A very one-sided game of King of the Mountain. 

Ryan likes to shovel snow back onto the driveway! 

Ryan's favorite site.

Ryan and I are hanging out and looking at his favorite website. He wanted us to post a few links to some adorable picture:

Just hanging around.

Scaredy cat.

This one scared Ryan.....

So much fun! 

After bath time, Holly and Ryan always look forward to Pow-Pow. Their term for some rose-scented (some might say perfumed) baby powder that comes complete with a little white poof for "poofing" on to little feet and butts.

Whenever we do pow-pow, we have the kids stand on a towel in an attempt to contain the great billow of powder that is nice and difficult to clean up, short of a wet sponge or mop.

The only reason I relate all of these stories, I got out of the shower today (yes, Kyle, another shower tale. Don't get too excited.) and grabbed the nearest hanging towel and buried my face into a nice pow-pow-filled experience. I must say it wasn't all that unpleasant, and I think I happen to smell pretty good today.

Some Events.....

Some things have happened this morning that have made me regret, yet again, the fact that my children are already smarter then I am.

1) After paying bills this morning, Holly asked me if I was finished with my homework. I told her that I was finished for a little bit, but my homework never ends.....

2) For some reason, even though I can't tell the days apart (Michelle needs to remind me when she is coming home in time for me to head to work), on Thursday and Friday, without any prompting or coaching at all, Holly asks me if I have to work tonight.

3) I think that I am the one who gets the most excited when it is time for Sesame Street. I am still a little disappointed that they moved it from 11 AM to 10 AM, but I am trying to cope as best as I can. (By the way the letter of the day is A)

4) While I was showering this morning (they hang out in the bathroom talking to me and each other) I found myself filled with fear and wonder when they started talking about building a birdhouse out of the stuff in the bathroom closet.

"Zip it, Grip it, and Snip it."

I must say that last night's episode of Scrubs was the best one this season! Wow, if they could keep it up for the reason of the season, ten more episodes, I think that the show might actually get some of the recognition that is so desperately deserves.

Reruns from early on (first and second season) would be really sweet too, enough of the same old third season reruns.

Where is the Line?

I was dismayed upon receiving some news today. I am not sure exactly which part got under my skin, but here is the background: A PBS show that we watch almost every day, "Postcards From Buster", has been involved with some controversy lately. Little did I realize that any show on PBS could be viewed as controversial, but here it is. In one of the episodes that hasn't aired yet, Buster (the premise of the show is that Buster is spending time with his Dad, who is a private pilot for a band. Buster flies around the country with them experiencing lifestyles and cultures that are new too him. His hometown of Elwood City is big and diverse, but Buster sees more "on the road".) heads to Vermont and learns about "farm life and maple sugaring". It just so happens that the couple who own the farm are a female same-sex couple.

So suddenly there is a massive knee-jerk reaction from the newly appointed secretary of Education condemning the fact that federal money was used in such a manner, and requesting a refund for the amount of money spent on the production of the show. The statement that "Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed on the episode" was what really bothered me.

I have done some thinking since I read the article and I have come to some conclusions. If you don't like them, bugger off, this is my blog. For the last 50 years, since the dawn of the television age, downplaying and ignoring gays and lesbians has only seemed to increase the intolerance and ignorance of the American Public. Things have been getting better, from what I hear, and discussions have been started especially in states with the marriage issue bubbling to the surface, but wasn't it just a few years ago that the nation was shocked by the beating death and then dragging of the man down in Alabama or something. Do a google search and there are thousands of results about baseball bat attacks, random attacks, and more. My view is that the previous way of doing things obviously isn't working, and if children are introduced to gay and lesbian people and fictional characters, along with a healthy dialogue with there parents maybe kids will grow to learn that they are not monsters to be attacked or insulted. The concept that the Federal Government is making the choice between what is presented to my children is much more disturbing then showing a farm in Vermont with two Mommies.

When I worked at a bookstore before I became a stay-at-home Dad, I worked with the most diverse group of people I ever met. I was in the minority, being a straight man. It was initially very awkward for me. But that's just it, it was awkward for ME, because it wasn't something I had really been around before. But after working there for more then four year, I value every person that I met, and am very glad for the informal diversity education that I received. It was invaluable.

Another thought......one of the other "Postcards for Buster" episodes had to do with Buster learning more about Muslims in America (Chicago specifically). It was very interesting, but I wonder what the Education Secretary would have said if that show was sit to be release closer to the time of September Eleventh. I don't think that there is much difference between religious intolerance and sexual intolerance.

Also this is the summary for the offensive episode that started the whole debate.

So dissappointing.....

I am very depressed with myself:




Ho, hum.

Snowy Day

There is a kids book about a snowy day, but you know something......That book doesn't talk about having to shovel out your driveway. I am still trying to figure out the snowfall totals for our "blizzard", but all I can tell is that there is a travel advisory in effect for our county and many of the surrounding ones.....But judging from the amount that we shoveled.....I would say that we got about 87 feet of snow.

Well, the official estimate may be closer to only 14 to 18 inches depending on the specific location. I guess that I have been in Rochester too long when a severe snowfall which results in more then a foot of snow sounds like a disappointment. I mean really, if we are going to have such a snowstorm where it is one of the major stories on the National News, it might as well be really noteworthy.

Not clean enough.....

One of the most disturbing things ever happened today. At some point after Ryan filled his diaper, but before I changed him, one of the diapers tapes came loose. With all seriousness: Holy Crap.

I have washed my hands three times, and taken an extra shower, but I still just don't feel like I have gotten rid of any residuals.

Wine and beer.

Today I wanted to talk a little about some alcohol experiences that I have had recently.

Not like that, though, I am a responsible father, I can't just get plowed anytime during the day. I think Holly and Ryan would do a lot of home-remodeling, given any opening at all.

Last night Michelle and I uncorked a bottle of Sutter Home White Zinfindel. It was a surprisingly enjoyable bottle of wine, with one major thing missing. After the bottle was gone, and I think I contributed to this a little more then Michelle, I didn't feel a single thing. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't looking to get pissed, and fall in to bed totally inebriated. I will gladly admit that I am a relative lightweight when it comes to the effects of alcohol but, I didn't feel even the slightest tunneling in of my vision, or acute god-complex that are the typical signal of my brain's bubbling speech: "You are right where you want to be, quit drinking." I even went so far as to go back out to the kitchen, and check the label of the bottle to make sure that I didn't buy some accidental non-alcoholic garbage, but I wasn't mistaken.

So I popped open a couple beers and that did the trick. I bought a six pack of Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde last weekend. Not my favorite kind, but I guess I occasionally drink a brand (Molson Golden) or buy some food (Wegmans-brand Italian sausage patties, Mild please) that reminds me of some past experiences. I guess I might not have been the most attentive, at that time to the strength of the memories that were being created, but I sure do hear it now.

I stand before you, accused of a crime: Blanket Stealing.

This morning I was accused of a terrible and heinous crime, that of blanket-stealing. But I maintain my innocence based on a little-known scientific principle called blanket-drift. I have attempted to find some supporting documentation on the Internet, however it seems that the scientific research up to this point has been a little lacking. Wake up, white-coated individuals, this is important!

Here are the circumstances of the charges, brought against me by my beautiful wife. We go to sleep with approximately the same amount of blanket on both sides of the bed, covering us pretty much evenly. When the fog of sleep rolls back at seven o'clock in the morning, most of the blankets (one velvety-type, one electric blanket, and the top comforter) have slid about a foot toward the floor on my side of the bed, leaving Michelle huddled under a ponderously small amount of blanket. But here is my proof that is isn't me, the sheet travels in the opposite direction. If I were truly the culprit of these acts, I would take the sheet too, but that travels the other direction! My other meaningful piece of data is that it is not just the top (closest to our heads) of the blanket that travels. The half of the blankets that are covering our leg, feet and tucked in at the foot of the bed ALSO move toward my side of the bed. Now there only a small number of circumstances that I can think of which fit the facts: 1) Maybe instead of sleep-walking, I get up and pull the blanket, nice and uniformly so it is touching the floor over my side of the bed. 2) More likely: Blanket Drift.

Blanket Drift has it's foundation in physics. Everyone remembers from High School that light sometimes acts like a wave, and sometimes acts like a particle (Why can't light be a third category all by itself? Photons....Hello?). For the purpose of measuring drift, it acts like a wave. Light, acting like a wave, traveling to us from distant stars and galaxies gets acted upon in one of two ways: Elongated, if the light emitting source is moving away from us the wave forms get stretched out as they travel from there to here. This is called Red-Shift. The opposite effect is called Blue-shift, when the light wave forms get compressed towards each other shortening the frequency. I am still analyzing how this exactly translates to blanket theory, but I am confident, especially with any grant money anyone wants to allow me, I will crack the mystery soon enough.

A quote from Holly:

As we were eating lunch yesterday (Rice, Baked Beans, and Hard-Boiled Eggs) Holly looks over at my empty plate, pointing to the spot where the beans had been and said "You ate all of your bean slime."

Spelling?

Of course I accidentally hit the 'enter' button before proof reading the gibberish that I wrote down....."Holly took one look when we said at they we put a mouse in front of her, and said "I'm using the computer". That should have said "Holly took one look when we said that we put......"

For Christmas we made some "Night Before Christmas" mouse cookies. Holly took one look when we said at they we put a mouse in front of her, and said "I'm using the computer 

Pleasures in Life, and a movie.

As I was sliding in to bed last night I realized that one of the most important items that we own is none other then our electric blanket. Don't get me wrong, Michelle and I like to cuddle for warmth, but there is something about climbing in to a bed that is already pleasantly toasty. It really makes me feel like I am experiencing a bit of luxury. And it is cheaper then paying four people (we have a king sized bed) to come in and lie in our bed to warm it up before we get in.

Michelle was so tired last night she went to bed early. So I stayed up and watched the DVD of Man on Fire. Wow! It was one of the most intense and emotional movies I have ever watched. I have seldom seen a movie like this one, such raw and viseral action. It struck me as something much more realistic than the Hollywood version of violence, which is almost sensantionalized or celebrated. I highly recommend it, unless you are squemish about blood or Denzel Washington cutting some guy's fingers off right on screen.

New toys.

Well, I am playing with some new toys, but they are free downloads. So I don't know if that counts toward my geek education equivalency credits (GEEC).

After several long minutes of deliberation, I downloaded and installed Trillian. It is a really neat little program that can combine Multiple IM programs (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) to one interface. But that withstanding, I think I like another feature even more. While typing or receiving an IM, the program highlights keywords that have "significance" and you can mouseover or double-click to find the Wikipedia entry on that word. Pretty interesting, that and a bunch of emoticons, one of which actually plays a little laughing .wav.

The other one for my GEEC points is Mozilla Foundation's Foxfire browser. This has several neat attractions that I am just getting really accustomed too. First, and foremost, it is NOT Internet Explorer. Second, you can open Multiple websites "in tabs", as opposed to have 5 different Internet Explorer windows open. One aspect of that is that you can right click on an entire folder in your bookmarks and open all of the sites contained within, in one click. Lastly, I am into the skins. There are a bunch of amateur skins, which are stupefying easy to download and install. And since PCWorld Magazine rated Foxfire the most stable and well-designed alternative to Internet Explorer and Netscape, I think it is a small matter of time till a flood of geeks (notice that they are small geeks, not big GEECs) make a vast array of skin choices. I can't wait for some of my fellow GEECs to show all the amateurs up and make some skins that are patterned after some of the games that I play regularly. That will be a fun day.

Well, whoever gave me the free subscription to PCWorld magazine, I do thank you. Between the free utilities and the current and upcoming technologies, it is a wonderful item to receive in the mail every month. Thanks.

Did I miss something?

So I was listening to the radio again yesterday and I heard something which made me a bit confused. And it wasn't the first time that I heard this particular news story either, but after the election and exit polls I became more confused then ever.

First let me preface my remarks, I support our troops, and I think that most of the ways that our country is representing itself overseas (especially since the tsunami) has been for what we perceive as the common good of the world as a whole.

I can support that, but I won't support the President. And I have serious issues with the people that voted for him on the basis of Moral Values. The radio news that I heard, NPR again, talked about how the White House was involved in the work in trying to sidestepping of torture guidelines defined in the Geneva Convention. There was a two year period during which the current administration advocated a memo, stating that causing as much pain as possible, is OK, as long as the person being interrogated does not suffer organ failure or death. The only reason that the issue came to light is that someone leaked the memo, and last week, some time around the first of the year, they rescinded the memo. And replaced it with a different memo, stating that the President can authorize actions to be taken in interrogation which are outlawed by US laws.

But one of the major reasons for Bush's win last November, that many news organizations cited was moral values. Does anyone else see some kind of contradiction with this? Sometimes I really don't understand sociology. How can large groups of people be so stupid or just hear what they want to hear, instead of listening to the facts? I saw a bumper sticker a few weeks ago that I think of now: "I can love my country and not love my President." We are the luckiest people alive, to be living in this country and in this time. But it is OK to question our government's policies and decisions. Checks and Balances were written into the Constitution to protect all of us. But who is protecting those Iraqi "detainees" that are being tricked into believing they are being intentionally drowned or buried alive, in the pursuit of "intelligence data"? The news article spoke about how many of the atrocities that Saddam Hussein and his sons committed before they were removed, would have been OK based on the White House's memo on torture. At what point to we become the evil we were trying to protect ourselves from?

Books

One of my favorite authors, Steven Gould, has finally written another book. His debut book Jumper was published in 1985, and he has written several others since. But his newest book is a sequel to his first.

Now, when I say that it is a science fiction book, that is a half of the description. Probably enough to put a lot of people off of it, but it is more complicated of a plot. In Jumper, the basic premise is that David Rice an 18 year old kid living in Ohio has been the victim of his alcoholic father's verbal and physical abuse for years. Suddenly before a few different instances of what promise to be vicious beatings he involuntarily "flinches" away. He teleports to the safest place that he ever knew: his local public library. After a few more jumps he realizes that it is something that he can control, and boy does Steven Gould present a fully-realized and clearly-described world in which Davy can teleport anywhere. There are limits, though. He can only teleport to somewhere that he has been and clearly remembers (solution: Davy buys a video camera and lots of tapes for acquiring jump sites in dozens of different airports). Jumper one of my favorite books, and of course I had to read it again, in preperation for this new book.

Reflex picks up ten years after the events in Jumper and I am already a good portion in after a couple hours. I love it, and I think I love it more, due to the updated technology. A lot has changed in the almost twenty years since Jumper was written, and so far it looks like Gould has put a lot of thought into the different technology that would be availible to the protagonist, as well as the antagonist. I can't wait to finish the book....in fact, why am I typing when I could have my eyes rubbing along the lines?

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street? 

Big Bird's Nest! They didn't want to get out, I guess it is pretty comfortable in there. 

Michelle's parents got us a membership to Strong Museum. Cool Arthur exhibit! 

Pleasant Day

Well, every once in a while the kids definately give me something that I compulsively need to write about, or talk about somewhere. This afternoon they both went and put on their boots all by themselves (something that alone I wouldn't bother writing here, but is actually a really great help for them both to be able to do) and were running in circle in the living room chanting "Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold." I have a toy Boba Fett that has a motion sensor on it and says a few canned lines from The Empire Strikes Back when you move in front of it. Wow, how they love it.

And for some reason there are colored pencil marks on the screen of my monitor. Hum...and I am pretty sure that someone smells vaguely of poop.

Happy Birthday Holly.

Holly is three years old today! She went out to a special lunch with Michelle's Mom and Dad. The big girl went all by herself, and they said that she was the most well-behaved little pumpkin they have seen!

I Love You, Holly.