An article about birdwatching at Fresh Kills

“It used to be they could see a garbage pile from space. Now they’ll see a park from space.” (Mr. Wollney* said later that the space-viewing was completely not true: “The Great Wall of China is not visible from space, either.”)

*Park associate taking birders into the dump. Which is no longer a dump. He's a man after my own heart, clearly. I bet if we made some sort of joke involving words for snow he'd point out that that urban legend is untrue for more reasons than... well, than I have words for, frankly!

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Three NYTimes blog posts about recess and/or school lunch

One
Two
I hold this truth to be self-evident

Breakfast for dinner!!!!!

This is in honor of the fact that I am unable to speak and am thinking fuzzily. So, you know, I had the nieces make dinner tonight.


Today Ana and Evangeline cooked dinner. (I supervised, and did most of the chopping.)

Ana read the recipe, doubled it, and made pancakes with bananas.

Evangeline and I made potato hash with red, yellow, and green peppers and also spinach. And we had sausages to go with.

Evangeline is so funny. I gave her a nice sharp knife to cut with, on the entirely reasonable grounds that a sharp knife is less likely to slip and cut you, and if it DOES cut you it will do much less damage because you'll be using less pressure and because, duh, it's sharper.

The first time we let Ana use a knife unaided (but not unsupervised!) she panicked going "I'll cut myself!" and I went "Yeah, probably - that's the secret ingredient after all! - but that's why I'm here" and so she chopped for a few minutes until she got bored or too worried and left.

Evangeline actually did cut herself. In retrospect, I should never have given her a half a potato but should have restricted her to onions and peppers. She gave herself a teeny tiny little nick on the corner of her thumb. And she said "OW!" as she did it, but she didn't cry, she went back to chopping.

But I glanced at her (I mean, she only said ow, so I thought it couldn't be very serious), and it was really bleeding a lot for such a small cut, so I told her she should wait for the bleeding to stop until she helped again. And THEN the tears came down! No, no, no, she wanted to HELP! Don't make her stop CUTTING!

Blood might be our "secret ingredient", but that doesn't mean I really *want* it in my brinner. So I sent her down to my grandmother to see if there was a band-aid there.

And then I forgot I'd sent her down, so when she came back up (hilariously, right when her dad walked in!) I was so shocked I actually said something - "Evangeline! When did YOU go downstairs??"

*headdesk*

I swear, I'm a good aunt, most of the time. I know what I'm doing. One can only hope that nobody understood me, congested and phlegmy as I am.

(Incidentally, my grandmother watched Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader on TV tonight. Now, aside from the fact that the folks on that show are dumber than the proverbial sack of bricks (they might not have used the terminology when you were a kid, but how hard is it to think that a "doubles fact" in math includes, I don't know, doubling something?), I have to ask what sort of crack the producers are smoking when they think that "phlegm" is a second grade spelling word. In the second grade, they're still learning words that are, you know, topical. When the heck is "phlegm" even gonna come up? Actually, that's a good question - is this phlegm EVER gonna come up? I can't talk! I can't breathe! I can't think! I can't even really cough! Gah!)