Waiting for the bus, I made this.

I made eclairs, filled with vanilla pudding. Today was full of...

I made eclairs, filled with vanilla pudding. Today was full of beauty and love.

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I took this picture while I was on the train home because I...

I took this picture while I was on the train home because I thought the clouds and the sunlight looked cool. And I was playing with some of the settings in my photo app, trying to find a combination I liked.

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Top 10 books

There's a virus (a good kind) going around Facebook where people share their top 10 books and then ask a few of their friends to list theirs as well. A number of my friends asked me and enough of them asked that I caved and came up with a list. Here's the list I came up with, in no particular order.

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 
• Daring Greatly by Brené Brown 
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison 
• Skystalker (Be an Interplanetary Spy book #12)
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss 
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski 
• The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

I'll have to tell you why each one was significant to me another time.

Training week

I'm not even going to pretend to catch you up on what's happened at our house since the last time one of us wrote on this blog. Where we are now is that it's training week, so we've sent +Chelsea to New York again to finish up her ABT ballet teacher certification. I booked her a plane ticket that would get her to New York mid-afternoon so she'd have time to settle in and kick around the city for a little bit before her classes start tomorrow, which meant that we had to wake up freaky early this morning to get her to the airport. The upside is that traffic wasn't bad.

So far, we put gas in the car, stopped at Krispy Kreme, straightened up the house, watched a few episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, and then we've each done our own things. I tried to mail nacho ingredients to Miss Kris in England, but was dissuaded from sending them FedEx when I learned how much it was going to cost. I'm going to see if the US Postal Service can get them there cheaper. Then I took down the Christmas lights. I know, it's late in the year, but it's been super cold, icy, rainy or I've been doing other things that I just haven't done it before now.

The rest of the day has yet to unfold, but there will be more. And Chelsea's not the only one doing training this week; I have training at work this week too, but mine is packed into 2 days at my office rather than spread over a week in New York City.

Awesomeland

Today, on the way home from ballet class, I was talking with Max about how a week from now, we'll be driving through New Mexico on our way to Texas. Driving through New Mexico is unequivocally the worst part of the drive, so Max proposed some changes to New Mexico to make it better.

First of all, he thinks that it needs to be not stinky. It will smell like candy. All the kinds of candy.

Second, the name "New Mexico" has been deemed lame and thinks the state should be renamed "Awesomeland."

Third, driving through the state should be fun and not boring, so the roads should be more like roller coasters. And you have to trade in your normal car at the state border for one that's "more awesome."

What constitutes a "more awesome" car? you might ask. (Because I did.) A "more awesome" car has lots of buttons that you can read and see what they do. These buttons do things like give you candy, food, soda, juice and water. (That's the order he put them in.)

If we make it a reality before he grows up, he'll move there when he grows up and move to a house that's really awesome and the house has buttons too and they say what they mean and also one gets you water, one gets you milk, one gets you soda, and the other ones get you fruit or candy.

This is how we feel about this proposal and I think we can all agree that the proposed changes are for everyone's benefit, so let's work together to make it happen. Awesomeland. It's gonna be a thing, with your help.

New glasses

I got new glasses today. I think they make me look like a hipster Bond villain.

Chelsea says that's just because I shaved. Apparently I look like a Bond villain when I shave. In any case, I'm digging my new glasses. What do you think of them?

Sick is the worst

I'm sick.

I got sick yesterday afternoon, and getting sick Halloween night is the worst. I still had to take the kids trick-or-treating, so that was an adventure. But I stayed home from work today and watched movies by myself, which really is my favorite thing to do when I'm sick. I started watching From Russia With Love, my favorite Bond movie, right after lunchtime and Sophie came home about an hour later with one of her friends. Right about when Bond has that brutal fight with Grant in the train compartment.

"What are you watching?" Sophie's chatty friend asked. "I'm not allowed to watch violence. What's this about?" As the two spies throw each other around the compartment.

Being sick and kinda cranky, I said, "Violence."

"Why are we watching this? Can we turn it off?"

"I was watching this before you came over and no. If you don't want to watch it, go away."

Not my best moment, but if I want to watch James Bond movies all day when I'm sick, I will. And don't question it, little girl.

Ghostbusters

I was trying to think of a fun Halloween movie I could watch with the kids that wouldn't creep them out and settled on Ghostbusters, figuring that if push came to shove (and it always does when I think the kids should watch a particular movie) I'd be able to use the legendary status of the movie to get them to watch. And to sweeten the deal even more, we went to the dollar store to get candy. As we drove to get candy, Max announced that he didn't like Ghostbusters and just wanted candy. That wasn't part of the deal.

So we watched the movie, which was mostly uneventful until Chelsea got home from work, and then Max screamed when Gozer fried the Ghostbusters. It was kind of funny. But we got through the movie and Sophie said she liked it. Max said he never wanted to see it again because it was too scary, so I told him that he wouldn't have to watch it ever again. Until next Halloween.

But the real measure of victory is that neither of the kids ended up in my bed in the middle of the night. I love it when a plan comes together.

Our trip to Zion

You may not have heard that we recently took a trip to Zion National Park. Chelsea's dad was going to be in a triathlon that weekend in Lake Powell, but with the crazy government shutdown, the park closed and the triathlon was canceled. We thought it would be a shame to do nothing, since everyone got time off work, so Chelsea's mom booked rooms in the town just outside of Zion National Park, where we could hang out and do fun things that didn't necessarily involve the park. 

Magically, the park opened for one day while we were there and we got to hike around. Here are all the pictures of our trip.

The Grafton cemetary. Grafton is a little ghost town outside Zion.

The Grafton schoolhouse

We had dinner at Oscar's Cafe in Springdale

I had a Murder Burger. The big question was how was I going to eat it?

I'd eat it by opening wide.

Wiped out boy

Wiped out munchkin

Wiped out mom

At the Zion visitor's center. It opened!

How often do you get to walk behind a waterfall?

Sophie left this message for other hikers.

The non kid-bound grownups hiked Angel's Landing

Dinner at Wildcat Willie's

It's not really that fun unless someone gets a bloody nose.

We had a fantastic time and would do it again in a heartbeat. Just as soon as our bank account recovers. Springdale is not a cheap place to spend time, but we had a great time with our family.