So, we bought the Astro Boy DVD yesterday (although I had already provided an opportunity to see it last week thanks to teh intarwebs, technically fulfilling the promise to the kids that they could watch it as soon as I could get it).

My girl watched the DVD Extras this morning.

And then this happened.

my husband is a polymath!

Polymath
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Leonardo da Vinci is regarded in many Western cultures as the archetypal “Renaissance Man”.
Leonardo da Vinci is regarded in many Western cultures as the archetypal “Renaissance Man”.

A polymath (Greek polymath?s, ?????????, “having learned much”)[1][2] is a person with encyclopedic, broad, or varied knowledge or learning.[3][4][5][6][7]

The dictionary definition is consistent with informal use, whereby someone very knowledgeable is described as a polymath when the term is used as a noun, or polymath or polymathic when used as adjectives. It especially means that the person’s knowledge is not restricted to one subject area. The term is used rarely enough to be included in dictionaries of obscure words.[8][9]

Renaissance Man and Homo Universalis are related terms to describe a person who is well educated, or who excels, in a wide variety of subjects or fields.[10][11] This ideal developed in Renaissance Italy from the notion expressed by one of its most accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72): that “a man can do all things if he will.” It embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance Humanism, which considered man the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible. Thus the gifted men of the Renaissance sought to develop skills in all areas of knowledge, in physical development, in social accomplishments, and in the arts.

Yep… my hubby is a polymath. And I mean that sincerely, he is a genius, literally.

which can be helpful and a great resource when homeschooling, but it can also be hard to live with…when he uses words I don’t know.

Just a few mentions of the things Bupba has his own names for.

oatmeal is “Hotmeal”
housecoat is “jacket house”
doctor pepper pop is “doctor office pop”
vitamin c is “vitanim seed”

yesterday for no reason , he came into the kitchen to tell me he loved me , then went bouncing right back out as quickly as he came in.

But the cutest thing he does these days, is how he says what time it is in the morning

he woke up this morning, and he sat up in bed and looked at me, asking why I was in his room.. I told him we had to go into the city today.. he looked at the window, and said ” oh, it’s ‘clock in the mornin’ me can get up now?

he’s just too darn cute

Back then, I had my PC, Mama had hers, then we had the laptop which I used in bed since my PC was in the Living Room and was partially acting as an entertainment centre for playing back movies (we had no DVD player except in the computer) and games and such. In our bedroom we had an older, slower computer that was for the girl to play her kid games on. In addition, I had a computer I used as a sort of server: it gathered our email from the net, took care of any file downloading jobs, and stored all our music in one place so any computer could access it. Finally, I had a Linux PC that I only used for tinkering around with and was kept in our bedroom just sitting around waiting to be used when I got it in my head to do something with that OS. Oh yeah, and we had one other laptop that is a 486 machine with no battery and no network capabilities but that worked OK plugged in for doing very basic stuff like playing old kids games.

How’d we get so many computers with so little money? Well, I scavenged. My computer is the one we usually buy upgrades for because it is the one that is used for gaming and video editing and the like. When I upgraded mine, I put the parts aside. When other people want to do upgrades, if they don’t want or can’t use the old parts I ask for them. We’ve picked up numerous monitors, keyboards and parts that people are just throwing out – some right off the side of the road. The Linux machine was straight off the side of the road in a garbage pile one night when we were out for a drive in a snowstorm – I cleaned up the motherboard, properly seated the processor, and booted it up. The server was 80% from a roadside scoop and 20% from parts of my old PC from 2000. The kids computer was also some leftover parts from an upgrade combined with a cheap $30 ATX case I bought in Toronto. Mama’s is simply my old computer when I built a new one. The 486 laptop was a Freecycle job that turned out to be useless since it could not be connected to anything else and has no floppy drive. The only computer in the house that we bought, intact as a complete computer, is the laptop I used in bed at the apartment on days I had no strength to get up.

When we moved, something happened to some of the computers. For some reason the power supply went completely hinky in the server, and because it was a server tower with an AT power supply, I had to do some soldering and reconfiguring to put in an ATX power supply that could be purchased since an AT on could not be had. The girl’s computer was utterly DOA, I am still not sure what went wrong. The Linux machine got put in a closet until we had a place to put it. 2 months after we moved, our SillyGirl had a tantrum and banged her hand on the 486 laptop causing it to quit booting.

So, we were down to Mama’s PC, my PC, and the laptop. This past spring (2007), we tried to buy some parts or an older system to get the kids back into a computer, but nothing was available for a reasonable price. We took the money and bought a new motherboard, processor, video card and memory for my system, which I installed, and then put aside the old motherboard and parts to upgrade Mama, then use the old parts from Mama’s to build a kids system. Then, of course, I ended up not having any place to work and no energy, and then it was summer, and fall, and everything just sat in a box…

I had fixed the power supply in the server in 2005 but had not had the energy left after that to get it working and then Mama started working on her home business plan and took up the space I needed to work, so the server waited.

Well, things recently got worse: the laptop’s power supply completely quit, out of the blue. So now we are down to two computers: mine which is a relatively powerful machine in the bedroom where I can get to it easily from bed to do all the things I do, like video and photo editing and gaming and so on, and Mama’s which is carrying a substantial load – serving as not only her computer for surfing, email and so on, but also as the file-downloading peer-to-peer machine and the file storage machine and the central point for virtually everyone when they are downstairs. The one thing we had added this summer was an external networked hard drive that was on for $99 at Futureshop because we were just flat running out of space and we needed SOMETHING to store our mp3s and photos to take the place of that server computer that was dead.

Recently we decided we needed to deal with this, especially with the laptop offline. Since we had the upgrade parts for her PC, it was time to get the server going so that when we upgraded her system it would no longer have to do the multiple jobs it is doing now. She finally cleared out a space and I went to get the server going. Power supply works perfectly. The motherboard? Dead. I can’t get it to work. So, I pulled out the Linux machine which uses a similar processor. I test it, it works fine. I pull the processor from the server, put it in the Linux machine. Dead. I think, hmm, well that sucks. I put the Linux machine’s processor back in. Dead. I try another processor I had in the same configuration – also dead! I root through everything we have – all of it is too old to have compatible parts.

So, here we are again – back at square one. Mama has a PC that is working its butt off just trying to keep up. Mine ends up being used for everything that needs significant processing power like video production. I no longer have the luxury of being able to lay in bed and go online here and there because the laptop is dead, but at least my PC is not far away.

Our family is computer crazy. The boy, at 2, wants to use his Mom’s PC all the time. The girl goes to TVO Kids and sites like that on her Mom’s computer to play games and check out sites for TV shows and stuff she likes. That means Mama gets pushed out and usually ends up on my computer up here. I have to constantly burn stuff to DVD even though it is just a missed TV show that we will watch once and never again, because we are so low on space to store stuff.

We REALLY need to do something about this – SOON.

It has been a lot of work but is educational for everyone… this is an all new technique, but it has been very exhausting since I can only put in an hour or two a day so it has taken what seems like forever.

Now, because we’ve been working on the garden something else got neglected – the front porch. It didn’t get any attention so some stuff just sat there, including a box with some pieces of rag and the silly girl’s purse.

Tonight, MamaRil finally started tidying it up since the garden is almost “done” (it will never be “done”, but almost all set up). When she picked up the box with the purse she heard noises inside… and buzzing. She got a little nervous, worried it was wasps and dumped it out on the front lawn.

It wasn’t wasps – it was a nest of bumble bees! Just a tiny little nest with a little queen and a whole bunch of the tiniest bumble bees you could ever see. Well, all I knew about bumble bees is that they don’t make honey and they pollinate EVERYTHING. So I checked things out online (the internet is great!) and we all learned a lot.

Tomorrow, we are building a new home for our bumble bees (hopefully they will stay around). We’ll put it in the back yard near the garden and hopefully they’ll help pollinate all our plants. Cross your fingers that the bees stay!