Friday, May 21, 2010

A Storm Comes In

A storm came rolling up this evening, complete with scary dark clouds and lightning strikes.

As a result, the children had to be reminded to get off the computers. We don't want to lose our computers due to a large power spike travelling up the lines and frying the power supplies and all the interface connections. Adam wasn't happy with this news, as he was right in the middle of his efforts to build a civilization with his Spore software.

His sister was also building a Spore civilization.



James had his hair appointment today; he was tired of the large glop of unruly head covering and decided to trim it down for the summer.



In other news, Cheryl and I went out to a coffeehouse to support a friend of ours who is putting out a CD. The power had been knocked out just a mile or so away, but the coffeehouse was fine, the music was fantastic, and the company was wonderful!

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Happy Birthday, Jan!

In honor of Jan's Birthday, James and Deborah played in the Middle School Pops Concert tonight, with several rousing renditions of popular tunes, some of which are very ... interesting when played by Middle School bands. Like old Queen tunes. And jazzed-up Simon and Garfunkel.

Due to his efforts above and beyond the call of duty, James won the coveted Director's Award pictured below.

When queried to explain how he was able to achieve this distinction, he replied in that now-famous teen-aged utterance: "I dunno."

Monday, May 17, 2010

Relax and Get Wired

I totally blame my dad for the fact that working on the house is relaxing to me.

This is just weird. All day long, hunched over a computer keyboard, staring blankly into the glowing orbs of three monitors, and I can't wait to get home so I can ... wire the basement.

Seriously.

It's been on my mind since the weekend, this project to put some lights into the shell of a room that will one day be a bathroom. It's got a wall between it and the furnace room, and until tonight, there was no outlet back there to plug in a light.

But tonight ... !



It's not a very good design right now, and I reserve the right to change it, but for now the bathroom circuit is wired into the main basement light circuit -- which also includes the sump pump, the water heater fan, and the smoke detector. One should never wire motors onto the same circuit as the lights. But, hey, it wasn't my idea. I'm just using what's available until I can run some new wire from the breaker panel. (The old wire is white, my new wiring is yellow; I just extended it from the old box to this new box on the way to the bathroom on the other side of the wall.)

Meanwhile, there's a temporary box over in the bathroom section with an outlet so a lamp or something can be plugged in back there. So I can actually work on the bathroom during the evenings when the light outside has gone away. And I can power my drills and things.


Why do I find this so relaxing???

Must've been all those years of training with the Master.

Friday, May 14, 2010

8th Grade Banquet

James is growing up way too fast. He's attending the 8th Grade Banquet tonight, then heading off with friends to watch "Robin Hood".

I hope he has fun.



(James is the one on the left.)

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Hermioninny & Dinner

(Don't she look like Hermione Granger??)



Dinner

I walked into the house after a long day of work and was immediately assaulted with questions by my youngest daughter, Mary.

"Can you help me with dinner?"

OK, um, where is everyone else?

"Mom's over at the school, helping with the Banquet decorations."

And your siblings are ...?

"Somewhere."

We rousted the siblings from "somewhere" and got dinner put together. Deb trimmed and steamed the green beans. Mary handled the rice and made up the gravy. Dad tossed the salad. James emptied the trash and swept the floor.


Adam cleared out the dishwasher so we could use it for the dinnerwear.

Mom didn't make it back home by the time dinner was ready, so we, greedy pigs that we are, ate without her.

Oink! Oink!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

The Braidy Bunch

The girls are insane. I have proof.

Mary has been doing her hair in braids for a few days now, and it's driving me crazy. One or two or maybe even three is is okay...



but ... FIVE??! What's up with that??



And of course, her sister gets into the act as well. Two braid-happy girls, tugging on each other, bugging each other, NOT going to sleep like they're supposed to be doing.



What's a father to do??

Monday, May 10, 2010

Aching Eyes

I don't know what's wrong with my eyes today. They hurt like crazy. Ever since I woke up this morning. Should've taken a shower so the humid air would soften 'em up and wash out the pollen (or whatever contaminant is ... um, contaminating them).

Guess my brain is a little contaminated, too. It was a long weekend.

Friday was a strange day. Cheryl and Mary were on a field trip to Detroit to see what it looks like in the pouring rain and windy cold. (Hint: it looks wet.) That left me in charge of the rest of the crew, figuring out what to do for dinner (Hint: everyone loves pizza) and what to do for entertainment (Hint: maybe we could watch Avatar for about the sixth time). We had an overnight guest (special friend of Deb) who had not seen the movie. And we had another overnight guest (special friend of James) who wanted to play Age of Empires with the boys (but somehow ended up on Facebook doing instant-messaging instead). And I had this special stash of Mountain Dew...

By the end of the evening, and some time into the morning, everyone was seriously caffeinated. It was a miracle any sleeping occurred at all.

Don't worry, I didn't have to handle it all by myself. Cheryl and Mary got home in the nick of time (8:30 pm) to save me. So Cheryl and I were able to hide in our bedroom without a care in the world while the kids attempted to sleep (they failed). Our only concern was that the singing might go on all night.

We all woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (can we still use that term?) on Saturday morning, ready to ... no, no, that’s not what happened. Actually, we all slept in like a bunch of lazy bums. It took forever for everyone to get up. The girls got up first and made breakfast for themselves and then started laughing their fool heads off, which woke everyone else up; so then we all got out of our beds and tromped downstairs (intending at first to tromp on the girls’ heads) and got our own breakfasts; and then, it was time to check the morning news on the various Internet devices scattered around the house.

James and his friend, after a rousing session of "Who's on Facebook?", were picked up by another friend and carried off in a cloud of dust to catch the new Iron Man movie. Soon afterward, Adam and I roared off in a cloud of dust to catch the new Iron Man movie. The girls just sort of hung around the house singing and laughing and playing Barbies or Legos or something.
________________________________________

Movie Review Interjection
________________________________________

Synopsis: Tony Stark is being pressured to relinquish his Iron Man suit by the Government (and by his arch-rival, Justin Hammer, CEO of Hammer Industries). He refuses, expressing his opinion that he has “privatized peace”. He is also being pressured by his friends to grow up. He refuses, because he is an idiot. A Russian physicist, Ivan Vanko, becomes the villain Whiplash (or Blacklash) in an attempt to revenge his father’s humiliation at the hands of Tony’s father, for whom he had once worked, and slices Tony’s Le Mans car in half during the race and is promptly arrested. Tony’s best friend, Lt. Col. James Rhodes (“Rhodey”), takes the old Mark 2 Iron Man suit and hands it over to the military. The military hands it over to Justin Hammer for upgrades. Hammer liberates Vanko (Whiplash) and hires him to create an army of drones based on the Mark 2 suit. Tony hands over the reigns of Stark Industries to Pepper Potts. Everything is set up for disaster!

Commentary: Iron Man 2 is kinda cool. Got lotsa techno-geek stuff to keep the boys happy. Got some face-to-face between Tony and Pepper to keep the girls interested. Got a lotta plot swirling around like snow in a blizzard. And, like most movies, it’s got some issues.

If you don’t want to know particulars about the movie – move along, little dogie, move along. Here be dragons.

BEGIN SPOILERS

(1) The Physicist’s Phury

At the beginning of the movie, Ivan Vanko sits in a little apartment watching his father die. Why? Ivan and his father are both physicists. Very intelligent. Ivan’s father had fled to the US but was deported because he tried to get rich off his inventions and Howard Stark (his employer) didn’t like it. Or something like that. So the Russians, instead of taking this genius physicist and using him to build bombs or reactors or something, exile him to Siberia. Then for some reason, they let him come home again as he is dying? Does that make any sense?

Ivan is very, very smart. Smart enough to find people to make him fake passports. And he has the money to pay them. Where did this money come from? Why are these two super-smart physicists not working for the Russians in some top-secret weapons facility? Or, if the Russians don’t want them, how about helping out the Iranians or the Arabs or the North Koreans or any one of a number of terrorist groups? There’s big money out there. Obviously, Ivan has some kind of money, because he has enough to buy all that expensive (even if slightly ‘used’) equipment he’s got all over the place. He has enough equipment to build his own super-battery power source, plus all the fancy metal gear to turn himself into Whiplash (or Blacklash). And he’s got money to fly to Monte Carlo. And money to bribe someone so he can get a set of those orange jumpsuit things he’s wearing by the track. But apparently, for some reason, he doesn’t have the money to get his father to a decent medical facility, or get a decent apartment. And with all them brains and moneys, he ain’t got no better revenge plan than to step out onto the track at Le Mans and chop Tony’s car in half. STUPID.

(2) Moonlighting Redux

I’m jumping ahead a bit here, but the whole point of the thing with Pepper Potts is that Tony is too vain | stupid | selfish | self-absorbed to notice that she’s head-over-heels in love with him even though he doesn’t deserve it (and there’s a very long psychological explanation for this very common problem, the “good girls fall for bad boys” thing). But that’s to our benefit because, like Maddie and Dave in “Moonlighting”, the tension between them gives us an excellent opportunity to enjoy some verbal sparring. There was a little bit of it here, but as soon as Pepper gets to be CEO, she’s overwhelmed by the responsibility and becomes annoyingly business-like. So at the end she has to go through the obligatory “I can’t take it” scene where she resigns and gives him back his company so she can become the old, Tony-obsessed Pepper Potts. And they can go back to the way things were. Or at least they should. Instead, they end up kissing. It’s lame. It’s too early for the “serious relationship” thing. This is only movie #2! There is still at least one more movie’s worth of zingers they can sling at each other before they go all mushy on us..

(3) Final Fight Fiasco

The final fight was too short. Not the final fight, I mean the FINAL final fight. You know the one. Where "Rhodey" and Tony fight Ivan-the-Terrible near the little stream. They’ve already spent most of the valuable fight time dealing with the drones. Now they have to take down Ivan (aka Whiplash). By all reasonable estimates, this should be at least a ten-minute scene. But for some reason, it is no more than a minute. He throws them around, lashes them with his whips, and then, using what they’ve learned from Ghostbusters, they catch him between their palm-thrusters and fry him. Huh? That’s all they had to do? Combine their little palm-laser thingies? Wasn’t he impervious to them before? Did the physics suddenly change?

(4) Chrono-drones

Why do the drones give warning (via the blinky-blinky power thingies on their chests) before they blow up? Who was the genius that came up with THIS stupid idea? Evil villains, take note: Never, ever put timers or big, flashing power sources on the front of your bomb devices so that the good guys have an opportunity to get out of the way or defuse them. If you want them to blow up and take everyone with them, just LET THEM BLOW UP. It makes for a fantastic ‘dark’ movie ending.

Imagine it: The drones blow up, taking most of the Expo with them; Tony and Rhodey are saved by virtue of their suits, but poor Pepper Potts is ‘peppered’ with shrapnel. Tony suffers a huge emotional crises because Pepper is gone. Setup for the next movie, where it stops being just a game for Tony because now he realizes the seriousness of the stakes.

(Of course, there could also be a teaser at the end of the movie showing that Pepper Potts has been miraculously put back together by some gee-whiz device from Nick Fury and his Avengers, and has now become a super-hero in her own right…)

(5) Construction Crunch

How on earth does Tony Stark build all that fantastic hardware by himself, in a ridiculously short amount of time? Sure, he’s a genius with all the money in the world. But he’s only one man, with so many hours in a day. Have you ever tried to fix a sink at home? Do you remember how long it took? All day, right? There is absolutely no way on earth that the incredible, amazing Tony Stark can single-handedly build his own cyclotron in order to create a new element in what appeared to be days (if not hours). No way.

This is the same problem I had with the original movie. I didn’t really believe he could create that first crude suit inside that cave (or whatever it was), even with the help of that other guy, whatshisname. Not in three months. Not in three years! With hydraulics, electronics, pulleys, gears, motors, and power supplies. Uh-uh.

Suspension of disbelief is one thing. Suspension of common sense is another.

Final Note

By the way, please don't rush out of the theater. You'll want to sit through the entire (and I do mean ENTIRE) credits to get the 30 seconds of "teaser" for the next big Superhero movie. We laughed at all the people who left too early. Those fools!

END SPOILERS




Saturday night was not Mother's Day, nor was it Mother's Night, but we went out anyway. The kids were having a wonderful time doing ... something ... and there was plenty of leftovers in the fridge and we needed to run out and do some grocery shopping, so we figured they could handle themselves for a few minutes. Turned out to be about three hours. We went to Costco, then to the grocery store, then stopped by Noddles for some yummy Asian food, then spent oodles of money on paint at Home Depot (under the deranged thought that we're actually going to have time this spring to paint our bedroom).

Sunday was Mother's Day, but since we had gone out the night before, and the kids actually didn't eat any of the leftovers but opted for Kraft Mac'n'Cheese instead, we had lots of leftovers to eat. Which we didn't. Instead, we ate the roasted chicken we'd gotten at Costco the night before. It was yummy! So we still have leftovers.

Want some leftovers?

So I still don't know why my eyes are hurting so much. I'm going to soak them tonight in the shower and see what happens. Meanwhile, you can soak your eyes with this latest image of my two goofy daughters with their new hairstyles.

Sunday, May 09, 2010

It's Mother's Day - and what a blessing they are!

We have been blessed with wonderful mothers, both myself and my lovely wife. God-fearing, patient, gentle, kind, loving to their own children and the children of others. Teachers, caregivers, with spirits of compassion and understanding which have served to create for their progeny a legacy of success. Truly, your children and grandchildren rise and call you 'Blessed'!

As for myself, I greatly esteem both my mother and my mother-in-law for their wonderful ability to communicate with me and with others - to share, to converse, to just sit around chatting about the significant and the insignificant, to laugh and enjoy the company of family. Among the greatest joys in my life are the times I get to talk to them, to hear their wisdom, to listen to their histories, to discuss our mutual woes and sorrows, and to imagine the futures of our precious descendants.

May God bless you with a wonderful day, and many more wonderful days to come!

Saturday, May 08, 2010

If it's Spring, Why is it Freezing outside?

A freeze has been predicted for tonight.

Spring is always a mix of warm and cold weather in the northern part of the midwest. We get the winds from Canada coming down, mixing it up with the warm winds coming up from the Gulf, and they fight it out for a few weeks until finally the mosquito winds from Minnesota sweep across the Lake to try and drain all our blood while we camp. It's a fine midwestern tradition.

It was wonderfully warm just a few days ago, up past eighty, and then the temperature dropped like a stone back to the forties and the wind picked up and suddenly it's like winter all over again, except for the snow. The deep snow, I mean. Up north of Grand Rapids, there was some snow mixed in with the rain, and people were just shaking their heads and expressing thankfulness that they weren't down south where the floods were causing all kinds of devastation.

Our time will come, though. Seems like every year, the River overflows somewhere along the line, and the houses which are foolish enough to exist near the banks will suffer some kind of damage. The television news shows will have footage of flooded basements, mildewed drywall, dog houses floating out to sea. It's always a gamble living on the riverbank.

Mother's Day is tomorrow, and the weather is perfect for having a marvelous dinner indoors. No one is going to be having any picnics, and I feel sorry for anyone hoping to pose for some photographs in the garden. They'll be wearing thermal underwear if they do. We haven't figured out what we're doing yet. Cheryl and I went out for dinner tonight, and we picked up a roast chicken at Costco that can be used for dinner tomorrow; there's plenty of leftover spaghetti for tomorrow's lunch since the kids didn't eat it for dinner tonight (they opted for mac'n'cheese instead). So we've got all the meals covered. We hardly ever cook on Sunday anyway. Lunchtime is generally used to clean out the leftovers, and Sunday evening is less a dinner than a snacktime.

Sometimes it's hard to make Mother's Day as special as one would like. We know that she deserves some kind of reward for all the work she does, and we'd like to shower her with gifts and dinners and flowers and chocolate and all those other things. But then we allow logic and calculation to slip into our minds, and we figure out that there isn't really anything she needs apart from what she has, and we really can't afford to go out for dinner again, and the chocolate won't help our waistlines, and we generally let her pick out her own flowers because our ability to select them is inhibited by our fear of sneezing (even though the plastic ones technically don't exude pollen).

The children are not especially cognizent of events such as these; we have to remind them over and over again, and then not be surprised when they produce nothing in the way of cards or notes or homemade treasures. That's the way kids are. It's best to keep our expectations low so that we are not disappointed at their lack of sentiment, and occasionally surprised by their generosity. They'll learn. Especially those who will one day have girlfriends. Oh, yes, they will learn.

As one of my assignments this past week, I sorted through about a million digital photographs (and a few old-fashioned printed ones) to locate some significant events in the life of Mary, who will shortly be graduating elementary school. (I'm still amused by the thought of "graduating" from elementary school. Is this one of those bizarre self-esteem things which has come into vogue in recent years, or has there always been a graduation ceremony for elementary school? I certainly don't remember having one.) The task was to find one birth-year picture, one 1st-year-of-school picture, and one school-event picture. I thought I'd share with you what I found.

Big brother Adam gets to hold new sister Mary


Suddenly she's going to school.


And then she's hanging out in Detroit with her Mom.


Man, they grow up fast. Next year, she won't be able to sleep in while her siblings get up with the dawn; she'll be right in there with her sister, standing at the bus stop with the rest of the commuters. No more walking to school.