Daley Ponderings

My friends Bonnie and Liz participated in the last Challenge, and quite intimidated me by doing so.  But I put OrgJunkie's blog in my reader (one of only three strangers' blogs I read) and have slowly been gaining confidence.  The real enouragement I give myself is to note what... (More)

Jonathan loves to create meals and side dishes.  On 10/2, he made a vegetable salad that we have recreated several times.  Carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, onions, with one lemon's worth of juice as a dressing.  Simple and delicious. 10/12 - I was in the basement... (More)

Jon asked me to post this essay written by our friend. Life as an Immigrant By Marc Brands From 1993 to 1996 I did an apprenticeship in Electronics Engineering at Siemens. In Switzerland apprenticeships are very common, students attend about 16 hours of classes... (More)

Here is a brief review of Organizing for your Brain Type by Lanna Nakone .  This is a neat book that gives some explanation about why some people have trouble keeping things organized and why some have trouble understanding those others. She puts people in four different groups,... (More)

In college, our friend Volus used to say that it was always sunny on Sunday.  Even if it was gray in the morning, the sun was out by the time church was over.  I found that he was right for the vast majority of the time.  This weekend was no exception.  Saturday was rainy,... (More)

Lower left.  It's been bothering him for quite a while.  Glad it's through and I hope the matching one comes quickly so we can have a rest for a while.   Noah has made up his own game that's kind of like Bocce ball.  He holds one ball in his hand, and then uses it... (More)

Note to self: when going to bed, and walking past a heating vent that is blowing cold air, double check that the furnace is working.  52 degrees in the house this morning, and it isn't that cold out (27 or so).The fan is on constantly, but the ignition isn't turning on, so it seems... (More)

I'll begin by assuaging grandparental fears: no one is hurt!  And now I'll start from the beginning.  As mentioned elsewhere, it is extremely cold out today.  We forgot to open the cupboard under the kitchen sink and thus the pipes froze.   I put our space heater on... (More)

Jonathan likes to eat turnips (just cut up and boiled) - he was exclaiming over them so much I thought it should go into the blog.   He counted backwards from five the other day, on his own. He said, "That's Soot-su's address."   This morning he drew a "6"... (More)

I heard about bump keys recently, and had a little time to play around this morning.  I read an article about them, and watched a youtube video , and away I went.  It took about 15 minutes to hand-file a key.  And then another 20 minutes to try the "pull-back"... (More)

Somehow the appliance spies informed our dryer that we were at Sears looking at a new dryer.  Heather wanted to get a new one, since this one doesn't have a low heat setting - but the dryer has worked fine for years. The next time we used our dryer, it refused to start a couple times,... (More)

Jon took us on a small family vacation this weekend to a bed and breakfast on a farm .It was fun, despite cold precipitation and wind for most of the weekend. After breakfast is farm chore time - pumping water, feeding goats, sheep, guinea hens, chickens, and gathering eggs. Farmer Dale tells... (More)

Last weekend, Heather was sick with mastitis, which meant she just wanted to lie in bed all day with flu-like symptoms. It actually started on Friday morning, and she did get progressively better throughout the day, but still decided to stay home from care group that night. I was planning on... (More)

Wednesday, June 28. 2:30am. My water broke! That was different. I woke Jon up with the news and he called the midwife while I went up to go to the bathroom and to wake up my parents. The midwife said it could be a long time before labor gets going after water breaking, but that we could... (More)

This is the hardest one I have ever worked on. [ Update 10/24/2006: thanks to you all reading this post and posting other links, I have since found more interesting ones -- look through the comments - the one posted on October 9th appears to be pretty hard, though maybe I just made a mistake on... (More)