Zazzle's making me money!

Create your own merch booth

Heh -- that's a fancy professional looking tool from zazzle.com where you can buy stuff that i drew or whatever. My designs actually have sold two or three things, so i have made a theoretical $4.50 or so. Which they probably expect me to spend on one of their products. But people who resonate with the "Born to be a Calvinist", or "Arminian by choice" things, if you buy something i promise not to put you into a jar and shake it up to watch you fight.

I feel like i should do a synopsis of the day real quick: i worked, then we went to Karen's parents house in order to see Ashley, wife of Karen's brother whose in the Army. We ate chicken pot pie which was great, but not (as one might expect) illegal like pot brownies. I drove the kids home and put them to bed finally at 10:30pm, and they stayed asleep. I'm finna fall asleep right here too, but i should probably paint.

Tired again

Zane woke up last night at about eleven thirty, and stayed awake crying until i gave up and went upstairs to bed at, i dunno, about two in the morning. I tried lying down with him, but he cried and cried and kept shoving his saliva-soaked blanket all over the place. Gross. So i got up with him at about 2:30, and he stayed awake with me, tottering around the house and playing with a ball, Lego, paper, i dunno... It was almost four in the morning before he started acting tired, or rather, stopped covering up his tiredness by frantic-eyed activity, so we both went to bed. Poor kid. And he's been crying a little bit tonight too. I bet my left over Vicotin crushed up in pancake syrup would make him sleep really well.

Hahahahaha. Like i would do that. Hahahahaha. Where's that dropper?

Fortunately...

I'm celebrating two things: one, my eBay auction for an old motherboard i've had kicking around in the basement has ten minutes left, and is up to EIGHTY DOLLARS!!! That's so much, i'm convinced that these people don't know what they're bidding on, even though i was extremely clear as to what they were buying. Sheesh. Um... scary! The high bidder at this point has zero feedback. We will see how this goes -- i'll not spend the money out of my paypal account for at least seven days.

Okay, the other celebration thing is that i found this amazing open source vector graphics program called Inkscape. That's how i got the cute picture of Houston jumping into his airplane. See, vector graphics work differently from normal "pictures" on the computer, which are simply an arrangement of pixels. If you zoom in enough, you'll see the individual pixels. But vector pictures use numbers to describe shapes and lines, so no matter how far you zoom in, you've still got smooth, sharp lines, and details can be fine tuned and tweaked. It's so totally awesome. That picture (with some minor color adjustment on Houston's face and hair) will actually go into his book that Karen wrote.

Okay, i gotta go fiddle with some other stuff and put away my painting materials... i like art. Anybody wanna hire me for lots of money a year, with benefits?

Funny pictures, Houston's progress.

Okay, seriously, today Karen took one of the BEST PICTURES OF ME EVER!!!!!!!!!!!ELEVEN!!!11!!! It's so awesome that i'm not even gonna write anymore until after the break, so you're forced to click on the __more__ link and actually pay attention.
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Shingles = thrown away!!!

It was near 5:30 this afternoon, and a rumbling noise indicated the presence of a huge skip being unloaded from the back of a truck right in front of our house. See, Karen's sister and her husband Todd most astonishingly graciously offered to bring a dump truck over and haul off all the shingles that have been cozily nestling next to our house for the last seventeen months or however long it's been since i tore them off. Well, a little over an hour later, all the shingles were gone, the skip was pulled back up onto the truck (cool bit of hardware, that) and the bottom foot or so of our house on that side will now be able to breathe again. Also, we can walk next to our house without stepping on nails constantly. Oddly, with months of walking over them, and weeks of working constantly with shingles and nails and stuff, the only time i stepped on a nail and actually poked my foot was this evening. And we punctured the tire in Todd's wheelbarrow. D'oh.

In other news of generosity, Houston made breakfast all by himself. I was sleeping, so you'll have to look to Karen's weblog for more details about that. But he made me a "cereal sandwich" which was two slices of bread with rice crispies in between. It was a couple hours old when i got downstairs to eat it, so it was a mysterious mix of stalenesses. The very top of the slice of bread was dried out, forming a mildly toast-like texture. The rice crispies had soaked up moisture from the bread, turning them kind of chewy. And of course, the flavors of white bread plus stale rice cereal isn't going to make any gourmands swoon with pleasure. But i ate it, only slightly disappointed that i wasn't eating what i'd woken up wanting, which was toast with Marmite. I did go into the kitchen right after finishing my stale cereal sandwich, and Katrina noticed that i was acting hungry still. So she made me another cereal sandwich which i dutifully ate, and to be fair, was much more tolerable while the cereal was crisp. But still... i had to enjoy my Marmite later.

I hope the next time Houston prepares a meal for the family all by himself, it's... tastier.

Squirrel

Yes, i know that today's picture makes it appear as though we keep our kids in a cage sometimes, but really that's totally not true. It's one of those images which, you know, creates an optical illusion to the effect of "kids" being locked in a "cage". Really, they're sitting on a couch watching pro wrestling.

Hmm, let's mosey back into reality now, and allow me to share: We got home from church this afternoon. Karen put a sleeping Zane into his crib (which is nothing at all like a cage, in case you're concerned) and came back downstairs. I went into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher and start cooking lunch. Karen and both kids came into the kitchen, and Karen let the dog out our back door. Suddenly (and "suddenly" is most certainly the word for it) there was a burst of chaotic motion, the nexus of which moved like a scary random whirl of crazy energy across our kitchen. Karen started screaming really really loud, like, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" (breathe) "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" and she was kind of jumping up and down. Houston was screaming too, but it was more like "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" and he was shaking his arms. I think Katrina was probably making some kind of noise, but it was being drowned out by everyone else. See, a squirrel had leaped right into our house from outside. From outside! What the-??? So it scrambled across our kitchen while i could do nothing but laugh and try to, i dunno, assure my family that they weren't going to get hurt or something. Well, the squirrel left the kitchen (we have a really small kitchen, which is usually messy but mostly sanitary) (do squirrels carry germs on their feet?) and i ran out, calling to my family "I'm going to get my camera!" while they fled to the bathroom. Karen pointed out in her post today that our bathroom is the only room downstairs with a door, which is totally true. Weird. So anyway, they hid out there while i snatched my camera. The resulting video is after the jump.

Oh boy, my poor family! Karen said that she knew perfectly well that she was not in any real danger, and was aware that her screaming a) was scaring the Houston and Katrina, and b) might wake Zane. But she couldn't stop! Houston was terrified mostly by the actual squirrel. He didn't even want to see the video afterwards. I didn't even get the willies. One doesn't want to get bitten or scratched, but as long as one doesn't actually grab, with bare hands, a frightened wild animal, the likeliness of that happening is slim. So i kind of chased it around with the camera and it jumped out the window i opened. The most exciting part of the video is when it's scrabbling around behind the venetian blinds in the kitchen.

Totally awesome.
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Pretty tree!

There's our tree! I did a video this year. It's better, perhaps, than a simple picture which doesn't show the depth and beauty of the tree. Eh, whatever. It's dark. If anyone out there is thinking about buying a new digital camera, allow me to recommend with hearty eagerness the Canon A570IS. It's a great camera with a lens and sensor which matches well, performs excellently, and perhaps best of all, had excellent video recording capabilities. Like, you'll leave your camcorder at home. At the bottom of your junk drawer. Two people i know have bought this camera on my recommendation, and they love it. It has a really cool face lock-on feature. Plus, it's fairly cheap, in its class.

Okay, so today i raked leaves because the waste transfer facility near to us is closed, so we can't throw the shingles away like i was planning. The leaves didn't melt or anything, like i was pretty sure they were going to. So i had to actually rake them into a pile. I raked the pile onto a big tarp and dragged across the street. There's a crash barrier and a wooded drop off across the street from my house. It's great for dumping leaves, but might not be as legal as, say, dumping leaves at a designated leaf dumping site. But i'll tell you what's even more criminal than tossing a leaf or two into the woods: dumping murder victims. I don't know if you realize this, but if you get a couple hundred pounds worth of leaves into a tarp and try to pull the tarp over a metal crash barrier, the leaves roll up and compact into a shape extraordinarily like a body wrapped in a tarp. They even thump onto the ground just like you'd imagine a body would. Yikes.

We got a treeeee!!!

This morning it snowed a little bit. A teensy bit. So the first thing Houston did when he got the chance was to scrape up enough snow to make a little wrinkly lozenge of snow. He ran to me and hurled the "snowball" at me with mischievous enthusiasm. I actually didn't realize what he was doing until he looked at me expectantly. So then i convulsed in shock and surprise. He laughed a lot.

And also on our tree-fetching trip, we found a place which was quite expensive, but they had a Christmas tree painted on a board with a hole cut out in it for people to poke their heads through... but what's up with that? Does anyone want to dress up like a Christmas tree? Odd. But it is cool that you can find details like this in digital pictures. And, we did get a tree, but not like the hilarious wonky utter reject we got two years ago. This year's example is actually well proportioned and cute.

And then Karen and the kids decorated the house while i was at work. I struggle to enjoy decorating. It involves a whole arcane thought process which i shall probably never understand, and certainly won't ever excel at. And the options seem so arbitrary! But the end product, which i encountered when i got home, is really awesome. Karen (and the kids) did a fantastic job. Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today there were two leaves on Houston's window when we got in the car. One leaf blew away. So there was one leaf left. Two leaves were left on the window, and one leaf left, leaving one leaf left. We laughed and discussed how there were two meanings of "One leaf left" and Houston said "There's three meanings, like, one leaf that way!!! Hahahaha!" He was pointing to the left, obviously. Awesome. I mean, Karen had said that already, but she's a grown up and stuff. Houston's five.

We got together with Karen's family for the big day. The food was fantastic. But i didn't stuff myself, because while i really like food, there's nothing to be gained by gorging. And the conversation was lively and conflict free, besides a row over a kid with a wicked peanut allergy. But we didn't talk about politics or welfare or education. Although when we were playing Apples to Apples, i made enough comments making fun of postmodernism to make Karen think i'm not postmodern. But i am. It's just so much fun to attack the vacuous, waffling nonsense postmodern thought has spawned in popular culture. "It's true if you believe it's true." I can't tell you how many times i've discussed how totally off the kids at work are when they believe -- they actually believe -- that they can accomplish whatever they set their minds to. Um... by the way, that's not true. You're not going to become the Eternal President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. No matter how much you eat your delicious wholesome Wheaties™.

But anyway, i'm totally a cultural relativist, which is the main socialogical tenet of postmodernism. How can you live in this small world and not be? By burying your head in the sand, i suppose.

Oh, and for my giving of thanks, today... i give thanks to God for my wife, who did something awesomely geeky today. She was moving pictures from one computer to another at her parents' house, which isn't networked (I KNOW!!!), so she was putting pictures on a memory card, putting the card into a reader on the other computer, and moving them to the other computer's hard drive. Well, the memory card got full, and Windows kicked out the standard error message. Well, i was standing there stumped, having thoughts of writing batch files and scripts to redo the whole copy routine without errors. Karen, in the meantime, yanked the full memory card out, slapped an empty memory card in, and whacked the "OK" button on the error dialog. It worked. The copy resumed. My flab was totally bergasted.

Sweeping

I really like sweeping. Zane is a boy after my own heart. Video on WaanTube. Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! I'll try not to talk about the war or global warming or government assistance.

I broke Karen's computer today.

Our neighbor kid spent half an hour one time on Karen's computer, and managed to gum it up so full of spyware and virii that it was absolutely unusable. Karen didn't talk to Corbyn for, like, a year. But i said all joyously, "i have another stick of memory which would plug right into your computer and make applications like Paint Shop Pro actually work without crashing every time you want to do something like 'paste'." That's why people are buying these ridiculously fast multi processor computers nowadays, so they can "paste". That's advanced computing.

I emerged from the bowels of our house with an only slightly dusty stick of memory in hand. It was exactly the right speed and size of memory for Karen's computer. It plugged in perfectly. The clips secured the memory cozily into the slot. Everything was great. Until i pushed the power button. Then, we started smelling the magic smoke... and sure enough, the computer refused to work. The memory module had several blackened, melted contact patches, and part of the memory slot was melted. And the whole computer wouldn't work after that. So i quick tossed in a different motherboard, processor and video card i happened to have in the basement, along with a hard drive i'd been not really using in my computer, reinstalled Windows, and now it's hopefully all exactly the way it used to be. Besides some extra goodies like a fancy swooping application selector bar thing... and it'll be FASTER!!! I hope she likes it.

Rats.

Operation Tan Guy is still going. Because it has to.

I looked out the window this morning to see a fellow with a Clipboard and a pink slip of paper. He was looking at the piles of shingles i haven't gotten rid of yet. I strolled outside doing my best not to look irate or aggressive (i bet the guy has some pretty astonishing conflict resolution skills, or he can do some intimidation of his own?) and asked if he was writing up a complaint. Yes, was the answer, so we chatted for a minute -- the guy was really friendly and stuff. And we have a week. Bummer that it's Thanksgiving week, which is everybody's least favorite week to shovel shingles. That's actually true, you know... So i guess something must be done.

In other news, Houston is tall. All three children took a bath today. Houston was last to leave the tub, and i asked him to lie all the way down to get the back of his hair wet. He did, and his head won't go into the water anymore! Sad! So i decided to take a picture, with him covering his Boy Parts so he wouldn't be embarrassed to look at it when he's older, i told him... and then i counted down from three and of course he removed his hands on "three", and burst into uproarious laughter. Luckily for me, i know my son, and had taken the picture on "two".

Pain tolerance...

Isn't that picture cute? It's my first watercolor attempt in ages. Karen wrote a story which we're going to turn into a book with me doing the illustrations. I'm really excited to see what it looks like. Also, today we took a bunch of pictures for our Christmas card which you can be expecting in the mail. We'll dump them all in the mailbox on Michigan Ave right by the post office. Good luck actually getting them. Here's Karen's gallery describing and showing the picture taking session. Oh, and when she posted that gallery, i thought "You know, i bet there's flash photo galleries out there we could use..." and oh wow, there sure is! Free stuff is so great.

I have always been pretty sure i have a high pain tolerance. I think that's true, but of course pain is utterly subjective, so it's totally impossible to be sure. But i have come to recognize that tolerating pain removes "tolerance" from my pool of tolerance, as though tolerance is somehow a limited resource. Having kids climb all over me is easily tolerated, fun even, when i'm feeling okay. But when the sockets of recently pulled wisdom teeth are throbbing and Zane is banging his butt down on my chest over and over and over and over, well, that makes the situation not as tolerable at all.

So Karen's been asking me, "Am I annoying you?" and the answer has been "No, i'm tired and in pain." But patience and cheerfulness depend upon tolerance. So i seem like i'm annoyed. Lots of people get whiny and mopey when they're in pain. I just start, i dunno, screaming at everyone. Maybe not that...

I am totally a dork.

Yeah, i put a page up which will eventually have all the videos put up on Wanito's World. Not to eat up massive amounts of bandwidth, ('cause uploading videos from my weedy broadband account SUCKS) but mostly so i'll have a really convenient way to get to videos which interest me.

Speaking of which, we had two pee accidents tonight. I won't go into detail because it might embarrass my children when they get older, but let it be known that i have to go change my pants right now. And it's not my own pee. Gross.

Kids are totally awesome. But they're loud, messy, annoying and disorganized. When you're not feeling like a Olympian soccer juggler, (that means "if you're sick or tired or both") you sometimes want to die a little bit. So i hope that when i came home, i could deflect some of that urge from Karen, who'd been dealing with the loud...disorganized stuff all day. When Zane turns five, and if we don't have any more kids, i think we'll be able to keep the house looking like the "after" pictures we sometimes do. For longer than the shutter speed of the camera.

Sorry... another video.

Okay, i'm not really sorry... but i know having three videos in as many days might be utterly BORING, especially since the videos aren't properly edited and the cinematography can hardly even be called cinematography!!! More like webcamatography. Shudder! Another thing which causes me to be geeked is that the streaming video i serve up here can be viewed by the computers at work. Apparently, ozerik.homeip.net hasn't gotten tagged by Wedgwood's iron clad firewall blocker as "streaming video" yet. Probably if i put lots and lots of swears and violent words like "explode" and "stab" it'll get blocked. So nobody comment if you're a foulmouthed violencemonger.

Oh. I thought of a new word. Port'tion. Obviously, this is one of those words where you take two words and make them into one, of "portmanteau" and "contraction" resulting in "portmantraction". And then i took some letters out and put an apostrophe in there. Awesome word, huh? Perhaps a new acronym might be appropriate here: OBGMRME. Only Barely Grinning Mostly Rolling My Eyes.

Finally, the REASON FOR THAT VIDEO!!! Karen totally cut Katrina's hair, and it's absolutely the cutest ever! Katrina's hair has never been cut or trimmed, so this was a big first for her. And Karen's brave to take the scissors to Katrina's long flowing locks. Well, the haircut works for Katrina. It frames her little pixie face really well. And it makes her hair color firmly in the "brown" category, which is cool. Before, when asked, i would say "Um, brown..." and nod my head as though weighing how true that might be. Now, i can proclaim with confidence and pride, "Brown!"

Post finally, i made chili again today. Yesterday's chili was my first try, and it was acceptable. I tried cooking the beans right in with the rest of the ingredients, which made them tough and the Crock-Pot burned some of the chili to the edges because i couldn't fit enough water in there to satisfy the absorbency of the beans. Also, i cooked the tomatoes and onions as long as i cooked everything else, and i didn't add any green peppers or other vegetables. And i used cheap ground beef.

Today's chili had less overcooked vegetables, and canned chili beans, which made it more successful. But really, to make a proper chili, i would want to slow-barbecue a nice brisket of beef, slice it thinly and cook it for a long time, maybe along with the (non-canned) beans. I shall try again, someday.

Random day off!

Usually i work Thursday night, but today i'm off! It was nice, very nice. I wish i had every day off.

When i was a kid, i worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken right about the time they changed the name to KFC. The rumor before the change was "they're taking the FRIED out of the title!" and i thought to myself "Kentucky Chicken? What the--?" Anyway, one of my coworkers would leave her paychecks in her purse for months on end, because she was rich, and didn't need to work at all. She just worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken for the reason.... which i can't even imagine. I mean, if you're looking for variety or social interaction or simply something to do, why would you look to fast food? Seriously?

But anyway, can you imagine working at a "normal" job if you were independently wealthy? I cannot. Not at all. I can easily imagine working for a good non-profit like Wedgwood, or volunteering, more likely. Maybe drilling water wells in African villages. But whatever i did, it would have to be useful and somewhat stimulating. And if i had to stay at home all the time? Well, at this stage in our family's life, that would be okay with me. There's enough useful, stimulating things to do around here which will seriously make a huge difference for our kids.

Right. So we visited Andrew and Linda today, along with their three beautiful, talented daughters. Okay, maybe more accurate would be to call them cute and funny, but i'm sure they'll grow into talented beauties someday, all three. But it was super fun. And we talked about very important things like the fact that They took "In God We Trust" off the $1 coin. Actually, no they didn't. But still, it would be really funny to make gift tags that say something like "This Christmas present paid for exclusively with God Approved Money". And there could be a picture of the Scandinavian Jesus clutching prominently displayed "In God We Trust" bills.

After the jump, please find a video of Linda and Andrew's house. The kids are listening to "The Skeleton Song", which is actually Medeski Martin & Wood's “Is There Anybody Here That Love My Jesus”. Houston expressed confusion that there was no singing or indication whatsoever that the song was about skeletons.
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My very own *.FLV embedding!

AWESOME!!!!! I learned how to embed video files into my website without using YouTube or any external service! Which is why that file is going to load astonishingly slow for everyone besides Karen and me and others who might be using a computer connected directly to our network. This means the video part of this weblog will survive the collapse of Western civilization.

And now, i'm off to take a painkiller and collapse into bed. I think i have a "dry socket" which means "pain", mostly. And "irritability unless i'm busy doing an involving task like making chili or figuring out how to embed .flv movies onto my server". Oh yeah. Besides figuring out how to do that, i made chili. It smells pretty good. Yum.

Picture Day!

Okay, so yesterday i tried to do a one-picture-per-hour, but i utterly failed since i am forgetful and lazy or something. But today i remembered mostly. So check it out.

I started my day waking up, pleasantly well rested, since i'd gone to bed over twelve hours previously. Sleep rocks. Oh, and by the way, i heard a program on NPR about dreaming, and studies where people are woken randomly during REM (the time of sleep when you dream) report that they're having "bad" dreams over three quarters of the time. But i've been trying my hardest to keep track of wether my dreams are pleasant or not, and all the ones i can remember have been odd, but not unpleasant. I have no idea what they were, i just remember thinking upon waking "huh, that wasn't a bad dream at all".

The picture up there is Zane. He's the first to wake up every morning, so in my haste to get out of the house to the training at work, i snapped that horrible picture of him. He looks like a blob of protoplasm.
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What day?

Today i had an interview for a new job. It's still within Wedgwood, but it's for the "Education Specialist" job back with the girls' unit. It'll be all mornings, and that is the deciding factor in why i actually want to go for the job. Working where i work now, with the sex offender boys is amazingly good -- we're actually doing work there, we're making obvious progress. With other homes throughout the agency, not as much progress is made, because the kids at Crossroads actually want to change. That's probably more than half the battle.

In a couple weeks i'll know if i got the job. I'm quite ambivalent.

Besides that, we went to a park where i tried to have energy, and the kids had fun. We made pizza with a fresh pizzeria bought doughball, and it turns out that cooking the pizza on a grate is a lot better than using a plain cookie sheet. We don't have a proper stone to heat up in the oven beforehand like JJ talked about in his comment, but the grate might be just as good. Then i fell asleep at 7:30. Wow. That's 7:30pm. The last time i fell asleep at that time was probably before i was potty trained.

I think Karen needs a marble in her Kind Jar for letting me sleep that early. Awesome.

Still doing okay

My teeth aren't even bothering me! There's a little pain, and it's not comfortable to eat yet, but there's no throbbing or shooting pain or anything like that. I'm not even taking painkillers. Alisha and i must share pain genetics or something. I don't even think i'm swelling. I think i miss my one tooth, though. Ever since i was a kid, the entire chewing area of my upper and lower jaws were covered with imposing molars (and bicuspids and canines and incisors), and now i have... gums. I even miss my wisdom teeth.

But yesterday at work, i was supervising almost all the kids while the thirteenth was going off. He got restrained, and even got himself naked in the seclusion room and wrapped his underwear around his neck. The staff who were dealing with him had to "rassle" him down to take the undies from around his neck. So i could say yesterday with all honesty, that even though i had five teeth pulled today, i pity those two staff.

Tonight, to talk about something much pleasanter, we had Family Drawing Time.Karen does a great job explaining it in her post from today. She said i'd be posting my evening's work, and sure enough, here it is!

And here's a cute picture of Houston, with me on the scooter. I just post it here because i went to all the trouble to crop it and stuff.

Duuuuuuude, i am sooooooo hiiiiiiiigh

First... that picture is me saying Oh. My. Gauze. If you'll excuse the blog punctuation affectation thing.

As promised, here's a recounting of the first mind altered experience of a thirty five year old drug virgin. I've never even been properly drunk.

I did lots of research last night about nitrous oxide, but more interesting (at least, more relevant) is my subjective experience. So first off, there was tingling in my hands and feet, which was precisely like the tinglings at the very onset of numbness due to local anesthesia. But then there was a light headedness which i could say was similar to the rush of being excessively tired or having exercised strenuously. But once the effects of the nitrous came on fully, it was a feeling closest to the most awesome dream states i've been in. There was, alas, no flanging of sound. And no hallucinations, besides the fact that my eyes had only the vaguest interest in pointing the same way.

Then, the nurse asked me about my dreadlocks. So i had to talk. And my brain would only work very very very slowly. M... y... ... d... r... e... a... d... l... o... c... k... s...? I told her how you tangle and knot the ends really well, and thread the knots through the untangled hair nearer the roots, and twenty minutes later, i finished that sentence. But she was patient while i told her about my dreadlocks are this white, educated Christian male's symbolic rejection of racist advantage and my visible dedication to advocating for the repressed and disadvantaged. I actually said most of that, but extremely slowly.

What interested me was my total rationality, but the amount of effort to remain rational was, while pleasant, quite significant. I thought "how weird that i can reflect on how hard it is to be reflective. Whoah, and it takes lots of effort to reflect on how hard it is to reflect on how hard it is to be reflective. I give up." I also thought with bemusement how pleasant the gas effects were making an otherwise horrible experience -- getting five teeth yanked out of one's head. So, i thought, it's no wonder that people everywhere are getting high. They need to escape from the agony of their lives! No wonder i'm not a drug abuser. I actually like my life. I don't have anything to escape from.

The theme of my trippy experience (besides the cracking noises as teeth tore away from the dental ligaments) had to have been an overarching feeling of love and goodwill to all my fellow humans. I felt the doctor flossing my teeth, i thought, and was so happy that he was doing that, since there was absolutely no reason for him to floss my teeth. His job isn't as an oral hygienist, how utterly generous of him! But he was stitching me up... but still, that was really nice of him to do also! What a competent, kind doctor! And the nurse's hands were sure and warm. I forget what she looks like (i thought) but i know she's really nice and she's probably totally beautiful. I'm so glad she's here.

And of course, the transitions into and out of the state were gradual, with no let-down afterwards. The experience would have been far more rewarding in a comfortable, warm place surrounded by friends, where nobody is extracting your teeth. But i was surprised to find that listening to Shpongle (arguably one of the trippiest bands around) didn't add anything at all. Besides the benefit of listening to Shpongle. And then, i went to work before my local anesthesia wore off, and impressed everyone by actually doing okay, (i even read Psalm 22 for devotions, with feeling!) and not taking Vicodin until a few minutes ago... so i have to go to sleep pretty much now.

Flying turkey

There's the turkey from our game of Turkey Bowling at Young Life. It was gross. Raw (dead, plucked, minus parts) are not attractive things. It's always funny to watch kids who really think they're too cool for anything be goaded into doing something they'd never ever do normally. Something not illegal or self-destructive, i mean. It would suck to watch a kid die of alcohol poisoning, no matter how cool they think they are.

Tomorrow morning i'm getting my wisdom teeth yanked. I'll be going with nothing but nitrous oxide and local anesthesia, because i need to be able to drive home. But it's gonna be quite something. See, my wisdom teeth are all four completely erupted, and i've been using them for twenty years or whatever, so the bone around them is really dense and strong. So getting them out will be like, well... pulling teeth. Harder, even.

I'm interested in what the nitrous oxide will be like. I've never used any kind of mind altering substance besides caffeine, and i hear that nitrous is one of the pleasanter experiences, particularly due to the utter lack of side effects or crash afterwards. But i also have a job and three kids, so i might just fall asleep. I'll report tomorrow, probably with a funny picture of me with astonishing squared off jaw. Third molar surgery always makes men look so sexy!

You have to be brilliant to be a rocket.

First, allow me to share with The Internet a little known fact that should cause rejoicing among quality bread lovers everywhere: pizza restaurants will often sell a dough ball to anyone who lurches in clutching a grubby dollar bill in their unwashed fist. Out of the three places i've called, two allowed that. The first place featured a young kid with a rules-relaxed policy about it, saying "I dunno what the owner would say..." and the second said "We can't do that" and the third (Vito's Pizza on Leonard) said "of course." So eat at Vito's. It's good. But i think they use canned mushrooms. Call about that first.

So anyway, a good pizza dough is possible to make at home, but it involves buying good high protein flour -- semolina durum flour, same kind of wheat they make good pasta with -- and then you need to do the alchemistry of yeast and sugar and whatever to get the dough to rise properly, then the kneading and proofing process will take all day or longer, and THEN you'll probably end up with something as good as you could get at a store for a pittance. So that's me tossing the pizza dough. It's fun and cheap. And the pizza was excellent. Seriously, you should NOT settle for the hideousness of most frozen pizza crust when you can obtain such soft, yeasty warm goodness for such a small amount of cash and a little bit of (fun) labor. Also, i recommend Spartan brand "low moisture, part skim mozzarella cheese in the one pound rounded-cube thing. It's way better than the cut, rectangular mozzarella of any brand, and probably better than most pre-grated cheese.

Okay, i'll shut up about food now.

Oh, except you need to use fresh mushrooms because mushrooms are basically sponges, and absorb the flavors and aromas of the things they're around. If you have a canned mushroom, what has it soaked up? The salty, mushroom-flavored water in the can! Is that what you want? No!!! You want the mushrooms to absorb the essences of the cheese, the subtleties of the pepperoni, the FLAVOR of the PIZZA!!! Eat well, please, i beseech you.

We were assisted in the consumption of the pizza by Karen's brother Rick and his lovely wife Ashley (and, second-hand, their infant Benjamin). We ate, talked, ate pretzels (also made from pizza dough) and played a rousing game. During this game, Karen said (and i bold the quote to make it leap from your monitor) "You have to be brilliant to be a rocket!" It was awesome. She meant "-rocket scientist", but Neil Armstrong was an astronaut: not the same thing. So to be fair, i should specify that the sentence should have ended with a dash, not an exclamation point. But it's funnier that way.

Besides that, today we had our first Parent Teacher Conference, which was so illuminating. It looks like Houston is going to be an excellent student, even socially. Karen's got a write up over there. Houston wrote about school in his weblog. He's gonna be an accelerated reader, says Daddy with pride!

3:30am

that's about when i woke to high pitched screaming: "DAAAADYYYY!!! IT'S SHOWWWR TIME!!!!!" so i heaved my achy bones out of the warm bed to find Houston shivering in the bathroom. i showered him and staggered back to bed, but Graham was barking incredibly loudly. i stayed in bed, fantasizing about all the mean things i could do to our dog to make him shut up, but after half an hour of not sleeping, i finally went downstairs to let the stupid dog out of his cage. i tried to fall back asleep on the couch while he peed on the carpet. it was a bad night. i'm going to bed now.

Kind Katrina

Sometimes i watch Katrina and get completely happy because she's just so kind. When she's not disobeying. Or telling Houston she doesn't love him and never wants to see him again. Here's stuff i saw her do today: open the car door for me while i was carrying Zane; open the mall door for me, even though those things are massively heavy for a 30 pound 3 year old, and then hold it open for the two ladies who followed us in; get Houston and Zane plastic knives, spoons and forks to help them eat their bagels; run with gleeful energy to fetch Houston's shoes for him when we finished at the mall play area... and that's all the ones i can remember. This contrasts stunningly to Houston's throwing a fit when he doesn't get The Star Spoon.

But i love 'em both. And on the down side, Katrina's well on her way to being an enabler to some selfish meth addict someday.

Scooter

Today we got together with lots of Karen's family. One of her cousins is a cop, and an all around great guy. We'll call him Cal, because that's his name. Oh, lemme back up a little and say that i drove my scooter to work and then to Karen's parent's house today... Lemme back up even more and say that i stayed up until 6:30 (not sure if that's pre- or post-time change time, but it's Super Frickin Late) working on a custom Windows XP installation CD. That means my post today will be incoherent and odd -- more so than usual -- so please forgive my poor brain for not working very well.

Okay, so i drove my scooter this morning, and it was 36^o F, which is a little above freezing. I was C-O-L-D. I see motorcyclists out there in cold weather all the time, but my entire range of motorcycling experience has been in warm weather, so it never occurred to me to feel a twinge, sting even, of sympathy for them. But i do now. Burrrrrrr.

Anyway, Karen's cousin Cal saw me walk in with my waterproof armored jacket, gloves and helmet on, and he was like "Oh wow, you got a bike?" and gushed with exuberant enthusiasm. I muttered something in the affirmative, and asked if he wanted to see it. He was like "Totally! What'd you get? A big Harley? A 750 something? I wanna see!" and then we rounded the corner and he howled with laughter. And said the word scooter, mixing it well with guffaws... but he was quite happy to see that another of us is a two wheel enthusiast.

Now, Karen's grandparents heard the commotion, asked what was up, and stated their misgivings with polite indredulity: "What is the rationale behind that?" and other dire sounding phrases i cowardly remained too far away to hear clearly. Karen championed my "rationale" by citing the scooter's excellent gas mileage and epic slowness. She's a good one.

More rambling impressions of driving the scoot: wearing something on my neck makes it much much less freezing cold. I hold my eyes really far open to observe absolutely every tiny detail which might present danger. I constantly am watching traffic and predicting behavior, looking for eye contact, noticing dents or cell-phone-talkers, which indicate carelessness. I imagine curves and vectors of myself and other vehicles and plan plan plan always for possible emergencies. I never drive on sidewalks, almost. I can do a little wheelie just by lifting the handlebars, but the engine power only adds milliseconds to the length of my wheelie. I can do little stoppies (where the bike goes up on the front wheel) but only tiny ones. Nothing like Christian Pfeiffer's Monster tricks. And it's just so fun to drive around on a little, cute, underpowered scooter.

Spiderman 3

Yes, that's a new game. It's very pretty. Especially when you're racking up the frags with the flak cannon.

Yesterday night Karen and i saw Spider-Man 3. We didn't like it. We kind of made fun of it the whole time. See, i simply cannot buy Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. I'm sure Tobey is cool in real life and stuff, but he's just such a dork in the movie. I've read many of the comic books, so fans of the series who cry "But Peter Parker is a dork!" aren't telling me anything i don't know. But there's plenty of dorks portrayed as dorky-cool, or dorky-lovable or dorky-emotionally-available or whatever. Basically: dorky-likable. I can always imagine myself being friends with those dorky characters. Indeed, most of my real life friends ARE dorks. But Peter Parker as portrayed in the big movies is not someone i can imagine being friends with. I'd find him tiresome, boring and selfish.

In the movie, Topher Grace plays a dork who is much more like i imagine Peter Parker being. He's desperate, clueless, a little bit pathetic, but very likable! In fact, Topher Grace would have made a MUCH better Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire. And i feel dumb saying this, but i don't like how the name Tobey Maguire is spelled -- the vowels are... uncomfortable. Awkward. But i never liked Where The Wild Things Are because i don't like the font.

I find it highly unusual to be so critical of one person, since i'm usually filled with warm esteem for all my fellow humans. But TM seems capable of only two facial expressions. Well, three, if you count "no facial expression whatsoever". But besides that, there's the poo eating grin he uses in most of his scenes where something emotional is going on. The other one is just all his facial features moving without discernible purpose which i'm pretty sure means "Aaah, a cement truck just fell on my torso".

More about the movie: they completely dropped SpiderMan's spider-sense. What??? And Spider-Man/Peter Parker are directly involved in bad stuff which really hurts all three villains of the film and he never once apologizes. I find it quite odd that the film got pretty good reviews. Karen and i said many times that we could have simply stopped watching the movie and have been quite comfortable with that. Karen may even have admitted that she would find Koyaanisqatsi more compelling than Spider-Man 3, and she's quite the non-fan of Koyaanisqatsi (which is basically a 90 minute music video to modern classical music). Maybe we're both just highbrow snobs.

Oh wait, i just saw KOYAANISQATSIi on our shelf, and right next to it is A Knight's Tale. Turns out we're not highbrow snobs.

Computer Working!!!

And so have i. Until now. It's after four. I'm going to bed now.

But lemme say that it's so so so fast! And i'm not even overclocking yet. I like!

The Star Spoon.

A long time ago, a spoon with stars on it found its way into our cutlery drawer. Probably it migrated, like a burr covered seed pod, attached to my shoelaces or pant leg. Or in my pocket. From work. I dunno. But both Katrina and Houston love it.

So today Katrina got the Star Spoon with her cereal. She looked at it with delight, and said brightly "Houston! I got the Star Spoon!" Houston looked at me with huge puppy dog eyes and said "I want the Star Spoon!" Well, the tedious details of the next several minutes can be left to fade into history. We arrived at a teary, gulping Houston sitting trembling on my lap, with me lecturing him (quite over his head, perhaps) about how selfish it is to care only what kind of spoon you get when we're so blessed to even have enough food to eat. Soon after the whole fiasco started, Katrina decided that she wanted to give the Star Spoon to Houston, which i did not allow. She got it again for lunch, when she did give it to Houston, so she got extra candy for being so totally nice.

The rest of the time i spent with Houston, i told him frequently that he needed to find something nice to do for Katrina. The best he could come up with is getting her red plastic frisbee out of her treats bag.

I must remember! He's only five, and empathy will come, someday, someday. Someday.