Dream of the '90s

Yes, this is a Portlandia reference.  You will understand soon enough.

*Furniture delivery!  The box was indeed extremely heavy (my goal weight, coincidentally).  The truck driver was super nice--with a nearly impenetrable eastern NC accent, to boot--and he did indeed bring the box to the door, and even up the front steps, for $20.  I wasn't really able to help Mark with the construction, since I was pretty busy with baby-wrangling, and it did indeed take one person about four hours to construct!  We haven't put it into place yet, but I'm sure we will tomorrow evening.

*Despite the fact that we now own a perfectly functional converter box and non-rabbity antenna, I still watch most of my new-run broadcast TV on Hulu; this means I am always a week behind on Fox shows, but I can deal with that.  Anyway, there was a '60s song on Glee the other week that I knew I had heard covered before, but I just could not remember where.  Then it finally popped into my head:  

Oh yes, Vonda Shepherd.  Then it occurred to me that the character singing the song on Glee was a sophomore in high school...and would have been an INFANT when this aired. Sheesh.  So this song is impenetrably stuck in my head now.

*Finished Eats, Shoots and Leaves, largely in a marathon session this afternoon.  I wish this book had been written when I was in high school!  I had a bit of an addiction to semicolons myself.  In fact, I ran across a semicolon-hater my senior year of college:  one of my honors thesis readers.  I did tend toward a kind of stuffy, Anglophilic style back then (the late '90s, again!), and this woman just hated it.  I mean, she was crossing out semicolons that were actually necessary, like in lists!  (I ended up converting at least one of those to a short chart, but still.)  Anyway, I really liked the book--though I took a bit of exception with her hatred of emoticons, which I think are a perfectly rational response to the impersonal nature of email and other internet-based speech (though I wouldn't use them at work!).  I just hope it doesn't make me too self-conscious when I'm typing!

*In order to keep Rosina occupied while Mark was building the entertainment center (the purchase of which was almost entirely motivated by concern for Rosina's safety, not because we desperately needed another big bulky piece of furniture), we put on a Classic Sesame Street DVD.  We watched the very first episode!  Interestingly, there was an introduction to the episode that mentioned that the DVD was meant for adults to watch, not children.  What could possibly be wrong with 1969-vintage Big Bird?!  Well, we figured it out about halfway through:  in a segment meant to teach kids about prepositions (over, around, under, through), a group of kids roam this semi-apocalyptic landscape.  Running around a clothesline was no big deal, but how about going through a storm drain culvert, or over a pair of sawhorses at an abandoned construction site, walking on 2x4s three feet off the ground?!  I suppose we don't want to encourage that sort of thing; though I've gone through a storm drain in my time, the balance-beam trick was definitely a bad idea.  And nowadays, when everybody's supposed to wear bike helmets...well, I just can't imagine the righteous indignation! ;)

*It was also a day of baking:  granola in the afternoon (with probably a bit too much molasses, though it is really tasty), and hidden-vegetable "toddler muffins" in the evening.  We tried the muffins tonight, and they're good--kind of a cross between banana and carrot cake, with sweet potatoes as well--but Rosina hasn't tried them yet.  The woman who submitted the recipe said that her son likes to eat them right out of the freezer when he's teething, but I'm not sure how Rosina will feel about an ice-cold muffin; she's way too used to regular food now!