Kid and Caboodle

We’re now going on Day 5 of our unexpected winter vacation, thanks to the roughly two feet of snow that hit the D.C. area last weekend. So far my neighborhood has not seen any sign of a plow.

Cul-de-sac, two days after the storm

A.J. has been spending most of his waking hours playing Webkinz, which is something like The Sims or Second Life for stuffed toys. Each Webkinz toy come with a computer code that, when registered, creates an avatar on the Webkinz site. On the site, Webkinz owners can feed, bathe and dress their Webkinz; read electronic books; or “cook.” The site also has a virtual economy; players can work at different jobs, answer trivia questions and surveys, or play arcade games to earn “Kinzcash” to spend on pet food, furniture, toys, room decorations, classes, spa visits, vacations and “home renovations.”

A.J. pondering a move in Link'd (Connect Four equivalent in Webkinz)

The site is actually quite engaging, which is a mixed blessing. My son certainly has been entertained the past few days, but he hasn’t really wanted to do anything else. He also wants me to play as well. (I bought myself two Webkinz so my son would have someone to interact with on the site.)

I also have mixed feelings about how the Webkinz manufacturers have used the site to encourage future purchases. Access to the Webkinz site expires after a year, and the only way to renew is to buy another Webkinz and register its avatar code. Clever!

In between Webkinz sessions, I have managed to do a few useful things in the real world, but it has been hard to stay focused. Hopefully I’ll do better today. Chris has been doing a much better job than I have of being productive; not only has he shoveled a lot of snow and done laundry, but he has been assembling some shelving units. Good husband!

We’re expecting at least six more inches of snow this afternoon and tomorrow … wow. Guess we’ll be having a few more days of family bonding time!

Just spent about 40 minutes playing with the Wii. Much of it was my trying to figure out how to play various games, then going back and trying to get it right. Oh well. No matter what, it was more fun than jogging on the treadmill. I fear I’m going to be pretty sore tomorrow, though!

Technically I received a Wii gaming system for Christmas. It was supposed to be a fun way for me to get exercise. In reality, I have spent about 20 minutes using it, hurting my finger in the process. In contrast, A.J. and Chris have spent the last few days playing with it. I guess the Wii was really a gift for the household!

Oh well. Technically I gave Chris a Kindle for Christmas, but so far I’ve spent more time using it than he has!

Rules: Type your name in the google search engine, followed by “needs,” then write down the first 10 things that pop up.  Below are my results, followed by my comments.

1. Peggy needs a vacation. (Sounds good to me!)
2. Peggy needs help selecting some fish. (Is this to replace the office’s dead sea monkeys?)
3. Peggy needs an evil twin. (Hmm.  This has possibilities.)
4. Peggy needs a little help from Laura Bush. (Why?)
5. Peggy needs a home. (I like the one I have, thanks.)
6. Peggy needs to develop a task force to review the assessment to extract specific information and develop specific recommendations. (What do you mean “extract”?)
7. Peggy needs your pearls. (No thanks; I have some of my own.)
8. Peggy needs to talk to the people at “Picture Loans.” (Is this so I can “extract” specific information from them?)
9. Peggy needs a makeover. (Hey, that’s rude!)
10. Peggy needs to calm the hell down. (Sorry, did I overreact to the “makeover” comment?)

Here is my version of this meme.

1. My nickname is Pegasus. I got this nickname because of the Buddy Holly song “Peggy Sue,” the science fiction show Dr. Who, and the children’s author Dr. Seuss.
2. I am allergic to artificial food coloring (dyes). This means I can’t have most sodas, children’s cereal, candy or frosting, and I have to be careful with processed foods and over-the-counter medicines.
3. I don’t like coffee. I like the smell of coffee, but not the taste.
4. I am terrible with plants; among the ones I have managed to kill are jade plants, a potted chrysanthemum, a miniature pine tree, marigolds grown from seed, an aloe and a cactus. Please don’t ever give me a plant unless you don’t care if it dies.
5. My favorite season is autumn. One of the reasons I like autumn is that I don’t feel guilty about seeing dead or dying plants anywhere.
6. I hate loud noises such as fireworks, thunder, gunshots and popping balloons.
7. I once took a course in belly dancing.
8. I used to take ballet.
9. I have studied karate.
10. I am now several pounds heavier than when I studied belly dancing, ballet and karate.
11. I did not learn to swim until I was 12.
12. I learned to ice-skate at the age of 5.
13. I was born in Buffalo, New York. My family left the city after the Blizzard of 1976, when Buffalo was hit with 14 feet of snow. That’s 14 FEET, not inches.
14. During a student exchange program one summer I lived on a farm in Wales. I realized that I was definitely not cut out to be a farm girl when I tried to help my host father bale some fleece and broke out in hives all over my arms.
15. My first summer job was as a clerk-typist with the U.S. Army Garrison, Okinawa, Japan. It was a lot easier for me than working on a farm.
16. My first language was Taiwanese, a Chinese dialect, but I cannot remember a time when I did not know English. In addition to Taiwanese and English, I know some French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Welsh, Hebrew and sign language.
17. I play the piano.
18. I used to play the flute. Then I got braces and couldn’t play properly, so I quit.
19. My favorite colors are red and purple. These unintentionally were my wedding colors; red is the traditional color for Chinese weddings, and the only colors that looked good on all four of my attendants were purple and dark green. Since I didn’t want my reception to look like a Christmas party, I went with purple dresses.
20. My parents have been married for nearly 43 years. I hope my husband and I will eventually match, if not beat, their record.
21. I have a younger brother. He lives a lot farther away than I like, but he seems happy.
22. I have 14 first cousins on my father’s side. Most of them live in the United States.
23. I have approximately 12 first cousins on my mother’s side, but I’m not sure. Most of them live in Taiwan.
24. Although I wear glasses, one of my eyes has 20/20 vision. I tried wearing a single contact lens once, but couldn’t get the hang of essentially poking myself in the eye to see properly.
25. I don’t participate in chain letters. I may share a recipe, mail a kid a pack of stickers, or answer a bunch of random questions, but I won’tcontinue the chain. Chain letters stop with me, so don’t ever send me one unless you want it broken.

I have decided to stop playing the X-Box games Mater-National and Carbon. Both involve driving a car at very fast speeds to win races. I hate driving in real life, and I don’t find these virtual versions any better! I cannot control my game piece properly, so I find myself constantly smashing into walls and ending up in last place. At the end of the game, I wind up with a very sore hand and a murderous mood. I’ve decided I’m not going to play any more, no matter how much my son begs. I see no point in playing a game that does nothing except frustrate me; I have far better things to do with my time.

Rules:
– Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
– Turn to page 56.
– Find the fifth sentence.
– Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall, and post your sentence in a comment here as well. Include the title of book and author.

“Again, the tingling, more like a vibration sweeping over him.” (“The Sleeper,” by Roger Zelazny, in Wild Cards Volume I, edited by George R.R. Martin)

I’ve been spending way too much time playing on Facebook this weekend!  One game I’ve been playing a lot today is H2Opia, in which players take care of other people’s tanks of virtual fish and exchange virtual parts to build underwater homes (as well as more virtual fish).  Certain actions apparently will lead to the game company to donate water resources for real to needy populations.  It’s fun and does good in real life — how can you lose?

Downloaded and tested various pieces of software onto the new laptop.  I was able to load a driver to access our home printer through the wireless network and loaded two pieces of software I need to update the AAJA-D.C. Web page.  I also successfully tested my access to several work-related Web sites.  So far I’m pleased with the performance of my new machine.  The only thing that bugs me is that the “Delete” key on this machine is in a different place than on the laptop I had to return, so I keep hitting the wrong button.  Oh well.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read. Below is my list:Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers