Our family's first broken bone

Houston's leg is BROKEN!!!! It's not broken like, jagged bone ends piercing the skin, or with the leg hanging off at a bizarre angle, but it's definitely broken.

Karen took him to get X-rayed today. Karen said "Houston wants to tell you what happened." Houston reported: "My leg is broken." Karen elaborated with "The radiologist said that there are bone fragments, but wouldn't say more." They didn't get to see the X-rays. Which is a giant bummer. I hope they give them to us. I bet if we had single payer socialized medicine, we'd have been able to see the X-rays.

So that's the dealie-oh. In other news, i replaced the front rotors on our minivan. That chore was far less arduous than i'd feared. And cheap. You can buy car parts on The Internet for, like, half the cost of the local auto parts franchise. And, you know, i've never ever replaced rotors on any of my vehicles. I've never even had them turned (where a shop scrapes off some metal to get rid of warp or variations in thickness). Our van really needed new (or resurfaced) rotors, though. It was embarrassingly wobbly, especially at certain speeds. Karen felt very unsafe, even though brake systems are extremely robust, and even have built in redundancy. But now stops are as smooth as waterlogged cheese puffs.

CAMPING LOL!!!

We went camping from Wednesday afternoon to Sunday midday at Ludington State Park. And Ludington should be spelled Luddington, because that's how it's pronounced. Dudington would be "Dude-ington", right? But then through the park there runs the Sable River, which rhymes with cobble not table, so maybe it's a French spelling thing. Unfortunately, my whole semester of French in college leaves me with no expertise in that area. But i can say "I would like a little bit of cheese" in flawlessly accented Parisian French.

Wednesday evening was nice for setting up! There were moments of sunshine! There were more moments of sunshine the next day when we went to the beach at the mouth of the Sable River, and our local star became unblocked again, just in time to dry out our tent, but besides those times, it was mostly rain. Chilly rain. We seem to be destined for rainy camping trips, since we've been rained on more often than not. And our very-much-on-sale gigantic tent continues to keep us dry! Go cheap tent!

Tragically, however, Save-A-Lot has seemingly discontinued "Ginger Evans Complete Pancake Mix", replacing it with "Good Harvest Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix". They've ruined pancakes for us. The new recipe has a little less salt, softer flour (less gluten), and they've added some flavor -- vanilla maybe, or just a little sugar. I am aghast, not because they're now so bad, but because their old stuff was so much better than any other pancake mix. And now we have to tolerate mediocrity.

Okay, so Karen's post for today has details and a slideshow with dozens of pictures, all of them fantastic, so i won't try to duplicate her efforts. I'll sum up: Houston, Katrina and Zane were so well behaved. They made us beam with pride. Houston rode around on his decorated bicycle until he got made fun of too often and then he took off the flags and crepe streamers. That made us sad. I like his decorated, customized bike. Katrina played sweetly with her cousins and siblings, and was a picky eater. But she drew some excellent pictures, and wrote a book. And she bravely flushed at least three toilets unassisted by grown-ups. Zane played by himself hilariously well, coming up with whole universes for his dump truck to traverse. Also, i told him "Hey Zane, i'm going to go to the bathroom. Do you need to go?" and he responded brightly, "No! But I will go with you!" So we had a little outing to the bathroom.

Houston injured himself. He leaped down a flight of stairs which turned out to be more stair filled than he'd expected. It might be a sprain, and might be... broken! He's clearly in pain, but remains patient and resilient. And calm. It's weird to have him stuck to one place and not be able to bounce off any walls. We'll see tomorrow. Poor guy. I felt especially sad for him as he scooted around the sand dunes we climbed so he could be closer to the action. I got to carry him around on my back for most of that trip, though, so we got to have fun conversations.

Finally, i love the ages our kids are at right now. Zane is totally verbal, expressing him concrete thoughts in his carefully enunciated, rhythmic way. Katrina has a quick, clever mind, so she comes up with some very funny observations and jokes. Houston is learning to think, so he's inquisitive and critical, and can carry on entertainingly deep conversations. So that's my kids. Also, i love the age my Karen is at... :) And we're all prime ages, as i believe has been pointed out.

Kids

Houston and i sat for about ten minutes today, just talking. I think we talked about bugs, but i'm not entirely sure. But the awesome thing is, he's interesting! He has ideas! And complex thoughts! I dare say he's more interesting to talk to than most kids i've met at work. And not just because he's been steeped in an environment over which i have a great deal of influence.

Also, Zane fell asleep with his head buried in his favorite backpack. He LOVES that backpack. It's like the long lost brother he never had, besides Houston, who he never lost, and he DOES have. Major differences there. Plus, Houston's not made out of green nylon canvas. Synthetics never have complex thoughts.

Finally, in case it seems like we're camping for the next few days, we're totally not. Karen's going to sharpen our sword collection, while i'm going to be reloading 5.56x45mm NATO ammo. Katrina loves getting dressed up in her padded bodysuit and training Fang and Damager, our pit bulls. So that's what we'll be doing.

Headphones

Today (actually, yesterday) Katrina came up to me and showed me her headphones she'd made from paper. Included was a plug, exactly like a wall electricity outlet. Which she taped to the wall, as you can see, and plugged the wire into. I'm sure that Katrina's not aware that she'd get a loud pop and some smoke from headphones she plugged into a 120V 60Hz AC household plug.

Speaking of which, i've never heard of a kid getting injured by household power, even here in the States where our plugs are quite scary compared to extra-extra-safe-plugs required by other countries. A Google search listed only hazards from high voltage wires outside, or the dangers of poorly designed hair driers or curling irons. No stores about toddlers toasting themselves by poking forks into unprotected outlets.

Cause, y'know, i was shocked several times as a kid by household current. I got burned twice, but usually it was just a surprising fast-wiggly-feeling in my arm and then a little adrenaline rush. So really, i've got to believe that, while we should obviously respect electricity -- especially near water and plumbing -- it's really not that big of a deal. Much more dangerous: cars. And stairs. And any imaginable combination of the two.

Wheee!!! ...d

Story from work:

I was letting a kid get some fishing stuff out of a closet today, and another kid ran up to me and started emptying his pockets. "Oh, hi Insertname, you got back from your home visit?" Yeah, Insertname had just returned, and was strangely eager to prove that he didn't have any contraband.

Plot thickens: his roommate* started acting ill. "I don't want to eat," he said.

*Yes, i work on a sex-offender unit, and the kids have roommates. In fact, once we get to full capacity of sixteen kids, nine of them will be in triple occupied rooms. Nine of sixteen. Over half. This is a recipe for poisoning the therapeutic milieu. I have a problem with that.

More flour added to plot, and heat turned up, starts to thicken more: Insertname's roommate told me that Insertname brought weed back from his home visit. This kid showed me two lighters and some rolling papers

The plot has been boiling for a while, and the potatoes are starting to disintegrate: when Insertname got back from the activity, i told him "Hey... bad news..." and confronted him. He denied everything! And resolved to deny everything for about ten minutes, when he broke down to my tenacious logic and admitted that he had some weed, and he gave it to me.

The plot wasn't very good and was way overcooked, so now it's cooled on the table, and a gelatinous mess: All three kids in that room got grounded, so the two who hadn't "snitched" got extremely angry at the snitcher and planned to beat him up. Don't even think about it, said i, because it's simply not going to happen tonight. So they sat around and grumbled until they could start resignedly cracking jokes.

The plot gets thrown onto the compost pile: No wonder the kid didn't want to eat. It was disgusting. Plus: i am SO GLAD i don't work tomorrow.

Happy Wedding Day, Richard!!!

There's little Richard! Except of course he's not little anymore... he's like twenty two. So he went and got hisself married. Wow.

We showed up on time. WIN! We saw Richard's mom and dad and chatted. AWESOME! We talked to Aaron, Tim's brother. LOVE! And i got to meet Tabitha for the first time. But then we didn't talk to the bride or groom at all, almost. The day everybody congregates around you, and turns out your busy with pretty much everything. So instead, we hung out with my old buddy Dave, his wife, and four daughters, and then danced like insane ZUBMA! people. Dave and Sarah's kids in particular love to dance like insane ZUMBA! people. Unless that's also how Hannah Montana dances -- i've never seen that show. Which might actually shock some people, considering that i like, y'know, Hello Kitty.

So congratulations, Richard and Tabitha! Your new life starts NOW. No wait, NOW! N....NOW!

Zane on his tricycle

Yay! A picture!

Okay, bedtime.

Bowling!

Rats. My camera is in the car. So no picture today. Oh wait, i'll just use that old drawing.

But we went bowling! Last winter, we tried to go bowling to reward Houston for doing well in school. But it turned out that it would cost somewhere between thirty and seventeen thousand dollars for the five of us to bowl one game. And we're rich, but not in the "have lots of money" sense. So we left, disappointed.

However, Monday we went to ZUMBA!, where Houston's eagle eyes spotted free bowling coupons, about which he carefully inquired, and took exactly five, so today we could all go and bowl a game. I'm proud to say that i broke the double digit barrier, and proud of Karen for trouncing me, and proud of Zane for never bowling it so slowly that it didn't make it all the way to the pins. Also, the bowling alley was very clean and polished looking, and only smelled a little bit like ashtray.

So, a positive experience.

Final post about my amp...

There's the finished product! It's in a "Bart's Trivia Game" tin. I was going to post pictures on the forum where i've gotten a lot of help troubleshooting, but i seriously think they'd be insulted. They take themselves pretty seriously. Plus, the metal is really thin, and "ferrous", which means it's made from an iron alloy (steel) so it resonates with the magnetic fields from the transformers.

So when it's on, the amp itself hums very quietly. Big no no in the audiophile community.

Also: i used the two words "resonates with" without it being a lame trendy substitute for actual description! Sweet! You know... like "The new Weezer album resonates with me" barf.

Okay, final note about the amp, then i'm done. I used it for both my ZUMBA! classes. It performed extremely well! Quiet... but some different resistors will fix that. So... i guess i reserve the right to mention if my modifications are successful...

Plus, my kids are amazingly cute, but everybody knows that.

Fun day with the kids!

Today i took the kids to two stores! They seemed pretty excited about that. In the electronics store i bought heatshrink tubing, and at the building supply store i exchanged one of our blinds which decided to never go up again. Which left us with the option to become agroaphobic, invent Viagra for blinds, or exchange it. We did the third. Also, we bought Little Debbie snack cakes. And some glue.

Then, i took the kids to the YMCA. Their sound system sucks so bad. Terrible. I might need to change the boot cap cutoff resistors in my amp (they're the ones i replaced with a different value than came in the kit) so i can make it get louder, but once it gets louder, it would TOTALLY sound so much better than that amp. ZUMBA! was fun, as always. Oh! A different guy went up front with Tara this time! And i think his name's Lorenzo -- a Spanish sounding name! I don't know how i feel about that.

Um... in between that, mostly we cleaned the house, ate food, and played. :) Now i have eleven days with one day off. :( Oh wait, i have Friday off, which is random.

Most boring expensive car ever

Allow me to introduce the Bristol. Meticulously hand-built from the finest available materials. And they cost, like a quarter million dollars. But they're' so boring looking.

Anyway, today we went out on the boat, which is always really fun. Then we came home and i hooked my new amplifier to some speakers and listened to music. Oh! It was astonishing. I'm used to my fun computer speakers with their heavy handed amplified bass, or decent headphones. But this was new. I could hear the nuances i'm used to with my Sennheiser headphones, but with some reproduction of the bass frequencies i can kind of hear from my computer speakers. Ah... never mind, just know that it sounds so much better than i expected. I've always thought of the amplifier as kind of an electronic doohickey which does its job, but turns out they do make a difference! So i blasted the neighborhood with some of my ZUMBA! playlist (which was so enjoyable now that it sounds really good) and played with Houston and Katrina. We played "throw the water balloon without popping it". Fun game.

And besides the Bristol car, i've recently been reminded of The Yip Yips. I suspect it was Jim Henson and crew who designed these muppets, but whoever did was completely inspired when they came up with those two. And the premise and acting is so goofy -- i can just imagine sitting under the set going "Yip... yip... yip yip yip yipyipyip Uh huh, uh huh" and trying so hard not to crack up. So Funny! Choose you this day what you will laugh at, but for me and my household, absurdist humor is where it's at.

YES!!!

Okay, today i'm mentioning people in my InterBlog so's i can say that i mentioned them on FaceBook.

a) Karen, my honey, has amazing kids. Houston cleaned up like crazy today, with virtually no prompting. He was awesome today, and he enjoyed it! And, he's an incredible actor. Yesterday during quiet time, he was told he could come back downstairs and play on the computer, but he'd have to "pretend" to go to quiet time so his younger siblings would feel that life was Fair. So Houston complained, dragged his feet, said how bored he'd be, and then sneaked downstairs when the act was over.

b) JoeTanner. This is the dude i busted some locks up in his hair at Young Life Camp. He's local, so he popped over for a dread refresher, and we hung out and chatted while i made some dread wax. I hope that stuff works out...

c) Jeff. When i was... eleven... Jeff and i started hanging out building electronics. Fans, mostly. I'm pretty sure everybody thought we were colossal dweebs because we had contraptions built from band-aid tins or, um, pill containers, with model car motors affixed to the top, and model airplane propellers melted to the motor armatures. My third or fourth scar is on my right thumb, upwards from and to the right of my thumbnail. It's from where Jeff and i were soldering a difficult, complex bunch of wires together. My thumb was involved in the holding of said wires, and a large drop of solder fell on my thumb. I flicked it away and it ricocheted around the basement, but not before leaving me with that scar. The reason i mention this is:

MY AMPLIFIER WORKS!!!!!eleven!!!11!!! I am so happy! It sounds ...(shudder)...amazing....(shiver)....... At least, this amp sounds amazing according to self-delusional audiophile types. I have to admit that it sounds clearer and cleaner than my $25 (for the set) KLH bookshelf speakers have ever sounded. The treble is a little tinny and undefined, but that's a marked improvement from not having any. This project was quite an ordeal. First, there were dozens of tiny SMD bits to assemble. Then i discovered that most DIY amps require plus AND minus voltages, so i got another 24V transformer for the negative rail. Then i burned up two tiny SMD resistors i'd swapped with other ones. Then i learned that my 24V transformers were actually putting out 38 volts once the current was rectified and smoothed, and that was too much for my amp. So i found some adjustable voltage regulators out of a burned up computer PSU, but then i fried those voltage regulators by discharging the smoothing caps THROUGH them. At least i think i did, because once i tore apart about twenty (newer) computer power supplies, finding no adjustable (positive) voltage regulators, i finally did get some, and then the voltages were still wrong. Until i put a fresh battery in my multimeter. Grrrrr. So i tested, i multimeter'd, i fiddled, i procrastinated... until tonight i finally powered my amp up, and it makes music! Not smoke!

And Jeff started me out soldering.

So now it's really late, and my mp3 player is charging, so what better time to go to bed than now?

Aaaaaah!

On the day before her hearing aids arrived.
Sorry about the politically incorrect humor there. Karen (certified sign language interpreter) okayed it.

Okay, yesterday was pretty cool -- we went on "an adventure!" This is what Karen's been doing with the kids to fill out the "Things We Will Do This Summer" list. It's getting more and more filled out! Yes! Yesterday we had Culver's Frozen Custard for the first time. It was underwhelming.

Today i got to be the only staff at work with the four kids who had been bad enough to not get to go sailing. Sailing! I was thinking the kids were gonna be fine, but they were not. Sigh. Finally, they saw sense, and the most naughty of the kids followed me around doing all the chores i could think of for two and a half hours for a consequence... but what was supposed to be a fun shift turned out to kind of suck.

So i need some sleep! Maybe i'll get some of that real quick.

Tearing up the road.

My little calendar thing works! Happy! These pictures will change every day to match the date. Automatically. It uses three lines of Perl code. Well... thirteen if you count the headers and footers. There are whole suites of applications which do things like present one picture per day or display a random picture from a folder... but nothing this simple. Maybe someday i'll put the script and the necessary folders in a zip file and make it available to the world to do this very thing.

A giant noise woke me up this morning. It was a construction crew sawing up our street, and dropping giant chunks into the back of a dump truck. Cacophonous. So then, after springing down the stairs, i joined Karen and the kids outside to spectate.

I guess The City has decided to remove driveway things which don't lead to a garage or parking spot. Corbyn's ex-house had one of those, which was handy to pull the car onto to do work. However, that area is going to be replaced by dirt and grass.

The driveway thing removal crew moved quicker and more coordinatedly than any construction crew i've ever seen. The guy with the Bobcat skid-steer thing was spinning around our street, constantly near-missing his coworkers, their truck, and my car. Twice i even saw the front shovel push a guy's boot, and nobody commented.

So i told them that they moved like a well choreographed dance team. I'm not sure that was the best compliment i could have given five African-American construction worker guys, but Ennis (after whom, along with "and Sons", the business is named) accepted with graciousness.

Accomplishments

Houston made a beautiful pattern in his food this evening.

Also, Karen taught the kids to tie their shoes. Katrina figured it out very quickly -- astonishingly quickly. I remember working on learning how to do that for at least days. Houston got a proper knot a few times, but will need a little more practice. Katrina has more aptitude for some things like this. I've even heard her give Houston advice on how to get a pesky computer program to work.

The most awesome thing about the kids learning to tie their shoes is that Karen has been teaching them how to tie in a SQUARE KNOT!!!!! Yes! That, or a reef knot, which is a more nautical sounding term for the same thing. Slipped reef knot, to be exact. Details here. Way to start them out right. Myself, i was in college before i discovered that i had been tying granny knots in my shoelaces since i was five. Whoops.

I managed to avoid my obsession with my amplifier power supply today! Okay -- i DID go to a computer store and get five blown power supplies to rip apart to find adjustable voltage regulators, but i haven't even touched them yet. But the way i avoided it? Related: Karen found this:
Obviously, this is cute. It would be cuter, in our humble (but correct) opinion, if the sign holders were our children. So Karen said "Hey, Juanito, could you figure out a way to do that for our weblogs?" and i responded "Uh... it would be really complicated.....", but i did come up with something. This is it (i think):

I hope that tomorrow or the next day, Karen will make better pictures to fill in that calendar. Also, today i wore Katrina's shorts on my head as a hat.

Bookworm

Houston reads. He loves it. Some people read because they feel obliged. Many people very seldom read. Karen and i read lots. Thus, our children are destined to be readers.

Score!

Can't skip too many days!

So yeah, here i am. Stuff is normal... i had to work early Friday Saturday and Sunday, and of course i remain obsessed with my amplifier and power supply.

Y'know my perfectly functioning regulated power supply? Well, it includes these large capacitors, which are similar to batteries, except they can discharge all their electricity in a microsecond. So if you touch the terminals of a large capacitor, you will give yourself a nasty shock. This is why it's not terribly smart to disassemble disposable cameras, since the flash capacitor can really give you a jolt. Not enough to kill you... And the caps in my power supply are much larger. So to be safe, i was sure to discharge the capacitors every time i needed to keep working on my project.

Little did i know, but discharging the capacitors THROUGH the voltage regulators burns out those regulators. So they're toast. Bummer. At least they were free. Now i am disassembling all the broken power supplies and whatever electronic junk i have laying around so i can find some more voltage regulators. Also! I'm throwing it away when i'm done! Awesome.

On the weather ... heh ... front... it was very pleasantly summery today. Thunderstorms, hot, sunny, and now thunderstorms again.

Also i didn't set my alarm this morning, and woke up to the closing of the front door -- our cousins were leaving to go back home. Providentially, their car is loud, so i went from "Hmm, my front door closed" awake to "Guests leaving, probably time to wake up and go to work" awake. Perfect!

And yeah, it's bedtime. Sleeeeeeeep.

Regulated power supply works!

There's the regulator and smoother part of my new power supply! The really cool thing about this is that i used nothing but used parts. The voltage regulators and resistors i got out of an old broken computer power supply. A couple of the capacitors came out of a Rockford Fosgate amplifier which i found lying in the middle of the parking lot near the Department of Human Resources -- where people get welfare. The amp had a couple blown MOSFETs, which are $5 each without shipping, so i never even thought about trying to fix it. But that's where a couple of the caps came from.

The best part is that it WORKS! My power supply used to put out an unregulated 37 volts, which is too much for my amplifier. Unregulated means that when there's nothing using the electricity, the voltage will be higher than when there's a load. My transformers are kind of gigantic, so they can put out plenty of power for any load i'm likely to pile on, so basically the 37 volts won't dip very much when my little amp is likely to only pull a few amperes of energy. Therefore, i need a stable source of power. Turns out they make things which take whatever voltage you feed them, look at a ratio of resistors you connect to the legs of the device, and put out whatever voltage is specified by the resistors. My resistors are 150 ohms and 3,300 ohms, which gives 27 volts. Ten volts (at whatever amperage load is being drawn) will be dissipated by the voltage regulators as heat. Thus the heatsink.

Now i have to finish a couple things with my amp, and try powering it on! I'm a little bit nervous. I've been procrastinating on this project, kind of looking for other things to do (like the ill-fated toroidal transformer from yesterday) so when my amp actually doesn't work (which i'm terrified will be the case) i'll just be kind of done. And then i'll say "dang it" and do something else.

Also today, we had Zane's very small family birthday party. He loves being the center of attention. He's such a cutie. Oh -- i also made food. I'm not JUST making non-working electronic devices right now.

My nifty toroidal transformer

Just so i remember later: i wanted a 12V power supply for one of my old amps which i never got to work. So i tore apart an old power supply which used to work but broke, and unwrapped one of the toroid inductors in there to use as the core for a toroidal power transformer. Toroidal transformers are what all the cool kids use in their fancy do-it-yourself amps. There's a whole subculture devoted to these amps, full of obnoxious descriptions of how amplifiers perform. These dudes are crazy -- they claim that certain electronic components like diodes or capacitors in the power supply actually make the music sound different. Um... no? A rectifying diode makes AC electricity into DC electricity. That's all it does. It's like saying the lugnuts which hold your wheels to your car change the way your car handles. And we humans are so incredibly susceptible to false impressions, and these people make changes to their amps and try to use their memory to remember what the amp USED to sound like, and compare that to how it sounds now. "The soundstage seemed farther away, the upper mids were no longer brittle, but had detailed attention. However, the pacing seemed off, with the amp seeming clinical in presentation of the lower frequencies." Okay, you're full of crap. Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome crap.

So anyway, i had the core, and several hundred feet of wire i got out of an old computer monitor, so of course i started winding the core. I got perhaps 1,500 windings into the primary coil, and wrapped a couple hundred turns of the secondary coil, and tried plugging it in. Yeah... i got a whole two volts out of it. And there wasn't enough impedance in the primary windings -- it would have blown my circuit breakers if i hadn't been using my light-bulb tester device, which basically runs my electricity through a lamp which will just turn on if there's a short or fault in my projects. Instead of blowing stuff up or tripping breakers. Karen thanks me.

Sigh. I gave up on my really nifty toroidal transformer, having no clue what i did wrong. Maybe 1,500 windings wasn't enough in the primary? Maybe the wire was too big? Maybe the insulation on the wire was scratched? I dunno. So now my project is to build a regulated power supply for the amp i just built, using more broken power supplies and random resistors and stuff i have lying around.

I admit, i'm having a lot of fun.

BLUEBERRIES!!!!

Today we went to pick blueberries! It was so delicious.

I don't like peas. They're utterly uninteresting to me. I don't like the taste, i don't care for the texture, they look kind of gross -- a pile of dull green, slightly wrinkly spheroids. But every time they're offered on the menu, i'll try a few. Sometimes when i'm feeling particularly health-conscious, i'll even eat a heaping bowlful. But every time i try them, it turns out they're still gross. I'm nearly to the point where i decide i will never like peas. Not quite yet...

Blueberries are like the tasty oblate spheroid yin to the dull green wrinkly spheroid yang of peas. So every year i wonder privately if this year i'm just not going to like them as much. But no!!! I do like them as much! They're so utterly awesome to eat. I ate... a lot.

Mmmmm, spicy sweet, subtle, i even enjoy the spiky treat of the crown thing on the abactinal (that's a Mervyn Peake word meaning "away from the mouth (stem)") side of the blueberry, which turns off many who would otherwise adore these little planet shaped morsels of incredibleness.

My ZUMBA! classes:

My class at Wedgwood has been falling off in attendance. So much so that i got to leave early, after giving one of our chaplains and a kid she was hanging out with some salsa lessons. Salsa was the first Latin style dance i learned, way a long time ago, to dance to this song. So salsa's like my old favorite pair of shoes of dance moves. Comfy and easy to... um... put on? But it's not that easy, i guess, for some people. Especially when you do the salsa-kick. Or the crossover.

My later class at the Y, however, is going very very well. There were probably thirty people there, packed into a little carpeted studio. And i recognize a lot of them, so they must be regulars. And they know some of the dances! But the room is getting too small (yay, awesome, go ZUMBA!) and the sound system is nearly intolerable. Abrasive treble, grating mids, and murky bass. And that's after i've fiddled with the graphic EQ settings. One time my Ukrainian student (no idea if she's Ukrainian -- she does have a Slavic accent) really complained about it, with the horrible speakers pounding a headache into her. Ow.

I continue to admire the lady who leads the class downtown, Tara, who has a new song like every week. Dang. She probably has twelve hours of material from which to draw, whereas i have less than two. Tara also does an excellent job looking like she's having fun. She grins hugely, gives obvious eye contact (especially to me when she makes a mistake, because she knows i'll notice) and is a blast to watch. Me? I realized today that most of the time when i'm leading, my eyes are nearly closed! Partly this has to do with my near-phobia of looking at myself in mirrors while other people might notice. Partly the gender balance in the room.

One time in college, i was hanging out between classes in a lounge area. I saw one of my friends approaching the building, and i noticed that he was walking oddly -- almost strutting. I realized that he could see himself in the Texas-heat-rejecting reflective glass of the front of the building, and was basically checking himself out. I thought "Do I do that???" and realized that i probably did, so from then on if i could see my reflection, i purposely ignored it. And now that i'm aware of that, i notice other people doing the "look at me!" thing in reflective glass.

So i do not look at myself while leading ZUMBA!. Also, there's thirty women and girls are in the room with me shaking their bodies -- and look at me the only XY in the room. This intentional-ignoring skill i mentioned earlier has been handy since i discovered, sometime around puberty, how interesting certain parts of females are. And it makes people comfortable, when you're interacting with them, not to have their chests be stared at. And i've always tried to make people comfortable. First-born peacemaker thing, i guess.

Therefore, in a room filled with me, dozens of gyrating women, and a bunch of mirrors, there's very little to look at.

Grr!

Sorry i've not been posting. My stupid brain keeps obsessing about my amplifier. So i'm trying really hard to stop thinking about it... but i can't! So... i guess i'll just try really hard. My new book is really good, so maybe i'll go to bed and read that.

Microfarads. Ohms. Voltage regulators. Rectifying diodes. Transformers, center tapped, dual secondaries... Okay, i should have been an engineer. Or a teacher.

Zane is THREE!!!!

Zane's birthday started for him at six thirty, with "Mommy!!! My diaper is falling off!!!" and so we had to deal with that. Yeah. It improved some after that. Namely, i got to sleep a little more, i finally got to go to one of Houston's t-ball games, and then we made cake! And Zane opened presents, we played outside... and eventually went to a ball game in box seats.

And the box seats were incredible. Now baseball is generally a boring sport for non-fans. Fans can appreciate the statistics, the strategy, the skill set, the subtleties of the fields... and me? Well, when the outfielder sprinted to catch the pop fly to deep left field, and dove for it, performing a flying catch, after which he slid for several feet and crashed into the wall: that was good. Very entertaining. But that was just one moment. He was on our team, and we won... and that's about it. But the box seat added beverages, delicious hot food, a place to walk around, and interesting company! Those additions made the sum very, very much fun.

And now i'm falling asleep at the keyboard. Which isn't as dangerous as falling asleep on, say, an escalator. But in bed is better.

(dinosaur) Happy (dinosaur) Birthday (dinosaur) Zane!!!