Ah, beans

Ah, beans

Them's the beans, those are. There are some in the pretty-much-ripe stage, and some that are green with little bit of red, and some that are all red but not very dark red. It's been fun watching the growth of a substance on which I rely as heavily as water or air. All hail the coffee plant, oo oo aa.

Finally found the doohickey for the camera, as you see. It was its turn to be the Lost Item of the Day, apparently, and I had failed to notice. You will also note that I have recovered my ability to write little html tags to make links. Boy, does this girl know how to party or what?

The big activity for the weekend was MIT Splash, which was pretty damn fabu as usual. I got to sneak out to the MIT Press bookstore, and I - gasp, be still my heart - scored a copy of the most fascinating and complete book on the neurology of cognition that exists anywhere , and even got to have an intelligent conversation about why I find this stuff so fascinating. The new edition has new material on neural plasticity! This is the key to everything! Oh, boy! It's edited by the guy who is basically God, for this topic, anyway.

I'm pretty excited about it. Can you tell? (Yes, this made the intro/description of my darling husband and I even funnier (and more terrifying, for some): "hello, this is S, who's a Ph.D. in astrophysics, and his wife L, an ex-actress with a hobbyist's interest in neuroscience.") (okay, we almost never did that, not unless we both wanted to have people flee.)

I'm doing okayish, still. I cried a lot while writing some thank you notes, but that's partly what they're for. We're going to my relatives for Thanksgiving, like we usually do. Little guy simply loves having bezillion relatives all over the place; the girls are not as keen. It'll be fine (or fine-ish). We called up Nana (my MIL) and sang happy birthday today. And the kids did a really full day of formal schoolwork here in homeschool land! Oldest did something silly with her math course so now she's got a huge pile of proofs to write and is putting in the time, hurray for responsible teenagerhood--and got an A- on her psychology course! whoo hoo! Middle did yeochild's work on her normal stuff plus an entire chapter of vocabulary lesson. And little guy soldiered through a big batch of math and some writing lessons and then a whole chapter of Latin, which he used to have to break into sections but now has the stamina to do all of it in one sitting. They found the time to nearly finish the Harry Potter structure, too, but we seem to have lost one teeny tiny piece, so it's taking a rest. The work so far:

I'm not sure Hagrid is supposed to have been knocked senseless, but the lego guys, they can be a rough crowd.

Peace, everybody.