Things not to get Shannon for her birthday:

Funny that Cheryl should suggest a pedicure for Shannon on her birthday. I'm inclined to think that she won't want one, seeing as how she broke her toe this morning!

Yes, that would be a spiral fracture of the first bone of the 5th toe in her right foot as a result of trying to leave her toe outside the bathroom while the rest of her went inside. The good news is that the Dr. decided that she won't need a pin to get it to heal right. I'm sure Shannon's blog will have a few more details soon.

Birthday List

Shannon's birthday is in another week or so. She hasn't created a list of any sort (at least, not that she's let me know about) of what she would like. So, here's where you get to help me out:

What does Shannon want for her birthday? (feel free to be creative)

Not that any of you will know . . .

This question has been rolling around my brain for months. There is a beer commercial, for Michelob Ultra as it turns out, which indicates that "Your life has more than one dimension, so should your beer." I understand that my life has "more than one dimension". It has 3 physical dimensions (or 4 depending on how you want to count them) but really it's a metaphor in that my life has various, somewhat independent aspects.

[Aside: now I am currently considering whether or not different activities in my life could truly be considered orthogonal, and thereby constitute different dimensions. It seems to me that orthogonality should be a requirement of multi-dimensionality, though perhaps they need only be linearly independent. This is going to require more thought.]

Anyway, what I can't figure out is what it could possibly mean for a beverage to have "more than on dimension." I've never had any beer, let alone Michelob Ultra, and I realize that most, if not all, of my readers can't intelligently comment on beer, but still: what could this possibly mean?

How many dimensions does milk have? Kool-Aid? Could orange juice possibly be multi-dimensional, one for the liquid and one for the pulp?

And now, as a first for my blog, I present you with a beer commercial:

Nearly a month ago Emilie used the insurmountable power of "tagging" to hereby force me to take pictures of my house, messy or not. It took a while, but I did it. (More quickly than most of the other people she tagged, I might add.) Evidently the rules are that you have to take pictures of things in their current state. No cleaning, straightening or wiping of noses. Think of yourself as a National Geographic photographer of your own life, duty bound by your journalistic code to be accurate and true-to-life. Emilie specifically said that I had to take 10 pictures, but then only posted 9 herself, so I was forced to make up my own 10th thing.

Favorite Shoes
I spent a fair time trying to figure out what those would be. I finally decided that it must be the shoes that I would be most bummed out if they broke, and since I just had a pair break and it bummed me out. Here they are.

Kid #2
This is not, in any way, to be construed to be any sort of announcement. This is simply the best I could do. I figure that if my second child were to have any physical location, this would be it. Come back in a few years for a better picture.

Closet (mine)
This is actually quite clean. Of course, I wasn't instructed to take a picture of the pile of clothes on the floor just outside the closet.

Fridge
A bit fuzzy. But if you look close, you might be able to see your picture on it

Kitchen Sink
Hey, the rules never said I had to take good, sharp pictures of anything.

Toilet

Laundry Room(a)
No possible picture can be taken of our entire laundry room, so you get a bonus 11th picture.

Laundry Room(b)1st Kid
The order of these pictures confuses me. Why is kid #2 first, and why are the two not together? Also, why don't we call this one kid #1?

Favorite Room
I've decided this is the "Starcraft Room"
Bed
I decided that the extra picture to bring the total up to ten (excluding the bonus picture of the dryer) should be my bed. Thankfully, Shannon makes it for me.

Green River

Well, we're in Green River. And it's um . . . Green, I guess. We've got a lovely hotel room, total cost: 45 bucks. It's kinda like staying in your friend's grandmother's basement. Wood paneled walls, brown carpet, 1970's chairs, old little TV. But I guess we can make do for one night.

No, you can't go to Zion

~Come to Zion, come to Zion
And with in her walls rejoice~

It turns out that getting to Zion (National Park) is harder than you'd think. It's 20 miles from La Verkin to the park entrance, but park visitors are doing everything in their power to make sure it's the slowest 20 miles possible. The speed limit is 65mph through much of it, but on our trip out there yesterday, we were stuck behind a van (from North Dakota. I'm keeping my eye on you, North Dakota) going 45. The road is one lane each way, so you have to wait for a spot before you can pass. A few miles down the road we found someone going 55. Passed them, too. Then, a motor home pulled out in front of us. And proceeded to to 40. Again, we had to bide our time behind him for a mile or two before we could get around. And this happens every time we go. There is always some driver who is going significantly below the speed limit. I'm not asking people to speed. I'm not asking people to make way for me, because I want to speed. But I'd be happy if we could just keep it reasonably close to the speed limit, not 20 or 25 below.

~Come to Zion, Come to Zion,
Ere his floods of anger flow.~

On a slightly related note, there is a car commercial out there which repeats about 20 times how their cars are great because they get to many "MPGs". And they say it just like that: "Em Pee Gee's". That's a lot of Em Pee Gee's! I have no problem with the acronym when written, but it shouldn't be said. Besides, saying "Miles per gallon" is only one syllable longer. I don't know what car company it is, but if I did, rest assured that I wouldn't buy any of their amazing em pee gee cars.

DC: WWII, Korea, Lincoln

I just want to point out that 4 lengthy posts with 16 pictures about Washington DC has resulted in 4 comments. 2 lengthy posts about estimations and quick calculations garnered 18 comments. You people sure like strange things . . . .

From the Washington Monument, I went to the WWII Memorial. It's quite nice. There is a big nice pool/fountain. Also, all the fountains in DC (at least all the ones I saw) don't have money in them. They have signs asking you to keep your money out of them. Apparently they stain the pools, but more than that, it keeps them looking clean, so you can think about where you are, rather than thinking about how many half dollar coins you can spot in the memorial.


And, of course, the memorial was a nice place to take a few more pictures of the Washington Monument.

The National Mall and the area around the reflecting pool (which is very long, and has ducks!) is, in my experience, dominated by a few things: college students jogging, and college students playing sports. Maybe it was just the time of year, or the time of day, but there were joggers absolutely everywhere. I suppose there are always enough people there that they feel safe. And there were intramural sports. Softball mostly, with a little bit of soccer. There is a whole lot of grass around the different sights, and DC has lots of college students. I passed dozens of softball games, and it seemed to go on for hours. They were everywhere!

Amid the softball games, I found a small little WWI memorial. If I remember correctly, it is for people from DC who fought in the world war. It's kinda tucked away by itself on the side of the reflecting pool, and it was a place where I could (very briefly) be alone for a moment.

At the end of the reflecting pool I first came to the Korean War Veterans Memorial. It's a collection of statues of soldiers accompanied by a neat stone wall of images. The stone wall is quite glossy, except for where the surface has been removed to reveal the lighter stone underneath as a way to create pictures on it.

This also provided a bit of an answer to one of the problems of traveling by yourself: there is no one to take your picture. Sure, I could have asked someone, but then I would have been there standing by myself posing in front of something. Instead, I settled for this technique:

I'm a bit more visible in this shot:

Finally I made it all the way to ol' Lincoln himself. Looks just like the back of the $5 bill! The picture below is absolutely not a good representation of my time in the monument; I managed to get a shot without any people in it. It took a little bit of patience and some luck. A more representative shot would have included about 63 8th graders.

Gmail chat

I don't log in to our home computer very often. Shannon is always logged in, and it's about a 5 minute ordeal to get the computer to switch, so I just use the computer as her. And it works great. With the exception of Gmail chat. For unknown reasons, Shannon's login dislikes me and gmail chat doesn't work. It always says I've been signed out of gmail and have to resign in. But no amount of signing in will fix it. I just can't chat. The feature works flawlessly from all other computers.

We spent the last 6 days in SLC/Orem/Provo. We're back. We had vacation, and I had a short business trip. It's a good thing it wasn't very exciting, because I'm not even half way done posting pictures from my last business trip . . .

Leonard Bernstein

This question has been bothering me for a few days now. Perhaps as long as a week. How can you, on one day, comment disappointedly on your husband not enjoying musicals, and then, on the very next day, not know a song that come from West Side Story? I guess maybe the answer is that if your husband actually enjoyed and watched musicals with you, you would have finally seen the Sharks and Jets do battle.