one minute wonder

i think it's time for another quiz:

Your results:
You are a
beautiful
princess
with great
strength
of character.



yeah, i'm wonder woman
which superhero are you?
go on, click here to take the superhero quiz

quiz addiction..

well,

where should you spend your summer?

You Should Spend

Your Summer in Europe

You're in to almost all forms of culture -

art, music, architecture, food...

And spending a summer at the beach

sounds pretty darn boring to you.

So head off to Europe,

where you can have your tiramisu

(and even eat it on the beach!)

i do have doubts about some quiz results, but this is funny, cos we just went to europe.. in their summer...

(and we're still going to the beach back home, in the middle of winter)

quiz addiction..

You Are Ernie

Playful and childlike,

you are everyone's favorite friend -

even if your goofy antics get annoying at times.

You are usually feeling: Amused -

you are very easily entertained

You are famous for: Always making people smile.

From your silly songs to your wild pranks,

you keep things fun.

How you live your life: With ease.

Life is only difficult when your

friends won't play with you!

I tried this quiz *three times* and got the same answer.. I must have spent too long over the three-day-weekend with hubby, cos this is *definitely* more HIM than ME.. except the friends part!!!

S8 is Ernie too (no surprises there)!!

how to cook perfect rice every time a coconut

mmm, i have been agonising over this for the last few years, because all-of-a-sudden, the method that i learned in my childhood seemed suddenly not to work, and gluggy rice is such a turn off. it's like the word 'poultice': guaranteed to make you shudder.

it turns out that there is a secret (which my mother told me last month) to nicey ricey, which is that you must start with good quality basmati rice. same old stoooory: what you pay for is what you get. aha, i shall be gifting my cheap'n'nasty old stuff to freerice (that's a joke, cos freerice is a vocabulary/grammar/art/maths website that donates rice for every free answer you give it. so yeah, 350 grains from me are currently fighting world hunger. i tried the french quiz.)

right, let's be having the five easy steps:
1. measure rice (2.5 cups for six hungry people) into large heavy-based pot. rinse and rinse and rinse the rice until the water runs clear. my mother's voice in my head is saying, "the chinese wash their rice nine times..."

2. now pour enough water onto the rice until it measures about two fingers above the level of rice when you lie your hand on top of the rice. easy to show, difficult to write.

3. bring to a furious boil, and evaporate the water (i finally know the scientific explanation for evaporation. ha!) until little 'tunnels' appear on the surface and the water only makes bubbles. try it. you'll see.

4. WHANG the lid on tightly, turn off the gas, and DO NOT TOUCH it for 25 mins (the steam/water is magically cooking the rice: don't let it escape!)

5. after 25 minutes, you may now lift the lid and peek in. and you'll find perfectly fluffy rice. but probably no coconut.

which Harry Potter character are you?

nope, this is *not* another silly facebook quiz. i'm actually h'officially on holiday this month, but i've skived off to a friend's classroom for three days this week - i'm swanning about with a great bunch of ten/eleven year olds doing TRASH TO FASHION - vewy exciting pics to follow. but first, a little funny moment:

one of the lads, during a breather from making stuff, popped over and asked me if i had acted in a Harry Potter movie. like, who? i grinned... Professor McGonagall? ummmm, yes, he insisted, have you? i nearly fell into my pile of rubbish, but LOOKIT...
*ahem* there does seem to be a FAINT resemblance:

watch it, kid. talk that way to me again and i'll turn ya into a frog.

français friday

oh em gee i just realised that it's Friday again!!
hubby's in bed recovering from yesterday's knee op, the kids are watching Peter Pan in the lounge, the teenagers are still snoring in their boudoirs (why oh why is there a seeming-competition on who can stay up the latest??) and i'm about to zoom into town and shop wildly for that late night christmas eve rendezvous with the fat jolly man. after i pile last night's dishes into the miracle-cupboard and switch it on.
for this minute, though, i'm dreaming of white christmases and dipping my toes in the Seine in summertime.


but wait: there's more:
(a free set of six steak knives, you ask? non, désolé)
while hubby was in theatre yesterday, i found a little something:
and seeing as it's been such a long time since i did a quiz, and seeing that i can't stand *txt msging* and always type the whole word (except for "lol".. and maybe "2" if i can't fit the whole message in) and seeing that i have a *thing* for correct grammar and an apostrophe fetish that i can't shake (i know i'm a rebel with my capital letters, but i do use a lot of extra punctuation to make up for it!!!!!) i bring you this:

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know "no" from "know." Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

Are You Gooder at Grammar?

go on then: click the link!!!
bonne chance!!!!!

If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it.

i finally dug up
the last of the poh-tay-toes
this morning:

the boots

the gloves

the spade

the buried treasure

the poirate
the quiz
Which one of Captain Jack Sparrow's
bizarre sayings from
Pirates of the Caribbean are you?

You are "Welcome to the Caribbean, love."
You're more than a little world-weary, but also intelligent
and you keep your head when things get dodgy.
You're everybody's favourite buddy,
but your stubbornness does get in the way sometimes.

another sQUIZ:

no kidding, i woke up thinking "i'll do a quiz", and *bam* i found one today at sarah's. i don't really resonate with ron: i would never leave my mates and zip off home. i know, he came back, but *really*.

G'day Ronald Weasley!

You are the strategizer, the one who is loyal and has a sense of humor! Though you can become very jealous at times, you are always loyal to those you care about! You keep your friends and family very close to your heart and will always pack up the courage to protect them at the end, even if it means facing your worst fears!

i am so NOT a strategizer, or even a "strategiser"; and i prefer to think of it as my sense of "humour" rather than humor. the english spelling looks prettier lol.

*whines* i really wanna be hermione. i even took the test twice, but still came out as ron. sheesh.

anyway if ya wanna find your HP identity too, click here .

quiz addiction

I am:

Benevolent Creator

You are a Creator

Your imagination, confidence, willingness to explore, and appreciation of beauty make you a CREATOR.

You are independent, and you enjoy your self-sufficiency.

Defying convention, you are very innovative, and you have a vivid imagination.

The look of things is important to you, and you have a keen eye for aesthetic beauty in multiple arenas.

You have a strong interest in what is new and exciting—and that includes forging ahead with new ideas, not simply discovering what is already out there.

Your eagerness to seek new and varied experiences leads you into many different situations.

You're not set on one way of doing things, and you are creative when it comes to finding novel solutions to complex problems.

You trust yourself to be innovative and resourceful.

Your confidence allows you to take your general awareness and channel it into creativity.

You're not one to force your positions on a group, and you tend to be fair in evaluating different options.

You're not afraid to let your emotions guide you, and you're generally considerate of others' feelings as well.

You tend to do things on the spur of the moment, not sticking to a set schedule.

You are a fashion maven, up on trends, but distinct in your own style. You don't follow trends, you set them.

If you want to be different:

Appreciate the earthly, practical elements of things—there is beauty in form as well.

While you are good at thinking abstractly, focusing on details a bit more may help you discover things about the world.
how you relate to others

You are Benevolent

You are a great person to interact with—understanding, giving, and trusting—in a word, BENEVOLENT

You don't mind being in social situations, as you feel comfortable enough with people to be yourself.

Your caring nature goes beyond a basic concern: you take the time to understand the nuances of people's situations before passing any sort of judgment.

You're a good listener, and even better at offering advice.

You're concerned with others at both an individual and societal level—you sympathize with the plights of troubled groups, and you can care about people you've never met.

Considering many different perspectives is something at which you excel, and you appreciate that quality in others.

Other people's feelings are important to you, and you're good at mediating disputes.

Because of your understanding and patience, you tend to bring out the best in people.

If you want to be different:

You spend a lot of time taking care of others, but don't forget to take care of yourself!

Sometimes you can get overcommitted, and when you sacrifice spending time with those close to you, it can make them feel unimportant.

Take your very own Personal DNA test here

punctilious pandamonium

Meet my newfound kindred spirit, Lynne Truss. Over the last few days, my prominent proboscis has been firmly wedged in her hilariously supercilious book. Finally, I am breathing again. On the back cover of this gorgeous lemon-tinted treatise is a joke:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.
The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Ms. Truss begins her punctilious tirade on page 1 (if you skip the Acknowledgements, which I did), entreating the reader,

Either this will ring bells for you or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's." If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.

and proceeds to give advice on how to embrace one's Inner Stickler: skipping gaily through menus and shop-fronts armed with a big bottle of correction fluid, a red pen, and a tin of paint with a large brush.

I myself am an unabashed over-punctuator: liberally sprinkling commas, hyphens, dashes and parentheses throughout my emails and 'blogs. And (gasp!) I have a habit of starting my sentences with a conjunction. And seriously under-capitalising, especially the poor word "i", which I will not allow to grow up. I wonder what Freud would say? I prefer the excuse that I write as I speak - forgetting to take a breath at the ends of sentences, hence needing no capital at the beginning of the next - interjecting my thoughts with after-thoughts and helplessly blonde explanations.
It's "life on the fly", which is, essentially, how we roll.

After reading chapter two, I have taken heart about my adoration of commas. Truss recounts a lovely little vignette of a humorist (Thurber) and his editor (Ross) in the 1930s (no apostrophe needed),

... in the end Thurber simply had to resign himself to Ross's way of thinking. After all, he was the boss; he signed the cheques; and of course he was a brilliant editor, who endearingly admitted once in a letter to H. L. Mencken, "We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don't know how to get it under control." And so the comma proliferated.
Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living room.'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up." (p. 69, 70)

Ah, that really resonates with me. I'm about half way through the book and am becoming more eduKATEd with each sentence. For example, I have been persuaded to place a second "s" after the apostrophe at the end of the possessive of proper names ending in "s", as in Truss's, right there. Traditionally, I have left the apostrophe dangling in mid-air. Such pedantry is perhaps enough to make one's eyes glaze over. Wait till I get going. Where was I? (guess the movie line)

There is just one final thing holding us back, then. It is that every man is his own stickler. And while I am very much in favour of forming an army of well-informed vigilantes, I can foresee problems getting everyone to pull in the same direction. There will be those, for example, who insist that the Oxford comma is an abomination (the second comma in "ham, eggs, and chips"), whereas others are unmoved by the Oxford comma but incensed by the trend towards under-hyphenation - which the Oxford comma people have possibly never even noticed. Yes, as Evelyn Waugh wrote: "Everyone has always regarded any usage but his own as either barbaric or pedantic." Or, as Kingsley Amis put it less delicately in his book The King's English (1997), the world of grammar is divided into "berks and wankers" - berks being those who are outrageously slipshod about language, and wankers those who are (in our view) abhorrently over-precise. (p. 30, 31)

It's enough to make one hesitant about blogging. Right then, book aside, I'm off to watch My Fair Lady (tonight's movie of choice) with the kiwi-kiddos, all of us giggling at Eliza's outrageous pronunciation of English vowels, and singing along with Professor Higgins as he explains:

The French never care what they do, actually,
as long as they pronounce it properly.
Arabians learn Arabian
with the speed of summer lightning.
And Hebrews learn it backwards,
which is absolutely frightening.
But use proper English -
you're regarded as a freak.

Uh yeah, we're fans of Shakespeare and the Von Trapp family too.
*raises eyebrow*
And so I say, with correction fluid firmly within my grasp:
Whether we call ourselves a commaphobe or a commaphiliac - let's punctuate! (yep, it's another quiz, lol)

*quizzical glance*

oh k, am i overdoing the QUIZ thang? cos i just found this one too and i like it much better than the PUNKtuation one.

You Are a Newborn Soul

You are tolerant, accepting, and willing to give anyone a chance. On the flip side, you're easy to read and easily influenced by others. You have a fresh perspective on life, and you can be very creative. Nonconformist and nontraditional, you've never met anyone who's like you. Inventive and artistic, you like to be a trendsetter. You have an upbeat spirit and you like almost everything. You make friends easily and often have long standing friendships. Impulsive and trusting, you fall in love a little too easily. Souls you are most compatible with: Bright Star Soul and Dreaming Soul.

fancy a spot of *soul-searching*???
*kate falls off chair lol at own pun*
just click:

What Kind of Soul Are You?

"danger? i laugh in the face of danger.. hahahahahaha..."

(guess the movie line)
i feel like we're The *Bona Fide* Home Ed'ers today:
we've done *two* science experiments..
(that don't involve eating food)
it's a world first, i know.
J11 got this oh-so-dangerous-book for his birthday.
and since then, he's been commandeering all adults-passing-through to "educate" them a bit.


(that's the very patient Anne)
OH MY GOSH.
IT'S THE BEST. BOYS. BOOK. EVER.
anything we ever wanted (or think we wanted) to know or do: it's here.
and there's even an online quiz.
see if you can beat *boy wonder*...

and today, J11 decided to make flame-proof cloth (p. 141)
so we mixed up some aluminium potassium sulphate from his crystal-making-kit and oh, dear.. the solution wouldn't dissolve (too saturated: see, i *do* remember something from sixth form chemistry) so we added a little more water and heated it a bit in the nuke-box. and soaked the cloth, and now it's hanging on the line. we'll light it as soon as it's dry...
B-O-O-M!!!!!!!!!!!!
(we hope not)

oh, the second science experiment??
J11 just got a wasp sting ( i got one yesterday in the exact same place on the lawn. strange but true)
so we whizzed inside for the vinegar.
the rule is Baking soda = Bees, Winegar = Wasps.
J11 informs me that "as a wasp's sting is an alkali, the vinegar (acid) neutralizes it. it becomes a salt plus water."

and that's another moment in the life of an uneducated mommy learning at the feet of her brainy kids.

my quiz addiction: i'm blue

BLUE

You give your love and friendship unconditionally. You enjoy long, thoughtful conversations rich in philosophy and spirituality. You are very loyal and intuitive.

Find out your color at QuizMeme.com!

but my real favourite colour is...
*pink*.

springtime literature quiz

Guess who??


ok, here's your clue:

This has to be my all-time-favourite children's book. Partly because I remember reading it when I was a kid (Eric Carle wrote it the year I was born, which incidentally is the year man first walked on the moon..) and partly because I think it's been my most-read-book-to-children since I became an adult (yep, I really am a grownup).
The little caterpillar has miraculously retained his magic.. every time I read it, I wanna put my finger through the holes in the fruit and *see* where he has nibbled.
But wait, there's more...
(nope, sorry, *not* a free set of six steak knives)

"great minds think alike"

the kids were *really* excited to get *two* snail mails today...

one from Granny, and one from Aunt Mim..

and GUESS WHAT??

S-N-A-P !!!!!

they both contained the same thing -

the kidz page from the NZ Herald !!

woo hoo !!!

now all the intellectuals are doing the random questions quiz..

daisy girl

my friend mel has an interior/fashion designer friend who says he can tell what kind of a dresser a woman is by knowing her favourite flower..

wow, a real-life-quiz??

so she tried him on my fave petals:
"someone who loves white daisies?"

his answer:
she's fun, full of life and energy,and she wears funky casual clothes.

sheesh. that's spooky.

as you wish...

"The Princess Bride is the BEST. MOVIE. EVER. Throwing out Princess Bride quotes is the best way to find kindred spirits. If they laugh and finish the quote then friendship is possible. If they just look at you blankly then don't even try." (Sally)

I've finally found it: the ultimate quiz...

POP QUIZ

*guffaw*

D16 and I went on our *date* yesterday, into town, and we had sushi (i'll pick yours and you pick mine and ya HAVE to eat it lol).. and then he asked for a raspberry coke... a WHAT?? didn't you know you CAN'T put nuts in chocolate (because nuts are *savoury* and chocolate is *sweet*), you CAN'T bring your wife pretzels when she asks for a crunchie bar.. and you CAN'T put raspberry flavouring in the coke!!!

JUST KEEP IT PURE'N'SIMPLE, i say..

so it wasn't surprising to see my result from:

what kind of soda are you?

Go on, click the link...

You Are Coke

A true original and classic,

you represent the best

of everything you can offer.

Just the right amount of sweet,

just the right amount of energy...

you're the life of the party.

Your best soda match: Mountain Dew

Stay away from: Dr Pepper

still, I couldn't prevent myself from begging a *taste* of the raspberry coke.. but D16 was happy he got to finish the rest of the bottle *eeeeeeeeeeeeeewww!!!*

faster than a speeding bullet...

Here he is, Dashall Robert Parr aka M4..
"Watch me run, I'm SO F-A-S-T!!! I'm DASH!!!!!"

..and here's the quiz that might get ya giggling
Which Incredibles character are you?

of course, it makes sense that Dash's mummy is DASH too !!! I sure felt like Dash today, it was a wild, windy, sunny, rainy day.. and the kiddos were just like the weather !!!!!!!!
Our kids have a cool thing they do whenever friends are leaving our house in a car..
they race the vehicle up the road.....
ZZZZZZZZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM !!!!!