(no subject)

One of Cordelia's sort of friends had a bike accident and broke both her wrists. It's probably a good thing for her that the school year ends a week from Friday. (I call her a 'sort of friend' because Cordelia likes her, but this girl steals stuff from all the other kids in the class and generally harasses people. She gives most of the stuff back, eventually, but...)

Cordelia's best friend fell at school yesterday, tripping over a low fence that the construction folks put up during the winter and never took down. My impression is that the fence in question is no more than knee high, if that, and Cordelia says that it's in a place that doesn't make sense. The friend was badly enough bruised that she wasn't able to play in their in school concert for the fourth graders (She plays violin, and she had trouble lifting and bending her arm). It remains to be seen whether or not she'll be able to play at tonight's concert.

Lunch time is a little difficult for the kids in Cordelia's grade-- They send the kids outside for about twenty minutes, but the sixth graders are forbidden to use any of the playground equipment for fear they'll hurt the little kids or prevent the little kids from using the equipment. The school also keeps banning the activities the sixth graders come up with to keep themselves occupied. I kind of understand that because the kids argue a lot over the rules and some kids cheat, but those forty-six kids need to do something, after all.

Scott's parents are planning to come to the concert tonight. It's quite a trek for the fifteen minutes Cordelia will actually be playing, but they don't seem to mind. We don't know yet if Scott will be able to attend. He worked late last night, and he's hoping that that will mean he doesn't have to work late tonight. I am glad that they decided to separate the band concert from the orchestra concert. It means fewer people crammed into the multi-purpose room and a concert only half as long.

I wish there was a good way to get feedback on metanews. I'd like to know what sort of links are actually useful to our readers and what sort nobody wants to read. I'd like to pare down the blog list a bit and maybe try to find some other blogs that have content more focused in areas people are interested in (and with a better ratio of meta to not meta). I mean, are people actually interested in fifteen different links about the same episode of Game of Thrones? I don't have the time (or the knowledge) to evaluate which articles are the best, however, so I'm not sure how to cut that down.

I have gotten the definite impression that people want the names of the blogs included in the text we attach to the links. I'm just at a loss as to how to do that without adding a lot of time to something that already takes me too long. Writing up a link takes between two and five minutes, depending on how often I have to go back and forth between windows and on how well my browser and Gdocs are interacting at the moment. My best guess is that adding the blog name would increase that time by at least thirty seconds a link, and that adds up.

ETA: For Metanews, I'd also really like to know if it's necessary for me to keep tagging things with 'warning:spoilers.' I link a lot of stuff that says, in the title, that it's talking about a specific episode of a show, and it seems to me that sensible people would assume spoilers in something like that. Meta about a movie that came out last week also probably has spoilers. (Heck, meta about anything almost certainly has spoilers. I just don't bother to warn for things that are older.)

(no subject)

Insert expletives here.

A guy was just here to service the air conditioner, just a tune up to make sure it's running right as summer begins. We've worked with these folks for many years, and they've done well by us, so I'm inclined to trust them. Today, the guy told me that, while the air conditioner is currently running, he very much doubts it will last the summer and that we may be better off replacing it sooner rather than later, when it's really hot and they're really busy.

Last year, the same guy (I think) told me that a replacement would cost on the order of $3600. To pay that, we'd have to borrow more money from Cordelia. (And I'm not sure that 'borrow' is the right word given that we're not likely to be able to repay it all before she goes to college.)

I mean, we knew this was coming eventually. The unit was installed in 1991 (the same year as the old furnace and the old roof. We've had to replace both of those already), so it's almost twenty five years old. I just kept hoping that it wouldn't come any time soon.

I don't see that we have any really good choices apart from replacement. Scott and I both have summer allergies bad enough that the air conditioner really helps us breathe, and in recent summers, it's tended to get horrifically hot. We don't even have any way to put fans in windows to get a cross current. Our ceiling fans help a lot, but they're not magic.