Some Blog Site

So far, all the discussion of a clothes room has involved the children. How could it apply to the parents?

Lucky for you, I drew up some plans for that too.

The idea here was to move the dressers and closets out of the bedroom. But rather than make another clothes/laundry room, I chose to move them into the master bathroom.

Picture his and hers walk-in closets. Very large closets. Now take the dividing wall between them and add bathroom stuff. That’s the basic concept here.

Note, the shaded floor indicates carpeting. The rest would be tile, with radiant-floor heat.

This was the first idea. The shower is the least used item in the bathroom, so it didn’t make much sense to have duplicate showers. In this one, the common shower is the only passageway between the two sides.

(In case you couldn’t tell, hers is on the left and mine is on the right.)

The next idea was to make the bathroom less divisive. The toilet becomes common, but it gets its own door for privacy. In order to have room for that, the wife loses her long countertop. We compensate by giving her an extra counter dedicated to makeup, or whatever it is females need countertop space for.

The last plan, for now at least, is a compromise between the first two. It is less divisive with one entrance door, but the guy gets his own half toilet. With the shower between the sinks instead of after them, this design is slightly more compact than the others.

With the clothes clutter out of the way, the bedroom design can be more minimal – just a bed and a desk and a chair. And some nightstands too.

Somehow, the change from bedroom to clothes room in our current house combined itself with our hope to move into a new house soon, and I got to drawing up house plans.

Here are some ideas if we either built or could significantly remodel an existing house.

This was the first idea. The dashed line between the two smaller bedrooms indicates a passageway of some sort (tunnel, rope bridge, etc.) If you’re going to put all 4 boys near each other, might as well make it fun.

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One of our parents gave my wife a book by the Duggars (20 and Counting) and she read it and she was inspired.

No, not to have more kids.

She was inspired by the Duggar’s laundry.

To rearrange our furniture.

You see, the Duggar kids don’t have dressers in their bedrooms. The bedrooms are just for beds. So they have a couple large bedrooms, and then a dresserroom.

It simplifies laundry.

We have 80% fewer children than they do, but ours are all boys so consolidating makes sense.

Before, we had beds and dressers mixed in a couple of bedrooms.

Now, we have 4 beds in one bedroom, and 4 dressers in one dresserroom. Or clothesroom.

The bedroom closet has linens and pajamas. Things used for a bed.

The clothes room closet has 4 sets of hanging clothes. The hanging clothes for a 5- and 3- year old are short enough that they fit under the older kids’ clothes. I put a thick dowel about 2 feet off the floor, and that works for them. The other clothes rod is about 5.5 feet off the floor.

We are still getting used to the new system, but I think it will work.

There are some hymns that were great back in the day, but don’t necessarily translate to modern life.

For example, Count Your Blessings.

I’m sure the hymn writer didn’t imagine the days of social media, with Pinterest showing what is possible and Intragram showing what people are doing. And it’s always much better, cooler, and more fun than your dreary life.

So we need to update that hymn.

And I have.

I present to you: Count Your Neighbor’s Blessings

(Neighbor is taken in the modified Biblical sense, in that it is anyone whom you come in contact with, or can read about on the internet.)

Also, if you’re having trouble reading the music, right-click on it (or whatever you have to do) to view the image – the blog page scales it down.

Verse 1:
When upon life’s billows you are tempest tossed
When you are discouraged thinking all is lost
Count your neighbor’s blessings, count them when you’re bored,
And it will surprise you what they could afford.

Frain:
Count their blessings, list out all their stuff;
Count their blessings, you don’t have enough!
Count their blessings, list out all their stuff;
Count your neighbor’s blessings, your life is so rough.

Verse 2:
Are you ever burdened with a load of care?
Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?
Count your neighbor’s blessings, happiness will die,
And you will stay angry as the days go by.

Refain

Verse 3:
When you look at others with their lands and gold,
Think that riches passed you by, you’re getting old.
Count your neighbor’s blessings, keep your eyes on things.
Aim for temporary joy that money brings.

Refain

Verse 4:
So amid the conflict whether great or small
Try to be disheartened, others have it all.
Count your neighbor’s blessings, envy will attend;
Bitterness will fill you to your journey’s end.

Refain

In case you want the music in an editable form, here is the music for the Count Your Neighbor’s Blessings hymn in ABC notation.

Our central air wasn’t working, so I had to fix it.

The furnace and thermostat were working fine, because warm air was blowing throughout the house. After a couple of minutes and it still wasn’t blowing cold air, I started looking around.

First step, walk outside and see if the fan was running.

It was not.

Second step, look up “central air outside fan not working” on the internet. Also, “how to check air conditioner” and “troubleshoot central air”.
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Subtitle: in which I improve the government’s records

Allow me to introduce to you the 2013 SFS List of Baby Names that Combine Similar Pronunciations. That baby name list is the place to go in case you are wondering what are the most popular baby names in 2013 regardless of how they are spelled. The Social Security baby name list does not adjust the rankings based on alternate spellings (like Catherine/Katherine), but SFS does.

It’s was just Mother’s Day, so the SSA released the name rankings for 2013. For yet another year, Aiden is the most popular boy’s name in the US. Rather, the name that is pronounced the same as Aiden is the most popular boy’s name in 2013. No controversy for the girls – it’s Sophia again.

Some Stats

• The top 4 names for the boys are the same as 2012, even in the same order except (what the government said was the most popular name was actually fifth).
• The top 6 names for the girls are the same as 2012, it’s just Isabella dropped 2 spots (the government got the first 5 places correct).
• Noah is the highest-ranked boy’s name that has no spelling variations, passing Ethan, which fell behind William from last year. Either there’s a resurgence in reruns of ER, or else that Russell Crowe movie is more popular than I thought.
• Girl names still have more spelling variations than boy names (300/1000 vs. 207/1000 alternates)
• The boys still have the name with the highest number of alternate spellings (Aiden with 9 vs. Liliana and Carly with 7 each)
• There are so many Sophias, it’s not even a contest any more. There are about 50% more Sophias than the next most popular name. It’s like the name Linda in the late 1940s, particularly 1947.

2013 Improved Baby Name List

Click on the link above and peruse to your heart’s content!

Regular readers of this blog will recall that every May I enhance the Social Security’s list of popular baby names during the previous year.

That should happen next week, pending release of the Social Security data.

What I have this week might be more interesting to most people that just a list of names. It is an animation of the growth (and decay) in popularity of the names.

I’m not putting the animations here on SomeBlogSite; rather, they are at SomeFunSite, with the rest of the baby name information. Go view the animations.

Here are some still images though:

This is how I made them:

First, I collected the top 25 names for each year from 1900-2012. Then I combined them into a list – the superset of top 25 names. For boys, this list was 103 names long. For girls, this list was 175 names long. Apparently girl names go in and out of fashion more quickly than boy names.

Next, I went through each year and got the number of babies born with those names, and put all that information into bubble charts.

Finally, I combined all 113 bubble charts into one animation file.

And then repeat the steps for the other gender.

How long did that take?
Not as long as it sounds. The longest part was figuring out the colors to use and the size of the text for the names and the pattern/placement of the circles.

Once that was in place, it’s easy. Thanks to PHP and SVG, it takes about 1 minute for that second step (generating 113 images). PHP also got the first step done in about 3 seconds (after I took about 15 minutes to write the script).

The last step is a little time consuming. I used GIMP to create the animated GIF. I had to drag and drop 113 files (one at a time) into the program. Maybe there’s a batch import function, maybe there’s a way to script it, but it wasn’t too bad by itself so I didn’t bother trying.

The funny things is that this project succumbed to the problem that the baby names site fixes for the Social Security list of names. That is, duplicate spellings of names are not combined. So the charts have both Aidan and Aiden, or Michaela and Makayla. I noticed this late enough in the process that I didn’t feel like redoing things.