Links for You

We’re beginning to breathe a bit easier after being suffocated by damp & smelly laundry for a day or two. Actually, the household’s been slightly more chaotic than usual because in addition to getting things organized after the vacation, we’ve been processing New Acquisitions. First, M’s ceiling fan died, so there was shopping and choosing a new one. We were stumped, at first, until sweet little J and Cute W simultaneously hit on the idea of spray-painting a plain white fan to make it more fun.

Turquoise is M’s current favorite color, and although we’d planned to go solid, at two coats we’d hit such a pretty slightly-cloudy-sky effect that we stopped. But then poor W had to deal with various technical difficulties.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to fit a new computer into our living room. Cute W found some can’t-pass-it-up deal online, plus he’s been taking a bunch of photographs that occupy a huge amount of computer space. We have a small house, so when he mentioned that he wanted this computer, I was stumped about where the heck we could possibly hit it. So we moved sofas around, and I went to roughly seven thousand cheap stores looking for a clever solution, and then we moved the sofas back and used a table that we already had.

And meanwhile, between hooking up fixtures and moving sofas, the girls would do things like request a tickling session or spill an entire sleeve of saltines all across the kitchen floor.

Why is J topless yet wearing velour pants? These are her special “lounging pants,” hot weather be damned. She’s prefer to be entirely naked, probably, but we attempt to enforce a No Direct Genital-to-Upholstery Contact policy. By golly we have our standards.

If you’re still in search of holiday fireworks, here are All Over Albany, Albany.com, and the Times Union to help you out.

Thanks again to everyone who was kind enough to write a guest post! It certainly made my life easier, and it’s interesting to see what people think is worth writing about. Thanks also to readers who commented on the guest posts. People tried something new and spent time writing, and I know (oh, believe me, I know) that it can be difficult to sweat it out and then think, “Did anyone even bother to read this at all?” So it’s great to give folks that feedback. And I know it takes time. Heck, I lurk on a ton of blogs myself. But sending my special guests a little encouragement was appreciated, too.

And while folks were guest-posting on Capital District Fun, a couple of my posts were on Kristi Gustafson’s On the Edge blog. She has people write every year when she’s on vacation, and this was my first attempt. My only regret is that since I was away, I didn’t get a chance to chitchat in the comments at the time. Anyway, please do click over and read them! This post is about my dad’s rules for choosing a spouse, and this one is a story from when I was a brand-new mama–my friends know it as the fire alarm story.