Parentheticals

Alison assigned the kids a new project for school this week. They've been listening to the Wings of Fire novels as audiobooks and playing dragons, so for biology, they are each supposed to design a real-life dragon. They have to explain their dragon's skeletal, muscular, nervous, and digestive system, and how it would be classified scientifically. Rea also has to talk about how her dragon develops from an egg and how the cells differentiate to make those different systems. It has been fairly popular; the kids are enjoying looking at books of how bodies are put together and thinking about what their dragons are like. Rea wants to make a swimming octopus dragon, Timmy an ice dragon that's eaten by polar bears and is adapted to protect itself, and Sara a crocodile dragon. Alison is working hard on getting better at helping the kids learn to design their own projects for learning; the dragon one is a fun start, and she hopes it will help them learn how to create their own proje...

This week in retrospect: Rea decided that she won't go to bed without crying. We thought it was the darkness, but now I think that it must be the fact that Sara doesn't go to bed at the same time as her. We got her a night light, but it didn't help. She also decided that she wanted to play hide and seek with Jesus on Sunday. It was pretty cute. We picked grapes and made grape juice on Saturday. We carved pumpkins on Monday. We also made some pizzas: eggplant parmesan pizza, and bacon sausage five cheese pizza. Both were good. My bike is finally working again. It had gotten so many goat heads I thought it was dead for good. Hopefully these new tire liners will work. My card game is still moving along (however slowly). I have some guys online testing it, and two now have said that they have played games. No-one has written a summary of their thoughts yet. I am also thinking of doing NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month) this year ...

Whatever that means. This weekend I waxed the gouda that we made a few weeks ago. We went to a farmers market at Gardner Village on Saturday. We bought some beets and some cherries. The cherries are pretty good. We also lit off a few more fireworks this weekend - Andrea is starting to like them more. Yesterday we made pizza - pineapple mushroom pepperoni pizza and pineapple mushroom sausage pizza. We added 1/7 white flour this time, and the crust came out way more fluffy than it usually does (not necessarily a good thing - I like the pizza for the toppings usually (but not a bad thing either, it is not like thicker crusted pizza is horrible, it is just different)). I have wanted to reread the Chronicles of Amber since yesterday. I will probably give in and read them some time soon. Perhaps when we are stuck in the hospital after Alison has the baby. I want to reread them because someone commented on the internet that they thought that Corwin was the villain of the s...

This week I started up a genetic algorithm that is supposed to learn how to play dominion well. As of yet I haven't even got to the part where it could even play a game of dominion, however I hope to do that soon. This last weekend we cleaned up, and then fired up the grill that Alison found for me. We cooked (and burnt horribly) some hot dogs on Saturday, and also cooked up some pizzas with Sheila and Scott Sunday afternoon. Pizzas on the grill ended up being pretty good, though they were thicker than I would have liked. Sheila brought over some orange bell peppers that added a nice flavor, and we used some spicy pepperoni from Cys Market (which was great). One of the pizzas was curry flavored, one was a 4 meats pizza, one was veggie, and the other was a little of everything. Scott and I played some dominion. He defeated me by a large margin with a better deck the first time (He just had more golds than I did - it is not like we played that different a strategy), a...

Last week was an interesting one. I learned about a special deal that Artscow was offering that would allow me to print my cards up and see what they would look like (however they would all have identical backs, and that is not something that I really want) I considered that for a few days, but I think that I will hold off for a bit longer. I want to make sure that Ryan doesn't give me a lot of feedback that will change the game right after I get a printing made. I got to see Ryan on Saturday in between sessions of general conference (I loved Uchdorf's talks. They were both great). I dropped off a copy of the game with him (hopefully he gives some good feedback, and comes up with ways to simplify the game.) I played some games of Loot with various family members. It was fairly popular. I like the team aspect of it (4 vs 4 is super fun), but the randomness of the deal is a little annoying (there is the possibility of getting all merchant ships, and you can't ...

We went to the doctors this morning, and got to see some pictures of the baby. The technician says that it is going to be a girl. Looking at the images, I couldn't tell (but that is what they were trained to do, so I will have to trust them.) This weekend we ate two oyster mushrooms from our mushroom log. Alison says that mushrooms do not do much for her, but the flavor of these ones was so good that she liked them a lot. On Saturday we also went to the park and cut some grape vine clippings. We planted some in buckets in our house, and all the rest in the back yard. Hopefully they will grow well. The power company sent some guys out to cut our tree last year, and the tree is obviously dying. It's bark is falling off, and it didn't grow very many leaves last year. I think that we will have to cut off the tall branches, and inoculate the stump with more oyster mushrooms (just to be sure). At least we will then get to eat the tree even if we can'...

This morning I went to the SLC Library book sale. We got 3 bags of books for $11. That is a pretty good deal. This weekend we made another lb of cheese, and a double batch of granola. The granola is so good with Swee's yogurt, and 'ape jelly'. I eat it pretty much every day. We made faux curry pizza last night. The ingredients are: garlic bread, red sauce, cheddar, bacon, pork sausage, anaheim peppers, and curry powder. layer them like a pizza, and bake it (250 for a half hour, 'just like every thing else'). My secret gift for Swee's birthday is complete. Also, my D20 Modern SRD modifications for 42 Earths are sort of done. I need to add new psychic items, and search for errors. Here is the link to it. This weekend, we are going to be leaving for Becky's homecoming in California. It will be a week long trip, and will use up a lot of my vacation. Also, there are boxes of ~300 comic books at the local DI for $50 each. There are about 12 of them. I think that ...