This is something I really want, a pretty plant that can eat bugs, and we've got plenty of those here at my house.

When I was a little kid the local grocery store sold tiny venus fly traps in little plastic containers. My mom always said "no" when my brother and I would ask (a mother's wisdom--she knew that thing wouldn't last a week at our house) but one day she finally agreed, or I spent birthday money on it, don't remember which.

We took our little venus fly trap home and sat it on the counter, anxious to watch it devour bugs. I remember my brother and I finding a few dead flies to shove in it's little mouth because it just wasn't a fast enough killing machine.

I actually don't recall it eating anything. I do remember pushing forks into it's opening to watch it slowly close up. I remember thinking, if that's as fast as they close, how do they get anything?

I think the fork trick lasted a few times and then the plant shriveled up and died.

Now I'm eyeing this thing online (of course it's out of stock right now, but...) and thinking my kids will probably torment the plant as much as my brother and I did.
- posted by Christine @ 3:05 PM

 
Amazing story.
- posted by Christine @ 11:58 PM

 
I think this whole Dick Cheney shooting someone is rather stupid, but I did think this song that a local radio show did was cute.

I spent my afternoon in a Chuck E. Cheese-like restaurant minus the dancing mice. You know, lots of kids, noise, and tokens. It was really wasn't that bad. Yes, my daughter's tickets kept getting caught in machines and the pizza was overpriced, but the only real negative event was when my sister-in-law walked over to me and said, "I think we should get the kids out of here--someone just threw up." Sure enough, a grown man had vomited in several parts of the game room. As workers in plastic gloves made faces and taped up sections of the room for clean-up duty, we cleared out our meal and took the kids over to the child habitrail and avoided the mess, while a large group of Japanese tourists continued to eat their pizza.
- posted by Christine @ 6:21 PM

 
Pictures of the microseconds following an atomic bomb blast. Interesting.
- posted by Christine @ 11:52 PM

 
Well I just wasted about 10 minutes of my life finding a face in this picture of beans. Can you? (No, nothing jumps out at you on this one--I promise!)
- posted by Christine @ 12:27 AM

 
Well apparently the reason I felt so motivated to recharge my dead car was because I had enough foresight to know the working automobile was going to take a turn for the worst. Well, it's not that bad. Although I suspected the hissing sound coming from the front end of the car was something under the hood...it wasn't. It much more simple than that.

So I begged my son to get into the stinky old car for his ride to school. He cried. He screamed. He demanded to know why. I bribed him with some candy and got him into it, but he refused to sit back against the seat and plugged his nose the entire way to school. He wanted his coat on his backpack so it wouldn't touch anything and kept his feet up off the floor during his ride.

Okay, so it smells a little old and...musty. Even the resident Mouse Family appear to have decided to hole themselves up somewhere else for the winter.

So the 3 working cylinders and I made it to his school and back, jerking and bouncing much of the way, and although I may smell like I need another shower now, we made it.
- posted by Christine @ 12:47 PM

 
I sat through my very first football game this weekend. Had to. Apparently the Seattle Seahawks had never gone to the Superbowl before, and I heard a rumor that they would kick you out of the state if you didn't watch it.

Sure I've seen football games before in real life, actually in high school, when our pep band had to play half-time music (I'm sure the cheerleaders loved dancing to our version of Louie Louie). It was definitely a more social event than anything else. There were the die-hard football fans in the stands (parents and then that really old guy that had attended every game for the past 75 years or something) and then the rest of us would just mingle around the stands, usually shivering. Us band kids would return to our seats when we had to be there, then leave again.

At any rate, I sat through the whole game, and I have to say...it wasn't that bad. For some reason actually paying attention is a whole lot better than just having that annoying sports noise on in the background. I'm still not totally sure I understand the game. I do know for sure that I never want my kids playing it.

Another first for me -- I jump started my car by myself using my other car this afternoon. Yes, I know what jumper cables are and I know they hook to the battery and that you can blow yourself up if the cables touch, and well, that's about it. Determined to get my old car running again, I called my brother a couple times and he walked me through it. It really wasn't that hard to do, and I did get my beast of a car started.

Gee...sitting through a football game and jump starting a car... Maybe tomorrow I'll try hang gliding....
- posted by Christine @ 11:46 PM