Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Family

  • Perils of domesticity

    I don’t know what it is about this weekend, but here’s a few items illustrating the pitfalls of owning a home and raising a family:

    Saturday evening I noticed that the dryer had died. More specifically, that the drum belt had broken; the dryer would run, but the drum wouldn’t turn. So I spent most of this morning figuring out how to open the thing up, then buying a new belt and figuring out just how to fix it and put it all back together again. (You’d think a belt would be easy or intuitive to replace. If you’re like me, you’d be wrong.) Joy. It works, though.

    The event that led up to me discovering the dryer wasn’t working? My son, our youngest, was sick; he ate only a bite or two of dinner, then went to lie down on the couch. Which he then threw up on. But it wasn’t just the bite or two of dinner he threw up; it was lunch, too. So, I got to interrupt my dinner to clean up vomit from the couch. It was also on a throw pillow, which I cleaned, and was going to put in the dryer—and discovered the problem with the dryer.

    Same kid, twice over this past week, has set off his Tickle Me Elmo in the middle of the night (5:10-ish the first time, 2:10-ish the next time). Nothing’s quite as freaky as waking up in the dead of night out of a deep sleep hearing Elmo saying, “Elmo’s not ticklish there! Tickle Elmo again!”

  • Camping

    We spent this weekend camping up at Suttle Lake for the annual family reunion. I took Friday off and we left just before noon, and had great weather until Friday evening when the mother of all thunderstorms came through and we were hit by a torrential downpour. Fortunately, the tent mostly weathered the rain and the rest of the weekend was fun.

    It’s kind of nice to go dark and live off the grid for a few days. Back to it, though!

  • Gone for the weekend

    I’ll be offline all this weekend and most of Monday. We’re going to Portland: the kids have another eye doctor appointment with someone new on Monday, so we’re making a weekend out of it and heading up tomorrow.

    I’ll check my email Saturday morning but after that it’s au revoir.

  • Edgefield History

    This is just a little bit of history and trivia that popped into my head tonight, about McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon (just outside of Portland). The Edgefield is a 38-acre estate that features lodging, restaurants, a brewery, a vineyard and winery, a distillery, and more, dominated by a Georgian-revival style manor. It’s a fantastic, fun place, as all of the big McMenamins renovations are.

    Built in 1911, it was originally the Multnomah County Poor Farm:

    Residents operated a self-sufficient environment, raising hogs, poultry, growing a variety of fruits and vegetables, operating a dairy, cannery and meat packing plant as well as working in the laundry, kitchen and hospital.

    At that time, not long after the turn of the last century, my great-grandfather was a mortician in Portland, and on occasion he would have to make a trip out to the Poor Farm to pick up the bodies of residents who died.

    Yeah, an odd bit of trivia. It’s been an odd week.

  • Flu Season

    Been slow to post anything the last couple of days, mostly because we have the flu in the house, and we’ve been nursing sick kids. It’s mostly run its course, but turned into an ear infection in our oldest, and we got antibiotics for that today.

    And no, we didn’t get flu shots. I’ve never bothered to get a flu shot, and have never gotten the flu. If I caught it from the kids (hey, there’s a first for everything), it turned into a head cold that’s pretty much gone. Of course, I rarely get sick as it is, so maybe I just have an iron-clad immune system.

  • Some Items.

    Item 1. My in-laws are in town, from today until Sunday. This always causes some tension around here, as my wife doesn’t get along very well with her parents, but the kids just love them, so all’s well. Plus, they’ll watch the kids one night so we can finally go see The Matrix Reloaded.

    Item 2. The free ebooks section of my site here is definitely generating traffic; I get more hits from search engines (mostly Google and MSN) to this page than anywhere else on the site. I’ve also noticed some hits coming in from Google to the page with my PHP porter stemming algorithm.

    Item 3. Never, ever watch the movie SwimFan.

    Item 4. I’m writing up a long, geeky rant on comic books to post here sometime soon. If you’re into comics, keep an eye out. If not, no worries.

    Item 5. I actually can’t think of an “Item 5,” so that’s all, folks.

  • Dog Days

    So last night, the dog eats a bag of Hershey’s Kisses.

    Okay, so not a whole bag, but about 10 ounces out of a 12 ounce bag. And they were the new Kisses, tasty ones with toffee and almonds.

    Anyway, I go downstairs about 10 o’clock, and find the shredded bag on the floor, sans Kisses. Uh oh, I think. This can’t be good.

    Every one was gone. As was most of the foil.

    Gone.

    And you know what happens when dogs eat chocolate, right? Right?

    (Here’s a hint: they die.)

    So my wife calls a 24-hour vet, and they tell us that if a dog eats an ounce of chocolate for each pound of body weight, then they’re in danger, otherwise, they’ll just (probably) end up with some gastrointestinal problems. Since the dog is about 50 pounds, and he only ate 10 ounces of chocolate, there’s nothing to worry about.

    Hell with that. I’m worried about all the damn foil he ate.

  • Items for your consideration

    So, we got a new cat this week.

    More specifically, my wife got a new cat.

    She’s been bugging me to get another dog, which I will not do; one is enough. So, more or less in exchange for that, I capitulated on a cat.

    So far, our other two cats pretty much hate it.

    …..

    Over on Tim Bray’s website, there’s an article on enterprise software— and a delicious quote I couldn’t resist reprinting here: “Software pricing continues to be a black art, and one which most people practice poorly.” How true. How so very true.

  • What are all the colors of the rainbow?

    Our trip to Portland today was definitely one of the odder ones.

    In short: The good news is, Kaitlyn’s eyes are as good as they’re going to get, according to the doctor, which is pretty damn good. No more surgeries. The bad news is, the doctor recommended a second eye surgery for Brandon, before he turns 2 if possible. Definitely not what we want to hear.

    As for the (gory) details of the trip, this is a doozy: Brandon threw up on himself and he and the car smelled like puke the rest of the day. We had to buy him a new shirt at Goodwill because the one he was wearing stank so bad.

    Then Sherri managed to spill a bunch of orange juice all over her lap and seat while trying to fill the kids’ cups with juice. That wasn’t as bad as the vomit, though.

    After the eye doctor we went to the Lloyd Center Mall and had a highly mediocre cheesesteak lunch from a food court restaurant called Steak Escape (yes, they actually have a website).

    On the drive home, we saw the brightest rainbow I have ever seen when driving through Madras. I wish I could have taken a picture of it; it was truly spectacular and almost made it all worth it.

    Incidentally, the answer to the question in the title is: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (purple). Seven colors. Sherri didn’t believe me that there are 7 colors and that indigo was counted, until we got home and she looked it up online.

  • Kon-Tiki

    We’re heading up for a day trip to Portland tomorrow for Kaitlyn’s post-op visit to the eye doctor to check how her eyes have progressed since surgery. Have to get up at 6 am though, that’s a bummer.

    Here’s a link too geeky/cool to pass up: The Contiki Operating System and Desktop Environment. It’s an operating system with built in web server and web browser originally written for the good ol’ Commodore 64. This may not seem like such an accomplishment given today’s advanced systems and seemingly limitless power, but for those familiar with the C64— or especially anyone who owned/used one— all I can say is: Damn.