It's time for a post...

...but I don't really have a cohesive one in me. Instead, some newsy tidbits:

-- Eva is now weaned, at 14 months old. We'd been down to just a morning nursing session for about six weeks (prior to which we were still nursing morning and night). For the past two weeks, her nursing time slowly declined until we hit the five minute mark, at which point she'd sign that she was "all done," wanted to "eat," and would sometimes meow like a kitty and laugh at herself. It doesn't take a scholar to read the subtext here-- I'm done with this nursing thing, thankyouverymuch, can we start our morning?

I was pretty sad about it yesterday and still feel off-kilter, but it's hormonal. It'll be kind of nice to be able to take off to the gym on the mornings Mr. Milkweed is home without worrying about being there when she wakes up. So, all in all, no worries.

--Mr. M has a brand new, kick-ass resume (as opposed to an academic CV) and a shiny little cover letter to go with it, and is about to blanket about 100 schools in VA with laser-printed proof of his classroom excellence. Jobs haven't even been posted yet, but why not play the eager beaver and get his name out there? He's also planning on making follow-up calls to principals just to say hello and ask if they have any questions for him. Undoubtedly most won't, but even a two-minute conversation will help him to stand out in their minds when positions start being posted. Hopefully there will be some in some of those schools, and he can formally apply.

--We had a Saturday morning playgroup session yesterday so we could catch up with one of our former members who has since gone back to work. All of the husbands came too, and it was surprisingly fun, despite the fact that none of them had met before. I'm still hoping with every fiber of my being that we'll be able to move to VA, but I've said it before and must say it again-- our little area keeps making a great case for itself. It's a wonderful place to live.

--Finally, continuing with my quest to point you to the finest time-wasters the Internet has to offer (F. U. Penguin, anyone?), I offer you this: the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. I've spent some time recently thinking about the conjunctions between text and memory, and I started to wonder about people's experiences with "memories" of the Internet. It's been around for about 13 years now, and that's long enough for many of us to have concrete memories of the way things used to look or function. At first I was thinking it was particularly fascinating because there's no way to really go back and actually see what pages used to look like-- but actually, there is!

I distinctly remember being bored in the computer lab my freshman year of college (1996-1997) and just typing in random .com names to see where they took me. I TOTALLY remember the hokey picture at Jesus.com in its earliest incarnations. The evolution of that site is almost a microcosmic story of the Internet itself-- it's visual evidence of the shift of the web from a place for a few of specialized knowledge (and wacky sensibility-- check out Jesus.com in the early 2000's) to a commercial powerhouse (Jesus.com's current incarnation as the homepage for the influential MCC).

Anyhoo. Give it a whirl-- if nothing else, look up your college's old website and envision yourself at the age of 19 trying to find out the hours of the Registrar's office. Good times!