Possumblog

Why, yes!

I HAVE only had four hours of sleep!

Had a building committee meeting at church last night that lasted from 6:30 to 9:00, then I went home and found a house full of children who had not bathed nor done their homwork, and one particular oldest child of mine was on the computer vainly trying to find photographs of anemia and print them out, and who had very nearly torn the printer up trying to make it work, and another child who was supposed to be finding information on who easy or difficult it might be to travel in Russia, and a wife who was telling me in minute--as in minute-by-minute--details of her day as well as approximately four hundred other topics sprinkled in lest I get too unconfused.

First things first--Boy and Cat to the showers. Next, me into some loungewear. Next, figure out why printer is not printing. Ahh. I see. 13 jobs in the print queue, each one of them something like 40MB. Cancel all. Takes forever to cancel. Try to ascertain just how much information has been gleaned. Between nothing and next to nothing. Oldest needs a title for poster. "Anemia" Takes her nearly thirty minutes of constant fidgeting and screwing around with text color and font. Finally settles on the horrid Jokerman font (quite possibly the ugliest in the whole set of fonts) in red. "IT WON'T PRINT!" Send Oldest downstairs to start working on poster with the information she already has, and print out title. She had a bunch of dialogue boxes in the background that she'd not closed--most likely because she didn't know they were there. Even though she knows EVERY. SINGLE. THING. about computers.

Closed completely out of everything, and started the Internet back up. She'd been blindly searching through AOL for something about anemia, and had wasted hours upon hours not doing anything. Went to Google Images, typed in anemia, and found what I expected--thousands of pictures related to anemia.

Let me just say--Ick. Blech. Ewww. And, oddly enough, Rrowwl.

Obviously, that last one didn't make the cut.

Trouble printing again--seems the thing that causes loud, internal, plastic-on-plastic-on-metal grinding noises had been activated. After much heavy sighing and noncussing cuss word creation, I finally got it functioning again.

Kissed younger two kids and sent them to bed, got Middle One to go bathe, gave other photos to Oldest, who was complaining about all the work she had to do.

Middle Girl out, drag information out of her about what she wanted.

Seems they have a group project on Russia.

They're going to do a presentation.

She had been assigned something.

It was something about something.

Something about movement.

She wanted it on a disc.

She wanted it on a disc so she could take it in today.

She wanted to take it in today so she wouldn't be the only one without something.

Something about if it was hard to move.

In Russia.

She had a sheet of paper.

She went and got it.

I read it--her part was to find out about barriers to movement, or things that made getting around easier. Oh. No problem.

Sent her on to bed, since it was now past 11:00, then Oldest soon afterwards.

Started looking in the likely places, and managed to find some interesting sites--obviously the best place for official information was the Consular Information Sheet from the State Department travel site. Another that was worth checking out was Fielding's DangerFinder. Aside from the self-loathing political commentary (a tip--freedom is not what causes poverty and crime, you ignorant twit) it does offer some good information.

Wrapped up the cut-and-paste work around 1:00 this morning.

Which might explain why I feel rather woozy.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at March 17, 2006 10:20 AM