Nerdy Suburban Mom

Before going to the plant to see my friends, we stopped by Lillian’s old preschool/daycare to see all her friends. This was one of the best stops of the whole trip; Lilly really loved this place, and she loved Miss Marta (the morning teacher/caretaker) so much that she hasn’t been able to talk to her on the phone without crying. Amazingly, she decided to be a little shy when we first came in, despite everybody making a huge fuss over her; the natural craziness of toddlers in an enclosed area soon kicked in, though, and they were all running around like there hadn’t been a four month absence.

Daddy helped out when it came time to dance to some Disney music (aka, Mousercise!)…

After that, Lillian got to eat lunch with everybody before we went to the plant. I seriously miss this school, it’s tons better than her new one… one of those finds that you’ll never be able to duplicate.

When we visited the Bedford plant, Lillian and Reuven came in to meet the engineers.  (At first Lillian was surprisingly reluctant.  I asked if she wanted to meet some engineers, and she thought, then said, “Mmmm… no.”  By the time we had met five people, she was begging to meet more people; she was quite disappointed when she’d met everybody.)

One of the ways they won her over was by giving her all sorts of stuff — earplugs, a Visteon lunchbox, 12″ of vacuum tubing, safety goggles (two pairs!), and plastic caps (industrial, not milk).  She amused herself by putting everything into the lunchbox, and later by creating something fairly advanced for a preschooler: a pressure chamber.

She stuck the vacuum tube and earplus into a cabinet in our hotel room, then placed a cap on the tubing.  Once that was constructed, she came over to ask for ingredients to make pressure, and I quote directly, in order…

• batteries (x4)
• salt
• butter
• eggs
• sausage
• DVD for “this show” (?)
• some pressure (!)
• and a little teeny kiss

Running a little late this year, we carved our jack-o-lantern on October 30. Lillian requested a combination of happy and scary (so it got two pointy fangs), and she also chose the mismatched eye shapes. Very cute overall!

For trick-or-treating, Lillian reused her witch costume from last year, and we added a new accessory: Black Cat familiar!

Total sewing time for the cat costume was maybe 8-12 hours. I think he outgrew it while wearing it, it was definitely not something to grow into! But I designed it from scratch (using existing clothes as a basis), so I’m pretty proud of it overall. There were little black mittens (paws) that went along with it, but he lost one while we were out so he’s not wearing them in the pictures.

I decided to try to track my non-gasoline-fueled transportation, and do a few calculations to see how much money (and gasoline!) I’ve saved.

Basically, I will only count trips that I would have had to make anyway, and typically would have uesd the car for. This includes trips to the grocery store (2.1 miles), picking up Lillian from daycare (5.8 miles), the library, the ice cream store, the good hamburger place, the good pizza place… lucky a lot of these are just over a mile from the house, which means I’m not saving a whole lot of gas, but it is an easy trip and therefore a much bigger incentive to bike instead of drive!

It also includes trips made by Brett borrowing my bike. Maybe he’ll get his own eventually — this would be particularly nice because then I can include trips like the burger place which currently he has to drive to while I bike… and therefore I can’t count it.

Anyway, here’s the page — just over a dollar saved so far. I think I will buy myself something nice once I “save” enough money up!

I bought a bunch of string bags from ReuseableBags.com and they are really great to shop with. They hold tons of groceries, at least three times as much as a plastic bag, and are easy to carry even when completely full.

You can even fit a whole toddler in one. *

* Please note, this was entirely her idea. I don’t go about storing my children in bags normally. Even reuseable organic cotton string bags.

It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.

Lillian got freaked out twice last night.

First, her ceiling fan exploded.  Well, not literally, but it blew a bunch of sparks (while running with the fan on and light off), which then blew the circuit breaker and turned off half the upstairs lights.  It took us a while to troubleshoot and find out what the problem was, but it was definitely something wrong with the fan.  Obviously it’s now turned off, but she didn’t want to sleep in her room any more.  So we set her up with blankies and pillows in Reuven’s room (which is mostly unused).

After a bit, she moved her pillows and blankets down to the stairs to camp out there instead.  Then she was traumatized by a cockroach wandering by on the step above her.  Currently she’s bunked in OUR room, with lots of assurances that there will be no more exploding fans, no more scary bugs…  at this rate, though, I expect our alarm clock to catch fire or something.

There’s an E. Altschul in Pennsylvania who accidentally put in the wrong email address when signing up for a wind-power service (left out the letter “b” in her address), so I got her signup information instead of her.  So (me being me) I logged into the profile, found her phone number, and called her to let her know the mixup and to get her correct address so I could forward it on 🙂

Bizarrely, I’m also going to be in the Philadelphia area (near where she lives) for a wedding this weekend.  Small world.

In any case, I felt like I did my five minutes’ worth of good deed for the day, and it’s neat to find another E. Altschul interested in the environment…

I was playing around with “walkability” scores for my current (and some prior) addresses at Walk Score.

• Current House (Columbia, SC): 3
• Indiana Condo (outskirts of Bloomington, IN): 3
• Where I grew up (West Chester, OH): 15 (and that’s much better than it used to be!)
• My in-laws (Salem, OR): 31
• Boston Apartment (Charlestown, MA): 78

This isn’t a completely accurate representation, since we have a vast outdoor mall just over a mile away from us with gobs of things in it — Columbia is far more walkable than our Bloomington Condo (fondly known as “ass end of nowhere”) was. I wouldn’t consider that walkable for everyday “oh gosh I need a cup of milk for that recipe” errands, but it is if you’re planning on doing a lot of shopping. It’s the carrying-things-home that would be a problem!

In any case, it’s an interesting toy to play with, and can definitely be worth looking at if you’re moving and are torn between a few good places.