Preparing to leave

So as you may have read, my mother-in-law passed around Labor Day. She lived in a little apartment in Shadyside, and for the most part I've been taking on the task of moving her belongings out of there while my wife understandably builds up the strength to even go near the place so soon after.

I can thankfully say I haven't done this too often. The last time someone close to me died and I was involved in the demolition process was when my grandfather passed away about ten years ago. Comparing the two events, I must say that cleaning up my mother-in-law's stuff has been a piece of cake. She was a woman of simple needs. She had no car. No home ownership. Not much furniture. Oddly enough the one thing she had the most of in life was televisions. Why a single woman in a small apartment without cable TV needed four TV's I'm not sure. But regardless, I thank the woman for making the process relatively painless.

Throughout the process (which still continues), I have found myself thinking quite a bit about what I would do to better avoid putting this sort of burden on my family members if I knew the end was near. So, I guess it's time to put things in writing. Bear in mind that none of these ideas relate specifically to my mother-in-law or my grandfather. They are simply thoughts that popped into my head.

1. Take some time to clean out your closets. Closets are the absolute worst when it comes to this sort of shovel-out. 90% of what's in the average closet could have been thrown out years ago. 5% is something you thought you should save, and tossed in a closet never to be seen again. And the remaining 5% is perhaps of interest to someone.

2. Don't save greeting cards. My grandparents saved every one they ever received. Those cards may have meant a lot to them. They meant nothing to us except an extra trip to the trash bin.

3. Get your files organized. NOW. A close relative should have a complete list of your accounts, credit card numbers, insurance policies, safety deposit box locations, etc. There's plenty of articles out there about what to do...do it now.

4. Make sure someone knows your passwords. The previous item is something everyone knows. But I think new on the list is to have a way of letting the person in charge of safekeeping of your documentation know where to find your passwords to important systems such as Quicken, or to your bank website. This is especially true if you are the only spouse that pays the bills. I often think about how I use Quicken to pay everything and, if I were to be gone, my wife wouldn't know the first thing about even starting the program up.

5. Got something weird in your drawers, something you don't want people to see? Get rid of it.

6. If you own something that is of value or has meaning to the family, but that value might not be obvious to the naked eye, make sure to document. For example, if that little statue of the baby Moses on the mantle was carried by your great-great-great uncle Moishe on his back as he walked from Poland to New York (I'm just sayin'), then make sure someone knows it before tossing it on eBay or, worse yet, in the trash. If it's VERY valuable, mention it in the will. If it's just something you feel would be meaningful to someone, write it down and give it to the person in #3. On the other hand, don't go nuts. I have a friend who's mom thought she had an incurable tumor (she got better). Once she heard the bad news, she went around the house with a post-it pad bequeathing every last item in the house to one relative or another. Now that she's better, they are STILL finding post-its on everything down to the Pyrex cookware.

7. Pay for as much of your burial proceedings as you can in advance. Buy a cemetery plot. Take out an insurance policy that covers the burial fees. The only thing worse than having to bury a loved one is having to bury one and THEN deal with around ten thousand dollars in fees.

8. Make sure someone knows who your estate lawyer is. The lawyer should have copies of your will (you DO have one of those, right?) and will be able to make the whole process MUCH easier.

9. If you rent, make sure someone knows the terms of your lease. Currently we're dealing with a landlord who thinks he has the right to charge us a "termination fee" of several months' rent. That's not what the lease says. But the lease was written by a FORMER building owner. Currently the lawyer is working that one out.

10. If you have IRA's and annuities, it's important to be aware of the tax implications upon your death. Your survivors will have several different options for withdrawing the month to work around tax obligations. I say discuss those things now!

11. Do NOT save years' worth of bills and paperwork. It just confuses matters. Just as an example, my mother-in-law had an investment account back in the 80's with one company. In the 90's she switched to a different company. Around 2005 she switched again. She saved all the paperwork from all three accounts. The only way I could tell the first two accounts were not in existence was to call the investment companies, one of which no longer existed. That wasted a couple of hours. Keep all your current paperwork organized in one place, and list all current accounts on that document you're going to prepare for the person safeguarding your information.

12. Wanna have a little fun? If you know you're going to check out soon, toss some cash in your clothing pockets. The fact is that when emptying out the closets, your survivors will need to go through every article of clothing to make sure you didn't stash your diamonds in the pocket of the coat you last wore in 1984. And that's really boring. Might as well make it interesting for them, and toss a couple of bucks in here and there. Funny story related to that. Before my grandfather died, he took several thousand dollars in cash out of the bank before a trip to Florida. The money disappeared. He swore the housekeeper stole it, until the day he died. When we cleaned out his closet. Guess what we found? The cash, in the original bank envelope, in a jacket he decided he no longer liked.

More suggestions?

A major milestone

On the way to work today I had the pleasure of watching the odometer on my '99 Mazda 626 hit a hundred thousand miles. It makes me feel good to know that We've gone for about six years with nary a car payment, as both cars were fully paid for in '01. I dread the thought of buying something new right now. For one thing, I don't need the extra bill each month. For another, I'm concerned that if I bought right now, by the time I was ready to unload it there'd be all sorts of new technology on the road and my current car would have the resale value of a CD player. I think I'll treat my Mazda to a nice birthday washing. Perhaps some new belts, a little shine. It's taken care of me. I'll try to reciprocate.

My slow return

Boy, what a couple of weeks it's been. As mentioned previously, we're dealing with a sudden and somewhat unexpected loss in the family in that my wife's mom passed away. It was a really harsh time. She was a 3-time cancer survivor, but in the end what got her was heart failure. And we don't even know why. It might have been the many months of chemo; it might have been her stem cell transplant; it might have been something totally unrelated and completely coincidental. We won't ever really know, as religious belief took precedence and we opted out of having an autopsy done. Over the past weeks we've been literally surrounded by friends and family, dealing with a swarm of estate issues, with cleaning out an apartment that hasn't been rearranged in 15 years, and with dealing with two children that no longer have a bubba. I've been wanting to blog about so many things just to clear the air and get some perspective, but I don't know even where to begin. So I figure I'll just chip away at small chunks until I reach some sort of equilibrium. I'm not even sure if that last sentence made any sense, but I've had a couple of beers, so deal with it.

It hasn't been all bad. As promised, I've dived headfirst into building furniture for our home office. More details to come, but suffice it to say I think I've done a good job replicating that $400 Pottery Barn file cabinet with a $38 sheet of baltic birch plywood. Plus, my buddy Paul and I finally managed to see the Simpsons movie, something long overdue. I think that over the next few weeks, I'll be sorting out my thoughts regarding estate planning, preparation (such that it were) for a death in the family, and the concept of the Jewish shiva. Stay tuned.

Dealing with Grief

It's funny how things change so suddenly. My last post was about a simple thing like budgeting for overpriced furniture. Only days later, my wife's mom passed away unexpectedly. Needless to say, it's been a little tough to find the time to write in the past couple of weeks, but with the thoughts swirling through my head right now I could write a novel if I had the time. This post is simple a note to let all (okay, both) my faithful readers know I'm still out there, that I'll be back soon enough, and that sadly I've got a whole new vein of subject matter about which to write. In the mean time I'm observing. Having a close family member pass away is a very foreign experience for me, and I'm definitely learning as I go. From the logistics of cleaning out an apartment that hasn't been changed in 15 years, to learning and understanding how a 7-year-old copes with losing one of her most precious and beloved friendships only days before her birthday, I've got a lot to pay attention to currently. More to come. I'll try not to make it too depressing, though. You know me.

Pottery Barn Dreams on a K-Mart budget

With our house renovation behind us, we've lately been spending lots of time hemming and hawing about furniture. Well, maybe more hemming than hawing. As you can well imagine, after dropping a boatload of cash into construction, lately we get a little queasy when we look at the prices of things like dining room tables, couches, and office furniture.

Luckily, none of our needs are immediate. We've got a dining room table, though it's too small and doesn't match our decor (early neo-retro-classic with an art deco-country flair). We've got office furniture that's functional, but reminds me of my college dorm days (hmm... probably because it's the desk from my college dorm). We've also got an entire living room to furnish, but for now that room is the storehouse for Fisher Price's western Pennsylvania showcase.

As I mentioned in a recent post, my wife had the opportunity to hire a professional organizer to create an organized environment for her at-home writing career. I'll write some details on that another time, but suffice it to say having a clean, organized office has given me the bug to do something about furnishing it. So I've started hunting around for office furniture. I've found that the choices out there really, really, really suck.

Unless you like particle board, there isn't much to choose from. My repulsion for semi-disposable furniture automatically knocks anything from Ikea, OfficeMax or the like immediately out of the running. That leaves us with professional-grade places or fancy-schmancy places like Pottery Barn. We also crossed off the professional office furniture places, because we really don't need our home to look like a dentist's reception area.

One of the few places in the world that seems to sell good quality and decent looking office furniture is Pottery Barn. No surprise really. Everyone knows their stuff is gorgeous though pricey. I was recently browsing though their catalog (yes, I was on the john, of course. Bet you're glad I mentioned that) when I discovered this line of "modular" furniture for home offices. I showed Hilary, and she loved it. But as is usually the case with PB, I was horrified by the price. A simple two-drawer file cabinet was $250! Extrapolate that out and we could easily furnish our office for about the same price as a year of tuition at Carnegie Mellon. Not really an option. But I felt I had to go to PB and see this stuff in person, to understand exactly what magical powers this office suite possessed enabling it to garner such a high price.

So I went. And I looked. And you know what? It was very nice. But more importantly, I realized that the design was ridiculously simple. Clean lines, no fancy routed edges, absolutely nothing special (which is why we liked it so much). So, I decided it was time for my next woodworking project.

A half hour later, I had the basic cabinet sketched out in Sketchup.



One trip to Home Depot and $38 later, I had the lumber I needed. Tomorrow, a trip to Rockler (my new favorite store) for some additional components and a can of some good wood finish, and I have what I need to build a proof of concept. I figure if I can make a file cabinet as nice as they can (okay, 75% as nice), then I have all the skills I need to completely furnish our office and have enough left over to send the kids to trade school, at least.

I'll keep you posted.

More Poison Ivy Hell

If you ever saw Total Recall, my face kind of looks like Schwarzenegger’s did just before his head almost exploded from lack of oxygen.

Here's a picture of me before the poison ivy:



And here's what I look like now:

Poison Ivy Hell

This now makes the second time in one summer that the poison ivy gods have tried to take me down. A couple of months ago I thought I'd take advantage of my town's "free mulch" program. They take all the leaves collected in the fall, mulch them, and dump them in a public area free for the taking. This year for the first time, I thought I'd take some. Demonstrating that there is no free lunch, I got hit with a nasty case of poison ivy all over my body.

Yesterday, I got hit again. I racked my brain, trying to figure out how. I hadn't really done much outside. I certainly didn't roll around in free mulch. Then I realized it. I'd grabbed a plastic bin to collect some lawn waste yesterday. The last time I used that bin was to haul home free mulch. Man, that's potent stuff.

Luckily, only a day into this new case, I ran into a friend who's also a pediatrician. One scrip later, and I'm on steroids. Hot dog.

elementary changes

When I was your age, television was called books!

-Princess Bride

As we prepare Natalie for entry into first grade, we've begun to notice that things have changed drastically since my days at Northeast Elementary School.

First of all, lunch. Gone are the days of packing the daily peanut butter sandwich. Now, if your child dares bring in a PB&J for lunch, she is forced to eat it at the "nut table." Much like the designated smoking areas at airports these days, the nut table segregates legume-spread eaters from the rest of society due to the overwhelming number of peanut allergies in the schools these days. I wonder if there's a special table for those kids who can successfully spew milk out their noses when they laugh.

And then there's the PIN number. Every kid in school is assigned a 6-digit PIN number (insert Simpsons reference here: "These people look deep inside my soul and assign me a number in the order in which I joined"). This PIN number grants them financial access to mom and dad's wallet by allowing them to buy lunch and/or snacks. Gone are the days of bullies stealing your kids' milk money. Now they can just shake fellow students down for their passcodes, starting them early in a prosperous career in identity theft.

Some things, however, haven't changed. Natalie's school supply list included a pocket folder, so I took her to Target to pick one out. After mulling over the benefits of the spangly hearts versus the one with the butterflies, versus the pink with yellow circles, she decided upon the one folder I was hoping she'd miss - the full color head shot of High School Musical Heart Throb Troy Bolton. Yes folks, it's the next generation's Shaun Cassidy.

Horton Hears A Who

New kids' movie alert. And it looks to be a good one! Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey star in Horton Hears A Who, from the makers of Ice Age. March 14, 2008. Grab your hot steaming kettles of Beezle-Nut oil, and be there.

HSM2OmigodOmigodOmigod!!!

It's finally here! Excitement Excitement! It's the premiere of High School Musical 2!! Omigod, Omigod!!

The buzz machine was in overdrive this week both on the Disney Channel and throughout my daughters' circle of friends. After having the lyrics to every song of HSM1 embedded permanently into the deepest nooks and crannies of my cranium, it was time for the onslaught of the sequel. We invited some friends over on Friday night in expectation of a veritable All-Star Game of Disney movies, popped on the plasma, the girls' eyes lit up, and there they were, Troy and Gabriella and the Eastside High posse.

The DisMAY machine was in full swing. Throughout this past week we were pummelled with such marketing gimics as a TV Guide full cover spread (collect both versions!) of the cast, with a CD-rom filled with extras such as the dance moves and lyric sheets, ensuring every child receiving this disk would DEMAND to have a HSM2 party for their birthday, complete with professional dance teachers and a team of hired cheerleaders. There have been previews, trailers, skywriting, fireworks displays, and even a special address by George Bush himself creating a national holiday in honor of the event.

So how was the movie? Eh.

HSM1 was an accident. It was a kid-friendly, medium budget story that just happened to have really catchy music and a moderately decent storyline, and it suddenly became a phenomenon. HSM2 was all about the choreography, with little attention paid to the script or the acting. The storyline was some loose creation revolving around the kids working at an exclusive desert spa/golf resort that just HAPPENS to have a talent contest.

As demonstrated by the fantastic choreography of "hey batter batter swing", a combination swing/hip-hop dance song done on a baseball field, the cast has definitely improved upon their dance skills and complexity of their moves. The songs were far less catchy, but then again I'm saying that after only hearing them once. Perhaps by the fiftieth time I hear it, those few remaining slots of brain matter will be completely filled.

By the way if you missed it Friday night, do not fret. You can catch a repeat every night on the Disney channel for the next four thousand days.

Happy 25th Anniversary, Compact Disc

It was August 17th, 1982. That was the day , twenty-five years ago, that the very first CD was pressed, in the Phillips factory in Germany. And the first CD? ABBA's The Visitors. How frightening.

I can recall a few major milestones in my history with the little plastic coaster. The very first time I heard a CD was in 1986. It was Billy Joel's The Bridge. My friend Matt's dad had gotten a shiny new (and then very expensive) CD player, and Matt invited me over for a demo. He turned the volume up to eleven, popped in the disk, hit play, and it blew me away.

My first CD purchase was The Swing, from INXS. Back then, my sister and I were die hard INXS fans (up until the point where the lead singer knocked himself off while attempting auto-erotic asphyxiation). I was just about to hit college age and, without letting my parents know, I coordinated with my high school music teacher who "knew a guy" that could get me a sweal deal on a pioneer stereo, CD player, and dual tape cassette player with which to outfit my future dorm. It wasn't long before my roommates and I became the de facto party DJ's for our fraternity house, spending our Friday evenings surrounded bu stacks and stacks of jewel cases and cute women (okay, it was CMU...geeky guys) rummaging through them in search of an Ultravox request.

I still have that receiver in my workshop. The CD player, along with the multitude of other CD players I've owned over the years, has since hit the trash bin.

I also have a clear memory of the first DVD I ever saw. It was September of 1992. I just started my first job out of college, as a book buyer for the Childrens' book division of Readers' Digest (no, really). I met the guy in charge of all those Readers' Digest music anthologies, who to this day had the coolest office I've ever seen. All the walls were covered in acoustic carpet, and the back wall was floor-to-ceiling electronics. He also happened to be a beta tester for nearby Phillips Corporation, and showed me this newfangled thing called a DVD. He popped in (what else) Top Gun, and again life changed forever.

It seems a shame...a few years from now the idea of showing a friend your latest CD purchase, folding out the cover art, reading the lyrics...all that will be long ago history. Now in the days of iTunes, music downloads, and P2P, music has become so disposable. Think of all the young toddlers who will never understand the wonders of gravity discovered by rummaging through dad's CD rack.

I still love turning on my 500-disc CD changer, hitting the random button, and letting it spin while I work around the house, catching up on those musical memories and hoping to discover a long lost or perhaps never-noticed track from my original collection. No ABBA in there, though.

15 inches of fame

I would be remiss in my duties as a father if I didn't post this on the net for all to see. Natalie had her 15 minutes of fame (well, at least 5 of her digits did) by getting her hand in the local paper.

It kind of reminds me of Pixar's Monsters Inc, when Mike and Sully star in a TV commercial, and Mike's entire face is blotted out by the company logo. "I don't believe it....I was on TV!!!!"

A brief distraction or two

Animator Vs. Animation
Remember those stick figure animations that were circling the net a year or two ago? Here's another, entitled "Animator vs. Animation". There was one like it a while back, but I think this one's got some new bits.

The Impossible Quiz
Warning: Don’t open this during work hours. You will find yourself completely sucked in and all productivity destroyed. I tried it the other night around 11pm and an hour was gone before I knew it.

The game is called The Impossible Quiz. Give it a minute to load, read the directions, then answer the questions. You have three chances. Each time you get a question wrong, you lose a life. After you lose three lives you must start over. The questions are simple. Yet ridiculous. Brilliant stuff.

It's the Muppet Show....

Finally. At last. My kids will now understand just why their dad is so weird. It's the Muppet Show, Season One and Season Two on DVD. I've been waiting thirty years for this.

Short term and long term memory development in children

I'm not a child psychologist. Nor do I play one on TV. I have not done any studies on this subject. Nor do I plan to. But I think I can safely say with confidence that by age six, the development of a child's short-term memory greatly lags that of their long term memory development.

My wife witnessed this today when she dropped our older daughter off at day camp. It seems there was an immediate issue in that Natalie, for one reason or another, was about to be kicked out of Friday's talent show by her two best friends (they planned on singing selections from High School Musical, of course). The friends were disgruntled because she told a small fib, and they decided to get back at her in a way that only six-year-old girls can do...by kicking her out of the talent show (by the way, we have not confirmed if this talent show is something actually planned by the camp, or something formulated in the minds of three six year-olds much like their previous plans to form a nationwide charity selling seashells, to fly into space together on a fuzzy carpet dressed as princesses, or to take over the government of this country and replace it with a well-trained team of puppies). At some point during the renouncing of their friendship with our daughter, my wife had to break in, sit the three of them down, and lecture them on the consequences of lying, on proper behavior amongst friends, and on how to pick on other kids without getting caught by an authority figure.

Yet by the time camp was over, the girls were literally begging to come home with my daughter and play at our house. So much for ostracizing. Thus an example of short-term memory underdevelopment. Sure, you might say it was actually an example of small children not holding a grudge. But no. I don't think so.

There are a multitude of other examples I can provide. Most have to do with performing cleanup of their playthings. Sure, when they pull out the giant box of building blocks they hear us and respond affirmatively when we say, "make sure to clean those up when you're done!" But before too long they've been distracted by the ice cream truck, and have forgotten their half-finished castle even exists.

Or, there's that moment during the bedtime ritual where they rush to the bathroom to brush their teeth, pee, and all that other stuff. As one makes her way to her bedroom we ask, "did you brush your teeth?" Usually the answer is no, because she was distracted by a shiny strand of dental floss hanging from the towel rack.

Compare this to a child's long term memory development, and there are obvious differences. About two months ago we drove by a mattress store and noticed it had burned to the ground. Virtually every day now, Jessica asks us, "Wemembuh that mattress store we saw yestuday? Why did it burn?" Obviously, it's been a life-changing event for her.

Jessica will also say on a regular basis, "wemembuh when Uncle Hillel took me in the pool yesterday? I had fun!" That was three YEARS ago.

Sometimes we play this short term memory loss to our advantage. If one asks, "daddy can you play blocks with us?" while I'm ensconced in, I dunno...blogging perhaps, I can say, "yup! Be there in two minutes". And within 30 seconds they've already moved on to crayons, forgetting that blocks exist." Of course, a week later I will hear, "daddy, you never played blocks with us yesterday," thus proving that long term memory will always take over and bite us in the rear.

Which reminds me...I promised Natalie I'd buy a goldfish for her. Hmm, that was a week ago. I'm thinking she'll mention it within the next few hours.

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.

Like Organizational Mannah From Heaven

My lovely wife writes for several local publications. The editor of one assigned her a new story, one that made me jump for joy and go into sarcastic-husband mode all at once.

The assignment is for my wife to hook up with a professional organizer. The organizer would proceed to invade my wife's office and get her life organized. My wife would, in return, write a story about the experience.

My first thought was to ask if the magazine editor had a secret webcam pointed at my lovely wife's desk. How else could the editor know what a perfect candidate she was? That one didn't quite get me a slap across the face, but it did get me a "bite me" and a nasty look.

I've long ago accepted the fact that my lovely wife is the yin to my anal-retentive yang. If we had geeky organizational nicknames, they would be "file" and "pile". I file everything. She performs this precarious balancing act of paper, books, and other materials upon various strategic corners of the desk, floor, and any other flat surface. Once a month or so I go on a tear and clean things up, after which she berates me for throwing something important out. But don't get me wrong...I'm not perfect either. I cannot follow a schedule, remember an important date, or do basic math, whereas she can tell me exactly how many hours are available between Friday at 5pm and Monday at 8am and how few of the items I've put on our list for the weekend could possibly happen without disrupting the space-time continuum and creating a wormhole in our cul-de-sac. In a sense, we complete each other.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to this project. It involves cleaning, filing, and possibly the construction of one or more shelves. This should be quite an experience.

Insta-Blessing Key Fob

gizmodo has a posting about a new product called the "Say-A-Blessing"

The Say-a-Blessing keychain can get through those pesky blessings for you with the push of a button for whatever type of food you're about to eat (except pork and shellfish for some odd reason), allowing you to cut to the chase without pissing off the big man upstairs. Everybody wins? Oy vey. –Adam Frucci

Okay, let's think about this. an electronic key fob. With an LED light on it, no less. For what? for remembering all those easily forgettable shabbat prayers. You know, that day of the week where you aren't supposed to be using anything electronic. Hmm, seems about as useful as a Blackberry with a dead battery, doncha think?

I can just picture my Grandma Edith (rest her soul) trying to figure this out. She presses a button, and some Korean-sounding weirdo recites a brucha in his worst Ashkenazi, all the while Grandma Edith is yelling with a mouth full of rugelach, that little bit of crumb hanging from the side of her lip, a used tissue hanging out of her sleeve, and she grabs my arm with that deathly grip, "Michael...Michael, what is this this thing? I can't hear it! Can you hear it? I can't hear it! He's saying these crazy things, Oy. These new toys!"

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Very nicely done:

Someday I will Learn

Hilary has another story (poem, actually) published! It's in an online 'zine called Stories for Children, and the June issue has her poem entitled "Someday I will Learn". and, no, it's not a story about how much of a dolt her husband can be sometimes...

Check out the site here, and you can download the story reader in PDF form.

Toy or Tool? The Segway...

Howard and I have been sharing some thoughts on what gadgets fall under the category of toys, versus being classified as tools.

Last week I saw a Segway in use for the first time. A mall cop at Ross Park Mall in Pittsburgh was "walking the beat" behind Cheesecake Factory on one. It made me wonder what he'd do if he encountered trouble. would he leave the Segway unattended and pursue the actor on foot? would the perrpetrator's partners in crime steal the Segway when he leaves it?

To me, the Segway is the most unfortunate example of a toy is really trying to be a tool, but can't figure out how. Or maybe I can't figure out how. Here is a piece of phenomenal innovation. When the rumors began to surface about its existence, people in the know said cities would rebuild themselves around these things. But before the Segway could even gain a foothold (no pun intended), towns were banning them from sidewalks for fear of injuries.

The fact is, the Segway tries too hard to resolve a need that doesn't necesarily exist. I'm not sure I see how you can do anything on a Segway that you can't do better walking or on a bike. For one thing, cops doing a bike beat get more exerrcise and can go faster, and into more places, than if they used a Segway. So is there truly a NEED fora Segway? If not, then it's a toy.

In my opinion there are a few ways that a Segway could become more than just a toy. First, give it the ability to tow a trailer. This would make it useful for warehouses, mailmen, and the like. Second, make it strong enough to tow those trailers uphill. This might make it handy as alternative transportation for suburbanites. And lastly, make it faster than walking briskly. The idea of transportation is to get someplace faster than walking.

The Segway has its place. As a curiosity, as a toy, and in some cases perhaps as something that verges on a tool. But it ain't there yet.

Now, if Segway decided to actually build the Concept Centaur they show on their site, that right there is a toy that excels at being a toy.

Oh and hey...what's a Segway?

'bout 150 pounds.

Teens can't live without the internet

Howard posted a link to this article about how a panel of teens said they can't live without the internet and mobile devices.

"One kid, the most outspoken and rebellious of the bunch, said he had lost two phones in the last month — one left on the top of his car, and the second broken when he leaned on it while playing pool. Of course, later, when asked what piece of technology he couldn’t live without, he said he would die if he lost his cell phone."

I often think about the perception my daughters have of what computers and the internet are all about. To them, it's like TV, I guess...something that's always been a part of life and someday they are going to learn more about. They can't imagine life without it. But I have to laugh about a kid saying he'd die without his cell. True, if he was lost in the wild and had no phone, yeah, he might die. But frankly, I don't think I've ever said that about any piece of technology I own (no, not even the TiVo). Yes, there are many things I could not do without computers or the internet, but then again there are many things I DON'T DO BECAUSE OF the internet. Like read books. Like go outside more. Like clean the bathroom more often. Like play with my kids more.

Last winter, we had a power failure (very rare in our neighborhood) right at dinner time. My wife was not home at the time, so the kids and I went into campout mode. We dug out every Shabbat candle and votive we could find, ate a lukewarm dinner, and set up a campsite in the master bedroom. We told stories, talked about past power failures and past campouts before they were born, and had a great old time despite the fact that the room was dropping to a brisk temperature rapidly. The kids often ask me when we can do that again.

I'm thinking of shutting the power off to the whole house once a month.

Kromofons: The future of the Alphabet (or not)

Here's an article about some wackjob (or perhaps genius?/) who invented a new alphabet years ago based not on written text but on colors. Quite simply, each color represents a letter of the alphabet. He invented this years ago, but only now felt it was ready for the world due to the ubiquity of color monitors. Frankly, I see a whole new market for little code puzzles on kids' place mats at the local Olive Garden, but beyond that, I don't see it.

The website is an enjoyable, if not completely useless and time consuming, toy for about ten minutes, but it contains many of the inventor's complex word and sentence creations with little to no explanation of practical application. Basically, the guy must have had a little too much free time in his bedroom as a kid.

The EPIC program

The other day we attended our first official parent/teacher conference. Natalie's Kindergarten teacher had all good things to say about our little shining star, and in fact confirmed what we already know: that she's smarter than either one of us. We discussed enrolling her in the "gifted program" soon. This got me to reminiscing about my own experience with the gifted program back in my elementary school days.

There are only four things I remember from my years in elementary school:

1. Getting hit in the eye by a rogue snowball.
2. Witnessing my dog, Dusty, get pummeled by a car on the day of the science fair
3. The event at the school dance that caused every boy at Northeast Elementary to enter puberty simultaneously.
4. The EPIC program.

Okay, let's take these one by one. First, the snowball. to this day I don't know if it was intended for me, but I ended up with a scratched cornea and bad vision in my right eye to this day. If you, the thrower, are out there reading this, thanks a whole lot, buttwipe.

Second, the death of Dusty. It was my first encounter with death. Dusty hated kids. He repeatedly tried to eat me. But seeing him lying under that Michelin, tongue hanging out, eyes stoned cold, will be forever cemented in my head far more than the schematic of the inside of the Space Shuttle that I threw together for the fair.

Next, the dance. In a classic tale, a plain, homely, barely-noticed girl named Tina (I think) managed to get a makeover of Hollywood proportions in preparation for that night, showed up for the 8th grade dance, and caused every boy in the room to simultaneously grab the nearest helium balloon and position it strategically in front of his belt buckle.

And now, to the EPIC program. The only educational part of elementary school that I actually remember. I think I remember it so vividly because it was so traumatic. Several students were taken from class on Wednesday and bussed to a different school in town (Ivy Drive, the "school where bullies were made") for a day of advanced learning. I believe part of this was learning to cope with the repeated tormenting we encountered whenever we showed got off the short bus at the school parking lot.

But I have to admit, I actually learned a few things in the EPIC program. EPIC, by the way, stood for "Enrichment Program for Intellectually gifted Children". These were the kids that were bored in the normal classroom, showed an obvious tendency for advanced learning, or (like me) displayed absolutely no skill whatsoever in gym class. Each Wednesday, once we escaped the bonds of the typical social studies curriculum and made it through the gauntlet of the Ivy Drive Bullies, we were able to think freely, command respect from our peers, and screw around with a cutting edge Radio Shack TRS-80 computer all day.

I hope that Natalie's experience is as fulfilling.

A Memorial Day Weekend to forget

Okay, I'm back. The weather has been nice, and there have been way too many projects to do around the house to even consider sitting down in front of the computer for any length of time and ramble on about the wonders of my life. But today I've got time, as I'm in the midst of recuperation.

Today is the first day back after the 4-day Memorial Day weekend. And this one's going to be quite a memory.

It started Thursday night, at Thing#2's preschool picnic. Thing#1 wasn't feeling too well, so we left early and later discovered she had a fever of around 101. She was pretty miserable that night. But that was nothing compared to Friday night, when she managed to almost break her nose watching TV. I'm still not quite sure what happened, but somehow the coffee table encountered her face, causing her to spurt blood out of her nostrils and her parents to rush her to the hospital and explain to the authorities that we weren't child beaters. In the end the x-ray was negative for a break, but she spent the weekend looking like a raccoon.

Saturday was spent preparing to host some neighbors in a "break in the new deck" party. The instant the first guest rang the doorbell, the skies opened up and it rained for the rest of the night. During the (now indoor) party, I started to notice that I wasn't feeling too great. Plus, I realized I'd been totally bitten up by something outside.

Sunday, whatever hit me came out full force. I had a full fledged cold virus with all the trimmings, AND what I thought were insect bites turned out to be some sort of rash. I thought perhaps it was a reaction to cold medication, but later I'd be proven wrong....

On Monday, the illness and itching continued, and I spent most of the day sitting around in misery. My loving wife planned ahead for a night of being kept awake by my coughing and decided to set up camp in the guest room, but that didn't help any. Because late Monday night Thing#2 decided to wake up screaming every half hour from 11pm to 4am. Either she wanted a drink, or she was missing her stuffed bunny, or her leg was uncovered, or the night light was too bright. By 4am we were just about ready to have to explain ourselves to the authorities once more.

Today, I went to the doctor to see about this rash. It turns out it isn't a drug reaction after all, but poison ivy. I'm not quite sure how I managed to contract poison ivy, but my theory is this. Our township collects leaves each fall, mulches them and leaves the mulch pile in a public for any resident to take for gardening. I decided to take advantage of it this year and grabbed a few buckets of it. My guess is that’s where it came from. This is what’s known as “no free lunch”.

So as I sit here, squinting through my swollen eyelids, I think it's high time to get back to blogging. So there ya go.

The Best Movie In The World

My daughters have recently discovered the best movie in the world. At least, that is what they tell me. I believe it has something to do with Barbie, and the title of this movie escapes me. I just know the DVD is always in the player and the box is always lying open on the coffee table or wedged between couch cushions.
The movie is on constantly, whether I'm home or at work. Yet I have no idea what it's about. I've never looked up the screen or acknowledged it's script. I do know that Steven Right does the voice of one character. It's hard to miss him even in the background, and at any moment I expect him to ask why we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.

Recently I learned a bit more about the plot of this cinematographic wonder, as the girls have taken to acting out key scenes from it in the back yard. Best I can tell, here's how it goes:

Natalie plays Odette, the female (Barbie)character. Jessica plays Derek, the handsome prince. Odette lies on top of a faraway mountain, dramatically performed by the tarp-covered pile of gravel destined for the underside of the new deck. Derek lies upon the top of another distant mountain, skillfully acted out by the pile of sand for the walkway. The script is as follows:

Odette: "Derek!!"
Derek: "Odette!"
Odette: "Derek!!"
Derek: "Odette!"
Odette: "Derek!!"
Derek: "Odette!"
Odette: "Derek!!"
Derek: "Odette!"

This goes on for a half hour or until one of the actresses decides she needs a snack and retires to her trailer.

I really need to get that walkway done.

You have got to be kidding me

Teachers stage fake gunman attack on sixth graders.

I'm beyond words. I don’t even know what to say here. Whatever idiots thought this was good judgment should be hung by their toenails and beaten senseless.

Happy Fathers Day

Yesterday of course was Mothers Day, and as luck would have it while attempting to provide my wife with a day of bliss I think I stumbled upon the ultimate Fathers Day.

The morning started off with me cooking a nice brunch with all the trimmings. Works for me. I love to cook. Then, to give the wife some "me" time I took the kids out in the back yard to play. They ran around while I awaited a delivery of gravel for the landscaping under the new deck. Yes, I actually had the balls to schedule a gravel delivery on Mothers Day. While I waited, I dug out the area for our new walkway. Rarely does one handle a pickax on Mothers Day.

After the gravel delivery. It was off to Lowes. What? Lowes, you say? Yes, my lovely wife was reminiscing about the lilac trees in her back yard during childhood, so I suggested we check out the garden center at Lowes. While there, I loaded up on about a hundred square feet of pavers for the walkway along with two lilac bushes and some other items. after a stop at Cold Stone Creamery to harden our arteries, we came back and spent the afternoon landscaping.

Side note, during my wife's morning "me" time she went for a walk and passed by the neighbors' house. They swapped stories about Mothers Day events and, when she told them about going to Lowes later the husband replied with, "you're going to Lowes on Mothers Day??? Wow, you're a rockin' wife!"

Had it not been for the fact that we were out of beer, this would have been a perfect Fathers Day. As I often say to my wife (okay okay, not nearly often enough), how'd I get so lucky?

Failing to deliver

I'm very disappointed with myself.

I stopped in at the hospital this afternoon to visit my mother-in-law. As I was leaving, I got in the elevator just as a man pushing a hospital gurney came out. On the gurney was resting not a patient, but a six-foot step ladder.

At the time the best I could come up with to say to the guy was, "looks like you'd better step up his treatment." I got a polite chuckle out of that. But I KNOW there's a better one out there and it bugged me the rest of the day. I'm worried this is a sign of old age, not being able to hit folks with smartass comments on a timely basis.

If you can come up with better, feel free to share.

Buy your kid this toy or he will fester

NPR had a story about how the toy industry plays on parental anxiety by convincing new parents that without expensive and shiny toys and gadgets to stimulate a child's brain, the little squirt will aspire no higher in life than to enter the janitorial service industry (not that janitorial service isn't a highly respected profession in its own right).

The story included an interview with Susan Gregory Thomas, author of Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds. She points out how products are being marketed to stimulate certain sides of the brain and to help them develop certain cognitive skills, and to further explain that there's absolutely no science to back up the claims. She also points out that toy companies are interested in "cradle-to-grave" brand loyalty, which is why you see Dora The Explorer on everything from videos, to underpants, to notebooks, to sneakers, to computer games. I'm sure the marketers behind Dora are working on cell phones, checkbook cases, purple automobiles, and Depend Undergarments in an effort to complete the cradle-to-grave cycle as those Dora fans mature to old age.

We have a basement full of shiny, bleepy crap, most of which was given as gifts, that were supposed to somehow stimulate our childrens' development. And believe me, it's all crap. 90% of the battery-operated toys we own have long since had their batteries die, never to be replaced again. The tried-and-true winner toys are those that have nothing to do with this marketing insanity. They are:

Crayons and paper. Lots and lots of paper
wooden blocks
flash cards
books
Magna Doodle
Wdgets
Various little animals in a pretend farm/zoo set
Dress up clothes

Notice a trend here? No batteries. No branding. Total creativity allowed. And most of these items have been around for a hundred years.

There's one exception that I can think of to the flashy bleepy thing, which is the Leapster. My kids love this toy. And it's secretly educational.

My wife and I don't need to read a book to know the other crap will rot our kids' brains.

Now if I could just do something about those Disney Princesses.

Grease without the Hotpants

If you have a daughter between the ages of 3 and, say, 16, you have probably heard of - nay, been bombarded by - High School Musical. Or as I refer to it, "Grease for today's younger generation, without the hotpants."

High School Musical is yet another gear in the massive engine that powers the DisMAY (Disney Marketing around Youth) Machine. It's a movie about two beautifully perfect high school students. She is a scholar, an academic master. He is a sports star, captain of the basketball team and wanted by every girl in school because, like, omigod, he's got those dreamy eyes. During a New Years' karaoke party the two are forced to come on stage together, having never met before, only to discover they just happen to lipsynch pop music together like angels. They spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out how they can audition for a duet in this year's high school musical without his buddies mocking him, her science geek cohorts ostracizing her, or the two of them accidentally touching lips together in an act of unbridled (and inappropriate for Disney) passion.

The music is light. It's fluffy. It's meaningless. And it's unbelievably catchy. I will be the first to admit that the songs are far better than anything Barney, the Wiggles, or Christina/Jessica/Baldy could ever hope to spout from their headsets, and you'd be hard-pressed to keep your foot from tapping or your head from bobbing if I were to play it for you right now. But after hearing the soundtrack for the nineteen-hundred and twenty-fourth time in the minivan it still makes you want to stick a car key into your temporal lobe.

My daughters love the movie. Jessica, my three-year-old, knows the words to every song and will sing "Start of Something New" to herself all day long without even realizing she's doing it. Every day, as soon as they get into the car, they demand to hear the soundtrack.

The engine powering this Disney conglomerate is just awesome. It has rocketed the stars, Whatshisname and Whatserface, to an absolute pinnacle of Disney branding. There is a float in the Disneyworld parade. They have their own section in the theme park. There's HSM parties. Clothing lines. A traveling Broadway show. Every high school is doing the show this year. Heck, there's even an article in Wikipedia.

Recently my wife heard the news that the traveling show was hitting Pittsburgh. When I heard how much the tickets were, I cringed. Four tickets (that would be for the girls, my wife, and their grandmother) would cost close to $200. Of course after the Circus fiasco, I realized that $200 really meant twice that after t-shirts were bought, autographs were obtained, and twirly High School Musical light-up doohickeys were purchased. So I decided it was time to place my foot firmly in the down position.

Luckily, I never got the chance to do so. Our daughters have moved on to Barbie Fairytopia. Oh...there's a story for another time.....

Stacking the Deck

So, where have I been?

It's been an exhausting week. Mom and dad came in, and we built the deck. This was the last major step in the renovation; our house is complete now. All we have left to do is replace the grass, do general landscaping, make some built-in furniture, redo the dining room, the kids' bathroom, the front porch, the guest room, the office, finish the mud room, get a new oven, new washer and dryer....you know, just the little stuff.

The deck project was fun. Decks are really the ultimate guy projects. It of course involves lots of wood and power tools, there's lots of lifting of heavy stuff, and there's math and beer. Math, you say? When you can impress your friends by telling them how you calculated the rise and run of the stair risers and used lasers to determine if the deck would be level, well, that's a good guy project.

Building it took good portion of a week. I'd already dug the footers a couple of weeks ago, so Tuesday was spent doing most of the structure. On Wednesday I had to work (at my real job) for much of the day, so Dad busied himself with planning out the flooring and the stairs. All day Thursday was flooring, Friday more flooring, Saturday...flooring and stairs. On Sunday we finished the railing just in time for happy hour, which was my goal. The crowning moment was rolling the gas grill off the front porch (through the kitchen and family room), bringing a much overdue end to a year of neighbors yelling, "hey, what's for dinner??" every time I grilled in the front yard.

Finding the materials was an adventure. We went with "Trex-like" stuff for the floor, choosing Home Depot's cheapest offering. Luckily I was itching to get this project going for a long time and ordered the stuff over a month ago, because it took close to four weeks to arrive. The pressure treated lumber was ordered from an 84 Lumber store that closed down the day before delivery. The railing is made of aluminum tube balusters from Deckorators, bought at Lowes. The adventure there was being able to get all the tubes we needed at the Lowes in Cranberry, but finding out that the little plastic doohickeys that attach the tubes to the railing were only available at the OTHER Lowes, 20 miles away. And lastly, the top of the railing is made of (ridiculously expensive) cedar, bought at an 84 Lumber that DIDN'T close down, and strapped to the roof of the minivan in the pouring rain.

And then there were the screws.

Since the deck floor is made of composite, we needed to buy special screws. The lumber comes in gray, brown, tan, or red (we got red), and Home Depot sells special color-matched screws designed just for this purpose. Well, that is, they are color matched as long as you bought the gray or brown composite. Even though the rack at HD clearly states "red screws", there were none to be had. At any HD in Pittsburgh. Or in Connecticut, for that matter. Or Elizabeth, New Jersey. Yet when we asked a guy about special ordering them, he told us he couldn't because they are a regularly stocked item. This stupidity lasted about three weeks until I broke down and bought the brown screws. And, as it turns out, the brown screws match the red composite perfectly. Sigh. Why they couldn't have just told me to buy the brown to begin with....

By the way, some of you folks of the handy ilk might be wondering why we didn't choose one of those fancy "hidden fastener" systems that screw in from the bottom. Well, two reasons. First, it would have cost us about $800 extra. Second, every dealer we talked to said they suck. There ya have it.

So after an exhausting, muddy, wet week of non-stop work, we have a place to have a relaxing dinner or a drink.

Well, we did, until the bees found us.