Hmm, mixing coconut oil and grapeseed oil for lotion? Sounds lovely. I cook with that combo all the time.

bonny, where did you find the toothpaste recipe, if I may ask?

My stretch teacher uses coconut oil as a sunblock.

Something I've been wondering, there were people (including me) that signed up to a Coursera course on dinosaurs (Dino 101, run from the University of Alberta). It's now finished, with a new offering beginning on Monday. I was wondering, of the other people who were interested: did you wind up completing the course? What did you think of it? Have you signed up for any other online courses, through Coursera or EdX or such like?

For myself, I completed it, enjoyed it a great deal. It wasn't too demanding for time and was a lot of fun. I was pretty impressed with the level too, though it was obviously a 101 course. I've since signed up to a course on Chinese history from Harvard, on EdX: [link] The whole thing is slated to take over a year, covering the full sweep of Chinese history from Neolithic times to modern China. It's split into nine separate modules, though. The second one, titled "The Creation and End of a Centralized Empire", is starting now and runs for five weeks: [link]

I also signed up to Harvard's Introduction to Computer Science, this one for more work-related reasons: [link] It's given as a 12-week course, though participants have until the end of the year to finish everything. Just as well, because this one looks to be more demanding on a week-by-week basis, though of course you can just audit it. (I also signed up to a course called Paradigms of Computer Programming, but I think I'll have to drop that one because it's just getting ridiculous. Or maybe I'll just audit it.)

I've done a few computer programming courses online, and I really like the interface at Udacity, a lot better than the ones at any of other places I've tried. I did a course though Coursera on how to teach online, and I was really not happy with it -- it was one of the worst examples of Death by Powerpoint that I've ever seen. I'm taking a statistics course through Udacity now -- I took statistics as an undergrad, but it was a while ago, and a lot of the jobs I'm looking at now want people who can teach intro statistics classes, so I figured I ought to refamiliarize myself with the material -- and again, and I really like the Udacity format. It's generally no more than two or three minutes of video before it asks a question for you to answer, and then goes over the answer.

Heavy snow is falling here. We're expecting about a foot, and then temperatures dipping down to nine below overnight.

I didn't take the Dino course, but I did sign up for the Science and Cooking class. Have yet to watch any lectures or do any labs - still trying to figure out how to fit things other than working and sleeping into my schedule in a regular basis, frankly. That Chinese history course sounds super interesting, maybe I can get myself together enough to take it when it starts again...

We had a foot or so of snow Friday, freezing cold day Saturday,and now today it's supposed to get above freezing today with rain tomorrow. Then Tuesday, freeze again. Winter here is a slushy, icy hell.

I liked what I took of the Dino course, but need to go finish watching the lectures. That may be a fun activity for a snowy day.

I'm heading out to do round 1 of shoveling - I'd rather move this stuff 4 inches at a time than 12 inches at a time.

Best Neighborhood's Boyfriend proposed to S yesterday! So happy for the both of them.

It's raining now, hope it is warm enough to melt the ice in my downspout, cause I'd rather have J&S basking in their giddiness than rescuing me from the roof again.

Shoveling was not too horrible, but the snow is falling fast enough that the asphalt is almost completely covered again.

We are now looking at rain until about 9pm.

Someone - I think aurelia? - mentioned this thing from Thinkgeek [link] and now my kids are running around the house pretending to be video game heroes and cowboys.