Long Absences.

Wow, I'm glad the blog is still here, I'm so regretful that I don't have time to update more, but with demands on my time (work, kids, Facebook) I barely have any time to read a book, much-less sit down and write a witty and insightful blog article about current event in my life. But who knows, maybe I'll be able to find time a couple times a week. I hope.

Ryan's Graduation

I guess this means he is in Kindergarten now.

Me and my alarm clock

The human body just isn't made to get up at 4:20, in order to arrive at work at 6:00AM. I went to bed last night at a little after 8 o'clock, and read for a few minutes. Then I don't remember a thing until my alarm went off at the obscene time that I mentioned. It just isn't right.

A new first

It was funny, my first EKG yesterday. I had no idea, it take more time to actually put the electrodes on and turn the machine on than it does to actually take the reading. And then the EKG machine analyzes the rhythms all by itself. The doctor checks it over, but a summary is printed at the top anyway.

One thing leads to another

While I was listening to this program on the way home from work on Friday, I thought about my brother Chris, and his enthusiasm for the subject matter. It made me want to take a drive to some pubs in England (my car won't get me there), and it made me appreciate the resource that is located pretty close by. Custom BrewCrafters just built and opened a brand-new facility in Honeoye Falls, it is massive. They give tours, and are very public friendly. Next time Chris comes to visit, I think I know of one place that we can go on an outing.

Dreams, and mental illness.

I can't remember (could have been the two year gap between postings that I had) whether I have talked about one of my favorite theories before. My main assumption is that our neurons are made up of energy. Energy can be found in various forms but not destroyed. So when we are growing, we are coming from somewhere. When we die we are going somewhere. It is impossible for the thoughts and energy that make up our spark just cease to exist.

That is the assumption. Here is where it gets tricky for me to verbalize. It seems so neat and accurate in my head. Part of the ideas of quantum theory is that there is an infinite number of universes and possibilities. I like to think about blending the concept of the radio and dreaming. For every choice, or incident that occurs, there is another universe in which the other path was taken.

There is a phenomenal with AM radio and with printed magnetic tape that is called bleed-through. At night radio stations that are located near each other can be heard to bleed-through to nearby frequencies. Listening to one show, you might be able to hear certain chunks or interference from other programs. Annoying, but also critical to my thought process.

What if dreaming was like bleed-through energy from other universes? With an infinite number of world, surely there must be one where I find myself in a dark alley, chased by a 6-foot spider, trying to run away on legs that move like they are in molasses. Or one where I am shopping naked in the grocery store, everyone else is clothed, but they don't seem to care or notice that I have not a stitch on.

Does life have a rear-view mirror?

I was wondering whether it is always possible to know when you are at a crossroad or intersection in your life. It seems to me that there are certain times that looking back and seeing where you have been and where you're currently standing are the only ways of figuring out how things turned out the way they did. It isn't always possible to know or realize how the little choices or big choices will effect you now, or in the future. But the hiccup in my thought is that the aggregate of the little choices may turn out to have a bigger effect than one or two of the big decisions that we make. Make sixty little choices, and that can destroy a planet, but make one "Big decision" and that actually means nothing to anyone other then the person that did the decision.

Just have to keep from going mental about every little choice you make.

Happy Mother's Day

The weekend we tried to give a very nice Mother's Day to Michelle including breakfast in bed and a break from tantrums and arguing. I think it worked out pretty smooth. Bagels and cream cheese with coffee and a Mother's Day basket containing something from everyone. The break from tantrums, I'm hoping that lasts a little longer then just the weekend.

Eric's free-time.

My friend Eric has been working on, and just completed a nice little DIY project for his computer desk. One:I like the computer desk because it is really long, lots of counter space. Two: it is complete with the cable holes for running your cable down through the surface.

I guess the surface has seen better days. I shudder to think of what has been done on that counter top. He is a quick before and after of his journey.

Ouch, it makes my brain hurt:

It is so funny I had to take a picture to put here. Michelle found it at a garage sale, "Charge It! The Family Credit-Card Game." The box says "Be the first to accumulate the most wealth....on credit!"

The only thing that makes me feel a little better is that the copywrite date 1976. I was 2. So that make is less migraine kind of cringe, but more of a "what-were-things-like-back-then" kind of cringe. (I know I have seen the pictures, long hair, tie-dyed shirts, peace and love and all that crap. Sounds hideous.)

I have looked around on e-bay and there was this listing which is the exact match for what she found. Wild.

I fear nothing other than a complete loss of memory,

Two weeks ago we did a major rearrangement of the living room. Everything in this gigantic room got moved around: all the computers, the computer desks (logically), the entertainment center, book shelves, kid's work table. It took us two days to get everything shifted, and then even longer to get the odds and ends back to their places. It was an entire weekend of an event, I was quite sore when we finally got everything all set. And the kids were more then a little frazzled with the unfamiliar surroundings.

But it turned out to be a little extra eventful. We went to plug in my computer, and snap, crackle and pop, it fizzled out. I knew instinctively that it was almost definitely my power supply (I was holding my breathe that it wasn't worse then that) that got burnt. I ran up to Best Buy with the tower and they confirmed that it was the power supply. I was quite underwhelmed by the geek there, I feel that I am in a good position to rate the geek-factor of other geeks: being one myself. While he had the tower open he saw that I had a secondary hard-drive slaved up to my primary hard-drive plugged in, but just dangling around in my case. He offered to pop it in to the open bays next to my primary, and I told him that would be awesome.

So I ponied up the $130, walked around for 45 minutes, trying to restrain myself from spending any other money there, after I just spent some. So I made it out of the store and brought the old girl home and plugged it in. I then nearly had a coronary when windows wouldn't even recognize a single byte from the secondary hard-drive. I have it partitioned into 4 drives, and have a considerable amount of music and other data stored on there. And it was like it didn't even exist. I thought I lost all my music, 2 years of checking & savings account history in Quicken, and lots of science and geeky information that I had saved from Hubble and Cassini sites.

I tried not to commit seppuku, there had to be some way to fix it. I did some research here and there, double-checking the jumper pins, and the IDE ribbon cable. I removed everything and put it back exactly the way it was. It took me 4 days to fix it. But I finally did it. I guess it had something to do with the new power supply, I'm thinking because it was a new power plug going into the hard-drive, that could have made the computer think that the old hard-drive was a new device. I had to boot up the computer completely into windows, and then I went into Device Manager in order to double-check all the IDE drivers. I was grasping at straws, but as I accidentally right-clicked and a little dialogue box popped up with an option for "Scan computer for new hardware", I thought to myself "It couldn't be that simple, could it?" Well, that did it. Every 2 or 3 seconds a hard-drive registered as coming back online until I had all four partitions again, and I was able to breathe.

Ryan's Thoughts:

We were eating dinner: "It is a good thing they sell this chicken without feathers."

The first picture: they posed nicely. Then Ryan flinched from an imagined bug or something which resulted in the other picture.

One has a necklace, the other has pink cottonball ears.

At Holly's school last week was "TV Turn-off Week". So there were various activities throughout the week to help out the kids and parents by keeping people busy. One evening Holly and I went over to Puppet Night and had a blast of a time. We made two sock puppets (as pictured) and also a brown bag puppet (which we still have, but haven't pictured). Holly and I were one of the first few there and one of the last to leave, and she was still saying that she didn't want to leave! It was funny because she got to see her teacher again, and she was wearing more casual clothing. Holly loved her orange flip-flops.

Pencil Smoothies

So I have been planning a post (I have a small notebook I try to keep in my pocket for jotting down inspiration) about how no one has a problem with our kids using lead pencils in school. About how everyone is all concerned about lead paint in older houses, but no one seems to be thinking of all the kids who eat paste in school, taking a nibble on their pencils.

But then I did some research and learned that pencils are made out of a mixture of graphite and clay. What a let-down. As everyone knows graphite used to be called black lead (in the early 1700's) but some guys who are long dead by now discovered that it is actually a form of carbon.

And I was all ready to speculate about a lead pencil cover-up. Writing conspiracies.

A short clip of Holly and Ryan showing off their kitten action.

Wearing out some boots.

Today we took a short ride down the road (perhaps a quarter of a mile) to a place that I am embarrassed to say that we never have been before. Barely a car ride down the hill from us is a DEC environmental area. I'll try not to get into all the facts that are listed on their website, but it was a great little walk, several different trails, a 20 acre pond. The information area is open during business hours but the rest of the grounds are "always open". You are even allowed to bring "non-motorized boats" any time that you want.

We are looking forward to spending more time hiking this summer. The kids are finally getting old enough to make it through some trails. And the variety of trees and ecosystems is still pretty new to them. They are interested still.

But there are a few other really special parks around here too, within about 15 to 25 minute drives. So we are going to be busy. I need to buy a hiking vest or backpack. The boy scout in me won't let me head out with my posse without a certain number of supplies.