Skit Skat Skoodle Doot

Last night, not long after we got the kids to bed, the smoke detector right outside their room went off for no reason.  We ran upstairs, but there was nothing. I had to rip the detector off the ceiling to get it to stop.  We checked in the girls’rooms and they were still fast asleep.  I guess we can’t count on them to wake up if there’s a real problem.

Then today Jen and I both set off the smoke detector on the main level.  Me roasting coffee, and her burning the breadcrumbs off the top of a casserole.  Gia complained that it hurt her ears, but otherwise didn’t seem phased.

Gia stayed home from school today with pink eye.  Luckily it didn’t really seem to bother her, she was in a pretty good mood this morning.  Into naptime, then it was basically a non-stop meltdown for over an hour until she passed out with no pants on.  Then she slept for an hour or so, then woke up for more meltdowns.  But she didn’t wet the bed, which was a bonus.

The picture above is from this morning…we went to a cafe to wait for the pharmacy to open.

I swear I had something earlier today that I was going to post about, but now I’ve completely forgotten.  I need to start writing these things down and just keeping drafts.

So instead of whatever deep thought that was, here’s a picture of a birthday card Jen gave me many years ago.  I have the picture because it was the background on my phone for a long time.

I got my smartwatch, and love it for the fact that I can just glance at my wrist when I get a notificaition instead of pulling my phone out of my pocket.  It’s especially great when my hands are otherwise occupied, like when I’m holding the kids.

But now that I have this convenience, I keep wanting more.  Like when I’m holding one of the kids in my left arm and my watch buzzes I have a knee-jerk thought “Ugh, not only can I not reach my phone, but I can’t even see my watch.  I should get a watch for my right arm too”…keep in mind that I’m already wearing my FitBit on my right arm.

Or take the fact that Android Wear has gesture support, so you can navigate through the various cards just by waving your arm around a little.  Now I get mad when I have to actually touch the screen and can’t respond to an action with just gestures.  Although to be fair, it would be much much more obnoxious if the gestures were sensitive and fine-grained enough to do everything.  I’m sure there would be way too many accidental interactions.

On the whole, though, I do still really like the watch.  And I feel like I need to mention that just because we just passed the 1 year anniversary of the release of the Apple Watch, so there have been a ton of articles across the internet with retrospectives, and they’re mostly (but not all) negative.  Although I’d be pretty negative about it too if I’d paid the price of a new Apple Watch.  I paid just ~10% of that price for an early generation refurbished Android watch.

I hate going through and editing pictures.  I love taking them, and looking at them, but it’s basically never worth it to me to edit anything out.  I’d rather just throw them all into a folder and just ignore the bad ones when they come up on Shuffle.

But we took a lot of pictures yesterday (because the weather ended up being gorgeous instead of the rain that was forecast), and I actually skimmed through them and picked out some of the best.  I still won’t go to the effort of cropping or editing individual photos in any way, but at least I pulled out some good ones to share.

We’re at a lake house with some of Jen’s college friends for the weekend.  It’s Smith Mountain Lake, which is most famous for being the filming location of What About Bob?

It was pretty cloudy and overcast today, so this was the best picture I could get.  Tomorrow should be sunnier, I think, so I’ll get some better shots.  The house is right on the lake, and looks awesome.  And there are a bunch of other kids here, so Gia and Valentina are going to have a great time playing with them tomorrow.

I almost forgot to Skoodle Doot today!  I’ve been using TickTick as my TODO list / reminder system recently, and I like it a lot.  But the one feature that drives me crazy is the fact that when a reminder pops up on the phone, it turns the screen on.  The only way to keep it from doing that is to have a passcode on the screen…which I do when I’m away from home, but here I have it set to stay unlocked so it’s easier to get into.  So I disabled the popup feature entirely, which is a shame, because aside from turning the screen on it’s a great feature.

Long story short, I almost forgot because I only have the reminder as a notification and not a popup.  That combined with the fact that I have it set to not let me clear the notificaiton without dispositioning the TODO item (either marking it as Done or Snoozing it) keeps it from showing up on my watch, which is the real place I look for reminders now.

But don’t worry, I remembered in time.  My April streak is still alive.  Tomorrow we’re all going down to Smith Mountain Lake for the weekend with some of Jen’s college friends.  Hopefully we have WiFi and/or cell service so I don’t lose my streak down there.

And I didn’t have any good recent pictures on my phone, so the photo at the top is a chapulínes (grasshopper) taco I ate a few weeks ago at Oyamel.