Halloween and Master Bedroom Pictures

Here are the pictures of the newly rearranged master bedroom I promised. Here you can see the bed in the corner, and my bookcase.


This is the view from the bed. The bedspread really doesn' t match the walls, the flash on the camera just brightened it. Here you can see Brian's bookcase-type-piece of furniture, on the left, and his desk and accessories on the right of the picture.


Here's the place where the two desks come together in the middle of the room. This way we can work on our work, and still be together. When our offices were in separate rooms before, we felt like we had to choose between getting work done, and being together. This is much nicer. And the boys can sit in Brian's chair (on the left) and off the side of my desk during the daytime when we do schoolwork.

Here's a closeup of the two desks together. Maybe it's symbolic of our marriage. Different people who are right next to each other. :-)


Here is the boys dressed for Halloween. Alex is Superman again, like last year, and Sam is a "dead man". He was going to be a Jack-o-Lantern, until about 4pm on Halloween, then he changed his mind. He wanted to be a "dead man" like Brian was last year, from the song: it's a dead man's party.

This is the crazy pose of the boys in their costumes.

New Living Room

Over the summer, we have slowly recreated our living room. I've been wanting to do this for years, and I'm thrilled that it was finally time to do it. :-)

Here you can see one of the new sofas, and the ottoman. I also finally painted the walls a nice light brown, which I've wanted to do for a while. The electric piano is not new.

The wall color was carefully chosen to tie together the carpet, the ottoman, and the sofas. They call the sofa leather "bomber jacket leather". It's incredibly soft.

The entertainment unit has not changed. Here you can see the second sofa. There are two sofas and one loveseat.

The view of the table behind the loveseat.

More Pictures

Sam's new room.

Alex's new room.

Part of the new loft. The loft has also been painted a nice light brown to cover what used to be pink and dirty white walls.

This is a sign Sam made and put in front of his room:
"Belong to Samy"

We took these pictures, above and below, as we drove through a small town in Southern Texas that was named Sebastian, just like my nephew. :-)

Those wonderful boys.

This is a drawing Alex did for school last week. We had learned all about atoms that day. He decided to draw a picture of a Helium atom.

Here, Sam is rocking his dog.

The dog's almost asleep.


A beautiful piece of art that Alex made out of shaped pieces of wood. He does this for fun, with no one around to help.

Sam made his own sling and was able to fit a horse and three dogs in it.

The way our house used to be

January of this year, we changed around many things in the second floor of our house. We put the boys' rooms, minus beds, in the loft. Their bunkbeds were in a corner of the master bedroom, and the two small bedrooms of our house were used as parental offices.

The boys' "room", Sam on the left, and Alex on the right. You can easily see the boundries made with the matching red-topped toyboxes.

This was my office, from January to September. The walls are blue because it was originally supposed to be the boys' room.

This is another view of the boys' room. Here, seeing mostly Sam's room.

Sea World, part 2

More pictures from the week at Sea World Camp.

Super Alex. The wettest boy around!

Our camp group receiving a lesson next to the coral reef tank. Divers getting into the water for diver training and to feed the fish.

And for Brian, a shark!

Sammy gets to touch a small, and pregnant, nurse shark.

Sam jumped up and down with joy after touching the shark!

More joy!

Visiting the Killer Whales in the tank behind the Believe! stadium.

Sam is happy to be here with "his" whales.


After school on the last day, we decided to attend the Killer Whale Show. Here we are waiting, and ready!

Sea World, part 1

Last Summer, we attended Summer Camp at Sea World San Antonio. Here are some pictures from that week.


The campers are ready to go!

looking into the outdoor back-lot shark tank -- keep those hands back

the two boys, seen easily as the two with blue shirts and dark hats on, playing at a water feature at Sea World after our "schooling" that day

Alex loved playing with this feature, which randomly shoots spurts of water out of the ground.


Sam touched a big yellow snake.


This is Alex feeding the dolphins, in the center of the picture -- the blonde boy leaning to the left. Since we were in a special "camp" group, we got to be with the dolphins here, and feed them, all before the Park even opened that morning. The people you see here are the only people at the pool, the entire rest of the edges of the pool to my left are empty of people. The kids were given as many free little fish as they wanted. And, the best part, is that since they were the only ones feeding the dolphins, the dolphins gave them lots of attention!

Sam just dropped the fish into the dolphin's mouth.

Alex is ready to feed one.

Sam feeding a dolphin.

Sam and the dolphin getting to know each other.

Sam just touched a sting ray!!!

Sam and his friend the beluga whale, in the back tank behind the Viva! theatre.

The dolphin was playing with Sam. He kept popping out of the water vertically to look at him!

Pictures, finally!

Here are some of the pictures that have been piling up for me to show you....



This is the crazy picture of the boys, after taking the serious school year pictures.

Alex, beginning 1st grade.

Sam with his violin.

Sam, beginning Preschool 5.

A dolphin living in the back pools at Sea World San Antonio.

Another dolphin in the back pools. This one is about 30 years old, and is too old to continue performing.

Sam and his violin again. It's a 1/10th size violin, so cute!

What to do with your Nights

For the past two years or so, I’ve had horrible insomnia. But – it wasn’t every night, just occasionally. It got really bad a few weeks ago, to the point where it was every night, and I would be exhausted. The strange part, I wasn’t stressed. Rather, I had a chemical imbalance, I was chronically low on serotonin. I have a doctor I’m seeing, who provides me with bio-identical hormones such as progesterone, estrogen, and thyroid, which I have always been deficient in since I hit puberty, due to a thing called PCOS, or poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. I’ve been on supplemental hormones for almost six months now, and the theory is that soon the hormones will make my body normal. :-)

Anyway, getting back to sleep (enjoy the pun!), I had another hormone that was off-kilter. The doctor put me on 5-HTP and melatonin. The 5-HTP was the part I really needed. My body was pure dopamine, instead of a pretty balance between dopamine and serotonin. The 5-HTP is an amino acid which, when taken, the body will then convert to natural serotonin. Which… the body then converts to melatonin when the lights go out. What a great trick!

I wanted to mention this whole event because that last week, in which I really got no sleep, I realized to a degree how precious days are. I guess it’s like when people are sick, and they realize how a lot of their freedom to use their days is gone. I realized that even though I had the same time every day, I was so tired that I couldn’t use it to read and learn like I like to do. I couldn’t think well, I didn’t understand my kids as well, it was a great loss. I hope to remember this and make better use of the days that a good night’s sleep give me.

SETI

I wanted to weigh in and give my thoughts on SETI: The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Some of you may have heard of this program from the movie 'Contact'. The movie and the SETI program were both created by the same man...

I've loved Carl Sagan and his work since my childhood, and I still do. For the record, yes, I think there are other intelligences out there. However, unlike Sagan when he lived on Earth, I believe in a God, so I believe we were made by God. Therefore, I believe other intelligences out there were also made by God -- some by our God, and possibly some by siblings or equals of our God. This means I think the other intelligences out there, at least those on planets like ours, will look just like us.

So yes, I think they are totally contact-able.... if only you factor in enough time.

I wanted to throw out the possibility that while, I believe, they are totally out there, and yes, technological progress is a big factor, I also think that we need to account for the distances. We're using, at most, light speed. Using light speed, it may take incredible large amounts of time before any transmissions could actually be received.

Unless they are located very close to us, which is unlikely in a universe this size, then we must keep in mind that when we look out into space, we are looking back into history. So, really, I suppose, we are looking for civilized life that lived billions of years ago.

I just wanted to let everyone know this is a possibility, that they could both be true: a) yes, they could be out there, while b) we may not receive their transmissions.

Most Interesting...

You know what's fun? Wikipedia.com. I have finally realized that any little wonder I have during the day can probably be answered on this amazing website. So, you ask, what did I want to know?

I wanted to test a theory. I've wondered since about 10th grade what that & (ampersand) symbol means. Yes, it's shorter than "and", but is the symbol supposed to represent those three letters or what? This year I began learning French, and at one point, I realized that "&" is more likely is a combination, or ligature -- combined letters) of "e" and "t". I wanted to know for sure. I looked it up, and learned all about it! Ampersand. They showed the normal & and another older version which looks more like a connected E and T. And "ampersand" means "per se" is because & used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet, after Z. So, when people would say an old alphabet rhyme, they would say "x, y, z, and per se and that's the end" -- or something like that. So, the "and, per se, and..." merged together to become "ampersand". Now I'll never wonder again.

I wanted to know what was up with that long S that people say used to be an S but doesn't look at all like an S. Turns out it's called a Long S and the short version of the story is that there used to be two ways of writing an S, depending on where it fell in the word. This used to be a lot more common when everything was hand-written; part of the flourish a formal document held.

This lead to an interest in that "B"-shaped letter used in German that I also never did understand: ß. Turns out it's called an eszett, which is really just two S's next to each other: the Long S and the Short, or Round s. So, the German word strasse (street) is written straße.

My Work?

The past three days I've been busy, a good, and fun busy. I like things like that, that keep my interest, things I can focus on. I've been compiling and organizing all of my writings that were on the computer. These are mostly everything I've written for about the past 17 years. They are now all in one place on the computer, they are backed up, they are fairly organized, and they can all be read with Word. Before, they were not only all over, and interlaced with useless files, but many did not run on any current computer program and had to be converted. Then I defrag-ged. Our hard drives are much prettier now! :-)

Someday I will go through very old handwritten records, and include them in the collection, but no hurry. Do you like the new colors on this blog? Very nice. So, next, I guess, I write more articles. Then, I have to decide what to do with them, do they go on Blogger, or on my site, or do I just keep them? Probably I'll keep most and put the publicly useful ones on my website. So, I'll get caught up in my writing, then revamp and very much simplify my website, then I can be free to do more research.

Writer's Block

I have to write, or rather, things need to be written by me. I don't so much know what yet. This is why I started writing and collecting all of those articles on my website linked above.

I think the next step, besides just writing many more articles, is to start collecting, and in same cases, transcribing, things I've written in the past. I don't know if I'll include the poetry of ages 15-25, we'll see.

I have this urge, this compulsion, to record and document my experiences and my studies. I've had it all my life. As a child, this compulsion was the worst obligation I had, because I hated writing, and because we didn't have computers so any writing took much longer. Later, I grew to like writing. It became a way to get every last detail out of my head. Only after writing do I feel relieved of the obligation to record each experience and thought.

I had a dream when I was a girl. Not a repeating dream, I don't have those. However, this was quite probably the most meaningful and most powerful dream I've ever had. This is not because I think the dream was a real experience, but because the things expressed in the dream feel like they are true.

This dream occurred one night when I was young, somewhere between the ages of seven and nine. In the dream it was nighttime. The rest of my family was asleep, and I was in my nightgown. I walked out of my house, the house of my childhood, through the front door and to the small area of grass and trees in my front yard. The moon shone through the clouds with a beautiful pale blue and white light. I saw that a desk and a chair had been placed in the middle of the grass between the trees, and I perceived that Jesus came down from the sky, as if coming down from heaven. He stood next to me on the ground and told me that I needed to write in my journal. I felt some dread at hearing this, because I hated writing in my journal. I felt at this point that even though I was still a young girl, that this represented me nearing the end of my days, and that I had neglected to record most of the many events, experiences, and observations of my life. He told me that I would not be allowed to leave and to join him in heaven until I had completed my work and had written it all down. I sat down at that desk and wrote and wrote and wrote. I was very tired many times, but when Jesus is standing nearby waiting, you tend to keep working. I finally finished just before dawn. He took the book I had written, and now, after all that work, I was permitted to go. I held his hand and he took me, as if we went towards heaven. I felt a great relief that my work was done. However, I wished that I had not waited so long, to the end of my life, before I had finally written everything down as I had been personally instructed to do.

Upon waking, I realized that the need for me to write might be even more important that I had originally thought. I still kept only a very sporadic journal for the next ten years, picking up the habit more in my late teens. Now I keep periodic records, and have old computer files and old journal entries from pre-computer days. I'm thinking that, in addition to writing more articles and current things, I could compile previous writings. Maybe onto a CD or something, I'll figure that out next. All I know is that I now feel compulsed from some interior source. Not from the dream, not from exterior coersion, but from me. I have my whole life to do this, but I don't want to get behind! :-)


Also, I've started a new thing in which I get to read as many books as I want. I used to try so hard to be normal, including not reading many non-fiction books, because most people don't do that. I've been stunting my own development. I have a strong desire to reach my potential, whatever that is.

Books I'm reading now:

• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, in Italian and English, Volume 1
• Asperger's and Self-Esteem: Insight and Hope Through Famous Role Models
• Words in a French LIfe

Books I finished last week:

• Why Do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd only Ask a Doctor after your Third Martini
• Natural Health, Natural Medicine

To read next:

• Decoding the Universe: How the new science of informationis explaining everything in the Cosmos, from our brains to black holes
• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, in Italian and English, Volume 2

Also, I saw a book on Amazon.com about fractals in nature which looks really interesting.

I was also thinking of going over the Asperger's and Self Esteem book that I'm almost done with and listing all the traits listed in it that I have. It would be a long list, but it would be fun. :-) In fact, even though I knew I was an Aspie before, and many have told me it's true, I still wanted to secretly deny it to myself, to keep pretending to be normal. After reading this book, and reading their lists of all the differences in these really admirable people, most of whom I really like, such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, and my all-time hero, Carl Sagan, it indeed is inspiring me to be more bold and more free to be myself, and indulge myself in things I am interested in, in the hope of becoming who I really am designed to be.

Wish me luck!

Etymology

I love words. Ask my husband, I'll always think a joke is funny if it's a play on words. I love them. I'm starting to learn French now. Well, I started in January, but then I became Primary President, so it was put on hold. But now I think I can do both. Besides, I just can't not learn. I have to learn, to be learning something. Brian was really helpful this weekend and bought me language learning software. Why French? No reason, just wanted to know it. It's time I learn another language. I love how learning French interplays with my knowledge of Spanish. My knowledge of ASL doesn't hurt either, since ASL is also based on the French language. I love finding out that words are similar to other words, and seeing how it all means the same thing. It especially helps me understand obscure words in English better, I like that. French is like the link from Latin to modern day English and Spanish. Probably German too, but I don't want to learn German. :-)

Today I was thinking about the word lavender. The spelling of the word has always bothered me, with that e at the end, it always seemed a little odd. Today, I realized it sounds like "lave", which means 'to wash'. I don't know in which language it means this, I just know it's the root. Anyway, looking up the word shows I'm right, that it's from Latin "lavare", 'to wash', 'from the use as bath perfume'. Pretty cool! Now I know where that name came from. Now I just want to figure out why perfume is called "eau de toilette", which, with my best novice translation, means toilet-water. Maybe they just mean a liquid you apply while in the bathroom. Well, whatever the original meaning, perhaps someone should tell them that in English toilet-water means a whole different thing. :-)

I also wanted to share with you today some of my favorite words. If I think of more later, I'll let you know, but I've always liked the sound and spelling of: toluene, porphyritic, and lately, quixotic. I know toluene is a bad substance, but it's such a great word, rolling off the tongue. :-) Porphyritic is from my geology studies. It's actually a cool thing, it means a rock with crystals in it that are large and easily distinguished with the naked eye. Porphyritic rock is beautiful, I think. Quixotic has been in my head lately. Just mainly interesting to me because it's even a word. How many people in a society need to know a story before a derivitave of the protagonist's name becomes a word? It's really cool how that happened. Alex just learned about Icarus recently in homeschool. I wonder, does it work with that name too? Icarustic? Hehe. That sounds funny. I always love those plays on words. :-)

Back to School!

Hey guys. What a jam packed time this is. I'm so excited. Our Homeschool is starting on Tuesday! We usually start on August 1st and this year we'll do it again. I know it's early, but it allows us to take more breaks during the school year, which is worth a shorter summer, in my opinion. This will be my 4th year homeschooling! Wow. And yes, it is MUCH easier after the first two years. This summer I haven't been nervous at all, and I've had a clear vision of what to do to prepare for the new year. We are almost done collecting supplies (just want a small American flag, which I'll get tomorrow) then we're all set. Today we finished organizing the supplies, books, and posters we've been collecting over the summer for use in the new year. Sam is so excited, well, I am too! And Alex virtually completely learned to read over the summer, so teaching him should be a whole new ball game this year. It's like everything I taught him over the previous two years about reading and phonics suddenly hit! He's like that. He's taught me that sometimes a child doesn't need more teaching, they just need more time to mature, then they'll get it!

We had a great end of summer last week. We went to Summer Camp at Sea World. Every morning for four days last week we drove down to San Antonio and were taken on personal, behind the scenes tours of the entire park. I told a friend of mine that I was so tired last weekend because I got up at 5am every morning last week, and drove 1.75 hours to San Antonio and back again, then walked all over Sea World in 92 degree weather with very high humidity, while pushing a double stroller with a 4 and a 6 year old in it. She said, why did you do that??? I said: education. :-) It was a very educational, and experience-filled week! My boys needed it. :-)

We saw each animal exhibit, and had more time with them, because the park wasn't even opened yet, so we had the animal all to ourselves. Sam even got to touch dolphins, and shark, and sting rays! It was great fun. We have pictures coming, as soon as I can get Brian to get them online for us.

More later as the new fun school year develops!

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Chicago reference, from a song with lots of trumpets, which I love. Brian thinks it's cute how I like any song with trumpets, though he doesn't know why. I'm not sure either, but I'm pretty sure it's because there were many songs with trumpets in them in the early 70's when my dad DJ'ed on the radio. And, of course, your father is a girl's first love. :-) Also, it doesn't hurt that half the guys I dated in high school also played some sort of brass instrument. The other half playing drums. :-)

Ok, I was going to tell you my goals for the coming year, but a time crunch arose and I should cut these boys' hair before they need to go off later, so we will delve into that shortly.

The Book is now Online

Ok, so I've been planning to put it online for sometime now, just hadn't gotten around to it until today. Today is my hurry and catch up day. Laundry, dishes, folding clothes, picking up the house, organizing Primary, and, next, finishing up plans for school next month. Wish me luck.

Oh, got my new glasses a few days ago. I love them!! You'll have to see.

And, in case you wanted to buy the house next door to mine, it's been purchased. I've had a new neighbor there for about two weeks. It's very nice having someone next door again. They have a dog and everything. :-) I feel like the world is returning to normal. :-)