Some Blog Site

As you may have noticed, I changed the background picture of SBS again. Back to the fall shot of leaves in the yard.

Football has resumed, and has brought with it a thousand pleasant memories of the start of school. I will again be updating the Football Happiness Calculator, so check your mood on Mondays throughout the fall and early winter. Or don’t. I’m not keeping track.

But in the interest of summarizing my summer (would that be summerizing?), I give you these pictures.

First up, a day at the beach.

We had a week at one beach and another week (in a different month) at another beach. My kids had swimming lessons at the beginning of summer, and showed remarkable improvement from before the lessons to after. You can tell it was remarkable improvement because I just made a remark about it. So now my kids wander into the water without life jackets sometimes. They spent most of their time in the sand, building moats, castles, and other formations that were easily destroyed by wind, water, or mischievous cousins.

Next, a parade.

Regular readers of this site will note my displeasure of sirens in parades, and what better picture to show that than this? This picture was taken about a month and a half after I wrote about toning down the sirens. And I didn’t tell my kids to do that. They just instinctively know that loud sirens are bad for them. Just like any adult should also know. Or maybe my kids learned it from watching me.

Finally, the quintessential summer day. I’ll have to look up the etymology of quintessential. Mainly, what does “most representative” have to do with necessary fives?

Anyway, I like this picture because it shows what a good summer day should have. Swimsuits, a sprinkler, and freezy pops. This was one of the hottest days of the year and we, just like a million other people, thought we should go to the local water park. Since the water park was filled to capacity and had a waiting list (i.e. line down the sidewalk of people standing around and praying for people inside the water park to leave), we just went to the back yard and let the kids play while we did a lot of nothing. My nothing involved a nap on a hammock.

Okay, I looked up quintessential. And I got nothing. But it did point me to quintessence, which had a lot. It does mean “fifth element”, and is not related to the 1997 Bruce Willis movie (as someone at work once told me, “I’ll save you some time. Don’t go see the movie – the fifth element is love.”). But according to ancient philosophies, the fifth element is not love, it is ether (or aether or æther but no one really uses the æ thing anymore, much less knows how to pronounce it).

The first four classical elements are earth, water, air, and fire – all natural items seen on our planet. Ether was for the rest of the universe. I haven’t figured out how Earth, Wind, and Fire fits in here and why they shun water.

Since the normal website for this topic is not suitable for all ages, I thought I would contribute things I heard this week at my workplace.

• Employee: “Hahahahaha… I know better than to do this, but I’m going to send this to you.”

  Okay, Ethics 101 here. If you know something is wrong and do it anyway, you are usually worse off legally than if you didn’t know it was wrong. No, I don’t know who it was who said that. Where I am, I can hear the sounds from a lot of different cubicles. I could tell you the general direction (it came from over there), but that’s about it.

• Employee: “You know, if you tell your girlfriend that her dead cat never loved her, that really [irks her].”

  The editor had to intervene on the last part of that sentence, but you get the general idea. My co-worker and I overheard that one and just started laughing. I think it is funny mainly because I was left wondering why someone would say that. What was the background there? I could ask, I suppose, but I think it’s better not knowing.

• Someone brought his kids into work for a short time, maybe around lunch, and we heard a baby or small child crying.
  Child: “waaaaaaah”
  Engineer: “New program manager…”

  When someone brings small children, especially babies, into the engineering office, that usually prompts a number of jokes.

Side note: did you ever wonder about the phrase “a little bird told me”? Today’s verse, below, shows that the Israelites had that same phrase a few thousand years ago.

As you learned from yesterday’s post, I took the kids raspberry picking (this year went much better than last year).

And a week before that, we went blueberry picking.

After having experienced both, I will say, contrary to my longstanding view that raspberries are the best fresh fruit, that if you have your choice you should take kids blueberry picking instead of raspberry picking. Here are some reasons why:

• Blueberry plants are friendly. Blueberry bushes don’t hurt you. Raspberry plants have thorns, which causes children to avoid picking the fruit, leaving you to do all the work.
• Blueberries are sturdier. Kids can easily pick blueberries without squishing them. Grab the berry and pull. Raspberries are too delicate for those with not-so-fine motor skills.
• Blueberries are sturdier. I know I already used that point, but it has another aspect: you can pile the bucket full of blueberries and the berries at the bottom will be just fine. Kids can carry a bucket a lot easier than a shallow tray (“No, don’t tip it!”).
• Blueberries are sturdier. Last one with this heading, I promise. Raspberries almost, almost, collapse under their own weight. Drop a ripe blueberry from the table onto the floor, and it bounces nicely. Drop a ripe raspberry on the floor, and it splats. Now when you get home from your picking and your children want to help you wash and sort the fruit into containers for the fridge, which berry would you rather they handle?
• One vote for blueberries is that they don’t spoil so easily. The raspberries that seemed perfect a picking time were too ripe about an hour later, when I was washing and sorting them. Next time we pick raspberries, I am going to pick the ones that are not quite ripe. That way, they’ll be good when we get home. The blueberries stay good for a week or two at home after picking, but raspberries fade quickly after a couple of days.
• The other vote for blueberries: all the kids like them. Our middle child doesn’t really like raspberries, but he’ll eat a bowl full of blueberries quite readily. Note: If you are in charge of watching him, then don’t actually let him eat a whole bowl of blueberries. It’s not good on the digestive system.
• Oh, and blueberries are cheaper too. Blueberries were $1.60 per pound and raspberries were $3.75 per pound.

And now, some gratuitous close-up shots of fruit, compliments of the macro setting on my camera…

Since this past Saturday was the last weekend in August, I thought it would be good to take the vehicle out for one more spin while the weather was good. I took the kids to the local raspberry-picking farm place.

Here is a picture of my ride, parked on the field at the raspberry farm..

What’s that, the side shot of the Viper doesn’t do it justice? Okay, here’s a better angle of the Viper.

How do I fit two kids in car seats in a Viper? Let’s go back to the first picture and I’ll point it out to you.

There’s my vehicle. I was just taking a picture of my minivan and that pesky Viper was in the way. I hate it when that happens.

I do wonder how much grass the Viper scraped off the field as it was driving through the parking lot. It is just a regular grass field and has to have some bumps larger than the ground clearance of the car.

One of the joys of wireless internet on these newfangled laptoppy thingies is finding a Wi-Fi connection. I normally don’t take my laptop somewhere unless I know there is going to be free Wi-Fi there, unlike my brother who takes his iTouch (okay, iPod Touch, but no one really calls it that) everywhere and has fun seeing if free Wi-Fi exists wherever he is.

I was in a place that I knew had access, and I knew the router had the memorable name of “linksys”. I had my wireless program scan the airwaves and it gave me a list of routers so that I could select linksys.

I had to laugh when I saw the other router named “GET YOUR OWN CONNECTION”. Note: it was encrypted. I’m thinking they shouldn’t have a problem anymore.

The baby is several months old and has been sleeping through the night for a while. It was rough those first two or three months, but we made it and have been enjoying solid night’s sleep every night. Or had been enjoying.

The kids recently coordinated their efforts to interrupt my sleep. Friday night (also known as Saturday morning) it was the middle child around midnight, the oldest around 1 AM, the baby at 5 AM, and the oldest again at 6:15-ish.

Although it was rough, I must say the kids were off their game Friday night. We had a stretch from 1 to 5, a whole 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Back in the day, when those kids were in their prime, we had nights of no more than 2 hours of sleep at a time. I think they may have miscommunicated, and whoever had the 3 AM shift didn’t know it was his turn to wake us.

But I must commend the baby for bringing his A-game. Whereas the other children just needed to be accompanied back to bed, where they quickly fell back to sleep, the baby did not want just company. Nor did he want just to be held. No, he held out until I was carrying him and walking around the house before he stopped crying. When I gave up on that, he refused to go back to sleep until he was fed. Baby 1, parents 0.

I’m sure that, when the kids are older and cannot be roused from bed easily, I will look back on these days with fondness.

In a shameless spoof of MckMama’s Not Me Monday, I am posting a Not Mine Monday (which she has since also done).

• My children did not yell “Let’s put on our party hats!” and then run around the house with underwear on their heads.
• My child did not avoid going to sleep, and try to stay up with the adults when we were playing board games in the dining room. And if that child complained that his bed wasn’t comfortable enough and I asked how he would be comfortable, he most certainly did not respond with “by sitting up and playing something“.

And here’s a Not Me to round out this post…

• I did not discover that the baby sits quietly in my lap while I play 1080 Avalanche on the Game Cube (snowboarding video game for those of you who didn’t understand the last half of that sentence). And I definitely did not offer to take the baby when he was fussing around bedtime, because that meant I could get in a few games. (Note to wife: if I did do that, it would be only for the baby’s sake.)