The Baby : Can I go on the children’s pakuter ?
Mummy Dearest : Yes. What program do you want ?
The Baby : I wanna check my email.
Mummy Dearest : The Baby, you don’t know how to read. And you don’t have email.
The Baby : Yes I do !
Uh, am I doing this right ?
The Boy is being framed. What has saved him ? The fact that we still haven’t gotten around to installing the children’s printer. In fact, we haven’t even gotten around to opening the box yet.
It started on Monday. While Group X was at gym, someone came into their classroom and trashed one of the group projects. Really, quite the talk of the school. The Boy told me all about it, how all of the color pictures were ripped to bits, and they are very expensive, he assured me, pictures from a color printer.
The project was salvaged, only to have the same trashing happen again yesterday.
As I walked through the hallway of the school today- to pick The Boy up from his class for the clumsy- the teacher of his class for the overly-emotional stopped me. ‘Does The Boy have access to the Internet at home ?’ she asked me. ‘Why yes, he does.’ ‘Does he have access to a printer ?’ ‘Well, he has a printer, but we haven’t hooked it up yet. But if he needs something special for school, I can let him do it with my printer’. ‘Has he used your printer lately?’ she asked me. ‘No. He’s never used my printer.’ She smiled and thanked me, went on her way.
I didn’t tell The Boy about the chat in the hallway, but as we were walking home, he told me the big news : the project had been trashed again today and a note was left behind. On the note were ‘naughty words’ that had been found on the Internet and printed off on a computer printer. And the note was signed ‘The Boy ( like in my Boy, the kid walking next to me) and Q.’
The Boy had talked to his teacher of his overly- emotional class about it today. She had obviously just stopped me in the hallway to confirm The Boy’s story. He told her that they had to look for three things : someone who didn’t like him, someone who had a keyboard and someone that had a printer. Therein lies the answer to this deep and dark mystery, his air told me.
I could see that it didn’t sink in at all, that someone was trying to get him into serious, get- kicked- out- of- school trouble.
Billy Budd.
As I mentioned in a now deleted post, I’m…. worried – is a big word- about The Girl. And at a loss as to what to do about it, her, everything.
For some reason, this morning I decided that teaching The Girl more about making websites might help. Can’t hurt, and what it will do – at this age- is give her something of her own, something that most of her peers ( at least at this school) don’t know how to do, something vaguely ‘cool’. I mean, she already has her own website ( and gets almost 400 hits a month- something that she doesn’t know), a ton of web space, an MT blog installed ( although she doesn’t know that either) and this morning I cleaned up ( off ? ) the old digital camera.
As I wrapped up my work-work for this week this morning, I will spend the next few mornings installing the software that she will need onto the children’s computer.
And did I mention that The Boy wants his own website for his birthday ?
Tomorrow I will be watching the funeral of Princess Juliana.
You can watch it as well, here.
A memorial site in English here.
New people moved into the house across the street from us a while back. I had sent the children out earlier in the year, to meet the children, but it wasn’t until last week that it all came together and a band of children- of various ages- have found each other and now run through town, playing hide and seek and ( for this one time only, said Mummy Dearest ) let’s – ring- the- doorbell- and- then- hide. Yes , glimpses of the childhood we all fondly recall and that I thought our children would never have.
Last week, when The Girl and The Boy really got to know the new children across the street, they were both all a-twitter, for you see, the boy was a teenager. 14 years old, I was told by offspring whose faces were covered with awe and admiration. They knew a real teenager.
( As a side note : God, that awe makes me feel stinkin’ old. Imagine, being of an age where teenhood is seen as being something mystical.)
So one can imagine the disgust, the sense of betrayal, on The Girl’s face today when she broke the major- stop- the- presses news : he wasn’t a teenager after all. In fact, he is 12, a mere year older than The Girl.
And- in her eyes- has lost all of the charismatic charm that she once saw in him.
( Stinkin’ old)
In between setting up and emptying buckets in the bathroom ( The Father almost- but not quite- fixed the washing machine properly..drip…drip…drip…), stripping beds, brushing dogs and walking the multitude back and forth and back and forth to school today, I have also spent a rather large chunk of time work-working.
I had hoped that the first catalogue would function as a sort of template, saving me slathers of time with the next ones. I was right. I decided to start the longest one ( only 22 pages) today. I most likely will finish all but two pages today, including making the graphics ( aw, how cute : eensy-weensy sweatshirts, in different colors).
The last two pages will give me a lot of problems, though. It just might take me the rest of the week to solve those two. For you see, while I pretty well have a free hand here, there is only one rule that the site must conform to : each page must fit perfectly on The Father’s computer at work. No scrolling this way or that.
Through trial and error, I have discovered that The Father’s computer at work is caught in a time warp : he actually has a screen with a 600 pixel by 400 pixel whatever- it- is- called. Resolution ? But that is how much space I can work with.
It really is tiny. I think, though, that I have brought him around : last weekend, I asked him if he thought that his computer screen at home was a normal, typical, businessman size. Yes, he agreed, I think it is.
I then clicked to the site on his at-home- screen. The page that he had complained about fit perfectly here, why, there was even ’space to spare’.
There must be stats somewhere that give the most common resolution for today’s computers. But coffee time is over, must empty the buckets and make more beds.
Taking a break here from work-work, I have finally decided what to put up there in that last links block, that one that says ‘links and links’ : I’m going to put up the torrent links that I have used.
Especially if you have a pre-teen and a strong sense of pride, the links can save you from a lot of public humiliation.
I’m tired of this ‘blog’- I have been for a while. It’s just so…old. But I know that the minute that I announce an official ‘end’, I shall have tons to say.
Eh, eh, eh- computers- always looking for the new rush, dontcha think ?
Very exciting : a chimney fire.
The view from my little room of my own :
