the usual textbook, so I think he's close to being on track to finish by the end of May. This math is not something he'd be studying if he didn't need it for the diploma. I think it's good for him, make him think, but surely there have to be other ways to get him to think that way...

Made sure he got a writing session in. He asked if it had to be by hand; I said that sometimes I'd require something by hand, but not this week. So, he set up a cloud account and started typing his story idea (from way back, mentioned in my post about "Who are you and what have you done with my son?") on his iPad, saving it in the cloud so he could access it from the Mac. These modern kids, I tell ya! He's been getting some more silent reading in. Pretty good at getting his music theory stuff done, too. And, afaik, he's still been drawing almost every day.

So, not a bad week. Not great. Not what I had envisioned. But I hadn't envisioned us still being sick. And then my daughter was home sick on Wednesday; he wasn't looking great, so I gave him the day off. We spent most of Tuesday Christmas shopping (uh, yeah, we are celebrating Christmas this Sunday with my in-laws because my mil and fil will be soon heading down to Arizona for the winter). I don't know what happened yesterday, I was just so burnt out after my morning French class and my throat and cough getting worse. I know we read. And did math. (Oh yeah! My brain was in such top functioning mode (please read that sarcastically) that I wrote down "408" for "48". You know, 40-8. Oh man... lol)

My brain is feeling rather fried, to be honest. I'm not sure this post is making any sense, but we were both writing together and I got stuck with the story I was writing and blog posting is still writing, so here I am. hahahaha

I'm fine. Truly. Nothing that a good nap can't fix. Hopefully.

Friday, October 2, 2015

More Cool Science: Ants--Nature's Secret Power

My husband somehow ended up learning about an "ant city" and then found the whole documentary from which the original clip he saw came.

By last night, he was watching it his 3rd or 4th time. :)

It truly is fascinating and could make for a good science class. The mass collective intelligence of ants is astounding.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ants-natures-secret-power/

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Science Coolness: You Won't Believe Your Eyes

My 15-year old son might be a near iPad addict, but he also does find some really cool stuff.

He is subscribed to a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day and this new video from the channel showed up in his YouTube feed. He just had to show it to me--watch it and you'll see why! It's crazy!