Leftovers

Shannon made waffles for dinner. Pumpkin waffles, with apple syrup. They're very tasty. And that's a good thing, because these are the leftovers. Yes, this is after three of us ate all we could.

Planning our family vacations

The video is long, but I wanted to show off Julia's talent.

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

For the record she can locate (to the best of our knowledge) the following countries: Canada, USA, Greenland (we know this isn't really a country, but she doesn't), Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Madagascar, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sri Lanka, India (sometimes), Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Russia, Japan, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

Gizmo

I think my sisters (at least the older ones) will see a resemblance. (I sure think it is there.)

Change

When I was a kid, every so often (annually, biannually?) my dad would pull out his big piggy bank full of change and set all us kids to work rolling all the coins. He always seemed to have tons of change, and we'd roll up 30 or 40 bucks worth. Similarly, I had my tootsie roll bank and I'd pull the change out of there occasionally to trade in for "real money". A bit later in life, my friend Spencer and I would refer to change as "free money". If we wanted to go ride our bikes somewhere to get a slurpee or something, even if we "didn't have any money" we knew we could go find a little pile of dimes and go get something. The point is, piggy banks always seemed to be full.

That is not the case anymore. Shannon and I have but one change receptacle, which basically just sits there. (Unless she's moving stuff in and out when I'm not home.) In years it's never filled up, and its very rare that we go take anything out of it.

November

It's November. I may not own a snow shovel, but I did just mow my lawn.

Hair Removal

I've always been a procrastinator. For weeks I've been meaning to get a haircut. It got to the point that I looked like this:

Or, with a little bit of froofing out of the beard, I looked like this:

Yes, I know it would have been tempting to turn all that into a nice Halloween costume of either a caveman or Brother Brigham or something. But instead, we finally chopped most of it off:

TROGDOR!!!!!

Burninating the countryside. Burninating the peasants.

And the Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIIIIIIGGGGHHHHTTTT!

Things that must go

Websites that charge ridiculous fees on ticket sales. It's particularly bad when they do it per ticket. I've seen movie theaters that sell tickets for 6 bucks each that want to tack on 1 or 2 dollars more per ticket for letting you buy them online. Or, as was the case tonight, a site I saw that had a flat fee of $5 on $30 worth of tickets. It's one of those hidden costs that really ought to go.

(I listen to NPR in the car now. Too bad they don't have "things that must go".)