What the Internet?
My fancy Woot-bought router with flashy lights and MIMO all of a sudden broke. It seems like. D to the 'oh!!! So that's why our websites have been down for the day. I'll build a new router or something with moldy computer bits i have lying around and see what happens. Using something like Linux Open Router.For now, you're accessing this computer directly from the net. No router. No hardware firewall. Hardly any software router. Yikes!
We'll see what happens, right? In the meantime, Katrina thinks the girl wearing the eensy weensy teeny weenie yellow polka-dot bikini could just eat fish if she's too scared to come out of the water. And she also thinks it would be funny if i went hunting for a shepherd and found one and killed it. To make shepherd's pie. I don't think it would be funny... exactly... but it was a funny comment.
I can snowboard!!!
We had SO MUCH FUN!!!! It was totally great. Houston would probably have run up and down and up and down the entire time by himself, but he decided -- as did we all -- that it was most fun to all go down in one big group. We went faster that way, although it's not certain if it was the fog creating a layer of super slick ice on the snow or the extra weight. See, the tubes are rubber innertube type tubes with vinyl coated canvas coatings, with straps attached for hand grips and a big strap ending in a nifty cable grabbing device to let you get hauled up the hill by the cable device even if you lack the strength or attention span to grip something for that long. Then, you get to the top and choose which of the five channels gently scooped out of the snow to go down. And then you go! The thrill of zooming down the hill without the labor of hauling yourself and your tired, heavy children back up the slope was supreme.
Later on i broke away from the group to go to the snowboard area. Since i've never actually gone down anything bigger than a sledding hill on my snowboard, i went down the easiest straight shot hill first. Boooooo-Riiiing. Immediately i graduated myself to the deeply piped course, which was astonishingly fun. It turns out that i can snowboard without falling every time! I even did, like, jumps! I haven't done a jump AND turn yet. I guess that might have to wait until my 37th birthday event.
So Katrina had fun, squealing and laughing and not getting out of her tube not even once. And soaking her entire bottom half with melted snow. Houston had fun flirting with danger in a safe environment. Karen had fun on the cable tow, in a moment which would be tragically less funny if described. Beth had fun thinking she was probably going to die, or kill someone else who foolishly stood in our way.
Highly recommended. If you live somewhere that wasn't scraped flat by massive glaciers, somewhere where there are actual MOUNTAINS, please please go slide down them on something or other.
A bit about cars:
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HAPY BRFDAE DADY
That's what Houston wrote for me. He's such a cutie.Okay, so here's what my family gave me for my "BRFDAE". Karen gave me a knife. I have only one knife i enjoy using. It's an eight inch Chicago Cutlery chef's knife. It's got a wooden handle. It works great, and it holds a sharp edge relatively well, and i do keep it sharp. But when i cut zucchini or potatoes, the pieces suction themselves to the blade. Well, some Japanese style knives have little divots ground out of the face of the blades, which are supposed to keep slices of whatever from sticking. I guess high end knives are made of very fancy steels which inherently solve this problem, but they all cost more than a hundred bucks. So kullens on a mass produced santoku knife is what we got. And the only thing i've cut with it so far is cheese...
Karen also got me another wheel of Brie cheese. Oh man, Brie. It's like, if Brie cheese was a person, i'd run off with it. Or at least have a creepy obsessive fixation on it. But it's just food, i know that, so i content myself with, you know, eating it. On saltine crackers. I have a coworker who HATES Brie. What's up with that? He had his first taste in France, so maybe they had some ultra-authentic Brie there which had a more aggressive nose... or maybe since France is the land where Brie is "cheese", you can get really nasty samples for cheap in local supermarkets, while we get only the decent stuff. Witness the cheese which is "cheese" in the US: pasteurized processed American cheese food. Witness furthermore the spectrum of nastiness from the banal adequateness of Velveeta to the abominable, hideously orange examples skulking about calling themselves things like "Cheezy Does It". I challenge you not to gag just a little bit.
Houston gave me about fifty pennies, which he'd earned pairing up socks. One penny per pair. I've been carrying them around all day in my pocket. I wonder how many extra calories i've burned? Maybe in the double digits? He also gave me one of his Hot Wheels cars which he remembers me talking about, and i like. It's an olive drab AC Cobra. If i could, i'd paint all my cars some drab color like olive or primer black or rust. I find it a little sad that nobody who owns a Cobra, original or replica, will ever paint it some unattractive dull color. They always gotta be red, or British racing green, or Ford blue. With a white stripe.
Right. Katrina wanted to give me (Karen reports) her favorite doll and her doll bed. She was persuaded to, um, not. So she carefully perused her entire collection of possessions and selected a pink and white agate polished rock to give me. She was very excited. And i like it too!
I'm seriously touched by the nice things my family does for (and says about) me. I am so incredibly blessed. Yes, that's about as cliche as a Ford blue AC Cobra with a white stripe, but it's true.
My Birthday Eve!!!!!
Oh... i had a weird dream the other night. There's a greeter guy at church whose face is layered with character lines, and yet he never makes an expression. I always thought this was weird, that someone could have plain evidence of an expressive, mobile face, and yet never be seen expressing anything or moving their face. Anyway, Karen and i were walking to church in my dream, and i persuaded her to have a quick Ren Dez Vowse (in my dream, she was like, "what???", so i said it the right way. In real life i said that and she said "what?" in exactly the same way) in the woods, but there were already a bunch of couples in the woods having picnics and talking. Oh well. So we went to church, and the preacher was the fellow from our real church whose face is blank besides the deep character lines all over it. And his identical twin brother was there too. And his sister (or wife), and she looked almost the same. The church was very small and country-chapel-like, which made it odd that the preacher's image was displayed on a big clunker of a tube TV right up next to the pulpit. And the TV was getting a poor signal, too. Even more distracting, the preacher rocked back and forth while he talked, and the camera was zoomed close, so his face zipped through the frame back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome. When it came time to sing, somebody called me up to play something on the piano, but they got my name wrong. They called me Juanito Blakeslee. Close enough, i thought, and even though I can only play piano in the most undisciplined sense possible, i did my best and plunked out an error filled but recognizable hymn. A lady took pity on me and sat down to pour out an arpeggio filled, flowery, astonishingly gorgeous rendition of the same tune. I rolled my eyes and grinned.
Then i woke up.
I heard that dreams are our brain's way of practicing real life situations which make it easier for us to respond quickly to real life urgency. This explains the findings that the large majority of dreams are "bad" dreams. I guess they woke people in REM sleep and quized them. But i don't know why i had that dream. I'll know how to respond when i get amorous on the way to church, i suppose. Um... duh?
Anyway... Katrina and Houston remain incredibly cute. See above pictures for evidence of Zane's and Karen's cuteness.
My Houston is smart
I made cinnamon rolls again today. They're awesome. You want some. They've got no refined sugars, they're low carb, low fat, and i'm totally lying.But anyway, i was bombarding Houston with math questions, and he was effortlessly adding and subtracting, so i introduced multiplication. "If a pan can hold three across, and four down, how cinnamon rolls can the pan hold?" He didn't get that really, but when i drew it out, he kind of got it. So i drew a pan with six cinnamon rolls and asked him how many cinnamon rolls would there be if we had two of those pans. Twelve, he said. But then i asked how many would fit in three, and with a brief pause, he said "Eighteen". His fingers weren't moving. I was doing arithmetic on my fingers into my twenties.
Soon i'll introduce differential equations. Um... once i learn what one is.
Lunar Eclipse!!!
This is just a note to say that i got to see, for the first time in my whole life, a total lunar eclipse! It was very cool. And bitterly cold. God smiled on us and had the clouds disperse -- it's been overcast around here for days. But there the moon was, a deep reddish color, flanked by Saturn and some other bright star in a very pleasing astronomical display. Hmm... celestial display, i mean.Soup is good. Auto-Tune; not so much.
Over the past few years i've noticed that many songs i hear on the radio have vocals* which sound ever so slightly processed. Computerized, almost. The glaringly obvious example would be Cher's twelfth comeback hit "Believe", you know the part where it sounds like a keyboard is playing the notes she's singing? Yeah, that's the effect i'm talking about. It's used much more sneakily by artists like Shania Twain. I remember seeing that Shania video ages ago (probably the last time i saw cable TV) and mentioned how freakishly beautiful she is, and how she's got inhumanly precise vocal pitch. Turns out it's makeup, veneers on her teeth, and they're fiddling with her voice.
*It took me a while to notice because when songs have "vocals" i try to ignore them. Unless the "vocals" are also "nonsense".
Right. So what's up with all these dead-on accurate singers? Auto-Tune. It's this box or computer program which takes a vocal or instrumental performance and causes it to snap into perfect tune. Inhumanly precise perfect pitch type of tune. So now that i know about it, i detect it almost everywhere. Sometimes it's horrifying, sometimes fun, and other times, almost forgivable in how infrequently and subtly it's used. But seriously, give me a bald voice, a naked voice, raw with feeling. The song "Peaches" by the Presidents is an excellent example of "bald"... maybe Brittany Murphy (you know, the ACTOR -- if anyone needs vocal help, you'd expect some actor to -- and in a Paul Oakenfold dance song, no less!!!) singing about fast kittens or something, that's a good example of "raw with feeling". See what i mean about nonsense lyrics?
Day off!
Okay, if early preferences are any indication, Houston will be a professional reader (or writer), Katrina will be an artist, and Zane will be a cook. He's in the kitchen whenever there's cooking going on. I spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen today (with five mouths to feed, menus which take a more time tend to be cheaper!!!) and every time i went in there, Zane toddled along, pushed the stepladder up to the counter and stood up there. Just to watch. Watch and go "Uhh, uhh, uhh, uhh," flapping his fingers at the cup which still contains seven or eight M&Ms. He actually does help setting the table and emptying the dishwasher. Setting the table is particularly hilarious, since he's got the general idea, but he can't tell anyone what he's doing. So he'll take the forks i give him and walk over to the table, but nobody else who's setting the table will notice, so he'll just kind of put forks on shelves or on the floor or on chairs.
And we're avoiding teflon poisoning and forging ahead into the realms of tainting all our food with aluminum. Of course, we hardly use that pan. Only when something very punishing needs to be done, like sear a roast.
Marsh ill
Plus, it's Sunday. Okay, we go to Mars Hill, the mega-emerging-church monster here in the Gee-Raggedy. It's a great church, even though there's those who believe it's an insidious cult designed to lure children and hipster twenty-somethings away from denominationally affiliated private schools and the warm safety of their Christian ghettos and wealth-ridden enclaves. Oh wait... maybe it is that except the "cult" part. But that's not what i wanted to talk about. There's this one guy who sits near us sometimes. He sings loud. His voice is incredible. It projects. If he was from Kabul, he could get a job singing the morning calls to prayer or something. Without an amp. It's amazing. So he sings loud, and he sings long. He holds the notes all the way to the gloriously loud end of the measure or phrase, and sometimes longer. He's usually at least a half step off key, too.
This is all great. God bless the dude for worshiping with enthusiasm. The other week i walked to the back of our area for some reason, and there he was. Singing. I got the same feeling as i get when i find a cricket singing. Like, you can hear them all the time, but you hardly ever see them. And if you do see them, they don't look particularly loud. But if you see one singing, it's really cool.
So i guess that's just another cool thing about Mars Hill. The loud singer guy.
Aargh
I want to write a clever, interesting post, but i can't because i'm getting distracted by articles about Ray Kurzweil and electricity and stuff. Plus, i'm encoding DVDs, which isn't distracting at all, because it takes hours to do. Plus, Graham is walking around.And i don't have a new picture. I need to start taking pictures. But Karen's are so totally awesome. She has a great camera, and is a great photographer.
Touch-typing
Today we had Young Life Club, and i got to do the music all by myself. Usually there's another guitar guy there, playing too loud or too soft or too fast (but NEVER too slow... he's white and thinks kids like to sing worship music double fast). And then there's Sarah and sometimes Jen singing as well. But today it was just me. And the mic was really sensitive. And i'm very happy with the way it turned out. Fun!
I bet all our kids will be touch-typists. And i bet they'll have good pitch too. Katrina's already spot on when she thinks about it, Houston can get it when he tries, and Zane wanders around going "doo doo doo dooo" to various tunes he gets exposed to constantly. Awesome.
Katrina is FOUR!!!
Four is kind of like my favorite number. Even though it means DEATH is Korean and Japanese and Chinese. One, two, three, DIE. Oh... and in Korean, 18 means f- you. Sixteen, seventeen, f- you, nineteen... i think parents of high school seniors might find that morsel of trivia grimly comforting.So anyway, Katrina's not up to rude words yet (but she DOES walk around saying "What the heck?"), and she's the number of symmetry, the number which can be arrived at by multiplying AND adding two twos. It's the best number of wheels per vehicle in our three dimensional universe. Four circles touching is a nice thing to look at. And that's how old Katrina is! Yaaaay!
Her birthday was fun. It's always a treat to make a kid's day utterly special. Karen and i decorated our main room, Katrina's cousin Cheyanne was over to visit, we sang all the birthday songs we could think of, Katrina got to open presents... I worked this morning, so i didn't get the breakfast of cereal. I was eating sloppy joes* while the family was eating Katrina's choice for lunch: peanut butter sandwiches. Have i told The Internet that Katrina doesn't like jam or jelly? You can find some pretty weird stuff on the web, but that right there is just CRAZY. A four year old not liking jelly. I was home to enjoy the evening meal of cereal. It was great.
*Yeah, i made sloppy joes for lunch. Sloppy joes. You cook hamburger and add sauce from a can. But three people volunteered that they liked it; it was a "good lunch". Huh? I mean, yesterday i made split pea soup with smoked ham hocks, and it was unbelievably good. Over the weekend i made scalloped potatoes and baked chicken, and there was much freaking out. But sloppy joes? I think the people at work -- staff AND kids -- are so used to my cooking being delicious that having me standing behind the counter is enough stimulus to Pavlovian-response them into thinking the food is amazing. I'll call my restaurant Casa Placebo. Less of a mouthful than Chez Psychosomatica.
Our sitcom life
Seinfeld had Kramer. Family Matters had Urkel. We have Corbyn. He's the kid who comes over at least once per episode, er, ...week. The only problem is that he's not really very funny. Usually he wants to download beats on the computer, buy a CD-R, or just hang out. Today he wanted a ride to McDonalds, because he was starving. So we gave him a cinnamon roll and some rice with soy sauce. Sometimes i feel like we nurture the kid more than his own family does. We try! Today Katrina asked "Corbyn, what do you do for a job?" Awww.Okay, so to make up for the lack of compelling content on my weblog recently, here's a couple videos i remembered from Google Video:
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Just a picture
Among the debates i had in college with my roommate Tony were "if friction increases with decreasing surface area," (which is does in Perfect Physics Land), "why do wider tires give more friction?" I think i came up with something about rubber actually sticking to the road in a way that's not accounted for by Perfect Physics. Like, adhesion, or something. Plus, rubber is pliant and conforms to the road surface and grips it that way too. The other one was my assertion that high sounds travel more quickly than slow sounds, which is why you hear the treble "crackle" of thunder before the bass "BOOOM". I was unequivocally wrong on that one. The "crackle" is a shock wave from the lightning, and does travel faster than sound until the energy disperses into normal, crackly sound. The crack of a whip, and the crinkly overtones in a train horn are also shock waves. The bass notes bounce around longer and take longer to fade away. They're not slower. I'm so stupid. :)
Weird America
Today we ate at Pizza Hut. It's, like, the American pizza. Plenty of cheese, no intimidating spices or exotic ingredients, nice friendly crust. But Karen and i both were astonished at how sweet it was. Pizza Hut's sauce has always been too sugary for my taste, but the crust, this time, was almost as sweet as a graham cracker. Weird. I've noticed many products which have no business being sweet being sweet. I do not want a sugary salad dressing, thank you. Hold the sugar in my mashed potatoes, please.Another weird thing about we Americans. Automatic transmissions. In the rest of the English speaking world, they sneer in derision and call them rude names like "slushbox", and call into question the manliness of men who drive them. I don't think i'll say any more about that.
However, i think the US is the only country in the world where you can go out at ten o'clock and buy a crock pot. And not even be price-gouged. Or a welder. Or a lawnmower. So i'm sort of proud to be an American, but also kind of embarrassed.
Sleep
The whole mouse story of my last post was prompted by me not getting enough sleep. See, when i go to bed, sometimes i see flashes of light which, it turns out, are not caused by snowplows trundling down our street. And sometimes i see dark spots scampering along in my peripheral vision. I've experienced these types of things before, but usually in situations where there's some kind of crisis preventing proper sleep. Like the one time Karen and i bought a VW Bus that had been sitting in a horse pasture for seven years a month before we were scheduled to move to Chicago. That time i kept seeing people darting into the road.There's no crisis this time, besides having lovely children and having them need me so much. And working. And wanting some time to myself. All of these things i'm TOTALLY GRATEFUL FOR!!!!! Because we're so unreasonably, ridiculously blessed with things like food and a house and children and a job. Can you tell i'm reading A Thousand Splendid Suns?
Sneaky messes
This fall, i kind of freaked out because i saw a mouse in our cupboard, and flung everything edible off the shelves, moved all the dishes, and scrubbed out every nook and cranny in our kitchen with Pine-Sol. Turns out there were some holes which led adventurous or hungry (or both!) mice right into our cupboards! The same cupboards where we stored items like chocolate chips and brownie mix. Both of which mice like to eat. That's also where we stored the famous instant mashed potatoes which expired back in 2003. Mice don't care for instant mashed potatoes.So i patched the holes in the cupboard with expandable urethane foam, set out about fifteen traps, and ten million eons later, Karen and i managed to get the kitchen back into shape. Karen put lots of stuff into storage, or gave it away, and organized it in such a way that even pathologically disorganized ME can keep it mostly how it's supposed to be. And today after dinner, Karen and i spent about five minutes getting the whole kitchen and dining room all perfectly tidy and clean! Seriously, that's how long it took. And afterwards, there were only random spatulas and jars of peanut butter kicking around on the floor keeping the kitchen from being perfect. I'm very proud of what i did next. See, usually when Zane does stuff like toss a spatula onto the floor or throw a jar of peanut butter in front of the fridge, my well practiced kinesthetics guide me subconsciously over and around the toddler detritus. But this time, i noticed the mess trying to sneak into our kitchen, and picked it up!!! Awesome.
And i have Karen to thank. Thanks, Karen!
Also, i really like yeast. It makes bread. It makes cheese. It makes beer. It makes Vegemite. It's so great. Thanks, yeast! Except i think Karen, being a multi-celled organism and y'know, sentient and stuff... i think she deserves more thanks. By a nose.
Just a picture.
Cooking and fixing cars
Yesterday, i thought i'd try to make a baguette or three using that "simple" recipe. It took nearly all day, as one might expect with three risings and the fact that there's really no "warm" place in our house. But when i finally cooked them, they were pretty good. Better than Meijer brand baguettes, but not as good as the ones you can get at Panera or ACE Bakery. I suspect the flour they use is better than even my bread flour is. So it was good. Except i haven't figured out how to make bread not so crusty. I love crusty bread, but when the crust is a quarter inch thick shell of crouton like CCCHHRUNCH, well then, it matters not how airy, soft or warm the interior of the bread is, that's not the best eating experience. My experimenting continues!And then about fixing Beth's car. She says i'm her hero! I try. But allow me to share how utterly frustrating working on that car became! Very. Very very. I could keep writing verys, but i didn't get where i am today by writing "very" a lot of times.
Serpentine belts replaced the old style fan belts back when the number of accessories tacked onto an engine got unmanagable when each needed its own pulley. The more poorly designed American cars had three pulleys stacked onto the front of the engine... probably more in some cases. In modern engine bays, there's simply no room for that kind of silliness. The new kind of silliness has all the same devices being run with one much longer belt, which snakes (thus "serpentine") around hither and yon, and is tightened by a spring loaded idler pulley. In all the cars i've replaced the serpentine belt, there's an easily accessible hole in the idler pulley arm which you can pop a ratchet handle in and yank the thing over to make the belt all slack, whereupon you remove the old, carefully route the new, and let the idler pop the belt back to tense. But Beth's car had a 14mm bolt head you needed to grab to loosen the idler pulley, with only enough room to squeeze a normal wrench on it. That was fine, but i don't have any fancy long shank wrenches, so i could get only enough leverage to barely get the pulley loose by pulling with one cold finger... and then the wrench would bump into a bolt head and need to be wiggled around more... and then getting the belt under the crankshaft! While hunched over in freezing weather!
Oh man. So i realized when i was working on that car is that a good mechanic needs to have a few things universally overlooked. One must have a high pain tolerance to be able to squish your hands into very tight spaces, while your hand bones grind together and gritty surfaces abrade your skin or you pull a wrench very hard, when the pain of effort might be replaced quickly with the pain of bashing your hand into something sharp and metal when the wrench slips. Then, you've got to have a high distress tolerance, so you can maintain awkward positions for a long time while your lumbar spinal disks are slowly rupturing and your knee ligaments are getting stretched out of shape. Hey! I have both those things! Go me!
I think this is the only thing which enabled me to change the clutch in our VW Jetta in our parking lot one winter in Chicago. There were snow drifts. Clutches reside between the engine and transmission. It was so miserable that our landlord built a tent out of tarps and put an electric heater under there for me. Beth's car job was not that bad at all.
My little show off
Thanks for being patient. Probably one of these days i'll get inspired to write an awesome blog post. Maybe about lasers. And aliens. Zombie ninjas from outer space.
Ow! Again!
Hey! A couple of newses: first, Zane got his first stitches. He face-butted the corner of our coffee table and needed three stitches. The pain flooded his little system with endorphins, because he was extremely pleasant for the next hour or two. Before that he was, as Karen says, Needy McSneed... so much that when he tripped, banged and howled, even though it was right behind me, i kind of slowly turned and mumbled words of comforts. You know, to go along with the arterial spew.The other news is that the kid at work who spat on me got discharged. Gone. Bye bye, saliva boy.
I read the woot site – like their funny take. “No values at all” it said. But honestly – is this socially acceptable to have your eyeballs immersed in a video of someone bashing someone/something? Personally I find it divisive. Does nothing for family time. Grrr. Makes me so sad that normal and educational and instructional and warm fuzzy conversation is getting lost in this wave of new technology. No one has deep and moving conversations any more with their youngsters. Is that why Corbin comes over maybe??
-- mummu (Email) - 29 February '08 - 07:13