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

Dress Up

Who doesn’t like dress up?
[The Cast] Mommy, let’s play something.
[The Bite] Sure, what do you want to play?
[Set the hook] I know, let’s play dress up. [Reel her in] Yeah!!”
So what started out as one of many (recently) hunker-down-days turned into a glam-fest.

They started with

  • Hairboats
  • Ribbons
  • Crowns
  • Tiaras
  • and Headbands (at the same time)

Accessorized with

  • Jewelry
  • Rings
  • Necklaces
  • Bracelets
  • and Lipstick

Even Emma wasn’t immune. She got her own lip gloss. (I might have to sew a soccer ball into her One-sie if I hope to have a snowballs chance in Maui of ANY hope of environmental control) To her credit, she tried to eat the lip gloss.
The coup de grâce was Mommy’s vintage 1940’s, silk nightgown (Abby’s favorite stash is the nightgown drawer).

The Peep?
She just wanted to eat it.
The Mommy?
She got the full treatment too but she escaped the inviolable proof phase of the morning ritual, aka The Picture.

Dress Up

A good day

I feel like I have just had an all-around good day.

  • I found out that my car sputtering was a simple fix for out-of-date sparkplugs. A good tune-up and Petey is going strong.
  • I made it to the eye-doctor for a check up on my contacts and I found I was there JUST IN TIME to avert an infection in my tear duct.
  • I got a reprieve yesterday from this weeks time-pressure event; iglooing. That was really going to make this week hard to arrange.
  • Even though I found out today, technically, the fact that 25 CD’s were stolen from our unlocked vehicle Sat night means this days high is unaffected.
  • Last week I was nominated to be on the homeowners association board of trustees. Okay, so I nominated myself, (this isn’t a popularity contest you know) but never minding that, they didn’t turn up their noses at the suggestion. So, I will be editing the twice annual newsletter and probably be called off the bench for the occasional look at the website.
  • And just tonight, whilst preparing to sit with Abby in the bathroom for bath time with my trusty Powerbook, ready to blog my heart out she said

No! Play with me.

I grimaced slightly because getting wet, leaning over the edge of a hard tub on a soft, dinner-full belly, and with kneecaps crying out in agony, “Please sir! We do request sweet relief from the bone-spur inducing, textured laminate!”…well all of that didn’t sound like fun. I really just wanted to write down my good day anyway. So, I peace-offered an alternative

I know, maybe I’ll shave! (reasoning that she always likes to watch me shave)

Now, I really detest shaving, it takes too long, it hurts more than half the time and really the last thing I want to do when I am barely out of my warm snuggly covers is splash water on my face, lean CLOSER over a sharp edged sink, focus my quarter sized pupils on a brightly lit mirror, and in my serotonin regulated stupor draw a RAZOR across my face.

It has never appealed to me.

I don’t care what women say, acres of legs sound so much better. It is mostly straight and well…of course I would still have to bend at the waist which I am finding increasingly uncomfortable these days.

Huh. I detect a pattern. I observe “increasingly” being the active term.

Anyway, “…maybe I’ll shave” has just escaped my 3 weeks growth (this time I have a good reason though. I am still going to be sleeping in an igloo for two nights, just not THIS weekend. The next one instead.)

“…maybe I’ll shave!” just hanging there like a cartoon bubble and Abby, without hesitation and a serious tilt to her head from the far corner of the tub replies

No wayyy mister. You are NOT putting all that hair in MY sink!

Future spouse I offer this now:

  • First of all – It wasn’t me
  • Secondly – I’ll back her up all the way
  • And lastly – I hope you like to shave more frequently than I because shaving with hose water is, confidently put, REALLY cold.

Update: I still didn’t shave and I did end up splashing the bejeebers out of Abby and the bathroom in general while deftly illustrating how much water can be pulled six feet high from the underside of an overturned water pitcher.

Just when you thought it was safe…

I just stopped reading an email from my Auntie Hane about Cow Cow and I remembered that my story needed telling too. (Great Cow Cow adventure by the way.)

Yesterday was day number 4 of painting in Abby’s room.
We’re gonna do a real cute white base, with very light pink above a thick chair rail for relief, it is gonna be great…but I digress.

Abby, coerced us into buying her very own tiny paint roller (a little pink touch up roller), and she and I were all set to paint together. The potential for drips and paint on her clothes and hair notwithstanding.

I set her up with the ground rules.
* Don’t touch the electrical outlet (exposed – but she has a healthy fear of those so I am sure she will need some kind of acclimatization therapy once she is old enough to plug stuff in)
* Don’t paint anything but the wall
* If you drip, just tell me, we can clean it up.
* Roll it like this and that’s it.

Okay, I am just gonna run downstairs and grab MY roller and pan and I will right back. Okay?

Okay.

I quickly exit and pass Ang in the hall.

You are just gonna let her paint in there by herself?

[I scoff] She’ll be fine.

Quickly, and confidently yet still not underestimating the power of a 4 year old to find “another way” I grab my possibles, jaunt back upstairs, and down the hall with a saunter, THAT was fast.

As I turn the corner into her room, Ang right behind, I begin with

How we doin…

Abby, turns with a look and a desperately teary eye that says

“I-know-I’m-in-trouble-for-this-but
maybe-he-will-think-it’s-funny-but-I-know
I-better-say-something-because-this-just-isn’t-right
and-can-you-please-just-get-this-off”

sticks out her tongue and it is completely white.

Immediately the outright bawling started.

I don’t wanna go to the mergencyyyyyyyyy!!!

DOH!

The one thing I didn’t think of in my litany of rules. I suppose I could have also reminded her not to say…run with the bulls in Pamplona or ever exit a moving vehicle but gahhh.

Then the fun starts, Ang quickly grabs her and does the right thing rinsing her mouth out with toothpaste and a toothbrush while I am reading the fine print on the back of the paint bucket.

SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION IMMEDIATELY!

Then the real parent grabs the phone and dials poison control while I stomp around being angry with myself for not thinking to explicitly list “don’t eat the paint” in my Rules List and wondering aloud “Why did you do that? That is POISON!”

There I go, setting off that bomb. Somebody take me out of the room. Is there another word that has more gut-wrenching impact on a 4 year old who has learned not to even approach the underside of a kitchen sink and recoils physically at the very sight of [insert nasty cleanser name here].
Now she starts to cry, uncontrollably so, then sticking her tongue out and looking at it in the mirror with morbid fascination, then more crying.

Poison control, in their very calm and reassuring “we’ve seen worse” way told us that she would be fine, just drink some milk, she didn’t ingest nearly enough to cause at worst a mild tummy ache. They maintain an enviable database of information whilst performing a MOST un-enviable service. They called back two hours later to check on us.

Oh yeah, and after I smartly removed myself to the paint room, I noticed little white tongue marks on the drop-cloth where she was trying to wipe that nasty substance off. By now, they were “cute little tongue marks”.
Later she said

Daddy, I am just a little girl and you and Mommy know better.
Besides, I didn’t know what it tasted like.

I think we should tell Bella.

Thanks Ang, for doing the right thing with control and restraint.
You are a good Mommy and you know better.