ALERT: FDA dramatically increases peanut butter recall

--Dissociated Press--

January 31, 2009

In what will undoubtedly be the largest recall in U.S. History, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration today dramatically increased the recall of peanut butter products made with salmonella tainted peanut butter or peanut paste manufactured at the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Georgia. Initially the recall involved only a few products known to have been tainted by peanut butter products from the plant. Then, after a series of reports documented the health inspection problems at the plant, the recall was expanded to include ALL products manufactured at the plant from January 1 of 2007 until the present. Last week the recall was expanded even further to include ALL peanut and peanut butter products manufactured anywhere at any time. And after a nationwide panic was created after that recall, yesterday the FDA announced its most far-reaching recall yet.

"We're going to recall any product that has any of the letters found in the words 'peanut butter,'" said FDA spokesman Mike Marsh. "This is the only way to ensure that our food supply is safe."

Consumer groups, which applauded the initial recall and then later criticized the FDA for not acting quickly enough to expand the recall, have also put their support behind the latest recall. "The Consumer's Union supports this recall," writes President Jim Guest. "I've already thrown out all of my peanut butter products, and tonight I will be throwing out everything else."

Consumers on the street, however, are a little less sure of the latest recall. "I think they might be overreacting," said Marta Pierson, 42, who was shopping at the Kroger in Hyde Park. "The shelves here are practically empty. I mean, there are a lot of products with the same letters as 'peanut butter' that have nothing to DO with peanut butter. I mean, look around!" Pierson turned and motioned with her outstretched arms. "The store is practically empty! The only items left on the shelf are chili, fish, and milk!"

In response to such criticism, Marsh replied, "People always think that something like this is never going to happen to them, that they won't be the one to get salmonella from a product that has a 'p' in its name. And the truth is, the vast majority of people probably never would. But isn't even one salmonella poisoning one too many?"

When a reporter pointed out that just because a product has a letter from the word "peanut butter" in its name that it doesn't mean that it has any actual peanut butter in it, Marsh replied,"Same to you but more of it!" When pressed to explain the comment and how it even made sense in that context, Marsh added, "Up yours!" He threatened to ban all products with letters adjoining any of the letters in "peanut butter" and then ended the interview.

Over 3,000,000 people may have died from salmonella poisoining as a result of eating tainted peanut butter. Or maybe they all just died of something else. Details are unclear. However, scary stories about common foods killing people sells, so let's go with the 3,000,000 number.

My Invitation

Because we've moved and our mail was forwarded this didn't arrive in time for me to actually use it, but I guess that--in the end--it doesn't matter anyway.

As I've mentioned on more than one occasion, I donated a little of my hard earned money to Barack Obama's Presidential campaign (though not enough that you'll find me on any list anywhere. I knew what my anonymous limit was!). As a reward for the money, I've been spammed by the Obama campaign ever since. I thought when the election was over that the requests for money would stop, but no. Apparently he's saving up for 2012.

I've been emailed by the Obama campaign so much, in fact--and most of it presumably from President Obama himself--that I'm starting to feel like he's someone I know personally, a real friend. Heck, I hear from him more than I hear from my parents.

In any event, my latest piece of correspondence with B.O. (He hates it when I call him that, but I tell him to get over it! But he doesn't listen to me--I've been telling him for weeks to just choose a dog, for Pete's sake. He smiles and says there's still a lot of contemplating he has to do.) is a personal invitation to attend the Presidential Inauguration last Tuesady. The invitation included a letter from Barry asking me to join him in "any of the public events scheduled" over the weekend.

As I mentioned, due to mail forwarding I didn't get this in time to actually attend, but I am so grateful that President Obama gave me a special invitation to attend a public event. After all, without the invitation I probably would have...would have...well, I almost certainly would have been let in anyway, since I don't need an invitation to be out in public. Still, I'm glad to know the President was thinking of me.

_______________________________

Speaking of Obama, I want to quickly add this: I voted for him for President because I believed that he was sincere when he stated that he wanted to govern from the center, that he wanted to put petty party politics behind us and actually go about doing what is right for the government. He could signal he meant this very clearly early in his administration by doing the following: he should threaten to veto the economic stimulus package he's pushing if it isn't changed to appease the Republicans. The House passed it on a straight partyline vote. That tells me there's something wrong with the package. After all, the Republicans in office want to keep their jobs, too. They're not going to vote down an economic recovery bill that would fix the economy--they'd all be run out of office the next time they're up for election. They would only vote against it if there are problems.

I know Obama doesn't NEED the Republicans to pass the bill, and this is why I say he needs to lead. He doesn't NEED the Republicans, but he ought to have them, and that is why he should threaten to veto the bill unless the Republicans in the Senate tell him they are satisfied with it.

More Snow

Yesterday, as I suspected it might be, was the second snow day in a row for our family. The roads in Cincinnati were actually much worse yesterday than they had been the day before. Several sections of multiple interstates were closed for a period of time during the day Wednesday. The "cut in the hill" on I-75 in Covington was closed on two separate occasions due to accidents.

For the second straight day we stayed home. The girls played in the snow, watched movies, played board games, and read. I think the girls went out in the snow three times on Tuesday and once Wednesday. Natalie and I went out a second time Wednesday night, but we were working to shovel the snow. I took the photo above while we worked, and I recorded the video below, which Natalie narrates.

Snow Day

Yesterday was the rarest of days in my children's school district (mine, too!): a snow day. We woke up to about 4 inches of snow, which is usually just enough to get us a day off school. We all have to make up the day later, but who cares? And if the forecast for today is shaping up like the people on the news are saying, today might be a second snow day in a row!

Here's the view from the back of our house:

The girls got to get out into the snow and play. And since we've moved, there are kids their own age right on the street with us, so that means that a) the girls don't have to play with just each other and b) Lisa and I don't have to go out in the snow with them. Yesterday the girls had a snowball fight with some neighborhood kids.

First the rules were established...

...and then the fighting began!

I'll post more pictures of the fight to our family album in a few days. Each girl got a few good shots in.

Smart Kid!

Meredith had a pretty good week last week. First, she came home on Wednesday to find a letter stating that, of the 150 or so essays submitted to the local Elks club for a contest called "What Freedom Means to Me," Meredith came in second. Her essay will now be sent to the state Elks organization for the state competition. Meredith's school was so proud of her that they put up a notice on their website announcing the win.

Second, Meredith competed this weekend in the middle school Governor's Cup district competition. She competed in both the written composition and science category. While she didn't place in either event (and I think she was a little disappointed), her Quick Recall team won the district and moves on to Regionals.

You can see the notice on the school website by clicking this link.

Google Trends

Okay, here's something that's an absolute waste of time, but being the statistical nerd I am, I love it. I'm talking about Google Trends, which is a feature that Google has that allows you to compare two or more search terms over time from 2004 to present to see which gets searched for by Google users the most. As I said, it's not really all that useful unless you're into marketing yourself or something, which is probably why Google keeps it hidden, but I love pitting search terms against one another in a sort of cage match. Using Google Trends I've discovered the following:

1. It's been a back and forth battle, but for the last year or so more people search for "Angelina Jolie" than for "Pamela Anderson."


2. "Star Wars" is consistently a more popular search term than "Star Trek." As you might imagine, there was a huge spike in Star Wars searches when the final Star Wars film came out in 2005.


3. More people search for "pee" than "poop."


4. The Brady Bunch is much more popular than Gilligan's Island, though there was huge spike in Gilligan traffic when Bob Denver died (I didn't even know he was dead!).


5. The NFL is many times more popular than Major League Baseball, though the MLB gets more queries every year from April through June.
   
6. And speaking of cage matches, Hulk Hogan consistently beats "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. It was a close contest at first, but when Hogan made his come-back in 2007 his popularity shot WAY UP. See the chart below for evidence:

The Electric Company

I've heard that PBS is bringing back The Electric Company, a great educational show from when I was a kid.

Sort of.

There's going to be a new "Electric Company," which isn't going to have much in common with the old one other than it will be geared toward helping kids learn to read and it will include the classic "Hey, you guys!" line that opened the original Electric Company.

It's too bad there won't be more in common between the two because I LOVED The Electric Company as a child. We watched it in school every Friday, and it was fun to sit with other students and shout out the words that were being taught to us. I also remember, though this had nothing to do with The Electric Company, that a splash screen saying "KET" (for Kentucky Educational Television) appeared, and for three straight years one of the kids in my class would yell to another, "Hey, Kent, there's your name on TV: K-E-T!" and that Kent would yell back, "That's not how you spell it, dummy!"

The Electric Company did make me aware of actor Morgan Freeman a good ten years before most people had heard of him. In fact, when I see him in a movie today I still look at him and think, "Hey, it's the dude from The Electric Company." Same with Joan Rivers. She was the narrator for "Letterman," and no matter how gross she gets I still think fondly of her.

And it's because of The Electric Company that I can't get out of my head the idea that Spiderman is a mute.

I miss this show. I wish PBS had just starting doing re-runs of the old show rather than creating a new one. Or create a new show but give it a different name. Only the original Electric Company is the REAL Electric Company.

If you remember it fondly, like I do, enjoy these videos:

My 8th Grade Yearbook Photo

I was corresponding recently with a friend from high school that I hadn't seen in years and I told her something that was the absolute truth: she hadn't changed at all. She looked exactly the same as she had when she was in high school. Her reply to that was something along the lines of, "Well, I didn't think I was anything special in high school, so that's not much of a compliment!"

The funny thing is, though, that she was a very attractive person in high school. And that got me thinking about what I think is an almost universal truism: Below a certain age (maybe 16, maybe 17), NOBODY thinks they're very good looking. I taught high school English for 14 years, and at my school, because English was the only class at the time that every student had to take, class pictures were taken and distributed through the English class, which meant that I got to see all of my students' class pictures. On average during those 14 years I saw 100 new students each year. That's approximately 1,400 individuals that I taught during my tenure. And I can tell you from experience that of those 1,400 students, 1,328 or so of them HATED their school pictures. Everyone thinks they're ugly.

I wish somebody had told me that when I was in high school. Actually, I think plenty of people told me that in high school. I wish I'd believed them. Maybe I would have had a little more confidence.

On the other hand, maybe I wouldn't have. Because the truth is that--more than most people--I really WASN'T very attractive when I was in school. And I know what you're thinking: He probably was just like everybody else he's describing, overly hard on himself. But that's not the case, and I've got the photo evidence to prove it.

Not in every class, but in at least one section every year when I was teaching, there would be one student who wasn't just upset by his or her class picture, but instead was devastated. I remember one girl actually being in tears and trying so hard to hide those tears from the class. I discreetly took her in the hall and asked her what was wrong.

"I'm so ugly!" she said simply.

"Oh, girl," I told her, "you don't know!" I then brought her back into the classroom and got out my secret weapon: my 8th grade yearbook, which I kept stashed on the shelf inside my podium for just this occasion.

"Class," I said, "I got to see everyone of your photos today, and some of you, I know, might not like your picture. In fact, you might be thinking that your photo is the worst class picture ever taken!" That girl and a few others nodded. "I'm here today to tell you that there is no way that your picture is the worst yearbook picture ever. I don't care how bad your picture is, there is no way that it can beat my 8th grade yearbook photo. It is absolutely the worst yearbook picture of all time!" I then would actually get out my 7th grade yearbook photo and pass it around so that they could see that in the year prior I actually looked halfway normal. Sure, I had a stupid grin on my face, and sure, I was wearing a shirt that had Steve Martin's "Well, Excuuuuuuse Me!" written on it, and sure, my hair was plastered down, parted, and combed across my head like I was a middle-aged man with a comb over, but I still looked about as normal as the rest of the kids on the page. And then I would hold that blue 8th grade yearbook up and tell them the dreaded story.

"During the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years," I'd say, "something terrible happened to me, something that took me YEARS to get over. My hair--I don't know how to explain it--my hair CHANGED! It went from being completely flat and completely straight to being sort of a white man's Afro. It became EXTREMELY kinky, like nothing I'd ever dealt with before, and I didn't know how to handle it. I didn't want curly hair. I wanted my straight hair back. And I tried to compensate by getting men's hair spray and spraying it on my hair, but my superpower hair was too much for it. I responded by using even more hairspray. I would comb my hair down while it was wet and would still lay down, and then I would spray it with about 1/4 can of hair spray, the end result being that I had a sort of plastic-like helmet of hair on my head. And all was good in life. Until...

"...until gym glass, which was early in the morning. I'd go to gym class and exercise and sweat, and all of that perspiration would melt that hair spray, and in the areas I hadn't sprayed as heavily as the others, my hair would curl up. Then after I'd cool down, the hair spray would sort of harden again, and I'd be stuck with my hair sort of randomly curly in some places and straight in others. It was really quite comical. Or sad. Depends on how you look at. I'd rather laugh than cry about it, so let's go with comical.

"That's how my hair looked on Picture Day in the 8th grade. My hair was straight all over except for three places. There was a giant ball of curl right on the top of my hair, a ball so large that it had sort of drooped over to one side by the weight of itself. I also had two little wisps of hair that had curled up--almost like horns--just above each of my ears! To top it off, my glasses didn't quite fit me right for whatever reason, so they were leaning to one side in classic nerd fashion! And I wasn't an idiot: I KNEW how ridiculous I looked, so I wasn't even smiling in the picture. I had this morose, depressed look on my face. I fully suspected that I was about to take part in the creation of the Worst Yearbook Picture Ever!"

I then passed my 8th grade yearbook picture around for everyone to see. The reaction was always the same: Each person would look at the yearbook with this look of skepticism, sure I'd blown the ugliness of the photo way out of proportion. But they were never prepared for the truth: the picture was so bad that my words didn't do it justice. I would watch the eyes of every person, and each person would scan through the photos of normal kids until my face was found, and then that person's eyes would open wide and he or she would start laughing hysterically. It continued that way all around the room, with the people who saw it first turning to the people at the other end of the room and saying, "He's not lying!" You would think that the effect would diminish as the yearbook made its way around the room, that by the time it got to the last students that the expectations would be ratcheted up so high that there was no way that the real photo could exceed those expectations. But it always did.

The year the student was crying I paid special attention to her. She saw the picture and laughed just like everyone else. After she handed the yearbook to the person behind her she turned and looked at me and smiled. I smiled back and for just a moment remembered what I loved about teaching. And then I turned from her and faced the throng of people waiting to make fun of me.

"You're a geek!" someone shouted out.

"Tell me something I don't know," I'd say flatly in return.

I remember one popular girl looking at me like she was seeing me with new eyes. "Mr. Sweasy," she said, "you really were a giant dork, weren't you?"

"Yeah," I said. "I really was."

1,400 students. Not one of them ever disagreed with me that I had the worst yearbook picture ever. One girl one year, though, stayed after class one day and brought me a picture from two years before. "Yours is still the worst," she told me, "but this one comes close, doesn't it?"

I couldn't argue with her. I nodded and said, "It's really close."

She laughed. "But I don't look like that anymore. I don't look good, but I don't look like that anymore. And you survived, Mr. Sweasy, and that means that I'm going to survive, too, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," I said. "It does."

This is a long entry. I guess I just wanted to say this to my old friend: Everyone thinks he or she is "nothing special" in high school. But you WERE something special then, and you are now, too. The compliments are sincere.

The 7th grade photo

The Dreaded 8th grade photo

My Most Embarassing Moment

I used to assign students to write a paper with this title. How ridiculous, now that I think about it. Most high school aged students are pretty self-conscious, and I don't know what I was thinking when I gave the assignment. Why did I think they would share their most embarrassing moment with me? Why did I want to make them relive it?

And the problem for me, too, was that I never really had a moment of my own that was all that embarrassing. But I'd try to come up with a story so that the students would feel like I was sharing, too. Sometimes I'd tell the story of how when I was in elementary school there was this girl in church that I thought was cute, and that I was running through the church parking lot after mass one Sunday and ran by her. I looked in her direction and slipped in some mud and sort of did a Pete Rose slide right through the mud.

And that was embarrassing, sure, but I was also in fifth grade. The embarrassment didn't last very long. By the time my mom and dad made it to the car where I was waiting for them in a winter coat covered in mud, I was much less concerned about the embarrassment and much more concerned about what kind of trouble I was going to get in from my parents. Truth be told, I don't remember whether I got in trouble or not.

At other times I told a story about getting caught singing a song aloud when I thought I was alone. It was about as lame as the falling in the mud story.

But a few years ago, thanks to my younger daughter, I had an embarrassing moment that quickly rose to the top and became--whithout a doubt--THE most embarrassing moment of my life.

It happened at the food court in the Florence Mall in Florence, Kentucky. I don't remember where my wife was, but I was alone with my two kids. I had taken my two children, who were four and not quite two yet, to the mall to see the Christmas decorations. After we'd wandered around the mall for a while, seen Santa Claus and played in the play land, I took them to get a cookie from the San Francisco Cookie Company or whatever overpriced cookie stand was at the mall at the time. We each got a $2 cookie and then sat down in the middle of the food court.

I looked at my two children. They really were precious at that age, so full of life, so full of innocence. As I sat in the food court and watched the two of them eating their cookies, which were so large in their tiny hands, and the remnants of which were on their smiling faces, I was overcome with emotion, filled with love for them. I reached over and gave Natalie, the two year old, a kiss on the cheek, and I wiped a strand of her hair back off of her forehead.

Before I go on with this story, you have to remember--Natalie was only two (Nay, not so much. Not quite two). She had always been and continues to this day to be precocious in her usage of language. Most kids under two years of age are not speaking in complex sentences yet. They can put together a two word sentence, or maybe a three word sentence, but that's about it. Natalie was stringing together complex and compound sentences at 20 months, and she was putting whole paragraphs together by Christmas of that year. Still, as I said above, she was only two. Her grasp of English was tenuous, and she often did not have a mature understanding of the meaning of words. A "doggie," for instance, was pretty much any four legged mammal. The moon and the sun were the same thing to her. And the word "hurt" implied pretty much any sensation she didn't like.

So when I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, apparently it was not something that she enjoyed at that particular moment. Or maybe it was the brushing of the hair back from her head. Maybe I pulled one of the hairs a little. I don't know exactly what it was about it that she didn't like, but I know that she didn't like it. Because she dropped her cookie on the table in front of her and let out the loudest scream she possibly could. And then, at the top of her lungs, she shouted out, "Daddy! Stop it! You're always kissing me and touching me! It HURTS!"

All conversation in the Food Court stopped instantly. I froze, my mouth open wide, my own cookie halfway to my mouth. I didn't dare turn my head, but I could see out of the corner of my eyes that everyone in the area was staring at us. After a moment or two people turned and started whispering to one another, and I could see them all pointing and motioning in our direction. My face felt like it was on fire, and I could tell it was a beet red color. I looked at Natalie and I said, "Honey, I'm sorry I kissed you when you didn't want to be kissed." Then I looked at both girls and said, "Girls, it's time to go!" I started to stand.

"But Dad," Meredith said, "we haven't finished our cookies!"

"You can eat them in the car," I told her.

"But Dad," she said again, "Mom doesn't want us to have food in the car!"

"You can eat them in the car," I said again, this time much more slowly, biting off the end of each word. "We're leaving." (More people were starting to motion towards us, and I don't think my tone of voice was helping matters any.)

"But Dad," Meredith said once more, "you said you'd take us to the Disney Store!"

"We can go to the Disney Store another day!" I said fairly loudly as I pulled both kids out of their seats. "Let's go...now!"

Both girls were crying by now, and it felt like we had become the topic of conversation for everyone in the mall. I got the girls' coats on and got out of the food court as quickly as possible. We made a beeline for the nearest exit, went quickly to the car and drove straight home. I was so grateful to be out of that place. I honestly was worried that a mall cop was going to stop me and ask me to come with him for some questioning while the real police were called.

So the next year when we were doing personal essay starter ideas and I saw the topic of "My Most Embarrassing Moment," I had a doozie to tell. But by then I'd decided that the whole topic wasn't a very good one (not because it was inappropriate but because it seldom yielded anything good), so I never got to tell the story to my students.

And that's why I'm telling it to you.

When You Gotta Have One...

I've been at a conference at the Galt House in Louisville since Tuesday afternoon. Today is the last day. I've spent some of my time in the evening sitting at the desk in my room working on my computer. As I've been working away I noticed the sign below which was sitting on the desk.





That's one expensive cigarette! On the other hand, I'm impressed with how polite the sign is. It doesn't say, "No Smoking in this room!" It gives YOU the option. Go ahead, it says. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Just know the consequences.

Speaking of the conference, days like today remind me that I'm a lousy listener. I think I'm ADD. I have trouble sitting in one place for any length of time. I have trouble staying focused. And I honestly think that my current job makes this whole condition--which wasn't great to start with--WORSE. Because during the day I CRAVE the chance to focus, to be able to concentrate on just this one thing that I'm doing. But I'm constantly interrupted by emails, phone calls, and visitors to my office. I'd say--without exaggerating--that at any given time of the day I am usually working on at least two things at once. So the idea of sitting still for an hour and looking at a PowerPoint presentation almost scares me now.

President Obama

Yesterday was an exciting day. I didn't pay much (read "any") attention to politics when I was a little kid. I think Jimmy Carter's inauguration when I was almost twelve was the first I remember seeing. So I've been paying attention for the inauguration of five previous Presidents, and this is the first that I've ever seen to generate this kind of excitement. The Inauguration yesterday felt like an EVENT, almost a national holiday. I don't recall any feeling like that when President 43 was sworn into office. And I understand the enthusiasm. Whether a Republican or a Democrat, whether Obama becomes the greatest President of all time or is driven out of DC after four years, the fact that the nation has come so far to elect a minority President is a monumental achievement and a pivotal moment in U.S History. And it makes me proud to be an American.

At my work, so many people were interested in the inauguration that I had to send out an email in the morning asking people to watch on traditional TV rather than the Internet if at all possible as I was afraid it might crash our state-supplied Internet connection if everybody in the district tried to watch streaming video on the Internet at once. Despite my warning, we still utilized 65% of our bandwidth from 12:00 to 12:30. Which actually left us plenty of room. Unfortunately, the CIO's in the other 174 districts in the state did NOT send their users a similar warning. As such, KDE utilized 100% of its bandwidth, meaning that despite our district having a fairly clean pipe, viewers couldn't get out to see the video. In fact, the image you see above is pretty much what I got when I tried to watch online. I got about 5 seconds of video, about 20 seconds of audio, and then the whole thing froze up with that image (which I grabbed by taking a quick screenshot of my computer) and sat that way until I closed my browser.

I ended up giving up trying to watch the video at work and waited and watched it last night in my hotel room (I'm out of town at a conference for a couple of days) while I was ironing my clothes. It was a moving speech, with several sections I found so moving, profound, or surprising that I circled around the ironing board to rewind the speech and hear them again. My favorite line was "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." I'm glad someone finally was smart enough to say that! I've been waiting five years for it.

All of that said, I was so sick of hearing about the inauguration that I almost didn't watch it at all. The news from about Thursday on was about nothing else. There IS a war going on in Gaza, I thought to myself, and we are involved in two wars of our own, and the economy is tanking. Is an overblown ceremony really that big of a deal?

But maybe that's just a fault of mine. Pomp and circumstance has never mattered much to me (except for the SONG "Pomp and Circumstance." I'm still steamed that it wasn't played when I got my B.A. as an undergrad!): I didn't care about the ceremony of getting married, I don't much care for Independence Day or any other ceremonious holiday, and I skip awards ceremonies--someone else's or my own--whenever I can. So maybe Inauguration Day SHOULD be such a big event.

But I really don't care about it. Now that the brouhaha is over, let's see what happens TODAY! That's what really matters.

Dixie Chili

Dixie Chili, not Skyline and not Gold Star, has been one of my favorite places to eat for years. When I lived in Erlanger I ate there AT LEAST once a week, and as the article below mentions, the staff came to know me by first name. Since I stopped eating meat I haven't been there but maybe three times in the last seven years, but I still think fondly of the place, and this article doesn't change my opinion a bit.

Click here to read the article.

A Very Cool Website

Here's a website that's so cool that I felt like I had to share it! It's from the Newseum website (which Lisa claims is one of the coolest museums she's ever visited, and I'm a little jealous!), and it allows you to quickly view the headlines of major newspapers all around the nation (and all around the world, too, if you can read multiple languages). All you have to do is pass your cursor over the dot indicating the city and you'll get a miniature view of the front page of that city's newspaper. Click it and you'll get a full screen look at the headlines. You can then print (or save) a readable PDF, or you can jump to the website of the newspaper to read one of the stories that interests you.

It's such a cool site that I can't believe it's free!

Click here to see it yourself.

The Venerable Bead

Friday night Natalie had her 10th birthday party. For her party, we did two things we'd never done before. First, she and three of her friends went to a local beading parlor (didn't know there were such places) and made their own jewelry. Fun, huh? Then we had a sleepover with those same three friends.

I thought the beading party would be the worst part of the night. Turns out that the sound of four girls screaming in the basement is pretty ear piercing. But I know the girls all had a great time. Here are some pictures and a video.

What's Going on Here

1. I missed the first half of work yesterday morning because I had to deal with something that I had sort of feared ever since we moved into our new house: Frozen water pipes.

We moved in to the house in early December, and it was already getting cold then. And as we moved in I noticed that a) there were a number of exposed water pipes in the garage and b) the garage was pretty cold. So one Sunday in December, when temps made it up into the 40's or so, I went out and put insulation around all of the exposed pipes. I was aware, however, that a good chunk of the pipes went up into the ceiling of the garage and were not accessible. Sure, part of the ceiling in the garage was really just plyboard that had been screwed up into the joists, but that plyboard had wires stapled to it and running across it, and I didn't want to go to all of the trouble of fixing that. Plus, it appeared from what I could see before the pipes disappeared into ceiling that the pipes in the ceiling WERE insulated, albeit with thin insulation. I decided to not worry about it.

Big mistake.

Also, I read the weather report last night. I knew we were supposed to have subzero temperatures (and we did get down officially to -7 last night), and I knew those pipes were cold (The water coming out of the cold water tap was bone chillingly cold), so I left the faucets dripping last night. However, there's always a struggle deciding how hard to leave the faucet running. Leave it running too much and you waste water. Not enough and you risk a pipe freezing and bursting. The kitchen sink, which is right over the garage door, I left dripping fairly steadily last night, almost running. The bathroom sink, though, which is further back in the middle of the house, I left on a much slower drip.

Big mistake again.

I was working out this morning when Lisa walked in and gave me the news: the bathroom pipes were frozen. I tried to get it fixed before work, but to no avail. I finally made the decision that I was going to have to take off work to fix this problem. After I made that decision, I went out and took the plyboards off in front of the garage door. Sure enough, the pipes WERE wrapped in insulation, but I could feel the -7 degrees temperature just pouring in from the top of the garage door. I put the blow dryer on the corner pipe where the cold water line turned and ran back to the bathroom, and in less than a minute I heard the sound of water vibrating noisly through the pipes. Another minute and then I went back inside and water was POURING out of the bathroom sink and the tub faucet. I then went to Home Depot, got some better insulation, and tried to make those pipes a little better insulated. Hopefully, a) it won't get down to -7 degrees anytime soon, but b) if it does, the pipes will be able to handle it.

And I'll leave the faucet running a little harder.

2. Today is my younger daughter's tenth birthday. She had a sleepover last night with three of her friends, so I'm pretty tired this morning. I'll put up some pictures soon.

Another Flashback

Back before Christmas I described three of my favorite Christmas presents of all time. One of them was the Atari 2600 video game system. I just discovered the website below where you can play most of the games from the Atari 2600 system online. Fun if you have about 5 minutes to kill (which is how long it will take you to play all of the games you remember and then to recall how boring and lame they were compared to today's games).

You can visit the site by clicking this link. Make sure to visit pages 2 and 3. And if you get tired of the Atari 2600 games, you can play Nintendo NES games by going here.

I'm On Sarah Palin's Side on This One

Holy cow! I never thought I'd write that sentence!

Way back when Sarah Palin actually mattered, I wrote that a) I thought she'd be the downfall of John McCain and b) that I questioned her judgment* in agreeing to run for Vice-President, knowing that her daughter Bristol was going to get a lot of negative media attention as a result of Palin's campaign for the Vice-Presidency. So I'm not a fan. I've never really liked Palin much, and what in her that passes as charm for many passes as grating irritation to me. So I never thought I'd write the headline I wrote above.

However, I agree with Palin that her daughter ought to be off limits to the media, just like the children of any other politician. Bash Sarah Palin all you want, but leave Bristol Palin alone. She didn't ask for the media attention and doesn't deserve it. Let her raise her child in peace and quiet.

*which I spelled correctly the first time, without a spell check, thank you very much!

Let's Get Real!

Welcome to another installment of "Let's Get Real," where we compare traditional definitions of words or phrases with what they mean in the real world. Today's installment takes a well known phrase and applies it to t.v. meteorology. Today's word is

to dodge a bullet

If you look it up at wiktionary.com, you get this:

to dodge a bullet (idiomatic) to have a narrow escape; to avoid injury or disaster. As in
Harold dodged a bullet. He got a "D" on the final exam.

Let's Get Real! When it comes to meteorology, here's the proper definition of "to dodge a bullet":

to dodge a bullet (idiotic) 1. to screw up a forecast; usually used to deflect blame for the erroneous forecast away from the forecaster, 2. to forecast much more weather than was actually predicted in an attempt to get viewers to watch the 11 PM and morning weather reports. As in It looks like we really dodged a bullet as that 10 inches of snow forecast turned out to be just a few flurries. But a little further north, in Northern Quebec, they got that 10 inches of snow!

Lessons Learned

I've always been a fan of physical comedy. Maybe too much of a fan. Lisa has more than once looked at me with a truly worried look on her face when I laugh heartily at a piece of physical comedy. After I've caught my breath she'll flatly say, "That wasn't that funny." But I can't help it. When Kramer walked off the stage when he was modeling on Seinfeld, when Chris Farley on SNL leaped onto a coffee table when he was supposed to be a motivational speaker, when Eddie Murphy in his Delirious stand up act described his aunt falling down the stairs--these all made me laugh the first time I saw them until I cried.

But in the last three weeks I have twice slipped and fallen on the ice. Hard. And it wasn't funny at all. Either time.

The first time was the hardest fall. The fall happened on the evening of December 23, Christmas Eve Eve. It was the night that we had all of that surprise ice in my area. Lisa was out, and she had called to warn me not to take the girls anywhere, that it was VERY icy out, that she had almost gotten in a wreck. So it wasn't like I should have been surprised. But the next day was recycling day on my street, and I wanted to get the stuff out to the curb, so I walked out the front door of the house (see photo to the right), unaware that there was a thin sheet of ice on all of the uncovered concrete. I asked Natalie to hold the door open for me as I went out (the recycling container, which is just a big, open-ended plastic box, was all but overflowing with plastic and aluminum containers), and as I went out the door I said to her, "Don't follow me out, though, because Mom just called and--"

I never got the rest of the sentence out. As soon as I placed my foot on the top step of the porch my feet flew out from under me. Empty soda cans and glass jars and plastic salad dressing bottles rattled loudly in the plastic recycling bin and flew halfway across the yard. My body turned as I fell. It seemed that I hung in the air for several seconds, but I finally smacked the ground with my feet sprawled across the sidewalk and my right hip coming down hard on the corner of the bottom step.

"I'm all right!" I shouted to Natalie. "I'm okay!" But I wasn't. My hip was what really hurt. I wasn't sure at first that I hadn't broken it. I slowly got up, a little embarrassed as I assumed that the whole neighborhood had heard what sounded like a car accident. I slowly rolled over and didn't feel any sharp pain from my hip. So that was good, I told myself. But there was an achy pain, and I could tell there was going to be a bruise. I picked up all of the recycling strewn across the yard, put it back in the recycling bin, took it gingerly to the curb, and went inside. I calmed down the girls, who both looked pretty scared (Meredith, in fact, had been shouting, "Should I call 911?" while I was lying sprawled across the steps), and then I went inside and looked at my hip. A bruise had already started to form. By the next morning it was the size of my outstretched hand, and now, three weeks later, it's still there, though almost gone.

You would think that a fall like that would put me on high alert when it came to ice, but apparently not. And once again the recycling bin had something to do with the fall. Last week it rained a little bit, and then it snowed after that. There was not that much of either the rain or the snow, but it was enough to setup another accident. The whole family and I met at the school for Natalie's academic team meet, and afterward I gave everyone a ride home. After we got out of the car I saw the empty recycling bin in the yard and I picked it up and decided to take it down the driveway and into the garage, which is where we keep it. If you look at the photo above once more, you can sort of tell that the driveway is angled pretty steeply. There's a drain at the bottom of the driveway, and it works great, but there's a small area there a little bit lower than the drain. That small area was completely iced over, and the ice was covered by that dusting of snow. I hit that patch of ice and again I went airborne. My feet flew up in the air and I came down square on the center of my back, knocking the wind out of me.

"I'm all right!" I gasped as loudly as I could as tears poured out of both of my eyes. "I'm okay!" But I wasn't. I'd twisted my back a little, and I'd scraped both of my hands enough that they were bleeding. And more than that, I was miffed. It's one thing to slip and fall once a season. It's another thing to do it twice in so short a span. I was mad, mad mad. Mad at myself. Mad at the ice. Mad at the world.

I learned a couple of things from these experiences, though:

1) If I ever die a violent death (Say I'm murdered or in a deadly auto wreck), my last words are going to be, "I'm all right! I'm okay!" Apparently I say this on reflex.

2) Falling is a great equalizer. It's a great humbler. 'Cause it doesn't matter how important you think you are, or what big plans you have that day, or how full of yourself you feel. Gravity doesn't play favorites. And once you're in the air, you can be a homeless person or you can be President of the United States, and there's not a darned thing you can do about it no matter which one you are. You're going to do what you're going to do. It's actually a very liberating experience.

But that doesn't make me any less mad.

Just an Observation

Here's another sign that people are struggling in this economy: The number of people visiting my school district's website and asking for information about being a substitute teacher is up more than 300% from August of 2008 through January of 2009 compared to the same period a year prior.* People need money and are ready to take temporary work.

*Yes, geek that I am, I keep stats like that sitting around! But I have a good reason: People only request information via the web site when they can't find it on the web site itself, so I try to keep tabs on what a lot of people can't find on the web site so that I can either put it on the web site or make it easier to find. *

*Wow! Look how many times I wrote the words "web site" in a three line paragraph!*

*How much smaller can this text get before it's unreadable?

Breaking with the Union

A few days ago I saw this article about how the Consumer's Union, the organization that prints Consumer Reports magazine, is urging Congress to put off the February 17 deadline for TV stations to switch from analog signals to digital signals. According to the article, 7 percent of households in the U.S. will not be ready for the changeover on February 17 and will lose their signals.

I've been a member of Consumer's Union since the mid-90's, and I usually agree with most of the causes they get in a frazzle about. This is one case, however, where I am not in agreement with them. I hope to heck that the FCC doesn't postpone the switch to digital because I am SO SICK of hearing about it. I'm tired of watching TV shows and then having the deadline date of February 17 and a website to go to for more information scroll across the bottom of the screen. I'm tired of the commercials on TV imploring people to get a converter box. I'm tired of the fake news conference that my local cable company has been running on various channels describing the switch over. I just want this thing to be done with.

Also, here's the important part: We could wait until February 17 of 2011, spend the next two years running the ads and the scrolling messages at the bottom of the screen, and I guarantee you that on that date in 2011 there would STILL be 7 percent of the population not ready for the change. Some people, no matter how much you warn them in advance, don't make a change until AFTER they see the consequence of not changing. That's just the way it is.

So please, Consumer's Union, I'm begging ya, stop bothering Congress with this problem. Let's just get this thing done and over with.

Hamburger Helper

I made Hamburger Helper for dinner Wednesday night (We use soy meat for any of those out there who are wondering if the vegetarians in our family have become carnivorous), and as I was cleaning up after dinner, two questions came to me:

1. How can a company create 25 different versions of a product, every one of which taste exactly the same? It doesn't matter if you're eating Cheesy Baked Potato or Chili Cheese or Classic Cheddar Melt, they all taste like hamburger, pasta, and cheese mixed together. Occasionally there will be rice in the mix instead of pasta, but that's not much difference. They're all the same.

2. Why do I keep buying this crud, thinking that THIS flavor is going to be any different from the stuff I bought before? Wednesday we had Philly Cheese Steak, and it tasted nothing like real Philly Cheese Steak, but just like Hamburger Helper Chili Macaroni.

Also, I can't help but feel like white trash when I make Hamburger Helper because every time I make the stuff I can't help but think of this scene:

The New Phone Book

I was listening to public radio just now and a story came on that said that the local telephone company had received permission from federal and state authorities to make the online version of its white and yellow pages the official version, meaning that the telephone company no longer is required to deliver a print version of the two books to its customers. The story went on to say that our telephone company was one of the first in the nation to make this request and have it granted.

I imagine a lot of people might be upset when they learn that the only way they can get a new phone book in June is to visit one of the telephone company's local offices or stores. But my first thought was, "Who cares?" Every June we get three of these monstrosities, a region wide white pages, a region wide yellow pages, and a smaller county wide book that has both the white and yellow pages in it. We open the bottom drawer of our office desk, take out of the back of the drawer the old books that we've never opened, replace them with the new books, and forget about the books until the next year, when we repeat the process. Meanwhile, the homepage of our family start up page on our browser has a link called "white pages" and another called "yellow pages," and that's where we go to get our information.

It's just another change brought on by the Information Age, and it's not that big of a deal really. And in all honesty, I've never had my name in the phone book anyway. For the last 8 years I've lived at a business, and before that I always had an unlisted number, so I never had that moment of joy that Steve Martin had in The Jerk:

Senator Sweasy

I would like to use this blog to announce how thrilled I am about becoming the next junior U.S. Senator from Illinois. I make this statement because I figure that a) I have as good a chance of being the next junior Senator as does Roland Burris and b) I have about as much right to make the claim as does Roland Burris. So why not go ahead and make the claim? He's getting plenty of attention for claiming to be the next Senator from Illinois and has plenty of video cameras following him around. Why not me, too?

So let me again announce how thrilled I am to be Senator, and let me say that I intend to expend all of the powers the office will provide for the betterment of the citizens of Ilinois. At least, I plan to do so to the same extent that other Illinois politicians do so, people like our fine governor.

Oh, and in regards to using the term "our" to describe any Illinois official, I suppose I will have to actually move to Illinois and become a citizen of the state. I'll take care of that, though, after the U.S. Senate seats me.

In all sincerity, in a time of economic collapse, hundreds dying in Gaza and Israel, and the U.S. fighting two wars overseas, the capacity of our nation's politicians to do stupid, distracting stuff never ceases to amaze me.
__________________________________

UPDATE: This is what I get for writing my posts a day in advance! I watched the news last night and discovered that, lo and behold, it now looks like Roland Burris WILL get the Senate seat, a fact which renders this whole post sort of meaningless. However, I spent a good 3 minutes putting that graphic of the family and the flag up, so I'm not going to take the post down.

My Own Personal Stimulus Package

WARNING: If you're a daily reader of my blog, you might want to skip this one. I just reread it and even I think it's boring, and I wrote it! But I'm too lazy to write something else, so it's staying!

-------------------------

I bought a house recently. I just wanted to give you a chance to thank me for that.

That's because it occurred to me that that's the kind of thing that is going to really get this economy going again. Not Henry Paulson. Not Obama's 850 billion dollar incentive package. House sales are what's going to get this economy rolling. Consider the following:

1. We put 20% of the purchase price down on the house. Some of that cash went into a bank and is now there for the bank to loan to others.
2. The former owner received a big fat check. A lot of that check went to pay off her previous mortgage (Money which that mortgage company can now lend to someone else) , but she kept a chunk of it, and I imagine that she used some of it to purchase Christmas presents or pay bills or maybe to put her children through college.
3. The two realtors involved each received a commission, which in times as tight as they currently are for realtors (and they both communicated that to me) they probably used that money to pay bills and, again, for Christmas.
4. We had a new roof put on the house, which kept two men employed for a week's worth of time.
5. We purchased a new refrigerator, range, dishwasher, hot water heater, and garbage disposal. Our purchases helped pay the salaries of the salesmen, the delivery men, the installers, and the factory workers who created the products, in addition to the truck drivers who delivered the products to the store, the stock person who loaded and unloaded the trucks, and many others. Each of the people who were paid for their work took that money and moved it back into the economy.
6. We've painted almost the entire inside of the house, spending quite a bit of money on paint. Again, a number of people received some money as a result of those multiple purchases.
7. Speaking of multiple purchases, I've spent more time at Home Depot and Lowe's in the last 6 weeks than in the previous six years. Again, everyone from salespeople to cashiers to janitors were paid to help me.

And all of those people, as I've mentioned above, took their money and (hopefully) made purchases of their own, and kept the economy rolling along.

In fact, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that our simple purchase of a house was its own sort of economic stimulus, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the economy.

But I can't keep doing this every month (Believe me! I really can't!). Our economic stimulus package, if we're going to have one, should make it easier for people to make big purchases like that.

Back at It

Yesterday was my first day back at work after almost 2 weeks off. And it was a good two weeks off. Sure, I did work each Monday of Christmas Break, but it was just myself and two others in the office, so even that felt relaxed. And I had a very relaxing time at home. I guess I'd underestimated before our move what it was like to live at a business. I never felt like I was truly home when I was there, and I didn't even realize it until I WAS home in our new house. I really enjoyed the two weeks with the family.

So much so that Sunday night I sort of sat around beweeping my outcast state, saying how horrible it was that I had to go back to work the next morning.

Yesterday morning I came into work and the--uh--the poop really hit the fan, as I expected. I arrived at 7:20 AM, and by 8:30 I'd already dealt with a crashed server, three applications that had malfunctioned, and a bunch of new staff members who needed to have accounts created for them. Not to mention all of the little things I handed off to others to deal with.

Sounds like I'm complaining, but guess what? I LOVE THIS STUFF!

I'm a pretty lucky guy, all things considered. I love to be at work and I love to come home. I couldn't ask for much more.

Except maybe ten million dollars! Oh yeah, and large pectoral muscles!

New Year's Resolutions

I was listening to public radio just now. It was one of those inane shows where they just interview people for no particular reason. The announcer was getting ready to ask a bunch of people what their New Year's Resolutions are. I didn't even hear the people, though, because I was struck by the lead in for the story. The announcer said, "New Year's Resolutions are firmly rooted in both the past and the future."

He said more than that, but I was so taken aback by that statement that I didn't hear the rest. I'd always thought of New Year's Resolutions as being a forward looking thing, something about what we were planning to do this upcoming year. But as soon as the announcer said it I knew the truth of the statement: New Year's Resolutions are as much, if not more, about what we've done in the past than they are about the future. After all, no one resolves to "Eat better in the New Year" if they weren't eating poorly in the old one. No one resolves to stop smoking if they aren't bothered by the smoking that they've done in the past. So New Year's Resolutions aren't a hopeful look toward the future as much as they're a criticism of our past. And maybe that's why so many resolutions fail, because they're not really a plan of action for the future that anyone really can follow. They're just an admission of our past faults.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions. Never have. And it's not for what's written above, though that's fuel for the fire. I don't make New Year's Resolutions because I don't want the calendar to dictate for me when I'm going to make a change. I'm going to make a change when I think the change needs to be made. The fact that it's New Year's Day has nothing to do with it.

Also, I don't have to be disappointed later when I fail...

Missing Photos

As I guess everybody knows now, we moved about 6 weeks ago. When we did, we kept our Internet Service Provider. However, our ISP required us to create a new account at the new address, which is why I emailed many of you my new email address a few weeks ago.

In addition to having an email address connected to our old account, however, several of the photos in our "Family Photo Album" were housed under the old account. On January 1, our ISP deleted our old account, which meant all of those photos went bye bye. I had most of the web pages backed up on my hard drive, so I just loaded them up onto my new account, changed the addresses on our "Family Photo Album" page, and everything is hunky dory again.

Except...

...except that if I referenced a photo in one of my web pages, that link will no longer work (For instance, in the latest photos I referenced all of the past Christmas cakes. Those photos are no longer where that link is pointing). Also, you may find some photos on the blog no longer working, as I may have loaded those photos up to that account. Also, I flat out didn't have back ups for two of the web pages (Christmas of 2005 and October of 2005), so those web pages are gone. I didn't lose the photos, mind you. Just the web pages.

No one probably cares but me, but I thought I'd let you know all of this.

The Suspense

I am typing this on Friday evening at 8:22 PM. I am following the University of Kentucky's football team on the Internet as they face East Carolina in the Liberty Bowl.

I'm following it on the Internet because when we moved we didn't get a full cable package, but a scaled back package that included local channels only. And the UK football team is not popular enough in Cincinnati for there to be any radio station I can listen to up here that covers their games (Basketball is a different story, but football no one cares about). So I'm stuck following the game on CBS Sportsline.

And it's maddening because I know I'm not quite getting the game live. Someone has to type what's going on. And when there are long pauses, like in TV timeouts or other interruptions, I'm stuck wondering whether it's just a natural interruption or whether there's a problem with the Internet.

Take just a few minutes ago. Kentucky supposedly sacked the ECU quarterback. He fumbled, UK picked up the ball and then scored. But then there was an instant replay review. I waited and waited for the result, wondering, "Did UK score? Would ECU get the ball back? What's going to happen? Why is no one typing anything?" Finally, the moderator of the web page typed, "What is there to review? It looks pretty clear cut to me!" and I thought everything was fine, but then a moment later the screen says, "Call reversed!" and then ECU started moving down the field.

This must have been what life was like when telegrams were the primary means of communication. Disjointed messages. I'm in 2009, but it feels like 1879.

ECU was driving down the field, had just crossed midfield, and I was sure they were going to score and take the lead. Then my screen refreshed and the score read Wildcats 25, Pirates 19 and the screen said "Ventrell Jenkins, 56 Yd fumble return (Lones Seiber kick Failed), 3:02." Talk about the game turning on a dime.

In the time it's taken me to type the above the game has ended. UK won. I'm sure it was more exciting to WATCH it than it was to read about it 3 minutes after it happened.

Maybe I'll call the cable company Monday.

More Before and After

I've posted previously posted photos showing how the living room and the girls' bedrooms have changed in our new house. Today I thought I'd show you the kitchen.

We had no plans to do ANYTHING to do the kitchen at first, but then we decided there's no time to work on a house like when it's empty, so we went ahead and made some changes, as you can see for yourself below.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Happy New Year

Well, here we are in 2009. Feels pretty much like 2008, doesn't it?

This could be a scary year, what with the economy and all, a new President, India and Pakistan about ready to go to war. Could be interesting.

On the other hand, there's a lot of possibility as well. A new President (I know I said that already, but I think that fits in both categories), a new administration with new ideas, a whole year of possibility that lies before us. Could be interesting.

It's the last year of the zeroes. Is that what we call this decade? My kids will have done most of their growing up in this decade, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to call it. I was born in the sixties, learned in history books about the Roaring Twenties, the thirties, the forties, and the fifties, grew up in the seventies and eighties, and became an adult in the nineties. What are we going to call this decade? Does it have to be the zeroes? Or will we just say "At the turn of the century"? It works, but it seems to imply both the nineties and the...the...the zeroes, I guess you pretty much have to call it.

For that matter, what will we call the upcoming decade? You can't call it the "teens" because that leaves out 2011 and 2012. The "tens" sounds weird, too. We're in Never-Never land in naming our decades until 2020. That's a long time from now!

I just looked in Wikepedia to see how the decades 1900-1909 and 1910-1919 are handled (though, technically, the decades should be 1901-1910 and 1911-1920, but let's not get started on THAT!). The article on 1910-1919 consistently refers to the period as the 1910's, so I guess we could call the upcoming decade the 2010's. The article about 1900-1909, though, correctly points out that calling the decade the 1900's is confusing because that can mean the entire twentieth century. The article states that in 1900-1909 it was common to refer to the period as the "aughts."

I think I like the Zeroes better.