Another week, two more middle school open houses. Late last week it was for the nearest middle school, a few blocks to the north, across from Sticky Lips barbeque. Oddly enough, when I was in high school I visited this school for the weekend, they were hosting the all county band. It didn't make much of an impression upon the youthful me, which I suppose is good, I imagine we suburban kids were all anxious about visiting the big bad high school in the big bad city.

Of course we saw a classmate of eleven year old's, and also a mom and kid I recognized from the Wilson Open House. More interestingly, we saw an old roommate/best friend of Mrs. Ha's, who has a daughter 5 months older than eleven year old. Apparently her oldest daughter is a junior there. Yet another RIASC.

This high school had a strong vocational bend, they have a firefighter's program, a teacher's program, an IT program and a restaurant program (handing out just out of the oven chocolate chip cookies). They also have a new expeditionary learning program, which is what our elementary school is based on. Eleven year old does well in that sort of curriculum.

Eleven year old liked it, but I'm not sure how much of it was the cookie. She did say she liked the torn apart computers in the IT lab, I told her I have that in the basement. Six year old was her usual charming self, asking tons of questions and embarassing eleven year old.

Last night was another local middle/high school, across from an old apartment of ours. Again, we saw old roommate and her daughter, as well as another mom and girl from eleven year old's class. This one wasn't as impressive as the other ones, even eleven year old picked up on it and actually expressed a preference. Good, she's starting to care about where she spends the next 6 years.

Since the kids had Monday off, Mrs. Ha decided Sunday night would be a good night for a sleepover, and let eleven year old invite newspaper_girl over. The last time we tried a friend sleepover (Porsche_girl) it didn't work, mostly because six year old and eleven year old fought over who was sleeping wear. This time we laid out those boundaries and expectations ahead of time, six year old would sleep in her normal bedroom, and go to bed before the big girls, who would sleep in the bedroom being renovated in the bunkbeds.

It worked very well, we let the older girls stay up later, they made brownies with an extra helping of chocolate chips. While the brownies baked, we played Ticket to Ride, eleven year old won while newspaper_girl and I nearly tied for last.

In ebay news, the few items I can find vastly underpriced at the thrift stores are sold very well, too bad I can't scale that up much. Mrs. Ha is still planning on doing this, we haven't had time to walk her through listing stuff on ebay. I'm being patient.

Sadly, the money is a drop in the bucket to what we need. The van needed a new coolant pipe, it was steaming and sticking. That bill ran under $500. My dentist also told me I need two crowns, which will set me back about $1500 after insurance.

In beer news, I kegged my red ale on Sunday, I'm thinking tonight or Friday would be a good tapping day. It's getting cold enough now that I'm ready to switch to lager. I can't wait, I haven't had my honey lager in years.

I got a chance for a good workout on Saturday, as Mrs. Ha came to swimming to watch the girls, leaving me free to use the elliptical and the cybex machines. The sulfasalzine is really helping, even though I hadn't done weights in 9 months, I was close to where I was before my arthritic attack.

$corp is big on recycling and being green ( we implemented rohs since we sell lots of stuff in Europe). They had a recycling day earlier this week and I was able to drop off, for free, a small server room's worth of equipment. Two monitors (including that nifty rotating one), a Mac, 4 PCs, and some small appliances. For my geek cred I still  have 5 PC's at home (only two are running).

We watched Mad Hot Ballroom last week. Good if you like to watch elementary school kids learn to dance. We were hoping for insights into urban schools.

I've been alternating guard novels with other discworld novels, this week was an other,
Wee Free Men, a story of a nine year old girl who rescues her brother from an incursing world. Much more of a fantasy bend than I'm used to, worth reading but not my favorite.

That Gen X whinge prompted me to look up some pictures of Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna. As kid we would drive past the mill going into to Buffalo, it seemed to stretch for miles and miles. I was always curious about what it was like working there, the pictures give a little clue. I'm glad I don't have to work there, though, it would haved sucked to have fallen into an active open hearth furnace.