Several Boring Things and One Interesting Thing

Well, our little 16-month-old decided to step up her shock-and-awe campaign this morning by climbing out of her crib. There was some amount of goading from her big brother, who was entertaining her in her room before Chris and I got up, but I don't think he provided any mechanical help. So now, even though J. K. Rowling has lobbied against the inhumanity of cage beds for several years now, we are shopping for a crib tent. Sadly, there is only one maker of crib tents, and their product is widely panned as flimsy (although its ratings do average out to four stars on Amazon), but there aren't any other good options that we can find. There are those who say, "If you need a crib tent, you need a toddler bed!" But I laugh at those people, and invite them to come over and deal with teaching a 16-month-old to stay in a bed.

Other things have happened since I last posted. It rained a lot. Each house in our neighborhood is a lakeside resort now. I dropped my iPod in the loo and got a new one from Apple for half price, because they are nice. Chris and I hung a really attractive wire by the thermostat so we can jump the boiler whenever it gets cold, because the thermostat doesn't seem to work any more. There's something really rugged about jumping the boiler, let me tell you.

Oh, here's a trippy story. Someone sent me an email a few weeks back with the subject header "inquiry". Although, as one friend put it, emails with this title tend to be from exiled Nigerian princes, I chose to read it. Turns out it was from someone in Santa Barbara who wanted to know if I was a certain Kirsten Munson who graduated from San Marcos High School in 1994, because if I was, she had found some of my stuff in her attic. (I am, by the way.) Through further email exchanges, I learned that she'd found some of my paintings from AP Studio Art, and got my graduation year off the back of one that I'd apparently entered in a contest. OK, so here's the weird part. She found these paintings in the attic of a house on Valerio St, where my family moved after I graduated. In high school, I'd lived in a house on Crescent Drive, so that was the address on the back of the contest entry, and the person contacting me had also previously lived in the same house! So we'd shared two addresses in Santa Barbara. Cosmic!

She and her fiancé apparently want to keep a couple of the paintings, which is fine by me. Today, I tend to find my creative work from high school a bit... cringe-worthy, but if they think it's deep and meaningful, my high school self is grateful. That's pretty much what I was going for at the time.