Frog and Goat

Yesterday afternoon my sister brought Niece 2 over for her first sleepover with us without her sister. I’d have to say we all had a really good time and it was especially nice to see Niece 2′s true personality. Which makes it seem like she’s hiding it when she’s usually with us and I don’t mean that. But, she’s the little sister and sometimes it’s just all about the competition with her sister.

Niece 2 is an unabashed fan of bacon so the first thing we did was make a batch of bacon and maple ice cream. She cooked the bacon until there was a grease pop and her finger got the brunt of the burn. Then, she was in charge of stirring the custard ingredients. We had bacon and maple ice cream with a side of bacon this morning for breakfast. The three of us agreed that I’d alter the recipe to up the amount of bacon and make sure we kept the maple syrup under control. The recipe called for 2 1/2 cups, but I only had 2 cups of syrup and we all agreed any more would have taken the ice cream in another direction. Yes, we had that conversation. For reals.

We had an early dinner at a local hot dog restaurant and then played a round of miniature golf. The Niece didn’t win, but she was the only one who managed a hole-in-one. Pretty excellent. To top off the evening, we went for a nighttime swim and used the “disco” light at the end of the pool. It was the first time this season the better-half and I had been in the pool at night and I remembered how fun it is to be out there when the first stars appear and the bats are hovering over head.

At one point after Niece 2 and I got in bed (first time spending the night alone–need the aunt to be there) there was an outbreak of the giggles. The better-half asked me about it later and I think it was just the giggles of someone who didn’t want to go to sleep, but they were contagious nevertheless. Little kid giggles are the best.

This morning the better-half and the niece went into the garage and built a table out of scraps. The niece cut the legs and helped to affix them to the top.

Turned out pretty well:

I’ve been doing some volunteer work for an organization that offers elearning to people who work for NGOs. I was asked to work on the last module of a project management course. I’m happy to say it is ready to be translated into a variety of languages. It’s been an interesting process because I had all of the content and a template to use. I just had to figure out a way to tell the story so the content was engaging.

Usually when I work on elearning, I’m responsible for coming up with most of the content so it was a breeze in some respects to get the module done well ahead of the deadline. What wasn’t a breeze was getting the story together especially since I wasn’t present for the development of the previous six modules. I could only review those finished pieces and make some assumptions. Does it sound funny that I had to get the story together?

I suppose, without sounding too grandiose, that it is like a sculptor saying, “the form is there, but I just needed to remove all that marble so we could see it”. It is very much like that. Otherwise the course is just too many words on a screen and a back/forward set of buttons. Would you want to be that learner? Not me. If presented with that course, I’d take my chances with passing the final assessment/test by skipping ahead and seeing if I could score a satisfactory percentage.

Back in late June when I was first assigned the training module, the better-half and I were taking a late afternoon dip in the pool. I told him I was working while we were floating around in the water. He laughed, but said he knew I was. I was thinking about how to get all that marble out of my way so the learning could come into being. When I tell people that I get a lot of my work done when I’m not sitting down and banging away on the thing, it’s true. I’d rather let it perk and then let the solution come out all at once.