The Penguin Papers

For a while now I've been following MckMama and her MSC , especially Stellan who survived prenatal Supraventricular Tachycardia. Stellan is now 8 months old, but still battles SVT which has necessitated another hospitalization. You can read more here on MckMama's blog. MckMama can also be found on Twitter and will most likely do most of her updating there. In the meantime, prayers and good thoughts for Stellan, please! Oh, and if you think about it, wear orange and send me a picture at thepenguinpapers at gmail dot com so that I can pass them onto MckMama.

It has been, without a doubt, a challenging summer here so far. Oh, we're all healthy and happy, etc., except for one thing. We kill appliances. First, the hot water heater thought it required intensive care i.e. a new element. That necessitated several service calls before it was fixed. Then the fan motor on our water source heat pump went out. A week later. In the middle of hot, humid, mid-summer Mid-Missouri. Within the first 2 hours of the first visit with the second company we consulted, we had a fan motor ordered and a deal made. They came out, installed and we've been good to go since Monday. Did I forget to mention the dead dryer? That gave it up the day before Jim left for a 9-day backpacking trip in CO. The replacement "is on the way in 5-7 days" so Jim put a clothesline up for me yesterday and I used it for the first time today. Now I feel all earthmothery and slightly crunchy, which isn't a bad way to feel at all. I just didn't know a clothesline

I am, here and now, admitting that I am yet another number to notch onto Facebook's belt. I can quit anytime, really. I can. But wait - it goes deeper than that. I have. a farm. on Farmtown. Ah, yes, FT* toyed with me for a while, but it waited until a night of solitude to pull me into its web, as I screamed "Yes, I want to gift a friend!", and then finished me off. I love my farm. It doesn't have much yet, but it actually is soothing to play. And in just a few mouseclicks and a couple of keystrokes, entire fields can be plowed and planted, in about 10 minutes. It's just that easy. So, I'm harvesting a "field" and wondering how much time it would take a farmer to accomplish an equivalent amount in real life? And I'm not even breaking a sweat. Farmers sweat. A lot. Even with modern equipment, there's just no getting around the fact that a farmer's work is physically demanding, sometimes heartbreaking, and frequently challenging. They till

Erin*, our 13yo, is usually good about remembering birthdays. She was at her dad's during both mine and Jim's birthdays so she was unable to give us our birthday gifts until this evening. Behold I love it. *The Teen Princess

Yeah. So, tonight I took several pictures, including some of the Teen Princess, as basis for several blog posts. But, as luck would have it, they got eaten somewhere between my usb cable and the save-as dialog box. No doubt about it, this is a classic example of a PEBKAC* error, courtesy of yours truly. And I used to be so technical. *Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

My oldest kid, Meghann, and I have gotten into the habit of talking in the evening before bedtime, just hanging out, etc. Tonight as we were talking I was once again pulling my hair out over designing my new blog template, which I have yet to put up. (I've been wanting to do this for months and have finally decided to grab it by the, ahem, horns just recently.) During our discourse, this little lady made her way to me through email. Isn't she sweet?

Here is the rest of the story. Or pictures , rather.

So, sometime ago I bought a new toy, a Nikon Coolpix L100 and have been having great fun getting to know what it can do. Tonight I was bored, so I decided to take a twilight jaunt to our local lake which happens to be a mere 5 minutes from our house. Not all of the pics turned out as well as I had hoped, but the following are, if I may say so myself, not bad at all. There are more, of course, but this shutterbug needs to a)upload more to Picasa and b)convince myself to go to bed. I'm not sure which of those tasks will come first, though. :D