Every morning my new espresso maker reenacts the first line of Gravity's Rainbow. I may need ear protection.

Watched Notes on a Scandal last night with the Ws. A thoroughly depressing movie about despicable behavior. I wouldn't mind such a terrible depiction of an older woman if there were more positive images in the general media. Instead of invisibility or caricature.

The Ws have 4 cats now. They also have a rope pull for the doorbell. One of the cats has learned to pull the rope and ring the bell when he wants to come in. He's polite about it, he just rings once and waits patiently. I bet they could teach him to use the toilet, he'd enjoy the flushing.

I'm working on figuring out how to teach Kidlet about electricity, enough so he can start making some of the things he sees in Make. Which means I have to learn myself. The learning tools and books are frustrating - the kits sometimes have "black boxes" where miracles occur, but we certainly don't know what they are. Or they have you connect A to B, but don't explain what A and B are. The books are either too simplistic, or they assume you are starting from farther along than we are. I think I'm going to try to put some things together that take you along the learning curve with small projects that illustrate the concepts. People I've talked to seem to have learned this stuff from their dads, enough to get them started in that circular learning process, where you go forward and then go back and the earlier stuff makes more sense. I find the whole concept of electricity so bizarre, it's hard to think about it. The key is for me to let go of wanting to understand what it really IS, and learn about how it behaves. I got stuck like that with light a while back - is it a wave, or a particle? Part of me wants to know before I can learn more. One of those things that is basically un-understandable, really.