Cerebrate Good Times

Well, we all survived Sam's first day of kindergarten. Here's a picture of him on our porch, with our lovely dirt yard in the background, and Allison looking cute just for good measure. When I was a kid, my elementary school was visible from our house, and my mom used to watch us through binoculars from the house to make sure we got home safely. It was embarrassing, and I couldn't understand it at the time. Now it kind of makes sense, though. My main fear for Sam yesterday was that he wouldn't get on the right bus to come home, or would get off at the wrong stop. I never rode the bus to school, so it was a little outside my experience. But he made it, and even though Katie was a minute late meeting him at the bus stop in the afternoon (Allison was asleep and she didn't want to leave her alone in the house) he started walking the right way to get home. Overall, he enjoyed his first day and was eager to go back. Now we'll just have to be ready for the first time h...

Last night I dreamed that I was involved in a group planning an intricate heist of some sort. We all had our jobs. Mine involved researching the average weight of a variety of dogs so we could correctly dose the sleeping pills in the meat we would give them, because we apparently didn't know the breeds we would be up against. Eventually we successfully broke into the place the valuable item was stored, which was a high-rise apartment building. We ended up taking the small locked box the item was in (I remember we had to ride the elevator with some cops on the way down), allowing our lock guy to work on it for a couple days. When he eventually got it open, it was some sort of Micro Machine . We were all a little skeptical about the value of such an item, but it did look like an unusual one, and it came with something labeled a "micro computer." So we decided to check around to see what it was worth, but I woke up too soon to find out.

The other night I was reading Rumplestiltskin to Sam from a fairy tale book. As you all know, at the beginning of the story, the miller is a big fat liar, bragging that his daughter can spin straw into gold. So the king locks her up to make her do it, promising to marry her if she does it. So the creepy guy shows up and does it for her, and the king breaks his promise. But he tells her to do it again and he’ll really marry her this time. And so on. Anyway, around the second time the king lied to her about marrying her, Sam spoke up. “Why is everyone in this story lying so much?” Sometimes I forget how insightful he really is. And, on an unrelated note, the other day he didn’t want to put on a particular pair of shorts because he didn’t feel they were modest enough. And yes, he used that word. Maybe we’re doing a better job raising him than we feared.

Someone doesn't want us to go outside... [caption id="attachment_1367" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="If this works, I'm set for life."] [/caption]

Last night we went to Back to School Night for the first time ever. So I guess we should just call it "to school night." Semantics aside, it was an odd experience. I still dimly recall my experiences as the student, so it's a strange feeling to be on the other side now as the parent. It's one of those landmark experiences that makes you feel a little bit old. Not as old as having your kids graduate from high school, but still. Anyway, Sam is excited about school, and his teacher seems to be really nice, so we'll see how everything goes.

Imagine you are standing at the base of a mountain, with your climbing gear on, looking up. The top is shrouded in clouds. That’s how I feel as I consider the mammoth undertaking of getting a yard installed. For several weeks I’ve been trying to plan what needs to be done, in what order, and I’m running out of ways to pretend I am being productive without actually doing anything. So we have been trying to plan out what we will do. Katie and I love grass, so we never planned anything very ambitious. Frankly, a lot of people seem to try cramming too much stuff into their yard, leaving it looking cluttered. And as our previous landlord can attest to, we are not cut out to take care of a lot of garden area anyway. So the plan is to plant grass everywhere and have one small flower bed in front of the porch, and a couple of trees. We are also going to add a concrete patio in the backyard. So the to-do list looks something like this: 1. Till the soil to loosen it up. (We have already tried th...

Last night we had the most impressive thunderstorm I have ever seen. It all started a little before midnight, as I was trying to get to sleep. Bright flashes of lightning kept interrupting my descent into slumber, at a rate of several per minute. There was no thunder, though, at least for a while. As the storm crept closer we began to hear low rumblings, and the lightning became even more intense. I should have counted the flashes, but they were often interrupting each other, and the thunder was too. I kept thinking maybe the center of the storm had passed, when a huge peal of thunder would crash overhead. We opened the blinds for a while and just watched the show. The amazing thing was that the kids didn't wake up even though it lasted for an hour, with a few really deafening crashes. I always wondered how much electricity we could get from lightning, if it were possible to capture safely. According to one random website I just found, "One storm can discharge enough energy to...