I've been sniffling a bit, these last few days. Allergies, perhaps. Or I'm catching a cold.
Good thing we have a bottle of Nyquil left over from last winter.
September 2005 Archives
Two musical items:
- Roger Waters' opera, Ça Ira, which he's been working on for the last ten years or so, has been released. iTunes has the English version, only $20. (Is there a French version?)
- Jennifer and I were talking about the song Monster Mash this evening; "Maybe it's on iTunes," I said. Turns out it is: twenty-three different performances, including one karaoke version. The original is available, but I refuse to allow into my home any album with K-Tel in its title.
And that concludes today's music news.
The folks in Enfield, which is a few miles west of Carmi on Highway 14, are in the middle of their annual Mule Days festival: it started yesterday, and wraps up on Sunday.
They've been doing this every year since 1921.
I suppose it's no more eccentric than the Apple & Pork Festival they have in Clinton every September, or the various Testicle Festivals they have in Montana.
Here in Champaign-Urbana, we have the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival. No mules, no pork, no testicles. Just corn.
Interesting web site: http://www.librarything.com/, sort of an online library. Lots of hooks into Amazon.com, and widgets to put on your web page.
Might be useful for the reading list. I signed up for a (free) account. (The non-free accounts are only $10.)
NOAA reports 43° at 7:00am.
If this keeps up, I might have to go buy a new hooded sweatshirt. (The old one is rather ratty & threadbare, and no longer very warm.)
The sun was out this morning, but it's gone now. The cloud cover is pretty thick, but not as low as it would be if rain were imminent.
Still, radar shows a line of showers & storms just entering Champaign county from the west. I imagine it will be raining before it's time to leave work.
Mowing the lawn will have to wait a bit longer.
Did a little yard work this evening:
Emptied the two barrels, which over the course of the summer (now ended) produced a single tomato and bushels of disappointment. I think for next year I will make sure both barrels have proper drainage, a good layer of river rock on the bottom, and well-tempered soil. (Calcium...is good. Calcium works.)
Bailed out Jake's sandbox, which the recent rain had filled nearly to the brim; then we moved it to a more congenial location and dumped in three bags (that's 150 pounds) of play sand. Perhaps Jake will get to play in his sandbox a little before winter sets in.
And finally: filled two yard-waste bags with debris. I pulled up the basil plant from the box garden: it was enormous, and quite woody, but still smelled pretty good. I would have pulled up the purple sage, too, and put an end to this year's garden fiasco, but there was a tiny praying mantis crawling around in it, and I didn't want to hurt it.
I thought it was cool, but Jennifer seemed a little creeped out when I told her. "Are they...poisonous?" I don't think so....
Agent 86
Battled KAOS, made calls on
A shoe telephone
Best I can do while holding a screaming infant, sorry.
I wondered if a newer version of 3D Home Architect was available, and did a little poking around.
The Broderbund web site doesn't mention 3D Home Architect at all; instead they're pushing something called Instant Architect. Did Broderbund rename their product, or just abandon it?
Amazon.com has 3D Home Architect Home Design Deluxe 6, but it's published by Encore Software, not Broderbund. So maybe they sold it to Encore, instead of abandoning it?
But a comment in the Product Reviews section for 3D Home Architect Home Design Deluxe 6 says:
This is not a true update from version 4 but a completely new program. If you want the true updated verson try Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer products by Chief Architect, they were the makers of 3D Home Architect version 4 and earlier. I purchased 3D Home Architect version 5, and it was very hard to use. I can't imagine that this will be better.
So now it looks like 3D Home Architect never was a Broderbund product; they were just reselling it, or something. Very strange.
Mr. Samuel is off to the doctor today, for his four-week checkup.
Clever people will realize that Sam will be six weeks old tomorrow; such are the vagaries of physicians' schedules.
Sam's one-year checkup will probably be sometime in 2008.
Update: Sam's vital statistics: 11 pounds, 7 ounces, 24 inches long.
On the way to work this morning, I passed no fewer than three houses with impressive front-yard mushroom patches.
They were big mushrooms, too - white, with thin stalks and wide, flat heads.
I didn't see any in our yard, though.
Sputnik recorded a high of 75°, at midnight last night. The temperature's been falling slowly ever since, and is now 67°.
Sputnik also recorded an inch and a quarter of rain. Needless to say, the lawn did not get mowed. Maybe tomorrow.
It seems that my recent foolery with the Debt Reduction Planner and/or online updating of my credit-card account has broken the budget.
Specifically, Money has decided that none of the budget categories - with the curious exception of birthday and Christmas presents - represents an actual expense. The balance forecast for our checking account now shows a wildly optimistic accumulation of cash, because Money completely ignores budget items like groceries, gas, etc., etc., etc.
It seems that my only hope is to delete the budget and start over. Thank you so much, 'softies.
Update: I deleted the budget & created a new one; same problem. A bit more poking around uncovered the cause: seems I used my credit card for a few purchases, and Money helpfully reassigned those categories to the credit card account. (Did Money offer any hint that it had done this? No.) Fortunately, it's relatively easy to put them back where they belong.
(The process of creating and editing a new budget is incredibly slow in Money 2005: click, type a number, press Enter, wait thirty seconds. Repeat two dozen times for the other budget items. I felt myself growing old, waiting for it to finish.)
Finished reading Just a Geek, by Wil Wheaton.
Wil sure does cuss a lot. And he uses strange slang I've never heard before (e.g., hella).
I suppose I should have read his first book, Dancing Barefoot, before Just a Geek: apparently they're written in more or less chronological order. Oops.
Apparently there are people who've made a hobby of visiting the graves of all thirty-six dead presidents.
This is not a project to undertake lightly: it requires visits to seventeen states - California (1), Illinois (1), Indiana (1), Iowa (1), Kansas (1), Kentucky (1), Massachusetts (2), Missouri (1), New Hampshire (1), New Jersey (1), New York (6), Ohio (5), Pennsylvania (1), Texas (1), Tennessee (3), Vermont (1), Virginia (5) - and the District of Columbia (3).
(But James Monroe and John Tyler are buried within a few yards of each other in Richmond, Virginia, so that saves one trip.)
Chilly day today (temperature in the 60s), cloudy. Just now it's raining.
My umbrella is, of course, safe & dry at home.
This was posted yesterday to a WRI mailing list:
For those of you who haven't filled your gas tank, now is the time. I was informed that by the end of today the price will go up by .70 and by Saturday they are projecting between $5 - $7 for a gallon of gas.
As it turned out, I filled up Mr. Explorer on the way to work yesterday morning, and paid $2.66/gallon. I drove past the same station on the way home; their prices had fallen 1¢.
This morning, prices had gone up...10¢.
(If people knew that rumor-mongering leads to panic-buying, which leads to sudden spikes in demand, which leads to price increases, would they stop spreading rumors & panic? Probably not.)
The south wing of the former Chancellor Hotel, just across Kirby Avenue from dear old WRI, was demolished today.
Construction crews have been methodically gutting the building for several weeks now; today, they used a crane to knock down what was left.
I meant to get some pictures, but - alas! - never did.
NOAA reports 95° as of 4:00pm.
That's just insane for so late in the year. October is only a week away.
On the upside, I can with clear conscience refuse to mow the lawn tonight.
Here comes another Category 5 hurricane, Rita, expected to make landfall on the Texas coast late Friday or early Saturday.
And the hurricane season has six more weeks to go. Egad.
The NOAA has a Hurricane Rita RSS feed.
Jennifer cooked up a batch of Italian beef in the crock pot today. It ended up taking a bit longer than expected, so we had something else for dinner (sandwiches), but when it was finally done (8:00pm?) it was delicious.
Perhaps I will have some for lunch tomorrow.
The other day, my subconscious popped up the question: Whatever happened to the MX missile?
The MX, aka Peacekeeper, was a big deal back in the early 1980s. There was much debate: Do we need them? Can we afford to build them? Where will we keep them?
On the assumption that the Soviet Union had their own nuclear missiles aimed at each & every missile silo the U.S. had, it was suggested that we build even more silos, connected by custom railroad tracks, and keep the MX missiles in constant motion from one silo to another: a shell game, to make the Soviets waste missiles targeting empty silos.
That never happened. Now CNN says:
Troops, civilians and officials participated in a ceremony Monday at F.E. Warren Air Force Base to officially deactivate the Peacekeeper nuclear missile.
All that hoohah, and they ended up building only 50 missiles, which sat forgotten in Wyoming for fifteen years and then were retired.
Almost forgot: it's National Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Avast, ye scurvy dogs!
I bought this a few years ago, messed around with it a little (never quite figuring out how to design anything with it), then lost interest. When nessus was upgraded to Windows XP, 3D Home Architect never got reinstalled.
Tonight, I had the notion to fetch it out from the closet & give it another try.
The installer isn't very happy on Windows XP: there were numerous pauses - several minutes long - in which nothing seemed to be happening, not even a window on the screen. But it did finish, and the software runs.
It puked a bunch of shortcuts all over my desktop, but those were easily deleted. (Dear software publishers of the world: I don't want to sign up for AOL. I don't like AOL. Stop asking me to sign up for AOL. Thank you.)
So maybe in my copious free time I will contemplate house designs. (Or not. I'm very lazy these days.)
Jake's bath tonight turned into a shower. He had a grand time.
The last few baths, I've been turning on the shower, just to get Jake used to it. At first, he didn't like it, but tonight he was having so much fun he asked me not to turn it off.
He cackled all through the scrubbing & rinsing, then played around a bit afterward. As soon as he was out of the tub (and wrapped in a towel), he ran off to tell Mama: "I took a shower!"
I guess we won't be doing baths any more.
(Papa will have to figure out how to supervise a shower & assist in the scrubbing without getting himself completely soaked. Tonight, I ended up quite soggy on one side.)
Exciting weather this afternoon: around 5:00pm a particularly fierce line of thunderstorms hit Champaign. Jake & I were out in the middle of it, too, on our way home from work and/or daycare. (Sometimes WRI feels a bit like daycare....)
Sputnik recorded a 21° temperature drop between 5:00pm and 6:00pm, along with half an inch of rain and wind gusts up to 26mph.
No major damage, but power was out at a few intersections. We saw a fire truck stopped on Duncan, lights flashing, with a rather forlorn-looking firefighter standing out in the downpour. I don't know why he was there: I didn't see any trees or power lines down.
The power flickered once at home, enough to reset half the clocks. (We're sure this means another boil order from our ever-so-reliable water company, which calls itself Illinois American even though it's not based in Illinois and isn't owned by Americans.)
Cable kept dropping out, possibly due to the chewed-up cable in the back yard. (The signal always goes south in heavy rain.)
Then there was an hour-long pause, after which it all happened again. The sky has been quiet since 8:00pm or so, aside from the occasional distant lightning.
CNN says:
NASA unveiled plans on Monday to return humans to the moon by 2018 at a cost of $100 billion.
NASA has some fancy animation showing the new system in action. Looking at it, I thought: This is what NASA should have built in 1980, instead of wasting twenty-five years and countless billions of dollars on the [censored] Space Shuttle.
(It says something shameful about NASA today vs. NASA of forty years ago that even with the enormous head start of re-using existing shuttle technology - boosters, main engines, etc. - it's going to take twice as long and ten times as much money to return to the moon as it did to get there the first time.)
When I first heard about the WolframTones project, some months ago, my reaction was: I don't want music, I want Stephen's voice, saying, "Your phone is ringing. Answer your phone."
Now CNN says:
[Donald] Trump...is about to announce a deal with Warner Music Group to launch Trump Mobile. Products will include ringtones, video ringtones and Trump wallpaper for cell phone screens.
One of the ringtones is Donald Trump saying, "Why not answer your phone."
Thunder, lightning & a little rain this morning, around 6:00am.
This was also when Sam woke up and asked for a bottle. Coincidence?
I took some nice pictures at the Labor Day parade, two weeks ago. I've been meaning to get them up on the web site.
Alas, haven't managed it yet. Maybe tomorrow.
...a new pain, that is, distinct from the general pain of using Money 2005.
I have a credit card. I want to pay it off every month. I want to set up a recurring bill whose value tracks my credit card balance.
The bill manager won't let me do that. The debt reduction planner can't do it, either. I wonder if Quicken can do it. Hm....
As Geddy Lee once said: "[censored]. Stupid computer."
Update: Yes, Quicken can do exactly what I want: when setting up a recurring transfer into a credit card account, one of the three options for the amount transferred is "current balance".
The corner of the yard next to the box garden hadn't been mowed all summer, because of the pumpkin vines & volunteer tomato plants that had sprouted there. This morning, there was an impressive jungle of grass and weeds (mostly the latter) growing there.
It's gone now: I attacked it with the weed-whacker, the lawn mower and occasionally my bare hands. It looks almost normal now. The debris has been raked into a neat pile, and will be bagged up one of these days.
Jacob's play area - which was supposed to be a base of black plastic sheeting covered with mulch, but which ended up as a prairie restoration project much like the corner (only bigger & shaggier) - received similar treatment.
We're going to rip it all out, one of these days, put down new plastic (thicker this time, I imagine), cover it with some pea gravel instead of mulch, then set up Jake's sandbox & toys again.
We'll probably get this all finished just in time for winter. Oops.
Finished reading The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (which name I've never heard spoken, and have no idea how to pronounce).
If I can (acquire and then) read the Twenty-Second Annual Collection, published last June, before the Twenty-Third Annual Collection is published (next June, probably), I'll be caught up. Every few years I manage this, but it never lasts. I'm just a slacker.
This book was a Father's Day present, which means I took three months to read it. It's 654 pages, and there's been a lot going on these last few months, so I don't feel so bad about it. But Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince clocked in at 652 pages, and I read that one in five days.
Larger type, I suppose.
(I have the Seventh Annual Collection, which I've yet to read. Perhaps I should tackle that one, someday.)
CNN says:
Suresh Joachim broke the Guinness world record for the longest time spent watching TV. He finished Friday with 69 hours and 48 minutes.
And it was all the same channel, too.
Raining just now, a pretty good shower. I can hear raindrops against my office window, and see streetlights coming on over in the IGA parking lot.
No, they've turned off.
This is probably the first cloudy, drizzly day we've had since late Spring.
Mr. Samuel decided to stay up late last night. (I don't know why. There wasn't anything good on television.) It was after midnight before everybody was sleeping.
He woke up hungry around 4:00am, then again just before 7:30am. (Though in the latter case I think it was my alarm clock that woke him up.)
Silly boy.
Added some bills to Quicken this evening, just to compare Quicken's bill handling to Money's. Curiously, there's no way to tell Quicken that a particular bill comes due every other month.
We can't be the only people in the country with a few bi-monthly bills....
Update: Quicken's bill scheduler is actually much more flexible than Money's. The trick is that you must first select Monthly in the Frequency dropdown; only then can you specify every three months, every seven months, etc. You can even schedule things by day of the week: second Wednesday of the month, third Saturday, that sort of thing. Very nice. (No, there's nothing in the online help about this. I looked.)
Sputnik recorded just over ¾ of an inch of rain last night, between 1:00am and 5:00am. Jennifer says it was a thunderstorm, and it woke her up.
Jacob, Sam & I slept through it.
Today's high was only 77°: quite a change from the heat wave we've had for the last week, with highs in the nineties.
A little autumn will be most welcome, I think.
Microsoft announced Codename Max today: looks to be a photo-album manager, sort of like Flickr, except that Max isn't a web application. It's Windows-only.
Very pretty, but why would I want to create a photo album that Mac users can't see? Some of my closest friends are Mac users....
The 'softies also announced Microsoft Gadgets, which looks to be a clone of the OS X widget idea. I dunno - having a bunch of tiny little background windows clamoring for my attention seems like it would be really distracting.
I may be wrong about that, but I don't suppose I'll be finding out any time soon: Max and the gadgets, having been designed for Windows Vista, are unlikely to run on five-year-old nessus.
During my drive to work this morning, NPR was broadcasting the confirmation hearings for Judge Roberts. Here's the part I heard, run through the de-politicization filter:
Sen. Specter: I promised earlier that I wouldn't ask this question, and you've already said you wouldn't answer it if I did, but: if you are confirmed, will you overturn Roe v. Wade?
Judge Roberts: If I say yes, the Democrats will vote against me. If I say no, the Republicans will vote against me. Just how stupid do you think I am? Instead, I will spew mind-numbing legal jargon, liberally sprinkled with impressive-sounding Latin phrases, intended to sound like whatever answer you want to hear without actually meaning anything.
Sen. Specter: Thank you, sir.
At 4:16am this morning, Samuel woke up Jennifer & myself with a single earsplitting WAH.
Then he went back to sleep.
Sam was awake for most of the evening, which is unusual for him. Perhaps this means he'll sleep all night. (Dare we hope?)
Twenty minutes ago, Jennifer was watching television and I was messing about with Quicken on the computer. Sam was with Jennifer, and protesting loudly. (He must have some special dislike for David Caruso.)
Figuring it was time to be Helpful Husband Guy, I took him for a while. Sitting in the living room chair didn't help, but when I took him to the computer (so he could help me with Quicken) he fell asleep almost immediately.
Quicken won't let me create a cash account named "Cash". Name already in use, it says. Not by me, you silly software.
Paid a visit to http://www.optoutprescreen.com/ just now, and filled out the Permanent Opt-Out form. In theory, this will cut down on the unsolicited credit-card offers (i.e., junk mail, credit-card spam, and other not-so-nice terms) that have been clogging the mailbox lately.
In practice, spammers usually find some reason why opt-out requests (and/or federal legislation) don't apply to them, so the amount of spam in my mailbox may not change much.
CNN says:
A large portion of Los Angeles was hit with a blackout Monday afternoon.
Terrorists? Accident? Incompetence? As yet, nobody knows. Whatever the cause, I imagine President Bush is cussing a bit just now.
(I also imagine there are people in Los Angeles thinking, As soon as the sun goes down, I'm getting a new TV. Or am I just being cynical?)
Update: Now CNN says:
About 700,000 electric customers in Los Angeles lost power Monday afternoon after a worker mistakenly cut a wrong line, triggering a cascade of problems in the city's power grid, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said.
Power has been restored, disappointing all those people looking forward to a free television tonight.
Considerable airtime yesterday, and the week preceding, was devoted to documentaries and based-on-a-true-story movies about the events of September 11, 2001. I made a point not to watch any of it.
I watched the news coverage, four years ago. I read (all right, skimmed) the 9/11 Commission Report. I've tried to keep up with what little non-sensationalist news coverage there's been. I figure that by now, I know enough. Dwelling on the gruesome details just seems ghoulish.
I've been avoiding Hurricane Katrina news coverage for the same reason. It's a huge catastrophe, yes. Hundreds - thousands? - have died. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything. But I don't need each & every one of the dead and suffering to be paraded before the television cameras.
The WordPress fellas are a little annoyed that Microsoft has apparently stolen their slogan: Code is Poetry.
Um...I've seen the WordPress source. Poetry is not the word I'd use to describe it.
(I've never seen any Microsoft source, hence can't say whether their code is any better. I suspect not, given Microsoft's emphasis on cranking out new code instead of evolving - or even maintaining - old code.)
We've had highs in the nineties for the last five days: 91° on the 7th, followed by 91°, 93°, 93° and 91° today.
This seems excessive for September.
(Which isn't quite the same as Lansing, Michigan.)
The Army Corps of Engineers says they expect to have New Orleans "unwatered" by early October - though I wonder what the EPA will have to say about dumping that much toxic sludge into the Mississippi.
CNN also reports that the President's approval rating stands at 39%, a record low for the current administration. (Not that I put much stock in opinion polls. I imagine half the people who respond to them are ignorant, and parrot back the last thing they heard on television.)
You can be sure that the phrases "September 11" and "War on Terror" will be repeated loudly & frequently until the President's numbers start to improve.
The other day I picked up a copy of the 10th Anniversary Myst DVD Edition: the first three Myst games, only $20.
I had a copy of Myst, long ago - and the hint book, which made the game go considerably faster. (Some of the later puzzles are just time-wasters, not real puzzles at all.) It got garage-saled, or thrown away, or given to Dæv, or something.
Now I have it again. (First Age of Empires, now Myst. What's old is new once more.)
It runs fairly well on nessus, except for an alarming tendency to hang if I click the mouse too quickly. (That's all you get to do in Myst: click the mouse. It's a one-finger game.) Age of Empires has the same problem: buggy audio drivers, I suspect. Too bad Creative hasn't updated their SoundBlaster drivers in two and a half years.
It's been so long since I played Myst that I've quite forgotten the solutions to all the puzzles. But it's coming back to me. So far, I've raised the sunken ship and opened the rocket.
(Jacob is obsessed with the rocket. He doesn't want to see anything else in the game, just the rocket. If I go somewhere else on the island, he nags me to go back to the rocket. Silly boy.)
Lunch today was at Fiesta Cafe. Sam slept through most of it, but the arrival of a sizzling platter of steak fajitas (i.e., my lunch) frightened him: he woke up & started crying.
I picked him up, and he calmed down. Poor little guy.
Finished reading Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt.
In 1896, Helga Estby and her daughter Clara walked from Spokane to New York City: quite an accomplishment, especially at a time when everyone believed that women lacked the strength - physical and mental - for such things.
Interesting story, though the early chapters of the book struck me more as a lecture on Noble Women Enslaved to the Animal Lusts of Men than a narrative.
There's a web site: http://www.boldspiritacrossamerica.com/.
Apple released iTunes 5 today, so I upgraded. (Looks a little different, works pretty much the same. I suppose there are new features I haven't tried yet.)
It turns out that iTunes 5 includes QuickTime 7. Upgrading from QuickTime 6.5.2 wiped out the QuickTime Pro registration key for which I paid $32 just a few weeks ago. I guess I'm back to QuickTime Amateur.
Oops.
Sam had a bottle at 7:00pm (four ounces!), followed by a bath, followed by an hour of playing with Papa while we all watched Dirty Jobs (a wonderfully tasteless show).
He fell asleep a little before 9:00pm. He'll sleep a long time, thought I. Lots of food in his belly, lots of activity, he must be worn out.
Nope. He woke up at 10:00pm, wanting more food. (Another three and a half ounces, as it turned out.) And then he wanted to be awake for a while.
I think he's sleeping now. But there's no telling whether he'll stay that way.
Famous people die
and then their fans write haiku
goodbye, Gilligan.
Or:
He was Gilligan
that's because Maynard G. Krebs
was before my time.
Last June, Jennifer & I decided to buy a new camcorder battery, so we could get some video of Sam. So I ordered one from Amazon.com, which routed the order through batteries.com.
It's a nice battery. It works well. But batteries.com seems to think that because I bought one $20 battery from them, they have permission to spam my inbox for the rest of my life.
Yes, I've clicked on the please-unsubscribe-me link. In every message. The spam keeps coming. This evening I sent a complaint to feedback@batteries.com:
I bought a battery from you.
One stinking battery.
And now it seems that you vermin are going to spam my inbox from now until the end of time, no matter how often I click on the please-unsubscribe-me links you provide.
You have lost me as a customer. I will do without before buying from you again.
Nothing less than a groveling apology has any chance of changing my mind about batteries.com.
Update: Douglas Arthur, who may or may not be a real human being working for batteries.com (I have doubts), responds:
Thank you for your recent order with Batteries.com. We apologize for the inconvenience you've experienced. Your email address has been removed from our mailing list.
Anything you say, "Doug".
For those who always wondered about the geometrical minutiæ of flag design: a page explaining in exquisite detail how to draw the Union Jack.
(The Union Jack vs. Union Flag discussion, toward the end of the page, made me smile.)
Went to see the Labor Day parade, over in Urbana. (They don't seem to have one in Champaign.) Jake collected a bagful of candy, and had a grand time.
Sam slept through the whole thing. He woke up on the way home, though, and had this to say: "Excuse me, but I really am quite hungry, and there seems to be a stinky mess in my diaper. (Who put that in there?) Could you please take care of these little problems at your earliest convenience? Thank you."
Actually what he said was: WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH.
Nonstop. All the way home. Poor little guy.
But once he was cleaned up & fed, he settled right down.
At his last checkup, Samuel was found to have gained just over a pound since he left the hospital. I wondered how much formula it took to achieve this result. Rather a lot, as it turned out.
We've used about one and two-thirds cans of powdered formula so far: 1,790 grams, more or less. The ratio is 34 grams of formula to 8 fluid ounces of water, which means that in the last sixteen days we've mixed up almost fourteen kilograms of formula.
That's thirty pounds, more or less. I can't find any flaw in my calculations, other than initial estimate of one and two-thirds cans (which is just an estimate). I suppose there are errors in measurement, and in mixing; some formula never makes it into a bottle; and Sam does spit up a little, now & then. So he probably didn't get the full thirty pounds.
Even so, that's a lot of chow for such a little guy.
Grandparents came down from Arlington Heights today, to visit the grandchildren.
Plans to have panini sandwiches for lunch were frustrated: seems the grandparents' panini grill never made it into their car this morning. (Jennifer's mother reports that a George Foreman grill works nicely for such things. We'll have to try it, sometime.)
Sam spent most of the day asleep, silly boy.
One of my favorite teachers at Lake Central High School (in lovely St. John, Indiana, way back in the late 1970s) was a fellow named Al Pilarcik. He had quite a sense of humor, and never seemed to get angry about anything. (I wish I were like that.)
According to the Indiana Baseball Hall of Fame web site, a fellow named Al Pilarcik played pro baseball for thirteen seasons, 1948 - 1961. It also says:
After retiring from professional baseball he spent twenty seasons as a high school varsity coach. Currently he resides near Schererville, Indiana.
There are numerous pictures of the baseball-playing Al Pilarcik out in the world: old baseball cards, that sort of thing. There's one at the Virtual Card Collection site. (Scroll down a bit.) Sure does look like my old teacher.
I wonder if it's him.
Every now & then, I read the latest essay over at Uncle Orson Reviews Everything. I've noticed a pattern: in every essay, he finds some excuse to mention Pisgah Church Road.
Every single time.
It's starting to grate on my nerves.
Hm...today, the President is running around Louisiana & Mississippi, hugging & kissing hurricane survivors for the news cameras.
Clearly, the President is in full crisis-management mode - he's just not managing the crisis people were expecting him to manage.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, addressing federal disaster-relief agencies:
Get off your asses.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff responds:
You can't fly helicopters in a hurricane. You can't drive trucks in a hurricane.
Memo to Mr. Chertoff: the hurricane is gone. It's been gone for several days now.
Last night, while waiting for Mr. Sam to wake up for his late-evening bottle (which he didn't do until 11:30pm), I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.
A curious book (heh), about someone whose mind works very differently from most people's.
Somehow I had the idea that this was Jennifer's book, so I was in no particular hurry to finish it; but really it belongs to her mother. Probably she'll be wanting it back soon.
I didn't use a bookmark on this one: I just remembered what page I was on. It seemed like the sort of thing the protagonist would do.
The news from New Orleans is increasingly apocalyptic: devastation, death, pestilence, famine, lawlessness, with no end in sight.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
The Amoco at Mattis & John raised their prices 36¢ yesterday. I felt rather a chump for not filling up Mr. Explorer in the morning, when gas was only $2.80.
This latest spike in gas prices might put an end to premium gas. For decades, the oil companies have been running the hard sell: Premium is better! All cars need premium! They've been lying, all along. Regular cars run just fine on regular gas. People with $100,000 sports cars might need premium gas, but the rest of us surely do not.
Oil companies love premium gas, because it's an extra 20¢ of profit per gallon, so they're running promotions designed to nudge people toward buying it again. Shell is pushing their V-Power additive, which is only in premium (and which, suspiciously, had no effect on the price when it appeared). Amoco is running a free-gas-for-life contest: to get a game piece, just fill up with...premium.
It won't work. (At least, it won't work on me.)
Sam is eating more: he can manage three ounces of formula in one go, if he puts his mind to it. (And if Mama and/or Papa can keep him awake long enough. This is not always possible.)
He's sleeping longer, too. Last night he fell asleep around 8:00pm, and didn't wake up until almost midnight. He was supposed to have had a bottle around 10:00pm, so at midnight he was quite hungry. (But he fell asleep after only two ounces. Silly boy.)
I think I got through all of yesterday without having to change a stinky diaper. Lucky me.
