The typewriter turned out to be broken; the carriage does NOT advance when a key is struck – you have to keep hand pressure on the thing to move it with each key.  Everything else is in good shape.

Anyone who has a good idea of where in the Chicago area I might get this thing look at / fixed and back into service?

More in a later post.  She’s still fascinated with the typer and using it constantly – WITH the hand work, but jeeze, I don’t want her to be stuck doing that.

Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the  northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the distribution and opening of the presents).  This is the first year that we pretty much dispensed with Santa as a gift giver, and so there were only a couple of presents to distribute under the tree at home the next morning…

Usually, Connie (my MIL) would stay overnight at her sister’s house and leave there in the morning to go see Susan’s brother Doug and his family over the Christmas-New Year’s period, but there’s a terrible blizzard in South Dakota this year – high winds and over two feet of snow – so she’s staying here until the weather clears up, probably till Monday.

The big presents had already been handed out for the household earlier in the month; the house got a new HD TV setup in the living room.   Susan had needed a new pair of boots early, so the Ugg boots I bought for her went out a few days earlier – it was a necessity, but I didn’t like passing out presents early.  (She also got a very nice pair of lambskin mittens, via her mom, and a couple of other things from me.)

I’ve gotten over whatever the heck I was dealing with, but Susan and Mere have been miserable for the last few weeks on and off with what looks to be an allergy to the Christmas Tree.  Susan thinks it’s the tree as allergen, her mom thinks it’s something that was sprayed on it, but in either case, the thing’s presence is messing up half the household in unpleasant ways.  Since we had problems last year and this, we VERY reluctantly will be investing in an artificial Christmas tree for next year.

…from the Dayton Daily News (my hometown paper) about the twins.  This was a surprise, really, and will beyond any doubt be the end of the stories.

Part of it is that it’s all been said – there’s not a lot more to add.

Another thing that was going by the wayside recently was any advance planning for the future.  At this point, it’s starting to rev up again…I have two memberships purchased for me and Mere at Capricon and a room reserved; now to make sure that the $$ is there at the time.

On Monday, I’m going to go into the city for the first time in a while for the fun of it (rather than IVIG treatments at Northwestern Hospital monthly) with Meredith for the Do-It-Yourself Messiah.   3,500 people all singing their hearts out, with the audience as the chorus to a full orchestra and soloists, and the audience arranged as Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone, etc.   Mere will sit with me in the Baritone section, unless we run into friends.

In a surprise move, we’re having another couple over for Christmas Day to have dinner and play games and the like; the guy is agnostic, and the lady is Jewish, so Christmas is sort of a extra-day-off for them, and they’re a LOT of fun to be around.   She’s also a very good foodie and cook, and she’s bringing stuff to complement the Roast Turkey…

Still have no idea what we will do with no New Year’s Eve party.  No Weird Food Party this year.

This year we decided to buy a big household present for everyone rather than a lot of stuff (of course, Mere still makes out, but…) so the big add was a combination of an HD TV for the living room, and a  HD TiVo and a Blu-Ray player to go with it.

This is changing the ‘viewing experience’ quite a bit here.

First, there’s remembering where the heck the HD channels are….I just finished a listing of the channels that we watch and how to find them, with a note on there as to which is HD and which isn’t – and if there’s a HD channel, that’s the one in the listing.

Without the listing, it’s VERY confusing.

The HD TiVo really has much more limited space than the old living room one, and while TiVo touts a ‘DVR Extender’ eSATA hard drive that you can attach to the thing with a Terabyte of space, the things are out of stock and unavailable – apparently Western Digital ran into serious quality problems with the thing and has ‘temporarily’ stopped production.  For now, anyway.

That means no pile of stuff on the TiVo that we haven’t gotten around to, and that we’re forced to watch and delete on a real thorough basis.

The HD TiVo does have one very nice feature – it records in HD, of course, but it also can pull down streaming stuff for us from my Netflix account.  Some of their movies are set up that way, and we’ve discontinued our movie channels as of yesterday – the Netflix stuff (either rental or streaming) is much more useful and bang-for-the-buck.

It also is able to access YouTube, for what that’s worth.

The quality of the HD images and of the Blu-Ray player is rather good, and we like that part a lot.  Both the TiVo and the Blu-Ray are hooked up to the house Ethernet system, and can pull things off it from the Internet or be updated on firmware that way.   We only have two Blu-Ray discs at present – my gifts via Sinterklaas – UP and NATIONAL TREASURE, but we haven’t gotten through either yet.  In the future, I’ll probably buy either combo packages (DVD, Blu-Ray and ‘downloadable to MP3 Video player’) or Blu-Ray for the future.

Actually, our purchases of DVDs was dropping considerably.  Ditto books.  Susan and her Mom are on a Sara Paretsky binge at the library, going through the entire oeuvre, and I’m too busy to do much reading for pleasure (and have a huge backlog in any event) right now.

Dayton Daily News article; the reporter’s adopted child from China was first raised by a foster family in China, who the child hadn’t forgotten -and who hadn’t forgotten her.  Great story about how the foster family and the adoptive family got in contact…

Considering the whole thing with the twins and sisterfar, this hits home with me.

Meredith is having her last day of school for the year today, and we’re just as happy for her to have some serious down-time.  She has been getting really stressed over various things – it’s coming out right now over the tons of homework these kids are assigned – and I’m stating to get really serious rebellion over homework from her; fits of wild temper and the like that I rarely see.

Part of it is that she’s concerned over me, and part is due to a close pal of hers that has a tumor that has caused a lot of trouble for her; it’s in a terribly tricky spot, and the docs have the poor kid on chemo, and it’s caused the kid a lot of obvious trouble.  It’s a collection of other stuff too that is putting the kettle on the boil for Mere…

As for me, this is the longest for a while that I have kept out of the hospital.  Knock on wood.  I keep very close tabs on things, and note that when my insomnia kicks up for whatever reason (generally when I’m upset about something or when my body is giving me some other trouble, like sinuses) it adds to my troubles about keeping my system in fair shape immunity-wise.

I spend a lot of time with paperwork munching these days; pretty much most of my free time, so to speak.  Tons of medical paperwork, claims and the like, bills and the like, and so on.  It’s easy to get stuck behind the tidal wave, and you can’t or problems with it will blow up.   If you’re looking for why-Jim-hasn’t-been-posting, that’s a big part of it.    Also working with Mere two-falls-out-of-three on her homework, which can easily run from the time I quit work to eight in the evening, with a break for dinner.

http://bit.ly/6bT2Os  (from the Newseum, possibly not good after tonight – front page of today’s Daily Herald)

IL_DH (pdf of the page – big center layout of photos of the girls)
Click twice on the graphic to get it full sixzed
 

The local suburban daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, is reprinting the Newsweek story on the twins with different photos:

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=342760

http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1
The Power of Two:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098
Photo gallery of the kids, etc.  The Intro picture is particularly stunning.

This has been in the works since spring.  Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots.  The interviews mostly were around Duckcon.

There are errors.  They goofed on the date Meredith Grace was found (a year earlier), and a few little things.  (For instance, a photo that was supposed to be of our house in the Chicago suburbs is really of the other family’s home in suburban Birmingham.  Our house is not nearly as new, etc.)

But it’s written beautifully, and we are very happy with it.   That’s it for twin stories in the news until they’re grown up and can talk on their own…if that ever happens!  Enjoy the article and the photos!

Meredith’s 10th birthday (and that of her twin sister Mer, of course) is today, and we are having a series of birthday parties for her; the first included Susan’s aunt(s) at their home in Elgin over the weekend, and the next is a just-the-household one tonight, and then this Saturday night, Mere has five pals over for a sleepover in the downstairs library.

My big thing this week is to whip the library area into shape, odd-stuff-wise, before the kids get here on Saturday.  I’m also awaiting the household Christmas present; instead of getting each other a lot of stuff, we’re pooling resources and replacing our main TV with a HDTV.  The delivery is supposed to be today, and so I have to be attentive to the doorbell – did I mention that our upstairs ringer for the doorbell doesn’t work?  I have to rely on good ears and our ever-vigilant dogs who usually raise hell and selected sections of purgatory if they see someone coming to the house.

One big thing in the cleanup process is in rendering out a ton of magazines that have been sitting in piles in the basement; stacked up on shelves, but occupying a lot of space.  I’d love to keep a lot of them for photo reference stuff, but I’d imagine that if I did that, I’d never get to them.  So I riff through them and see if there’s anything article-wise of value, and then toss the rest after I’ve quickly taken out the article. This results in about 98% of the magazine(s) going into the recycling bin.

Also a lot of other follow-up stuff;

• getting a special present for Mere (she has been dying for a typewriter, and I have a good lead for one in excellent condition in the city, and no, I hate typewriters; my frustrations with them in college and law school is what got me into computers in the first place).
• getting dark chocolate letters made up (SMJC) for Sinterklaas’ visit this weekend.
• getting cakes for Mere’s two birthday celebrations; I need to double-check with Mere and Susan about if cupcakes are needed for the sleepover club this weekend
• and many other odds and ends of the same sort.

Photo courtesy of Sue Combs, who took it a few weeks ago on her trip to Chicago.  Thanks, Sue!

…cross fingers and all that.    My earlier post on this talked about dealing with a new set of docs at Edward Hospital, and so far, it’s paying off.  I’m on long-range doses of penicillin for the near future, about 2g a day (broken into four pills) and have to wash myself down with Hibiclens (surgical scrub soap) daily or so.  The stuff does work well, and we’ve also found that using it on Dot the dog seems to help a lot in controlling HER skin infections.

Mere has been dopy and tired and seemingly on and off sick over the last week or so; nothing dramatic, just a medium simmer of feel-like-crap and tired that has been miserable for her (and us, since she’s easily honked off when she’s sick and gets miserable to deal with, oh joy).  Missed three days of school over a LONG weekend last weekend.  We’re unsure exactly what’s going on there, as various tests at the doctor’s came up with nothing.

Both she and I are scheduled this next weekend to get H1N1 shots from the local county health department; we’re both considered high-risk.   Our usual doctor’s office said that they didn’t have any H1N1 and didn’t know when they’d get it in.  (And no, I’m not about to fool with live-virus stuff, I’m not nuts.)

She also got a new set of glasses – she had gone from a 1.75 to a 2.75, and hadn’t told us until very recently that she was having problems! Which, of course, is not cheap – our insurance is pretty good, but it really doesn’t cover much in the vision and dental direction.

Needless to say, Mere being sick has played a lot of heck with our schedules.   There’s much more to tell, in another post or seven….

Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town.

Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)

Meredith came home early today sick to her stomach and running just under 100F; the H1N1 still isn’t available out here except a trickle with the public health departments, and there’s been some deaths with teenagers (usual serious swine flu symptoms).   I can’t take the live virus nose spray, and that’s all that’s available.

Susan may have some trouble coming home on the commuter trains; there’s contradictory stories about the cops stopping trains halfway between here and downtown.

This is the article about the house fire on the block; people were stupid about an unattended grease fire on the stove.

As noted elsewhere, Mere is downsizing her Stuff; the toughest part was getting her to semi-methodically go through her books.  As House Librarian, I was the one sitting down with her; she got rid of quite a few books, about 2/3ds picture books.  In some cases (very few) I hung onto some stuff *I* wanted to keep around, like the Golden Book science stuff (which actually is a good basic handbook on this and that) and some stuff she hadn’t gotten into yet.  I do know that practically all of the newer books I’ve gotten her went into the ‘I didn’t look at this yet so I have no attachment to it here it is Dad’ pile.  I’ll hang onto them for right now, but she’s going to have a really hard time getting me to buy books for her on a whim (mine or hers) for quite a while.

I’m Mere’s primary homework person; helps that it’s mostly stuff that I’m great at (english, math, social studies).  I take a lot of care with her on it to (1) encourage her to think, and (2) encourage her to look at things creatively and logically.

My dad helped me with math as a kid – but at that time, they were switching to the ‘New Math’, and while he was very good with math, the whole point of view of ‘New Math’ was one that he had serious trouble wrapping his head around.  For literature and history, it was my mom – she got a great love of that and language from her big brother, and passed it on to me.

They had major weak spots; mom was hopeless at math, and dad was hopeless at anything non-1950s tech and not math (didn’t have the education for it).  And at a certain point, I so zoomed past their levels – and I had been self-educating since I was 3 to a greater or lesser extent…so, it would have been nice to get real long term help, but…

This sort of thing may happen to you if you’re a lot less involved with the process (somewhat NSFW in language) – and besides that – why have kids if you’re not willing to put forth the effort?

The family has taken up a new and very nice practice; having family reading times – not scheduled as such, but so everyone has something good to read and is in the living room together reading.  It works pretty well, I think, and is an improvement over endless oh-I-can’t-watch-that debates about TV stuff.

Tastes run like this for entertainment:

MERE: Could watch the Disney Channel endlessly as mind candy until her brains ran out her ears.    For fun reading, she likes fantasy stuff; I try to steer her to less trashy authors, though fantasy isn’t really my bag.   Some historical novels, some slice-of-life kids’ books.  She reads at a whole lot higher level than her age group, and she’s in AT math and English.  Right now, she’s reading the third HARRY POTTER book and loudly complaining about how much got left out in the movie.   Wait till she reads the rest…

SUSAN: Her reading list has involved a lot of sub-sub-genre stuff – mostly odd mystery books based around dogs or knitting, etc.  She’s now into two new-to-her Sara Paretsky books – BLEEDING KANSAS  (which is modern day) and GHOST COUNTRY.  She will read alternate history stuff, but she shares my distaste for stuff that masquerades as AH, such as CC Finlay’s latest stuff.  She accidentally picked up one of those from my donate-to-the-public-libray pile, and did a WTF. 

She’s also taken to using her MP3 player a lot for audio books, especially when in the car or commuting.

CONNIE: Really good historical novels, history works that are very readable and some biographies; she recently has been reading Ted Kennedy’s TRUE COMPASS cover to cover as fast as she can.   Occasionally, something new-agey inspirational.  One hole: she has a strong aversion to Roman history; I’ve tried to get her to read Falco mysteries or McCullough’s First Men in Rome series, and she won’t hear of it.  Not sure why.

ME: Alternate history (because I have to read everything in the genre, pretty much, for the Sidewise Awards).  Historical novels and histories.   he occasional mystery or fantasy book; THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA was my most recent hot-stuff fantasy, and my favorite book of all time is LORD OF THE RINGS.  (I like epic fantasy stuff, and not the stuff that is too weird (GORMENGHAST) or watered down (Shannara series, Thomas Covenant) to deal with.  Throw in science stuff of all sorts; my to-read pile includes a ton of research on climate and history and whatnot for the ice age and since.