We're covering the old Jackson 5 tune I Want You Back, which is a very tricky number--easy to sing/play along with, not so easy to reproduce. We futzed about finding me a key, since the original either has me at the bottom of my range, or sounding like I'm trying to sound like Michael. We settled in C. The cause of the threatened rude gesture was them saying that they wanted me in the range of my voice where I can best emote, and then a lot of riffing on me emoting. I didn't have enough hands to flip them all off simultaneously.

As you may surmise from the presence of a diary, I'm working late, and will be for the next three weeks. I have a boatload of work on my plate for the Nov. 7 federal deadline. It's not only my little corner of $evil_project, but also a few other things. I also started shooting targeted funding info to specific departments, and am getting a couple of "But why would we want to do that?" responses. Oh, I don't know, stipends for your graduate students, a higher profile for those students when they graduate and look for jobs, a higher profile for the university in the city? There's a reason I generally stick with the science types. At least they get my jokes.

Little K is thriving in her Spanish Immersion 1st grade. She loves math and is already already getting into solving for X (or at least the blank) in addition and subtraction (in both languages). MJ is doing fine in preschool, but has suddenly taken an interest in letters and numbers. He can almost count to one hundred, but sometimes trips up with things like "seventy-ten, seventy-eleven."

We didn't go to the boat last weekend, and I found the top of my desk in a cleaning frenzy. My husband and I have decided to switch rooms with the kids within th next six months. Our room is almost twice the size of theirs, and MJ is about to grow out of the toddler bed. The price for giving up the big room with the skylights will be that all toys stay in their room. No more toy baskets in the living room, and no more row of stuffed animals in the 1865 peer table. We'll have to re-floor the kids room to turn it into ours, probably with Pergo fake wood. The current floor is a carpet over vinyl tile. Oh, and we'll have to install a door.

Next weekend we move the boat. We sailed a lot this summer, and the kids did great, including some long trips. MJ got seasick for the first time, poor boy, and he couldn't remember ever throwing up before, so it was quite a shock. Little K has birthday parties almost every weekend, and she's having a Halloween party in two weeks.

In the middle of work hell. No, really, I'm sane. We've hired entertainment.

23:01