I'm looking for more flexibility, so I've moved this blog to http://www.kchristieh.com/blog/

Please come visit!!

My daughter’s backpack was stolen at school yesterday after she left it alone for less than a minute to go inside the cafeteria. Thankfully, the culprits took her cell phone, keys and wallet out of it and left them on the ground, and someone turned them in to the office. But she’s still without many hours worth of work that she had yet to turn in, as well as PE clothes, office supplies, etc. Hopefully it’ll show up in lost & found…

So we all appreciated suspending reality and watching “24” last night. We made the kids go to bed halfway through, and Tivo’d the rest for them. At the end, as I made a speech through my tears (it was quite an emotional ending) about how great an episode it was, my thumb was on auto-pilot and I deleted it. Stupidstupidstupid!! Thankfully, I found someone at Curves this morning who recorded it and will give me her tape tomorrow morning. PHEW!!

Just finished watching the Academy Awards, and I am appalled that “It’s hard out there for a p**p” won best song. Besides the fact that it had completely objectionable lyrics, it was just plain BAD! It repeated the same (rude) line over and over, and the music was very mundane. But, the one thing it did have going for it was that it was memorable.
As I write this, I’m washing it out of my brain with “Mushaboom” by Feist.

On a happier note, Stephen finally got his wish: we made apple pie this evening. Totally blew the diet, but it was the most terrific apple pie I’ve ever had. You can see the recipe for Grandma Ople’s Apple Pie at Allrecipes.com.

Today’s two favorite articles form bookends to each other.

First, we learn about how competitive it is to get your kid into a Manhattan preschool in the NYTimes’ In Baby Boomlet, Preschool Derby Is the Fiercest Yet. Of course it’s worth the $10,000 and the headache, because after all, if you don’t get into a good preschool, you won’t get into a good elementary school, etc. etc.

Next we have Reuters’ Most U.S. high school dropouts regretful - study. What’s interesting isn’t that most dropouts are regretful - duh! - but that the reason most dropped out was that they were b-o-r-e-d. I often tell my kids that even if school is boring, they need to stick with it. There are many things we need to do in life that are boring, but we still need to do them. On the other hand, some teachers do a great job at making even the most mundane subjects exciting to learn. Too bad the rest don’t.

Too bad high school isn’t as much fun as preschool was…

If we were in the U.K., our dear Genevieve could be a Beauty Queen!

It turns out that there’s actually a dog show for mixed-breed dogs called Scruffts. Finally, some respect!

I read about this show in an article entitled “Year of the Dog.” Here’s a quote from it: “With great respect to both lawyers and dogs, I have found terriers to be canine lawyers.” I agree.

“It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don’t make it.”

My friend Julie emailed me this great article about what makes people happy. Not surprisingly, it boils down to attitude and effort. You need to be grateful, kind, forgiving, positive and friendly and take care of your body.

Check it out the article by clicking here.

Here’s an article from today’s nytimes.com:

Stretched to Limit, Women Stall March to Work
Didn’t we all think we could work and raise our kids well at the same time? Maybe it works for some, but I truly appreciate being able to be a bigger part of my kids’ lives since I started working at home. Especially the older they get…

I love to forward articles and urls to people. Sometimes they express what I think, sometimes they make people laugh, but mostly I want them to make other people think. Here are a few I recently sent over the www:

Suburban Spirituality:
The land of SUVs and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn’t have to.
I admit to being suburban to the core, so it’s important to maintain perspective.

Down With Torture! Gimme Torture! by Sarah Vowell
I love “24″, so I also love that Sarah Vowell gave voice to my inner conflicts with the show.

The Christian Vision Project: Habits of Highly Effective Justice Workers
Should we protest the system or invest in a life? Yes.
Go Rudy!!

Cooking for Engineers
If you’re an engineer (as I am? was?) you’ll recognize a certain way of thinking here.

MySpace: A Dangerous Place
Yet one more article about how dangerous MySpace can be. Too bad - it’s a cool concept.

How to Survive a Tech Support Call
I survived a useless tech call last week. I still have the problem…defragmenting my hard drive didn’t do the trick. It was creepy having a man across the world be so flirtatious.

The Mensch Gap
Yiddish has the most expressive words! Too bad we don’t have a mensch in the White House.

I just had lunch with Rudy Carrasco, and he says that he produces his fantastic blog using WordPress. I figure that if I can figure out how to use this, I can teach others how to make their own blogs. In particular, I want to make sure that the La Canada Presbyterian Church ministry partners know how to use this tool if they don’t already have websites.