Mild Rants and Request

I have a crick in my neck from typing on my laptop while looking at the desktop PC's (actually, kitchentabletop, if you want to get specific) monitor. Because my laptop's backlight died this morning, which was a lovely way to start the day. Sentence fragments suggest frustration, dontcha know.

Fortunately, we purchased the extended warranty and someone from Dell is supposed to contact me tomorrow about coming out to replace it. Paul doesn't seem to think that this is a big deal, but swapping out the monitor on a laptop seems a bit more involved to me than doing the same with a PC. So I backed up my entire "Writing" folder, just in case.

For the interested, On Point had an interesting program on closed vs. open box systems and the future of innovation/the internet.

Moving away from technology to vent about something else briefly, let's talk about summer programming. I won't even get into the way most activities for kids assume an at-home parent to ferry kids around at extremely variable and inconvenient pick-up and drop-off times. That's not my rant, because I am an at-home mom and available to make those trips. (Though I still acknowledge how incredibly unfair the system is.) But figuring out a schedule for what my girls should do this summer was harder than creating a workable semester schedule for an English major/pre-med back in my college years. (There's very little overlap and lots of conflict, there.)

But I figured it out. June's will be the busy month; July and August will provide a bit more AM down-time (all afternoons are pretty relaxed). In June Ellie has summer school two mornings a week. Two other mornings, she'd be in a morning-only day camp at a local park. Those 4 mornings, Ada and I would go to swimming lessons together while Ellie was otherwise occupied. And the 5th morning, we'd do something fun altogether, usually swimming.

But I got distracted by the IEP and then vacation, and . . . camp was booked solid when I tried to enroll Ellie. It was the only camp I've found that had a two days/week option, so that it fit around her summer school schedule. But the closest pools to us have 4 days/week swimming lessons (a practice I like for the learning water comfort/safety process, though it makes scheduling tough) so I can't take Ada for swimming lessons unless Ellie has some sort of programming on those mornings. I don't think Ellie'd be really cool with being dropped off in the gym daycare while Ada and I swim. ARGH.

I know, I know, this is an insignificant problem, in the grand scheme of things. But I can't take swimming lessons with both girls at the same time (trust me on this) and I want both to have that opportunity. Scheduling summer programming feels like a big puzzle that I'm having trouble solving. Does anybody have the box, so that I can see the picture I'm trying to match? Seriously, if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Finally, thinking of bloggy helpfulness and to end on a positive note, I want to give a big THANKS to Carolyn for the Mystic Chai tip. I got three canisters for Mother's Day and I plan to put them all away before my September birthday. It's just as good as I remembered, even when I'm stirring it myself!