All Quiet on the Western Front

 

MS SUNBM seems to have taken a vacation.  Perhaps a summer vacation. 

Over the last few weeks, I have had three vehicle related markers to look for in the morning.  The first was at 7:08(ish) when a school bus would drive past the house Northbound.  Then at 7:15(ish) MS SUNBM would honk.  Finally, at about 7:25(ish), the Northbound school bus had completed its route and would pass the house Southbound.  This past week marked the end of the summer school season and, as you may expect, the buses stopped running.  And apparently so has MS SUNBM.  I’ve been keeping an eye out for her, and she is conspicuous by her absence. 

So now I have a working theory that she is an employee of the school district.  I’ll post a follow up after the school year starts to see how accurate my observation is.

And so it goes.

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p.s. The road that she drives by on is on the West side of house.

I (heart) NY

I just got done working out.  I like to watch Modern Marvels on Netfiix while I am attempting to forget that I don’t like to exercise.  During this last round I watched an episode on the history and building of the Empire State building.

This particular episode brought back memories of when my sister graduated from Swarthmore in 1997.  While my brother and I were in Pennsylvania for the event, we took a day to ‘tour’ New York.

The morning of the big day we bought tickets for the Peter Pan bus line that left Philly at 7 am.  Over the next two hours we traveled in relative silence, passing through the NJ turnpike into New York City.

Over the next six hours my brother and I did/visited the following:

• Went to Grand Central Station
• Took the ‘A’ train
• Observation deck of the Empire State Building
• Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
• Ate pretzels from a vendor
• The Rainbow Room
• Carnegie Hall
• Ate at a diner
• Listened to street musicians
• Said ‘hi’ to some rabbis
• Bought a ’silver’ jewerly box
• Saw a homeless guy make sweet love to himself
• Watched a living statue scare people
• Saw a man with AIDS asking for money. (We gave him some)
• Yelled, ‘Hey, youse guys!’  A number of people turned around.
• Went to central park.  (Damn that place is big!)
• Ate dirty water dogs at the park
• Took a nap under a tree in the park

During those six hours we literally ran from place to place so we see as much as we could.  This trip was really about saying that we did all things listed above.  Some of it was planned, some of it was not, but it was all very memorable.

I have a few good friends who live in New York now (hi kids!).  Our corporate offices are in New York, so I imagine that I will make it out there sometime to say hi to them.  I am sure they can show me a few things I missed…

And I can’t mention New York without mentioning Fester Peabody al Efreamei VI.  He taught me the term ‘dirty water dogs‘ and introduced me to Sabrett’s Onions n’ Sauce.

That’s it for now.

And so it goes.

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It’s Garbage!

 

A little update before we get down to business.  

I got our taxes done.  That was fun.  We are even getting a little bit of green back.  Work is going well.  We are not really seeing an improvement in the economy, but we aren’t seeing a decrease either.  I’ll take that.  

Noelle turns seven on Monday.  She has a blog now.  It is artbynoelle.wordpress.com

The matriarch of the family will be in town for a few days.  It has been over two years since I have seen her, so I am looking forward to the visit.  Ralphie will be in town for three weeks.  As usual, we are excited about that.

Joy has raised 2,605 of her 3,900 goal.  If you can, please donate to her cause.  You can check out her blog at birdtribird.wordpress.com for a link to her fund-raising site. 

The blog bug is currently napping while I draft new topics.  I usually go a few months without much and then explode for a month or so.  

Ok, on with the show.

There are six people in my house. Two thirty-somethings and four crumb snatchers. Between the six of us, we fill 1 60 gallon garbage can a week. Now that might sound like a lot, but a 60 gallon can is the smallest they have for the county. Each week I roll this thing out the curb and I am happy to know that there is still room. What is the secret? What about the rest of the waste of the house?

Let’s look at the kinds of waste generated. First there is green waste. These are food and compostable items. Next are the recyclables. Paper, plastics and glass. Finally, there solid waste. This is the stuff that ends up in the garbage can.

My compost pile in the backyard offers mute testimony to the amount of compostable items that we generate.  In boy scouts we had sign in the mess hall that read, ‘We Support Zero Ort’.  For the uninitiated, ort is food waste.  We don’t like to have any, but it happens.

The recyclables make up the majority of the volume of things that leave the house.  Cans, bottles, jars, paper and plastics go into a can in the kitchen and then out to the curb twice a month.  That is a 90 gallon can and there is rarely room.  

The rest is stuff that is not safe to compost or is not recyclable.  

So take some time and evaluate what comes in and what goes out of your home.  You’ll be surprised.  

And so it goes.

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myLife – I

 

As I promsied earlier, I am going to start bloging about my life.  Here goes.

The 70s

I was born, at a very early age, in a sleepy little bedroom community on the outskirts of Sacramento.  My father owned a plumbing supply store and my mother was a nurse turned stay at home mom.  My older brother preceded my arrival by several years and he was none too happy about having to share momma, or so I’m told.  My mother and brother were always very close, so my intrusion into their circle was bound to be disruptive. 

My first real memory is from when I was between two and three.  We were all in the backyard and my brother was hunting paper turkeys with a toy archery set.  I remember him wearing a pilgrims hat and that the turkeys were set in big juniper bushes. 

My second memory is from little later in life.  I am not  sure how old I was, but I think it was between three and four.  I was in our next door neighbors yard and I walked up to a big white German Sheppard.  His name was Tyson.  I said ‘I love you, Tyson!’ and he proceeded to reward my affections by removing most of my scalp.  I rolled around on the grass yelling, ‘Fireman! Fireman!’ because I seemed to know that is was you were supposed to do.  A quick trip to the ER, a hundred or so stitches and some plastic surgery, and I was as good as new.  One particularly odd experience was that I remember watching myself run to my mom in the hospital.  It was like I perched where a security camera would be and I could watch the whole thing.  I am fairly sure I was not running anywhere afterwards.

Next I remember riding the bus to kindergarten.  Every morning I would walk about ¼ mile to my bus stop on the corner Star and Camellia.  As a parent, I could never imagine sending my five year old son that far on his own.  Times have certainly changed.  Our bus driver was an older African American man who liked to joke about stopping at Kentucky Fried Chicken whenever we dropped some off on Kentucky Street.  It was not until years later that I found out it was Kentucky Street, so the joke never made sense to me until then.

I went John Holst elementary, which is now closed.  My teacher was Mrs. Nightingale .  We did circle time and learned shapes.  For some reason I vividly remember learning about ovals.  On our birthday we got to choose two or three friends to go to the school kitchen to help make carrot cake.  Each kid got to drop one stick of butter into the pan. 

After kindergarten, my parents decided to put me in a transitional grade instead of sending me straight to first grade.  My teacher was Mrs. Flemming.  Every year for our birthday, she would put on an obnoxious amount of lip stick and gives a big kiss on the cheek.  Again, I could only image what people would do these days if that happened at school. 

One day, Mrs. Flemming needed to write a note home.  Being an adult, she wrote it in cursive.  I tried to read the note on the way home, but was unable to since I could not read cursive.  I concluded that cursive was a code that adults used when then wanted to communicate with each other but not have the kids understand the message. 

That year I also created a silhouette of my head by shining an overhead projector light on the wall and having Mrs. Flemming trace the shadow.  The picture was then transferred to a piece of black on construction paper and x-acto  knifed and put on a piece of baked clay with a  clay flower.  The picture had a very nice cowlick, which I cut off a few years later.  Looking back, I wish I had kept it.  It added character.  Especially since Sammy sports one of his own now. 

Now that I have kids who are old enough to remember what happens to them, I am always careful to make sure they are memories worth having.  Not that they are all good memories, but memories that will shape and guide them through life. 

Next month I’ll blog about the 80s. 

And so it goes.

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Phloging the LOL Cats II

Hi kids!

Well, I decided that it is time to devote a post to the craziest of crazies, the looniest of loonies.  The thing that boggles my mind more than any other Internet phenomenon.  (Well, I won’t go that far.  I really don’t get this Rick Astley thing).  Yes, it is time to revisit the LOL cats.

Disclaimer: I just grabbed random LOL cat pictures that I have saved over the last year or so.  Some maybe repeats from my first LOL cats blog, but I really couldn’t tell you.  I’ll go through the work to link to it, but not the work to look at it.   

 

 

 

 

And my all time favorite:

And so it goes.

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You’re It (Duex)

In my last post  I talked about the most common tags used to generate traffic to a blog.  I added these tags:

 beer, fermat, free beer, blog, jailbait, hanna montana, porn, pron, porn,Hanna M0ntana, tags, math, jail bait, Miley Cyrus

 

Now,  look at the traffic generated yesterday.  111 posts.  My average daily blog views were at about 13 per day.

 

Now, if were some kind of tagwhore, I would always add these tags, just to boost the numbers.  But I am not a tagwhore, so I wont always add these tags to boost my numbers; however, I will add them because it’s funny.  Maybe.

I do need to come clean on one thing.  Also pushed my blog out to alphainventions.com, a niffy little site that runs through a list of blogs for you to peruse.  If you have a blog, go there and add yours to the reading cycle. 

And so it goes.

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You’re It!

Tags. They are those funny little words at the bottom of the page here. You see them on almost all of the blogs. What are they for? Why are they there?

A ‘tag’ is a little note that you can use to search for blogs or videos. For example, the two most common tags used in this blog are ‘beer’ and ‘free beer’. I use them because I am always thinking about beer. Or free beer. Not free beer in the sense that beer is captive, like in a bottle and I want to free it and drink it. No, I mean beer that is without cost. Of course, now that I think about it, if I were to look at free beer in the light of the former description, I would merely be liberating the booze so I could trap it in my stomach. It would be like breaking someone of of prison so you could tie them up in your basement.   But I digress…

I was reading an article on tags and according to the article, the two most common tags are ‘jailbait’ and ‘Hanna Montana’.  I was guessing something like ‘porn’ would generate traffic.  So in accordance to what some random person wrote, I will add those tags to my blog to see what happens.  I will limit it to this entry because I don’t want to lead people here thinking that they will be reading about Hanna Montana jailbait (although if they made it this far, they just did). 

What are your favorite tags?  How well do they work for you?

And so it goes.

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The old man and his blog…

As most of you loyal readers know, my little sister has a blog called Bird By Bird.  (If you don’t know that already, then you need to pay closer attention.  This is like at least the third time I have mentioned it here.)  Inspired by the on-line adventures of both myself and my sister, my father had decided to start a blog as well. It is called Kid By Kid.

As excited as I was to see my sister start to blog, I am even more excited to see my father start to write. He always has very interesting stories about his life and lessons. The stories I find particularly interesting are those that occurred before I came into the world. More often that not, I find myself thinking, ‘Oh, that’s were I got that from’.

It’s funny to see yourself in another person. This always happens with my kids. I will see them do something that I did when I was that age. Or sometimes I see them do something that I do now. It’s like have four trained monkeys around the house, copying your every move.  (Except for Leela, of course.  She can only copy major bodily functions)  I can only imagine what my parents think if they see one of their behaviors in their grand-kids. 

There have been times when I watched one of my kids do something that I do when I am frustrated.  That can be a little disheartening because you only want your kids to pick up your good habits. 

So go visit dad’s blog and ask him to write about the time he was stuck in Minnesota with a pair of Eskimos who only spoke French.  It’s an absolute riot. 

And so it goes.

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Happy New Years!

Well, tonight we say good-bye to a rather tumultuous year, at least for our clan.  We saw the loss of a job, an unanticipated move, the gain of a job, the blessing of a better place to live and the great blessing of another child.  There were also the incidental victories.  I got my second Bag ‘o Crap from Woot and I and won my fantasy football league. 

Looking back at the year, I feel the same way a forest must feel after a fire.  The fire hurt, but now there is room for growth and renewal.  In 2009 Sammy will start kindergarten and Mary will start pre-school.  I will continue (God willing) in my new job and Casey’s Speech-Pathology practice serving the Catholic Schools will grow.  We will wrap up the year with our first Christmas in Boise and our first Christmas in Idaho since Casey and I were married. 

We lost our dog, Cassie this year.  She was a good dog.  A good dog.  Noelle started wearing an eye patch to help with her Anisometropic Amblyopia.  For each day she wears her patch, she gets a gold dollar to use to buy a hamster.  The hamster won’t live as long as the dog (at least I hope not.  I don’t want a 16 year old hamster).

We are going to strive to cut our current garbage output from four bags a week to three bags.  We have cloth diapers for Leela and Mary will be potty-trained this year.  We tried last year, but it just didn’t take.  Too much going on. 

We replaced our dinner table one that will allow us to seat all six people and keep food on the table.  That may not sound like much, but it is really a huge deal to us.  Ralphie and Steve were nice enough to provide the table. 

Ralphie was able to spend a month with us while Leela finished cooking.  The kids loved having Grandma Ralphie around for so long.  So did we.  Mary is still asking, ‘Where did Ralphie go?’. 

This year my blog enters its third year and I will pass the 100 post mark.  I don’t know if that is really a big deal, but hey, I am running out things to say.

I hope all of you have a wonderful 2009 and that it is full of the Lord’s blessings.

And so it goes.

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Woot!

Don’t forget to check out the new Woot-Off pictures on my Woot page… (over on the right, where it says Woot…)