I know this isn't a real blog post, but...

...go read this article on Slate. I think it's funny:

http://www.slate.com/id/2234019/

Hornucopia 2009...planning!

Hornucopia 2009

Ok, here is the much-requested blog post, so there is easier discussion about activities and food. I'll keep the list of activities over on the right and add one for food, just to keep it simple. If you want anything added to the list, then comment on this post and I'll add it to the list on the right.

Here are the (constructive) comments that we have had so far:

From Mom:
we were thinking of everyone on their own for breakfast (cereal, toast, juice and cream chipped beef once)....

for sunday we r thinking about our holiday meal....mimi does the turkey and gravy ......julie and tony do sweet potatoes......jessica is doing dressing (can i bake the corn bread ahead of time and freeze ???) and mark can play the music - flutes or does he have a favorite food to prepare...pa is to do pie(s)........jenny mashed potatoes (instant?) and does jeff want to do his green bean casserole or be part of the mashed potatoes or the gravy.....whatever any one wants to do let us know and we will get the ingredients for their project....

the main meal of the day would be out while we r doing an outing.........dinner would be a free for all..........any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated......

From Jenny:
perhaps we could plan for 1 outing and 1 inning for each day. and then add an extra activity as time, energy and motivation permits.

For example:
student ice cream + dome building (plus rec center swimming)
botanical garden hike + bagel making
zoo + coin games
bigger hiking + ice cream ball

or we could write each activity on a note card, categorize them as "inning", "outing", "big outing" (put a symbol in the top corner to indicate), tape them to a board and then arrange them for each day. we could also weight them for '5 - must do' or '1 - if time permits' (put a different ranking in the other corner).

then we can have a family meeting each evening to figure out the night before what we want to do the next day. posting the cards also allows everyone to see and know what's coming so they can plan accordingly. (but no fair moving things around when no one is looking!!)

if you want to participate, you get yourself ready. if you want to sit out an activity, go hide.

and as far as food...i like the idea of breakfast on our own, since everyone gets up at different times. that will keep it simple. we can make a note card for the one cream chip beef morning and put it on "the board"!! oh, and make a note card for the turkey dinner too! :) then we'll have to plan for an ACTIVE activity (ie. hiking) for that day!

yes, put us down for potatoes and green bean casserole. i don't mind doing real potatoes (and maybe instant as a backup). if you want to buy supplies ahead of time, let me know and we'll let you know what we need, or jeff and i can go to the store while we're there.

regarding lunches/dinners -- again that can be planned based on the day's activities. more note cards for the restaurants that we want to make sure we hit!!

From Jessica:
I am definitely all for agile-ly programming our family get together. I too love note cards, though my devotion has been inspired through EFL teaching rather than computer science. Nothing like shifting cut up pieces of paper around to get a group going. And in fact, there is precedence within the Horn family generally - you might remember that we've done this at least once before that's been recorded for posterity (admittedly on a much smaller scale):




Do we need to start writing the note cards before we get there? Can the Clemson folks get a board together before everyone arrives?

Five years!

This year, on August 26, Mark and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. The date fell on a Wednesday and we both had stuff to do, so we didn't really celebrate on the day, but instead went to London on Sunday.

The fifth anniversary "theme" is wood, so we'll probably get a new set of wooden rings, since we never wear the ones we have because they're what we got married with and we're so worried about losing them or having them dry out. We are thinking of getting a set that we actually can wear, which I guess is silly, but that's OK.

Since we got married on a boat (of sorts) we also tend to have that as an ongoing theme for our anniversary celebrations (not that you need a theme, it's just what we have going on). We went on a boat ride in Paris for our first anniversary, so this time we went for a boat ride on the Thames.

We didn't do much else while we were in London, just walked around a lot, made our obligatory visit to Muji, went to the Camden markets and ate. It was exciting though because we were able to walk to our local train station to take the train in, so we didn't have to get in a car all day, which was nice!

On the train:


Camden market:


We had burritos for lunch at the market - they were quite good!


This was our boat - not very fancy, but it did float, which is pretty much all that matters.


You can just see the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben in the background:


And here are some shots of Mark looking left and right with various landmarks in the background:






HMS Belfast:




Paddington Station is one of the only places we can easily get Krispy Kreme doughnuts, so of course that was the best way to end the day!

Booker 2009 update - part one.

I'm fully in the throes of Booker-mania. As you can see (if one cared to see, I should probably say) from the "last five books I've read" page element on the right hand side, I've now read five out of the thirteen books on the Booker longlist.

I'm moving at a pretty good clip, in no small part due to my (if I do say so myself) incredibly clever technique that I thought up this year of listening to one book on CD while driving and reading another one at night at home. I do a decent bit of driving for work so I've already "read" two books that way. And it does give an interesting perspective on the books, especially since the two that I ended up "reading" that way (due purely to their availability from the library rather than anything else) had at their core an interest in an individual's perspective and how memories/stories/events are filtered by one's own experience/physical and mental states/etc.

Anyway, last night Mark asked for an update about which ones (if any) that I like so far, and if I had to pick a winner (my own choice of winner rather than which I think would win considering the way Booker prizes have gone recently) which it would be. So I thought I would share. I won't go into the (long, boring) detail that I did last night with Mark, and just say that to my surprise, The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, is currently the front runner in the What-Jessica-Thinks-About-Booker-Books stakes. It's a story of a man suffering from Alzheimer's (I know, really upbeat) and there are some things that I don't like about it, but so far it's the one that I think has a good combination of interesting content from an interesting angle pretty well told.

I don't know enough (or anything, really) about Alzheimer's to tell if she's accurately representing what it is most likely to be like to experience the disease, either as the sufferer or the loved one having to live with the sufferer, but it seems real to me, and it's the first time I've thought about what it must be like. It may not be the first time someone's tried to do it, and her structure may not be unique, but although I didn't enjoy it and there were some bits that I disagreed with, I thought it was pretty good.

I'm already on to the next one - about a journalist in Africa - and I've been saving all the ones that I'm really interested in (Coetzee, The Children's Book, the one from the point of view of a chimp, the popular one about Henry VIII) in case I start to slow down...

Another reason for Dad to come visit.

We went for a walk on the seafront tonight after dinner and came face to face with Weston Bike Night.

Apparently, it's organized by the Royal British Legion Riders division as a regular fundraiser. There were A LOT of bikes and all kinds, not just cruisers or just sports bikes and lots of people. Lots of different models and ages - same goes for the motorbikes, too.

I just looked at the web site and tonight was the "Japanese Power" theme night - but I guess all bikes can still come, it's just some get special attention.

Moving in.

It's been two weeks since we've moved all of our stuff into the new place in Weston-Super-Mare and we're now pretty settled. Last weekend we cleaned the old flat and handed over the keys, so we are officially fully and only in our new flat.

We still have stuff to do (like hang pictures) and some rooms have empty gaps where we will place new furniture that we have yet to buy, but everything we do have is pretty much unpacked.

We ended up not taking a lot of photos of the moving process. I've already posted the pictures of the flat right when we got the keys, but we mostly shot videos, which Mark has edited down.

This first half of the video contains some highlights from the packing process (starting with a demonstration of my "whittling down" method and the first time we saw the flat after getting the keys (so the second time we had seen the place). The second half was taken on the main moving in day and tries to give you that "you are there" feeling. (By the way, for those who haven't seen him before, that's Mark's Dad helping us out on the main moving day).



We ended up doing a total of 3 trips with the big van we rented and 3 trips with Noddy (our Honda CR-V). Mark and I had a bet about how many trips we would have to make with the van - we were both way off (Mark said 7, I said 5), but not surprisingly, if you add up the total number of trips we had to make with both van and car, it's bang in the middle of our two guesses.

So far after two weeks, some things we have learned:
-yes, as Jenny predicted, the kitchen sink is a bit splashy, but manageable
-we love the dishwasher (it's been so long I had forgotten how great they are)
-the neighbors are more noticeable and bit louder than the ones we had before (and we have more of them now), but the loud music we heard the first night we moved in hasn't been repeated, so we think that was a party and not a regular occurrence...and we've already started to tune out the other normal noises
-Poppadoms is an Indian food place that does delivery and it is very good
-having separate bathrooms is fantastic, especially in the mornings when we're both leaving for work at about the same time
-we seem to own a lot of books
-we can walk to the train station in 10 minutes
-we can walk to the sea front in about five minutes

So far, so good!