Cerebrate Good Times

The thing about having young kids is that things tend to change frequently, and we've had a few things happen. So this is more of a family journal type post. Since last summer Allison has been wanting to learn to ride her bike without training wheels. We've worked on it a few times, but I didn't think she was ready. She got a new bike for Christmas, and it still seemed kind of heavy for her. But a friend brought her smaller bike over and Allison just started practicing balance, and then started using the pedals, and within a few minutes she had it. She tried her own bike after a while and got that down too. It was amazing to see how fast she picked it up. James finally started crawling. Our kids have an interesting history there. Sam never crawled but went straight to walking, holding our fingers for several months until we were at a church activity one evening and he just took off to chase other kids. Allison crawled normally. Clara did her monkey scoot thing which was...

So, that happened. Camping, I mean. Friday afternoon the boy scouts gathered at the scoutmaster's house to caravan to the camp site. Questions about where we were going were answered by naming some person that apparently everyone in Idaho knows. "It's at so-and-so's place." Oh. Okay, then. Eventually I was able to get someone to point out where we were going, more or less, on a map. And eventually we were off. The property was a patch of dirt in the scrubland just a few minutes from some local sand dunes. We basically got there in time to set up camp and cook dinner. Then we hung around the fire and the kids told scary stories while I tried to watch the Jazz game on my phone (there was surprisingly decent reception). Of course it rained a bit, which is pretty much a legal requirement when you camp, and then it cleared up and the temperature plummeted. We all scrambled for our tents and, in my case, shivered for the next 8 hours. I hadn't been campin...

Last weekend was kind of an interesting one where lots of things seem to happen close together. It started Friday, when Katie informed me she had driven to the school and had gotten a flat tire. I had her use the tire inflator to get enough air in it to get home. Later I couldn't see an obvious nail or anything in it, so I took it back where we had gotten it for warranty-covered repair. They had to replace it, but of course they didn't have the same tire in stock so I had to pay for an upgrade. Blah. On Saturday the kids went outside to hide plastic eggs with candy, and Sam put one in the furnace exhaust pipe, which drops down into our basement. I spent all day trying to flush it out, using a shop vac from either end to suck it out, then an air compressor, and even a hose to flush it out with water. I never managed to find it, but things were obviously moving through the pipe well enough so I patched things back up. I ordered a 30-foot flexible inspection camera that attaches...

Last weekend my family visited Salt Lake City, the first time we had returned to Utah since moving. All in all, it went pretty well, although James struggled with a drive that was longer than anything he had endured before. A couple weeks previous I had traveled to Texas for a work convention. So what to me has been more travel than usual has made me think about traveling. It's something I've never really understood. I mean, I get travel when there's a necessity, and I do understand the occasional vacation. What I don't understand is people who travel frequently for fun. It's just so exhausting, and I think you spend more time in preparation and sitting places waiting than you do enjoying your destination. I guess I have a strange feeling that you should live where you live, and spend the vast majority of your time there. But maybe I'm just jealous because I have four kids now and don't have the money to travel for fun. I suppose I will chalk it up to ...

I want to write this down before I forget it. Last December we made a payment to a doctor for one of our maternity bills. The check bounced, which is of course our fault. Later we paid off the full amount when we got our tax refund, but a week or two later they ran that check again, so we paid twice. Katie talked to the bank and the billing company, and each blamed the other. I finally went to the bank and determined that someone physically brought this check in a second time to cash it, which happened 10 days after we had paid the full amount. The management company said they didn't show this payment and eventually shifted the blame to the medical practice itself. They finally looked into it, and one of the partners called me. He showed that they did get this additional payment, but he also claimed that his bank automatically ran the check the second time. That doesn't square with what I understand. I believe someone was trying to embezzle money through the practice. At an...

This all started with a banana. As I've noted before , bananas are something I want to like but struggle with. But I think I've discovered how to like them better. It's because I have this thing with maintaining my weight. My philosophy is that if I put on a couple pounds I work to eat better and get rid of it before I get overweight. But most people scoff if I make any kind of comment about trying to eat healthy. "Pssh, what do you have to worry about?" Well, I don't think I should make it harder on myself. Anyway, I've been on one such cycle recently, trying to minimize foods with added sugar and stop with treats for a while. But breakfast is hard, because I love me some cereal. I love to have it in the morning, and then have a bowl before bed. But it's hard for me to figure out what to eat for breakfast without it. I love eggs, but you can have only so many before you get sick of them too. So I decided to get some plain oatmeal, which I feel i...

I wasn't going to post this, because it's boring. But then I realized that I don't care; it's something that has been on my mind, so I'm writing it. I might be part magpie or raccoon or something, because I've always liked shiny things. Like watches. I remember getting a little blue watch in second grade and wearing it for years. I loved that thing. Maybe there's a correlation between liking watches and me being obsessed with getting places on time. Anyway, several years ago I decided I wanted a watch with a digital representation of an analog dial, I don't know why. It just seemed novel. In 2013 I got one of the first commercial smartwatches, a Pebble . It let me do the digital/analog thing, as well as showing notifications from my phone, letting me control music, showing weather, and acting as a display for my running apps on my phone. It's first and foremost a watch, and with a simple e-ink display it gets several days of battery life. I...