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After 13 years of asking I finally let Cara test my blood type. Apparently I am O positive just like her and all the kids:

I haven't blogged a book review for a while, so today I thought I'd type up a short one on a historiography of English chronicling during the medieval period I recently finished reading.

Well, this has been quite a weekend! Friday night was the GEM banquet for Alora & Brittan. It's a program for gifted girls run by the computer science department at the University. Their motivation is to get more women into a heavily male-dominated field, and the girls are paired with undergraduate CS student mentors for a research project. Then they present their research in written form and it is judged by faculty members. Alora's team, who wrote their essay on medical technology, won 3rd place. Brittan's team, who wrote their essay on the Wii, won 2nd place, entitling her to a $500 scholarship (if she attends UNL as a freshman CS major). Alora is going to play softball this summer, so after the banquet we finally went out and got her a glove. As we watched the lightning on the distant plains we played catch. Alora took to it pretty well, and by the end of the evening was throwing overhand to me 50 feet away fairly consistently. At catching she was also something of a natural, doing a good job of tempering her initial reflex of holding the glove upside down for balls that were below chest height. On Saturday morning I ran my monthly 5K. If it was a 1 mile I would have done very well - in a field of several hundred there were only two guys and a girl in front of me and I could see the lead bike for most of the first mile. Then my stamina started to fade. Usually I am better at pacing myself but I guess the excitement of such a good start led me to run much harder than I could sustain. This was the first race in a long time where catching my breath, rather than the swelling of my feet, was my biggest hinderance. I was down at 222 lbs yesterday though, so I know that made a difference. I think WHEN I get under 200 I'll be a pretty decent contender in my age division! During the day yesterday we finally finished switching the kids rooms around. Alora's new room is Maxwell & Zara's old room. Maxwell & Zara's new room is Alora & Brittan's old room. Brittan's new room used to be my office. I have been relegated with all my books to the family room. At least it will look nice when Dell & Kristen come tomorrow . . . Saturday night I collected donations for No2Arena at a potluck dinner. We raised over $1000 to oppose the city using taxpayer money to build yet another sports arena in Lincoln. There's a vote on May 11th about a bond issuance to pay for it and the developers who stand to gain the contracts to build it have poured 10's of thousands into promoting the idea. It's an uphill battle to convince Keynesians on the left that taxation and spending won't stimulate the economy and convince sports fans on the right that increasing taxation on one's neighbors is an amoral way to pay for one's entertainment. Today we're planning to relax. We'll see how much success we have at that!

This weekend the kids are playing musical bedrooms! Alora and Brittan are going to be separated for the first time ever. Zara will be be back downstairs in the scary place called the basement. Will it last? We shall see . . .

Yesterday afternoon started out, innocuously enough, with a trip to the Home Depot. We got some sand to open up the sandbox for the year, it having been away in the shed for the Winter. Cara got some caulk for the bathroom - our landlord reimburses us for such minor repairs. I got a Catawba vine to plant near the fence. My attempts to grow Vitis vinifera two years ago being such a failure, I figured I'd better start with a much hardier Vitis labrusca varietal. While I did my planting, Cara got started with the other thing she got - paint stripper for the kitchen table. She's refinishing it with a stain to replace the current white paint on it. She laid out the tabletop on a large cardboard box and went to work, without eye protection and with much bare skin. While the stripper was doing its work Cara also got started on her caulking project, meaning we couldn't use the sink, shower or tub in the main floor bathroom. Well, I finished planting my little vine and went to work on finishing my usual weekend task of paying bills - yuck! I was also starting to feel sick with what would be a nasty 24 hour bug. A few hours later it was time to make dinner, which on Sunday nights is Maxwell & Zara's job (with some help from dad). They decided to make spaghetti so we got to work - opening tomato cans, stirring, testing spices to see what they thought would be good. Their spice choices are often quite interesting, on this night they decided the sauce needed more nutmeg than oregano. They also both tried an ever so tiny bit of habañero just to see how spicy it really was. 6 glasses of water, milk and rice milk later they decided there would be no habañero in their sauce. Meanwhile, outside Cara had raised up the tabletop onto two sawhorses to make the stripping easier and Alora had started helping her because it looked like so much fun. Dinner was delicious, with Zara making many jokes trying to trick her sisters and her mom into thinking they had added things like habañero to the sauce. Then Cara got back to work stripping as the kids ran around the yard. Maxwell was very interested in what his mom was doing right at his eye level and she had to keep shooing him away. You can probably see where the arc of the story is going by now ... Cara sets Alora up to spray on the next coat of stripper while she goes inside to caulk. Maxwell gets too close and Alora doesn't realize it. Maxwell comes in a few minutes later with a bloody nose. It's not bad so Cara helps him with a tissue. Then he starts screaming that his eye hurts, so I run outside to check the warning labels on these chemicals the upshot being, getting on your skin or in your eyes is very bad. Cara is comforting him on the couch trying to put a little saline solution in his eyes and I decide we need to take more drastic measures. Maxwell is screaming and doesn't want anyone to touch him at all, much less flush his eye with water. So while I held him down on the counter with his head over the sink, Cara flushed his eye with the spray hose. After about 10 minutes or so his eye was feeling better and he had calmed down enough that I could call poison control while Cara continued flushing. They said to head out to the ER, so I wrapped him up in a towel and Cara took him while I saw to it that the other children got showered down in Alora & Brittan's bathroom. By this point I am running a fever and feeling like you-know-what. Zara was asleep in bed when Cara & Maxwell returned from the ER. Turns out our eye-flushing had done the trick - when they tested his eye pH it was perfectly normal. Maxwell showed me his fancy hospital bracelet and told me the tale while enjoying a treat for being so good. Then Cara put the three big kids to bed while I headed for bed myself, hoping to feel better in the morning...

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Here are some pictures from our Easter Egg Hunt this morning!

April 2nd, 2010 - The other day when entertaining I went down to my cellar to pull out a prized bottle which I'd been saving for just such an occasion. However, when I pulled the foil off the top I discovered to my horror that the glass had cracked around the cork. When I corkscrewed the bottle the glass shattered all the way around the top, dropping little shards down into the bottle. Was this treasure of mine now ruined? Read more at TheWineRater.com . . .

A couple years ago I rickrolled ye, my blog readers, for jest on April Fools Day by saying that Cara had lost her job. Thus it is with a deep sense of irony that I inform you today was my last official day at Experian. They actually let me go yesterday morning, but made today the official day so my health benefits would continue through the month of April. There's more I'd like to write here, but I'll err on the side of caution with regard the confidentiality agreement I signed to get some benefits beyond my due severance. So now my jobhunt begins - in the bar to the left directly under Buzz are links to my resume and CV. My only constraint is that Cara will not finish her degree at UNL until May 2011.