You know you're married to a biologist when Family Home Evening boils down to "Hey, let's go see a giant stinky plant!"

Ok, so it's a plant that only blooms about once every ten years, for about two days total, but still!

For FHE tonight, we played a session of kid-friendly D&D. Leach was our DM, and put together a fun (short) session for our two oldest and me to play. Wiggles (age 5) was a dragon named Smaug (why yes, we have been reading The Hobbit to her lately), Nudge (age 2.5) was a dragon named Green Dragon, and I was their human minion.

Fun is convincing your five-year-old that she can actually make stuff up for the game and play pretend. More fun is seeing your two girls really get into things in the fight with the dwarf who stole our treasure, by having their dragons growl and bite him when it was their turn.

And funny is your two-year-old breeaking down in tears at the beginning of the session when she hears that all our shiny treasure was stolen in the first place. We managed to get her calmed down by telling her that she needed to help us go find the treasure and rescue it.

Poke (age 5 months), meanwhile, just wiggled on the floor and chewed on a plastic fish. Good times.

Kogarashi is suffering from the Egyptian Flu.

That is all.

Update: Yes, really.

(Would've updated yesterday, but I got distracted listening to Conference and pushing myself to finish a picture for business cards.)

Wiggles loves playing with Daddy's minis. Included in his minis box are a set of small glass chess pawns to act as "catch-all" minis.

This week, Daddy and Mommy realized the pawns look an awful lot like very simple Daleks. We both joked by scooting one around and saying, "Exterminate!"

Wiggles started parroting the "Exterminate!" for the next few days.

Tonight, we joked about dressing Wiggles up as a Dalek for Halloween. She didn't know what they were, so Mommy found a quick clip on Youtube of one saying "Exterminate!" (and, well, exterminating people).

Wiggles decided now that they're bad guys and scary and asked us how to keep them from scaring her in her dreams. So Mommy dutifully found a Youtube clip of the Doctor (specifically Eleven's boast at the end of "The Eleventh Hour," where you see the faces of the previous ten). Wiggles watched a few more clips of the Doctor before heading off to bed with the reassurance that if the Daleks show up in her dreams, the Doctor will be right behind to chase them away.

What is it with Help Desks (any company) and not reading a trouble ticket thorougly the first time through?

( Examples Below! )

It must be nice to work in a profession where you don't actually have to read what you're trying to solve.

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line (unless the first line reveals the song title) from the first 30 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both artist and song title correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is cheating.
Step 5: If you like the game, post your own!

(Forgive the lack of punctuation in the Japanese. I had to Google the romanizations.)
( Songage )

While I was doing jacknifes in Wii Fit today, Nudge crawled up onto my chest and started to nod off.

It was naptime, and she'd been up since 5:30 am.



If all else goes well (read: I'm not so tired that I take a nap after church), I'll be doing a catch-up newspost on Sunday.

1.) Hey, is anyone going to CONduit in SLC this year? I'm planning on sending some of my painted fans in to the art show.

Would anyone who's going be interested in playing agent for me? Or at least being there to hang stuff?


2.) shadrach_anki and I will be going to Anime Boston this year, the first weekend of April. Wish us luck!


3.) I'm hoping to actually get an Alley table at Another Anime Con in Nashua, NH, this year. It's not until October, but so far they haven't been very on-the-ball with getting the new information up on the website, let alone providing enough warning about the sign-ups going live. Go figure.


4.) ConnectiCon is hereby struck from my list of cons to go to in New England, as of this past year. Big fiasco. Huge. More evidence that this state hates people.



In other news, I'm a huge slacker. Oh, wait, that's not news. Anyway, one of these days I'll catch up on backlogged newsposts.

In the meantime, I'm mentally formulating a ranty LJ post about one of the two (count 'em, two) novels in existence that I stopped reading partway through. That'll be up...sometime. Maybe Sunday. Maybe not.

Dear Internets,

Bite me.

No love,
Me.


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Found yet another site to add to the Firefox-Only list, thanks to a security hijack via ads. This time it was "XP Internet Security 2010" messing with me.

Lots of pop-ups claiming I have a "stealth infection" and a "security breach." No kidding, Sherlock. That'd be you. It pops up a window claiming "Firewall Alerts" whenever I open a browser. Problem: Windows Security Alerts (legit; part of Windows) politely informed me that there is no longer a firewall active on my computer, so nice try Evil Program. IS2010 also completely blocks IE from doing anything, but seems to have forgotten about Firefox. Sucks to be you, Evil Program.

This one appears to be a little more malicious than the previous attack I had about two weeks ago. That one still let me use IE. This one disabled it, and the files it wants to delete as trojans and viruses are actually legit and crucial Windows files. Plus, like all the others, it wants me to pay to register the software. No can do, Evil Program. No can do.

Malwarebytes is currently chewing on its head. Yay for BleepingComputer.

I had a long day today, so after getting Wiggles down for a nap and feeding Nudge to placate her, I decided to unwind with some Brawl after getting dinner in the oven. I fired up All-Star Mode, which is where you fight against every single character in succession, with a break on the rest stage between each enemy team. I'm currently in the process of clearing All-Star with every character to complete one of the in-game Challenges, and thus planned to play through a few times. I also like to play with the wiimote and nunchuck, set to do a smash attack (very strong attack) whenever I shake the wiimote.

I was on my second play-through and was fighting the Mario team. I had just KO'd Bowser and had dealt a good amount of damage to Mario, with Peach and Luigi waiting in the wings, when the oven timer went off. Nudge was all the way across the room playing with some toys on one of the shelves, so without thinking I paused the game and set the wiimote down on the floor. I figured I'd only be gone two minutes tops, and Nudge was fairly well distracted. I ran to the kitchen and pulled the foil off of the two casserole dishes, then reset the timer and headed back to the living room.

I found Nudge with the wiimote where I'd left it, happily swinging it around. On the screen, my character was doing smash attacks in the rest stage, with the Mario team trophies in the background to show that they'd been defeated. My character only had an additional 60% damage to show for it (barely got hit, basically).

Let me rephrase that. My eight-month-old baby managed to defeat three characters in Smash Bros. Brawl just by shaking the wiimote.

Next thing you know, she'll be wiping the floor at Halo.