Long Bus Ride

Maya was forty minutes late getting home from school tonight because of the snow, her bus got stuck five times in what is normally a pretty short little bus ride.

Dancing with The Woz

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer is competing on Dancing with the Stars this season. Being Zaheeda is the most ardent fan of this god-awful show we want to make sure she does everything in her power to make sure Steve wins!

Four Girls with a Video Camera

Maya, CJ, Avery and Annah playing.

Lenny

Maya shot this little clip of Tomme's dog Lenny so she could show her grandparents how a normal dog behaves.

Dinner with the Bjerkes

We had a nice day visiting with the my long lost friend Tomme (Tobias) and her family Nate, CJ and Avery. It was so nice to see Tomme after all these years and despite the passing of time she is still pretty much the same old Tomme. The girls all had a great time making Slime Worms and Shrinky Dinks and Zaheeda and Nate managed to politely sit though all our "remember when" stories.

Uncle Sven's Comics

Here's a video of Maya shopping for comics at Uncle Sven's.

Violin Practice

Maya took exception to my putting the violin lesson video up and wanted to make a point that she can read the simple piece that she was struggling with in the earlier video. She was practicing tonight so my posting bad violin playing may just be the impetus she needs to do the practicing she's supposed to do.

Maya's Day Today 2-18-09

Maya sitting at the Mall discussing her day. Annah listens intently while eating the case for the video camera.

Violin Practice

There is an old adage that says if you miss one day of practice you know, if you miss two days of practice your teacher knows and if you miss three days of practice the world knows... Well the world knows. This is a video of Maya trying to remember how to sight read after going so long without practicing her sight reading that she's having a hard time remembering exactly what all those little lines and dots mean. I told her she better get back on her practicing routine or she can expect more and more violin "shaming videos" in the future.:-)

No School

Maya was home all day relaxing and putting the final touches on her Ray Charles project.

Valentines

Valentine Card from Grandma

The girls both got Valentine cards from Grandma today with a nice $10 surprise included. Annah said she is willing to share her new found wealth, however Maya said the money is hers and she's not parting with a dime. Since Maya is not in what would be considered a "power position" in the family I suggested she change her attitude less I decide to charge ten bucks for gas money to take her to Georgia's birthday party on Saturday.

Christopher & Banks

We were at The Mall getting a little exercise when we noticed Christopher & Banks, Maya's Grandma's favorite store was having a big sale - and to think she wanted to go to this store when she was here this weekend, but we just never found the time....

Maya's Day Today

Coraline Movie

This weekend was of course Maya's big Coraline the movie weekend, and she along with her Grandma and myself all really enjoyed the film. Not only was it done in wonderful stopmotion, but was also shot in digital 3D making it one of the more visually stunning movies we've seen. Though great to look at, both her Grandma I thought the story tended to drag at times - so much so that we both fell asleep for a bit in the middle. Maya however felt Coraline was perfect in every way.

Our reviews are as follows -

Maya gives gives it: ★★★★★.
Grandma gives it: ★★★★✩
I give it: ★★★★✩

So that is our review for this week, and until next time the balcony is closed:-)

Grandma and the Girls

Doughnut for Mom

Maya picking out a doughnut for her mom.

Ordway Today

Maya has a field trip to the Ordway today to see the Lula Washington Dance Theater. Her Grandma thinks Maya's pretty lucky to be able to go see all these "cultural" type things, and that may be so - however given the opportunity to chaperon the Lula Washington Dance Theatre I really had say, "Oh gee --- ya know --- I kinda have to keep and eye on Annah during the day -- and yeah --- sorry, I'd really love too, but dang..."

Testing the New Camera

Well the camera seems to work. I spent a couple hours tonight trying to figure out how to embed YouTube videos into the blog at a higher resolution and I did figure out that it's possible, however extremely inconvenient. After tweaking, fussing and a fair about of cussing I think I got it to work so that if you simply click play on the clip you will get a little lower than HD resolution, although better than the usual youtube embedded clip. If you so desire, after clicking play you can click the little up arrow on the bottom right of the player and click on the HD button and that makes it as "Hi Def" as we can get out of YouTube. At one point in my meddling tonight I had it set to default to HD but for some reason it was really funky on the Firefox browser in Windows. It worked fine on all the other PC browsers and all the Mac browsers but for some reason firefox got quirky. So if you notice the page suddenly gets screwed up on your computer please let me know.

Flip Mino

We got our new Flip Mino HD video recorder today with its own custom designed faceplate complements of Maya. Now we need to do something interesting to record. Hopefully we'll have some fun videos up in the near future.

Clean Room Continued

Only a couple days left and her room has remained clean. Now we wonder what will happen after the week is up. Will she continue to keep it clean or will we see a weeks worth of pent up messiness unleash itself? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Maya's Mess

As an exercise of my new found leverage over Maya (that being that I can get her to do anything I want as long as I take her to see Coraline next weekend), I decided to insist her bedroom be kept clean for an entire week and if I go into her room and find it messed up during this time then the deal is off and there will be no movie. Unfortunately, like many great ideas the law of unintended consequences reared its head and my 'keeping your room clean plan' was no exception. The positive result of the deal was seen almost immediately she went into her room cleaned it up - even went so far as to make a check list on her white board so I can check off the days of inspection to certify that it was in fact clean. The problem arose a couple days later when I realized she was keeping her room clean by not going in it and instead moved her projects, activities and predominantly messy nature into our room - within a matter of days our room was a disaster area.

Walking to the Library

Two nice days in a row this weekend and that meant we could venture out and go for a walk. We headed out to the library and though the weather was pretty good, there was a lot of ice on the sidewalks and Maya fell down about four times. Annah screamed for most of the way there but took a nap for a little while on the way back.