Friday bullets, Feb. 8, 2019

Boy, it's been a week and I'm exhausted.

  • The ducklings seemed to have settled in and are doing well. The learning curve doesn't seem quite so steep this time around, and I think we have a better handle on how to contain the mess a bit better.
  • I still think it's weird you can ship ducklings that are less than 24 hours old across the country.
  • Yesterday our dishwasher decided to leak. To be different from all the others, this one thought leaking underneath the laminate causing it to warp would be fun. We cannot decide whether it's better to try to get this one repaired or go to the ReStore and buy another $150 dishwasher. 
  • It's a proven fact that large families are harder of dishwashers. Trust me, it's a thing. It seems that dishwashers are truly only designed to be run so many times and they start to break down after that limit. Large families tend to run their dishwashers constantly, thus reaching the point of no return at a much faster rate. 
  • I spent the day taking K. to an orthodontist appointment in the city. At least this appointment took almost as long as the travel time.
  • Since I was back in old territory, I did part of the weekly grocery shopping at my old store. Oh, how I miss my grocery store! It has such good products. It has such good prices. It has such a large and ethnically varied selection of produce. It is all in one store so that I didn't have to go to three different stores to find what I needed. I did a lot of stocking up. I'm pretty much resigned to never finding a store that will equal it out here. I have found ways to get most of what I am used to having on hand, but it has taken three or four different stores to do it.
  • I am relieved to tell you that we now have housing in both London and Amsterdam. Phew! That's a load of my mind. Thanks to everyone who gave suggestions. I truly investigated nearly every option available. We'll be at a small hotel in London which we got a fantastic price on. D. likes that we'll be right by the Baker Street Tube station with a statue of Sherlock Holmes nearby. In Amsterdam we'll be staying in a small apartment on a houseboat. It gives us a kitchen which means that we'll be able to fix a portion of our food and save money that way. It's a little out of the way, but still within a long walk or short bus ride into the main part of the city. Of course, I'm now obsessing a little over whether we'll like the area we'll be in... For those familiar with the city we'll be staying in the Eastern Docklands area of Amsterdam-Oost.
  • The weather today and yesterday has felt far worse than the super sub-zero weather of last week. I'm now officially tired of cold.
  • L. said to me the other day, "You know how people say if you read a lot you'll know how to spell? I don't think that works for me." And she's right. She read quite well, but her spelling is... still creative. It is getting better, in that there continue to be more and more words I actually recognize when I read her stories. I suggested that I could go through and correct her misspelled words in her latest story and she could see how her spelling and the real spelling were different. I didn't actually think she'd take me up on it, but she did. So, the other day, I spent a half an hour correcting the spelling on L.'s latest work, "Murder in the Amusement Park". There was dialog, action, and some humor. I'm kind of impressed at her writing voice. I was even more impressed that she spent a good chunk of time later that day carefully erasing and respelling every mispelt word. I'm pretty sure she'll learn far more from her self-directed exercise than if I had given her spelling words in a list.
  • After a week of careening from activity to activity, I'm ready for a calm and quiet weekend. A girl can hope...

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