But cooool thing:  Our friends in Uppsala have the coolest house, including modding the stairs so that kids can climb ladders, and indoor rope ladder, neat nooks and crannys, walls covered with the best art he's ever made, and, outdoors, the hundred foot Slip-n-Slide.  Not being content with the mere seventeen foot version, Artist M buys a roll of builder's plastic and a bunch of cheap inflatable rafts and adds to the Whammo version with a long downhill that ends in a splash pool.  To further cool-ify it, he hooks it up to the shower, so it has warm water. 

His idea of a good bath is to douse the kids in shampoo, which makes them go faster, and send them down the slide.

There were many other amazing things.  I didn't know it would curl my toes to see a first edition printing of Principia Mathematica, but it did.  The Gustavarium , which had it on display along with thousands of other things to make a scientist swoon, is a must see.

In other news:

• Work is heating back up again, so I have to remember how to do it. 
• Little K visits her Kindergarten classroom today.  Now we have to figure out how to deal with the temporal dislocation problem of the school issuing an afternoon Kindergarten assignment and a morning bus pass.
• MJ starts preschool in a few weeks. (Remember, the way people found out that MJ was expected was when I told Rusty, "I'm pregnant.  I'm stealing your pickle."
• My target weight is 125, so I have about seven pounds to go.
• We're sailing over to the Vineyard next week and will anchor off Menemsha so that MJ can see his godfathers.  One of them has started law school in New York, so we want a little time before he's too far away.
• I finally gave to the clothing box four bags of my mother's clothes, which had been sitting in the basement of the condo. 
• Our house was supposed to be panted while we were gone.  It's still not finished, but in the mean time, I'm using the chaos to get rid of things.  I put ALL the papers I had in my files from graduate school into the recycle, and shreded seven grocery bags full of financial documents.  Last night I did a toy purge, and this morning, the kids helped (!) by putting more things in the "trash/someone can use" bags.
• I am getting rid of stuff
• I made my first trip to IKEA and fell in love.  I'll be getting new bookshelves for my office with a corner unit, and getting rid of the pine boards screwed together version.  I'll have to organize my graphic novels better.  I have the Cerebus phone books and random Moebuis, Machine Man, From Hell, etc. down here, whereas the Sandman and Hellblazers are upstairs in the bedroom.  I'm considering having a book binder friend bind up my copies of the Alan Moore-penned Swamp Things and the Cerebus that I have in issues that I don't want to re-buy, like the Jaka's Story and Reads runs.
• Which reminds me.  I never got the last issue of the second story of Mage.  Also, need to order my copy of Lost Girls.

• The kids call IKEA "Stuff Mart"
• A month or so ago toxicfur, $coworker and I were driving on the Mass Pike.  (Did I tell you this already?)  There was a car with lots of Leftist bumper stickers, including one that read "Defy Corporate Dominance" or some such.  She was drinking a Dunkin Donuts iced coffee, with the plastic cup inside a styrofoam cup.  Yeah, that's sutainable, lady.
• Concepts in the water and diplomacy grant may apply to the minority health disparities grant.  I love it when that happens.  Now I have to go write on both of those.

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