Snow

It doesn't mean you have to stay inside.

Sledding by the pond.

Snow crater in the backyard.

Books.

We are members of our local library friends organization. As members Calvin and I go once a week to help sort recently donated books and get them ready for the monthly sale. When I first volunteered for this job, and was told that I would be assigned one day each week while other volunteers covered the remaining days, I couldn't imagine there would be enough books to keep us all busy. As it turns out there are enough books donated that I have yet to arrive and have nothing to sort. There is always at least one grocery back full of books, but more often we find four or five times that. I love being surrounded by the books. I love touching them, smelling them, and leafing through them. Calvin is rarely bored, either, especially since children's books make up the bulk of most donations.

Last Friday we were there sorting the handful of books we found on our arrival when one of the librarians came down to let us know that 16 bags of books had just been dropped off, music to my ears. Even better, this kindly patron had great taste and left us sorting through a real treasury of books, many of them from the 1950s and 60s. Possibly the best part was that two bags of these were not sellable by friends standards because they had that musty smell, and a few other undesirable traits, so I brought them home and sorted them here. Did you know that kitty litter will take that musty smell out of books? Just leave them in a sealed storage container with an inch or two of kitty litter in the bottom for a few days, sometimes longer. I owe my Godmother for that advice; it has served me well and we are now about ten 1960s treasures heavier on our bookshelves.

We find books irresistible.

NAIAS 2011

It comes this time every year, sometimes bringing with it great festivities and sometimes even growth of wisdom and knowledge, and no I'm not talking about my birthday, I'm talking about the North American International Auto Show. As sad as this may seem the show is usually the only time we make the trek into Detroit, but we do try to make it every year. Last year was Calvin's first time and while it wasn't a tragedy of epic proportion or anything I don't think the kid really got anything out of it and what we got out of it most of the time was the creaping in of a headache after the repeated "when are we going to be done" questions. Last year nothing engaged his interest and all he could think of was the People Mover trip that was awaiting him the minute we finished wandering between all those darn cars. So this year we tried something different. Having learned from last year that cars by themselves are not exciting we spent the week prior to our trip reading a book about cars, learning a bit about their engines, and creating a scavenger hunt and activity booklet for him to use while we were there. It was a success, the results of which can be seen below and are also mentioned in a post on Live and Learn.

"gull wing doors" was on his list of things to find and with a Mercedes this color it was not hard to find.

I much prefered this one:

And here he is drawing the logo in his activity booklet:

And a Tesla logo, too (good taste):

There was definitely an electric car craze this year...

More drawings for the book (this time a plugged-in vehicle)

He loved getting to watch the pistons in action

They actually want you to vote on this:

Octo-Scion

Surrounded by V engines

The forces of good and evil?

Actually making the pistons from this mock flat engine do their thing

Ford Vertrek, I think. Pretty cool looking inside.

All those cars and the People Mover was still the hi-light of his day. Calvin liked it, too.

The forgetting room, the growing room

I walked into our middle room the other day, the one we've been using as an "office" since we moved in. It would make a better "learning room" than "office," I thought. After all, we put our last desktop computer to bed a few years ago so other than the cable modem and Airport (and an old drive used to store music and movies we access from the TV only) there's no need for a traditional office in our home. That's why our office had really become more of a storage area over the years, storing mostly the "we're-too-lazy-to-file-these" piles of paper as well as our "rarely-used-now-that-we've-gone-paperless" office supplies. It had become the kind of room that you entered only to drop off more forgettable items, or to forage in cases of missing items unfound in any other crannies of the house. The forgetting room.

Really I had forgotten what a great space it was: big window, walk-in closet, lots of wall space for maps and artwork. Rather than a forgotten office it needed to be a light-filled, people filled, art and book filled space. So Saturday morning we started by rescuing the closet from the twin mattress set that had been inhabiting it since we brought home the bunk-beds from my parents' house two years ago when we were ready for only one of them. Calvin isn't old enough to sleep on the top bunk yet, but he is old enough to have it set up, so we started the office reclamation project by growing Calvin's room. Vertically. He's thrilled.

The rest of the weekend went to shredding, recycling, filing, dragging furniture, storing or giving away obsolete stuff, and moving in more relevant materials. It took two full days, but Monday morning Calvin and I sat our light-filled room and looked at the huge map on the wall, drew pictures at our desks and hung them up, and sat on the floor to play games, enjoying the open space. As an additional plus I got to move a good portion of our art and craft items out of our guest room, leaving more space in there for, not guests, but sewing.

Welcome to our new learning office.

Two dog night

We are spending the entire weekend reorganizing the house in order to make a more proper "learning office" for Calvin (we want him to be able to reach his crayons and markers without leaving them accessible to the pets, which can be more disastrous than it sounds). The dogs are desperately trying to ignore the chaos all around them. I'd say it's working.