Wow.

Four years ago today, I installed this instance of Drupal, and started figuring out this blogging thing. Having spent most of my life trying to forget what happened that day, week, month, year, I had changed my mind and decided I wanted to remember. That forgetting habit is hard to break, though, and I needed help. Voila! Brain #4, external brain #2.

Go ahead, figure that one out. Post your solution in the comments.

It's close enough to the end of the year that a retrospective wouldn't be out of place. So, here it is, my life thus far. In pie charts.

Really, I've wanted to do this since kottke.org linked to flipflopflying.com's personal pie charts "report". I didn't have any pie chart generator, and wasn't about to generate them by hand, but hadn't really looked for any generator until Google published their Chart API Well, then, the list of pie charts I've had for the last nine months could be generated. Voila!

Update: Ah, I just realized that the colors on charts with similar information aren't consistent. I'll chalk this up to a learning experience and do better next year when I add, "% life writing pie chart reports."

Mom and I spent the day making monkey bread. I say, "the day making monkey bread," because it seemed to take for-ev-ver to make.

Mom's mother used to make monkey bread for the family when Mom was younger. She made it for years for the family. Mom loved the smell of monkey bread cooking as a child; today's smell brought back memories. Seeing her smile and remember her childhood was nice.

Making the monkey bread took a long while. It had to be mixed up, left to rise, punched down, left to rise again, torn into little pieces, coated in cinnamon and sugar, left to rise yet again, and drowned in a crap load of cinnamon sugar syrup. At one point, during the torn into little pieces part, the balls looked like little poop balls in a bucket:

Dinner time, we finally started eating the monkey bread. We, of course, started with the pieced on top. You know, the ones that had been soaking in the cinnamon sugar syrup.

According to Mom, her mom stopped making monkey bread after accidently switching salt for sugar in the recipe one year, making some of the worst monkey bread ever. My grandmother was apparently horribly embarrassed and, well, once she was embarrassed, did her best to never do that same action again, to avoid further embarrassment.

How limiting must her life have become in the end... to never take chances for fear of embarrassment.

Mom and I were totally trying to cram as much into the day as we possibly could. We finished nearly all of today's errands: picking up prints, picking up the mail, stopping by warehouse store, getting bread for dinner, each lunch, buy an ice cream cone to keep our strength up. We stopped by the house earlier today, in the middle of the errands, to check on her supplies, then dashed off to the local craft store, 50% off coupons in hand.

Mom wanted to try her hand at block printing.

Karen, Eric's sister, was a printmaker. I remember, years ago, maybe 2002, giving Eric's parents a block print Christmas card I had made. This particular Christmas, we were both Moxie sitting and heading down to Eric's parents' house for Christmas. Karen was also there, and was interested in the card I had given her parents. I had no idea she was a printmaker, much less a college instructor on printmaking. Had I known, I'm sure I would have been much too intimidated to give her parents a linoleum block print card for Christmas.

She was good natured about it, so I wasn't nearly as intimidated as I probably should have been. Her print works are amazing, but I didn't know this until after I gave her one of my block prints.

So, Mom and I are working on block prints today. Mom's print is a bird that saw on a card sitting next to us when we were trying to figure out what designs to start with. I stuck with the tried and true: an oak leaf and an acorn.

Mom and I were at Sam's Club, the wholesale warehouse she goes to in Arizona, instead of Costco. When we walked in, I was immediately mesmerized by big screen televisions on display, and wandered over to watch them, compare them and, if no one was looking, maybe even lick one of them.

I stood there for a bit, until my bladder told me, "Hey, yo, remember me? I'm still small," and I needed to find a toliet sooner than later.

After sooner was done, and later had come, I wandered back to the televisions and, more importantly, the electronics and photo processing part of the store. Mom wasn't there, so I wandered around a little more, looking for her.

When it became clear I wasn't going to find her quickly, and I had no clue where she would be, I decided to walk out to the car. She wouldn't leave without the car (couldn't?), so that was where I'd meet her.

I started walking out the door I had come in through 15 minutes before. A guy was standing next to the door, the one who had looked at Mom's club card as we came in the store. After I had passed him, and was halfway between the store exit and the carts exit 15 feet away, he asked me "Do you want to go outside?"

I turned vaguely in his direction as I continued walking out the doors, and answered, "Yes."

He responded quickly, and more loudly, "You can't go out these doors."

Slightly confused, and still concentrating on getting to the car, I replied, "Okay," as I stepped outside the second door.

"You have to go outside the other doors if you want to leave!" he called after me.

Standing outside, I turned to look at him. "Uh...." was all I could manage at that point.

"Thank you!" he called, in a not very pleased tone.

At that point I finally realized what had happened. Now, I can understand the club stores not wanting people to exit the wrong doors, to leave bag and cart checking to the Trained Professionals™. And I can understand the guy's annoyance, in retrospect. But, come on! Don't ask me, "Do you want to go outside?" if you're trying to 1. get my attention and 2. ask me to use a different door. I mean, hello? Yes, I want to go outside. Why else would I be walking out the door?

Had to show Mom how well my new camera worked. She enjoyed the demo as much as I did.