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For a short week, this day is lasting forever. But I’m getting a ton done.

By short week, I mean I’m not sure where even the last two weeks went. It’s been a blur of work work work. We got our phone fixed, spent some time talking to customer service to get our internet fixed (mostly), and then just tried to play catch-up with whatever else before I fell into bed every night.

Turns out the satellite dish for our internet was tipped and possibly had water in it, which was bad, so the guy moved it and put a new… thing… on it. I’m trying it out for a bit to let him know and he’s testing that part he replaced to see if he really has to charge me for a new one. But the interesting thing he said was with the weather issues we should have called him right away (the installer) and not customer support. They only had ONE record of me calling last August. He got here around 9:30 and left about 12.

Anyway. He was literally just finishing up when I had to call in for a conference call. That went on for an hour and 45 minutes, then I finally had my lunch.

Somewhere in there Emma lost another tooth. It was hanging on bravely and the big tooth was coming in behind it, not directly above. The tooth fairy again forgot to place money under her pillow, but it showed up the next afternoon.

The US holiday slowed my stuff down enough I could catch up a bit work-wise. Intense focusing on one project makes it really hard for me to even remember much of anything else. (and then I have to switch gears and focus on a different project, but that’s work stuff)

And I just drew a blank on what I did yesterday. Work, I bet. And laundry. Oh, and Rosella brought me over a few stems off her peony bush.

I got up early this morning. A woodpecker was on the tree next to my open bedroom window, and we’re waiting for windows to be delivered, so we didn’t know if they’d show up at 8am. Sometimes on my morning walk, I see a couple families of ducks. This morning I saw some Canada geese and their babies, with the mist coming off the water.

Of course I didn’t have my camera.

I did get out to take pictures of the neighbour’s flowers, and this afternoon all the girls and I went down the road and picked a flat of strawberries. That’s twelve of those little wooden baskets they come in. They were charging $1.70 each, but she said I didn’t overfill so she gave me $2 change from my $20. Emma talked the whole entire time, and yes Mom she wore her sunhat. In among the rows of berries were blooming wildflowers, johnnyjump-ups and some other familiar ones I can’t name. the owner said it wasn’t on purpose, but I appreciated it anyway, sitting in the straw. We were there and back within an hour.

I also finished potting my tomatoes I had growing in the unused upstairs bathroom. When I told Rosella I did this, she asked me if we were into hydroponics and maybe we were secretly growing pot.

Ron is working on the front porch and the side porch today, and we just discovered it’s leaking again under the sink.

oh, and my flickr stuff is missing from my sidebar, no idea why. click here for the pretty pictures.

(Edit: I had connection issues posting this, so if half of it shows up in your feed reader… oops. You love me though, right?)

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Amy  Bowllan from School Library Journal ask me to contribute to a conversation about using technology as a learning tool in the homeschool, and did I ever fill her inbox. You can read part one here. Long time readers will recognize a lot of it, unschoolers will be nodding their heads. Hopefully a couple of my kids might even chime in.  Although The Boy is now done college and is busy moving for his work co-op as an ASP programmer for the Dept of Secondary Education (talk about proof of concept…), so he might be too busy.

Added bonus: see Sarah using the computer at age 2, and in diapers (cloth, naturally way back in the dark ages when you had to pin and fold them). And yes I did ask her permission before posting that. Sarah has recently done some work for a local small business, designing posters and brochures, all on computer.

Boy, the first time in a long time where I write pages about some homeschooling topic, and it’s for someone else’s site.

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For those outside Canada, here’s a scan Mom & Carl did for you. Enjoy!

See huge original (and readable) size here. I would have posted this earlier, but my connection crapped out on me and I had a meeting. (To which I was a minute late, but one guy said it was okay, cuz I’m a celebrity.)

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This is Bobby. Bobby came to live with us last weekend.

Bobby is a result of taking Emma (and the others) out for a wee bit of shopping, where we did not aim for the Dollar Store for a treat, but bumped it up a notch. This is what happens sometimes.

Now Bobby has made friends with Mr Bones and the Visible Woman. Sometimes I find Bobby and his parts in odd places, but mostly I’m just glad the CSI team has not stopped by.

Emma tells me that Visible woman and Mr Bones are an item, and in fact the parents of Bobby, but Bobby himself looks at us haughtily out of his one good eye, and Visible Woman already has a plastic fetus to take care of.

Yeah, I know. We ARE weird.

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I almost forgot to mention. I haven’t had a chance to actually look inside February’s issue of Reader’s Digest Canada, but there’s an article in there on raising A+ students. I was interviewed for it shortly after my surgery last year. I read it before it went to print, but sometimes things change. I won’t have a chance to see it before Thursday, and it doesn’t appear online, so if you see the issue while oot and aboot, flip to the article and see if we’re there.

They made us sound pretty awesome, I think.

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Before I get too far into the story below, I should tell you that my father’s side of the family is British. As in, they emmigrated from England to Canada in 1956 and they all have accents (mostly). And ones I can’t really hear most of the time. I can slip into one at will, too. I’ve found when my half-deaf grandfather can’t make out what I’m saying, I just rephrase it to be more British, with an accent and then suddenly he understands me.

My longish point there is we still have family “over there”, and every Christmas we all exchange cards and our cousins send over a monstously huge 1 kilo bar of English Cadbury’s milk chocolate. It is slightly different than the Canadian Cadbury’s chocolate, is why.

So last Thursday, there I was, out and about doing my shopping. (See? The British phraseology is slipping in there. Between this and the over-indulgence of Jane Austen over the holidays, we should just pack our bags and head back to the Queen.) The children were naturally with me, and we split up when we went to the mall.

Sarah came running up to me as I was once again perusing the scrapbook aisle of the Great Canadian Dollar Store.

“Mom! In Shopper’s they have a big Cadbury bar! And it’s on SALE! And it’s the LAST ONE!”

At this point we had no word about the annual chocolate from England, only that it was somewhere between here and there. Ron had said if ever we saw one of those bars here, we should grab it. We *had* seen it before, but it was elusive. Always when we didn’t have the extra cash, or it was heavily pre-holiday priced.  I hemmed and hawed a bit, waffled some more, and in the end got it. The clerk even thanked me profusely for “getting rid of it”.

On the way home, we stopped at the post office to pick up the mail. Sarah came back to the car grinning, carrying an armload of packages. She tossed one to me. “Guess what Mom? It’s from England!” It was suspiciously chocolate-bar sized. Now, normally the cousins send the whole thing to my aunt, and she divvies it up and sends along our portion. But I suddenly thought, what if it had been done on their end?

I laughed and laughed.

When we got back to the house, I opened up the parcel, and instead of chocolate, there was a book. I gotta tell you, I actually love new books *more* than chocolate. It’s true. Even better, it was a book our cousin had co-authored, AND it was on a portion of British history. Enclosed was a note stating he hoped we liked it.

I think I may have swooned.

The Battle of St Albans tells the story of two epic battles during the War of the Roses. These took place in the city of St Albans, which not only stands today, but that’s where some of my family now lives. The authors help clear up some of the confusion and legend surrounding the War of the Roses, explaining the political landscape of the time. They bring the battlefields to life, thorough series of diagrams, modern-day photographs of actual places and generous descriptions of the time and places. There’s even pictures of reenactments of soldier’s uniforms and fighting techniques, even snippets of text from documents from that time frame, in the  participant’s own words.

As Emma and I flipped through the book, we seriously got lost in the 15th century. We were immersed. And I longed for England once again. Mike did a bang-up job, and I’m sure our family could not have been more proud.
Back to the book - it’s jam-packed at 182 pages, 5.5″ x 8″ bound format and loads of b&w photos. By the time I got to the back cover, I was absolutely delighted to find it was part of a series of books based on all sorts of battles in Britain - all the way up through the Second World War. I immediately though of all our homeschooling and/or history buff friends who would *love* to get their hands on such books.

You can buy the book on Amazon.com  and visit the publiser’s site, Pen and Sword books for more historic battles. I’ll be over here, curled up with the book, noshing on chocolate.

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