In which I cut Houston's hair

Houston's hair has been looking somewhat shaggy recently, so yesterday i convinced him to let me cut it today. I was looking forward to giving it a go, since my only forays into haircutting have been on me, and have been either uneventful or pathetically bad. Right before i got dreadlocks for the first time, i was cutting my own hair in the choppiest way imaginable -- some would be half an inch, some two inches... and bleached and/or dyes various colors. So when i asked Karen if she'd be okay with me cutting Houston's hair, she had a few caveats for me.

I love caveats. Especially with a nice Hollandaise sauce.

His hair turned out good! I'm happy with it, and it's still long enough on top to keep Houston happy, with his odd desire to keep it lying down over his forehead. Possibly to hide his eyebrows, which he claims not to like. I think his eyebrows are totally cute. Graceful and expressive. Perhaps he'll grow to love them.

First flies of the year

Yesterday during our cleanup marathon, the kids and i grabbed "fly-slappers" and ran around hunting flies. I got one and then got distracted by whatever, and (i think) put the fly-slapper away. Then today i clapped the other fly right out of the air. It was chilly today, so the fly was lethargic. And it wasn't a normal housefly with their swooping random flight paths, it was smaller, and did those saccades things i've mentioned before. It turned. So i could slightly predict where to clap.

I can't believe that's the only thing i can think about to write. So embarrassing.

Oh, i know. Zane tossed together two cups of waking-up-early, two farm-fresh not-taking-a-naps, and three quarters cup of give-me-my-Smarties, and baked it at 350 in the taking-a-metaphor-too-far oven, and got himself a cake of the worst temper tantrum he's ever had. I never understood what the Bible was talking about where the lake of fire will involve "gnashing of teeth", but today, Zane gnashed his teeth. They did the grinding thing. Poor kid. Additionally, Katrina can't just walk from one room to another. She must, MUST, flip her hands in the air, point her toes, and possibly twirl. Sometimes several times. It's totally awesome. I was trying not to laugh at her.

And a story about Houston. Tonight in the car:
Karen - Aw! That family just got their hair cut! Oh, no... they were coming out of Subway.
Houston - WHERE!
Karen - I thought that whole family was coming out of the haircut place, but they were really coming out of the sandwich shop.
Houston - Which haircut shop?
Karen - It was back there. You can't see it anymore.
Houston - Why did you think they were getting a haircut?
Karen - Nevermind Houston, it was not that interesting.
Houston - What were they really doing?
Me - Horse. Dead. Beating it.
Karen - LOL
Houston - Why were you laughing?
Karen - It was a grown up joke, honey.
Houston - ...Why?

Katrina Simpson

Whenever a ping pong ball is broken, the only reasonable course of action is to draw pupils on the halves and pop them over your eyes. Katrina seems to agree.

Newest math:

Today in the car, i asked Houston what sixteen doubled was. Now, it's one of the numbers in one of the most important number series, so i wondered if they had already studied that. But Houston thought for a minute, and then said "Thirty two?" I said wow that's right, and asked Genius Boy how he'd arrived at that sum. "Well," he said, "I knew that five doubled was ten, so five plus six would be eleven." Pause. My brow furrowed. "So sixteen doubled is thirty two!"

Also today, Karen and i cleaned out our cars. The van was filled with Goldfish Crackers, Cheerios and papers which were Extremely Important Family Treasures when they entered the car, and have mostly returned to the pulpy mass from which all paper comes. My car was filled with an inexplicably large number of uncooked pinto beans. And trash and clothes and stuff. A lawn chair. A globe. Et cetera, which is of course, nonsense -- how can "cetera" follow that random list?

It's good to have a clean car.

Playing picnic

Today Katrina sucked me into a couple hours of playing a fairly esoteric make believe game of... camping? It started with her organizing her doll clothes, and getting a bag of bags out, and packing them up, but not with clothes. Mostly with old toothbrushes. We carried the toothbrushes all over the house looking for a beach. I stopped at the "restaurant", where i was cooking baked beans. But they took way too long, so i made grilled cheese sandwiches instead. Which we ate on the beach next to the ocean? And then i had to go to work. Stupid work.

Tuesday

I have no idea what to write. I was busy mostly all day, with my weekly meeting at work, hanging around the house (which turned into a nap) and then work. Where i led the kids in a couple ZUMBA! songs. It's funny -- the boys i work with actually seem to enjoy it.

But... a AA rechargeable battery can discharge as much energy as four bullets from the most powerful semiautomatic pistol ever manufactured. Not all at once. Which is nice.

MAN

Today i made paella. Except i burned the rice before i even started cooking it, so had to throw that out, and the only other rice i had was cheap American long grain, and half as much as i was planning on using, so we ended up with mostly mush. But it was quite delicious, nutritious mush. Other than that, it was a normal day around here. Except Karen let me go to the evening ZUMBA! class as well as the one we both attended. I did my Krazy song in both sessions, and people were seriously laughing! Are they laughing at me? Or because it's fun? Do i care? No?

Also, i now have a Man Bag. Here's a picture of it. Manly.

I wasn't going to post today...

But then Karen posted the cute things our kids did, and i remembered that all three kids played together so well this morning. One time i heard Katrina say "Hey Houston!!!! Let's go upstairs and CLEAN MY ROOM!!!!!" and Houston said "OKAY!!!!!!" and they ran off as though there was no line for the Millennium Force coaster at Cedar Point.

I want to go to Cedar Point.

Zanie!

Look! It's a picture! I really like taking pictures, but, i dunno, i've been busy? Or forgetting my camera? But today Zane found those extremely stylish 3D glasses (they are much cooler than the glasses they used to hand out, which were desperately swoopy and Oakley-like while being hideous, malproportioned and cheap looking) and, well, he was extremely cute. He's getting proud of himself in many ways. Cute! And, he can totally jump like a Moore.

Houston.......... well, i hope he remembers today without the help of this weblog. Sorry about being cryptic. If you want to know, just ask.

Katrina! Cute! Curls! Of course, no pictures from my camera. Rats. Today when i got home from work, she was wearing her chef outfit, and made Karen, me, and Zane a little meal. "You can share the grapes!" she told me.

Then, Karen let me go to Zumba right before bedtime. I led the Krazy song, and i was wearing what i'd worn to work in the morning with my cloth belt with the D-ring buckle, which needs periodic adjustment. Well, when one moves about vigorously, one's D-ring belt needs more frequent adjustment, so while i was leading the song, it needed adjustment, which is hard to do while leading that routine, and well. That got a lot of hoots. Silly ZUMBA! party people.

ZUMBA! (it seems like half of my recent posts are called that)

Today i led my first class. I carefully, painstakingly organized a playlist on my mp3 player which would give me the perfect schedule of warm up, heart rate peak, and variation in the song types and energy level. I kind of assumed that they'd have a wire right there with the needed plug... and they didn't. So, having arrived fifteen minutes before the class, and yet having no way to access my music, i ran around the YMCA building looking for a wire. A fella named Ron up in IT had a CD burner and a blank, and he put my music on to a disc, for which i'll remain forever in his debt. Unless he falls out of an airplane with no parachute and i jump after himdive out of an airplane with a parachute and catch him in free fall and thus save his life... not too likely, to be honest.

Right. So i had a CD with the songs all out of order, i was ten minutes late, the lady who'd been covering for me was "so boring" in Karen's words, but then i took over.

And i had fun. The heights and depths of hyperbole to which i could rise (and sink?) would fail to convey how much fun i had. So i won't even try. Even though i messed up almost every song, and i didn't call out transitions well, and could never even figure out what moves *i* was trying to do... it was really awesome.

Oh, and thanks to the no-wire emergency, there is no pictures or video. I even took my camera to be prepared. Sorry Mum. Perhaps next time.

Tomorrow! ZUMBA! Teach! ME!

I've spent most of today doing choreography... and now it's bedtime. I have a little more than 40 minutes of choreography. Maybe with the cool down and explaining the steps... i can stretch that to maybe fifty minutes. So tomorrow i need to choreograph three more songs. Lose Control by Missy Elliot, Galang by M.I.A. and, um, Showroom Dummes by Senor Coconut y su Conjunto. Yay.

Mondays rock.

When i went to bed last night, most of our covers were on the floor to the right of the bed. I pulled them back on, and leaped into bed, and heard a weird shoosh noise on the side of the bed, and found Houston lying there on the floor. Odd, thought i, this has never happened before. So i covered him back up and went to sleep. So this morning when my gentle, soft electronic palm pilot alarm went off, Houston and i could sneak out of the house without even going into the other kids' rooms. They slept!

So then we played and goofed off, making the house infinitesimally less of a mess (i think), until Karen spent an hour and cleaned the whole house spotless. I have no idea how she does that. It takes me an hour to make coffee.

Then i picked up Houston from school, bought kim/sushinori/laver for kimbap, and made it. There was much, MUCH, crying and whining surrounding various disappointments and misunderstandings like "But I wanted Katrina to ride her bike too!!!!! WAAAAAAAH!!!" and "Graham touched my leg!". Some milk shakes and homework served as a balm to the whiny souls in our home, and then i went to ZUMBA! We did a couple new songs, one of which is really just stupid-fun. And then? I was offered the chance to lead Thursday morning's class, and also pick up a regular Tuesday night class. Wow. I'm a little bit freaking out, because i'm not ready.

So i'm going to go into the other room and start making a fool out of myself. I hope to entertain our neighbors. Maybe we should buy blinds?

Meijer Gardens

We ate cereal, went to church, ate corn bread, went to Meijer Gardens (and Sculpture Park, thus the sculpture), ate pizza, and put the kids in bed! Then we watched the much ballyhooed episode of Jon Stewart's show, and now midnight crept up on me, so it's off to bed! After fifteen minutes of flossing, rinsing and brushing, that is. Then maybe a butterscotch candy or two before turning in.

Happy pi day!

That's my ZUMBA! shirt! I wore it yesterday to work, so at least three grown ups saw it and expressed interest in going to a class led by me. Even Mister Bradley (whom i would have called "Matt" before, but back then the students were allowed to call teachers by their first names and now everybody calls teachers <honorific> <lastname>, and plus, he used to come over to our house some Tuesday nights) said he would probably go. I told one of the kids that boy residents won't be allowed to go to the class, but any staff or teacher is welcome. The kid actually said "Even Mr. Bradley???!!??!?!" They frequently use too many exclamation points.

Other pictures from yesterday: Katrina dancing, Zane dancing, and Katrina's self portrait. She took, like, eight of them, which makes me feel better about how many pictures i take of myself. Houston held the camera for a while, and took one picture which is mostly just the back of my head, but does have a little self portrait in there. Houston's photographs haven't caught up yet with his drawing skill or wordplay -- he's really creative with writing. And humorous. We're frequently delighted with the stuff he writes down. He might end up being a poet, even though i loathe poetry. Slightly. No, i don't loath it, i just think it's obsolete, at least English language poetry is. Ask me if you want to know why.

Oh yeah, and it's pi day. 3.14. Today was the first "official" pi day. I wonder if "talk like a pirate day" will ever become official.

Tiny little post.

I worked. Karen felt yucky. We (everybody but Karen) went to the mall to play on some equipment. We went to the grocery store and had a picnic in the car, which is a big favorite. Karen and i watched a couple shows. Then, we went to bed.

Cheese.

Among the epicurean delights i most enjoy (blueberries, apples, fresh baked bread) is brie cheese. Brie is the creamy cheese with the white rind of mold. And it's so awesome. I don't know what proper gourmands eat their brie with. Perhaps strawberries? The picky skinflint in me has convinced the rest of me not to eat strawberries very often, since i'm usually drastically disappointed by the quality of what few strawberries i do eat. Anyone else ever bitten into a giant, dark red strawberry only to taste a pithy blandness inside? Ugh. U-pick strawberries are usually a waste of time too, since they're such a low density crop, so hugely popular, and so weather-dependent. No wonder they're so expensive. Houston loves them, though. Good for him.

Oh yeah, what i eat my brie with: saltines. Now, of the crackers, saltines have always been my favorite. They lack the greasy decadence of Triscuits, but also aren't greasy... and Ritz crackers also have fat in them, which i don't like. English style water crackers are just too bland, and more firmly crunchy. Stoned wheat crackers are pretty good, the fact that they're called "stoned" is just bonus. It's fun to make them "walk" around "grabbing butterflies" and saying "whoah, man". Oh, i like that Rye-Vita or Wasa kind of cracker, but not for brie. Too much character.

See, my favorite cheese needs to have a clean canvas upon which to paint its tasty masterpieces. Or maybe my palate is the clean canvas, the cheese is the paint, and the cracker is the simple, trustworthy brush. Or maybe there's something wrong with me for coming up with these stupid metaphors. Anyway, i like good, sophisticated cheese with the most prosaic of crackers.
___more___

I dunno, stuff

By surprise i got to work this morning instead of tonight. So, i got to see my family, especially Houston, a little more, and we got to go to ZUMBA! It's really fun to ZUMBA! in the gym, but the sound is really quite bad. Distorted and echo-y, but the crowd is big.

Also by surprise, i got to work at the charter school which rents the building from Wedgwood, the place where kids sit around mostly swearing and being rude to each other and only peripherally learn anything academic. My new approach to that school is that at least they're keeping these kids off the street, where they'd just be doing crimes of one sort or another. Anyway, the building the school inhabits has a nice large gym, which would be a great (while echo-y) place to have ZUMBA! classes! So my quest to make it happen continues. I'll even clean it up beforehand, since after a couple lunch hours with that group of kids leaves bits of apple, carrot, and other food strewn about in a pretty disgusting way.

And by the way, i'm a little cynical about youth in modern urban culture. Can you tell? At least Chris Brown pulled out of the Kids Choice Awards. This is the teen idol who beat up his girlfriend. Thanks for withdrawing, but still... jerk.

My first time leading ZUMBA! ever.

Last Monday, our crazy ZUMBA! leader told me i could lead a song "anytime". So i decided to make it this silly song (don't bother clicking the link, Karen, it's just the same song i've been working all week) because it's so silly. So today Tara (our crazy leader) let me lead that song. And i did... okay. I mean, i could have done better with the choreography and the timing, but it's my first time.

What pleased me most was that my nervousness was middling to light, and once the song started, nervousness dies as though the first stomp of my cumbia step squished it like a, um... centipede. Or a fly? A bug i wouldn't mind killing, basically. Because it it was an ant or even earwig, i'd try to avoid stepping on it, cumbia or no.

Hmmm, back on topic... Dare i say it, i really enjoyed being front and center! Shaking my butt, even! Not that the butt shaking -- or observation thereof -- added any enjoyment to the experience. I have been ever so slightly worried that i am not really going to get into leading ZUMBA! classes because, i dunno, i'll be nervous or something. Or forget everything once i get up front. Or mess up and not be able to recover. Of course, i know from years of leading singing that messing up is something i'm perfectly comfortable with, and i forget words pretty much always and still manage, so getting a step or two wrong won't get me off track much.

In other news, Houston drew a bicycle lying down, from the front. This amazes me. He is only seven, and he can hold a representation of a bicycle in his head and rotate it so the front is facing his mind's eye, and draw it. I'm good at that kind of stuff, which is why i can sew and make stuff out of paper bags, and i'm so glad Houston got it too. Also, Graham had been licking his bandage a lot, and the vet today gave him an "E collar" which stands for Elizabethan Collar. It's the cone thing. Wouldn't Queen Elizabeth be proud to know her legacy includes a device to keep pets from fiddling with their bandages. But our poor dog. He looks so depressed. Poor, poor dog. But also: hahahaha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha gasp, hahahahahahahaha. Poor dog.

Zane asleep

None of our kids have made a habit of falling asleep anywhere. I think Houston fell asleep in the middle of the living room one time, and Katrina sometimes sleeps collapsed halfway on her bed. But no falling asleep in closets or in a blanket fort. But tonight Zane fell asleep while we were watching the most random kid's movie i've ever seen. It tried so SO hard to be random... and self-aware randomness ceases to be funny. Quixotic elephant dander! See? Totally not funny.

What was funny: Zane sleeping. Trying to stay awake but nodding off and catching his head... extremely cute. We got it on video.

HOUSTON IS SEVEN!!!!11!!!

There he is. He had (has) a friend over to spend the night -- i'll call him Texas -- and they were completely insane. Loud, running-through-the-house-hands-waving-in-the-air crazy. Which is a marked contrast from Katrina's birthday last month where she had, i dunno, seventeen little girls over here, and they tiptoed about discussing flowers and rainbows. Gender differences!

Um, and it's 9:50, but really it's 10:50 because it's time change day. So i'm going to go to bed. Before Houston and Texas are still giggling away in the other room.

Friday off!!!

I took today off. The weather was warm-brisk, the sky stayed clear, birds chirped and squirrels scampered. The seasons are turning! We played outside! Katrina throws the frisbee really hard, like hurt-your-fingers hard. Houston is loving riding his bike. Zane loves jumping.

And yesterday, Karen's computer blew up. It's probably just the power supply, so i'll fix it when the new one arrives. The house smells like toasted electronics right now, which for all its acrid unpleasantness, isn't a smell i mind too much.

Midnight update

I've been going to bed at midnight every night (except i guess there's a thing in observing Lent where you have "festival Sunday" or something, so last Saturday night i stayed up late) and here's the update: AWESOME! I feel rested! And good! And energetic! I don't remember if i got enough sleep before we had kids, since that was beyond the event horizon. Now we're post-singularity. I can't remember what we spent our (double) income on either. Or what our time was spent doing. Every time i think of that, though, i remember that one time i built a water cooling system for my computer. With a Peltier device that got the processor down to minus 40 degrees. Either scale. That's the crossover point.

It was so fast. I get a little choked up every time i think about how fast that computer was. Compared to its stock speed, of course.

So right, i'm enjoying this whole "getting enough sleep" gig. I ever so slightly miss my hours of browsing Slashdot comments and Wikipedia and figuring out solutions to whatever, or playing driving games until the wee hours... but the trade off is pretty good.

Ballet! And GPS! and the YMCA!

Today i got one of my birthday presents. It's the cheapest GPS i've ever seen -- and thanks to a bunch of free software, it's super advanced! I can play videos, listen to mp3s, and all that stuff! Sweeeeet.

Also, Katrina had her last ballet class today, which i got to watch and enjoyed a lot. She leaps, she wiggles, she spins, she flips her ribbon! She does the 1st position to 2nd position jump with enthusiasm. At the ZUMBA! workshop, the other guy student was a ballet dancer, and he recommended strongly that Katrina stick with ballet. He said ballet is dying. Sad!

And today there was a shooting at our YMCA. We weren't there, but Karen could have been. And it was right there in our parking lot! Bad.

Ice Cream

Back in the 90's, Breyer's ice cream was good. The ingredients were cream, milk, sugar and whatever the flavor of the ice cream was. A few years ago Karen and i got a quart (or whatever) as a treat, and it was... different. It was sticky or something. I found the ingredient list, which had always been a large font list of the four or five things they made the stuff out of. But this ingredient list was a small type rectangle squeezed onto the side panel under the nutrition information, and it contained something called "Natural Tara Gum". Tara gum??? I was expecting carageenan, carob bean gum, locust bean gum, guar gum... some kind of vegetable gum which has been added to ice cream since they invented packaged ice cream.

See, i guess vegetable gum keeps ice cream from crystallizing if it melts and refreezes a little bit. Plus, it lets the ice cream get foamy. Air is, well, free. So if you can sell something by volume and include air in the product, WIN! That's why so many ice cream cartons and tubs are absurdly light. They should call some of it ice cream foam.

Then yesterday i was tasked to buy "chocolate ice cream" at the store. I went after bedtime, so was by myself. Shopping with no kids in tow is kind of a treat, so i went kind of slow and investigated things and sung a little bit... and did a dance step or two. And it turns out that Dreyer's doesn't make an unadulterated ice cream. Haagen-Dazs is perfect. Every other premium ice cream had the stabilizers in it EXCEPT (and this is amazing) Meijer brand premium ice cream. Crazy. A store brand product that beats nearly everything in quality of ingredients. Yum.

Whoops, late!

Midnight snuck up on me. Snuck isn't a word??? Sneaked, i guess. Stupid English language. No offense, Anglophones.

I didn't take any pictures today, and that's why i started playing Flatout 2 Ultimate Carnage -- to get a screenshot. The game is basically Flatout 2 with prettier graphics and a couple new racing modes. The new graphics are really cool. There's environment mapping which makes all the sheet metal reflect the environments perfectly, including the reflection imperfections like for rivets and body joints, and the water is the reflective wavy stuff which seems so popular in games now.

Besides that, we've got kids in our house who seem to be a little under the weather, which ramps up the whining INCREDIBLY. Karen and i need to ramp up the centrifuges and increase patienceranium ore mining to get enough weapons grade patience to cope. So far we haven't gone critical.