This should be a link to the Chris Matthews interview: [link]

b/c Stewart pretty clearly had his number.

I only wish Stewart could have turned straight to the passage he was referencing and read it aloud.

My mother and sister are coming to Chicago and staying in my apartment this weekend.

I should not be spazzing about this, and yet? So totally am.

Why will nothing work properly? I've lost 300GB of data, can't transfer a different 300 Gb of data, am being ignored by the parts of IT who know anything and a coworker just told me he's sitting around in pjs covered with teddy bears.

I would blame it all on the teddy bears.

or on the Don't Care Bears.

Meara is me w/r/t laundry.

Me too. Or I'm probably more like lisah.

Made it to work. 5 hours after I woke up and 3 hours after I first left the house. Go me!

When I was a kid, I liked the cuddly sort of dolls, like Cabbage Patch Kids, much better than I liked Barbies. My sister had some Barbies, and sometimes I'd do things like braid their hair or make clothes for them, but that was more a craft project than playing with them in the usual sense. With Cabbage Patch Kids, I could read to them, or pretend to feed them, or hug them when I got scared, or talk to them, or sit them in chairs and pretend to be their teacher, or all kinds of other stuff like that.

I also liked electronic toys, though I didn't have all that many of them -- my parents really hated any toys that beeped. I had a zillion construction toys, though -- Legos and things like that. I also had the girls Lego set. I treated that one more like a model kit, though -- it came with instructions for making a playground, and so I made a playground. The regular Legos, I made lots of different things. I got a toy carpenter set when I was about 8 -- a box of wood in different sizes, a bag of nails, a container of Elmers Wood Glue, and a kid-sized hammer -- and built a bunch of stuff with that. Including stuff like tables and chairs for my dolls.

My best friend growing up and I didn't like dolls, but we would play with my dollhouse because we used it as a stage for endless storytelling. Her brother had much cooler toys, toys that our parents wouldn't buy for girls, like a castle with knights, an Erector set and a garage that had a car lift. These were much better stages for the storytelling, and we appropriated them frequently. We besieged the castle. We told made up customers made up car problems. We built the props the stories required.

As a kid I had Legos and Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys and whatnot. Sometimes I'd do stuff like build two opposing fleets of spaceships that would have epic battles. Other times I'd take on engineering challenges, like building Lego or Tinker Toy towers that reached the ceiling. Oh, and I built a random number generator out of Legos that used marbles.

Oh, and I built a random number generator out of Legos that used marbles.

Why am I not surprised?