What-What?! Week of October 19th

This week was a week.  I started on my new job, which is not horrendously exciting, but well enough.  I suppose I should explain what I am doing a bit more; I am working for ZeroChaos as an Ads Quality Rater.  The official description for what I do is: As an Ads Quality Rater, you will be responsible for reporting and tracking the visual quality and content accuracy of Google advertisements.  (Hit the link for more info on the job description).

Monday I had my training, and Tuesday I started working for real.  Thursday evening, I got my first review, and received pretty good feedback -- the things I went wrong with were mostly ratings where the guidelines are a bit more fuzzy.  This job relies on a lot of general knowledge in making decisions, and makes me happy I know as much as I do about computers and car companies, because I keep getting tasks centered around those topics.  The only difficult part about this job is doing it at home; I'm still working out a good schedule that makes it easy to work around taking care of the kids and house.

Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures

I don't know what to categorize this as, other than just awesome.  Thomas Geijtenbeek and his associates do biomechanical engineering work, and have done extensive research on animating creatures using physics-based simulations.  The video below is both interesting and pretty funny.  For the author's website, hit the above link.

Crazy Halloween Costumes

Saw this on Reddit, and was really impressed by the costume accuracy.  This was the child's costume from last year.  The one for this year?  A vending machine:

...and my kids just want to be robots, princesses and Buzz Lightyear.

Maybe next year we should all be inanimate objects?

What-What?! Week of October 12th

This week seemed to go by about as fast as molasses.  Not good, not bad, just interminable.

I got confirmation that I will be starting my new job on Monday, so that's exciting!  It will be good to work again, both in terms of money and maintaining my sanity.

Started working on Saffron's dress earlier this week.  I spent about 20 minutes cleaning my sewing machine after I pulled it out; the move and sitting around made it get pretty dusty.  I'm at the point now where I have to iron things.  I don't like ironing, so I'm procrastinating a bit there.

We went to the Lowe's Build and Grow clinic for October.  The big kids had a good time making their own haunted houses.  We brought them home and they played with super heroes and their spooky houses.

Review:  Digimon Tamers

Earlier this week, the kids and I finished watching the third season of Digimon.  The first two seasons were pretty classic kid show stuff -- lots of humor and creepy-cute monsters fighting bad guys.  The third season, though, Tamers, is made of different stuff.  It's darker and more serious than the earlier seasons, and spends more time looking at the nature of Digimon as monsters.  The show is more complex, though it does suffer from a slow start, it gets better as it goes along.  The fact that the season is 50 episodes hurts it quite a bit -- it could pretty easily be edited down by a third, maybe even a half.  Even still, my kids, especially Saffron, fell in love with it.  Saffron is currently obsessed with Renamon and Rika, who are the strong female leads in the series.


Lopmon and Terriermon.

She also likes Terriermon and Lopmon, but that's because they are glorified rabbit Digimon.

(Images via  digimon.wikia.com, deviantart.com: angel-in-disguise234)

What-What?! Week of July 27th

I really don't have much to talk about this week.  The week was eaten up by looking for jobs, taking care of children, and sadly, not working.  As an apology, I give you a gif of chickens attempting to eat a laser:

...I miss having chickens.

Odd Jobs Seen on the Craigslist

I have been spending a rather large amount of time staring at job listings.  Most of the time, it's pretty mundane stuff, but sometimes there are special ones, like this opening for a severed head trimmer: (click for larger)

...and this opening for a matchmaking assistant:

In the future, I'm going to save and post more of these oddities as I find them.

That's it for this week.  Next week, there will be more.

What-What?! Week of July 13th

It has been nearly a month since we left California.  Life here isn't bad at all; the weather is quite nice, the people have been very friendly, and living in a larger town has its benefits.

Still, I get homesick.

Sometimes the homesickness catches me by surprise.  The other day, I was coming home from the store when I saw someone that looked strikingly like one of my brothers.  I was then promptly run over by homesickness.  I miss my family, and I miss the husband's family, too.  I know the homesickness will get better over time.  But especially right now, without a regular job or being in school, it's pretty easy to feel it.

The husband started his job on Tuesday; it is a very physical job, but he seems to be doing well with it so far.  On Friday, he came home from work, including doing an hour of overtime, and then assembled my new computer desk.  I was impressed.

I am now working with a temp agency, and while they don't have a real position for me yet, they do have a variety of one-day and short-notice work which will give me hours around the husband's job.  I'll be doing my first gig this evening.  It is nice to make some money.

Being home with all three children by myself makes the day go by slowly.  Because the kitchen is small, I spend a ton of time washing dishes.  It's annoying.  On the other hand, I have a lot of time to cook and do other things...

Cooking:  Homemade Egg Noodles via The Pioneer Woman

I've made noodles before, many times.  Mostly with a food processor, which brings an ease to the process that is really unmatched.  I haven't made noodles entirely by hand in quite some time, but with the food processor packed in a box, and not much by way of counter space anyway, I decided to make these egg noodles by hand.  It was much easier than I had expected, and when the dough was finished, it really was a dream to work with.  Very easy to roll out and cut.  I added mine to some chicken noodle soup, and the noodles really made the soup something special.

(img via thepioneerwoman.com)