This'n'that

[ciroccoj]

It's really weird, not having to study for the bar.

• I've got all this extra time now, except it's not really extra time in that I'm catching up on a lot of stuff I let slide for a while. The house isn't too much of a disaster zone, but I did, among other things, clean out a lot of stuff from the fridge that I'll just skip over in the interest of not being icky. Nothing too bad, no new species growing in there, but it was a little overdue.
  
  
• Have to scan in things, answer e-mails, go to the doctor, move stuff to storage, get a job, prepare for Christmas... I get a little tired thinking about it.
  
  
• Speaking of tired, I finally watched (most of) the new version of The Andromeda Strain. OMG long, and I fell asleep a few times despite the eye-candy present. There's a lot of eye-rolling stuff in there, but some of the updates were pretty cool, if you weren't looking for a quickly-paced plot. Like more background on the characters, more conflicts, stuff like that. Frank Pembleton Andre Braugher was a nice addition too. Oh and the Odd Man (an unmarried man, the demographic the army has found most likely to make the right choice as to whether or not to detonate a nuke, played by Ricky Shroder) is actually gay, not just single. Cute quote: "It's ironic that the army's extensive battery and psychological test has conclusively determined that the person they are most afraid of is the best suited to make the right choice in this crisis."
  
  BTW, does anyone remember a wormhole in the original film version? I sure as hell don't. Chris believes there wasn't one in the miniseries either. He thinks I fell asleep and A & E switched to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and I got the DSP wormhole confused with Andromeda. I think he's wrong.
  
  Haven't finished watching it. Hope I taped the whole thing, or I'll be seriously choked.
  
  Total aside: I wonder if anybody's ever made a porno called The Andromeda Stain.
  
  
• Daniel came to the study last night after bedtime, crying. "I don't think I really knew Luli very well at all!" was all I could get out of him at first.
  
  I'd wondered. It had come out in conversation the day before that Justin, who was only four when my mom died, had forgotten what we'd done with her body - cremated, buried, etc. So we explained cremation, explained inurnment, and told him that her ashes were at the Pinecrest Cemetery, which we go past every weekend to get to their Spanish class. Then we stopped there on the way back from Spanish, spent a bit of time there, answered some questions, talked about my mom, and came home. Daniel seemed perfectly fine. I'd wondered what he was thinking.
  
  I wish there was some way of making this better for him. Chris and I tried to comfort him, and eventually he seemed OK and went back to bed, but... the fact is, he didn't get to know my mom very well. He was only seven when she died. We can tell him stories about her, and we have, but it's not the same at all.
  
  He missed out on so much with her, and there isn't any way of making up for that, or making it fair or right. All we could tell him was that he knew her as well as he could, considering how old he was, and that she knew him very well. And that she thought he was one of the neatest people she'd ever known. She was well aware of his faults - I certainly bitched about them enough - but she was still his biggest fan.
  
  I feel her absence so, so much when I'm dealing with him. I don't believe in an afterlife, but every so often when Daniel's spaceyness is driving me up the wall I swear I can hear my mother laughing at me ;) It's comforting, but I'd rather have her presence than memories.
  
  Oh well. Life goes on.
  
  
• Finished reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with the boys, and started the Narnia series.
  
  
• Finished reading On the Banks of Plum Creek with Justin, and started By the Shores of Silver Lake. They are so totally different, my boys. Daniel lost interest pretty quickly after Little House on the Prairie - not enough action, too much flora, fauna, and food. Justin is just thrilled by it all. Don't know how long that thrill will last - for one thing, as Laura gets older, I imagine she'll get harder to relate to for him - but who knows, maybe he'll want to continue all the way up to her adulthood.
  
  
• We're going for our blue belts at the end of the month! Will have to attend a new class and everything. ::gulp::
  
  
• I would like our new car now. Have been without one since October 30, since Chris takes the car to work and he's out in the boonies. It's not so bad - we may have only one car in the family, but we've got four bikes and eight feet - but still. A car during the week would be nice.