Lots of things have been going on in the past couple weeks. I will have to tell the story in pictures.
JC, BopOp, and me finished our 100 mile training ride as you may have read about earlier. I didn’t really recognize how much yellow we had on until now. I like yellow.
We made a sandbox for the girls.
After a very hot training ride just yesterday BopOp got a nap in with a Mermaid.
Abby excellently performed her jazz routine to Think Pink by Barbie.
Wednesday afternoon I won tickets to the Mariners game…for Wednesday night.
I called home.
Does Abby want to go with me?
Abby, do you want to go with Daddy to the baseball game?
N.uhhh…well…ok.
Her vote of confidence was overwhelming but when she was apprised of the potential for cotton candy and hot dogs she was all-in like Templeton.
She wore her pink Mariners hat, pink Mariners pants, her sporty shoes, and a blue windbreaker…Mariners of course.
We got there early and then waited an inordinately long time for a train. I am not kidding, something like 15 minutes or more on the wrong side of the tracks makes the cotton candy on the other side equivalent to a christmas that will never come. We procured our hot dogs and watched batting practice from our seats in right field. We weren’t back again until the 8th.
Since the M’s aren’t terribly good right now there were a lot of available seats and we sat in all of them. Every half inning we switched seats. At the top of the 300 section; now on the rail; 20 rows back from the 3rd base dugout; now we’re in Ferris Bueller land.
Two servings of cotton candy (blue and pink), one hot dog, exactly 1/2 of a peanut (salted and unshelled – “echhh! THAT is nasty!”), one homerun, 8 baseball cards, and a whole lot of seating changes we cheered the M’s to a 1-0 victory over the Boston Red Sox.
Somewhere about the 4th or 5th inning, near the Beuller seats, Abby said:
I didn’t know it was gonna be THIS much fun!
Emma fell down today. She has fallen before but this time she hit her face.
We have noticed a couple of things of late.
1) She is navigating stairs and other obstacles with relative ease of late, and she is going faster and faster because of her confidence.
2) She is falling down more.
Today was a perfect storm of a composite driveway (crumbly surface), a steep grade, biggish shoes, and a confident two year old.
It all added up to this.
A scraped cheek, a split lip, some scraped knees, and well…her pride is still pretty much intact.
She cried of course but overall, she recovered and was back to business as usual before the day was over.
It seems that she has QUITE the pain threshold.
You know your car has been parked (no gas added) for a while when this happens.
About mid April Petey’s engine light came on and she started running roughly. I parked her and since then have logged about 500 miles on my bike, Draftless, commuting to work. Add in a couple of weekend rides and I am probably over 600.
This week alone I have commuted an all-time high 140 miles.
All of this is to celebrate Bike To Work Month, and to get ready for the Seattle To Portland classic double century ride in July.
You can see my stats (along with the rest of my company) online for a while at http://www.cbcef.org/contest/btw_report_riderstripsdaysmiles.cfm?contest=13&orgid=2038
I am very late in getting the visuals (or even for that matter the verbals) of this big day up for everyones viewing pleasure, I apologize. Come to think of it, I am not as utterly late as I am with the Christmas DVD, so you might count yourself lucky in that regard.
Let’s just say that Emma looked forward to her birthday for weeks and weeks. We may have had some small part to play in building the anticipation. She was even singing the song to herself for many days.
When the day finally arrived for the party she was a little gun-shy with the small crowd we assembled. We intentionally kept the group smaller for her sake, as she seems a bit edgy in rooms full of people so we made the tough call and kept the gig to just parents, grandparents, and immediate parental siblings (and families). It was a good size for Emma and she warmed up quickly, after she woke up from her ‘hewg’ nap.
I think we all agreed that she got her fill of Ariel, Elmo cake, and playing with all of her many boy cousins. We had water balloon experiments (remember that one day in early April that was 80 ÂşF? Yeah, the party was that day), feats of strength, dancing, contests of skill whereby one tried to spill the least amount of water from two full cups whilst hopping from one circle to the next.
It was a very invigorating event and everyone had their own methods. In the end Emma just showed us how much it all mattered as she hopped a few times and then poured out both cups happily in the lawn. That was more fun.
She is putting together complicated sentences and even describing events that happened six months ago with words that she can only now say. Amazing how the mind works.
So, now she is “twos” and not “un” anymore. With the help of her sister she is going on about…oh…twelve.
Here we see her cake, in the style of Elmo’s World. It was crafted fastidiously by The Mommy with much skill and even more fondant. 🙂
![Twos! [blink blink]](https://i0.wp.com/blief.zwise.net/blief-images/amz_01may2008_b.jpg "Twos! [blink blink]")
Lastly, perhaps the most commonly sung song in the world. And no I am not paying royalties. Observe how The Wee One deftly handles the cake bringing the candle to within striking range. (1MB video)
[flv:amz_01may2008.flv amz_01may2008_flv.jpg 320 240]
Okay, so I thought I would have a little fun with photoshop and something about the truthfulness of the hailstorm lent some credence to the story. And, well, maybe a little bit of “I never do anything like that”. But it got me thinking, what is it about the All Fools Day that endures? Why do some among us crave that chance to prank? And also, why do so many think it is funny?
My answer to that is it is a good reminder.
Thanksgiving reminds us to give thanks for our health and family.
Veterans Day reminds us to thank those who have sacrificed for the rest of us.
Valentines Day reminds us to love.
So maybe, just maybe, April Fools Day is a reminder to remain vigilant about information we consume. Especially in this age of digital manipulation, of PhotoShop and realism in movies that make real people doubt even real footage. We must (perhaps unfortunately) be vigilant.
At the root of it I prefer trust. I think trust is the oil in an engine; it makes things run so much smoother.
So, in the spirit of debunking, here is a great resource for debunking myths. Behind the scenes at www.snopes.com is a handful of individuals who expend a lot of energy debunking myths, many of which start on the internet these days.
Now, on to the appeasement. Since most (all?) of my readers are family (or close enough) and don’t really need to hear my diatribe, let’s get to the good stuff shall we?
The Wee One here got some sunglasses for Easter and she wore them for darn near an hour straight…maybe that is why she only found about 10 eggs? Or maybe it is because she put them on upside down?…the sunglasses, I mean.
And her sister, Le Grande has here drawn a self-portrait…with four arms.
And here is a detail shot. Either way it is tough to see the arms but trust me (please!?), she has four arms.
Okay, weird weather is one thing you know; snow in March and all that but hail! And hail like this!
I came home tonight about 30 minutes after the hail storm to end all hailstorms.
Ang and the kids were at a birthday party and what do I find but this! I was dumbstruck.
Take a closer look here!
I found this in the garage, it must have melted or broken quite a bit because I don’t see how this hail stone, even as huge as it is, could have done that!
I called all the news channels 4,9,r,1, & 7 but they haven’t sent anybody yet. They don’t know what to cover anymore. I think they are all fools anyway.
Then when the kids got home, well we just closed the door to the garage and thanked our lucky stars that nobody was home and that nobody was hurt.
All she wants to do these days is watch the
“Aaa” Moomie “AaaAaAaaaaaa”
For those without mermaids, Aaa and AaaAaAaaaaaa is the Wee Ones reproduction/title of Ariel in The Little Mermaid.
Because she always drew balloons on my birthday cards.
Tonight was a total lunar eclipse here in the northern hemisphere. We started out with clouds but then the sky opened up just in time for the start of totality.
I snapped a ton of blurry pics with my little canon elph and out of those I got some decent shots and a couple of good ones even through my binoculars. These are the best ones.
This one is approximately a 2.5 second time exposure. Slightly overexposed the moon but you can just make out the two neighboring bodies. Maybe BopOp or Jerry can identify them? I sharpened this image a little bit.
This is a camera zoom (3X). I screened this one over at 50% to make the stars (bodies? I think the bottom one might be Saturn) pop a little more. You can clearly see the darker side of the shadow on the left side of the moon. This is full totality.
This image is taken through my binoculars, full totality, with full camera zoom. I had my binoculars set on the deck railing, propped on my cell phone. My little 3.2MP Canon was attached to my Joby Gorillapod tripod which was in turn latched onto BopOps tripod leg at just the right height to point it through the binoculars. I think there is some chromatic aberration going on here (the red halo along the bottom of the moon) either from the binocs, the camera, or both. Also note, the moon looks oblong but I checked it for round in my graphics editor and it is an optical illusion. In fact, lets see if I can’t clean that up a bit.
Aha! I simply erased the chromatic aberration from the edge and re-filled the background with all-black (no noise). Not too shabby for a 3.2MP hack-job, through smudgy binoculars, and a nice editing tool.
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Update: Two testimonials, one visual and the other via Skymap, confirm the “body” to the lower left was indeed Saturn. Blief-it-or-not.
blief 