2014 wheels are off the ground

The New Year is off and running and I'd say its a good start. New Year's Eve and Day were spent watching a fair amount of Twilight Zone episodes on SciFi Network marathon. Also took in a few football games. But mainly spent the day unpacking and cleaning up after holiday trip to see my folks in Louisiana.

Today is trash and recycling materials pick up day - and I put out our bins last night. This morning I had one last bag to put in trash before pick up. I noticed upon lifting the lid on the bin that a neighbor had filled our container with overflow from their house. As I reached in to grab a big bag to reposition it to make more room, a sharp thick wire poked through the bag and stuck me in the finger. Not sure I was punctured because I tried to squeeze some blood out but got nothing, and later noticed a good scratch on another finger. Went in to wash hands, and hopefully wash away all infections. So be careful out there.

Before leaving for Lake Charles, LA, my family here watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, on VHS no less, a version which is not intended to be a faithful rendition of the Dickens classic, but I rate it high on entertainment, and Michael Caine is terrific as Scrooge. (check Hypnogoria podcast for a rating of the Christmas Carol movies) As a result I decided to re-re-re-read the original story to refresh my memory on the variances between most "Carol" movies and the source material. So I downloaded the novella from Project Gutenberg, migrated it to the Nook, and casually read. I came across this paragraph in the second stave which I didn't remember:  (emphasis added at the end by me, and copied from the ebook I downloaded from Gutenberg)

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because “three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so forth, would have become a mere United States’ security if there were no days to count by.

Obviously the bold text intended to imply that Scrooge's assets would become worthless. I had no idea there was a US reference in Christmas Carol much less using its financial instruments as a metaphor for loss in investment. Scrooge has always been portrayed in the movies as a ruthless landlord ready to throw out his renters as soon as rent went in arrears. Apparently he turned cash futures that depended on timely execution of deals.

Hopefully the future contains no possibilities for this US security metaphor to be repeated, but I fear the likelihood of the opposite is increasing.

Coincidence? I think not.

Late night Christmas Eve, I was driving to our church to pick up Tory. I had my mp3 player plugged in and set on random play. As I was about to exit the freeway, Carry On Wayward Son came on. Merging onto the access road I saw the light up ahead was already red, of course, and so I stopped behind a car already waiting. Then I looked at the license plate of that car and saw it was from Kansas.

Unplugged

I was listening to Laura Ingraham's radio show yesterday as I took the end of the week off for Spring Break. She was talking about "unplugging" from the electronic connected world, if not for a short a period of time to cleanse and rejuvenate the brain. She also spoke with Jon Mattleman (link from Technorati) about programs he uses with middle schoolers and why unplugging is a good thing.

This topic is constantly lurking about our house. As our kids use the internet more for email, chatting, and stuff, we are battling to limit the time spent online. But our kids don't come close to the hundreds of minutes a day online either - but on occaission they can come close.

How difficult is it for us to unplug? In my opinion we're not in too deep. Only one computer in the house, well except for Evan's and nobody wants to go into his room and he doesn't want to come out, and as a result demand far outstrips supply as far as online time goes. Only one family cell phone with no text messaging and I have a business cell phone - no texting. Cable TV is only the basic of basics. We get 12 channels maybe and several are the community access stations which are jokes. Everyone now has a personal mp3 player too, except Evan recently had his stolen and is using Sam's. Beyond that we're relatively free of technology, and yet we feel its tidal pull. Email must be checked, Facebook page maintained, mp3 players managed, research for school (something actually productive!), and checking the blog reader. Homework on the computer is accompanied by Instant Messages, and other chatter and distractions.

Unplugging is a conscious effort, hard work most of the time met with resistence. We took a trip last October to Big Bend National Park as part of unplugging, but an mp3 player or 2 went along, and all the pre-trip planning happened online. It was successful but we were swept back into the tech current as we returned home.

I can't argue against a regular respite from the information superhighway, on a family basis too, but its a planned, announced event.

Father's Day

Another Father's Day, and another long day. 2005 was the year of the kidney stones, and 2007 was a stomach virus of some sort. Shortly after lunch, my stomach painfully knotted up. I ended up hitting the sack for the next six or seven hours. As I drifted in and out of sleep I managed to catch the US Open on tv. Sometime around 8:30 pm the ailment began to clear itself up. As I remember now, as I waited at the ER two years ago, I watched the US Open on a tv there as well. After my hernia surgery back in 1994 I watched all four days of the Masters on tv. That was the year that Greg Norman had his horrific collapse in the last round losing to Nick Faldo - and I got to watch that in all its painful glory.

In other news, Samantha and I went and got a root beer float from Sonic the night they were free, about a week ago. As we're leaving the house about 9 pm, I run over a snake, both driverside wheels, in the road just around the corner from our house. I hit it where the Far Side guy might have drawn a belt, right in the snake's middle. I backed up and shown the lights on the snake that was now all knotted up. After pointing it out to Samantha, the snake uncoiled itself and then began to crawl back towards the far side of the road. One tough snake - I let it go because the yard it was going to crawl into has 3 pit bulls living there.

Samantha's float was too high on the ratio of ice cream to root beer, and mine was the opposite, too much root beer to ice cream.

Speaking of ice cream, we found an ice cream freezer in the attic that was given to Sean and me as a wedding gift that we have never used. Samantha and I decided to give it a test run. I scrubbed all the parts clean and tested the motor which still ran perfectly despite being stored in a super hot attic for 22 years. We managed to whip up some decent ice cream too.

Inside the box was the card from whoever gave us the freezer, and is signed by the givers. This person who gave us the freezer is now somewhat slightly famous (or rather infamous). I laughingly proposed selling his autograph on Ebay, but then reconsidered - that might be in poor taste because we were pretty good friends at one point.

Where in the world is Tory?

Tory is spending the week at a leadership conference at Mo Ranch. If you've got some time and perhaps a large Snicker bar, check out these photos posted on the Mo Ranch website - Tory is in a few.