Hee hee, this is too fun. Okay, I'll stop now. 

Picasa en la casa!

 


Okay, just having some fun here with Picasa, which is a nifty little program from Google to organize the pictures on your computer.

In other news, Wini has a little fever. Maybe we did too much on the weekend. Friday, she had the day off, so Nick took her on an "adventure" by riding public transportation around the bay. I met them in Fremont and we went to a local bluegrass pizza pub we like. She danced with the wild abandon of a 5-year-old having just made friends with a dancin' 3-year-old. Wini finds kindred spirits wherever she goes.

Saturday there was a trip to the San Jose Children's museum, and Sunday was Heather's son Joshua's second birthday, so it was a weekend filled with activity. Late Sunday I remembered we were supposed to make a "family turkey" for her class involving stuff we could find in the kitchen cabinet. A good solid half hour of glitter-glueing later, we had a rice-fiore-pasta-cotton-ball turkey worthy of the Kibre name.

When I picked Wini up for kindergarden, a friend ran up and asked if she could come over for a playdate. After a non-verbal exchange with the mom, I gave Wini permission to go play. It was a short play date - which is a good thing, because she hadn't been home more than five minutes before she was asking me to hold her (a SURE sign she's not feeling well) and I realized she had a fever. So to Patrice, um, sorry. No doubt your three kids are infected now too.

 


Hee hee, this is too fun.

The Streetcars are Safe, Plus, The Neighborhood Around London Avenue Canal Breach

Around Town: London Ave Canal Breach, Watermarks, Trash Mountain

Trash mountain. I know this is on a neutral ground somewhere; maybe someone can write in and tell me where this was.





Here's several pictures of houses with visible watermarks.








From the London Ave Canal breach.

Outside on Bancroft Drive

Drew prepares an MRE. There is an internal bag with food, which is inside another sleeve that has a chemical at the bottom. (I'm guessing Na or something like that - anyone know?) You add water to the outer sleeve, it reacts with the chemical and heats the food.


Mmmm, spaghetti and meatballs!
Here's looking down the street.

Hmm, this picture is suspiciously near Cafe Du Monde. And when did Drew get taller than Sherry? You can see some cruise ships lined up there.

Working on Grandma Janet's House

Here's Sherry and Drew working in the back hallway. That's not carpet on the ground. All the furniture and carpets were removed before they got there. Where Sherry is spraying (bleach and water) is where the 50th Anniversary quilt was hanging.




Here's Drew in the telephone cubby in that same hallway. He's already completed the wall on the right - a world of difference!





































Before picture. (I think this is the middle back bedroom.)























This is the living room after the walls have been cleaned. Hank and Nick pulled up all the tiles on the floors. At one point, they broke a sledgehammer!







The back bedroom, before.




But the after picture looks great!

Unfortunately, all the interior doors had to be removed due to warping.

Here's looking through the house to the back yard.

Nick & Sue in the Avante Garde Overworld

We went to see a play performed by the Berkeley Repertoire theater last Saturday: Finn in the Underworld. We got great seats, great parking, enjoyed browsing the used book store next door, and just had a great date night without the little bratchild to torment us. She was busy tormenting grandparents, forcing them to play Go Fish and the like. We were free for the evening!

The play was billed as a ghost story, and it was...but with a Berkeley twist, I guess. So it was better than going to a movie, but probably not as good as snuggling under a blanket at home with the kidlump to watch Toy Story. Ah, well, there's always next year.

Random thought about ghosts: Wini kind of took to the idea of ghosts; at least, she took to the idea of putting a sheet/towel/blanket/pillowcase over her head to pretend to be a ghost. The funny thing is, she somehow got it into her head that she has to strip naked before donning her sheet. Otherwise we'd see her clothes, you see, and she wouldn't be invisible. So we've had some R-rated ghost hauntings in the Kibre household. What made me think of it just now? The appearance of a Thomas the Tank Engine ghost (pillowcase) with no arms. At least it covered her bottom this time.

I had the machine on Monday and Tuesday and came home to find 12 messages on it. All these professions of love for my birthday, I thought! Not so much. Three messages from relatives, one from the dentist, and the rest were political ads. We had several propositions to weigh in on, but I found it pretty easy to decide how to vote. If Schwartzenegger proposed it, I voted against it. Maybe when he puts the $2 billion back in the education budget that has forced some kindergardens to have 30 students in our district I'll consider his ideas. Until then, he gets a big fat NO.

I'm going to try to upload some pictures from Nick's trip to New Orleans.

Just a glimpse for now, they take a while to upload because the files are big.

Petal Power!

I've been going through a course of training to become a Daisy Girl Scout Troop leader. Man, the paperwork is unreal. You can't so much as walk outside of the meeting room to play on the grass without getting signed permission slips from each parent in advance. But I really like the values the girls work on to earn their petals.

The Girl Scout Promise

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.



The Girl Scout Law

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine is in charge of planning the school's harvest fair, so I ended up agreeing to do face painting at the fair and to bake five dozen cookies for prizes. I made the first 3 dozen cookies when Wini was at school. We worked on the last two dozen together, but they came out awful. I guess all the precise measuring does make a difference! I'm going to have to whip up a big batch tonight after bedtime.

My birthday's just around the corner....we're going to a play at the Berkeley Repertoire Theatre and leaving li'l bit with her grandparents Kibre. Should be fun.

18-Year-Olds Wannabe Models

I managed to skip a month in this blog, and I've blocked out the entire summer of BB. It's like it never happened. Who cares which hamster hid himself in a storage box in the back yard to escape the cameras long enough to masturbate, all while keeping his microphone on? It's a distant memory. I can't even remember his name anymore.

So it's on to the model wannabes of America's Next Top Model. I've gone through half a dozen of this season's contestants so far. It's an easy gig; recycle questions that you asked last week and throw in a few personal things so they know you half-watched the show. I did a little trick during Big Brother where I would read aloud the names of the other contestants, and the interviewee would give their opinion of each person. Easy peasy, folks. But I can't diss it too much, because the girls love to chat about each other. It really gets them to open up and start gabbing.

Still, many of them are so young, they don't have any life experience or anything that makes them interesting. Kahlen from Cycle 4 was so inarticulate I nearly threw the damn interview in the trash. What can you do with someone who stops themselves mid-senten - changing their grammar aro- so you see I think it was diffi- and anyways, speaking in complete sentences is so - You get the picture.

This "cycle" (ooh, we can't just call it a season like the rest of TVland), the most frustrating girl I've interviewed so far is Ebony. Here's a girl who's 18 years old, who made the age deadline by less than a week, whose head is still pretty much in the hallways of high school. She had been doing phone interviews all day, and I got an unlucky late afternoon time slot. The girl was so exhausted she was almost slurring her words.

Maybe we all get a little juvenile when we're tired, but it was painfully obvious that the girl given a makeover that was supposed to read "urban sophisticated" was ready to go home to Mama. This is the girl who said the best part of the experience was that she got her own bed. She'd only ever slept in a bunk bed with her sister, you see. Having her own bed was "tight."

I don't mean to rag on Ebony (although a little giggle about her photographic memory and an unconvincing, "I dunno, it helps on tests I guess" didn't really endear me to her as a former nerd/smart kid), it's just that she hasn't done anything with her life yet. Go to college - get some polish, read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and start wearing black turtlenecks. Give me a call when you've learned what it is to wake up in a puddle of your own sick. *sigh* Okay, maybe that's taking it too far, but it's like interviewing Strawberry Shortcake each week, with a little catty talk about the other 18YO's thrown in.

Enough of this silly reality TV. Announcing...Lavagirl!





Lavagirl is a superheroine who gets to have hot pink hair. Need I say more? She's a 5-year-old's dream without having to be the same old princess that everyone else is. On Halloween night, she will be wired - and not just from the sugar. We have glowing light strips to wind around her for her stroll through the neighborhood. More pics to follow (hopefully!).

Virtue is its Own Reward

Quick story - we were walking home from school yesterday and in front of the school we found an earring. It had dangling mother-of-pearl circles and it was obvious it was an earring someone would miss. My daughter was thrilled at finding it, but I explained to her that it looked special and that someone was probably looking for it. She could see my point and was a little disappointed, but agreed that someone must really love the earring so we should go to the office and leave it with Lost & Found.

So she gave it to the school secretary, who congratulated her for being honest and turning it in. She told her it was great that she did the right thing, and filled out a "wonderful ticket" - put her name in a jar for a drawing at the end of the week.

Typically, my daughter didn't say a word through all of this, just looked wide-eyed. Then we left and started walking home again. Before we'd left the block, she found a broken rubber band on the sidewalk and said, "Mom, it looks like somebody lost their treasure! We better go turn it in." On the way home we found lots of this type of "treasure" - a candy wrapper, a flower petal... By the time we got home my pockets were crackling with treasure. Those ten blocks between school and home got a nice cleanup!

I titled this anecdote "Virtue is its Own Reward," which seems odd if you consider that Wini was actually rewarded with a Wonderful Ticket. But I didn't mean her, I meant me. It's not like I went through some moral quandry about returning the earring, but I certainly reaped the reward of seeing Wini experience that feeling of having done a good deed.

The Next Stop on the Cheesy Reality Show Monorail

Big Brother is wrapping up, but the cheesy silliness of America's Next Top Model is already calling. I emailed my contact at UPN to ask if we can conduct interviews this cycle, and she enthusiastically responded that she remembered me and already had me on her list. It's nice to be remembered. The girl (Chelsea) sounds about thirteen years old on the phone; I picture her as fresh out of college with a Communications degree assigned to the lowest press contact position on the totem pole. It's not like the journalists are going to be trying to sneak in hardball questions.

Meanwhile, it's almost certain that Ivette or Maggie will win hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is worse, the nurse who enjoys watching a patient "code" (i.e., go into cardiac arrest and die) or the young, immature Cubana who lives in her own insular existence of her shallow friends and their petty concerns?

What can I say about Maggie? She has vile personal habits, such as peeing on the toilet seat and not wiping it off for the next person. And yet, she doesn't feel comfortable using the same toilet as her fellow houseguests because they have germs. She says she's a nurse, but advises Ivette to put mayonaise on her burn. She thinks aspirin is evil. She thinks Janelle was lying about playing the flute of all things. She's got a lot to say about the people she hates, yet doesn't stand up for her own teammates when push comes to shove. In a conversation about the tragedy of Waco and the innocent children who were forced to live there as the offspring of cult members, she shrugged off their firey deaths, saying they were all "inbreeds" anyway. She isn't looking forward to going back to her job because she hates most of her patients, and is tired of "shoveling shit out of assholes." Oh, and her language is filthy; she routinely calls Janelle the C-word and refers to the bathroom as "the shitter." Lovely.

And then there's Ivette, who has turned out to be the most oddly intense houseguest since that guy who held a knife to another houseguest's throat. Ivette - well, this girl feels things deeply. Unfortunately, she thinks that gives her an excuse to act on every emotion that crosses that tiny brain of hers. Someone eats the ice cream before she gets to it? She's ready to burn the house down. She leaves her lotion in the bathroom and frets incessantly that one of the evil ones will notice it sitting there and tamper with it. She wins POV, and runs around the yard screaming "el tres final" and making an ass of herself humping the lounge chair cushions. When April tells her she's offended that Ivette would celebrate what amounts to April's demise (which is a bit snotty of April if you ask me - Ivette won fair and square), Ivette mopes, whines, and cries for hours. Yes, they had a verbal blowout, and Ivette can yap a mile a minute - but it was the endless aftermath of whining that truly defined Ivette as someone who just cannot see herself as having done something wrong.
What I really hate about Ivette, though, is her bigoted views about Kaysar. At her insistence, Kaysar sat down with her and discussed her problem with him. She told him that he didn't belong in the Big Brother house because he is devoutly religious. I'll spare you her arguments, but rest assured that they made no sense. I'm appalled that anyone growing up in the United States - which was founded on the principles of religious freedom - would espouse such a view. Add to her angry descriptions of Kaysar as, oh, a camel jockey would be the nicest epithet she liked to throw around, and you've got one ugly person. She and Eric had this bigotry in common; they liked to sit around and trash Kaysar, talk about burning the Koran, calling him Saddam and Osama. What's especially galling is that Kaysar had already shared one night in the house that his uncle had been killed by Saddam Hussein in a particularly horrific manner. The Republican Guard left his body on their doorstep with a bill pinned to his jacket for the cost of the bullet that killed him. So nicknaming him after his uncle's killer takes a special kind of cold hardedness that I'm glad I've never encountered in real life. Kudos (I guess) to BB for flushing out the worst cockroaches of humanity imaginable on this season of Big Brother.