Manana is just banana with an m, but mañana is a way of life.

Phoebe sent me an email today which said, in its entirety:

"Everybody in the World Except US Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote and Elect the American Government"

–Leading Intellectual Slavoj Žižek

That was it. Funny! The dude (who is the very energetic crazy guy with a speech impediment from the extras of Children of Men) supports Barak Obama, among the current candidates, although he's ideally have someone "to the left of Obama". The whole interview is over here. I like Obama. I'm not even sure that i'm not an Obama fanboy. How embarrassing. At least i'm not horrified by any of the other candidates. I mean, not any more horrified than the sort of background horror that i associate with all politicians.

Lemme tell you about Pete Hickey, the "tinpot bureaucrat" who who forced us to move the VW Bus into the garage. He ran unsuccessfully for Michigan's congress recently as a Democrat. I heard about that and thought, "Hey, i feel like i even know this guy! I'd vote for him!" but then i remembered him "pretending" not to hear me saying that the van is broken and doesn't run. That's fundamentally dishonest. I told him that i was slightly insulted that he'd automatically expect me to misrepresent the status of the vehicle just to "comply" with "code". I will not lie (said me) to him, in court, or in other ways. He seemed a little bit surprised.

Back to today: Karen was ill. She slept for over a dozen hours. While the kids were awake, he was down here for perhaps an hour and a half. Amazing. I was so happy to let her sleep. Everybody needs to do that once in a while, especially when they're sick. The kids were good for me. But i've discovered that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can keep their houses clean all the time, and normal people.

Finally, you know that "verbal" communication? Well, we've managed to get our kids to say some of the right things during day to day interactions. Katrina said something like "I don't like this video. Robots is better." Houston responded "I do not agree with you." Awesome. A personally neutral declarative statement. So then Houston said "Look Katrina! It stopped raining!" Katrina responded in "nyeah-nyeah" singsong: "I do not agree with you, I do not agree with you!" It drove Houston nuts. I laughed and reminded the kids that they''re stupid worthless good for nothing idiots. Or something. I don't remember exactly.

Techie Sunday

Today Shane Hipps spoke at church. He’s kind of an authority on technology and spirituality in church. I’ve heard before that technology has served to separate people from each other. Every technology. I’m not prepared to accept that every single example of technology makes it easier for people to ignore community, but it’s worth thinking about. The wheel? Um… with the advent of the wheel, people could move very heavy things all by themselves, without relying on others. See? Obviously mp3 players with headphones and Bluetooth thingies allow us to more seamlessly ignore our actual surroundings. But email and weblogs and cell phones do allow us to keep in touch with our loved ones, seamlessly, regardless of our actual surroundings. We can stay in touch without actually seeing our loved ones. But we should should SHOULD spend time actually with our family and friends. It’s super important.

So it was a good sermon. Shane is funny. And i'm reminded again of how important it is to actually be present for my cherished family. It's not good enough to be nearby, i must be present.

Yeah, i'm totally being not eloquent. It's because i'm busy installing Office and other programs on this other computer i'm working on. And i put the Honda up on Craigslist, and already got an offer for $150. Not sure if that's going to be my BEST offer... The car has seen one or two better days. One time i put a car for sale in the paper for $200, the guy offered $175, and i bargained him down further to $150. That car actually ran and drove. In fact, the guy test drove it even though it had a broken water pump and was running on three cylinders. I suppose that's a natural urge when you're going to buy a car; to test it out. I'll let you know if the guy (or girl? ya never know) tries to test drive the Accord.

Oh yeah, and today after we scanned two pictures that Houston drew, and colored them with The GIMP (Houston already knows Ctrl-Z for "undo" and some other GIMP hotkeys like Shift-E and P for erase and paintbrush -- he's going to be more of a Gimp guru than i am)... um, where was i? Okay. Houston GIMP'ed the pictures, and then ran over to the scanner all excited to take the picture out. When it was still the same picture he'd drawn, unaltered, he looked crestfallen. It was so cute. Poor kid thought there were, i dunno, actual markers which were actually coloring on his drawing somehow... through the glass of the flatbed scanner? It seems so real on the computer screen! But happily, he did the GIMPing while sitting on my lap and we were actually doing it TOGETHER.

Imagine with me...

Close your eyes... oh wait. Open them again.

You're happy, it's dark, you're with your homies, chilling, walking around and bumping into each other a little bit. But that's okay because that's how you like it. Plus, there's a chunk of paper egg carton you can hide under. Suddenly, light crashes in on you! The whole roof of your little home lifts off! You and your friends panic! Then over the top of your comforting wall there appears two hideous, blunt beak like things which start to grope about clumsily, trying to snatch someone from your little home! You hope it doesn't catch you! AAAA AAAH AAHHH it got me! You're being LIFTED SO HIGH YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE THE GROUND FROM HERE AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!! Oh! Hey! It's warm! And moist and dark! But still pretty weird and scary and your friends are nowhere. You'll still wiggle some, because it is kind of cramped. Can't an arthropod get enough room to turn around in? What's that? Is that wind? Oh, nope. Wait, it is! Lots of wind! Oh dang, there's a hurricane wind blowing over you, and even hunkered down you can feel yourself being lifted away from the soft surface your claws can't quite grip! You're being sucked towards a hole in this warm moist dark room! There's no way you'll fit and POW!!!! You're shot like a projectile from a cannon out into the air! You're spinning! Your compound eyes can't focus on anything farther than a few feet away, so you can't see anything at all besides blobs of light and dark! But you're spinning every which way, so it doesn't really matter. And then you crash into the ground, which, thanks to the fact that strength goes up with the square of your cross section, while weight goes up with the cube, you don't suffer any injury at all. And you can see stuff again. It's fuzzy and brown, and there's nothing at all to hide under, but that you can handle. Until WHAM! A hand claps down over you, and you're returned to the container with all your other cricket buddies.

Yes, people, yesterday at Young Life Club, i led and participated in a cricket spitting contest. I told a more animated version of that story at work today, and received many odd looks for my trouble.

And Houston went to Craig's Cruisers with his aunt and uncle, and Karen spent some gift certificate money on new clothes, leaving me home with Zane and Katrina. They can be so well behaved together. It's awesome.

Thursday

Frequently on Thursday, Karen lets me sleep in. That happened today. Usually what happens then, is that i get all well rested, and stay awake on Thursday night well into Friday morning. Well, Friday morning is approaching soon, and i'd like to avoid making the same mistakes by, you know, going to bed. Fifteen minutes.

So today i slept. Mmm, i needed that. And then i fiddled about with kids who love pretending like they're starving, because Daddy gives them their favorite foods, when Momma already gave them their favorite foods until they'd had enough. But graham crackers and bread are at least not artery clogging sodium filled diabetes inducing horrors, fortified with trans fat. You know, like Kellogg's Pop Tarts.

So they ate. Karen got back from dropping off the 'Ton at school, and we Stepped for a minute (you know what song would be great? Fatboy Slim, Rockafella Skank -- the "Right about now, Funk soul brotha" song. But there's a part where it totally slows down to a standstill. And then it gradually speeds up. Impossible for today's computers to figure out steps for. Give it twenty years when we've got sentient machines...?

Then i worked. Besides Young Life Club, which is almost always fun, it was kinda bad. Except i made chili from scratch (without any premixed spices, even! No chili powder!) and it was declared delicious. And an enormous pot of it simply disappeared. Usually when i cook that huge pot of anything, there's leftovers.

11:59, gotta go.

Not a real post

I don't want to knock that picture off the top of my page, so... this isn't a real post. I just want to say that Stepmania is FUN! I know the culture bus has pulled away from this stop, what with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but i feel confident that Karen and i will be taking the trend of the '90's well into the oughts. I mean... we are. Just now. Maybe i should get Broadband Internet. Or a car phone.

Country and DDR

That picture is Katrina when she was little. Ain't she totally beautiful?

When i was in high school, one of my best friends, Katie Morell, she liked country music. She was from Colorado. Her mom had a '74 VW bus which she let us paint a really nice aqua color. We were involved in the kind of love triangle... or parallelogram or rhombus which are fairly common in high school, and which managed to keep me and my closest friends romantically unattached. Which was pretty cool, because we stayed good buddies. Except since high school. We kind of lost contact.

Anyway, Katie was totally cool. However, she liked country! My freshly adolescent mind had trouble with that fact. I've come to recognize, in my infinite wisdom of being twice as old, that lots of really cool people like country. I've tried to warp my cortex into whatever shape it would need to be to enjoy country, and besides the songs "Swingin'" by Jon Anderson and, um, nope, i think that's the only one. Well, besides that one, i can't get into it. I appreciate the self mocking humor of songs like "Pickup Man" -- he says that i could take his pickup truck, and roll it down a hill, but he still wouldn't trade it for a Coupe deVille. Or the (cheesy) poetic sentimentality of "Don't Take the Girl", or "Don't Laugh at Me." So if you like Country music, i don't think you're dumb.

And then there's Dance Dance Revolution. The name is utterly dorky. The game concept is silly. My friend Richard used to play it on purpose. So i tried it one time, and it's actually really fun... and stuff. So today and yesterday Karen and i have actually been playing Stepmania, which is a free Dance Dance Revolution clone. I highly recommend it if you happen to have a dance pad you can hook to your computer. Or if you want to build one. Or pay me to build one for you. And one of the things i really am enjoying about Stepmania is that you don't need to put up with the shrill, neurotic Japanese electronic dance music, in fact the game doesn't even come with songs. You can download plenty of song packs from wherever, but even better is to import your own songs into the game. Karen's a little bit geeked about that part. Really my whole family is enjoying the game right now. Houston is tolerably good for a novice five year old with the energy of a day care. Katrina likes running in circles on her pad. Zane likes being carried... or stomping. He's been a fan of stomping for a couple weeks now. Zane the Stomper. And the game? Hard.

What the? What the? What the?

That post title is almost the same title of the book Karen's reading right now, What is the What. But Katrina doesn't have any literary pretensions, besides reading to Zane when she can't... read. Anyway, that's what Katrina was saying today on the way to church. I'm feeling a little weird with two days not posting. So lemme recap...

Work has been bad recently. There aren't any positive leaders in our group, and a few kids who really enjoy watching the house be chaotic, and some kids who are simply astonishingly, flabbergastingly selfish. Pathologically selfish.

The bathroom is finished, but only for small values of "finished". The bathtub drainpipe leaks a lot because it needed to be shoved up through the floor to account for the extra inch we added to the height of the floor. And just today one of my soldered pipe joints started leaking. I've been wondering what was going on that all my pipe joints don't leak. People talk about how fiddly or intimidating sweating pipes is, and while some of my joints have been hideously ugly, none of them have ever leaked. Until today. I fixed it a few minutes ago. I'll fix the shower drain tomorrow before anyone showers. Because i need sleep.

Oh yeah, i need sleep because i spent hours and hours getting those dance pads working with the computer. If you take an Xbox controller and chop the plug off and take the wires apart, you can hook it up to a USB plug, matching the wire colors. Except with this particular brand of Xbox controller, the yellow wire needs to be connected to the USB's white wire. And thus lies one of the stupidest reasons i've ever stayed up until four in the morning. On the night before Easter Sunday, too.

So, happy Easter! What a holiday... holy day. There's been a discussion around here as to which holiday is a bigger deal, Christmas or Easter. I think we agree that Easter is the more significant. Of course, Christmas comes after a crescendo of frenzied materialistic hedonism while Easter follows weeks of restraint. So obviously, Christmas is more culturally relevant in modern times. But the big deal is that Jesus rose! Not that he was born, or died... i mean, i've done one of those things myself, and the second one has been accomplished by most people so far. But Jesus defied death. That makes me have joy.

Three Stooges

One time at my mechanic job in Chicago i locked the keys in a customer's running car while she was waiting to drive it home. After we broke in, my boss told me that sometimes watching me work is like watching all three of the Three Stooges. It's true. Sometimes stuff happens around me that is absurd and counterproductive, and i might be partially to blame.

Well, after hours of colossally frustrating Stooge like work, i finally got our bathroom back to full functionality. I even put actual 45 degree bend bits into the embarrassing maze of pipes behind our bathtub faucet. It used to be worse. But still, it doesn't look right. See, our old bathtub has two holes in the faucet area. Bathtub faucets come in singles, so you can put a hot and a cold spigot in, or they come in threes, so you can have two handles and a spout, upon which you mount the shower pipe. So back when i turned the bathtub into a shower, i had to find some way to get it to work. After much thought (and absolutely no searching of the Internet -- we had dial-up at the time) i put a spout with a shower take-off in one hole, and one of those handles which turns the water on and selects the temperature at the same time into the other hole. Well, the handle wouldn't turn all the way hot or all the way off if it was mounted in the normal configuration of being square to the rest of the house. Stupid tyranny of the 90 degree angle. So i mounted the handle and the valve at a 45 degree angle, which then required all the ridiculous bends you see there.

And i feel like it's been AGES since i spent any time with my kids or wife. Tomorrow will be a good day for that! Yaay!

Exhausted!

I got to volunteer at Houston's school all day. I hung out in classrooms helping kids think of fifth-grade ways of saying "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Great times.

Since then, i've been working on our bathroom. I'm tired. I've been incredibly frustrated, mostly because i don't have a hand saw. I used a hacksaw (like a bow, with a very hard blade with tiny teeth, designed to cut metal) to cut a 2x4 in two places, on a 45 degree angle. It was agony. Having work which should take a few minutes but ends up taking over an hour, especially when i want nothing more than to be FINISHED so i can spend time with my family, is infuriating. And my shoulder back muscles have been cramping for several days. I think i'll go outside and wait for the waaambulance.

Floor part one and a half

I worked this morning, where i found two more things to get kids in trouble. Some of the kids go to off grounds school. They come back, and we're really supposed to do a quick search to make sure they're not carrying WMDs or unapproved notes from girls (probably equally dangerous). Or cigarettes. And i'm three for three last week and this morning. Unapproved, inappropriate CD, unapproved note, and at least two larger-than-one bills of US currency. I think the kids might figure out to hide stuff more thoroughly, or quit bringing stuff back to the unit.

While i was busting teenage boys for minor rule infractions, grout was being squished between the tiles on our bathroom floor by Karen's dad, and they painted the walls. The floor is, alas, not ready for the toilet or bathtub or sink. Tomorrow. See, the grout has to set for 14 hours. Usually i'm not much for rules involving letting stuff "dry", but having the grout all crack apart isn't something i'm willing to risk, just to be able to pee in my own house. I can pee tomorrow, right? What's the big deal? Heh... actually, we're staying at the Generous In-Laws. Thanks again, guys!

New Bathroom Floor Part One

We're putting a new tile floor in our bathroom! It's going to totally kick butt. Of course, that picture is kind of horrible and makes it look like an ADHD preschooler put it together out of ripped up construction paper. Wait... no it doesn't. But regardless, the picture really doesn't do the new floor justice.

The old floor was cheap, discolored vinyl roll flooring. It wasn't horrible, but it was certainly not very nice. And the thing about tile floors is that when you first put it down, it looks nice. And it'll continue to look pretty much exactly like that for pretty much as long as you own your house. Unless you never bother to clean the grout.

I thank my in-laws for the astonishing amounts of help. Karen's dad helped carry the toilet, sink and bathtub out of the bathroom, he cut pretty much everything and didn't make even one mistake, and Karen's mom helped keep our ADHD preschoolers entertained. Thank you so much guys! Tommorow it's grout time, and then put-stuff-back time. Can't wait.

181,066,490 MPH

See that yellow car? It's our little yellow Honda Accord. I liked that car a lot. But now we're going to get rid of it after i try to get it working again. It'll need a battery, a carburetor overhaul, and some fresh gasoline. I hope. Then it'll need a long list of other things to make it actually roadworthy, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The next owners will cross that bridge when they come to it.

Our cool little Accord... It's always sad for me to have to part with vehicles i liked. Our neighbors (not Corbyn, the other ones) said they want it. If we do sell it to them, that'll make the second time we've sold vehicles to neighbors living in that house. The first time was the turbocharged Subaru which would boil its coolant and whistle like a giant teapot from a crack in the cylinder head. He bought it and actually drove it that way for a few months before it died, sat in his driveway, and then mysteriously disappeared.

One hundred eighty one million sixty six thousand, four hundred ninety miles per hour is how fast you would have to drive your car for a red light to appear to be green. I know this because i asked the smarty pants's over at Yahoo Answers. That's fast. That's over seven thousand times faster than the escape velocity you need to escape Earth's gravity, so if you managed somehow to drive under a traffic light, you would be in space so quickly that your puny human brain wouldn't even notice that you'd passed through a solar system, let alone a planet. Oh yeah, and your car would vaporize from catastrophic amounts of atmospheric friction. And if a car hit the earth going that fast, it would be like an enormous nuclear bomb explosion.
___more___

Phun!

Today the kids played with their Webkinz web sites, which are little virtual worlds a little facsimile of their stuffed animals can play around in and stuff. It's really cute and harmless, and i think... maybe... using the computer to imagine the lives of their toys might be okay. They're not actually playing with the physical objects, but maybe that's okay. I dunno. Spending time in front of a screen has taken the place of so many activities which used to involve no screen of any sort. I read books from a (little, handheld) screen. I tinker with the inner workings of computer software instead of fiddling with gadgets or machinery. Although i do that too. We take pictures and "process" them with computers. Letters are written, art is done, things are bought, all in front of a screen!

Well, the kids seem to really like it. And it was only half an hour.

So, instead of "building" things out of "stuff", here's a little toy which you can build crazy whatevers with and watch them do their thing. It's a 2D physics sandbox. Except there's no sand to get in your dreadlocks.

Fixin' Stuff

Well, yesterday i can't remember fixing anything. But today i fixed some stuff. First, i fixed to go to work (you know, fixing to go to work?) where i missed my wife and kids, but i fixed some sloppy joes.

Remember how everybody loved my sloppy joes last time? Well, this time we didn't have any sloppy joe sauce, and not even any canned tomatoes of any kind - sauce, juice, chopped... nothing. Except we did have some really gross looking sauce made up of mostly tomato which was a week old that nobody had used. There was a sticker on the top with "pasta" written on it by hand. Um... the contents weren't "pasta" at all, and it smelled of garlic and cumin, which are totally chili spices, not spices to put on spaghetti. Except garlic. You can put garlic on pasta. Anyway, i used the slightly gelled sauce to make the sloppy joes. And they were as popular as ever.

Moral: when you're fixing sloppy joes, just throw any old thing in. Used t-shirts, coffee grounds, the stuff you scrape off the bottom of your refrigerator door... it's all good.

Then i got to come home and see the fam! They like me. Then i went to the garage and fixed the garage door so it goes all the way up now. Then i fixed the back wheels of the Honda Accord we still have. I like that car. But it will soon be out of our life, sniff. See, the back wheels didn't, you know, turn. It was really hard to get them to turn.

And now i'm typing on a new network topography (or whatever) that i put together while Karen was out of the house. She's been stuck with the kids ALL DAY, so i could help by encouraging her to visit Beth. :) So i fixed her too! Except not really. I'm not that much of a clueless man. Anymore.

Circus! Yaaaay! kinda.

Hey! We went to the circus today! So Karen and i indulged our inner children -- and our real, very much outer, children -- in spectacular feats of daring and skill. But my inner adult was predicting the acts and detecting the dramatic embellishments that made such entertainment merely diverting, instead of amazing. And then my internal nature lover was watching the magnificent animals and thinking how unnatural it was for the lions to be doing silly little tricks like walking across a plank. I heard an interview recently which talked about the nature of these predatory animals. They want to stalk, hunt, kill, and then devour living flesh. It's in their nature, it's hard-wired in. We humans experience irresistible urges, like the drive pregnant women sometimes feel to clean and organize their house. The urge to chase and kill must be so much more fundamental in the "psyche" of big cats, that the animals sitting on the pedestals and jumping through a hoop of fire must be severely psychologically damaged to not eat the soft, defenseless pink bag of protein strutting about within paw reach.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we don't consider Death By Hungry Lions entertainment anymore. And i have to remind myself that animals don't have psyches like we do. But the more intelligent they seem, and the more unnatural the behavior they're made to do, the more tragic their exploitation seems.

Okay, i'll quit serving up the huge dish of wet-blanket with the side of bummer and a diet cynicism, and focus on the fun! Katrina lit up when she saw the first glittery skimpy outfit. "I like that girl's costume!" she reported. Her favorite part was the girls. Houston spent most of the time staring at the action, mouth agape. He liked the human cannonball best of all. The guy was super friendly too! Zane liked trying to escape from Tall People, and go touch the elephants or fall down three storeys worth of stairs. We Tall People are pretty quick, and caught up with him. I liked watching the Rhesus monkeys jump between elevated platforms. They would crouch, and wobble their heads back and forth to get a distance measurement by triangulation. I've seen treehoppers do the same thing. It's so awesome that brains -- primates to insects -- can do that. The people tricks were best.

Oh yeah, there was this guy who did the old balance-on-a-board-on-a-cylinder trick. He increased the difficulty by adding a spacer above and below the rolling cylinder. Then he tripped Karen an i right out by using two rolling cylinders between three spacers, meaning he had to balance in two axes. Um, you can't do that, Karen and i said to each other. The MC talked about the five cylinders (the spacers were cylindrical, but placed on their flat faces) and i immediately thought of an Audi engine. And the guy actually did it. But not for very long. Which might have been because he did the whole thing on a huge swinging platform.

Doin' the eBay thing!

There's one of the things i'm clearing out. It might sell for SO MUCH, but it might go for, like, a nickel. I'm okay with either. But more the first one. I like money*.

*Um... it's awkward* to explain footnotes right after... anyway: you should watch the silly Mike Judge movie Idiocracy. Lots of crotch kicks and fart jokes, but if you can handle that, you're allright.

*Isn't "awkward" an awkward looking word? And awkward to type? Like onomatopoeia, but not with sound.

So anyway, i got to take Houston and Katrina and Zane out today, to buy wood for Project Protect Volkswagen, and then we ate bagels. I remember how much i like bagels. But it was fun, and i also remember how much i like taking my kids out for... well, walks. Even though we drove everywhere. Now that there's no useful sledding or snowboarding snow, i'm totally ready for the weather to GET WARM! Please?

Okay, features of the walk (which we drove on). "Weather ball gray... nothing to say!" and "Weather ball red, ow! my head!" Here's Katrina: "Daddy!!!!!!! C-Could we make bagels someday????" (i'm pretty sure she actually thinks in that many exclamation points and stuff.) I respond that sure, we could. She then thinks, and screws up her face in a serious, worried way, and says quietly: "But would we go to jail?" Oh wow, to understand the surreal landscapes that Katrina's train of thought passes through.

Cleaning out

Last night my two eBay auctions ended, and i made a whopping eight dollars. I sold two kind of broken things we've had laying around the house since... well... I bought the flash from eBay before Christmas for Karen, but the mount didn't work for her camera, and since we quit using the router which broke. I think i'll have a new eBay auction up every Tuesday night, ending Sunday night (statistically, auctions which end then get the best bids). My junk may lighten someone's day, and, uh, heavyen my wallet a little bit.

I also downloaded a program called WinDirStat, which gives you a nice visual representation of how your computer hard drives are being used. I'll be cleaning out my hard drive too! I already deleted over ten gigabytes of game files i'll never use because: i didn't like the games. This is an important step for me. Deleting something i will never use is very difficult, because maybe i'll totally change my whole personality and actually like games which needlessly glorify thoughtless violence.

Also, i archived my whole Gmail inbox. Weeeeeird.

Karen and my taste:

Today we watched Quick Change with Beth. Karen and i LOVE that movie. Blauftoni! Haa haa. It's more funny than a clown in an explosive vest. Hmm... Except maybe you have to be, like, Karen or me to really enjoy it as much as we do.

But when we turn on the radio, neither of us are really happy with the other's music. I like electronic dance music, downtempo psychedelic trance, d&b, and Karen likes "lyrics" and "real instruments" and all that crap. TV... i don't like to watch TV. But movies and books are two areas we can totally agree on. Nobody liked Hudson Hawk. Nobody. Except Karen and i. Bill Murray's other very silly movie which wasn't well received, The Man Who Knew Too Little -- we laughed ourselves ill.

And we both like computers. And little cars. And children. And food. I guess we agree on quite a bit more stuff than we disagree on. I sure do wish she could bring herself to enjoy Shpongle, though.

Aww! My boy's SIX!

That's, like, half a dozen! And i'm so exhausted, i can hardly think of anything to write. Okay, something must be wrong with me, because i still couldn't think of anything to write (it got bad enough for me to answer questions on stupid Yahoo Answers for almost an hour) but then Karen tosses off a fantastic, touching post about our little boy. Very awesome post.

So i'll say that Karen's spot on. She nailed it. Houston's brilliantly smart. He's always been full of wiggly energy. We used to have to hold his arms down to get him to fall asleep. I think he might break the whole law of conservation of momentum thing. I'm glad you can't go to jail for that. I'm so excited that he can read. And i'm so excited that he's got friends.

I don't really remember much about my friends from when i was six, but i think they were kind of kids i drifted towards...? But Houston's friends (who he befriended with absolutely no intervention from us) are both really cool kids. It occurs to me that i really like kindergarteners because they're all completely, utterly genuine. There's no need to guess what a five or six year old is thinking. It's right there. So some of the kids in Houston's class are shy, some are naughty, some are calm... but his friends are both SILLY! It makes me very happy. Can't you just imagine the three of them becoming, like, a little clique? Like, one of those healthy cliques who also have their larger circles of friends, who only support each other without being exclusive or possessive? Like Parker Lewis and his two buds? Anyone?

Houston's last day to be five!

Houston's five. Tomorrow he'll be six. On my fourth birthday, i learned that my name's really John and i cried. On my third birthday, a kid shoved me from my new toy tractor and i cried. I don't really remember my sixth birthday, but i'm guessing Houston will. For a couple years, at least. Especially if we do something that will make him cry. Hmmm.....

I like my kids.

We played a lot today. It shocks me how much flinging my kids tolerate -- enjoy, even! I understand that since i've never dropped them on their heads or given them whiplash, that they have learned that it's safe. But sitting on top of my head with me holding their ankles and then flopping backwards to have me stop them from plummeting head first into the carpet (this game only happens on the carpet... like that makes a difference) sounds horrifying to me! Yikes.

We spent perhaps an hour doing tricks on the floor today. Everybody loves it. Houston is too heavy now for me to grab his ankles and hands, with him lying down between my feet, and hoist him up to my shoulders in one swoop. Sad. Katrina is a little scared to stand on my hands while i'm lying on my back, but Houston and Zane love it. Zane is scary because he likes to let his legs go floppy, so i have to catch him on my knees or tummy. Oof. Houston is a little scary because he starts dancing and wiggling like crazy.

I hope my kids learn how to fall and play without breaking bones or spraining themselves. Karen and i are really good at falling down in a nice damage controlling, energy absorbing way. So far our kids seem to be falling in genetic line, so to speak. But i'm a little worried that the adrenaline rush they're getting from playing with Daddy Jungle Gym is going to encourage rough or wild thrill seeking behavior. I used to worry about that more, back when Houston's wildness was a big problem when he was playing with others, but when we quit playing like that for a month or two, it didn't make any difference. Being in school has almost totally solved that.

So anyway... yeah... i like my kids. They're cool.

Volunteering!

I'm a Barack Obama volunteer! I called seven (7) Ohio residents today to encourage them to get out and vote, and oh, while they're there, why not vote for Obama? Cause, you know, Barack rocks. Or whatever. But in eight short years i went from being a devout political apathist to actually participating in a campaign! Of course, my contribution was less than minimal. I called five "not in service" numbers and two answering machines, one of which was not the person i'd been told i'd be calling. And now it's too late. We'll see in the morning how my favorite presidential candidate of all time fared.

In other news, Katrina is proud to report: "I sure do love bacon." This announcement came in the car as Karen and i were in the front, discussing the ongoing drama of our VW van (we're going to have to move it -- any ideas?) and Houston and Zane were in the back playing a game that involved lots of saying "FFFFFFFFFFFF" and laughing. That Katrina of ours can be so hilarious.

Houston's school

I have to go to bed real quick, so this post will be even less well written than usual. But today, i got to go help out in Houston's classroom! And you know what? Kindergarteners are CUTE!!!!!! Yeah, they're a bunch of cuties -- full of life, engaging, fresh. Maybe i'm jaded by working with damaged teenagers? But as fresh and engaging as they are, there's still some interesting stuff going on.

Like, when they had to pick a lion or a lamb to color and cut out, every single boy besides my boy Houston picked a lion. Every single girl except for one chose a lamb. One of the kids even laughed and said "Houston is a girl!!!" but either he didn't hear, or that "epithet" doesn't bother him. Scare quotes inserted (by the way) to demonstrate my open mindedness and anti-sexism; calling a boy a girl is not an insult... you know...

But anyway, later there was a chunk of free time. Immediately, the girls grabbed a laundry basket of blocks and started building a magnificent city. The boys couldn't cooperate enough to move their own basket of blocks, so i picked up the heavy thing and started putting it near the other basket, but they protested: "Don't put it by the girls' blocks! We need some blocks for ourselves!" I put it near enough so that hopefully a little bit of interaction would happen. The boys proceeded to build a giant wall.

Houston went his own way and grabbed a little A4-sized whiteboard and marker and drew a (very manly) garbage dump. I was pleased to see that everyone else in the classroom caught on quickly, and there was much drawing.

Dinner at my house!

Mmmmmm, candied ginger! The recipes i've found for candied ginger involve things like "throwing away" the water you boiled it in. Throw it away??? And lose the FLAVOR??? So the way i make it is simpler. Peel a ginger root and slice it thinly. Toss it in a little pot, barely cover it with water and add a ton of sugar. Bring to a boil and cook it for... i dunno... half an hour. Fish out the pieces, drain them some, and fling them into a bowl full of sugar. As the bits cool and dry out, keep them stirred a bit to coat them with the yummy sugar, and eat them!

They're super hot. Houston had a piece and enjoyed it okay. Katrina had a piece and immediately asked for another, and another. The third time i let her choose her own, so she picked a big fat slice which i KNOW was incredibly spicy. She took great gasps of air through her teeth as she ran to get a glass of water. Even Zane had some, and he tolerated it well. But there were no converts besides our progeny. Even Karen's mom, who loves spicy food, passed. Graham was coolly standoffish, until Karen taunted him by making him sit/stand/beg/lie down/turn around, and then he gobbled up a morsel until he, you know, tasted it and remembered that that's what i was trying to get him to eat.

Have you ever noticed how dogs can aim their nostrils? It's so funny.

Some of Karen's family visited today (they're the ones who rejected the candied ginger) and we ate lots of really good food. I blog a lot about food, don't i? And cleaning. Cool.

Allow me to interrupt:

I'm in the middle of making hot and sour soup. Katrina and Zane are in the living room. Katrina's reading Zane a book.

Katrina: Rhinoceroses snort and snuff, And little dogs go RUFF RUFF RUFF! Some other dogs go BOW WOW WOW, And cats and kittens say meow! A duck goes Quack! A horse says Neigh!......... It's quiet now.......
... do you fart?

Zane: Mm HMMMMMM!!!!

Limping along

I've got my server to act as a router as well, but it's really slow and clogged up with the kind of cruft that Windows accumulates over the months. Or years. It's been a couple years since i installed WinXP on that machine. Wow.

So here's an example of the stupid kind of stuff i see from Microsoft. I've been using Internet Explorer 7 for some testing and stuff on this computer. Well, every time i start it up, regardless of what i set my homepage to, it goes to this "Welcome to IE7! Adjust your settings!" page. I've always changed the address to Google or Wanito's World before much stuff loads. But i got annoyed with that stupid routine so i next-next-next'ed through idiotic screens like "Congratulations! You're connected to The Internet!" and finally made it to a link which said "Go to your home page now!" I clicked the link. Nothing happened. A tiny symbol in the bottom bar of IE7 was showing. I clicked on the tiny symbol, and discovered that Internet Explorer had blocked a popup. Um... that "popup" that you blocked wasn't a pushy ad or malicious website, it was my home page!!! I clicked on a link that was provided to me by a page that i couldn't avoid any other way, and it blocked me from doing what i wanted to do.

So stupid.