Down

• I walked 7 miles on Saturday while Calvin napped. Great exercise but my calves hurt enough that I reduced exercising this week. So, I probably lost exercise time instead of gaining.
• I’ve been fighting with Qwest about our static IP. For some mysterious reason, they canceled it a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to get them to fix it and repeatedly was shuffled between tech support and billing. Finally someone in tech support said they could reorder it for me but it’d be a $20 setup fee since they had no record I’d ever had a static IP. I was tempted to tell them that I would be happy to pay the $20 fee if they could refund the $5.95/month I’ve been paying for years for a static IP. However, Jaeger found what our old static IP was and using that they somehow confirmed that, yes, they did make some sort of mistake though no one seems to know what or how. Anyway, we have a static IP back but I’m still waiting for the next bill to see if they forget and try to charge us a $20 install fee. They claimed they put a note on my record that my fee should be “refunded” but we’ll see what really happens. I’m particularly annoyed that even though it was because of nothing on our end, they’ve wasted multiple hours of my time of this issue.

Ups

• It was good weather so Calvin and I went to the park today. As usual, he loved it and had a lot of fun running all over the place.
• Thanks to the RRA-L listserv I subscribe to, I got a huge number of books to read. I’m not sure they’re all exactly my style but it still is interesting to at least try them. The first one I read was Dark Mirror, by M.J. Putney. She’s written romances before under a different name but this is her first young adult book. I did enjoy it though it was very obviously young adult and I’m not much into time travel adventures. I finished Dark Mirror last night and immediately started reading Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. I also finished it last night. This is a young adult retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty set during the Holocaust. It’s funny. I’ve read a lot of holocaust non-fiction but for some reason, this fiction book made the horror more real to me. The non-fiction books seem to emphasize the triumphant survivors of the concentration camps and it’s easy to not pay as much attention to the millions that were murdered. I suppose it also could be different because I read a lot of the non-fiction books as a teen before I had a child. Anyway, very good book but also very disturbing. Glad I read it but probably won’t re-read it. I can’t decide what book I’ll read next. Possibly The Greyfriar by Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith. I’m really tired of vampire novels but I’ve heard pretty good things about it and the vampires being evil again would be a novel change.

Calvin Moment

Calvin is growing up. Today in the park he started climbing the rope pyramid (Kind of like this. I really need to take pictures of these playgrounds so you can actually see what he’s doing). He’s been enjoying hanging on to the bottom rope for a while. However, today is the first day I saw him actually trying to climb several levels up. I decided the rule was that if he requested help at the higher levels, I would help but then bring him back to the ground and he’d have to start the climb over. This seemed to work fairly well. He did fall a couple of times but pretty close to the ground. Anytime he got higher I hovered underneath him. It’s very encouraging to see him grow up and achieve new abilities.