Yeah, I Rock

I used to be the guy on the left. Then I played the game. Now I understand. (From xkcd.com)

What song is this?

A rousing round of Guess the Backward Song...

[Addendum 12/29/07: Sorry if you haven't been able to see this video. I used the new YouTube feature to post a video directly into a blog. It worked right after I did it, but apparently something changed since then and the video stopped showing. I'm trying again a different way. Better luck this time, I hope.]

Wisdom

Franny says I gotta post more. So here's some philosophy I found enlightening. As always, click to make it readable.

Merry Christmas!

Between the holidays and the toddler, it's been busy, but I had to post a Merry Christmas to everybody out there. Ours was fairly low key. Most of my family was in Colorado, but we couldn't make that trip unfortunately. Only so much leave to go around. We did get a chance to see them on the webcam, and although the Mizz has about a one minute tolerance for sitting still, we still got to see family on the appropriate day.

We actually started Christmas Thursday when my folks came through on their way to the Colorado festivities. They brought along a winner -- a tent and tunnel combo. The Mizz loves it, although it does pretty much fill up the living room. We're down to the tent right now, which is still plenty big for him. It's full of legos rights now. He keeps inviting me inside, but I can only fit about halfway in laying down. He keeps telling me to wake up.

We ducked away Saturday night to Newport, Oregon. It's not exactly prime beach season, but we figured, if you're going to be cooped up out of the rain with a toddler, you might as well be somewhere cool. As we rolled into town, the rain stopped, so we were able to run around on the beach for a while. The Mizz has never really seen the beach, so rain drenched sand in the cold was still pretty cool to him. He did a lot of playing with kelp and sand and just running around. He kept saying that he wanted to go the beach. When we pointed out the fact that he was at the beach, he said, "No, I want to go to the beach of the water." He then ran directly for the surf. Luckily, we had seen this coming and we were a good hundred yards from the waves and the sharks and whatnot so he was easy to catch. We also caught a glimpse of some harbor seal napping on rocks. The next morning, we checked out the historic bayside, specifically to take the Mizz to the Undersea Garden. It wasn't that cool. It was a good sized aquarium, but unlike the brightly colored brochures, it was pretty drab. A whole green and brown aquarium full of green and gray and brown fish. Somewhat interesting, but only for a short time. The Mizz did get to touch a starfish and was pretty pleased about that. More interesting were the sea lions lounging on the dock outside. They were a little wary of us, but stood their ground. After all that, we decided that although getting away was nice, cooped up in a hotel with a toddler isn't that great. We wandered up the coast a way, with a quick stop in Depot Bay (world's smallest harbor) to observe the storm action in the blowholes. The water was shooting maybe 30 feet above the roadway, which was already quite a bit above the water. Very cool. After that, we'd had our fill of driving in the rain, so we called it a trip and headed home.

Today was pretty relaxed. The Mizz got a few things, but he's still pretty young to really understand the whole day. He has fun opening presents, but if they hadn't been there, he wouldn't have noticed. Waiting for him under the tree this morning was an old Tonka dump truck of mine, circa 1974(?). It is labelled as "hydraulic." "Spring loaded" or "catapult" might have been a better description. We'll show the Mizz that feature some other time. He also got a bunch of new legos, as I was feeling limited in my creative possibilities with his old ones. Now we can build much taller towers and much more complicated castles. We even built a house, because the Mizz wanted one to put a flower on. I'm just the builder, not the designer.

We got a taste of white Christmas. We got a good bit of heavy wet snow that made everything pretty, although it didn't stick around for long. We were going to go for a walk in it, but it was already raining again by the time we got moving.

To end the day, some friends brought over Chinese food, and unbeknownst to us, some more gifts for the Mizz. The best was four eggs worth of Silly Putty. The Mizz got four plastic eggs, WITH the original wrapping, and the rest of us got a lump of nostalgia to play with.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, whether it was a big family holiday, or just another day off.

I have GOT to get me one of these!

Give me one good reason why I don't need a glow-in-the-dark cloned cat. It is one of those irritating long-haired beasts, but then, I'll only be looking at it under a UV lamp anyway.

Enough already with the latkes and the fryin'

I have to start this by noting that, as anyone aware of my diet will attest, I can appreciate a fried bit of whatever. However, even I have to admit that there might be a limit. We've eaten latkes (potato pancakes, VERY fried, hash brown looking, but way better) with someone on four of the six nights of Hanukkah so far. I do love me some latkes, but that's too many. I feel like I have oil flowing out of my pores, not to mention the fact that I've had probably twice the recommended calories this week.

Maybe I'll cleanse my pallette for the next couple days by indulging in another Hanukkah tradition -- donuts. I'm pretty sure there's no way those can possibly be fried... (yeah, Dave, about that...)

Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy Birthday Mom! I know it's a day late, but at least this time I can say I was not near a computer yesterday until late at night and I was three hours jet-lagged. Mom's birthday was actually yesterday, and for the record, yes, I did call her, albeit from an airport while I was chasing the Mizz around trying to tire him out for the plane. I'm not sure how coherent the conversation was, but I'm sure she got the gist.

Since it's not polite to call your mother old, I decided to dig around for a picture to make fun of instead. I was originally thinking of a hospital one from around my original birthday with full-on beehive hair, but this one struck me. It struck me because with the chops, the perpetual squint, and the apparent lack of fashion sense, that could be me in the background instead of Dad. (In case you missed it, I'm the short guy in the blue track suit.) I also thought Mom had quite a good look going too until I realized that the glasses, shirt, and even the hairdo would probably be right at home in Portland today. I'm assuming there's some sort of polyester pants action going on too, but that might have to stay in history's laundry heap. Even in Portland, we have standards. Now that I write that, I can safely assume that the Mizz's generation will bring polyester back just to annoy me. Or maybe they'll work with 80's stuff like parachute pants and Miami Vice colors. Whatever it takes to irritate Dad.

Anyway, back to the point. Congratulations on another eventful year, Mom. Happy Birthday!

Back West

We made it home yesterday. The Mizz likes to kick airplane seats, but other than that, he's an awesome traveller. On just about every flight we take with him, we get an unsolicited compliment about how well he behaved. I always imagine the compliments to be sarcastic, but on the other hand, people who really had a problem with him probably wouldn't bother to say anything at all, at least not directly to us. I attribute his positive public response to exceptional parenting.

It was odd to get back to Portland to find that it was dry. When we left DC, grass and whatnot was covered in snow and it was sleeting on us. In Portland, it's obviously been raining lately, but today, it's clear as a bell and much milder. Franny bundled the Mizz up in the airport and put on her own hat and gloves before we went outside, not realizing that it was almost 50 degrees. I kind of chuckled inside, but it was fun to watch.

Another fun thing about this trip was rediscovering video games. Specifically, by brother-in-law brought Guitar Hero, or more specifically, Rock Band. I always thought this game looked ridiculous and couldn't possibly fun for very long. That was before I played it. My rudimentary guitar experience was irrelevant, since although the controller is shaped like a guitar, it's still pretty much just a video game controller. However, picking up this guitar is much easier than the real thing, so it's easy to feel like you're really making killer music. Even Franny thought it was awesome. Add in Scene It, a movie trivia game with individual buzzers (as all trivia games should have), and Franny and I were actually having a serious conversation about getting an Xbox for Christmas. Perhaps I'm not be as old or mature as I feel sometimes. Knowing how we are, one of us will probably look at a price tag or something and decide that maybe there are better ways to waste money, but it must have been fun if we were actually having the discussion.

We had a good time back East, but it's good to be home. We were in our regular bed and the Mizz seems glad to be back in familiar territory. At the very least, our house is somewhat childproofed, so we can comfortably let him play at his own convenience for minutes at a time. That's worth a ton right there.

Now if I could get him to sleep later than 4:30...

Northwest Storm

If you haven't seen it yet, this is I-5 near Centralia, Washington. I believe the water has subsided somewhat since this picture, but the road is still covered in a lot of mud that has to be removed before it can be reopened this weekend.

If you're interested in seeing some details of the storm, The Oregonian newspaper has put up an interactive map of various pictures, weather satation reports, etc. I especially like the rain guage and wind speed reports, such as 129 mph in Bay City, Oregon (near Tillamook, of cheese fame). It also shows road closures, but those are current, so some previously closed roads are not shown. Yesterday, the roads from Portland to Astoria, Seaside, and Tillamook were all closed.

I'm not sad we missed this one.

How's traffic in your town?

This elephant apparently got mad during an elephant polo match in Sri Lanka. I can't say that I blame him. (Yanked from Yahoo! photos)

I did it again

There I go again, wandering off and forgetting the blog. For three days I was travelling without the internet, but no excuse otherwise. Lazy? Probably.

The internetless travelling was a whirlwind work trip to Bend, Oregon. Lotsa work, long days, whine, whine, whine. Actually, it wasn't horrible. The guy I was working with has a timeshare membership that scored us what amounted to a two bedroom condo for $30 a night (total). No internet, but that per diem is going to feel great for this one. The real problem was coming home. We had to get home Wednesday evening, but Bend is on the other side of the Cascade mountain range from Portland, and as luck would have it, there had been a boatload of snow on the Cascades the night before, with more on the way. Both of the reasonable passes through the mountains had lots of snow and chain requirements. Although we had chains and some snow driving skill between us, we decided to be prudent and go straight north to The Dalles on the road that only had a weather warning rather than the severe weather alert on the passes. This might have added and hour and a half to our trip on a normal day, but due to the snow that happened during the trip, it added more like three. So a trip that's normally about three hours ended up taking us six, although we found that my van, loaded down as it was, actually held the road rather well and we never even had to put on the chains. But still, nine o'clock at night is no time to roll in if you haven't been out doing something fun.

Non sequiter FYI: my capitalization of The Dalles is correct. "The Dalles" is the actual name of the city. Why the mix of the French "Dalles" with the English "The" I have no idea. I was thinking you might see this type of thing in Canada, but then I figured that there, it would probably say "The Falls/Les Dalles" with some kind of legal fight as to which part should be listed first. This is the main reason this country should never officially declare an "official" language, god forbid two of them. We are still free to call things whatever we please, as long as we can convince other people to call them the same thing. Freedom fries, anyone?

Now we're travelling again, this time back east to see family. I wouldn't say the Mizz was a complete joy to travel with, but he could have been so much worse. He got to ride in a taxicab, two airplanes, a bus, a black car, and some escalators, all equally fun to him. He took a good bit of entertaining on the planes, but for the most part, we were able to keep his feet off the chair in front of us and he only cried one in the Chicago airport, mainly from being way overtired and cooped up. Due to a kindly jet stream, we actually got to Chicago about an hour early. However, due to an unkindly winter storm through the Midwest, there were delays all over the place and our next plane took off an hour and a half late. O'Hare is not cool enough to justify four of my hours. The flight from Chicago to DC was pretty bumpy -- not so bumpy as to frighten you, but bumpy enough that the captain kept the seatbelt sign on for the whole flight and wouldn't let the flight attendants up either. Not scary, but miserable for lots of people, especially the Mizz, who kept wanting to "come see Daddy" or "come lay on Daddy". We talked a lot about the signs with the arrows (seatbelt signs) and the fact that Mommy and Daddy both have to wear their seatbelts too. He wasn't buying any of it, but we all survived. The plane was late enough getting in that they were in a rush to get the next set of passengers boarded as quickly as possible so they could get off the ground before 10 pm, as there is a hard and fast curfew at Reagan National. We finally rolled in about midnight, much later than planned, but luckily we have nice relatives, and they were up waiting for us. Thanks guys, you're awesome.

The funnest part of the trip so far has been the car Franny scored for us. She had a couple free upgrades from Enterprise, so she tried to get us a Dodge Charger. They were out of them, but we're running around suburban Maryland in a Chrysler 300. It feels a little wrong. This is quite a bit more car than we're used to driving, but it's kind of fun. It's not the top of the line version, but then, I don't think I've ever driven a top of the line anything, so I don't really know what I'm missing anyway. This one has 250 hp and handles wonderfully, so we can certainly have a little fun. Franny's main gripe is that, since it's not the really nice version, there aren't nearly enough gadgets and buttons for the passenger to play with. The Mizz is fine with it though, as the dash is full of blue lights at night. We could drive him around on a tractor if there were enough lights on it.