Cerebrate Good Times

That was my high temperature yesterday, which is the highest fever I've ever had (as far as I know). I'm pretty sure I could see through time for a while there. Anybody out there had a higher fever? Other than Boogie, of course.

I don't normally do this, but here's a bit of a family update. On Saturday we finally spent some time out in the yard. It's funny that we've been here two years and have hardly spent any time out there, mostly because we've felt guilty for not keeping it up the way we should. [caption id="attachment_1238" align="aligncenter" width="362" caption="Seriously, girl. Mow the lawn."] [/caption] Sam decided to pull the giant pine tree down with a rope. [caption id="attachment_1239" align="aligncenter" width="179" caption="It's you or me, tree."] [/caption] But he decided it would be easier to have a tug-o-war with Allison instead. [caption id="attachment_1240" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="No fair, wrapping it around your waist."] [/caption] Tonight for family home evening, we decided to have a sock fight. Yes, that is the Benny Hill theme...

She's been watching how Sam plays with his carnivorous toys.

Okay, I can’t decide if this idea would save the world or ruin it, but I don’t think there’s a middle ground. You know that feeling you have when you get something new, and it’s great, but over time it gradually fades and you want to replace it with something newer? What if we identified that the feeling is caused by a particular chemical secreted by your brain, and we could synthesize it? All of a sudden people wouldn’t buy a new car every couple of years, which would hurt companies but really cut down on how deeply in debt everyone was. We’d probably be slightly less mean toward each other, too. So, would this idea save us or destroy us?

... when you have an idea for a blog post, but then you find out that you've already posted it? So I guess I'll post something different, but equally boring. When it comes to being up at night with your kids, parents wear those experiences as a badge of honor. The longer you spend awake, and the more kids you're up with, the more you can brag. And last night was a doozy at our house. (Can you believe the spell-checker doesn't recognize "doozy"?) I was going to give a detailed explanation, but I decided that was snoresville. The gist of it is that we were up 10 times during the night, mostly with Allison. She woke up every half hour until 5 a.m., when I finally decided to see if she needed a drink of water. She was really thirsty, and after getting a drink she went to sleep for several hours. So, yeah. I felt stupid, but that night probably made our top ten list of worst nights ever. On a happier note, and because I don’t feel like putting this in a different p...

Today I ran the Provo Half Marathon, and I'm too tired to come up with a good title. I learned an important lesson about starting off too fast: don't. Still, I managed to finish, and my time wasn't too terrible: 1:39:23 ( 47/667 overall; 7/53 in my age group). As I ran, I couldn't imagine ever doing a full marathon. I suppose it's similar to a woman saying she could never have twins after birthing a single baby through natural childbirth. Or, more likely, it's nothing like that. I'm tired.

I was thinking about how we all assume that older people are out of touch with current technology. (“What’s a Twitter?”) We like to laugh a little bit about how we know how to use our smartphones to do our taxes, while our grandparents never could get the hang of using a VCR. But I think as we grow older we’ll find ourselves in an even worse position than older folks today. I don’t know whether the Singularity will ever happen, but it’s pretty easy to see the accelerated growth of technological development. Whereas they look at a computer and think, “Okay, this is like a television that connects to that internet thingy,” we won’t even have a beginning point of reference to conceptualize the devices like the portable boxes that raise your consciousness to another level, or the floating orbs that are beings of pure thought. We will be totally lost. So they’ll probably just plug our brains into the Matrix, so we old fogeys can pretend it’s still 1999 and party accordingly.

Okay, I am having another issue with a billboard . Apparently I'm turning into a billboard bigot, and I should change this to the Billboard Blog. But this complaint is more serious than the others. There is a series of them around, telling us to dial 911 at the first sign of a stroke. That is a great message, because it could save lives. Except for one little detail... They don't say what that sign is. I'm sure I should know, but my brain is full of more useful facts like quotes from the Simpsons and remembering my favorite order at Wendy's (baconator). I've been seeing the billboards for weeks, and I never think about them when I'm sitting at the computer and can actually look up the symptoms. Until today. So let's see what I can find out. According to the Mayo Clinic , stroke symptoms can include trouble walking, difficulty speaking and understanding, paralysis or numbness, trouble seeing, and a headache. It sounds a lot like being drunk, except for the...