Funny Face

Hold onto your butts.

[kabillieu]

I need new swimsuits. I've been wearing the same awful, unflattering and poorly made Cupshe two pieces for three years. And I have a few one pieces from Target, and they aren't great either. I spend too much time in a swimsuit for this! I hate ordering swimsuits online, but I've finally given up and admitted that's the only way to go, so I ordered some separates from Quince.

I've never worn Quince before? But while I was looking at swim tops and bottoms, I also threw a couple dresses and these short-alls in my cart, and thankfully I LOVE the short-alls. They really scratch the itch I have to be wearing overalls at all times, except make it summer. Make it unbearably hot.

And the linen sundress I ordered fits and is nice too.

Only one swim top has come in, but it's also nice??? Here's hoping the bottoms will also fit and the other dress will be nice too.

I'm so used to putting clothes on my body, and they look like garbage. It makes a girl think there's something wrong with her! But really so many clothes are made like garbage these days (and are literal garbage in landfills soon after) and that's why they look bad. Quince also may be garbage, but these short-alls are making my heart sing today, so I don't care!

[kabillieu]

I've been so busy lately that all I eat is oatmeal for breakfast and turkey sandwiches for lunch, which is fine, but this morning, with very little effort, I ate slightly more interesting meals, and I'm feeling very satisfied with it.

For breakfast I had two frozen egg white crustless mini quiches with multigrain toast and strawberry jam. (Dead easy but felt close to a restaurant meal.)

And for lunch I had a taco salad with leftover black beans and a little seasoned ground beef on tortilla chips with melted cheese, tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, chopped up quick pickled red onions, hatch green chili salsa, avocado salsa, and sour cream. Really delicious! Extraordinarily low effort!

I'm sure tomorrow will be oatmeal and turkey sandwiches again, but it's nice to remember I can make other things.

[kabillieu]

Riv: Look at my hand!

Dominic: Okay?

Me (suspicious): Anything on your hand we should know about?

Riv: Germs.

[kabillieu]

I know I am an insane person with a brain fully saturated (as it should be) with love for my child, but every time Riv deigns to paint, I think it's SO GOOD.

He's really not that interested in drawing or coloring??? To an extent that makes me sad sometimes. But every now and then he'll sit down, usually with dot paints, and I feel like he's inventing a new art movement?

To me, this painting has movement and composition. And Riv also mixed paints and made new colors. The smearing! The layered dots! The use of color! The way the painting moves across the page!

It's very silly, but it's happened often enough--Riv making interesting paintings--that I really feel like he's got some sort of uncanny savant thing going on. Or I'm just a mom who likes when her kid paints. Either way!

In general, and as of late, he's been incredibly funny and cute. This morning he crawled into bed with me (which he never does) and pressed his forehead to my forehead, which is what woke me up, and then he just laid like that with me, our foreheads pressed together, for at least 20 minutes. What a kid!

[kabillieu]

[kabillieu]

I’ve made a lot of mistakes this week, but I’m still slowly chugging along, which is about all any of us can do.

[thirdtwin3]

"Revelations" 03.07 (1998)

[blignick]

[canadiangold]

[kabillieu]

Give me the strength to get through my work today, Dwight Yoakam

[kabillieu]

Spent all day trying to clean up this mentorship mess before it starts on the 15th. Had a mentor drop out at the 11th hour. Panicked. Immediately found a replacement mentor. I have to write some instructional materials tomorrow, and that will take time, but things are slowly getting better.

Meanwhile, Robyn is helping.

[kabillieu]

My birthday yesterday was so fun! @thebarbaricyawp and Gavin came to visit, and we went to a skating rink! My big kid had a great time. Riv struggled because he couldn't immediately skate perfectly (he's not even four!). B is, of course, a former roller girl, and Gavin is also really good on skates.

I am not good on skates and in fact busted my ass so hard I am now bruised (a little girl wobbled by right in front of me), but I still had such a nice time. There were all these skate crews there practicing their skate dances! It was so fun. God bless the young men of Pensacola who are deep into the shuffle skating subculture.

At home, we did a record pairing with Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and a fishbowl cocktail. We bought blue curaçao especially for this drink, and it ended up being so tasty, so watch out! In year 44, I am drinking blue drinks!

Dominic got me fancy perfume as a gift, and it smells like roses, salt spray, and vacation. What a wonderful day. Everyone should get to turn 44 like this.

[kabillieu]

The House that Harry Built

On beauty, aging, and coming to terms with it all

It's my birthday! I had fun writing this one.

[kabillieu]

I’ve done way more work than I wanted and have been too stressed out about it, but I also got some writing done, and other good things happened too.

[kabillieu]

Bitching about Canvas and my mentorship gig, so break

Canvas's free-for-teacher option, which is still shuttered, has opened today for 24 hours so people can retrieve their course content. The mentorship really only uses Canvas as a repository for students to upload work and for mentors to receive it and provide feedback. It makes it easier for me to track everything from one place so that I can make sure everything is running smoothly and that mentees are uploading work and mentors are providing feedback. It also has a peer review function that was extremely useful. And it can be accessed all over the world for our international students.

In the research I did, the only other LMS option, other than Google Classroom, seems to be Moodle, but we will still have to pay for a hosted version, and I'm unfamiliar with its interface. I have an appointment next week to talk to a Canvas representative about whether they offer paid versions for an organization as small as ours. And then Canvas is also saying they will bring back some kind of non-paid version. Not crazy about continuing to use Canvas at all after this debacle, though, which is understandable!

The decision I made for this summer was to use to Google Classroom, but it's an imperfect stopgap mostly because it's not accessible in mainland China, and we have some mentees who will be affected by this.

So today I'm getting my materials off Canvas and beginning to set up shells on Google Classroom. All of this has been a giant headache, as you would imagine. And I'm super nervous that I'm not thinking through all the organizational aspects of moving to Google Classroom. Maybe I should have immediately moved to Moodle, which is where I think we'll eventually end up, but it just made me so nervous to commit to a paid LMS at such short notice and to have to learn a new interface and deal with a company and program that I had no idea even existed until a week ago. The mentorship begins in two weeks!

It's scary that I'm making all these decisions essentially by myself! Why am I in charge of all this! Who let me do this???

I'm trying very hard to break all the work up into manageable steps and not get overwhelmed by everything, but just know that internally I am screaming.

[kabillieu]

Really old-heads will remember when my big kid was Riv’s age, and we lived here full time, and I was constantly posting pics like these. Time really is a flat circle.

[kabillieu]

It is very barfing pretty here

[kabillieu]

Cuties! 🥰🥰🥰