A little ditty

Found this little ditty taped to the wall of a teacher's room today:

We are born into the world

Like a blank canvas

And each person that crosses our path

Takes up the brush

And makes his mark

Upon our surface

So it is that we develop

But we must realize there comes a day

That we must take up the brush

And finish the work

For only WE can determine

If we are to be

Just another painting

Or a Masterpiece.

--Javan, 1981

And I don't know who Javan is, but I know this: if he's still alive, I want to find him and beat him up...

I'm thinking I may ALREADY have blogged about this video...

...but I don't care. It's funny enough for a second go around.

My daughter was playing all of the ring tones on her cell phone for me just now, and I said to her, "Hey! Make that one MY ringtone! It's Pachelbel's Canon in D, my favorite!" After going to YouTube and playing the REAL Canon in D for her, I had to play her this video:



(I can't see the video.)

P.S. I JUST found this video, which is quite funny, too...




(I can't see it, either.)

A Long, long time ago...Last Friday

I caught myself this morning thinking, Remember the good ole days when life was easy...last Friday!

Last Friday night was one of the most pleasant nights I've had in a while. My older daughter was doing a school fundraiser and then spent the night with a friend (And no! Her absence is NOT what made it a nice evening! Her absence was the one thing wrong!). While she was gone, my wife, younger daughter, and I all went to York Stree Cafe, a place I think I'd been to once or twice before, but not for years. It's a great little restaurant with a lot of personality. We then went shopping, and came home. It wasn't much. Nice and simple and quiet.

Since then, life has been crazy:

Saturday: As mentioned in my previous post, our basement flooded. Read the previous post to hear about that.

Sunday: The day began at about 1:30 AM. I was awakened by the noise created by all of the fans and dehumidifiers in the basement. Worried about the carpet in the basement, I spent the next two hours taking every towel in the house and soaking as much water as I could out of the carpet. Keep in mind that we'd already done that Saturday morning, but the carpet was still wet enough--despite the fans, humidifiers, and Shop Vacs--that I soaked most of the towels again. I managed to go back to sleep for a couple of hours after that, but was back up later in the day, again working on the basement.

Monday: Exhausted from my lack of sleep since Friday night, I took a personal day from work. I used the time to decompress a little and then to try to prep the outside of the house for the next batch of rain that was supposed to begin late that evening.I cleaned the gutter, stacked unopened bags of mulch around the grassless part of the yard at the top of the driveway, and reached deep down into the drain and got out every bit of mud I could reach.  Later, I went to watch my younger daughter run a track meet. The meet ran from 5 o'clock until 9 o'clock in the evening.

Tuesday: Early Tuesday morning the heavy rains DID begin again, and I was up every hour checking the drain to see if it was okay. I actually went back to work that day, but the rains came down with such tremendous force that I soon went back home just in case the drain started to fill up again. That night we had a contractor come to the house to give us bids on various outdoor projects, most of which were designed in some way to help alleviate the flooding issue.

Wednesday: Another major batch of bad weather hit Wednesday evening. A tornado warning for our county forced us out of bed about 1:30 in the morning. We were back in bed about 2 AM, but I will say the straight line winds that came through were frightening. In fact, a couple of semis were blown over at a truck stop just a few miles down the interstate. I went to work again Wednesday, and had ANOTHER track meet. This one ran from 4 o'clock until a little after 8.

Thursday: Work all day, and then a jazz band concert tonight.
Publish Post
I long for the good ole days...

No Comment

I'm going to let this awesome video speak for itself.



(I can't see the video.)

The Coolest Thing Ever!

Okay, this may not be the coolest thing ever, but it's still pretty cool! My wife showed it to me yesterday, and I just had to share it!

Did you ever do a project in school where your teacher took a famous piece of art, broke it into sections on a grid, and then gave each section to one student to recreate? Once each student did his/her piece, the teacher assembled it all together into one piece. It usually looked bizarre, but it was still interesting.

Well, somebody came up with the idea to do the same thing with a movie. He took the original STAR WARS movie and "assigned" it to the general public in 15 second increments. He then assembled all of the parts into a single film. It's fascinating to watch. Here it is:

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/watch

I actually see instructional uses for this. When I was a teacher, I had students work on movie making in class. They'd brainstorm, write a script, storyboard the film, film it, edit it, and then share it. The problem is that the project would mushroom into something WAY too big. A good movie takes years to make, and that's when people work on it full time. Asking students to make a movie, even a ten minute movie, working an hour a day for four or five weeks is unrealistic. But broken up into pieces it might be possible. And the link above shows that it certainly is still entertaining, even if a little weird.

The First Year

I've been thinking about my father a lot lately...

I was told by people in the know (and by that I mean people who have lost a parent) that the whole first year would be hard, that I'd think about my father throughout the year. The "firsts" would be hard. "First Father's Day without My Dad" or "First 4th of July without My Dad" and so on. And, at first, things certainly played out that way. The first Christmas without my dad he was certainly on my mind, and he was definitely missed at my Mom's birthday a week later.  But both of those events were just a month from the time my Dad had died, and he was on my mind EVERY day regardless of whether or not it was a special day.

But after that, the sting faded, and holidays passed without much noticeable difference. My daughter's birthday was in January, and my father was missed, but honestly not so much. My own birthday was a few weeks later, and I missed my father wishing me a happy birthday, sure, but I didn't see him every year on my birthday, so again, it wasn't so painful. And certainly Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day passed by without me thinking particularly of my father.

But this last week, as I said at the start of this blog entry, I've missed my father quite a bit, for two reasons mostly:

1. University of Kentucky Basketball. The Wildcats haven't been to the Final Four since 1998, and I sat Saturday night and watched them take on UConn and thought how sad it was that my father had missed their return by just a few months. In fact, it occurred to me, he had seen THIS TEAM play back in November, and he'd told me at the time that they weren't going to be very good this year. He would have enjoyed seeing how far this team had come in a few months, and he was very much on my mind as I watched the game. I understood for the first time, I think, when people say that they can almost feel the presence of a departed person. I could imagine him sitting beside me watching the game, commenting during the commercials about how they couldn't hit the basket, how nervous they looked. And I was actually kind of glad Kentucky lost the game. It's one thing for him to have missed their return to the Final Four by just a few months. It would have been another thing for him to have missed a UK championship. Too much to take.

2. Vacation. As I mentioned in the previous post, the family has been on Spring Break vacation for the last week. And I've thought about my father a lot. Of all of the places in the world, I think he was defnitely the most comfortable and at peace in his own house. After that, though, I think place number two would have been on vacation at the beach. I remember he'd rent an umbrella and a couple of beach chairs from the lifeguard on the beach, and then he'd settle down underneath that umbrella with a cooler, his sunglasses, and his bathing suit. He'd watch the kids play in the sand and the ocean, and he'd people watch. When he got really hot he'd jump into the ocean and play with us kids for a few minutes, and then he'd head back up the beach to his chair, shoo whoever had gotten into it out, and settle back down again for a few hours. For four or five days, he would just be.

I had a great time at the beach with my kids, but my father was always on my mind because I remember doing everything we did with him. Natalie and I rode "boogie boards" for hours in the water. I don't know if boogie boards existed in the 1970's and 80's, but I remember riding floats on the waves with my father. The whole family walked the beach looking for shells, something I remember doing with my dad as well. And while we walked we saw several sand castles built by little children, something I also remember doing at the beach with my dad.

So I guess what I've learned is that what all of those people said is true. The first year IS going to be hard throughout, but it's not every holiday that's going to be hard. It's every moment that reminds me of my dad when I will feel the pain of the loss.

Silver Springs

So the family's been on Spring Break vacation this week. Saturday through Tuesday morning we were in New Smyrna Beach, and for the rest of the break we've been visiting Lisa's family in The Villages, Florida. Today we went to a nearby zoo/amusement park called Silver Springs. It was an odd place. I could tell that it was originally designed to host thousands of visitors a day, but according to Myra, the place just isn't that busy any more. So it was nice to see, but also a little sad, because parts of it were shuttered and most of it was in need of a touch up job. But at the same time, it was a really nice zoo.

Here are some highlights:

The first video is of the girls feeding giraffes. What the video doesn't capture is that a few seconds after I turned the camera off I took one of the crackers in my mouth and fed it to the giraffe from my lips. The giraffes have a rougher tongue than I expected. That's all I'm saying.



(I can't see video one.)



The second video is one of the many shows we watched. This one was a display of alligators being fed raw chickens. It's apparent from watching this video that these are not your run of the mill, wild gators. These are lazy, been-living-in-a-zoo-all-my-life gators. Still, I wouldn't want to spend any time with them inside of that display.



(I can't see video two.)

Finally, we went on three different guided tours, one in a jeep, and two in glass bottomed boats. So we got to listen to a lot of canned, memorized lectures from guides who sounded partly bemused and partly bored. This guy was our favorite. In fact, we laughed about this part of his lecture all the way home, unaware that I had filmed it.


(I can't see video three.)

Sweasy.net...a Different View (or Five)

I was just logging onto my blog page to make a new post, and when I did I was informed that Blogger, my blogging platform, has released five alternative views to each blog, including Sweasy.net. Each view is a little different than the others, but they all seem to share one thing in common: they depend pretty heavily upon images. As a result, I'm going to try to include images more often (though you'll notice there's no image on this post, so maybe I'm just all talk).

In any event, of the five different views, the one I find the most interesting can be found by

clicking this link.