Jewish people and health care

My mother-in-law has been dealing with a tremendous number of health issues lately. My wife, being the only child, of course is involved in her issues on a minute by minute basis.

Today I overheard one side of a conversation (my wife's side) that reminded me of what I'm dealing with...a Jewish Mother and her daughter. She was on the phone with her mom, who was in the hospital being scheduled for some tests. The one portion of the conversation that I overheard went like this:

"...and what time do they take you for your tests? How long is the procedure supposed to be? And the doctor knows to contact me with the results? Pot roast. It's in the slow cooker."

Kena horah.

Google Wants You

I came across an announcement that Google wants to pay you to be part of their product research. Provide your information, fill out a survey, and they will put you on file as a potential candidate for their research, either at a Google office or remotely from the computer. if they pick you, they pay you $75 for about an hour and a half of your time.

Of course I filled it out, but I also noticed a bit of genius in their survey. They obviously want to classify you in their files as someone who either has a clue about how to use a computer, or as someone who still asks the question, "Do I have the internet on this computer?". And they do this with two simple questions (actually more, but these two were the particularly brilliant ones:

1. I have changed the default home page in my web browser.

2. When I search the web, I am confident that I will find what I want.

The first, I think, is the most brilliant. I've seen so many computer users with their browsers set to go to Dell.com, AOL.com, or whatever other site has hijacked their browser never allowing them to return. Those are usually the same folks who have no idea of the secret Control+Enter shortcut that allows you to type the url (cnn) and automatically add the www and the .com on either end of it. If you can reset your home page, chances are you can do a few other things as well.

The second question is pretty sharp too. I know that I can find anything on the web, from the definition of pugilism to Castro's favorite color. Bet there's a lot of folks out there who haven't figured that out yet.

Thank you J.K.

Our family does not own the latest Harry Potter book. Oddly enough despite the fact that my wife is a the most ravenous bookworm I've ever met, devouring tomes more quickly than I can consume a box of Entenmann's Mini Chocolate Chip Cookies, I am the furthest ahead in the Harry Potter journey, having finished the fourth book about a year ago and running out of steam.

But with the buzz around the latest and final addition to the Hogwarts juggernaut, Harry is back in the house. We'll eventually buy the last book, but we've got a few more to get through first. Over the past couple of weeks I read #2 to Natalie (I'd read #1 to her last year), and began reading #3.

But my six-year-old put me out of a job.

I came home one day this week to discover she decided she couldn't wait for me, and read the next two chapters on her own. Now, two days later, she's almost done. And she's six. Why doesn't it seem normal for a six-year-old to be reading a book the size of Harry Potter in a matter of days?

All the buzz is true. Harry Potter isn't just a story. It's a piece of magic that has introduced young and old alike to a world of reading they never knew existed.

Staying at two

My 7-year-old got some devastating news last night. It seems her best friend, already the older of two sisters, is about to have a second sibling. As soon as poor Natalie found out that she was going to remain in the "just one sister" club while her best friend would enter the more exclusive "oldest of three" sorority, Natalie's world began to crumble.

"All my friends are having more brothers and sisters, and I only get one sister! It's not fair!"

Now, when you start off with as logical a statement as that, there's really nowhere to go but up. We started off by pointing out that of all her friends (and there are A LOT), we could only think of two that had more than one sibling. And several were only-children. We also explained how having an additional kid was a very complicated and important decision to make (I believe that was the point I mentioned something about her mom being no spring chicken and getting slapped, but my memory is fuzzy).

We then continued by pointing out that her father was one of two, and her mother was a standalone. and lastly, we explained how, if there was a new baby in the house, Natalie would lose out on all the attention she gets from us now, she wouldn't get anything new because we couldn't afford it, and she'd have to become an auto mechanic when she grows up because we would only be able to afford technical school rather than that exclusive university where she would learn to be an artist, dancer, rescue girl, fire-fighter, and teacher with a minor in English Lit.

None of it worked. She cried for 45 minutes. We were flabbergasted. We had no idea she would react this way. Finally. I offered up a reasonable solution.

Tomorrow, we go shopping for goldfish.

On a side note, when three-year-old Jessica was told the news, she responded with, "aw, we never have any new babies" and went back to playing with her My Little Ponies.

Yakko's World

It's a shame that Animaniacs had to disappear from the airwaves. It was perhaps one of the most brilliant cartoons out there. and educational, as well. check out:

Yakkos'Nations Of The World

The State Capitals

The U.S. Presidents

Or, if you're more into the Shakespeare scene, try Animaniacs on Hamlet or Midsummer Night's Dream

Sheer brilliance.

62 Uses for Vinegar

Click here for 62 household uses for vinegar. Some of them are quite useful and interesting. I had completely forgotten about #10, soaking a chicken bone in vinegar overnight to turn it into rubber. I remember doing that a few times as a kid. I didn't really get out much, after all.

Lance is in my head

I hear him there. It's Lance again. Mocking me. Telling me to get off my ass, to give up on that Family Guy marathon on TBS, to dig my running sneakers out from under that pile of dirty towels, and to get out of the house and work up a sweat for a change. Man, I hate that guy.

Lance Armstrong is inside my head. More specifically, he's inside my iPod. well, actually, he's inside a little doohickey attached to my iPod, called an iPod Nano+Nike..umm...doohickey.

A couple of months ago, my doctor checked my cholesterol and told me I wasn't getting enough exercise. I told her that I thought perhaps going up and down the stairs twenty-eight times each night before the kids managed to successfully fall asleep would classify as "enough" exercise, but obviously it didn't. she told me, in not so many words, to get my ass to the gym. Trouble is, I've tried that. Like most Americans, it never works. You start off going four days a week religiously. Then suddenly that drops down to two days, then once a week if you're lucky, and soon you forget which road the gym is on. No, I needed another option.

That's when I decided to try running.

I hate running. It's boring. It's painful. It's exhausting. It sucks in hot weather. It sucks in cold weather. In fact, I have some recollection that the first time I ever used a four letter word was when the track coach back in grade school met me and said, "hey, a tall thin guy like you should try out for the cross-country team!" I believe I replied, "F*ck that!" But recently I realized the benefits of running. It's cheap. There's virtually no equipment. You don't have to drive anywhere. And you never have to worry about getting to the gym only to discover you forgot an important item in your gym bag, like soap or headphones. So I gave it a shot. I started to realize it wasn't so bad. I could run a few miles and work up a sweat, and given the geography of Pittsburgh there were plenty of hills on which I could challenge myself to see how well I was doing.

Then, I discovered this iPod Nano+Nike doohickey. It's a $30 gadget that comes in two pieces. One piece plugs into the bottom of your iPod Nano (or my wife's Nano, in my case), and the other piece hooks onto your sneaker. Use it when you run, and it tracks your mileage, pace, and calories as you go, storing all your run data on a Nike website for reference.

Frankly, it's a brilliant piece of technology, but not because of the data it can track. It's because of Lance. You see, throughout your run, a young attractive female voice briefly interrupts your music to tell you important things, like "1 mile completed" or "400 yards to go!!" but any time you hit a new milestone such as the longest run you've taken, or the fastest pace for the mile, Lance pops in and congratulates you personally. "Congratulations! You just ran your longest run ever!" Makes you feel pretty accomplished.

And it drives me crazy. With each run, I wonder what I can do to get him to notice me again. When I take a week off from running, I truly believe he's just sitting there, inside the little gadget, as it rests on top of the inkjet printer, thinking, "oh great, another couch potato." Yeah, I can hear him. Right now he's talking to the main voice-over lady saying, "can you believe this guy?? I won 7 tours in a row with one testicle, and after his first and only 5-mile run he can't stop whining about the blister on his toe. Jeez, what a slug."

But recently I discovered there's a setting on the doohickey where you can change it from Lance's voice to that of world-famous marathon runner Paula Radcliffe (I never heard of her either). That's much better. I've been mocked by women all my life. It's part of my comfort zone. I can work with that.

Now where the heck did I leave that headband with the built in umbrella?

Leave the kids home and see Ratatouille

We spent a hot summer day in the movies yesterday to see Pixar's latest masterpiece, Ratatouille. It was a really good movie. But the kids hated it. Our younger one fell asleep, and the older one cried to leave (we convinced her there was ice cream in her future if she stayed, so she did). Frankly, I could see her point. It wasn't scary. But it was adult-themed. Most of the characters talked with a French accent, and she didn't follow it. The jokes and humor were way, way above her head, and the overall theme of French cooking had no basis on her everyday life. Add that to the fact that the head chef was a meanie, and she wanted outta there.

I thought it was a good movie. Not Pixar's best, but a couple of things resonated with me. First, this movie really seems to be a cross-over for Pixar, where they successfully draw both animals/characters AND humans. In Toy Story, the humans were clunky looking. In The Incredibles, they were purposefully cartoonish. In this movie, they looked right. Second, the cooking theme was fabulous. Anyone with a sense for the kitchen would love this movie, and the writers made this a major point of the movie with a theme of "Anyone can cook."

On the flip side, the idea of rats in the kitchen just didn't work for me. In Bugs life, the ants were cute. In this movie, the rats were, well, rats. And seeing a thousand of them flowing into a restaurant was just ooky.

I will have to see it again, though. If only to recall which character was played by John Ratzenberger. Supposedly it was someone named Mustafa, but I don't recall who that was.

My Simpsons Avatar

The Simpsons Movie Site has a game on it where you can create your own avatar. Or, in non-geek terms, draw yourself as a Simpsons character. Here's me, though I couldn't find a nose that truly did me justice:

Money advice from a 6-year-old.

Now that our renovation is winding down, we decided it was time to refinance and somehow pay our way out of this money pit. The process involved dragging the squirts with us to the bank to sign some loan papers, so I informed the kids it was time to get their shoes on so we could go to the bank.

"Why do we need to go to the bank?" Natalie asked. I explained to her, in basic terms, what it meant to "refinance".

"But daddy," she replied, "you could save ten thousand dollars over the lifetime of a loan with Quicken Loans! Why don't you try them out?"

Hmm, too much TV maybe?

Off Topic: Make me a WiPod!

I try to avoid getting my geek on here, but I couldn't resist. I, like a bazillion others out there, have been ogling the new iPhone while being completely uninterested in buying one. I currently have a work-provided Blackberry, and have no reason to expect to use anything but that in the near or long term future. Therefore, the phone part would be of no value to me. Plus, I don't have six hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket. I already have plenty of holes in my pockets, and I need that money to buy new pants.

However, I’ve been saying that by the end of the year Steve Jobs needs to hop back up on the stage and introduce the next generation of iPods, which would (should) essentially be the iPhone without the “phone” part. Multi-touch screen, OSX, Wi-Fi access, and bigger drives. It seems I’m not the only one thinking this way.

Now, in this article, the writer suggests that the next iPod will not have internet access. To me that would be a mistake. I would think that the benefits of having a truly wi-fi networked iPod would be huge to Apple and to users. And it’s exactly what I want. I want my iPod to do the following:

-Automatically connect to available wifi
-sync wirelessly. I hate cables. So does Steve Jobs.
-Be recognized by my desktop machine running iTunes, so that I can listen to music on my office computer that's shared by my iPod.
-Sync with an AppleTV wirelessly, so I can (in theory) go to a friend's house and play that episode of Lost on my friend's TV easily. I say "in theory" because I have no friends with AppleTV, nor do I expect to any time soon.
-Have all that cool google maps stuff and browser stuff that the iPhone has.
-And, yes, I suppose to some it would be great to be able to buy music from the iTunes Music Store directly from the iPod. I don't expect to do that much, but I can't imagine Apple's not thinking that way.

It seems to me that anything less wouldn't be worth doing. Especially because it ALREADY EXISTS.



Imagine being able to walk into the office with your iPod, it connects to the Wifi automatically,

Waiter, some more monsters in the closet please?

I once determined that dressing a small child is like putting socks on a moving ceiling fan. Be that as it may, putting two small children to bed is like trying to walk a tightrope. One false step and you're flat on your back, staring at the ceiling, wishing someone would just come and put an end to your misery.

It usually starts innocently enough. "Five minutes 'til bedtime" comes the proclamation. After this initial announcement, brief series of events are scheduled to occur:

-Clean up the toys
-Go upstairs
-Change clothes
-Come down for snack
-Read a couple books
-Head upstairs
-brush teeth, pee, wash up
-Nighty night
-Mom and dad get some "us" time.

Believe it or not, things don't always go as planned.

Sure, we start off on the right foot. But more often than not, the tightrope starts to wobble somewhere between agenda items #1, and #2, and by Item #4 we're tangled up in the net far below. Let's take a walk, shall we?

First, there's agenda item #1, the cleaning of the toys. This simply doesn't happen. The conniving little varmints have already learned how to scheme their way out of cleanup duty, usually by stirring up a ruckus. "She hit me! She poked me in the eye! Waah! Get upstairs, you!" So let's move to #2.

Going upstairs can be surprisingly challenging. Often I have this bright idea of yelling, "last one upstairs is a rotten egg!" This starts off great, because the kids hit the steps running. However usually by the third stair tread either someone trips, pushes, or gets upset at being deemed the rancid poultry. If in fact they DO make it successfully up the stairs, dad becomes the rotten egg and a ten-minute giggle fest ensues.

Let's touch on snack time next. Typically it starts like this. "What do you guys want for snack? (no answer). What do you want for snack?? (no answer). Snack? anyone? Kitchen closes in thirty seconds!!!"

"Grapes!"

"We don't have grapes."

"But I WANT grapes!"

"We don't have grapes. How about strawberries?"

"Grapes!"

"Once again, we have no grapes. If you can find grapes, you may eat them."

"Really?? Yay, grapes! Wait, ACTUALLY, I want strawberries."

My wife and I could wash, trim, and cut an entire bushel of strawberries - nay, an entire truckload of strawberries, and no matter how many were placed in front of those kids it would be two strawberries short of needing a second helping. "Can I PLEASE....have more strawberries???" So, one of us gets up, washes, cuts, and arranges a nice second helping of strawberries only to find out that while we were in the kitchen hunger passed, and it was on to things, like the discovery of the dried up piece of Play-Doh found under the kitchen chair that makes a great bouncy ball.

Let's skip ahead a few chapters, to the bathroom ritual. Each night, the statement, "okay, go brush your teeth" seems to have an alternate meaning. what it really means is, "yay, I get to stand in front of the sink, stare at myself in the mirror, and imagine myself as the beautiful princess that I am, swept away by Prince Eric, to a land that's pure and white, with happy little animals and colorful flowers, and friendly flying dragons that breathe fluffy white clouds for me to lay upon, and...

Sorry. Got carried away there.

Anyways, the bathroom ritual is my least favorite part of the evening. If it's not the escape to dreamland, it's the aftermath. I'm curious to know when a child first realizes that spitting out toothpaste in a downward angle, TOWARD the sink, is far more effective than, say, spitting in the general direction of the tub? OR that a towel can often dry hands just as well even if it doesn't have a picture of a princess on it. Or that the proper method of cleaning toothpaste spooge off the mirror is NOT to lick your hands then rub the mirror with them. When the kids finally head off to college, I'm calling the CDC and having them quarantine the bathroom and study it for the existence of a new virus.

From start to finish, we typically expect the bedtime process to take about ten minutes. The reality is that more often than not, two hours is gone before the final goodnight. And mind you, the final goodnight is never the first goodnight. Shut the lights and leave the room, and suddenly it's as if the kids are at a fine restaurant that serves only parental annoyances. "Yes, I think tonight I'll have the scary shadow, with a side of noises outside the window. What's that? You're out of scary noises? Well, perhaps the chef can whip up a nice bad dream from that movie we saw earlier, with a side of another book please? And for dessert, perhaps a slice of can I sleep in your bed? Wonderful, thank you."

Check please.

Mizpee

MizPee is a new service focused on delivering pertinent information regarding the location of nearby restrooms.

Using MizPee is as simple as surfing to mizpee.com via a mobile device browser. Users simply enter their location and MizPee delivers a list of nearby toilets, how far away the toilet is, a rating and whether it requires payment. Further details may include disabled access, whether the restroom includes a diaper-changing station and for those really keen on browsing for the best toilet, user comments as well.

SMS is also supported; users can send a text message to 415-350-2290 with their location and receive details of their nearest loo in return.

Unfortunately, nothing in Pittsburgh yet. Suddenly, I see an opportunity. If I became the Pittsburgh expert on this, I could generate quite the following of tech-savvy old farts in Squirrel Hill who need to pee while wandering down Murray Avenue looking for the best deal on kosher meat. A veritable "Peed Piper" of sorts.

Regardless, I tried this out on my Blackberry. I'm afraid I don't hold much hope for success of this service, as it took so long to load up on the Blackberry that before I could find the nearest bathroom I...oh never mind, too easy.

A picture is worth 426,000 or more words

Artist Chris Jordan's website contains an exhibit called "Running The Numbers", a unique look at popular statistics? Want to know what 2 million plastic bottles, the number consumed in the US every five minutes, looks like? How about 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day? Pretty stunning pictures. As he says:

My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

Out of the mouths of 7-year-olds.

It was approximately 4800 degrees in the shade today, so Natalie and Jessica were delivered to one of those industrial indoor play-places today to burn off some energy while their mom paid a visit to the local Costco. Later, at dinner time, Natalie gave us some details of the events that transpired while they were there.

"It's a good thing I was there with Jessica," she said, "because five boys were pushing her and trying to get in front of her."

"They were?" replied my wife. "Why were they doing that?"

"I think it was because they wanted to be behind me because they thought I was so pretty."

Paris Hilton, look out.

That wasn't so easy.

I'm not a very deep thinker. For example when someone forwards me a video like this on the mathematical principles behind moebius transformations, describing how a flat plane can be bent to do all sorts of crazy mathematical things, I think, "oh, pretty colors." I prefer to think about the more mundane things in life, the everyday things that happen around me. Simple stories. uneventful stories. Stories of things that really annoy the crap out of me and are only worth repeating during the walk to lunch with coworkers.

For example (and you knew there'd be an example), I walked into an office supply store yesterday, after my mother-in-law requested that I buy her a cordless phone system. She wanted one similar to the one we have, with one base and multiple handsets, one that would work well and be simple to use. That last part is crucial. My mother-in-law is a self professed luddite, daunted by technology. If it has a neat feature that doesn't involve receiving a call, making a call, hanging up the phone, or beating a prowler senseless with the handset, she doesn't want to hear about it. Frankly, after two years of using a Blackberry I don't blame her.

So as I was saying, I walked into office supply store yesterday. I won't mention the name, but its corporate colors are red and white. Doesn't narrow it down? Okay, well, the name rhymes with "Shmaples". As usual, there was perhaps one other customer in the store, a round creature rummaging through the clearance table perhaps hoping to find a sweet deal on an external floppy drive marked down for final clearance. I headed for the phone section. Now, Shmaples tends to be a pretty well-organized store, but I think the staff member in charge of the phone aisle must have left his headset out of his ear that day (if you've ever been to an office supply store lately, you'll know that these days all the staff wear special two-way radios in their ears so they can pretend they're members of Jack Bauer's field ops teams instead of the dudes in charge of making sure the Sharpies are lined up in the plastic bins with all their caps facing in the same direction).

On the display shelf were perhaps three dozen phone systems, each of varying prices, features, and quantity of handsets. One would EXPECT that directly under the display models would be the boxes of said models that customers could grab and take to the register with them. However, that expectation would be false. Instead, what I saw were perhaps four dozen boxes, strewn about the shelf like it was late afternoon on Black Friday and all the early bird sales had ended. Of the three or four models I was considering buying, I could not find a single matching box on the shelves.

Noticing my look of consternation, "Doug" walked over. I knew his name was Doug because his headset was clipped to his nametag, causing the nametag to flop up and down as he walked, thus bringing my attention to it. Finally I understand the purpose of the headsets.

Doug asked me if he could help with something. I explained I wanted to buy a multiple-handset phone system, I was looking at "these three" each one being priced between $59 and $79, but couldn't find packages for any of them. He replied with, "oh, if you want a multi-handset phone, follow me."

Confused, I followed him to the end of the aisle, where a several packages of six different models were stacked. However, none of those packaged sets matched anything I just saw on the shelf.

"I don't understand," I said. "if these are the multi-handset phones, then what are those back there?"

"Well, these are on sale, so I thought you would like to know about them."

I looked at the stack of merchandise. As I mentioned there were six different products on the rack. There was one price tag on the entire rack, stating $79.99 for a Sony model of some sort. I looked around at the products and noticed not one of them was a Sony. So I pointed to a Uniden model and said, "so how much is this one?"

"Um, I will have to check."

He disappeared and returned to tell me it was $129.99.

I said, "But the Uniden model over there looks pretty much the same as this for $69."

"I guess you're right."

This guy should get a job at the Apple Genius Bar.

At that point, my cell rang. Thank the lord, I had an excuse to get away from this amorphous blob of human indifference. After I took the call, I considered just leaving and going to one of the other red-and-white office supply stores, but "Manager Bob" stopped by.

"Can I help you find something?"

"Yes," I told him. "I would like you to go over to that shelf there and find a single box that matches any of these phones you have on display. I bet you can't do it." I wanted to make a snarky remark about the staff having lots of free time to get the shelves more organized since there were never any customers in the store, but he interrupted too quickly.

"Let me grab Steve, and he can help you out."

Bob called Steve over, and then Bob went to barricade the door so I couldn't leave without buying something.

Steve, surprisingly, was relatively helpful. He told me, "This shelf is a mess. Let's go to the computer and see what we got. Ah, I see we have one of this item (the one I was interested in) in stock, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. Tell you what, let's order it and have it shipped to your house for free."

Well, at least THAT was easy.

The boy next door

I'm so glad I have girls. Having boys must just suck. Take one of the local neighbor kids, whom I shall refer to as "Tad" (named changed to protect the innocent) as an example.

Tad is a local neighbor kid. He's 8 years old. And chances are if there's trouble in the neighborhood, he's behind it. He's also responsible for some of the best sarcastic comments I've ever heard from a kid his age.

A while back Natalie was riding her bike in the cul-de-sac. He joined in and, as 8-year-old boys tend to do, started following her in circles in a slightly menacing way (for an 8-year-old). Natalie was still getting used to 2-wheeled riding, so understandably this was making her nervous. I called out, "Hey Tad! That's my daughter and I'm pretty protective of her, so if she gets hurt there's gonna be trouble."

His response was, "Why? You've got another daughter."

Point for Tad. Another was when he came out to ride his scooter with no shoes on. I asked him where his shoes were, and he replied with, "aw, mom doesn't care...she just wants me to make sure I don't end up in the hospital cuz it will screw up her exercise schedule."

Now, knowing his mom, I can definitely see her saying that. And I can respect her for that...I'd probably say the same thing. But she obviously didn't realize when she said it that he'd use it against her later. Point two for Tad.

This past weekend we had some folks over for a BBQ, including two girls around our girls' ages. The four of them vanished for the entire evening. We never heard a peep from them. For at least two hours I forgot I had children.

But then Tad showed up. Within minutes, there was trouble.

He came down he driveway wearing bright green rubber dishwashing gloves. He said he just liked wearing them, but I'm guessing he was really hoping to avoid fingerprint evidence. Before too long I saw an object from the toy collection flying down into the part of our yard I refer to "the ravine of lost souls", and Tad tumbling after it. The girls were about to follow, but I warned them against it. Soon after that, Tad found himself bound tightly to a plastic see-saw with jump rope.

Now, normally I would have cheered for four little girls who were able to hogtie an older boy like Tad to a plastic see-saw, but I'm afraid he likely tied himself up. From what I've heard, boys will do that sort of thing.

The problem was, he couldn't get out. The more he tried, the more it tightened. The boy obviously has a future as a kidnapper. I had to go and rescue him. I considered leaving him tied to the see-saw and carrying the whole package back to his dad, but I figured the dad had enough aggravation. They have another boy. I then considered tossing the whole pile into the ravine of lost souls, but there were too many witnesses. So I had no choice but to go down there and untangle him.

Later after I untied him, his name came up amongst the adults above on the deck. From the driveway he yelled, "I heard that! I know you're talking about me. Remember I'm everyone's nightmare!"

He's a sharp kid.

Speaking of boys versus girls, I heard another example of the difference from my wife today. she took the kids to dentist and, while Natalie was in the chair, my wife recognized one of Natalie's classmates in the waiting room. Now, Natalie knows every boy and girl in her class by name. She can describe each one's habits, dressing styles, mom's name, and favorite colors. When my wife said hi to the boy and said she was Natalie's mom, he responded with, "who?"

She followed with, "you know, in your class, long red hair..."

"Hair?"

Thus proving boys have no concept that girls exist until cooties make their presence known.

When Doody calls

For some reason the subject of professional pooper scooper services came up the other day. In doing my usual extensive scientific research on the subject, I found that there is quite literally, well, a crapload of companies out there in the business of cleaning up your dog's business. In fact, there is even a nationwide directory of poop scooping companies, sorted by state. Who knew? And the names, oh the names. I'd consider getting into the business myself but a)I'm not interested and b)I don't think I could come up with a business name nearly as slick. Some examples culled from the above site:

Doodie Calls
Wholly Crap Pet Cleanup Service
Bomb Squad Dog Waste Removal Service
Doodie Free
Doggie Dooers
Doodle Scoopers
Pup-P-Doo Crew
Double Doodie
Poop Fairies
Civic Doody

This company did a fine job of putting a promotional video on their website that really sums up what they do. Make sure to watch through to the end:

Discovering the power of Sketchup

I mentioned in my last post that I discovered the program Google Sketchup, an amazing and FREE 3D rendering program. The program is great for drawing to-scale 3D images of just about anything. In only a couple of hours of fiddling I was able to make this accurate drawing of our family room complete with not-yet-existent built-in furniture. But I was a bit befuddled when I thought about changing the size of the bookcases. I wanted to "drag" the sides out flush to the side walls, but the drawing was too complex to simply grab a side and pull. So I needed to do a little research.

The above is my long-winded way of saying, "holy crap, check out this tutorial". I came across this video (about 20 minutes long) that shows a professional carpenter named Gary Katz designing an attractive bookcase in Sketchup. In this video he shows you very simply how to use each of the most powerful tools in the program. It is truly an amazing piece of software. I dare you not to get hooked after viewing this.

My kingdom for a dehumidifier

Lest you think I've abandoned the blog for better pastures, fear not. I've just been collecting fodder. I've also been spending a decent amount of time doing some of those niggly little projects that have hit the list since the renovation was completed. Like installing ceiling fans. Like getting poison ivy from free mulch. Like watching it rain inside the house.

What's that you say? Rain inside the house? That can't be good.

No, it's not. It seems we have a trifecta of issues, as it were, that's leading to a visit from Bob The Builder later this week. The house has about double the square footage of roof area now collecting water. Additionally, it has brand new siding. Add to that an absolutely torrential rainfall, and we've found a glitch. It seems that last night, during the downpour, the front gutter was overwhelmed and rain began to "sheet" down the front of the house. Directly above my daughter's bedroom window is a small U-shaped vinyl channel that's designed to "finish" the bottom end of the siding above the window. This channel filled with water so fast that it couldn't handle the load, and water filled up behind the siding and began running down the inside of the window. Not good.

It's situations like this that make one realize just how fragile an organism a house can be. It also gives me the ironic realization about just how fragile a homeowner's budget can be. This happened the same day I had to bring my car in for emergency surgery, and hours after my wife and I decided on a design for built-in furniture we want to put in our family room. As the saying goes, "it never ends".

But on to other topics. I've fallen in love with a computer program called Google Sketchup. I was looking for a simple home "CAD" program that would allow me to put together some designs for built-in furniture when I came a across it. Sketchup is a FREE program that allows you to quickly and painlessly draw in three dimensions. After about a half hour of learning and two hours of doing, I was able to produce this to-scale reproduction of our family room with potential designs for built-ins. And the best part is that in the actual program, I can rotate the image around on three axes to get a view from all sides, above and below. Like I said this is an amazing program. There's also a wealth of information on how to use it, an entire society of woodworkers who've put together templates, tools and plugins, and a database on Google of presketched images you can grab for free. Oh, and if you're designing a building and you want to see what it might look like in the real world, you can place your image on Google Earth in exactly the location you want, to see what your house might look like in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, or in the sands of Dubai. Like I said, it's free, so check it out.