High Expectations for Remote Control Airplane

This weekend, we went to the park to try out my son's Radio Control Air Surfers Plane. We've never had a remote control plane before, so the anticipation was high.

Assembly must have been pretty easy, because the kids did it themselves without asking for my help. The charger, powered by 'C' batteries, took an agonizing 25-30 minutes to fully charge the small battery for the plane. Actually, 25 minutes is pretty reasonable, but for the kids it seemed like forever.

Finally, charging finished and we made our way to the park to try it out. It took us a few attempts to figure out how to get the plane flying, but we eventually got the hang of it. The problem really was that, by the time my son started to get the hang of it -- the batteries were exhausted. This only took about 5 minutes!

It was pretty frustrating to only be able to fly for five minutes. Since we had brought the charger with it, we recharged for 25 minutes and then tried again. My son was able to fly for short distances, but always resulted in a fairly quick crash. This time the charge lasted a bit longer (maybe 7 minutes), but all in all, disappointly quickly.

To make matters worse, my son refused to let my daughter give the plane a spin until the batteries were almost exhausted, and this resulted in screaming fights between the two of them for most of the time that we were there.

Keep in mind that it's entirely possible that we just don't know what we are doing. Perhaps someone with more patience, or better yet -- skill -- could do better with this plane!

Ant Farm Demolition

My son got an Ant Farm for Christmas, and we finally got around to setting it up this week. The instructions explained that you could either send away to receive the ants in the mail, or catch your own. We decided to catch our own as we had a bad experience ordering tadpoles in the mail (they arrived dead as doornails, and on the second try, one lived but he ended up being deformed). After all, how hard could it be to catch ants?

We followed the instructions and put a jar with water and brown sugar outside. I assumed we would be swarmed with ants within 24 hours. Um, wrong! We waited for days, through torrential rains and sunshine, still no ants.

Finally, my son resorted to crawling around with tweezers and catching a lowly three ants by hand. While he was on the ant safari, I setup the farm by adding the wet sand. We finally got the ants inserted, and eagerly waited for them to get busy making tunnels and being ant-like.

Unfortunately, it appears that one ant got crushed by the tweezers because he kind of just laid flat on his back on the tunnel steps. Ant #2 seemed sluggish, and only Ant # 3 at least walked around a little. We gave up watching and, the next morning, ran to the Ant Farm to see how they were doing. Mysteriously, 2 ants were missing and only Ant #3 remained. What happened?? I could only imagine that Ant # 3 was a cannibal. By the morning of day 3, Ant #3 was also missing.

A few minutes later my son found an ant (presumably Ant #3) crawling on the floor. Unfortunately, I then had no choice but to banish the Ant Farm from our home, as the thought of escaping ants was entirely unacceptable. My son begrudginly agreed and we dismantled the farm and sent it to pasture.

Write a book for your child - it's easy!

Looking for a way to make your child think you are cool? When my daughter was a toddler, I wrote her a personalized book. Really! Using the Illustory personalized book kit, it's easy.

You don't really have to have talent to do this -- goodness knows I didn't! I simply made up a 'story' in rhyme format that included real personal aspects from the daily aspect of my child. The kit provides blank pages and instructions for how to layout the pages. I then created a very simplistic character that kind of looked like my daughter, and went to town with magic markers.

You send the pages and the accompanying text, via mail to Illustory, and they typset and bind the book and send it back to you! My daughter absolutely loved her book, which was called 'Alex's Busy Day'. She loves swimming, so here's an excerpt....

Good morning, Alex!
It's time to play.
It's a bright and sunny
day today!

Alex went swimming
and saw some fish.
They said, "Splish, Splash,
Blurb, Blurb, Swish, Swish!"

Finding Rosie

I read a snippet in the paper this morning about Rosie O'Donnell suing some tabloid because they claimed she was breaking up with her partner, Kelli Carpenter. The article also noted that Kelli Carpenter recently had her name changed to Kelli O'Donnell.

I was and am a huge fan of Rosie, but Kelli changing her name seemed a bit odd to me since I had also read somewhere in the past that sometimes it was a struggle for her to maintain her own identity as the partner of such a high profile person. But I digress...

Reading this simply made me think of Rosie, and reflect on how she has absolutely and totally removed herself from (or has fallen from) the spotlight since she left her show. Thus, my thoughts of her reminded me of her interesting yet bizarre book, Find Me. How ironic the title is right now, as Rosie is nowhere to be found.

I won't give away the premise of the book, but I will say that my emotions once I reached the end of the book are hard to describe -- I was intrigued, yet stunned that Rosie was so open and yet so gullible about the strange relationship that she became entwined in.

As a fan, I hope that Rosie has found happiness.

Mattel says “ello” Empowers Girls

Interesting info from Mattel,

"Get ready to deconstruct the building toys of the past, and get ready to say, “hello” to “ello™.” ello is the first creation system for girls that inspires them to design and create whatever sparks their imagination....from people to places to jewelry, the possibilities are endless. The ello creation system extends beyond the linear play patterns historically associated with boys’ building toys and engages girls in a way relevant to them by incorporating social play with creativity and crafts. Unlike anything else on the market, ello not only provides the tools and inspiration for girls to build elaborate fantastical environments, but also includes pieces to create characters and decorative accessories."

My take on "ello" -- my daughter is 11 and it is tough to find 'toys' that she will play with anymore. She's a typical 'tween' and she focuses more on clothes, computer, and crafts than on toys. She got ello for Christmas and has played with it briefly once or twice. Interestingly, she's having a few girls sleep over tonight and told me that she was going to get out ello to play with them. I think ello has a certain 'cool' factor because of its funky, fun style.

Tivo turns me on to IO Pen

Every couple of days I will sit down in front of TIVO and 'catch up'. I'll scan for new shows from my huge wishlist (Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, Shirley Maclaine -- don't laugh), review the Showcase areas for new movies, and read new TIVO messages.

It's interesting to observe the interactive advertising TIVO presents. TIVO sent me a new message with an attached 3 minute video clip about a really cool new product called the Logitech IO Personal Digital Pen. I watched the video and immediately wanted this item. The pen has a digital processor inside, and when you write on the IO specially encoded paper, it records everything that you write. You can then upload it to your PC via a USB connection. The pen holds up to 40 pages of handwritten text. How cool is that? I immediately thought of my neice who will be heading off to college in the fall.

The pen runs around $189, but I think the turnoff is the cost of the paper that is required, which runs about $24 for 80 sheets. Apparently every pixel of the paper is somehow encoded and the pen records this as you write. Maybe if you write really, really small....?

The TIVO video got me really psyched because it provided a web address and indicated that TIVO was giving away these pens to TIVO subscribers. I rushed to my computer to snatch up my free pen, only to discover it was a contest, not a freebie for everyone. It also looks like we're out of stock on this item right now, but it was so Jetson-like I couldn't resist talking about it.

Customer reviews are mixed, but it's definitely a fun to have, interesting item for those 'ahead of the pack' technophiles.

Longing for a long lens

I'm into photography, and since I've gone digital, I take pictures constantly. Believe it or not, I was a freelance paparazzi for ten years. Now that I'm old, married and a mom, my photography is all kid-based.

As you may have guessed, I have a number of SLR and digital cameras. My Sony Mavica FD-95 was my first digital camera. It's a fantastic camera but definitely on the big (i.e. inconvenient) side. Since I got it three years ago, I haven't found any digital cameras on the market with a comparable zoom lens -- until lately.

The Olympus Camedia C-730 has a huge zoom range -- and -- it's small! I've been wanting this for quite some time and one of these days I'm going to break down and get it. I've pored over the customer reviews and I get relatively good vibes from them, although of course there are a few unhappy campers (there's always at least one in any bunch).

When contemplating a purchase like this, I always get that nervous feeling that as soon as I buy it, a bigger, better, and of course cheaper model will come out. Of course if I keep waiting, the price will come down, but the technology will become outdated.

Maybe after tax time.