This ‘n That

— 1 —

Happy Valentine’s Day! This year it coincides with the daycare’s parents night out, so Jose and I get a dinner and movie date tonight! Yay!

— 2 —

We had tomato basil soup for dinner on Monday night. Emma almost always eats the same thing we do, but since soup is not really a toddler-friendly food, Jose made her a sandwich and one of those single serving veggies trays of cauliflower with cheese sauce. After we’d been eating for a bit, we both suddenly realized that Emma had started to dip pieces of her sandwich bread in the cheese sauce — just like we were dipping pieces of french bread into our soup. And suddenly we both were hit with the realization that HOLY CRAP, she is watching every little thing we do. No pressure, this parenting thing…

— 3 —

I have been watching non-stop Olympics this week in the evenings, and after a few days I realized that NBC’s tape-delayed coverage totally foreshadows event outcomes. On Tuesday, for instance, I managed to avoid news of the halfpipe outcome all day so that it would feel “live” when I watched it that night. But before they even got to the final round, I could tell that Shawn White didn’t win just by the way they covered the event! On top of that, the prime time coverage is so heavily edited that I never feel like I really get to watch any single event in any depth. As a result, watching the Olympics has been a lot less fun this time around. Bummer.

— 4 —

In recent years, my workplace has put together several communal meeting rooms and “collaboration spaces” in rooms around the space center that were unoccupied. Earlier this week, I had a meeting next to one called the “Longhorn Room” by the people who have offices nearby. They told me I had to see it, so we poked our head in and whoa — this room has a taxidermied longhorn head hanging smack in the middle of the wall, and it is HUGE. I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to sit facing the longhorn and feel like it’s looking at you, or to sit with the longhorn behind you with the knowledge that it’s back there, looming over you. And oh, to make this even better/more amazing/more creepy? The longhorn that is now taxidermied on the wall apparently used to live here as part of the Longhorn Space Center Project.

I am not making this up.

I decided not to post a photo here because I don’t want to risk it ending up as fodder somewhere else, but wow. That room…is something else.

— 5 —

I’ve been making steady progress on the February block of the Once Upon a Time sampler I’m doing this year. This month’s theme is the Frog Prince — the beginnings of his crown are the 3 purple sections in the middle of this block. The original pattern had text saying “Smooch!” running up the right side and I wasn’t crazy about that part. There are a lot of different people posting their progress on this sampler on Instagram, and several of them make changes here and there — so I took a cue from them and decided to replace the smooch text with a few more arrows and hearts. It was fun to come up with my own little variation!

— 6 —

All week I’ve been forgetting that we have Monday off work for President’s Day. And then every time I remember, I get excited all over again. We might “celebrate” by buying a car. We’ll see.

— 7 —

There have been a zillion quizzes making the rounds on Facebook recently. I’m always up for a silly quiz so I’ve taken several. Turns out that if I were a Disney villian I’d be Cruella de Vil, if I were a Disney princess I’d be Belle, if I were in the zombie apocalypse like Walking Dead I’d be Maggie, if I lived in Panem I’d be Rue, if I were a font I’d be Times New Roman, and I should live in Kansas (what?).

(Linking up: 7 Quick Takes, hosted by Conversation Diary)