My two eldest are having a sword fight behind me. My daughter has her pink and green cardboard shield (what all the fashinable women warriors are wearing this year) and my son has his orange and white "Viking" shield out, and they're pillaging and plundering the family room while E. pushes a plastic triceratops around on a Little Tikes desk chair. The house may survive this, and then again, it might not.

Andy got on a spree today, cleaned out the garage, weeded the landscaping in front, and primered the downstairs bathroom. No more Christmas red in there. Instead it will be a goldy yellow, a little like my journal background.

Writing progress: a few more pages on the Oregon short... er, novella. I keep running across NaNoWriMo blogs and feeling vaguely guilty. Don't much feel like working on any novel lately, so I think I'll stick to shorts.

Homeschooling: Disappointing trip to the Science Center yesterday. Couldn't get anybody to tell me what the hours for their paleontology prep lab were, so we just went, only to find ourselves overwhelmed by about fourteen busloads (no, I am not exaggerating) of school kids from various districts in Illinois. Mostly they were all middle school and high school students. A lot of twelve and thirteen year old girls trying desperately to act like eighteen, nineteen, or twenty year olds, and mostly just looking scared, like any step they took might send them over some unidentified edge. A 12 year old girl wearing a midriff shirt and jogging pants with "Paws Off" scrawled across the arse, running up the stairs shouting like a kid while she clutched a white handbag. The fake flowers on her flip-flops fluttered when she walked. Another girl with rings on every finger, eating lunch with her mother, eyes flickering back and forth -- looking as if she hoped nobody would see her. We had to kill a lot of time waiting on 2:00 when the prep lab was supposed to be open, but my kids didn't seem to mind. They spent a lot of time watching the life-size animitronic tyrannosaurus and the skulls and peering into the clear sides of the lab while I mainly tried to keep E. in the stroller out of harm's way. (It wasn't that any of the schooled kids were misbehaving, but just that there were so *many* of them. It was like trying to study a rock in a flood.) Nobody ever showed up to open the lab, which annoyed me, but by then the kids were tired anyway and wanted to go home. I'd wanted to actually touch a dinosaur bone, though, considering that I had wanted to be a paleontologist through a good part of my elementary school years. So I was more disappointed than the kids were, wanting to give a little present to the kid in *me* after so long.

I'm settling for attending a Paleontological Society Meeting next Friday. The kids are excited about it, and I am, too :-).