no simple highway

I babysat a friend's toddler yesterday, which was my first time doing solo childcare. (All of you who took care of younger siblings starting at age 8 may now laugh at me.) Found that it's both easier and harder than it looks. I was amused that the things she was most interested in playing with were my cellphone and my key frob. She would take the cellphone and hold it up to her ear and say either "allo?" or a string of babble I couldn't understand. If there had been another phone within arm's reach, I would have called the cellphone and had her answer it. Her favorite video is this thing called "Baby Bach", which is a lot of short sequences of various toys in action set to synthesized Bach. It's by an outfit called Baby Einstein, whose target audience can be easily inferred by the name-- they also have "Baby Shakespeare", which I find profoundly disturbing. Hope they don't do Macbeth. Its ostensible purpose is to develop one's little darling's brain, but its real purpose is so yuppie parents can plonk the kid down in front of the idiot box without being racked by (as much) guilt. I wouldn't be surprised if its real purpose is to secretly reprogram the brains of thousands of toddlers so they turn into some evil overlord's army of drooling minions 20 years from now.

(None of the forgoing is intended to impugn the most excellent parenting of this toddler's mother, incidentally.)

After getting home from that gig, I found I was absolutely and completely wiped out, probably from not getting nearly enough sleep for several nights running and being on my feet pretty much all weekend, with wedding prep and the wedding itself. Lay down and read part of some obscure pulp fantasy thing and drifted off into a nap, then went to bed really early.

Made mozarella cornbread for dinner today, more or less on a whim. Had to substitute plain yogurt for buttermilk, not having any of the latter, but that seemed to work OK. Was a bad boy earlier today and went to Kitchen Etc and bought kitchen gadgets. But I needed a pastry blender! :-)

Gosling has expressed interest in joining LJ, but is having trouble thinking of a username. I refer to her by an old nickname of hers, but she thinks it might sound too fluffy. What do y'all think?