A few random things from a week that got way too busy, before the start of a week that will also get pretty hectic:

1. Kate insisted on wearing these glasses to church today. Paired with a hot-pink polka-dotted sun hat, purple plaid dress, three sets of plastic beads and two purses, the effect was quite stunning. We are in so much trouble.

2. Regina Spektor has a new album out. There are no words for how happy this makes me, but more importantly, it's going to make Kate's entire year. Anyone who visited us about four months ago know that for a long long time, every single time we got in the car, we had to listen to Regina Spektor's song "Fidelity," sometimes twice. She does this, gets hung up on songs, decides that they are her favorite driving song, and then insists that they be played first thing every time we get in the car. She's ruined quite a few great songs for me this way, including:

Allison Krauss and Robert Plant's "Rich Woman," which is basically a song about the joys of having a sugar mama.

Feist, 1,2,3.4 and "Mushaboom."

Lately she's all about "Jacksonville," by Sufjan Stevens, which is fine with me, because it gives me an excuse to put the full Austin City Limits version up on the blog. One of my remaining live music aspirations is to see Sufjan in concert. I say "remaining" because at this point in my life there are very few artists that I would stay up past 9 p.m. to see. I am totally uncool that way now.

We'll probably have to get Kate her own i-Pod for her fifth birthday so she can make her own super cool playlists. As it stands now, I have more Elmo videos on my formerly-pristine i-Tunes library than I care to admit.

3. Having returned to the land of books that don't have immortal heroes, I recently read Charles Dickens Great Expectations for the first time all the way through. For some reason, every other time I tried, I lost the thread of the story and gave up. But I enjoyed it this time, in spite of some re-entry troubles I had in remembering how to read British literature. They call everything by different names, or at least Dickens did, so in every third sentence, there's a noun I don't have any definition for. So when I get to those words, and pay attention here, because I'm about to unveil the secrets I learned in four years as an English major ... I just ignore them. It's a lot like how I got through reading an entire mystery novel in German during college in spite of the fact that I understood almost no German even after TWO YEARS of trying to learn it. And from that experience, I learned that it turns out you don't have to know what all the words mean to figure out the general gist of a story. Neat, huh? I realize that I could choose to learn the definitions for the words I don't recognize and thus become a more educated person, but I am lazy, and I don't want to.

4. Have I mentioned how I can't take a decent picture of myself and Kate? Here is proof. Our friend Bob took this the other night when we were enjoying the gracious hospitality of the Podgurski home. I understand there were actually some good photos that resulted from the photo session, but there was also this one, in which I look like an absolute crazy person. The reason for this is that Kate starts flopping around like a recently-caught trout when I try to get her to sit in my arms and smile for a photo, so I'm constantly going back and forth between trying to smile and trying not to let her crack her head open on the tile. The result is photos like this.

So now we're opening comments on this awful thing to see who can come up with the best caption? Post it in the comments section and I'll pick a winner. This means that Bob owes me $20, because he bet me that I wouldn't post it on the blog. He doesn't realize how little dignity I have left.

My suggested caption is "Crazy lady with frizzy hair kidnaps half-naked toddler," but I'm sure you can do better.