Harry Potter on A's trip - more photos added

A's trip to London/Oxford included a good bit of Harry Potter. They had a talk from the Dumbledore stand-in from the first movies. He said in the first movie the only lines he had were "Welcome to Hogwarts" as the students went up the stairs.

Here's Dumbledore with A:


They also got sorted into various houses - A became a Billywig:

They played a rousing game of muggle quidditch:

They ended the week with a Hogwarts banquet, where they ate such things as witches broth, supreme of dragon with lizards' tails, blast-ended skrewts, mixed mandrake and finished off with fortescue sundae. A says it was all delicious. He did wish that we had packed his Harry Potter robe and wand, but he was able to borrow one of each from a fellow student (and not everyone had HP gear anyway).

* Finally got photos to post. Enjoy

Halloween costumes

Finally some pictures of the kids from last night. Seemingly it was the 5th or 6th time that was the charm. I got the first picture loaded on my 2nd try, then it took off and on the rest of the day to get these other two photos.


Here's A, making plans with a friend as to when and where they will meet up to go trick-or-treating.


And here's M ready to go out. He forgot his blood last night, but he still looks plenty spooky.

Somehow the iPod strings seem to make him even spookier...

The pumpkins.

I enjoyed the new camera which let me take pictures without a flash, so you can see the pumpkins all lit up. However, the kids weren't as good at staying still long enough - this was take #3. In the earlier shots we got a better view of kids faces, but this is the best I got.

Happy Halloween

Trick-or-treating was very odd this year. Because of changing daylight savings time, it was still broad daylight out at 6pm (our normal start time). In fact, it was still awfully light out when we finally went out at almost 6:45. I think the kids got tired at about the same time as when we went out earlier in years past. We were home around 7:30, which is about normal, but hit many fewer houses. They still seemed to get plenty of candy though!

I have pictures of the kids from tonight, but Blogger isn't cooperating about uploading them. Sigh. I don't understand how some people can get 6 or 8 or more pictures in a post. I struggle to get 2 or 3 to load. Trust me, the kids were looking good in their costumes. I'll post photos tomorrow

Walk-a-thon

Walk-a-thons to raise money for the school seem to be all the rage suddenly. Both kids schools added one this year, and I know I've read of some other schools doing them too.

M came home early on in the school year all excited about the walk-a-thon. Raise money (some for your favorite teacher or program - he chose his technology teacher), win cool prizes, etc. I filled out the permission slip and he got a sticker that allowed him to cut in the lunch line or the library line. Oooh aaah. Big stuff. Then a sponsor form came home. I dutifully agreed to sponsor him - at $1 per lap number. ie $1 for lap 1, $2 for lap 2, etc - with a total donation cap of $50, though, because they were billing it as a 20K, consisting of 14 laps. If he had walked all 14 laps, that would have been quite a donation! ($105, as M learned how to figure consective addition in math class).

But, after getting my sponsorship, nothing else happened. I suggested asking grandparents. My mom even promised she would sponsor him, but he never actually asked her. The last few days he decided he didn't want to go walk. "What's the point - I'll only get a few dollars...not enough for a prize." and "I hate walking. I never wanted to do this." However, we decreed that since he signed up, he had to go walk.

So this morning, we headed off to his school for the walk-a-thon. We got there and got signed in, M still grumbling. I sent him off to get started and said that A and I would follow. And we did, though far enough behind that we weren't exactly sure where M was. Then M must have passed us at the end of the first lap, while A and I were looking at the silent auction items. I bought some cookies to support the chorus and A and I waited for M to give him his cookie - by the time we met up again, M had completed 3 laps. He still wasn't thrilled, but was in a better mood and was seeing some of his friends and listening to his iPod. We went back to the car so M could change out of his sweatshirt and into his walk-a-thon t-shirt, then I sent M off again while A and I headed home for lunch. We could have stayed there and bought hotdogs for lunch, but I figured M would keep walking more if we weren't there.

We came back a little after 1, to see the "surprise guest appearance" of his principal's band. M allowed that they were "OK". By this time, he had completed 8 laps, of roughly a mile each - and about 11.5K, so a good effort (and one that A informed me would cost me $36).

I have a picture to go with this, but unfortunately blogger isn't inclined to let me get pictures tonight, so maybe I'll try adding photos tomorrow...

GREAT Swim Meet!

(Photo added - better late than never!)

The kids both had a great meet tonight!

This was the first meet for M as an 11 year old. That's a big deal because at 11 they have to start swimming 2 lengths of the pool in each stroke. M chose to swim freestyle, breaststroke and butterfly. Butterfly - WOW! He's never swum 50 yards of fly before, but he did a wonderful job. His fly looked nice and I think he came in 3rd. Great job M. M's even happier about his breaststroke swim. He came in 1st in his heat! Got his first real heat ribbon.



M was MUCH faster than the other 2 boys in his heat (as in, he finished at least half a lap ahead of them). So, he might do even better if he had some competition. He came in 3rd overall - only one boy on our team beat him. M was really psyched about it all.

M will get best time ribbons in both fly and breast, since he hasn't swum those as a 50 yard race before. I think he got a new best time in free as well. Way to go M!

A did quite well too. This was his second meet for this season, so he's already had the best times based on getting bigger and stronger over the winter, but I think he'll be getting some best time ribbons tomorrow too. His freestyle kick looked much better tonight - I think he took several seconds off his best time. His breaststroke was really competitive too. It looks like breast might be the best stroke for both kids - amazing since it was not the best for either D or me.

{I've got some good photos to post, but Blogger isn't cooperating tonight on the Mac. And the PC is mis-behaving. I'll try again tomorrow. In the meantime, I've been backing up all the photos off the PC onto CD's}

Pictures added

I finally got pictures up of my quilt from the last post where I tried to post pictures. I ended up having to email pictures to the other computer to add them. I wish I could get Blogger to behave!

Photo problems

Something still isn't working right with Blogger and photos. When I try to load photos from (new) Blogger, I can choose my pictures, but the "Upload Image" button is missing from the screen. So, I can't get the pictures on the blog.

Fine, I thought, I'll just send them from Picasa. Seems to work fine from this computer, but when I was looking at it from my other computer (a Mac using Safari if that makes any difference) I couldn't see the photos - just little boxes. Hmmmm... is it a Safari problem or a Blogger problem. My mom says she can't see the photos either, so not just a Safari problem.

Now, for the interesting bit - when I look on Safari, I do get the "Upload image" button. But, my pictures aren't on that computer.

Grrr. I hate having to fiddle with this! I checked the help page and it seems that other people are having photo problems too. I hope they get it all sorted out quickly.

Can anyone else see the pictures on my last post? Or have any helpful thoughts?

New and Different Blogger problems

At first the switch to Google Blogger seemed to go smoothly...perhaps too smoothly. Currently I can't get into my account on the Mac, but I can just fine on the PC. However, once on the PC, I can't upload pictures from Blogger. I click on the little picture icon, choose my pictures - that's all fine, but there's no button to upload. The only way I've found to get pictures is to send them one at a time from Picasa. It works, but its not elegant (or fast). Sigh.

Switching to Google Blogger

I finally had to switch - Blogger wouldn't let me defer any longer. So far it seems to be a relatively easy switch. I was a bit worried since I'd heard from other people that all sorts of things got messed up when they switched. Maybe they finally worked all the kinks out in the beta version. Hah.

I'm hoping, though, that I will be able to post pictures and commentary without Blogger freezing Netscape on me. So far, so good - I put 3 pictures up on the previous post - all in one try. Amazing.

It's giving me the ability to label posts, but I'm not sure where/whether anyone else can see the labels (I can see it on the page where I edit posts). I guess I'll learn more about this as I go along....