Category: bliefs

This explains a lot

I heard once that we (humans) are wired to be curious, the same way we are wired to think babies are cute. Not only is it fun but it serves a further purpose (and for the continentals out there it serves a better purpose BECAUSE it is fun). The elation we feel when we invent or discover something may be that which keeps us curious and helps to explain our rapid and sometimes exponential technological advancement over the past one hundred thousand years.

There are those behaviors that seem to defy explanation, like messiness or procrastination. One side of my family (at least) seems to have taken a second helping and as evidence I present our individual garages.

’nuff said.

This morning I am happy to report that I have discovered the explanation for that trait summed up beautifully by a child’s author; it is a selectable trait indeed.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
– AA Milne

So now all of you organizers (our cleaner-halfs you might say) can rest easy, kick back and watch the party, and revel with us in our discoveries.

My Mermaid

First a little logic problem for you.

Abby is my daughter.
Madison is a mermaid.
Abby is Madison.
——
Therefore Abby is Madison and also a mermaid.

OK she is going to be a mermaid…when she grows up.
Oh alright she is at least going to be a mermaid for Halloween next year.

And she has the hair to prove it.

We recently screened the movie Splash at our house about 8 times in 8 days. Well that is a slight exaggeration, it was more like 6 times in 5 days.

And despite some of the sophomoric humor, some PG-13 language, and crude mid 80’s kicks Abby…er…Madison saw right through all that to the heart of the matter. The love story and the mermaid and the kinky hair. Oh and Alan, formerly known as Tom Hanks, now known as me.

My name is eeeeeeeee yyyyyyeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

My numbers today

16.5 – The miles I rode to work this morning.
12.3 – The avg mph on that ride.
2 – The temperature outside when I arrived.
80 – The number of minutes the ride took.
15 – The number of minutes Andy was late to the meeting place for having awakened late.
54.4 – My WPM in Dvorak on the “common” words typing test I took this AM.
5.4 – The mistakes per minute during that same test.

256 – Just a random number I felt like typing.

Don’t know how many days

That title describes so much.

Last weekend 7 of us took a weekend trip to Las Vegas for Beau’s 40th birthday and for March Madness (college basketball tournament). We were there for 3 calendar days but it felt like about five or six days because we were up about 20 hours out of each day.

It is now 4 calendar days after my return and I think I have finally recovered from the sleep deprivation. It sure was fun though to be able to do that.

Next stop? Disneyland in May. Pretty much the same thing but with a slightly different target audience (very slight).

Then I also don’t know how many days it has been since I switched to Dvorak, something like 15 or so? Today I peaked at about 40 words per minute but a more accurate assessment is more like 33. I still make a lot of mistakes and sometimes have to pause for a couple seconds to “gather” myself for the next word.

I think I am going to be good at this though.

One Dollar Bill

So back around Valentines Day Emma and Abby each received a piece of mail. Inside the envelopes they each discovered a “greenback” courtesy of their Great Gramma Elynor.

Abby knew what she had and it would seem as though Emma understood too as evidenced by this video I was lucky to capture.

I finally got around to posting this for you Gramma!
Enjoy. 🙂

Click this link to see Emma’s movie. (1.9MB)

Getting faster everyday

I am now up to 24 words per minute on a typing test.
I can’t quite achieve that when I am creating things like this post. I believe it is because when I am copying words for the test I am only going letter by letter but when I am creating I think in whole words or phrases or something and the letters “fall out of my fingers” in clumps.

I tend to get stuck on single letters more and I also tend to do dyslexic things about ten times more frequently…trying to type the Dvorak letter with the opposite finger.

Dvorak

Today is day 2 of me using the simplified keyboard layout Dvorak.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

You may notice less verbose posts in the following weeks, probably even higher concentration of pictures.

As of now I have pretty much picked up where I left off five years ago, typing at about ten to fifteen words per minute with a lot of errors.

I am actually happy that I don’t have to relearn all of that.

Also, I am thinking that it would be good to teach Dvorak to Abby and Emma so they can take advantage of the benefits without the tedious re-learning curve.

Pre-emptive post

So I was interviewed briefly tonight by KOMOTV for a story on the viaduct.

After I left the interview I felt like the questions were just a little bit leading and didn’t really pose the true question. On top of that I didn’t really feel like I could speak intelligently on the subject because it hasn’t been on the top of my list recently.

The only things I said that I stand by for sure are “I want more bike lanes” and something about the governor doing one thing, the mayor doing another, and now the people trying to vote on yet another, all of which may have a different answer. Or something like that.

So I called the reporter when I got home and told him I didn’t want my interview used. He didn’t relinquish his hold on my footage completely and said he would use it in a “vague” way. When I told him the only two things I still stand by (aforementioned) he said “Okay, I’ll just use those.” and quickly ended the conversation. Probably interested in making sure I didn’t cause him 30 min more editing before deadline.

Moral for me…don’t answer questions about something you aren’t invested in no matter how big the camera lens is unless you want to go on record sounding like you don’t know what you are talking about.

Catch up

So I have a lot of catching up to do.

I have been so busy with work and play recently that I haven’t done my civic duty…namely posting pictures and telling funny stories about my girls for relatives that can’t hear them directly. I apologize for that. So, at risk of cheapening any of the aforementioned stories and pictures I will present them at once.

I say cheapening only insofar as describing what happens to a person who looks at a really funny FarSide cartoon and laughs so they get a calendar of FarSide cartoons and they laugh every day. Then frequently they cheapen the experience by looking at all of the FarSide cartoons until July thinking that somehow reading 150 at once will be 150 times funnier than reading just one. Trust me, it is better to spread them out.

But I digress and risk making this post IMMENSE in my digression. Tally ho.

Allow me to recount in reverse order.
Yesterday I went on a bike ride with my Dad, Andy, and Dad’s friend Charles. We planned on 35 miles and we made it 13.1 (very important, that number, in light of the fact that all of our feet and faces were NUMB from the cold). We rode out in Ravensdale and at one point were riding through falling snow and about 1 inch of slushy white snow on the ground. Not good, so we stopped early. But we are all training to do the Seattle To Portland 190 mile ride this summer so I say again Tally Ho!

Last weekend Dad, Tom, Me, Naresh, and Bhanu (who has NEVER been camping even in the summer) decided it was high time to make an igloo…on a mountain…and then sleep in it…for two nights. Long story short, we only did one night but all the rest happened. Bhanu was good enough to actually upload his pictures and he has shared them with us here.

http://www.fastalbum.com/bp/15

Let me just say, it is hard to take pictures when the wind blows hard, the icy rain falls fast, and you are working so hard and fast to simply put together an igloo so you will have shelter from the previously mentioned weather that you hardly have time to think about eating let alone grabbing the camera.

We started at noon and were finally laid down to sleep at 11PM with about 1+ hours of rest in between. We got wet that night and some of us got cold so the second night was out of the question. Nevertheless, the experience was excellent and amazingly enough I would like to do some more igloo building…maybe just not sleeping in it after. We’ll see what time does to my memory.

Those are my recent story/journal-like entries. Now comes the real good stuff. Pictures.

I just liked this picture of Abby reaching for Emma from the bottom of a long thin box laying on the floor. I think it was the fireplace mantle security thing that came in this box. Anyway, Abby and Emma played for quite some time in this box and you know, with the right type of viral marketing I bet someone could make a fortune selling boxes and sticks and string to parents of small children…and cats.

Grab my hand!

Here we see Abby after two days with braids in. It takes two days to kink her stick-straight hair like this and about two hours for it to straighten out afterwards. She REALLY likes her hair like this lending more evidence to the theory that “The-grass-is-always-greener” syndrome is probably not a learned behavior.

Don't touch it!

Abby was just posing cute this day with her little skull cap. The shot was blurry but I thought it added to the effect. I also did some blue-photo-filtering on the shot and added a new feature I found in Photoshop called Surface Blur. You can see some real examples of surface blur in my pictures to come from our igloo trip…the humidty in an igloo rivals a suana. But that is for another day.
Just check out the shoulders.

On to Amelia Mabel.
She really loves looking at pictures (photos, drawings, paintings, labels, logos, anything really) and she also really loves to have things on her head (as you may recall) and look at herself in the mirror.
Such blue eyes

Here we see a darker side. The one that punishes Polly Pockets for being so…well…pocket sized. She likes the bald ones the best by far and I think I may have just detected a pattern to her cooing and babbling when she is playing with them…something like fee fi fo fum.
Fee Fi Fo Fum

And finally we have moved into the rare sightings category.The elusive CockaPeep. First our photographer managed to capture a shot of one sleeping. We never heard from this poor soul again but when we managed to recover his camera and develop his film we knew we could take action.
sleeping CockaPeep

We set up one of those motion sensing cameras together with a trip-wire hoping to catch the elusive CockaPeep in the wild. We got some tedious shots of Tasmanian Devils, dumb butterflys, some kind of dinosaur, even a boorish Zimparumpazoo. We tossed all those out because we were after something more elusive and finally, our patience paid off.

The Elusive CockaPeep.

Be warned: don’t look directly into her eyes or you will be transfixed.
Don't look into her eyes