Screw it. My family can hike through the prairie and bathe in the stream.
Milestone Rewards
How do you encourage yourself to reach a milestone? I know smoking programmers who give themselves a smoke break (7-15 minutes) when they accomplish a task. I don’t smoke, so I do a chore that doesn’t involve the computer. Today’s milestone breaks are brought to you by "Crack Plumbers, we’re just cheeky!" After Sarah did an art project involving rocks and the bathtub, our drain slower terribly. Now its stopped completely. This could be a coincidence. We have enough longhairs in this household to clog the public waste system so periodically I have to open the drain and pull out the alien creature that grows in there. It will be about 4 feet long, black, sluggy, and psuedo-intelligent. The most frightful thing I ever saw as a child was a Twilight Zone episode that involved a housewife vacuuming a dust ball out of her air ducts that turned out to be an alien creature that ate her. Since then I have never been fond of dust bunnies, air ducts, or alien looking snake-like gooey lengths of beyond description filth. However, I do want to bathe today…
So I just accomplished a very big deal on my current project involving combining functionality of two different parts of the application into a single page. It also involved altering the roles based security. Implementing roles based security on custom apps can be a time consuming pain in the neck. But fun! Time for my 7-15 minute break. Here creature creature!
Update: Pipes-1; Doug-0. Expect @cathymccaughan to report on my highly anticipated trip the emergency room during my next milestone break.
Update: Pipes-2; Doug-0. Done until Saturday.
What’s today?
Today is about coding! I’m sick as a dog and the tub won’t drain and it has to work before this afternoon and all my buckets are at the in-laws house. None of that matters. Today is about showing results to my client!
Send the Girls to BlogHer
Registration ends next week!
BlogHer has announced the desire to close registration next week. We’ve had our first contributor! We are a 7 person household and 6 of those people have blogs! (that doesn’t include Facebook and MySpace etc.) With BlogHer coming to Nashville I think Cathy and Sarah should go! I created a ChipIn to see if we could get them sponsored and two days ago we received our first contribution of $5! Awesome! Now if we can get 59 more people to do the same, the girls get to go! I think it will be some good bonding time for mom and daughter. I think they will have some great social networking opportunities with bloggers they only know in print. And I think they will come back excited to try new blogging tools, technologies and writing techniques they discover at BlogHer. Plus Barry will write snarky things about them!
Registration ends next week!
Our Life
Between coughing up my lungs today, I have been hard at programming on a project. I have some neat things happening but they never seem to happen quickly enough. I took only one break today to return something I borrowed longer than I should have. I am close on my code but it always seems like I need just another half an hour when our evening chaos erupts. This evening’s chaos was complicated by the high school parent night.
What is evening chaos? It starts when a child says he needs the mouse I stole from his computer so he can do his homework. Then Mom dashes out the door explaining the homework Amy has to do after the kids finish cleaning the kitchen table. That’s the table with 3 inches of soapy foam on it and a perplexed middle schooler asking, "uh. How do I clean that up?" Still he manages to leave the table a sticky mess. Evan, who is getting closer to being housebroken, pees on the floor in the girls room. I’m on the phone with the bank trying to get them to fax me a letter that they say they can’t mail to me for 10 days due to federal law. I need it Monday but preferably tomorrow. Dinner has to be made. Go downstairs and sharpen a pencil. Hear Amy and Evan start to fight. Cathy texts to tell me she is going to park illegally. I call to give her a hard time but get voicemail so I text her my approval and then she calls. Evan is screaming just because he has lungs that aren’t filled with gunk. Evan wants to help with Amy’s homework. Oh dinner. Noah has a question on his homework. Code? Sharpen pencil again. And… that’s just the beginning.
From the mouths of babes
Cathy: "Do I look inappropriate?"
Me: "Very slutty dear."
File that under things not to say!
Of Grasshoppers
Student: I thought I was making the correct choice at the time.
Master: A disappointing or unexpected outcome does not necessarily make the choice wrong.
Are family stickers on cars dangerous?
For an eon, I have wanted to put the decals representing our family on the van. This past Mother’s Day I made a greater effort to find them and came across several people admonishing the stickers as careless parenting and dangerous to our children. I felt compelled to comment:
The DC Internet Caucus panel on kids and predation has determined that the media has misrepresented the way that children are preyed upon. Although we want to protect our children, being realistic about threats is important because overprotecting them can be just as harmful. Just think, if you teach your children to jump from every shadow, they may grow up to believe that stickers on a car might actually make your child more vulnerable to a child predator.
Yesterday, Evie, a child abuse awareness volunteer added commentary stating that those of us thinking people were being overly paranoid or overly protective were wearing rose colored glasses and not living in the real world. I felt compelled to comment further:
Evie, I’m a realist but while you think we are viewing the word through rose colored glasses, I think you are jaded because you work with the problem.
When I worked as a quality assurance engineer my job was to find problems and when I left the office I continued finding problems. I found billboards with misspellings. Newspapers with poor grammar. Stuff in my life that was assembled wrong. And so forth. But the truth of the matter was that although these were “problems” for the common person, and on the grand scheme of things, they were inconsequential.
I think the quality of our life, and the ability for our children to grow up confident rather than afraid, out weights over the top paranoid reactions to events that have a low likelihood of ever happening to most people.
I am a scout leader and have been trained on child safety and protecting our children. I am a father of five. I want no harm to come to my children or anyone else’s. But like the woman who allowed her 9 year old to travel the subway alone, I want my children to live life to its fullest. I want them street smart but trusting because I believe by breeding trust we help make the problems go away. Don’t treat symptoms; treat problems. Ask the adults around you and I think you will find most of us lived as a child safely being away from home all day long and not abiding by any of the safety recommendations of this day and we all turned out okay. Using reasonable safety measures and common sense makes our children very safe today.
Yes, abductions are easy. So is drowning but that didn’t stop me from taking my children to the ocean and letting them have the time of their lives this summer.
I feel bad for the children Evie has had to help. They should have never been in such a predicament. Isn’t it true that most child abductions are by friends or family? or someone otherwise close to the victim? If so, the stickers really don’t make a difference do they? According to Duhaime.org, 75% of abductions are by friends or family with most abductions being by a parent in a custody dispute.
Evie, you do not live in the real world. You live in a microcosm and broadcast it upon the real world. No insult intended.
How children lost the right to roam in four generations is written on a UK website but certainly reflects similarly to how our children in the United States are treated. As a parent, the thought of my children roaming to areas where I cannot locate them is terrifying but that thought is hypocritical. As a child, I was told to be home at a certain time. I might go out and be in the woods for 6 hours. As long as I got home before 5pm, I didn’t get in trouble. And I would play without a watch. I knew the time based upon where the sun hit the tree tops. My mother had no way to contact me other than a loud shout. Today we have cell phones and FRS radios and GPS trackers. With such technology, why do we keep our children closer than ever? Shouldn’t we allow them the opportunity to explore and grow? Instead we keep them close to home. Doesn’t that encourage more indoor play? Or sedentary computer gaming? Perhaps keeping our children on a short leash and teaching them that no one can be trusted is not good for their health, mental stability, or overall development. Kids need the adventure of ‘risky’ play.
See also:How Far Did You Roam As A Child?
Colbert needs to interview these people!
Papa Bear did a bit of a smack down on some youthful Obama supporters. I think Stephen Colbert should interview these same two supporters!
And Dear Stephen Colbert Staff, in case you don’t watch the show on a 21" television, the green screen during the interview segment reflects off the mahogany table in an almost painful way. Mahogany shouldn’t glow green unless it’s from Oak Ridge, TN.
This video originally seen on Mahalo.
Mock Shepherd’s Pie
Last night I made a mock shepherd’s pie. Basically, brown a pound of ground beef, add in some drained green beans and a can of tomato soup. Grease a 2 quart casserole and put this mixture into it. Then spoon mashed potatoes over the mixture and bake uncovered for 30 minutes at 350°.
I made my mashed potatoes by hand last night. That was the first time in my life I had cooked mashed potatoes that weren’t instant and I have to say it was easy! And I think the results were quite tasty.
A rule with children: Never mix food. Shepherd’s pie breaks this rule so naturally then only people partaking of it are the adults. This would make a nice dish for a potluck.
From the mouths of babes
Evan, bouncing: "Wake up. Go sleep. Wake up. Go sleep. Wake up!"
Dad: "Yes. Go to sleep and we’ll wake up in the morning."
Evan, with a gasp and loud: "Ah! THANK YOU Da!"
Things that don’t go together
A child, a strong magnet, and a tv.
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterz. Replies.
Update: Unplugging the tv for several hours fixed the problem. And created a nice quiet around the house!
And then she cut them off…
In memory of the curls…
Update: It doesn’t look terrible to me but Mom has declared it a disaster. They’ve gone to get the hair fixed. I am sure we will have before and after pictures.
Update: Cathy has posted the before and after pictures.
Labor Day
Labor Day in the United States is odd. We celebrate Labor Day by taking the day off from work. For most people, this is a three day weekend. I usually work on Labor Day. For me, it is a day that the phone rings a little less and I can really get some code written. This year, I will be digging through ancient archives and pretending to be an archeologist as I complete my tax paperwork for 2002. I will also be trying to get to my next milestone on a PHP project. Finally, it is my turn to get Tommy back to school. Cathy is sick and does not need to make that drive; of course, if she is feeling well, maybe the whole family will take Tommy up and we can have a picnic before coming home to do more labor.
I visited Jamaica once and braved leaving the resort. With a couple of other people, I contracted a local bus driver to give us a private tour of the island. While other tourists chugged their rum, ate papayas and mangos in the safe confines of the resorts which looked like a little piece of Heaven on Earth, our small group experienced the poverty of Jamaica as we drove through shanty towns. We stood by a cave haggling for a tour price as a helicopter flew over and the cave guide shook his fist saying something French sounding. Our bus guide explained, "They look for crops. He doesn’t like them." At Dunn’s River Falls, the locals aggressively tried for the tourists money. A man with a burro explained I could only take their picture for $5. Little shacks abounded with sale items of local crafts that looked like they were made in China. Dunn’s River Falls is a waterfall that the tourist walk up. It’s like a very wet staircase. There were many people eager to give tours up the falls; some looked official while others looked like they’d just walked up to see if someone would actually give them money. We got official looking tour guide but a teenager followed along anyway and since we allowed that we were expected to tip him. During the tour up the falls, the people from the resort who had joined me were convinced by the guide to sit under a fall and let him take their picture; a service to increase his tip. The boy chimed up, "give me your stuff so it doesn’t get wet." They naively handed over a few items including his wallet. As they got their picture made, I watched the boy open the wallet and start to flip through the money. After a couple of stern words letting him know I was watching, I recommended my friend get his wallet back. I don’t think he ever understood what the boy was doing. But I digress.
The reason I bring up Jamaica is its Labor Day. We happened to take our private tour on Jamaica’s Labor Day. Theirs is different than ours. People were in the roads painting the lines for instance. Our guide explained that on Labor Day, all the people who pay taxes take the day off. All the people who choose not to pay taxes, do community service. Then at night, everyone parties! It all erie!
It’s not a yard; it’s a prairie.
Why should we cut grass anyway? It’s grows naturally! I say let it go through its full life cycle. After much sweat and many words not appropriate for a Sunday, the nut holding the seat to the frame gave way. Most of it was cut away then after a thorough soaking of WD-40 (as I was too lazy to get my Liquid Wrench), a screw driver and hammer were violently applied until what little piece of aluminum was left began to turn. After that a wrench did quit work of removing the remainder of the nut leaving the bolt in good shape for the replacement nut. The fiberglass body lifted off after unplugging some wires and the fuel line (the tank is attached to the body being removed) but only after puzzling through the proper bizarre twists and turns required to life it off the varies levers. I only almost cracked it once. I am sore, sweaty, and blistered. 
The starter motor remains attached to the engine and the rusted terminals under the key switch make me think it could be the switch (or the rusted terminals and not the starter itself. However I am done for the day.
As I was inspecting the mower, I thought about putting the belt back on. See, last trip out I was in an area that I had not thoroughly policed and I heard this god awful kerthunking noise and the blades quit spinning. I thought I hit a log and threw the belt. I no longer think I hit a log since I was being pretty careful. The mower had a catastrophic failure. The pulley that drives the blades which is turned by the belt connected in a serpentine fashion to the engine broke. I mean the metal of the pulley ripped from the shaft that spins the blades. I suppose I should still check on the starter. This could make a pretty cool go cart…
Update: Looks like I have a melted fuse or other electrical component. So one mechanical and one electrical repair plus maybe the starter motor before I can get my lawn cut again. Ugh.
