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My daughter and I were in the car today, heading to the chiropractor, when she asked me how many seconds were in a day.   Or rather she asked me what sixty times sixty was.   I helped her figure out the answer by stepping her through easier steps starting with, "well, you know what six times six is, right?"

After getting that answer she said she was trying to figure out the number of seconds in a day.  So we kept going.   She worked out all the answers herself with me giving her ways to split the problem into pieces she had the knowledge to solve at her age and math skill. 

When we got to the office, she had just figured out the final answer—and she was so proud.   When we went inside she was telling the ladies at the front desk the answer and saying she was going to figure out the answer for a year next.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son was very outgoing at a family dinner tonight with my in-laws and brother-in-law's family tonight.   He was playing the comedian role almost and getting a good bit of laughs.   He seems older than he was a year ago.  By a lot from a maturity standpoint. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter, ever the thinker, was given the answer to how many seconds in a year by the helpful staff at the chiropractor's office as we walked back today.   She called out, "yes, but what about a leap year?"

Not Even Sure

...what to title this post. My back is screaming at me and I need to get to bed and have been helping someone with something that needs help.   So let's see what the children did today. 

The Big Boy Update:  I think my son has some real friends that want to spend time with him.   He doesn't search them out, they come to find him.   I suppose that's a good thing.   He's so interested in being cool and accepted.   I think he actually is. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter insisted there was a bug in her hair because she could hear it.   She was freaking out and said it had been trying to get in her hair for a while.   I didn't believe her but after feeling around in her hair and not finding anything at first I saw something and then lost it.   I didn't tell her but said we should go upstairs and brush her hair out.   She had some cricket-like creature in her hair that was close to an inch long.   It jumped out and landed on my shirt and I calmly, without upsetting my daughter anymore, went to the door and shooed it away.   

Gloomhaven

We have some friends that wanted to play a board game and wondered if we'd be interested in playing with them.   We said sure.   They warned us it would be a long game.   We said that was okay.   They said meaning multiple sessions.   We said we were still in.   

Today, we found out what the full meaning of, "a long game" meant when we went to their house while Nana watched the children (and singlehandedly entertained the children while at the same time managing to clean and tidy our house, leaving it in a far, far better state than when she arrived) while we played this board game for five hours. 

We made it past the very beginning.   The game we're playing introduces the concepts of the game level by level because there is so much complexity it's too much to take in all at once.   And the game we're playing is the introduction game to the actual game, which is another who knows how many hours of time necessary to complete. 

We had fun seeing their game room and learning about the games they've been playing plus just talking about this and that while we played.   If we had focused completely on the game and nothing else we would have gotten farther along, but that wasn't the complete point.  We wanted to do something together and play the game at the same time. 

We're going to schedule the next round of the game, Gloomhaven, the "toddler" edition it felt like given how little we knew at the start, as soon as we can sync up schedules.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is in bed.  It is after eleven o'clock.   Funny songs are starting to play out of my Alexa beside the computer.   He is making jokes two floors up, it would seem. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter got us all to take a neighborhood bike ride just before dark tonight.  She and her father on their double bike with her in the back and my son and me on our bikes.   It was a short ride, but it was a lot of fun.

Club Champion

I am so wiped out.   I'm going to say my husband won the club championship today, coming back from a rocky start yesterday and winning by several strokes.   He's pleased because he's lost to sudden death several times in the past years 

The Big Boy Update:  I lost one of the models I was filming for Filament Stories.   I found it on my son's desk—broken.   I normally wouldn't mind, because I could print another one, but in this case, I needed it for filming.   He now knows not to pick up my models until I'm finished.   Then he can have them and if they break, it's okay.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was wailing and miserable upstairs at bedtime.   She had lost her piece of paper with a string on it tied in such a way it would make a sort of kite.   She found the paper but the string had come loose and part was missing.   I retied it but it wasn't the same.   It wasn't just a piece of paper, it was her friend, she told me.   Tomorrow, I told her, we could get a longer piece of string and upgrade her kite.   She thought that would be okay and went to sleep now that her friend was going to be all right. 

Late and Wow, Yeah Late

Dear me, I had a nap that turned into much longer than a nap.   I've been working with my husband to get out the next "Story" with Filament Stories.   All has been going rather swimmingly considering we don't know what we're doing and are learning as we go.  

That's not entirely true, we know a lot about a good portion of the facets of this whole endeavor.  It just feels like we know very little because the portions we don't know much about seem to be important.   But we're learning, and we're doing it together, and that's been fun.   

The best part is when I'm recording and can't for the life of me get the words to come out the way I want them to.   We have some rather silly gag reel things we might someday release.   I'm trying to embrace the silly, because it's me in a way, and that sounds so much better than stilted, formalized words.   The feedback we're getting interestingly has a large portion related to the funny things I say or do that weren't my intention in the first place.   From that standpoint, it's been nice encouragement to leave all those accidental parts in.  

Not that we have that much content yet.   It's a surprisingly large amount of work to get a single minute of video released.  I think we all know realistically it has to be a lot of work to get audio, all the video shots, the timelapse videos, other video pieces, color correction, noise reduction, music, sound syncing, uploading, tagging, uploading and tagging four more times to the other platforms, commenting, liking other's comments, responding to other's comments, etc., etc.    

And that's just the video creation side of things.  There is all the printing side, which is a whole other big side.   Thank goodness it's all fun, or it might seem like work.   

But it's late, and I'm super tired, and I'm only going to write one sentence saying that and then press publish.   Only I seem to have written more.   

The Big Boy Update:  Taking three stuffed animals upstairs and getting his shoes to walk out the door to go to Nana and Papa's house for an overnight visit was just too hard.   How dare we, as parents, expect him to do those things?  He pitched such a fit over it.   My husband said, "This is easy.  This is the easiest thing to do, but you want to make it harder by fighting, taking time, getting everyone upset, and in the end you're still going to have to do them.   Why do you do this?"   My son was too angry to answer the question. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wants to make cookies.   She asked me to look online for some recipies.   I told her I had a recipe book with 1001 cookie recipes in it.  She was excited but then when I showed it to her she said, "but it's not in braille."   It was so sad, her little voice.  I said I knew it wasn't but the recipes on the web weren't either, so let's find something together and then I'd print it out for her in braille.   There is a world of information out there she can't yet get to.   When she learns to use some of the device technology out there it will open up her world.  

Rachet & Clank

A long time ago in a galaxy far before I had children, my then not-husband and I enjoyed playing a series of video games called Ratchet & Clank.  Clank was a little robot that rode around as a backpack-type attachment to Ratchet, who was the last of his kind creature with huge, fuzzy ears and an endearing personality. 

The games were all about gratuitously large guns that did sometimes silly things in a world that was cartoonish and campy.  The story was cute and the gameplay was almost Looney Toonish in feel.   The games were just fun and both my husband and I enjoyed them from start to finish. 

It has been many, many years, but a new game has come out in the series.   Tonight, my husband started playing after trying to get my son interested for a few weeks.   My son has been shouting out what to do next, giving advice, and asking questions.   We've been telling him how the game is like the historical games.  

Tomorrow I bet he'll want to start his own game.   I enjoyed being part of the conversation, helping my son understand that games have been cool in the past and both his father and I were game players with skills.    He is currently annoyed we sent him to bed, even though it's almost midnight.  

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Laundry Update:  The children aren't happy about this.  The next iteration of laundry duty is upon them.   They must now bring their laundry down, start their own loads and run them through to the end result of folded and hung laundry being put away.  My daughter threw a fit tonight saying it wasn't fair she had to do her laundry.   I told her fine, no allowance.  And I wasn't going to do her laundry for her.   She huffed off.  I wonder if she'll do her laundry tomorrow?

Around The World

I have some friends I communicate with on a daily basis electronically.   They are what I would call my, "3D printing friends."   People talk online in various different ways, this group of friends is via a sort of chat group not unlike a big text message chain with a lot of people in it in this case called a "channel."

What amazes me is that these people are all over the world but it doesn't seem like it.  Someone will have a picture of something they've printed.   They'll drop the picture into the chat group and we'll all comment about how lovely it is or what a good choice of filament or how funny that the models are mouse houses to protect his daughter's stuffed mouse collection from their household cat.   Anything at all can be posted. 

The rest of us see the picture a second or two after the person shares it.   It happens so fast we don't even think about the complex order of events that has to happen for the bits representing that picture to travel around the world from their device to ours.   Did the bits fly by satellite?  Did they go under the ocean?  What was the path taken, because it might have been anything other than direct.  

I've started thinking in time zones, trying to remember if it's morning or afternoon in Russia based on what time of day it is for me.  Or Australia.  Or England.    We talk about products related to 3D printing such as printers, filament, accessories, and through that discussion we're addressing the locale of the manufacturer, their location, and what shipping costs might need to be paid to get the item to them. 

There are commonalities, such as most people speak English in the channel, but there is a smattering of American and proper English amongst the group.   Currency for the various products comes up as well.  If a particular spool of filament costs $19.99 for me, what does that equate to in Euros or Australian dollars? Is there a way to get the product within your geography as opposed to buying it from the manufacturer?

It's a lovely little group of online friends I'll never meet.   I am humbled in that we all speak English, my native language, and the default currency discussed is the US dollar.   Everyone else does mental conversions regularly.   The world keeps getting smaller.   It was getting smaller, now it feels like it's getting more connected. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son got his keyboard back at a price.  He had to get online with his friends and say with sincerity, "remember how I called my mom stupid a couple of times yesterday?   That wasn't really a good thing to do.   I should have been more respectful."   We let him say it with his own words and that's about what he said.   I didn't want him to lose face with his friends as that is very, very important to him, but he had to say he was wrong.   And when he did, I heard the other children being supportive of what he was saying.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Countdown to kitten visitation.   My best friend from childhood, whom I have missed very much these past COVID-19 months, has two kittens.   They are now safe to be out in the house with her other, older cat and my daughter has been invited over to see them.   She absolutely positively can not wait.