Mister Detective

Okay, back in the presingularity time when we didn't have kids, there was this one electronic dance music album called something like "0214F1E300" which i randomly downloaded from a newsgroup or hijacked FTP site (back when 1337 h4x0rz like me used to use newsgroups and FTP sites) and there was one song on the second CD which blew my mind with the intense breakdown/buildup. From what i remember, it was the best one ever.

Due to entropy and bitrot, hundreds of my files from over the years have kind of evaporated, including this album, of which i never learned the proper name. It's not like Yes's famous album 90125 (which is just the number assigned to that album), or the famous motherboard, the ECS K7S5A. These seemingly random character strings have meaning, but that album wasn't actually called 0214F1E300. Turns out.

One of my old friends and coworkers also liked that album, and she may have leeched the mp3 files from my computer during one of our pre-parenthood LAN parties. So i asked her recently, and she gave me some CDs of music that her brother had rescued from a dying hard drive of hers. Happily, she did have three of the songs from the beginning of one of the discs. Having a look at the metatags, i learned the names of the three songs. Some searching of Discogs revealed the album to be "Big Room DJs 02", which has been out print for years, as is the way with dance compilation albums. The Bittorrent networks hadn't heard of the albums or the specific song (Energy Flow by Vitae), so i thought my luck was up.

I remembered then a filesharing program named Soulseek, which is a network used by serious music lovers who generally seem to be interested in things outside the scope of services such as iTunes. And yes, there was one user who had that album. I am now downloading it. I am excited. And..... i should.... buy it. I guess?

Wiggle picture of wiggly kids

Katrina's wiggling just a bit, Zane's in the background looking a little distracted, but it's Houston who's leaping. Leaping right off the steps there. Awesome.

It's been a while since this rule has been explicitly stated, but in our family, you're only allowed to jump off things which are shorter than you are.

Some about ZUMBA!

Yesterday i sent an email out to all of Wedgwood about leading ZUMBA! classes at Wedgwood. So today was my first day! Two people showed up! More successfully, i went to a class at a YMCA branch i've never been to, and it was pretty big! And the teacher of that class (and the activities director (who also works at Wedgwood (weird))), gave me her class! So now i'm not only a YMCA employee, i'm actually going to work there!

Letter follows the break. If you're reading this as a Facebook note (you can do that, you know) they you probably have no idea what i'm talking about. Welcome to Facebook, where that happens a lot.

Let's see... okay, lemme talk about our front door. Back in the nineteenth century, when our house was built, doors were a quarter inch thinner than they are now. No big deal, but at one or more points, the people who owned our house decided to upgrade the door. Okay fine, but the screw holes got worn out, and they had never heard of the toothpick trick, where you stuff glue-covered toothpicks into a hole that's been stripped out and then reinsert the screw, and keep doing that until the screw sticks. Okay, i never heard of that trick before, i made it up. But it works really really really well. Especially with modern, aggressively threaded screws.

Right, so they never heard of my trick. So their solution was to move the whole door further into the door opening, and make new holes for the screws. So then, when the door shut, it would interfere with the trim around the door. Every time the door was closed, there would be giant amounts of force on the hinges and hinge screws, rapidly destroying the tightness of the hinges. This is why our door has never seemed to be very well attached. Oh... and they misaligned the hinges, so our door has squeaked, flung itself open, and the hinges have been slowly ejecting their pins, needing us to bang them back in every couple years.

Lots of goofy, messed up stuff is wrong with our house. I'm glad i'm smart enough to figure out how to put it right. So anyway, that's what Karen and i did yesterday, we fixed the front door. A couple insights: using the box the hinges came in as a shim to try to align a poorly aligned hinge is a bad idea; belt sanders are loud and messy, but holy crap do they take material away quickly; using a hole saw on a preexisting hole is hard; our door is hideous.

Also, Karen scoured the back yard of dog poo, broken toys, and varmint-strewn garbage, and i built a little pen out of chicken wire to hold our compost pile in an orderly pile, and not the misshapen, steaming pile of rotting, bacteria infested kitchen garbage that it used to be. It's still all those things, of course, but now it's not misshapen. There's a little opening at ground level to get out the best dirt. Yay.

---okay, email now---
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Sunday!

Prepare yourselves for a boring post.

Today was Karen's mom's birthday! We ate.

I got two new Tyvek bracelets at church, making the total thirteen. This might be the most i've ever had. I never think about them unless some comments. Like Karen saying "I don't know how you can stand to have that much stuff on your wrist!" Plus the LOVE WINS bracelet and the beaded one i don't know where i got. Some girl from work gave it to me but i never wore it because she had bad boundaries, but now i don't remember who it was, and it is cool, so i wear it.

Karen's old 17" CRT monitor has been sitting next to my 20" LCD on my desk for a couple months. The old CRT was extremely dark, and they are very inefficient, so i never hooked it up. Today i took it off the desk and gave it to Corbyn for his birthday. He invited me into his basement where he has a surprisingly well laid out "recording studio" with a computer to "make beats" and an amp and speakers and everything. Plus, he has a KORG M1, which is.... well, it's stunning. Flabbergasting. That's the most popular keyboard ever. If you have listened to any popular music since, um, 1988, you've heard a lot of KORG M1 sounds. I kind of freaked out a little, and Corbyn seemed taken aback.

Instead of the monitor we gave Corbyn, i'm using an old 14" LCD as my secondary monitor. It's washed out, blurry, off-center, there's hilarious amounts of ghosting... it's really retro. And pretty cool. Works fine for The GIMP menus or having Winamp running.

Our other neighbor is Marilyn Monroe's cousin. She told Karen.

Neighborhood weirdness

The house next to us has had some weird people living in it.

When we first drove past this house, i instantly wanted it because that house had a Subaru parked outside. The fellow who lived there was single, older, and he was constantly fixing up the house. He fell off his ladder one time while painting the house alone. He eventually bought our Subaru after the head cracked and it would whistle exactly like a giant tea kettle at stop lights. He paid $100. I think his name was Tom. Maybe Gary?

Then came Frank and Chris. Frank drank O'Doul's, which means he was a recovering alcoholic. He uncovered his alcoholic side, and Chris kicked him out to live in the upstairs apartment while she learned deep-tissue massage and shining infrared lights on people's feet. She was really weird, but very smart and kind of hilarious. We all miss her. One time she staggered around complaining about how much gravity is pulling her oppressively to the earth. It fit with the conversation, but that didn't make it any less delightfully funny.

Now we have a pretty cool couple living downstairs whose only vices seem to be that Chris (the dude) has a temper, but only swears out of earshot of kids, and he's a casual racist. Lola is a twin, has many piercings, and would only make weird noises for the first several months after they moved in. She talks now, and is friendly and easy going. But i bet they smoke pot. The upstairs couple is reallllly weird. Tom is the guy who thought he was going to die this past winter. Ursula is his "sweetie", who is quicker on the uptake, but has some personality quirks of her own. One is that when Tom says anything she accuses him of lying or being crazy or this picturesque quote: "Your ass sucks canal water!" I'm not sure what that means... but yeah.

Our alcoholic neighbor across the street was foreclosed upon, we're pretty sure, so his house and the other two he owned on the block are currently vacant. I'd LOVE to get his house. It's not big, but the yard is amazing. The kids would love it. When Corbyn and his mom sell their house, we'll be the people who've been living on this block the longest. Besides John, the English professor who has a scooter. He and his wife have lived down there since we moved in.

Scooter!!!

I started the scooter up today! The weather was amazing for scooter riding, which also means it was perfect weather for standing on your porch yelling or walking down the middle of the street, both of which are popular hobbies in this part of the city. So i took the kids on the standard route, which includes a steep "historic" cobblestone hill and a very steep alley, and a short section of brick-paved road. Most of the road on my standard route are asphalt, and the alleys are usually gravel, so the only kind of common road surface my route doesn't include is concrete! Oh wait, the very steep alley is concrete.

Sorry for being boring.

After the scooter rides, we went to a "Carnival" at Houston's school. It was loud, chaotic, hot and somewhat insane. It's really cool seeing Houston in his school environment. At least five kids came up to my little son and said "Hi Houston!" so either that's what kids do to each other and Houston's too withdrawn, or he's quite a popular little first grader. I love him to pieces, but i'm his Daddy, so duh... and he gets in trouble at school for stuff, so it's really good to see that he's well liked. I dread the thought of kids talking to their families about my boy in the same way my family talked about kids at school who were troublesome.

Knees

Zane does this thing where he flings himself into the air and comes crashing down on his knees, and then he'll sit with his knees in front of him, his legs bent back and to the side, and his butt on the ground. As an adult, may we all say "ow"? Cause... ow. When do we lose the flexibility to sit like that? I remember noticing for the first time that it wasn't comfortable to kneel down and sit on my feet, Japanese style. That was sometime in high school. I can only manage an approximation of cross legged sitting.

I console myself that i can still put my palms to the ground when i'm stretching over to touch my toes. And i've got good balance. And maybe my knees don't bend that way because they never need to bend that way unless i want to, y'know, sit like that. So i'm probably okay.

Every time i look at my blog i see that cute picture of Karen and Zane. Cute!!!!!!! So i took a screenshot of one of my Hawker Solo doing a jump in Paradise City. That game is so pretty, but i tried prettying it up even more with my GIMP skillz. However, it fails to come even close to the picture from yesterday.

Another picture i took today is this kid from work. I'm not supposed to video or photograph or audio record the kids from work, and i take those rules to mean "don't let pictures of the kids leave the unit". Usually i delete pictures instantly, but this time a kid decided to drink while lying down, because he'd heard that would get rid of hiccups. Um... it did? But he also drenched himself and his floor. Funny. Hilarious, actually.

Zane and Karen!

Cute!

Graham's leg has now healed. Where there was once a giant lump of a fatty tissue tumor there is now his slim foreleg. With a pink scar on it.

His cone was tragically funny, and could be amazingly annoying. But being the obsessive compulsive dog he is (with the obsession to lick compulsively, at least) he wouldn't leave his healing leg alone, and we most certainly didn't want him to mess up his extravagantly expensive surgery. So he whacked about beconed.

A few days ago we took it off. He barely reacted. His primary sensing organ has been separated from his body for months, and i was expecting him to sniff joyfully at his paws, tummy... butt... but he didn't do any of that! I mean, his mood lifted a little, but then he remembered his leg and started licking it. We sprayed the horrible tasting spray on it, which wore off, so he was back to licking, and thus chose to have the cone reinstalled around his neck. Bummer. (By the way, is not Love and Logic's website kind of horrendous?) Poor dog. But last night, we took it off and sprayed his leg once, and he has avoided licking that area since then. Good dog. I guess behaviorism works too. Probably better on dogs since "EEEEW BAD TASTE YUCK" works better than "When I engage in that behavior, this unpleasant thing happens, so logically I should avoid that behavior."

So i took a picture of our noble beast. He is a good looking dog, considering his age and mongrel breeding. Also cute are Katrina with her blue eyes and Houston looking unremarkable. I think Karen will put a funnier picture on her weblog today. Houston has some really funny faces.

NPR or ZUMBA

First, i think NPR's spring pledge drive occurred when we were on vacation. That makes me a little happy. But i don't listen much to NPR anymore. I only listen to stuff in the car, and then i'm always listening to CDs of ZUMBA! music, mentally working out routines. I've got a pretty good one for Celia Cruz' La Vida Es Un Carnaval. Oh. There's lots of bikinis in that video. Sorry... Bit what a totally positive song. The lyrics are really uplifting. Okay nevermind. I took out the bikini one because it was a live version, with less words.

Right. So either i get to be politically informed or have a repertoire of ZUMBA! songs.

Totally unrelated: Dan, my favorite Aussie internet personality wrote about uploading consciousness into artificial computing systems. This is something which has worried me for a while. If i did upload myself into a vast computational substrate, i'd still be me, the guy who wanted to exist in a computer... and i'd see my emulated self doing all the things i wanted to do, but i'd still be me. Well it's good to know i'm not the only one thinking about that stuff.

Race Day!

There's Houston's car! I spent hours getting the finish so glossy, so at least notice. It was pretty fast, perhaps fourth out of twelve or more. Next time, i'll polish the axles instead of just filing them smooth, and put weight very close to the back of the car. See, because the weight falling is what gives the car speed, and if the heaviest part of the car has the farthest to fall, there will be more energy to be gained from the drop. There would be a tradeoff in stability, especially if the weight went behind the rear axle -- the car would wheelie on every bump or jiggle of the track.

Karen was the pit crew mom, while Zane and i made faces at the camera. It was good to see Houston being buddies with his friends from Boy Scouts. And to see that there were boys there more rambunctious and troublesome than him. Now Houston isn't rambunctious or troublesome most of the time, but he does get in trouble for that stuff in school.

Finally, lemme talk about mousetraps. We live in an old neighborhood with countless opportunities for mice to forage, nest, loiter, congregate... swarm... so we've always had mice in our house during the spring when they have themselves little baby booms, and in the fall when it gets cold and they're seeking warmth. I got utterly fed up with the old mousetrap (than which those who build one better will have paths beaten to their doors) because they'd get sprung, fail to capture anything, and then mice would be at liberty to much on whatever morsel was attracting them. Setting them was an exercise in PTSD desensitization therapy: "tense tense tense tense SNAP!!! SHOCK gasp ow?"

So last fall i got fed up, and spent five bucks on four nice new plastic traps from Victor. They're white, and look a little like giant stubby clothes pins. They are easier to set than burping, they never spring unless they catch something, and the bait doesn't get eaten before or after then trap springs, so the ones in my basement have been catching mice on the same bait since fall. They caught maybe three all winter. But in the week since we got home, i've caught perhaps fifteen mice. Because they're getting warmed up and are looking for foooood. Today a mouse got really unlucky. All mice who get killed by traps are unlucky, i suppose, but this one got caught twice. I can't figure out how... did it somehow step on the trigger with its back foot and then drag the trap to the next source of food? Did the deployment of the trap flip the mouse over and randomly get his back leg caught in the next door trap? Dunno.

Okay, i'm falling asleep at the 'board, so goodnight.

Post!

My first shift at the YMCA was easy... in that nobody came to my ZUMBA! class. I had fun music playing, the door open, and i even went and talked to a group of kids. But they all stayed away.

See, what it was was, there was a special event -- a fundraiser, i believe -- hosted at the Y. Hundreds of teenagers came, but every one went to the third floor where the weights and basketball courts are, or to the first floor where there was some kids having a rap... maybe it was a rap battle. But when i walked past, i heard something about the Holy Spirit, which isn't entirely typical subject matter for most rap battles, if that movie 9 Mile (or whatever) is to be trusted. Most of the girls there were dressed all cute in their tight jeans. Most of the boys appeared to be earnestly confirming their heterosexuality, and shaking one's booty in front of a mirror isn't the best way to announce one's vigorous machismo to the universe.

The first good news is that i have built up a serious thirty minutes of ZUMBA! that i'm comfortable leading. Which is more than half of what i need. The second remains that i am now an actual employee of the YMCA, even if my first shift was amusingly pointless. I chatted with the yoga instructor, who got two people to come to her class five minutes after my class technically ended.

Oh, and the other thing i did today was paint Houston's pinewood derby car. He drew a big, sixties-style convertible on the side, so i sawed, sanded, sealed, sanded, sealed, etc.'ed it until it needed the color coat. Houston picked Apple Red. Pictures will be up tomorrow, after the wheels go on. The wheels which are turning on filed-down axles, with graphite lubricant. Tomorrow morning we'll see if the tricks worked.

It's fun to work at the YMCA!

Tonight i get to fill out an application to the YMCA. Tomorrow morning I get to go into the YMCA to fill out the "new hire" paperwork. I will, from tomorrow forward (until they fire me, i guess) be in the employ of the YMCA!!!eleven!!

Now, my schedule for the planned future is only one half hour shift on Friday night, but half an hour is infinitely more time than zero, so i've got my foot in the door! Which causes me much happiness and rejoicing.

Also, i should share some musical goodness. Pandora is awesome. That's my Bassnectar station... very nice bass filled downtempo eclectic electronic music. Love it. Also goes very nicely with Milkdrop, which makes extremely beautiful visuals to go along with music. It comes with Winamp.

Funny story... no, it's actually boring.

When we got home from Kentucky, there were two messages from doctor types, one from the dentist reminding us of Karen's dentist appointment Monday. Then, there was a call from Katrina's doctor asking us to reschedule her five year checkup. So then at nine thirty or so, i got a phone call asking to reschedule "the appointment" to eleven twenty. Okay, thought i, we'll show up then. Well, my GPS touchscreen isn't working, so i didn't take it to Katrina's appointment.

When i finally found the doctor's office (how come i get "Fuller" mixed up with "Eastern"? Is it the F and the E?) they had no clue why i was there. They were so nonplussed they were minused. Me too. So i chalked it up to random stuff that happens, drove home via a large detour to buy window locks and Korean ramen noodles, and came home in time for Karen to make it to her one o'clock dentist appointment. And about then i realized my series of errors.

See, the dentist had called to reschedule Karen's appointment, but primed as i was by the messages on our machine to reschedule Katrina's appointment... you get it.

Happy Easter!

Six blue eyes in three cute heads. Today, Houston, Katrina, Zane and their cousin hosted an evening of dinner, games, and a show. Dinner was imaginary, but the service was exemplary, including a kiss on the cheek. Games were going to be Candyland, which the CIA might consider using to replace waterboarding their (adult) prisoners, but we narrowly avoided that by suggesting a lively round of paper-scissors-rock. A simple single-elimination bracket later, we convened to watch a show, which was mostly Katrina balancing in dress-up heels, Houston collapsing on the ground, and their little cousin narrating a story replete with kings, queens, princesses whose parents died, people "getting a baby"... and pom poms. Like cheerleaders use.

Graham missed us so much. Our house didn't get robbed again while we were at church. The preacher at church was really weird; very political, disjointed, and slightly risqué. The Easter egg hunt went as well as can be expected, and all three kids munched down their candy within hours. I managed to choke down one egg full of sweets. What is it with kids and candy?

Back from vacation!!!

Please enjoy a panorama of the computer stuff in my dad's mad computer geek lab. Soon i'll write a post about the details... it's not a story to get into tonight.

Our drive home was happily scenic because suddenly the GPS turned into Karen's dad and took us by back roads for a whole couple hours. The kids were mostly awesome. Zane loves saying "Water Tower!" with perfect annunciation. Our little Honda minivan is astonishingly reliable. Nothing ever goes wrong. Ever. The visit in Kentucky was perfectly enjoyable. Yesterday we ate over at the house of "Mamma Chegge" and her son who was unceremoniously kicked out of his seat at the table as soon as JJ and Lauren arrived. Cultural thing, i guess. They're from Kenya, and the food was really good. Greasy, and flavorful without having even a hint of hot-spiciness.

But... we came home to a house that's been broken into again. We have no idea how they got in... possibly one of the front windows. But the dude (or lady or possibly a group of mixed gender) left by the back door, leaving it wide open. So far the only thing we can figure out that's missing is the jar Karen made in college which contained years' worth of coins. Mostly pennies. When i talk of this robbery, i plan on talking about (the clay) pot, and our stash (of change), because what use is getting robbed if you can't make a joke out of it? Especially next Monday. They went through drawers. They opened cupboards. They went through jewelery boxes. They even looked under our mattress. Looking for crack money, i guess.

Right now the forensics lady is looking for prints, but she doesn't seem hopeful. In CSI (Karen says) they can get fingerprints from gloves. Or paper burned to ashes. Here in "the real world", you need shiny surfaces. So my anti-theft technique will be to coat everything we own in a thick layer of glossy epoxy. Problem solved.

Welcome to JJ and Lauren's kitchen!

Maybe later when i remember how to make a panorama work in my weblog i'll do that after the jump. That's JJ's kitchen! Be sure to notice the ghostly half-figures of JJ and Lauren, and the neat-o curved lines everywhere, almost as though i have a fisheye lens on my digital camera! Except i don't! Those things cost multiple hundreds of dollars!!! Autostitch is FREE!!!!! Enough with the exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

JJ cooked artichokes for us last night. They were delicious. Since i was five years old, i have only had canned artichokes in pasta dishes in restaurants, or on fancy pizza. But when i was five, back in 1977, my father cooked artichokes for us. I remember them very clearly, and i remember liking them a lot. The flavor... the nifty way you eat them, with scraping the fleshy inner parts of the leaves (petals, probably)... the complex flavor with the indescribable lingering memory of aftertaste, not unpleasant. Obviously, they made an impression on the five year old me. So JJ just cooked some for us, and they were good.

Today, JJ cooked for us again, and this time it was baked salmon, homemade pasta, yellow squash with mushrooms, and asparagus. Turns out Houston loves asparagus. He ate and ate and ate, and when there was no more, almost welled up in tears. Tears partially due to the hour which had elapsed between normal bedtime and then.

All three kids fell asleep in the car on the way home. They were tired. Why? Because of the rest of our day! See, we went to look for a labyrinth in a "burial ground" at "Elm and 3rd street" (which sounds really creepy... "labyrinth", "burial ground", "Elm street"... "Freddie Krueger"...), and instead found a pretty bad neighborhood with a very poor strip of cemetery right there. On the GPS there was obviously a very large cemetery right across that cyclone fence, so we drove the TWO MILES (GPS confirmed) to get to the resting place good enough for the rich folk. And good enough it was. There was a giant monument to some dude who'd been the Secretary of State, was a presidential candidate four times, was rich and otherwise all around famous, but who died anyway. So we ate Arby's right there, to put his memory in its place. Later we found the actual place (on Elm Tree Lane, not Elm) and it was all locked up, chained and padlocked. Good thing we had gotten lost.

Also done today: candy factory. They don't actually make candy there, they just take things like pretzels (bags of them like anyone could buy at a store) and cover them with chocolate (which they buy in giant ten or twenty pound bars from some company in California... does "Guitar Chocolate" mean anything to anyone?). I saw a taffy pulling machine, but nowhere were they actually making candy. Bummer, dude. Also, we went to a park with an excellent waterfall wall. Beautiful white noise. Also, a park with bronze horses. Also a park with live teenagers skating and falling, where there was a slide, which seemed to be designed to let you hang your legs over the side while you slid down, but which also wobbled along its long axis, but not very freely. Houston got on, started sliding down, and suddenly it flipped him right onto the ground. JJ said he sometimes sits near that bizarre toy and laughs at kids who do that. It happens a lot.

Then, the food. Now, the sleep.

Okay awesome, i got the panorama thing to work. Just be a little patient to let the image load. And the perfect setup would straighten all the fisheye-distorted lines, but this one is still pretty cool.
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Tuesdays in Kentucky

Antony bought a new car!

In barely related news, i'm breaking stuff. Yesterday i went over to JJ and Lauren's house, and instantly, the music player on JJ's computer (Winamp Pro) started glitching. While i was listening. Then we went to JJ's best friend's house, and while i was playing that ridiculously addictive game, Burnout Paradise City, he got the infamous Red Ring of Death. This is when an XBox 360 system dies. Dead. Microsoft has fixed hundreds of thousands of these machines for free because turns out this happens a lot. But it happened while i was playing. And today after Antony bought his car, i started messing with the CD player, and made the display stop working. Usually the opposite happens -- i have an aura which fixes machines. Many people i know have the opposite experience, and now i know how the other half lives. Or feels, at least.

Antony's new car is a 89 Honda Civic, the bare-bones model without even power steering, but somebody swapped engines with a Civic SI, which is the sportier car. Then, the owner put a multi throttle body system on, which i had never even seen before. It's really really cool. It's got four chrome trumpet bell looking things feeding four separate throttle bodies (from a hyper-performance Honda motorcycle) going into the SI engine. It's got a proper 4 into 1 header on it, with a stock exhaust. This is funny, because it makes much more noise from the intakes than it does from the exhaust. The "blat" noise hot Hondas make isn't a noise this Honda makes. This one goes "GRRRRRHHHHH", more of a sucking noise than a typical exhaust noise. I've always wanted a hot little Honda.

Okay, seriously, i told Karen it would take twenty minutes to turn a computer video into a DVD player DVD, and it's taken nearly an hour. Wow. So i'm going to go tell her it's almost done.

Kentucky -- Monday

There's Josiah and JJ. Good kids... or good kid and good man. We played that Burnout game i got at home... and now it's really late, and Zane is trying to wake up, saying "Momma, Momma, unnggghhhhh" so i'm wondering if i should go give the kid a hug or just go to bed and hope he falls asleep. Either way, i'm out.

Day One in Kentucky!

Today we went to High Bridge Park, which is a little park overlooking the merging of the Dix and Kentucky rivers. There's a railroad bridge over the Kentucky River gorge, which was quite an engineering feat for its day. The guy who originally was to build the bridge was the same fellow who designed and built (until he died) the Brooklyn Bridge. Like the Brooklyn Bridge, the "High Bridge" was originally going to be a suspension bridge, but after what's-his-name left the project, having already built the towers which were to support the cables which would span the gap, another dude was hired, and he built the bridge as a cantilever bridge (cantilever means "without support") looking pretty much like the skeleton of a steel-girder building lying on its side. Less graceful or beautiful than a suspension bridge, but impressive nonetheless. Good for them. High bridges are cool.

Houston seemed a little bit sad today. We couldn't figure out why. Katrina loved being outside in the nice weather. Zane remains extremely cute. Karen took a small nap. Vacations are awesome.

Driving to Kentucky!

That's what i did all day. Driving to Kentucky, and working. The drive was scenic, my children were hilarious, and the GPS which i got mostly to fiddle with and add software too so i can watch videos, play games, listen to music.... yeah, it also works as a "GPS", sending us directly to my parent's house with voice prompts, arrows... it was amazing. My first trip lead by a machine, and it really made it a lot more enjoyable for me.

Kid moments: Karen set up the laptop to let them watch a movie. She said "Can you guys see the screen?" and Katrina said brightly, with joy, "I can see half!" Zane smeared his face and hands with chocolate, and when Karen went to photograph him, telling him "Say cheese!" Zane responded "No, it's chocolate." And Houston's tooth fell out! His fourth tooth to vacate his mouth, and his second upper tooth. Yay!

Michigan traffic

Yesterday i was coming home from the Y, and there was construction on the freeway. Construction in Michigan is a constant presence, even in the dead of winter. Our freeze-thaw cycle treats roads brutally, ensuring that any tiny crack in the road surface gets widened each time water seeps down and then freezes. The big trucking and construction lobbyists have manipulated our government into allowing monstrous trucks to operate on our roads, with no weight limit. The only limit on how much weight a truck can carry is how many axles it can stow beneath its frame. So you have full length semi trailers with eight axles under it carrying the maximum payload per axle, and every time this truck turns, the wheels on the axles toward the front of the trailer chassis are scrubbing across the road! Terrible. And then there's the fact that Michigan has been the poorest state in the country for a good long while now.

So anyway, there's construction. The exit i want is right before the construction. So, why in the world couldn't they keep the freeway two lanes, with the right lane an exit only lane? Why did they need to force everyone to merge into one lane, and THEN let people who want to take my exit (a pretty busy downtown exit, too) get off the freeway? They do this every time, and i think it's so STUPID.

Also stupid: Michigan lefts. A few years ago i wrote the office of the Department of Transportation using the elite sounding name "J. Houston Moore", complaining about these stupid intersections where in order to turn left, you get in the right lane, turn right, cross however many lanes of traffic to get in the left lane (going the WRONG WAY from which direction you want to go) and then do a U-turn (possibly carrying fifty tons of gravel in an eight axle trailer) and then proceed through the traffic light. Again. So unbelievably bone-headed. The response i got from the MDoT included statistical benefits having to do with accidents and traffic flow, but they're clearly inferior.

I would perhaps accept that The Experts know what they're talking about, until i think about left turn traffic lights in this state. At an intersection in Michigan, if you have a green light to go straight, and a blinking red light for the middle lane, that means "yield to oncoming traffic and turn left". Since when in the history of the USA does a blinking red light ever mean yield? Oh i know in Michigan. But nowhere else. Blinking red lights always mean "Stop". For the first couple weeks we lived here i treated these as they're treated in all 49 other states, and stopped, and proceeded with caution. This surprised many people behind me, i'm sure. So clearly the road designing experts in Michigan are not as expert as one might hope. I feel slightly vindicated every time i see a new traffic light. See, finally somebody noticed what was going on, and now left turn lights are blinking yellow arrows, red arrows, or green arrows. Finally, compliance with the rest of the country! I have no hope that they'll ever abandon the Michigan Left, though. Entrenched bureaucracy and all.

Burnout: Paradise City

Okay, there's this game called Burnout: Paradise City. It's the first of the very entertaining Burnout series which has been released for the PC. Well, i got it last night. And i fully blame that game for keeping me awake until mumble mumble thirty. Karen did the math today and told me i got one and a half hours of sleep. I feel fuzzy, but okay. I'll sleep LONG tonight, i promise. The attractions of Burnout: Paradise City are: It's pretty easy. You don't lose control of your car when you hit a curb. Your opponents aren't omniscient or omnipotent. And the city is totally beautiful. You can drive anywhere. There's never any loading time for races. The best part is the car damage rendering. It's incredible. Now i've spent a lot of time watching cars crumple in crash tests. Catastrophic disassembly of complex machines has always fascinated me. So in the game, when you run into a wall, and your hood and fenders crumple, your door openings bend out of shape, your wheels smash back into the wheel wells... it's just so so so cool.

Anyway, that's what i did last night. Stupid, but fun. Some people do "feast days" for Lent, where you can enjoy that which you gave up for Lent. I guess i took all my feast days in one just then.