Crazy Carl

Last night I read Julia a book at bed time about a dog named Carl who is left to watch a baby while mom goes up to the second floor of the department store.  Mom seems to be gone for a good half and hour while baby and Carl go get into mischief.  But right at the beginning of the story, when the baby climbs out of the baby carriage and onto Carl's back, Julia's comment was, "That's not an expected thing to do!"

Calling . . . well . . . anyone

Come one, come all, and marvel at my new technology toy.  I call it: a cell phone.

Yes, we bit the bullet and got me a phone.  I had a phone through my previous employer for a couple of years, but since moving to Michigan, we've been working on one shared phone, which was essentially Shannon's phone.  (People rarely call me anyway.)  When we moved out here and my old phone quit working (funny how that happened right when I quit my job) we intended to get a phone for me, but it just wasn't a priority.  Getting moved it, unpacking boxes, and setting up all sorts of other things were more important.  So we put it off.  And off.  Here we are 15 months later.  Really, we got by pretty well without other phones.  The only tricky part is if Shannon is off somewhere (like right now, she's at a meeting for the pre-school) and I don't have a good way of getting a hold of her.  Actually, I can use g-mail to call her, which I've done before (and it's free), but she can't call me.  So if she knows she's going to be late, she just has to wait and wait until I get fed up of wondering where she is and call her, and then she can explain things to me.

So we've got phones.  They've got a camera and a keyboard and all those things, despite being the cheapest phones they had.  (Shannon was due for a new phone and got one just like me.)  So, if you see a call in the near future from a strange number in area code 989, please pick it up, because it might be me.

(I'm easily combating the urge to just tell everyone my phone number right here and now by not having any clue what my phone number is.  I've never even seen it.  It's written down on a piece of paper around here somewhere . . . )

Working Girl

Julia recently got a job.  She'll be 4 in April, so we figured it was about time to get her to work and become a contributing member of the family.  A friend of ours works for a professor at a local university who is doing some sort of study on young children learning or test taking or something like that.  (This is clearly a friend that Shannon knows better that I do.)  So, she has come over a few times and spends an hour or so with Julia asking her questions, doing puzzles, and testing short term memory.  So far, she's earned 40 bucks!  (I wish I could get paid to take tests.  Especially since taking tests is one of my best skills in life.)  Julia has used some of her money to buy a cash register, which is her new favorite toy.

But things really got interesting when I related all of this to my parents, who asked, "Did she pay tithing?"  Oh.  Yeah.  Tithing.  I remember that.  And we pay it when we earn money.  But for some reason it never occurred to us that Julia should pay tithing, too.  The trick, however, is to explain tithing to a 3 year old who barely even understands what money is at all.  Or fractions.  Let alone making a connection between God granting us abilities to earn money and pay checks and funds for running the church and other related issues.  To further drive home the point that this is above age level for her, there is no tithing lesson in the nursery manual, nor the Sunbeams manual.  So we made it up ourselves.  Hopefully it worked.  At the root of it all, we decided, "When you earn some money, we give a little bit of it to the Bishop, because it's a commandment."  And really, what else is there?

Classical music requests

At work, I've decided to listen to more music while I work, in an effort to muffle the noises from my co-workers.  I love the guys I sit by, but we can get chatty sometimes, and that doesn't make for a productive day.  They'll start talking about something (NFL fumble rates, rate of change of daylight, deepest point in the ocean, how far you can jump a snowmobile, the size of the Chinese navy, weather in Sweden, etc.*) and suddenly you're sucked into their conversation.  For some reason, I'm the guy who always just has to google it in an effort to settle the matter.

Anyway, I'm combating this with music.  Specifically, classical music.  You can find just about anything on youtube, so I'm asking you: what should I be listening to?  Composers are nice, but specific pieces are better.  I prefer long pieces (>20 minutes), other wise I listen to a song for 5 minutes and spend the next 5 trying to pick the next piece; that's not much of a productivity boost.

*Yes, those are all real topics we've discussed.  At length.  I'd say I would keep track for a month and report back on the results, but would probably be ashamed at the length of the list.

IE? Really?

Blogger has some fun stats associated with it these days.  It's neat to see even my rarely updated blog got 284 views in the last month.  My all time most important contribution to the world is my comments on a song about Santa using zebras to fly his sleigh in Africa, which I think I've mentioned before.

But the craziest thing is that 53% of you people are using IE to look at my blog.  IE!  If you're still using IE, any list of reasons not to use it probably isn't going to have an impact.  If you were the sort to pay attention to such reasoning, you would have switched from IE long ago.  Instead, I'll just tell you: Quit using Internet Explorer.  Go download something else instead.  It's really easy.  Go get Firefox (23%), or Chrome (10%) or Safari (5%).  I've used them.  They're good.  Each has it's own supporters who would be glad to discuss their various merits, but they'll all agree on one thing: they're each better than IE.

Oh, and one last thing.  If anyone wants to admit to being part of the 489 visits from the Netherlands (2nd place, followed by Russia (321), Germany (254), France (253) and Iran(147)) I'm kinda curious.

I am an old man

Apparently.

This is probably going to be a theme here, as I do turn 30 in a few weeks.  Recent developments in aged-ness:

- Gray hairs.  A disappointing number have started popping up.  Unless you happen to be trimming my beard, or for some other reason are 3 feet away and staring at my hair, you probably wouldn't notice.  But I've noticed.  And once you've noticed, there's no un-noticing that.

- Back trauma.  As a kid, I remember thinking it was funny that old people complained about things hurting the day after physical activity.  As the years have gone by, more and more of that has crept into my reality.  But today was a first.  I played basketball yesterday, as normal, and last night and today, my lower back was a little bit sore, which doesn't always happen, but isn't terribly uncommon.  The real news here is what happened at church.  I was carrying Ella to nursery* and when I put her down, something Bad happened.  Previously unknown muscles were suddenly on fire.  I'll live through this, I'm sure, but it's not comfortable.

*Yes, Ella goes to nursery now.  Yes, it is glorious.  Of course, back muscles sending Morse code pain messages out during church still make it hard to pay attention to a lesson.

Self-Locomotion

What with the new year and all, we've gone and done something silly.  In a fit of can-do-it-ive-ness, our family made a goal to move ourselves 1000 miles this year.  No, we're not moving to a new city, state or country, but we will be transporting ourselves as much as possible, before our weary bones collapse in our stationary beds at night.

The basic "rules" are these.  (Rules is in quotes, because let's be honest here, we made them, and we can un-make them and generally cheat however we see fit.)
1. We will walk, run, hike or ski (x-country) 1000 miles as a family.  Biking doesn't count, and I haven't thought of any other methods of moving our bodies along a path that would qualify that we are likely to do.  (See that rules out swimming for distance -- we aren't likely to do it, and even if we were, it's way more work than just walking!)  Things like basketball, which certainly involve running don't count.  I don't have to justify why not to you!
2. Each individual's effort counts.  If the whole family goes on a 1 mile walk, we mark down 4 total miles.
3. Trips must be at least a quarter of a mile long.  This limit needs to be short enough that the girls can contribute in their own way, but long enough that we aren't trying to "nickle and dime" our way, here.  None of this "well, I walked over to the neighbors to borrow an egg, that's like 85 feet."
4. Trips only count if you didn't have to make them anyway.  This rules out all the mileage at the grocery store and things like that.  Essentially, we're trying to measure effort above and beyond what any couch potato has to do just to keep themselves fed.  (I suppose they could be having those potato chips delivered?)

More rules may be forth coming, should they be necessary, but since only 4 people are playing this game, only 3 of them can form sentences, and only 2 of them even know about the game, how many rules could we possibly need?

So far we're 12.35 miles in.  Yes, in 14 days.  I realize that we're a bit behind pace.  I realize that the goal is probably a bit over-aggressive to say the least.  1000 miles is about 20 miles a week!  Winter is tough.  Who wants to go on a walk when the high today was like 19°?  Who wants to run in the snow?  But we'll see how we can do.

And besides, we've got a whole extra day this year to get it done.