When my fellow homeschooler Kay invited us to ride along with her on a trip to visit the new California Academy of Sciences yesterday, I jumped at the chance. For years now, peering out from the De Young Museum’s observation tower, we’ve watched it being constructed, and it looked awesome. A huge science museum with…
Author: cjbickford
San Jose Art Crawl
I’ve been working hard and been rather stressed lately, so I decided to give Charybdis and Scylla Academy a spring break. To begin, I gave Neil a minimal day of academics: a paper on the late middle ages (for which he wrote about Philip the Fair), a few chapters of Ivanhoe, and learning how to…
Party Girl
I felt like quite the socialite this weekend. I had not one, but two parties to go to. I was even welcome without my husband, who was so sick from some virus he’d caught that he mostly spent the weekend in bed, alone. The first was nominally a five-year-old’s birthday. Surprisingly, for a girl who’s…
Hoteloween and the Softening Economy
As I reported before, the San Diego Comic-Con is huge, and unlike many other things, apparently unaffected by economic woes. For some comics- and pop-culture fans, it’s Christmas, Easter, and Disneyland at once, all wrapped up in one 4-1/2 day extravaganza. Last year, circumstance allowed me to go to the show casually, and it was…
Funny Foreign Phone Conventions
I have been stressing over a number of matters during the last week; so much so that Neil joked that for me, it’s not March, it’s FREAKuary. Yesterday, an English friend called me about one FREAKuary concern that had gone from just bad to godawful, and which tangentially involved him. As he always does, he…
The Art of Artistic Restraint
Like many comic book fans, Peter and Neil were excited to go see the movie version of the Watchmen. Even though the movie was rated R, Peter and I didn’t have any great reservations about Neil seeing it. He’s read the graphic novel three times already, and he’s seen artistic nudity and violence in the…
Carolyn’s Daft Investment Tips
I recently happened to make an investment move so astute my broker complimented me on the action when it was done. I’m not rich; I just managed to lose less money than I would have if I’d kept my money in the market. So forthwith, based on my one brilliant move, I am sharing with…
Desperately Seeking Shiaw-Ling for the Protocol Office
Two recent diplomatic gift–presentation debacles have highlighted one thing: whoever our current administration has in the Office of Protocol who is in charge of procuring gifts for foreign dignitaries, it’s clearly not Shiaw-Ling. And now that we’re all (well, ok, maybe just me) embarrassed by the gift-giving gaffes, the only thing to do is to…
California School Science: Death to All Guppies
My children and I blazed through earth science, and we’re on to biology. It’s one subject, at least in its “lab” component that works well for both Neil and Kelly. Kelly marvels and observes while Neil extracts scientific principles from the experiment. A few weeks ago, I got some worms for a few experiments. Our…
On Having a Job
I came to a hard realization that I still needed to squish in a blog or two when I went to extreme measures just to add my opinion to an entry on James Hudnall’s blog. My comment was really the sort of thing I would have written up as my own blog entry back when…