Thought this was amazing.

Lost WWII battlefield found in New Guinea.

A hiker found the remains of an undisturbed battlefield.

7 Quick Takes Friday - The Thirteenth! (hee!)

1.  Mispronunciations:

Patrick is pronouncing volcano as "vol-CANE-hoe".  I guess at least it isn't "Vulcan-hoe", which would be something else entirely, eh?

Calla has erplane (airplane), wanana (banana), and gircle (circle) on her list.

2.  End of the school year!  Patrick is off for a few days until he starts a summer session on Wednesday.

3.  Speaking of the end of the school year, an observation on the difference between early elementary and secondary teachers:

Me, at the end of a school year - go out to the car and blast the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah on the car stereo (sadly, the cassette player isn't working any more, so I'll need to find some other way to do this in the future).

Patrick's teacher, today on the last day - was fighting tears.

(But that was really sweet to see.  She was so good with the kiddos - fantastic catch for the school district, I think.)

4.  Drove straight from Patrick's class's end-of-year award ceremony to where my in-laws were having lunch on a car tour, to drop Patrick off with them.  He'll have a great time on the tour (as always!).  Meanwhile, Calla was off with the babysitter at a local homeschool co-op's day out.  She apparently had a great time with them.  I really didn't want to haul Calla with us, for her to find out Patrick was staying and she wasn't, as my MIL can't keep a good eye on both of them right now.  In another year or two, they'll be more of an age where they can both go without a problem.

5.  I'm wondering how Patrick will take to his teacher next year (who will be the one at the summer session as well).  The summer session will give him the chance to get acquainted, to practice classroom-type skills a bit more, etc., and I'm hoping it'll be easier to transition in August, since we'll be able to tell him he'll have that same teacher - rather than his being done right now, and perhaps thinking he'll be having his teacher from this year when he goes back.

6.  I really need to order the book I'm going to be using for the co-op that I'll be teaching at next year.  I've seen it before - heck, I've taught from it for a few years out at the private school I worked at - but I don't have my own copy, and I'll need it for this.  I should probably get it sooner rather than later so I'll have more opportunity to get some better planning done.

7.  The hubby has been watching recorded episodes of Star Trek:  The Next Generation on his comp.  They recently finished the series, and so are back to the beginning.  He's watching "Code of Honor" right now.  When I saw it come on, I said "Oh no, THAT episode" and he remarked that you could say that about all (or nearly all) of the first season episodes, and some of the second.  Heh.  He did say that, in returning to the beginning, he noticed that some of what they do in the episodes - such as the dramatic music before commercial breaks, etc. - is a lot like what they did in the original series - that it's much more obvious to him, after just having watched episodes of the final season (as well as the first season of DS9 on DVD from Netflix), what had changed over the years as they adapted.

Other than just that the episodes got a bit better. :D

Love it. :D

Something that is possibly irksome.

I saw this on LFMF:

From Learn From My Fail:

Whenever you have a red substance in your stool, remember that you had four helpings of spaghetti and a cherry slush drink for dinner last night before you rush to the ER with "internal bleeding". It will save you from the extreme humiliation you will receive. #LFMF

Now, he didn't say what the "extreme humiliation" was.  It may just have been whatever tests they ran before finding out that it was just from food coloring (probably the slushie), because I can't imagine that the tests that would have been done for suspected bleeding from that area would be all that dignified.

And I hope that's really all he means by that.  It probably is.

But if he did overhear any of the staff chuckling/laughing, well...it isn't necessarily something that would encourage him to come back if, next time, he suspected a heart attack (but wrote it off to heartburn).  If you really do want folks to get to the ER *pronto* if they have symptoms that may indicate something serious (but may also be something fairly harmless), then folks MUST feel that they can make a mistake without ridicule, and should be reassured that their mistake was understandable (even if from a medical POV it may not be all that normal a mistake to make), and given better information if necessary on how to tell if they are experiencing the suspected issue.

Again, not saying the medical staff in this situation were overheard having a laugh at his mistake.  He may well have felt humiliated simply by having tests done only to find out it was from his food.

COFFEE!!

From Fake Science.

7 Quick Takes Friday - XII

1.  I have been informed that my little 5-year-old boy is very popular with the 4th grade girls.  They apparently think he's a sweet little boy (which I think he is as well, but then, I'm a bit biased).  Dunno when they're around him to form this opinion - recess, I suppose.  But it was cute to hear.

2.  Garage sale scores - a $30 Madeline doll for $1 (tag still on it), and a book entitled "Ninja Secrets of Invisibility".  Hey, it was 50 cents, I HAD to.  A cursory flip through the book reveals that it is about stealth.  It'll be a nifty read. :D  There was more that I bought, but those were the two most interesting, to my mind, at least.

3.  Finally got a replacement wheel for our lawnmower.  The hubby had NO luck trying to get one last fall, and barely managed the final mow of the season with an epoxied-and-taped wheel, which held together juuuuust long enough.  When he tried finding a replacement, the dealer finder on the Toro website was NOT working, thus a bunch of fruitless trips.  Yes, I suppose he could have ordered one, but he had been hoping to find one in stock to finish that last mow done with an intact wheel.  I decided I would try to track one down yesterday, and behold, the dealer finder WORKS now - so it took us less than 5 minutes to get the location of a nearby dealer, another few minutes for me to call and find out they had a wheel in stock, and that afternoon, I picked it up.  Much easier, LOL.

4.  While doing that, I passed by a few places in the nearby city that I typically don't drive by often - one was Arby's, which is where I grabbed lunch (I probably have Arby's about once a year - not b/c I don't like it, but b/c I'm just never going that way, so it has to come to mind and/or I need to specifically want *that*).  The other was a Mexican grocery store, which I had been meaning to stop in and check out, but hadn't really had the opportunity yet.  So I did - and I WILL be going back.

Meat prices were fantastic, they had some different produce at decent prices, and a whole lot of Mexican-bottled Sprite!  WOOHOO!  If you have never tried it, DO.  It has real sugar (as does Mexican bottled Coke, etc.), and it has more lime to the flavor than the US bottled/canned Sprite does.  The local grocery store does have a spot for it, but never has it in stock.  Now I know where to get it. :)  The hubby is pleased. 

At any rate, I did pick up some Sprite, bananas and some cookies -  wafer cookies, like the vanilla/strawberry/chocolate ones - but unlike those, the ones we've tried so far (dulce de leche) didn't leave that kind of filmy feeling after.  And of course, no HFCS - sugar sugar sugar.  Now, I'm not one to call cookies health food, heh.  I know they aren't. :D  But no filmy aftertexture (well, it isn't really an aftertaste, is it?) and real sugar?  And REALLY good?  Nifty.  And a fair number of different flavors available (as well as the standard vanilla/strawberry/chocolate), such as mango and guava.

5.  One oddity spotted at the above grocery store, and I imagine it's just b/c someone was pulling up whatever on the meat pricing label just to get the packages marked - one pound packages of crawfish were labeled as "imitation crab meat".  Not crawfish meat, either.  The whooooole crawfish.

6.  Also, I had noticed before that one of the play grocery store items that Calla has, which is supposed to be a 2 liter bottled drink, has a label declaring the flavor to be "aloe".  I figured this had to be some kind of mistake - well, kind of, anyhow - that they used that recognizable 2 liter bottle as the representative container for any non-canned liquid, and that it was meant to be hand soap or lotion or something.  But now that I've seen the soda choices at the store, I see that her toy label was NOT a mistake.  There is indeed aloe-flavored soda available there.  I don't think I'm quite up for trying it, though I imagine it probably wouldn't taste much different than a carbonated herbal tea or something.


7.  Passed by a coin-op laundromat on the way home from there - the name?  "The Lost Sock".  So either they're promising you will find all those lost socks you've been missing, or they're advertising the inevitable result of laundry.  Either way, it is memorable, so I suppose it does work for that. :D

So the big lesson learned this week - if you have an ethnic grocer near you, GO.  You never know what you may find.

7 Quick Takes Friday - XI

1. Been a while since one of these!  Anyhow, the boy is off to school.  Didn't know if he'd be going today, since he was up a lot last night coughing, but he was up and asking about school this morning, soo...we'll give it a go.  Resumed breathing treatments as well, so hopefully that will help.  Allergies are awful right now.

2. Calla likes trains.  Not so much playing with toy trains (though she will), but making trains from lines of chairs or other furnishings...

The view from my seat.  Skeleton bear (thus named b/c of his skeleton costume - he doesn't have his hood up, but Calla prefers it down.  He's her favorite stuffed animal by FAR.) is in front of me, in the dining car. ;)  There's an ottoman in front of the table, but you can't really see it from this angle.

 And the view behind me, where her favorite doll is riding.  Sometime after this, she also added a little toy-sized Cozy Coupe as a passenger as well.

3. We're going to be getting Patrick a new car seat this weekend.  I had been forewarned on one of the message boards I frequent that the one he has now, which can be used with a harness or as a booster, is not a good booster b/c of the way it positions the seat belt on the child's body (lap belt too high).  I tried it to see how it fit him, and yep - it did NOT fit him well at ALL.  It's almost like it held the seat belt out in front of him for him to crash into, rather than position it to lay across him correctly.  He's hit the weight limit on the harness of the seat, so we'll be getting a new carseat for him this weekend (probably a booster only, but I'm open to a higher weight limit harness & booster combo, if we can afford it).  We'll probably move Calla into Patrick's current seat with the harness, because it is SO much easier to get a good snug fit on the harness in his than in her current seat.

4.  Purged some toys from the kiddos' room yesterday and boxed 'em up - they could probably stand to have another box out as well, but I only had one box.  I was going to rearrange their room to see if I could get them more floor space with the beds against the wall, but it didn't work well that way.  Oh well - at least I got a box of toys out.

5.  I took Calla to a baby-to-preschooler age mom-and-kid type music class thinger on Monday - the instructor's son had been in speech therapy with Calla.  I had been meaning to take her for months now, but with the bronchitis and such, it's only now that I finally got around to it.  She didn't quite follow what was going on, but that's pretty typical of the first couple of sessions.  I'll probably go ahead and take her through the rest of this year (only a couple more sessions until summer break), since it's only $1 per session, and then we'll see how she handles it when it starts back up this fall.  I'd like to get her acquainted with a structured activity of some sort, just to see how she does.

6.  Assuming that enough students sign up, I'll be doing a physics class for a local homeschool co-op this coming school year.  It's two hours a week (the co-op is actually one day a week, but they have classrooms secured for a second day for high-school level classes and such that really do need more tutor-led instructional time per week), and the child care during class times is a whopping $5 (though I'll need to check - I dunno if that's available during that additional day or not.  If it isn't, I imagine I should be able to line someone up for that one day per week, since it's such a short time).  The following year, though, I will probably be trying to get into the local school district.  Glad we'll have been able to swing my staying home with the kiddos as much as I have until school age, but it's been tight, and being able to get some savings built up will be a good thing.

7.  Fingers crossed, I think Calla very nearly has this whole potty thing down.  She's very inconsistent with poo, but otherwise seems to have it.  Hopefully that'll come too pretty soon.  C'mon, Calla!!