On Friday, Jess and I drove up to Burlington with the kids to train at an aikido dojo there. After class, we were talking with one of the dojo members, who told us that their head instructor's father had recently died and that he has been spending a lot of time away from the dojo while helping out with the family farm - which just happens to be in ( Read more... )

We brought Meg's Mac Mini along with us on our visit to my brother, because it's a lot easier to carry a Mini, keyboard & mouse than it is to organize all the kids bookmarks and passwords to use on someone else's machine. In order to hook it up to Don's monitor without having to change the cable every time we switched users (which, if you remember ( Read more... )

This afternoon, Nicky stepped on a bee and was stung on the foot. As I was carrying her to the car, I asked her if her foot was feeling better. She said it wasn't really, and I tried to console her, saying, "It'll get better, most things get better," to which she agreed, adding the caveat, "Except maybe your life if you have kids."

The following is an exact quote of something Meg said this morning ( Read more... )

While we were driving, Nicky showed off her knowledge of geography and her lack of knowledge of distance. Out of the blue, she asked me, "Are we near Panama?" I replied, "No. Why did you think so?" N - "I saw a sign that said Columbia." I pointed out that the sign she saw was for the city of Columbia, Maryland, not the country, Colombia.

This afternoon, while grocery shopping, I picked up microwave popcorn. Since they have essentially the same nutritional profile and not knowing which one I would prefer, I decided to get Act II "Butter Lovers" and "Xtreme Butter" and run a side-by-side taste test. While putting them in the cupboard, I happened to look at the ingredients list. ( Read more... )

I'll be at my college reunion this weekend, so if anybody wants to get together, send me an email or give me a call. I'll be arriving Thursday afternoon, staying at a hotel on the north side, and leaving on Sunday afternoon. Jess and the girls won't be along, because the reunion didn't have much by way of kids programs, and the kids had things to ( Read more... )

As I mentioned back in December, I'm currently going through my music to update my cassettes & vinyl to digital media that are easier to listen to.

A few weeks ago, when we were watching Frozen with the kids, there was a line which reminded me of Alan Parsons Project's "Don't Let it Show", which reminded me that their Best of the Alan Parsons ( Read more... )

This afternoon, after dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we headed to Space Coast Stadium to watch the Tigers play the Nationals (for those who care and don't already know, our home-town Nationals won 8-1, on the strength of an Ian Desmond 2-run homer in the 3rd ( Read more... )

Yesterday, Meg went to a spy-themed birthday party, where she got a pair of sunglasses & a fake mustache as a disguise and a gadget pen that writes in invisible ink. This morning (yet another snow day), she wrote us a note with the invisible ink, asking for a mission. Spy missions being very thin on the ground in our household, I racked my brains ( Read more... )