Sunday Miscellany

It's ridiculously early to be up on a Sunday morning, but I am ... one of Agnes's friends from Germany misread the time difference and called us at about 4:15 this morning. Nothing like a phone call in the middle watches of the night to get one's adrenaline pumping.

But as long as I'm up, I may as well post, right?

Just a few odds and ends for this NoVa Sunday morning, because I'm not awake enough yet to do much more ...

My brief comment in yesterday's post about "trying out my new recipe for giant soap bubble solution on the grandchildren" engendered a lot of comments. It actually worked out very well, although we were a bit hampered by the stiff breeze that came up from time to time. The mixture (which somebody posted on Facebook the other day) is pretty basic: six cups of water, two cups of ordinary dishwashing soap, and one cup of corn syrup (which gave the bubbles more strength and stability, but made the mix a bit sticky). Here's a picture of Leya trying out the solution with her battery-operated, fan-powered bubble blower (I had to buy two, exactly alike, so that she and Elise wouldn't argue over whose turn it was to use it). Now I want one, too ...

Elise quickly got the hang of it, too ...

Yay, bubbles!

On other fronts ...

Before I started this post, I crafted a long response to a comment left by a reader on last Tuesday's post - Why Bother with Those Pesky Laws? I think we'll just have to agree to disagree ... read his comment and my response and let me know what you think.

This afternoon, Agnes and I will be going over to Dance Studio Lioudmila in Alexandria for their Spring Dance Showcase. I'll be emceeing the show, and Agnes will be taking pictures. We've been away from the dance floor for a while, so it'll be nice to get back into the ... uh ... swing of things.

On a more serious note, it's good to see that the horrible situation in Boston has come to an end, at least for the time being. One of the alleged bombers is dead, and a second is wounded and in custody. It's time now for the spin doctors and the conspiracy theorists to take over. If it were up to me, I'd have just had the police fire a few warning shots into their heads ... but I guess that's why I didn't go into a career in law enforcement.

Oh, and speaking of e-books (I know we weren't, but just humor me, okay), why is it that (a) they're so expensive in relation to their print cousins, and (b) so full of typos and formatting errors? I guess I could understand the proliferation of formatting errors if I were reading an older book that was just scanned and reset by an OCR device, but I'm reading a brand new (December 2012) book right now (The Pointblank Directive: Three Generals and the Untold Story of the Daring Plan that Saved D-Day, by L. Douglas Keeney) that is full of annoying and distracting errors. If you are an editor/publisher and are reading this, how about doing a better job for your customers, eh?

And that's all for now. Maybe I can get another hour of sleep in, ha, ha.

Have a good day. More thoughts later.

Bilbo