Mundania 12

Always A Clean Inbox... Our email program has gone from crashing every six months or so, to crashing about three times a day. I have the installation CD, so can stay online, but have no backlog of emails to worry about. Also no address book, so I don't have to be bothered with keeping in touch with anyone, with is a wonderfully liberating thing for anyone who LIKES to be lonely. Perhaps a bit belatedly, it occurred to us to save the addresses that come in in a WordPerfect file (WP because I'm saving them -- I'm one of the last ten people in the world to use WP instead of Word). So I have most of the important addresses: "important" defined as, "anyone who wrote me in the last week."

Who Needs A Computer, Anyway?... Either me or Stuart; I'm not sure who suffered more. This past week, in addition to the email frolics, our entire computer froze up. Well, not really froze up. It just wouldn't respond. In fact, it was a whole lot like Stuart when he's playing Age of Mythology (yes, he plays it by himself now) and I'm trying to talk to him. For two whole days we couldn't use the computer. Instead, we played outside, we played card games, I wrote out a story I'm telling the kids in parts at night, and Stuart and I lived with the constant reminder that the heartbeat of our living room was silent. This morning, I sat down to look at the problem again. Within five minutes I realized: the left mouse button wasn't working. A good, firm whack got it back into commission, and now the computer gives us that blue glow of comfort again. I think the moral of the story is that we learned to live without electronic entertainment, but that's a dumb story.

"Look at our van! It's got a REALLY BAD DENT!"... Which it does NOT. It's the corner of the front fender, looking remarkably as if it got crunched against a raised concrete sidewalk during an ill-advised attempt to back into a parking space. Since this is the first injury of this kind that we've inflicted on our vehicles, though, A&S are entirely overimpressed with the damage.

In Case You Hadn't Noticed... It was a pretty fun week this week.

Princesses, Mermaids, and Unicorns: The Heart of Classical Music... Inspired, I admit, by a Baby Einstein video, I pulled out the remnants of my classical music collection to introduce A&S to it. Me teaching music appreciation is pretty funny stuff: I know hardly anything, really, about music. The only reason I ever listened to classical music was because I went through the "All Music Except Sacred or Classical Is Evil" phase. Although I became familiar with many pieces, I never really understood them. All I can do is make up stories. But, as it happens, that's just what six-year-olds and four-year-olds like to do.

We listened to "Carnival of the Animals: Aquarium" and enacted an exciting underwater scene involving mermaids, mer-warriors, and sharks. (At first it was just mermaids, but then Stuart came into the room.) Several selections of the music from "Carmen" hit high on the popularity charts with a story about a princess escaping from rebels into a hidden forest camp. (Yes, that one.) With the "William Tell Overture," I was determined not to cast horses in the main role. Addie took the question entirely out of my hands by introducing unicorns, and they galloped to the finale after all. Even Daphne clamored to be held and danced with, and meanwhile I got help getting two rooms cleaned.

Any more suggestions for story-friendly pieces?

-- SJ