3/31/2012

Today was Mindy's birthday. I hope she enjoys being 25. My birthday present mainly involved taking as many of the kids out of the house for as long as possible. Mother Nature was as uncooperative as possible - it was 45 and raining. I took Scott and Parker to Ollies (which is an amazing mixture of nice stuff mixed in with a large quantity of crap and all in a building where they are clearly not concerned about the setting selling the merchandise, but relying wholly on the merchandise selling itself.) After that we went to the local Ducati/Triumph/BMW motorcycle dealership. I drooled like Homer Simpson over a donut and left a bit sad. I miss the bike. I wish western PA was a place I could get a bike as a year-round commuter vehicle. Alas, it is not. Then we went to Home Depot, Rite-Aid, Weis and finally came back home.

Cole had spent the entire time making artwork for Mindy. He is quite creative and loves to do artsy stuff when he is not doing things such as wrestling, playing in the dirt, building a beaver dam with his brother (yes, he and Parker - according to Parker - built a beaver dam yesterday). The boys spent much of the afternoon destroying the house room by room.

Have I mentioned that we're excited to move to a real home, one with a basement and a yard? Even a garage for them to go ride their bikes in when the weather is lousy will be an improvement. We're excited to plant a garden, work in the yard, and not have the neighbor kids looking in our windows while we're eating dinner or practicing their skateboard tricks at 8:30pm right below Scott's window.

We don't know what home we will be in yet - we won't for another month or so - but we're excited.

I think we're going to tell everyone that our ancestors were a founding family.

Weekend update

On Friday afternoon I picked up Dad at the Wal-Mart parking lot/Megabus stop. We then drove to Cleveland that night. Western PA is quite hilly and made for some slow going. We spent the night with Lee & Wendy in Cleveland, loaded up the trailer in the morning with a bunch of lumber and a table saw which Mindy had pulled across the country when we moved to PA, and then drove to Philadelphia. It rained almost the entire way. But the trailer tires didn't blow out and we made decent time. After unloading the stuff into Tom & Kathryn's new (to them) big house, I headed home. I pulled into our parking lot at midnight. It was good to get home.

The boys (and I think Mindy) were happy to see me on Sunday morning.

The boys say some funny things. I don't remember any of them right now, but I do remember that Scott fell off the chair this morning. It amazes me how resilient they are, especially at his age. So he got the massive black eye 2 weeks ago, it is still healing. Then he fell down a half flight of stairs on Saturday and scraped up the same eye, then he also falls off the chairs, trips when he is walking, and otherwise turfs it in some way or another many times a day - and he gets up for more.

He also dances a lot which is pretty cute. I'll try to get some video of it.

What Is Fair?...and this post is now recorded on a government server

I saw this the today and thought it was well-put.

What Is Fair? - Reason Magazine

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So while one party tells us that all will be fair as long the government can take a sufficiently large amount of other's income and earnings, the other gives us the horror show DHS and builds a giant spy center to record 20 terabytes of data a second, of U.S. citizen phone, email, fax and whatever other electronic communication is taking place. It'll make you feel warm and fuzzy, or at least inclined to protect your privacy by relying on cash as much as possible and talking via tin cans and a string.

This one is a link to wired magazine about the "Utah Data Center"
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Fairies wear boots

With the change of Facebook to the timeline, I've about had it with Zuckerberg and co., so I'm going to start this up again. In conjunction with a dropbox folder where I will upload pictures, you will get to hear our goings on.

The last post was in November 2010. Since then we've had a child, and among other things, he's learned to walk. Mindy spent much of last summer in Utah. I spent the summer in Hagerstown, MD with JLG and two 22 year old roommates.

I finish the program in about 6 weeks and we are moving to Butler county PA. We may even live in Butler, PA.

Cole & Parker now empty the dishwasher each morning. They put the utensils away and stack everything else on the counter. This morning they stacked a cup that had flipped over in the dishwasher water and all. Mindy learned this the hard way when the water ran down her arm.

And in other exciting news, spring has arrived. The grass is green, the trees have buds and some of them are even blossoming. I saw a few in full bloom on campus today. They were beautiful.

Irma the groundhog is pregnant again. After a long winter hiatus she is back scrounging around her home for leaves and stuff. Yesterday Mindy scared off a year-old cat who was headed down into her hole. She didn't want the boys to witness the murder of a cat by a groundhog.

Oh, and Fairies wear boots...it is a Black Sabbath song.