Everything Changed

I am writing this at 11:00 Thursday night. I am in my bed writing on my cell phone. This is not the blog entry I thought I was going to make tonight.

I had planned to write about the fact that today is System Administrator's Day (maybe I will write about that tomorrow). But the power went out at my house due to a thunderstorm just a half hour or so ago, and everything changed.

Lisa is out of town tonight visiting with a bunch of her ventriloquist friends up in Columbus, and I had a full agenda for my night off. I was going to

• Work out on my elliptical
• Do the family finances on the computer
• Play our new Wii Sports Resort game
• Write this blog entry
• Probably just waste an hour doing basically nothing on the Internet.

As I said, I had a lot to cram into one night.

But what do all of the above have in common? That's right: Electricity. So here I am, unable to do anything. I can't even light a candle because--with Lisa gone--I had no way of determining which candles are of the okay-to-actually-use variety and which are of the that's-a-decoration-don't-ever-touch-it variety. It quickly became apparent to me that I just needed to go to sleep tonight and get done tomorrow what I could. So that's what I'm going to do.

I Don't Know Everything

The title of this post is obvious, but sometimes I have to admit that I really feel like a fool when it comes to things I DON'T know at work.

As the district's technology guru I'm expected to know everything there is to know about computer stuff, and many people expect me to have other technical skills as well. And the fact that I'm not afraid to go to maintenance and get a drill or a paint brush or whatever else I need to get something done adds to that belief.

But I really DON'T know everything, and I can think of two specific examples of times when I've had to apologize for it.

This morning I was the first one in the board office, which isn't a first for me, but it's the first time that's been the case since the electronic lock on our front door broke and we've gone back to using a manual lock with a real live key. And I couldn't figure out how to work the thing! I ended up standing in front of the door wrestling with the key and the keyhole until one of the secretaries showed up and showed me how it was done. And she laughed and said, "Aren't you supposed to be a technology whiz? And you can't open a lock!"

This reminded me of a situation from just a few months ago. It was Administrative Assistant's Day (used to be called "Secretary's Day"), and as a treat the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and I paid to send all of the board secretaries to dinner and to a massage/manicure during an extra extra extra long lunch break. While they were gone we agreed to answer the phones in their place.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of answering the phones. The first couple of callers wanted me anyway, and though they were surprised that I answered the phones, I explained what was going on and things went smoothly.

The third caller wanted the superintendent. I hit the "Hold" button on my phone and then shouted at my superintendent (who is right across the hall from me), "Hey Mike! [So and so] is on line 50!"

The fourth caller, though, wanted one of the secretaries. "She's out right now," I told the caller, who was a teacher in one of the buildings and who apparently hadn't recognized my voice. "Can I send you to her voice mail?"

"That would be fine," the caller said.

I put her on hold and then stared at the phone for about 7 seconds. Then I took her back off hold and said, "Yeah, Pam...uh, I don't know how to send you to her voice mail."

"Excuse me?" she said.

"Well, I don't usually answer the phone. All of the secretaries are out of the building for Secretary's Day, and I don't really know how to send a call to the voice mail system."

By now the caller had recognized my voice. "Bryan? Is that you?"

Sheepishly I answered, "Uh, yeah, I guess it is."

"Aren't you IN CHARGE of the phone systems?" she asked me.

"Well, technically," I told her. "But I just call the guy to come and work on them. I don't touch them. And I pretty much just RECEIVE calls in my office. I never have to transfer them anywhere. No one's shown me how."

"But don't you PROGRAM the phones every year when new employees arrive and when we need additional lines?"

"No, I just make sure that a couple of people in each building know how to do that."

It was a humbling moment. And as more and more technology is placed in the district, and as I delegate more and more of it to others, I'm sure these will not be the last of these types of moments.

Sarah Palin the Poet

Several people sent me this video yesterday, and I felt it so good that I had to share it...

Fire

Yesterday I came perilously close to setting our house on fire. And it was definitely my fault...

On the way home from work yesterday I stopped at Kroger and did our weekly grocery trip. I saw that, at our Kroger anyway, t-bone steaks were on sale. I hadn't had a good steak since I gave up being a vegetarian a few months ago, so I decided to get one for me and one for Lisa. I was VERY excited about it. I came home, made a quick marinade for the steak and let it soak in the marinade and some basil while I prepped a fruit salad and a garden salad. I then went outside to start the grill. I had set the grill perhaps a foot and a half away from the house.

After a few minutes I brought the steaks and a soy hamburger for Meredith and soy chicken nuggets for Natalie down and put them on the grill. A little voice in my head told me to stay with the grill, but I'd left it alone for a minute or two while roasting hot dogs, so I thought it would be okay, so I went upstairs to set the table for dinner.

There's a big difference, though, between a couple of hot dogs and 2 big steaks with lots of flammable fat that have been soaking in flammable marinade. I was upstairs setting the table and trying to reset my cell phone clock, which wasn't working for some reason. I needed to reset it so that I could take it outside with me to time my cooking of the steak. Because I was dealing with a clock, I know exactly how long I'd been upstairs away from the grill: 6 minutes.

Apparently that was too long because while I was turning my cell phone off and turning it back on again I heard a scream from downstairs and then both Lisa yelling for me ("Bryan! Bryan!") and Natalie yelling for me ("Daddy! Daddy!").

I knew before I even made it downstairs what they were yelling about. I knew there'd been a flare up. I wasn't prepared for how bad it was. Almost the entire firebox of the grill was engulfed in flames. I WAS able to get outside (The grill was on the other side of the glass doors leading onto the patio), but after a moment I realized there was no way I was going to be able to open the lid of the grill and move the meat from the flame. Luckily, though, the flames were all headed UP, so I was able to crouch down and bend around the grill and turn off the propane tank. I did have a moment of panic, though, when I stood up and realized that turning off the propane had not diminished the flames AT ALL! It wasn't the propane that was on fire--it was the steaks themselves. After about a minute, though, the flames dropped a little, and I was able to open the lid and flip the steaks off of the hot side of the grill over to the other side, where I hadn't even had the burners on.

We ended up throwing the steaks out, and that really bothered me, but as I said during grace when we sat down to a nice meal of garden salad and fruit salad, thank God that my stupid mistake hadn't burned the house down. It's hard to be bummed about a light dinner when there was the possibility of those flames--which had been licking the basement door--catching the wood in that door on fire and then spreading to the rest of the house.

I still want a t-bone steak, though, so I might go buy two more tonight and try again. This time I'll stay with the grill, though.

Mondays

It's Monday morning, and again, I have nothing to say. This is becoming a pattern for me. I've noticed that for the last 3 months or so that about 2 out of 3 Mondays I really have to struggle to find something to write. Today I'm just going to throw out some random stuff...

1. I have almost completed the process of transforming the outside of our new house from Kelly green trim to plain old white. It looks a little less dated. I'm really getting tired of painting, though.

2. It's hard to complain about a hangnail to someone who's dying of cancer. I know that. So I also know that this next statement isn't going to garner a lot of sympathy, but I'm going to go ahead and say it: After 6 weeks of working only 2 or 3 days a week, I'm a little nervous about working 5 straight days this week. I'm not sure I'll have the stamina.

3. Last night Natalie had a sleepover with a friend. I have to say, it was the calmest sleepover either of my kids have ever had. I remember Natalie's sleepover on her 10th birthday--it seems like the 5 girls involved just screamed non-stop for about 3 hours. But last night was fairly quiet. Lisa and I went to bed long before the girls did, and we never heard a peep from them.

4. "Calmest" doesn't look like it's spelled correctly to me, but it is.

Quote of the Day

In church last night our pastor, during the sermon, quoted a line from a song I'd never heard of from an artist I'd maybe heard of. I really liked the quote:

We gotta kick against the Darkness 'til it bleeds Daylight.
--Bruce Cockburn, "Lovers in a Dangerous Time"

So later last night I did some searching online and found the song on YouTube. As much as I like the line, I dislike the song (It's your typical mid '80's garbage).* But if you're in to torture, here it is:



*I don't see how we children of the '80's survived its music unscathed. Then again, maybe we didn't. Maybe that's why Nickelback and Jessica Simpson became multi-platinum artists.

Jesus Sandals

I am not the best at picking out my own clothes. In fact, I pretty much stink. As often as not, if I come home from a store with some clothing I've purchased, Lisa will look at it and say, "That looks terrible on you! Did you even try it on?" Honestly, I never try on clothes. I just go by how they look on the mannequins, and they always looks good on them. You'd think I'd learn by now that I don't have a mannequin's body. You'd think.

Of all of the attire I've ever purchased, though, the one item that REALLY drives Lisa crazy are my Jesus sandals. I purchased them very early on in our marriage, sometime in the summer of 1995. I think they may have been stylish then. Regardless of whether they were stylish or not, though, the biggest complaint Lisa had about them was not the style (though she didn't like the style), but that they were too big for my feet. "They look like clown shoes!" she said to me when she first saw me wearing them. Just like clothing, I hadn't tried these sandals on. I'd just picked up a pair of size 10's, which is the size shoe I wear. Apparently these weren't men's 10's, though. They must have been giant's sized 10's, because the tip of my toe barely comes up past the straps.

I could have taken them back, I guess, but I'd been wearing them for about a week when Lisa noticed them, and I really felt it wrong to take them back. So I kept them. "Don't worry," I told Lisa. "I didn't pay much for these things. They'll wear out in a year or two."

Except that I don't wear sandals very often. They don't go with my business suits, and I'm not hippie enough to wear them with blue jeans. I don't even like to wear them much with shorts unless I'm going to be taking them on and off fairly regularly because my feet tend to sweat in sandals. So pretty much the only time I wear sandals is when I'm going to the pool or the beach or if I'm just throwing them on to take the trash out or something like that.

So it's been 14 years that I've had these sandals, and every year Lisa looks at them, and every year she tells me that THIS year she's going to buy me some sandals that look right on my feet. And every year I have to tell her that these sandals are FINE, that I don't want any new sandals!

She's told me how bad they look enough times, though, that I have started to feel a little self-conscious about them, and on a couple of occasions I've gone sandal shopping. But I'm always amazed at how expensive good sandals are, so I've always balked and said that these will do.

A couple of years ago several people were pushing me to buy some Crocs. "They're great!" they told me. "They're comfortable, and they wash right off!" (These are the same people that have spent last winter trying to get me to buy a Snuggie). I've always felt like the little kid in the story "The Emperor's New Clothes" when it comes to Crocs, though. Those are some darned ugly shoes, and I don't see how anyone over the age of 15 could ever put those things on, so I've (wisely) declined to buy a pair.

So why am I telling you all this? Last night, after dinner, I took the girls to the pool for a couple of hours. When it was time to leave I slipped on my trusty sandals and felt my left sandal turn in an awkward manner. I looked down and the sole of the sandal had pulled away at the strap nearest the heel. The sandal was irreparably broken.

So now I'm going to have to go and buy some new sandals. I'm not sure what kind I'll get. I last shopped for sandals this spring, and it seems like half of the options were Jesus sandals, so maybe they're back in style. I'll make sure to take Lisa along this time, though, so that I get a pair that meet her approval. I don't need 14 more years of shoes that are wrong for my feet.

I promise you this, though: I won't be buying any Crocs!

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

I wanted to talk really quickly about the whole hubbub regarding Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s arrest, and tell a quick story about a similar situation that happened to me...

If you don't know the story, Gates, a prominent Harvard professor, came home one night to find his front door broken. He basically had to "break into" his house in order to get in. A neighbor saw him wrestling with his front door and thought it was a REAL break in, so the police were called. The police came and, despite Gates having a driver's license that showed he lived at this address, he was arrested.

Gates, who is African-American, claims that he was treated this way because of race, and there certainly may be some merit to his claim. However, I can't help but feel that we don't have the whole story here. The police officer insists that Gates was arrested because he became belligerent and offensive to the police. While I don't think the police are completely innocent in this matter, I can't believe that Gates is completely innocent either.

And as I said, I have a story to tell. A very similar story, actually...

I don't remember the exact year, but I know that it was sometime between 2000 and 2004. I know this because my family and I were living at Vent Haven Museum, but I was still teaching. Everyone else in my family had gone to sleep, but I was awake grading writing portfolios (which is pretty much how I spent most of August-March for about six years). I took a break from grading and decided that--before I forgot--I had better set the museum alarm system for the night. The system protects the four museum buildings AND the curator's home where we lived. When I punched the key code into the system the system acted like it was arming, but instead of beeping 5 beeps over and over for about 30 seconds, it instead let out one long beep followed by a pause and then another long beep. I thought it weird, but I just reset the system to normal and then re-enabled the alarm, and everything seemed fine.

What I didn't know at the time (but learned just a few minutes later) was that the alarm system had a "panic" setting on it. If a person was under duress and was being forced to turn off or on the alarm, the panic setting could be used. It mimicked the resetting of the alarm, but it also silently notified the police.

Usually when the alarm goes off, before the police ever arrive, the alarm company would call to make sure that this was an actual alarm and not a false alarm. But they don't do that with a panic alarm because they don't want to tip off the intruder that the police are on their way. So I didn't get a warning call. I was just sitting at our kitchen table in sweats and a t-shirt, drinking decaffeinated coffee and grading an essay, when the doorbell rang. I jumped up, afraid the doorbell would awaken Lisa or one of my kids, who were just little toddlers back then. When I got to the door I saw that it was a police officer. I ran back, disabled the alarm, and opened the door.

"Can I help you, officer?" I asked him.

"There was an alarm drop from this location," the officer told me seriously, looking me up and down.

"Really?" I asked as I stepped outside. "We didn't get a call from the alarm company like we usually do."

"It was a panic alarm," the police officer told me, and he then explained to me pretty much what I'd just told you above about a panic alarm. He then said, "It's used when someone is in distress."

"Well," I said, trying to be funny, "I'm having a little distress about these essays that I'm grading, but everyone else in my house is asleep. I don't think they're in distress at all."

The police officer laughed heartily for several seconds and then paused and said very seriously, "Do you mind if I come inside, and would you mind showing me some ID?"

Now, if I'd been a black man, like Gates, I might have assumed that the police officer wanted to come inside because I was black. And I guess, to some extent, I WAS a little offended by the questions because I understood what the questions meant: this officer didn't entirely trust me that everything was okay. I could have gotten angry. I could have gotten belligerent and refused to help. I could have gotten myself arrested, like Gates did.

But I didn't. A little voice inside of me told me that the police officer was only doing his job, and so, though I'm pretty sure that I looked and sounded NOTHING like a criminal, I let the police officer come in and I showed him my ID, which showed that I lived at the house. I offered him some of my coffee; he declined but did ask if I had some water. I got him a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and he and I stood in the entry to the house and talked for a few minutes. I asked him to talk in a low voice because everyone was asleep and he did so. After a few minutes he said he was satisfied that it was a false alarm, and he left.

My point in all of this? I don't think Gates was treated the way he was initially because he was a black man. I think he was treated the way he was because the person across the street reported a break in at his house, and the police were treating anyone in the house as a potential criminal (There's another question of whether racism was involved in why the person across the street made the call in the first place, but that's a discussion for another day). His later treatment MAY have been a result of racial profiling or it MAY simply have been a result of his belligerent attitude. And I think President Obama needed to wait for all of the facts to come out before making his judgment. I'm going to wait, anyway.

Rest Areas

While making dinner last night I was listening to NPR's All Things Considered, and I heard this story, which discussed how several states across the union are shutting down interstate rest stops in order to save money. Some are going to be closed temporarily until the state's budget crisis passes, and others are going to be permanently shuttered.

The story presented three people who opposed these actions. The first, a representative from Triple A, said that it would lead to more tired drivers travelling the road, and that would lead to accidents. The second, a big rig truck driver, said that he often took his mandated sleep time at a rest area, and that now he would have to pull off and sleep in a more dangerous location, such as an interstate off ramp. The third person complained that the interstate rest areas were a piece of history, and that if they went away a piece of every American's childhood would go away--all of those rest area stops on the way to some vacation spot. She said that interstate rest areas should be saved, as sort of historical landmarks.

I have no problems with the first two arguments. It's the third that really got under my skin. Really? Rest areas are historical landmarks? As the news story itself said, they're just a building and some concrete and vending machines. If you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all.

And don't get me wrong: I have very vivid memories of stopping at rest areas on the way to vacation spots. There's a rest area just outside of Frankfort, where I grew up, and I remember every year that we went on our extended family vacation, we would all meet up at that rest area before caravaning to Myrtle Beach or Panama City or wherever we were going. But I could honestly not care less if that rest area were shut down.

We don't need to make EVERYTHING a cause.

Charlie

So...do you want to know what kind of sense of humor my two children have? They think the video below is hysterical. I have to tell you, I don't understand all of it, but then again, I don't think I'm supposed to...

The Last Day

Today is the last day for me. The last day of my "summer break" before returning to a 5 day a week, Monday through Friday work schedule. For all of the people out there who think that educators need to shut up about their low salaries because they get June, July, and August off, I'm here to tell you that ain't the case. Sure, I'm not your typical classroom teacher, and I work several weeks a year more than the average teacher, but even the average classroom teachers are not off in the summer. They're at workshops, professional developments, taking classes for their continuing education, teaching summer school, designing new curricula with fellow teachers. They're hard at work. They're not just sitting by the pool somewhere lounging for 2 1/2 months.

It DID used to be that way. I know. I'm starting my 20th year in education, and I think my entire career has seen the transformation of education into what it is becoming and what it will continue to become: a data driven business.

Anyway, I'm not here to write about education. I just wanted to say that I hope no one from work emails me today with an emergency situation. If they do, I might not reply until I'm behind my desk tomorrow morning. I might not even carry my cell with me today.

The Doppler Effect

Friday morning I took our dog Xena (Warrior Princess) for a walk through Fort Mitchell. We were coming down Dixie Highway, walking on the sidewalk that was WITH traffic, when a car passed by us from behind and a teenage boy leaned out of the window of the passenger's seat and shouted a sentence of several words in length. He then shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows as if he were waiting for an answer. I immediately noticed two problems with this feeble communication attempt.

1. I couldn't understand a word this person shouted to me. Thanks to the Doppler Effect I heard a high pitched, indistinguishable voice followed by a single understandable phoneme (the short "a" sound) followed by a low pitched indistinguishable voice. As I said above, I could tell by his inflection and body language that he was saying several words, but that's about all I could say for sure. If I'd been a woman I think I would have assumed that he was making some sexual comment about my hind side, but since I'm not a woman I have no idea what he was saying to me. He might have been trying to tell me that my dog was dragging and needed a break (She did.) or that I looked ridiculous wearing shirts, shorts, and shoes with three different shades of olive (I did and didn't care) or he could have thought that I was someone he knew and maybe was trying to say something witty to that person or maybe he was just shouting an insult at a random stranger for no particular reason (Haven't we all done THAT before?) Or heck, I don't know, maybe he WAS making a sexual comment about my hind side. My point is that I don't really know.

2. Even if I HAD understood him, I couldn't have responded to him. By the time he finished saying whatever it was he was saying to me the car he was in was forty yards down the road. By the time I would have processed what he had to say and come up with a response he would have been twice that far down the road. There is no way that I could have replied to whatever it was he said. Was I supposed to drop the dog's leash and take off running after the car he was in so that I could reply?

All of which has led me to a conclusion: Attempting a conversation with a pedestrian from the window of a moving car is probably not the best method of communication.

I got Nuthin'

I spent pretty much the whole day yesterday at the Vent Haven ConVENTion, first working the museum open tour and then just hanging out with old friends. Lisa and I got home last night about 2 AM, so...

...I got nuthin'!

Cincinnati Art Museum

Yesterday, while Lisa was off helping at the Vent Haven, the girls and I visited the Cincinnati Art Museum. It was the first time the girls had ever been to the art museum before, and the first time that I had been without some express purpose (The other two times were for educational meetings), so we had a every nice time. I'd been trying to get the girls to go for a couple of years, but neither was very enthused. Nothing changed yesterday in that regard; what changed was me. After asking them if they wanted to go and both of them whining, I just shook my head and said, "I don't care whether you want to go or not. I want to go, so we're going."

And as I said, the girls enjoyed it. They especially liked seeing paintings of famous artists they'd heard of before, such as the following:

Vincent VanGogh

Claude Monet

Pablo Picasso (This painting is behind reflective glass, and you can see the reflection of me standing in front of the painting snapping this photo)

Andy Warhol

And we got a bonus, too. For some reason, the art museum is where naturalized people in the Cincinnati area are sworn in as citizens, and we just happened to be there on the day that this occurred, so we got to watch about 50 people take the oath to become U.S. citizens. It was really an exciting moment.

The Cincinnati Art Museum has free admission, so it's a great deal. That said, I'm not sure when we'll be back. The girls enjoyed it, but after about 90 minutes Natalie said, "I'm all arted out." So we may wait a while before going back again.

Harry Potter and Technology

Wednesday afternoon I took Meredith and Natalie to see the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I am not a Harry Potter fanatic. I've always thought the books were just okay--exciting and fun, yes, but not the masterpieces that many would make them out to be--and the movies have been even worse. But I was pleasantly surprised by this new film. The Half Blood Prince is easily the worst of the seven books (700 plus pages that could have been whittled down to about half that), but this was the best of all of the films. It had action, texture, and humor, and I look forward to the next two films, which were based on what was easily the best book.

Anyway, I'm not here to write a movie review today. What I wanted to talk about was something that's always bothered me about Harry Potter, and that's the unusual lack of technology in the stories. It's never been explicitly stated--in book or film--exactly WHEN the stories are taking place, and the buildings and costumes in the movies have a Gothic look to them, so I've always assumed that the stories were taking place in some nebulous "contemporary" time. However, in the new movie, the bad guys leave the "wizarding" world and come to London, where they destroy the Millennium Bridge (You get glimpses of this destruction at about the 2:08 mark in the trailer I've linked to above). The Millennium Bridge, as its name implies, wasn't finished until the year 2000, which places the setting for this film firmly somewhere in the 21st Century.

And that's when the lack of technology begins to bother me. Why aren't the wizards and witches in these stories using technology? Are they like the Amish? Have they abandoned all technology?

I know that some might respond and say, "Why do they need technology? They have magic, for Pete's sake!" And in some cases, I can see the logic in that. After all, disapparating from one place to another is certainly more convenient than flying in a commercial airline. And healing spells which repair a broken nose instantly beat a visit to the high tech hospital any day.

But what about cell phones? Why are the wizards in the story insisting on communicating via messages carried by owls and talking faces in fireplaces? These don't seem like very secure or reliable means of communication.

As an example, in the latest movie all of the students are heading to school on a train. As everyone is getting off, Harry Potter is attacked by Draco Malfoy, his nemesis. Draco leaves Harry paralyzed on the train, and Harry is missing for several hours. His friends and teachers are all terribly worried about him as Harry ends up having to walk from the train station to the school and arrives hours late. If he'd had a cell phone, he could have called Ron Weasley on Ron's cell phone and said something to the effect of, "Hey, it's me. I'm on my way to school but I'm going to be a little late. I got jumped by somebody, but don't worry. I'm okay now. I'll text you the details when I get a chance." Then no one would have worried. This failure to use technology seems a real problem for the wizarding world.

And it's not as if they'd never know about technology. They go in and out of the non-wizard, or muggle, world. Harry and Hermione especially. Hermione has muggle parents, and Harry lives with muggle relatives, so these two spend their summers in the "real" world of the 21st century. And what real teenager today doesn't have an iPod and/or a cell phone, or better yet, both in an iPhone? I'm sure Harry and Hermione both would have had these devices. At least Hermione would have. After all, as the movie points out, her parents are both dentists. I would think they could afford to get their daughter a cell phone to use in the summer when she's not allowed to use magic. And what teenager could use these devices for three months and then go back to school without them? None, I would say.

So maybe I wasn't enraptured by the movie as much as I thought, because these were the kinds of thoughts I had while watching it.

Google Voice

Yesterday I signed up for Google Voice, a slick new, free service from Google that I haven't yet figured out exactly how I'm going to use.

Google Voice gives you a phone number (and you get some choice in what that number is, such as choosing the area code and sometimes even specific numbers or letters) that becomes your universal phone number. You register other phone numbers with Google Voice, and when some one calls this new phone number it rings all of your registered numbers.

For instance, let's imagine that you were given the new number 555-2009. You then register your cell phone, your work phone, and your home phone. When someone calls 555-2009, ALL THREE PHONES RING SIMULTANEOUSLY. The first phone that picks up gets connected.

That's pretty cool all by itself, but there are other nifty features as well. If no one answers at any of the numbers, the caller can leave a voicemail. If he/she does that, Google translates that voicemail into text and will send a text message of that voice mail to your cell phone. You can also go online to the Google Voice website and either read or listen to the voicemail.

There are other features as well that I haven't really had the time to try out, but I'm immediately struck by a few possibilities for how this could be used:

1. For professional reasons. I COULD set up my work, business, and cell phones with a single number and give that number only to people I felt needed to reach me in the event of an emergency. That way I could get the call from those important people wherever I am. My problem with this is twofold: 1) At night my work has night service which picks up after the second ring. I'm pretty sure that most calls would go straight to this night service, which isn't going to work for me. 2) Lisa currently doesn't work during the day, which means that the phone would be ringing at home with business calls and she might answer them instead of me. So for right now, I don't think I'll be using it in this fashion.

2. For personal use. I COULD set up Lisa's cell phone and home phone with a single number. That way when people call that number both her home cell and home phone will ring, and she can choose to answer the home phone instead of the cell phone, thus saving her cell minutes for when she's away from the house.

3. So People Think I'm Always Home. If I'm going on vacation and going to stay with someone, I could (with their permission) add their home phone to my Google Voice account temporarily. That way when people call my house the new phone will ring and I can pick it up and answer as if I were at home. This would be especially useful in an area with spotty cell phone access (like the entire state of Mississippi USED to have).

Anyway, it's all pretty cool, and I'm sure I'll have more ideas when I've actually had time to play with it (I've spent more time writing about it for this post than I did testing it). If you're interested, the web site is http://www.google.com/voice . I think you currently have to be invited to sign up, but I'm nobody special and I got invited, so I'm pretty sure that if you sign up you'll receive an invitation in a day or so.

Mad Men

One of the things that really bothers me is when I pay perfectly good money to rent a movie and then end up never watching that movie. This is the second time that I have rented the first season of Mad Men from Blockbuster, and this is the second time that I will be returning the disc unwatched. I guess I don't REALLY want to watch the show.

But I've heard such good things about the show. The writing is supposed to be incredible, and the ensemble cast superb. So I feel like I OUGHT to watch it. But I just can't get myself excited about a TV show about ad executives. I'd rather watch WIPEOUT or a STAR TREK or WEST WING re-run.

I guess there's always a disconnect between the things we think we ought to do and the things we want to do. Maybe someday I'll learn that and save myself the $4.99 rental fee.

Lessons from the Greyhound

Last night Lisa, Natalie, and I had dinner at the Greyhound Tavern (a favorite local restaurant) with several friends and their children and grandchildren. All told, there were five adults and five children in attendance. And I learned a couple of things at this meal:

1. The Greyhound gives you way too much food! Honestly, who are they trying to impress? We went for fried chicken night, and though you can order anything off the menu on fried chicken night, most people (and every adult at our table) order the chicken. And instead of bringing you your own plate of food, on fried chicken night the restaurant brings you an empty plate and all parts of the meal (cole slaw, green beans, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and, of course, the chicken) in serving bowls for everyone to serve themselves from. It's sort of homey, and I don't have a problem with it.

What I DO have a problem with is how much they bring. They brought the five of us adults (and this is not me exaggerating here) two and a half chickens! That's a half chicken for each person! That's a lot of chicken!

Here's an idea, though. Why doesn't the Greyhound serve less chicken and lower its prices a little? 'Cause as good as their chicken is (and it's great) it's just mediocre the second day.

2. I am glad that our kids are older. As I mentioned above, this was a full court, five on five affair last night, like the NBA Finals. The only thing that helped us adults win is that I am counting Natalie on the child's team, but at 10 she was quite a bit older than the other kids and basically helped the adult team. But I had forgotten how hard it is to eat at a restaurant with multiple smaller children. Trying to enjoy the kids and manage a meal is like a juggling exhibition.

And don't get me wrong. These were good kids, all of them, so much so that one older gentleman came over to our table to compliment us and say he could not believe how well behaved the children were.

But it's just hard to keep so many plates spinning. I am very glad that my girls are now old enough that when we go to a restaurant together we sit and have conversations rather than coloring.

I told Lisa as we were leaving, "Well, I'm tons more stressed AFTER that meal than I was before it!"

Star Trek on YouTube

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of Star Trek. And for other fans out there, I wanted to let you know--in the event that you didn't already know--that you watch EVERY episode of the original series online on YouTube. There IS a 30 second commercial that runs at the points in the episodes when commercials would originally have run, but that's no big deal in my humble opinion.

Anyway, you can watch all of the episodes by clicking this link.

The Kids are Growing Up

Thursday through Saturday I was in Frankfort with the girls. I had a meeting Friday morning, but mostly we were there to visit with family. We saw my parents and the girls' cousin Luke, and we took Luke to the Game Farm. While we where there, we snapped a photo of the girls with the big fish in the lobby, which adds to my growing collection of photos that I've been snapping in three year increments. As if I needed more proof that the girls were growing up!

P.S. The photos above also demonstrates how the digital pictures we take have grown in size over the years. It's not the text of the year that's shrinking from picture to picture--they're all actually the same. It's the photos that are getting larger!

Reddi-Wip

Okay, I'm 41 years old, which makes me almost ashamed to admit this, but I'm going to go ahead and do it: Until just a few days ago I had NEVER had Reddi-Wip before. I don't really have a reason why I'd never had it. I just always bought Cool Whip before. But the other day I wanted to make strawberry shortcake and I was in a hurry to get out of the store, and there was Reddi-Wip right there beside the strawberries, so I just grabbed it and went. And you know what I discovered?

Reddi-Wip is awesome!

It's tons better than Cool Whip. I almost feel ripped off that I've been eating Cool Whip all these years.
I will quibble with one thing, though. The Reddi-Wip can said that there were 40 servings in it. I think I ended up having about 6 servings before the sad, sad sound of hissing air and nothing else came out of it. Apparently I was using a little more than the suggested 2 tablespoons per serving.
In any event, I'm a Reddi-Wip convert now! I may never buy Cool Whip again.

Pandora and the Music Industry

Back in September I wrote about how I had discovered the Internet radio station Pandora and how wonderful I thought it was. What I didn't mention at the time, though I knew about it, is that for the last 2 years or so Pandora has been on the brink of going bankrupt. The reason for their financial crisis is that--for every song played on Pandora--the service has to pay a fee to the record companies, and in 2007 the record companies wanted to DOUBLE those fees. That's a huge increase for anyone. Imagine if your local grocery store doubled your grocery bill overnight! Or imagine if gas companies doubled the price of gasonline in just a few months. No, wait...

...Anyway, I read online yesterday that Pandora and the other online music stations reached a compromise to pay the music industry something closer to one and half times what was being paid previously. That's better and will keep the web radio companies in business, but that's still MUCH more than either traditional radio or satelite radio pays. And I think that's unfair, because, if the music industry wants to generate record sales, I can think of no better source than Pandora. I just looked back through all of the music that I have purchased since September, and only one CD did I purchase as a result of something that I heard on traditional radio (Nickelback's latest CD, which as I mentioned earlier, I really am starting to dislike as I listen to it more and more). In that same amount of time I have purchased the following music as a result of listening to Pandora:

• Everything Missy Higgins has ever done
• Two Over the Rhine CD's
• A song entitled "Make You Feel My Love" by Adele
• "10,000 Stones" by Adrianne
• Several songs by Ani DiFranco, my favorite of which is "You Had Time"
• One at a time, I've purchased about half of the songs off of Brandi Carlile's CD THE STORY. My current favorite is "Wasted."
• Several songs by Eva Cassidy, who a) is dead and b) when she was alive didn't record original songs but instead did original covers of well known songs.
• The latest Indigo Girls CD
• I've downloaded one song ("My Own Two Hands") by Jack Johnson, and I've checked one CD of his out of the library, and I love every song on it. This means I will most likely purchase more of his music.
• A song called "Words Fail You" by Kris Delmhorst. I've never heard any other songs by her, but that song would undoubtedly appear in my Top 100 songs of all time somewhere.
• "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles, and I've been tempted to download several others of hers.

All said, I've probably spent $100 on music that I've heard on Pandora, and about $15 on music I've heard off of the radio. That's because the kind of music I like (I guess you'd call it folk-influenced pop, or maybe more accurately pop-influenced folk) doesn't get played much on headbanger radio stations or Top 40 (which are really more like Top 15 these days) radio stations or on classic rock. The only Cincinnati station that EVER plays music like what I like is NKU's public radio station, and even it only plays that kind of music maybe a third of the time.

So Pandora is where I am discovering new artists, and the record companies would do well to keep that in mind the next time they want to drive them out of business.

It's Not My Fault

You may (or may not) have noticed that my posts are not always getting posted on time. I wanted to write a quick note to say that this is NOT my fault! My blog provider, http://blogger.com, is having trouble with scheduled posts, which are posts that are written in advance and then scheduled to be posted at another time (I hope I didn't damage the opinions of me from people who thought I was actually getting up at 4:45 AM every morning to write my posts). It's been going on for about 3 weeks now, and they still don't really know what the problem is. But in any event, I can still write my posts in advance, but I have to manually post them whenever I can remember to do so. It's kind of a pain.

But it did give me something to write about today...on a day when I really didn't have anything to write about!

I Got a Shout Out!

Hey, as I mentioned several times a few weeks ago, I spent the third week of June just outside of Louisville at the 2009 KySTE Conference. I presented one session at the conference, and one of the Regional Engineers from the Kentucky Department of Education made two posts about my presentation on HIS blog. I'm honored. You can read his posts by clicking this link and by clicking this link.

Left to My Own Devices, part two

As you may be sick of hearing about now, for the previous five days I was alone in our house while Lisa and the girls visited her mom in Mississippi. I promise I'm not going to talk about painting, but I did want to revisit a post I made a couple of months ago. At the time we were in the exact opposite situation: Lisa and the girls were at home and I was gone for about three days and staying in a hotel room. I wrote a post about how I lived life differently when I was away from my family. But after writing it I thought to myself that a lot of the changes might not be genuine, that they might be a result of me being away from home and away from my stuff. So I thought I'd see how me alone in a hotel compared to me alone in my house. Here's what I found:

1. Even at home I don't watch much TV. I can tell you exactly what I watched while Lisa and the girls were gone:

• 20 minutes of THE MATRIX
• I played a Nintendo Wii game that I checked out of the library Thursday night. I played for about 10 minutes
• The first ten minutes of the NBC Nightly News on Friday
• Sunday morning I flipped channels while eating breakfast
• I watched the fifth set of the men's finals at Wimbledon Sunday. That WAS about 2 hours of TV, but it was exciting stuff. I kept painting while watching it, though.
• I flipped channels while eating lunch yesterday. There wasn't much on except soap operas, which I'm surprised are not being filmed in HD.

And that's it. Wait, one other thing: I DID watch two episodes of the original series of STAR TREK, but I watched them on YouTube on my computer monitor. Don't know if that counts or not.

2. I burn the midnight oil at home as well. I typically went to sleep about midnight.

In addition I discovered the following:

• Left alone, I eat cold cereal for about half of my meals.
• I also don't eat many vegetables.
• In fact, if I'm not careful, I won't eat at all. I'm really not sure what this means. When the whole family is at home I'm hungry often and eat a lot, but on my own I never seemed to get hungry and had to make myself eat.
• I was glad to discover that, instead of running the dishwasher daily, I pretty much would only need to do it once a week or so. It's still only about half full.

In any event, I'm glad they're home today. I missed them terribly.

The Final Paint Job

Last August I wrote a post about a new online tool that Microsoft had just released called a PhotoSynth. At the time I created one but only took about 15 pictures, so it didn't turn out so great.

I thought I'd create a new Photosynth that would show you what the finished basement looked like. I took about 120 pictures this time, but the Photosynth still turned out choppy. I tried.



This isn't EXACTLY what the finished basement will look like, but it's close. Lisa and I still need to put the china cabinet back together and all of the china is underneath the TV. Also, the former owner had painted all of the switchplates with the same paint and glaze that I had just replaced, and I didn't have time yesterday to go to Home Depot to get more, so they're not on the walls. Finally, I haven't put the handrail back up because I'm afraid that in the process of doing so I'll mess up the new paint job. I'll put it back up in a day or two when the paint has had more time to cure.

Don't Feel Sorry for Me

Last week several people at work at different times asked me if I was going anywhere on vacation this year, and I told them all the same thing, that Lisa and the girls were leaving [last Thursday] to go to Mississippi to visit her mother, but that I was going to stay home to paint the basement. To a person each of them looked at me with these sad, puppy dog eyes and said how terrible that was, and then after a moment, their eyes grew wide and they said, "That means you'll be alone on the 4th, doesn't it?" When I told them that was correct, they seemed alarmed.

I told them what I'm telling you now: Don't feel sorry for me. By nature I think I'm a person who enjoys more solitude than the average person, and I've really been enjoying the time alone. The house is completely quiet when I want it quiet. I can eat what I want when I want, I can walk around in my underwear if I want, and I can (and have been doing so) listen to a radio/CD players as loudly as I want.

For the last 48 hours I have listened to a portable stereo for probably 24 of those hours. Here's what I've listened to:

1. The entire Friday broadcast of All Things Considered
2. My new Indigo Girls cd, which has been out since March but which I just found out about Friday morning listening to Pandora on the computer. The CD is entitled Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, and as soon as I found out about it I quickly downloaded it off of Amazon.com's website. It's a CD that I'm liking more and more with each hearing.
3. Nickelback's latest CD, which I'm liking LESS and LESS with each hearing.
4. Two Over the Rhine cd's. Over the Rhine is a local band that I've heard on the radio several times before and always liked, and I did purchase about four of their songs from Amazon.com a few years ago. I'd always liked them, but I hadn't really given them much attention. That was a mistake. There are almost 30 songs on these two cd's (one of them is a double disc and may be--in my humble opinion of course--one of the best cd's EVER) and I like EVERY song. This may be one of those ah-ha moments where they become one of my favorite bands now.
5. The last four monologues of Garrison Keillor, which I downloaded off of A Prairie Home Companion's website and then burned to CD Friday morning.
6. An unabridged audio book entitled The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus Christ by Peter J. Gomes. It's definitely not light "reading" as it's much more intellectual than I was expecting when I pulled it off the shelf at our local library, but that's not a bad thing. Of all of the above, I am enjoying this the most. I'm about halfway through it and should finish it tomorrow.

I still have two more days of solitude, though, so when the family arrives home either late afternoon or early evening Monday I'll probably be VERY glad to see them all. But between now and then, don't feel sorry for me.

More Painting the Basement

Two posts in one day!!!???!!! I know. Weird. But I wanted to share these pictures with the family in Mississippi. Here's the basement after one coat. It may look good in these pictures, but up close you can see that it needs another coat, which I'll put on tomorrow.

4th of July Stuff

I have several things to say today, none of which merits a full post, so I'll squeeze them all together...

1) Sarah Palin
I planned to write a piece describing why I thought that Sarah Palin had stepped down, but then I found this Reuters article, which says exactly what I was going to say but does a better job of it. My money, by the way, is on the final option presented in the article, followed by the second option presented.

I absolutely do NOT believe that she stepped down so that she could prepare for a Presidential bid. If she did, she isn't just unprepared to be President, she's crazy! She has a limited resume as it is, and leaving office before her term is up will make her a "quitter" in critics' eyes. "How can you think about voting for her," they'll ask, "when she quit the one substantive political job she had when the going got tough?" I think Obama is salivating at the idea of running against Palin! He could practically not campaign and beat her.

2. 4th of July
Last year on the 4th of July I wrote about how I didn't "get" Independence Day and patriotism. This year I'm feeling a little more patriotic, if for no other reason than I have recently spoken with several soldiers who just returned from or just deployed to either Afghanistan or Iraq. I also have had conversations with family members of several soldiers currently in Iraq. No matter how I feel about the political policies of our country (and I actually feel pretty good about them right now anyway), I have nothing but respect for the boys (and girls, I guess, these days!) putting themselves in harm's way for this country.

Despite that, just like last year, I'm eschewing any July 4th parties and working again today. As I said last year, I'm not really a party type, and I can't be anything other than what I am. Speaking of which...

3. Basement Update
...I'm still working on the basement. Yesterday I got up early, at 6:30, and about 11 hours later I had the entire basement primed. Today I'll try to get the first coat of actual paint on the walls and maybe even begin cutting in the second coat. I hope to be finished with the entire job by mid-afternoon Sunday. We'll see.

Painting the Basement

Yesterday morning Lisa and the girls left for Mississippi to visit Lisa's mother (and the girls' Nana), and I stayed behind to paint our basement. It was sincerely a hard choice to stay behind, as I haven't seen Ethel in at least three years, and I hate that I'll be away from my family for almost a week. But I couldn't pass up the opportunity to paint the basement without interruption from anyone (They even took the dog!), so I'm here by myself.

And it's odd. I miss my family very much, but it's not Lisa or the girls whose absence I noticed when I came home from work last night. It was the dog's. It occurred to me that I had been home alone lots of times without the ladies, but since we'd adopted the dog three months ago SHE had always been here when I came home. The complete silence was weird.

Anyway, as I hinted at in the paragraph above, I didn't start painting as soon as they left yesterday morning. I worked at my real job all day yesterday, even staying late, so that I didn't get home until after 6. By then pretty much all I had time to do in regards to the project was move the little furniture out of the basement, move the big furniture into the middle of the room, put down drop cloths, and get out my materials. The photo above shows how the basement looks as I get up this morning. By the end of the day I hope to have primed the whole basement (I can't just paint over the old paint because it has this ugly decorative glaze on it that I don't want to bleed through) and gotten started on the first of what I hope will be only a two coat job. I'll post more pictures later (mostly for my family, who has Internet access down in Mississippi).

I Need to Read my Own Posts

The title above pretty much says it all.

I just now went back and actually read in detail the wikipedia article I posted yesterday about bonobos. The section on sexual social behavior may have been too x-rated for this family blog.

Crazy chimps!

At the Zoo

Yesterday was the last day our zoo pass was valid, so Meredith, Natalie and I decided to go to the zoo one last time. We're not going to renew the pass this year because--well, the zoo is pretty much the same as it was when Meredith was an infant. Sure, they maybe add one new exhibit every other year, but that's still not much. We figure we'll go back again maybe next summer or the year after that.

Anyway, there WERE two interesting things that happened at the zoo. First, we fed the lorikeets in the lorikeet exhibit, which isn't anything new. After all, we have pictures of that here and here. However, we've never gone and seen two lorikeets get into a fight on top of Natalie's head and in the process get themselves completely tangled up in her hair. Here's the video:

After that, we were just on our way out of the zoo when we came upon the bonobo exhibit. For those who don't know, bonobos are chimpanzees basically. We've seen bonobos before, but we'd never seen them being fed. It was very interesting. I especially liked the way they clapped and raised their hands for food. Here's the video:

Finally, Meredith wanted to add a note of her own...

...**** people out there, I'd like to tell you that I sound like a weird TV host in the YouTube video, and I wish for you to ignore it. Plus, chimps and bonobos are two very different things, but they are commonly confused.***