Random ramblings

The imp broke a 10-day streak of dry underwear, last night, while he was watching Top Gear with Odysseus.  Yep, Dad noticed when his leg started feeling damp. 

Imp is not wearing Thomas underwear, today.  Peeing on Thomas makes him sad.

The imp has lost all of his blocks for an as-yet-undetermined length of time.  Tuesday night, he was playing with the pixie in his room, running up and hitting his closet doors with one of his cylindrical wooden blocks to make the pixie giggle.  It was pretty random, not really constant drumming, but every time I checked on him, that's what was going on.  So, finally, I quit checking on him when there was a bang on the closet door.

Big mistake.  Sometime after I quit checking on him, he quit running up and banging on the closet, and started throwing blocks at the closet.  And sometime after that, the pixie wandered between him and the closet door, and got nailed with the corner of one of those wooden alphabet blocks. 

She screamed, and I went running in to see what was going on, and found her sitting on the edge of the bed, bleeding like a stuck pig from where the corner of the block gouged her forehead, just about halfway between the inner corner of her left eyebrow and her hairline. 

She's fine, didn't need stitches or anything, but that scared the absolute piss out of me. 

So, yeah--no more blocks for a very long time. 

This morning, the pixie got a little bit of revenge for that.  We got them a six-pack of foam balls--something that doesn't hurt even if it gets thrown as hard as an adult can throw into the face.  And he really winged one right into her this morning.  So, she grabbed one in each hand, raised both little hands over her head, ran right up to him, and threw both of them as hard as she could throw, right into his face. 

Odysseus nearly fell off the couch laughing.  Imp just said "ow," and started giggling.  No harm done.

Right now, the two of them are playing with Hiro, Gordon, and Percy on the imp's wooden rail set.  The imp will periodically knock all the engines and cars over on their sides, and say, "All engines have big crash."  

I have been avoiding the news like the plague for the last few days.  It's either been gloating (on the part of the lamebrain media) or whistling in the dark (everyone else) about the whole mandatory Medicaid mess.  I'm still so angry that I can't see straight, and sincerely hope the American people are able to make their displeasure sufficiently apparent in November. 

I've been having issues with internet connectivity for the past two days.  My wireless card in my netbook is starting to give out.  I'm kind of white-knuckling it to August and the back-to-school sales tax holiday.  It still works fine for writing, and for reading, but I often have to run software troubleshooting to remind the thing that it actually does have a wireless card, and access to the internet. 

This is not going to work for teaching.  Every time it resets, it kicks me out of the grade book.

I've got something like nine stories in the pipe for the current anthology I'm working on--basically finishing the "plot" and the resolution.  I've got two stories I'm currently writing/revising.  And the total word count is something like 72,000 words (about 150 pgs, single spaced).  So, everything is going fast enough to make my forearms and hands cramp.