Campaign Ads

Ah, now that the election is over, I just realized that I can go back to being annoyed at those inane Mac vs. PC ads.

UGH.

Let Me Help You Out

I have two suggestions for a couple of websites. I see no better way to voice them than my sparsely-visited blog, because surely word will get back to them somehow, right?

1. Alton Brown. Your personal website and the Food Network website offer no way to contact you. You seem like a personable guy, so I can only assume this is because you feel you would get too many comments to respond to personally, so you've left off a contact link to keep people from being disappointed.

That's too bad, though, because I have a really good show idea. I define "really good" as "I need the hell out of this information, and I think he's the right guy to present it." I mean, yes, it's full of self-interest, but...well, it's really just full of self-interest.

I (somewhat) recently moved to a location that is considered "high-altitude". All my life I've vaguely noted the high-altitude directions on the recipes that include them, but it never occurred to me that one day, I would be the one needing them. Baking here is a mess. Pretty much anything with a mixture of wet and dry ingredients seems to be affected, and nothing seems to come out quite right, even when you have high-altitude instructions. Cookies are flat. Brownies too. I haven't even attempted a cake or bread or something a little more complex, but I can only assume that they would also be affected by the curse of the mountains.

Yes, there are other sources that lay out the concepts behind high-altitude cooking, and I've tried to get into several of them enough for the information to sink in. It's either my usual state of sleep deprivation or the fact that they're as boring as plain white rice, but I can't stick with any of them long enough to learn anything.

What I figure I require are puppets and skits and some sort of illustrative use of styrofoam balls and yarn. Surely, if Alton Brown can't teach me how to make good cookies at altitude, it is a lost cause.

But I can't ask him to do this show, because there is no known way on the internets to get a message to him. If I had a homing pigeon, I would use its services. If anyone reading this post can find a link I couldn't find, I will bow to your superior internet kung-fu if you take pity on me and leave it in the comments.

2. Very simply, to all brick and mortar store websites: you are not allowed to have a website unless I can go there and find out when your store is open. If you have a store locator and there are no store hours on each location's individual page, you fail and you have to start again. In this information age, I shouldn't have to pick up a phone and derail one of your employees just so they can tell me that they'll close tonight at 7:00. That is 20th century thinking, which would be great if that was the century we're living in, BUT IT'S NOT.

Let me know when your outsourced website vendor figures their shit out and puts ALL the basic info on your website, because that's when I'll bother to go there again. When I make a wasted trip to your site, all you do is teach me not to waste my time in the future. In this economy, I don't think you can afford to do that. Just some love from me to you.

Blech

Why are my glasses getting so schmutzy lately? I don't remember cleaning them this often before, and finding so much crap on them each time I clean them.

Is it the altitude? Am I messier than I used to be? Am I fussier than I used to be? Did something else change?

I just don't get it.

What's Cindy's Last Name?!?

I drowsily looked up at the television one Saturday morning a month or so ago and the credits for "The Early Show" were rolling. I saw this:

Poor Cindy. Surely someone knows her last name. She's a stage manager, for heaven's sake. It's not like she doesn't work with a bunch of people if she's managing the stage.

(And thank goodness I got around to snapping a pic of this so I could finally clean this off of our TiVo.)

Stupidest Website Registration EVER

I couldn't get through to the automatic account information for one of my utility bills to verify the balance I should pay and so, like a good web user, I went to their website to see if I could get an account there and see the balance via that interface. When I went to the page to begin account registration, this is the help text next to the form I was asked to fill out.

Username: AT LEAST 10 characters please. No, forget the please. 10 character minimum. MINIMUM!

Password: At least 4 characters, and NO MORE THAN 10 characters. No specs on whether you have to include letters and numbers, or letters/numbers/mixed case like most sites that are concerned about account security.

You put the security on the PASSWORD, morons. Not the username.

How many people routinely use a username that's at least ten characters? Ridiculous. If this wasn't a one-shot usage (I don't anticipate having to use the site again, even to verify account balance) I would be seriously ticked off.

Ant and/or Dec

Ant and/or Dec

Turned on the first ten minutes or so of the newest television reality offering. I admit that I was drawn in because the people playing were "celebrities" (as in, I knew who one of them was) and they were playing to win money for charities, and not for themselves. I think it was called "Bet You" or something like that. I could look it up, but eh, my kid's still restless in bed and if I have to listen to her fighting sleep by singing and kicking the bars of her toddler bed, you should have to do your own damn research if the exact title means so much to you.

Anyway.

The hosts were familiar in that I've-seen-them-in-one-other-place sort of way. British, so that was a bit of a clue, and helped me rule some possibilities out. Suddenly, I wondered aloud, "Hey, I think that's Ant and/or Dec!"

My husband, though he may deny this, has seen the movie Love, Actually nearly as much as I have, which is to say, far too many times. My favorite character from that movie, personally, is Billy Mack. Those of you who have also seen the movie might recall an appearance Billy Mack makes on a talk show (chat show, to you Anglophiles and/or actual Brits) where he writes naughty things on a picture of the group Blue, his main competition for the Christmas Eve #1 single. He referred to the host he addressed directly as "Ant or Dec", meaning that he had no idea which one the guy he was talking to actually was, and furthermore, couldn't care any less about whether he ever found out. Interchangeable little talk show hosts.

So, back in the Real World, I hit the Info button on my remote to see if the, well, 'info' there would tell us who the hosts of this (fairly wretched) new show were. Damned if they weren't Ant and/or Dec, whom I recognized ONLY from their brief appearance in the movie Love, Actually.

The mister opined that we should actively avoid for the rest of our lives discovering which one is actually Ant and which one is Dec, and I think that's a valid tribute to good old Billy Mack. I'll start with not watching their little betting show again, regardless of the fact that I think it's nice that one of those shows is giving money to charities instead of out to regular people who will only go spend it at Wal*Mart on stuff that will break three months from now. The show was that silly.

But I love ya, Ant and/or Dec. But really only because you were in Love, Actually.

Can't Buy Me Kite

So, let's assume that you have a yen to go kite flying. It's windy. You'd like to go that day. There's not a specialty shop near you, but you have a big-box toy store and a Target somewhat nearby.

Would you be kite flying later that day, or not?

That would depend on your timing and which employee you ask at the correct store, but very possibly, you would not be kite flying that day.

It's such a basic toy, isn't it? Target has whole aisles dedicated to Pla-Doh and things that buzz and tweet and toot, but I dare you to find a kite in Target. Perhaps at the beginning of whatever season is considered kite flying season (I honestly don't know...but aren't there windy days in every season?) then there MIGHT be a novelty kite in the seasonal row, but you'll get nothing but blank stares from the (usually helpful, 'round these parts) Target employees if you ask.

We made a special trip (~20 minutes each way) to a Toys'R'Us and looked around on our own before inquiring with an employee, and we lucked out and picked the guy in the store who has a crazy ability to remember the locations of even the most incidental of items. He remembered two sorta goofy pseudo-kites that they only had in stock because they were character-branded, and they were stuck on an endcap in the seasonal section among the pool stuff. You actually had to look quite closely to figure out was in the packages. We bought them and went kite flying with mixed results (wasn't quite windy enough) but if it hadn't been for that employee and some buyer who stocked the item because it went with the other seasonal stuff for that franchise's characters, we would still be kiteless.

They're sort of cheesy kites, really, so we still are kind of kiteless. It's weird to think of such a basic childhood toy as something you just can't find anywhere but a specialty shop. I'm trying to look for something close by that I can get something sturdier, but I may end up buying one from Amazon or something. Still...strange. Who thought kites were so scarce?

Two Meditations on Replacing a Cable Box

There was all manner of cable company weirdness at the homestead yesterday. It was like a semi-self-correcting cascade failure: first the internet connection, then the phone, though television service was still fine. I busied myself resetting modems (cable and phone) and eventually it all worked itself out.

Then the oddness started. We lost our HD channels, so I switched to the 'regular' version of the channel to wait it out, see if it would correct itself again. About ten minutes later, though, the box itself started to make some alarming clicking noises. I mean, Poltergeist-style. (Combine this with my daughter's latest habit of randomly proclaiming, "It's coming!" and you can see why I was momentarily freaked out.)

I tried to power it off with the remote to no avail, so I got up and yanked out the power cable. In the vain hope that a power cycle would somehow help things, I plugged it back in, only to observe the problem even worse than it had been the first time.

A call to Comcast, with a remarkably laid-back customer service agent (which I thought was a thing of the past, as those CS agents seem to be judged on call length more than customer satisfaction) led us to the idea that the construction in my area had caused my intermittent outages, and also a surge of some kind when the cable was fully restored that one of my boxes survived, but the older, more beat-up looking of the two, did not.

I got the address of the "closest" service center (if you, like me, can observe that they're never close to where you live, that's actually a good thing, which I'll get to later) and planned my route for after the B got up from her nap. The good thing was that the office was open until 7:00, so it allowed me, home-bound during her nap, to still make it there after she got up. Thumbs up on the office hours.

It came time to head over there and we took off, GPS and Google Maps-assisted. The neighborhood got worse and worse as I got closer and closer. I had used street view to look around where the office was so that I would more easily recognize the office once I got there (unnecessary, as it turns out...there was a huge sign that even my sense of direction-impaired butt could see) and the building opposite the cable office, whose sign was too blurry to read in Google street view, turned out to be a "Gentleman's Club". Ahem.

I went in to retrieve my new box and was asked for my saga yet again, but it was, I think, just conversational. The content of my story didn't seem to be a contingency on getting my box, but a way to pass the time while he brought up my account and switched the old box out and the new box in. Interestingly, I was told I was getting the last one, and it was indeed the only one of its kind in the stack on the table behind him. I mentioned that the phone agent had told me she thought they had "plenty", since, as the agents can't see inventory for the different offices, they are supposed to send an email to the phone center when they are running low. This apparently reminded him of what he was supposed to do (though that hadn't been my intent, I just mentioned it in stream-of-consciousness mode) and he was working on it when I left with my prize.

So my first meditation, for those scoring from the title, is that cable service centers are always in the Bad Part of Town.

On the ride home, I decided to actually listen to the GPS and take the highway, instead of the side streets I tricked it into on the way there. There were many changes from one road to another, and in those merges, I realized the second of the things I learned on my trip yesterday.

By far, and I mean a very wide margin, the drivers of cars bearing a specific sort of Colorado plate seem to be the ones most likely to try to run you off the road, stay ahead of you on a merge at any cost, or refuse to let you switch lanes. That plate is this one, initially added to the roster after the Columbine school shootings, but now seems to be in use more by abortion opponents more than people concerned with schoolyard violence:



Not one, not two, but three cars with this type of license plate messed with me on my way there or my way back. I assure you, with my two year old in the car, I err on the side of caution, so I was not driving so aggressively as to anger everyone around me. One of them was clearly behind me as I tried to merge onto I-270, with plenty of space ahead of them for me to come in and still leave him sufficient following distance, but he sped up and paced me, forcing me to slow down to merge in behind him.

He was, of course, one of those Colorado drivers (and yes, I say Colorado, because this is more prevalent here than ANYWHERE else I've ever driven) who, once all the merging and whatnot is done, they drive along the highway at LEAST ten miles per hour under the speed limit.

I guess there were sort of two driving meditations there at the end, the first about the Respect Life plate and the second about the Colorado Sunday Driver phenomenon, but I'm far too lazy to change the title now.

Rock Band Online Play, Plus One Funny Link

First, the link. Halloween is only months away, so if you have a 5-6 year old, consider these costumes when your child is trying to talk you into letting them be a firefighter or a princess AGAIN.

("Trick or treat" sounds a LITTLE like "exterminate", doesn't it?)

Also, I've been playing some Rock Band online multiplayer. When you can 95%+ songs as a singer on Expert, I've found that's pretty much like being a healer in an MMO. There's no chat (come on, PS3, even Mario Kart Wii lets me choose phrases from a rotating menu so that we can have some sort of rudimentary communication system) so it's hard to tell, but I do get a fair amount of friend adds after playing as a singer.

There are some fairly well-established proto-communication techniques at work in PS3 Rock Band, though. One of them was told to me by the good Dr. Heimlich, which is the idea that you waggle up and down on the difficulty setting menu when you don't want to do the song the leader has chosen. It's also interesting to watch (or be involved in) the delicate negotiations that occur between the two people using the guitar to see who plays guitar and who plays bass. That's usually a pause-move to the one you want-wait to see if the other guy moves there too sort of affair. I actually prefer most of the bass lines so most of the time I would imagine the other person relieved at 'getting' to play guitar when I indicated that I wanted bass, although I did get overruled a couple of times. Frankly, if you can play on Expert on the guitar, I'm fine with you taking whichever one you want and I'll play the other one on Medium.

But still, frustrating to play and have no way to communicate other than by waggling on menus, just out-and-out leaving the group, or adding someone as a friend if you enjoyed playing with them. Seriously, how hard is it to add a menu of prefab phrases? Please? Otherwise, it's pretty fun, especially when you get to watch someone kill songs on Expert, which I normally only get to see when I play with the aforementioned Dr. Heimlich.

And yeah, though there are a lot of power players there playing on Hard or Expert, there are a lot of people who play on Medium, too, which makes it less embarrassing when I want to play guitar or bass and have to play on Medium if it's anything higher than the first two difficulty categories.

It's a good time, really. As soon as we get our drum pad replacement (It broke on day 60 of its 60 day warranty, which EA is now enforcing! Yikes, that was close!) I might give them a go, though I still find the placement of the first two drums disorienting. But that's the subject for another whiny post.

Adding to the Discourse on 'Cool'

I have a wonderful friend who recently insinuated that the Wii is not cool because it is a...wait, let me quote this directly:

...a little, plastic-looking white thing...

I think that probably makes all this crap uncool too:








And that's just what I could grab from the VERY FIRST PAGE of some guy's Flickr set of all of the Apple front pages in recent memory. In fact, the only thing that distressed me at first about the Wii is that it looked like Apple made it.

Now I'm completely confused about what is cool... ::scratches head::

Worst Advice Ever

DEAR [author name redacted]: I haven't had a boyfriend for a while now, and I'm not sure why. Everyone says I'm cool, funny and outgoing. I play video games, sports, and do things that boys think girls would never do (like paintballing in the woods or bungee jumping over and over again).

All my guy friends think I'm awesome, and I do get compliments on my looks as well. I'm not a tomboy, I wear nice clothes and some makeup, but for some reason, whenever I get a crush on a guy, he says it would be "weird" because I'm a "really good friend."What am I doing wrong? I love who I am and so do boys. So why don't they think I could be "girlfriend material"? [advice-seeker name redacted]

DEAR [name redacted]: It may be that "guys" see you as one of them. And because of it, they don't consider you in a romantic way. Therefore, it's time to emphasize your feminine side and present yourself in a different light. This may mean temporarily downplaying your involvement in boys' sports and paintball games, and amping up your "girlishness." Give it a try and see what happens.

-----------------

What a total load of horseshit. "Be yourself" unless you happen to not be girly enough, and then you'd better run off and bake a pie/do your nails/flip your hair if you want a boyfriend, honey. That is such total crap.

How about this:

You haven't met the right guy who is attracted to you for who you are and the things you like to do. Keep being you, keep looking, and don't amp up a single fucking thing that isn't a true portrayal of who are. The right guy will like you even if you *gasp* like to bungee jump.

Dvorak Schmorak

I've had a passing interest in the Dvorak keyboard ever since I first heard of it. The notion of being able to type faster than I already do (~90 wpm) is extremely compelling. Mind you, I've used QWERTY since I was (literally) three years old, learning how to spell in front of a manual typewriter with my mother asking me to find letters and type words, so I would guess my QWERTY typing is so ingrained that it would be impossible to supplant with another system.

(Learning to spell on a keyboard is clearly why my handwriting is so horrible, but I'd pick fast typing over good handwriting any day.)

I stumbled over a Dvorak keyboard article, and went to our old friend, Wikipedia, to get a look at this superior layout. I have to say, I'm unimpressed.

Look at the placement of some pretty commonly-used characters, like "r", for example. Ring finger on right hand, not on the home row. Not exactly a power placement. Common punctuation like (" , .) on the left hand, and not on the home row. Bleh. "L" might not be the most-used consonent ever, but how does it rate being in the gulag up there? The "l" key is the top-row equivalent to the bottom-row key for the same finger, which is "z". Madness.

Writers of any discipline that includes dialog wouldn't benefit from the " moving, would they? To say nothing of ' being so far away from a power position, because I personally cannot say that I would enjoy avoiding contractions and sounding like Data from "Star Trek" all the time.

Vowels all jumbled together on the left hand. Ugh. Every word has a vowel in it. Most people's left hand is weaker than their right. So why overstress the left hand with all that typing? QWERTY puts two on the left and three (or four, if you count "y") on the right, which is a nice balance for most people.

I can't believe programmers of most of the modern programming languages would benefit from this setup. Lots of ":" and ";" used in coding, you know. There are some disciplines that probably use ";" more often than letters like "h" and "n".

And on a personal note, I think all of us would have to look at the keyboard layout above to see how inconvenient typing our names would be, as it's something you usually have occasion to type, especially if you regularly use it in your email address or business correspondence. I have to say, typing my full name would be a complete bummer on this keyboard.

I'm at a loss as to why this keyboard is supposed to be so efficient. Looks like a horrible design to me, but people swear by the Dvorak layout, I know. I guess it works for them, but I'll stick with what I know in this case.

I wanted to like you, Dvorak keyboard. I did. It'll just never work out between us.

I Have the Power

So, the wind blew above 10 miles per hour during a thunderstorm last night, and 50,000 people in our area lost power. Including us.

It was a million degrees here last night, and has been surface-of-the-sun hot for over a week now. We also use a baby monitor without a battery backup, though we have a secondary monitor that does operate via battery.

However, at 1:00 a.m., do you really want to be in your kid's pitch black, completely silent room trying to sneak a fresh 9V battery into the nursery unit (I was pretty sure it was a fairly run-down battery in there) without waking up the baby? I decided just to wave the white flag and bring her in with us, something that ensured that none of us got a lot of sleep last night.

This morning, we still had no power, and the number of households in the blackout weren't getting lower very quickly. No ETA's from the power company, either, although they always seem to be working hard to restore power when this happens.

The real problem isn't the power company and how quickly they restore power. The real problem is that a rat's misplaced sigh seems to be enough to set off some sort of blackout chain reaction. The technicians seem to be hard working and well-intentioned, but I can only assume that some areas of our county have such woefully outdated or just plain busted power infrastructure that we'll have these issues over and over.

It always seems to be the same zip codes. It always seems to be the same damn houses in those zip codes. It makes me want to call the power company and beg them to raise everyone's rates some infinitesimal amount and upgrade the damn breakers or whatever is not toting its load. I am so sick of either freezing or roasting in this house without climate control.

The B, on not a lot of sleep and a crappy nap the afternoon before besides, did a wonderful job soldiering through this morning. I took her out to Target, Kohl's and then St. Louis Bread Company for an early lunch, and she was a trooper. She waved at people and stomped around, still in a good mood, but boy if she didn't just collapse when I put her down for her nap.

Best moment of the day was when I was leaving Bread Co. and called our answering machine one more time before giving up and taking the B to our BIL and SIL's for her nap (because they had power) and discovered that we got our power restored just in time for her room to cool down enough for her to nap in.

Seriously, though. I've never lived anywhere that had so many troubles with its infrastructure. The cable is iffy. The power is iffy in lots of areas. Property taxes per square foot are comparable to our last house, only the city doesn't pay for trash collection out of that kitty. It's just insane, but no one is interested in fixing it. The only things that are argued over in our elections are social issues that the candidates have no intention on following through with anyway, just interested in using the hot button issues to get elected.

Fix it! Fix it so those poor techs aren't out in the middle of the night, in the rain, trying to get our power back. Won't someone please think of the techs?

A Quick Note

I have a million other things to say, but I will leave you with this one bit of wisdom that I just re-learned. When you are filling up a whirlpool tub, do not turn on the jets until they are all submerged in water. Unless you want to look like you are in a Marx Brothers skit.

I don't think so

You know what, Inez? I don't think I will "confirm my mortgage G5N7" with you, even though you've been kind enough to contact me at my personal email address to ask me about it.

Is there really someone sending out their mortgage information after an unsolicited email from someone they've never heard of? Isn't the odd letter/number combo in the subject line enough to warn them off?

Honestly, I hover between wondering how spam possibly suckers anyone in anymore, to wondering why we don't get more of it, when I realize that the sheer amount of spam we all currently get is an indication that there are plenty of sheep out there waiting to be shorn.

And hey, it's not every day that you get to use the word "shorn", so I'll cut there.

Uh-Oh!

Our B doesn't so much believe in learning words that are labels for things, like "milk" or "ball". You know, stuff that could be useful when she needs to tell me she wants something. She does say "mama" and "dada", but that's as close as she comes to labels.

Instead, she has learned exclamations and general purpose words. We've given her credit for "hi", (actually, "hi hi!") "bye bye", (actually "eye eye" with the occasional 'b') "hey", "yay", "mmmmm", (for yummy foods) and most recently, "uh-oh!"

I didn't mean to teach her these things, other than "hi" and "bye". What she's learned is the stuff that gets repeated to her over and over. We say, "Hey! There's the baby!" and stuff like that when she's walking around, so she learned, "Hey!"

We say "yay!" when she does something we've been trying to teach her—important stuff like putting her blocks in her incrediblock or how to kick her tiny pink soccer ball (which she can do, and with intention, thank you very much!) So she learned "yay!" and even says it at the right times.

"Mmmm" is obvious, really. When we try to "sell" her a food that she might or might not like, she always got the "mmm", so now she says it when she eats something yummy. It comes more often as an echo, but sometimes she does it on her own.

"Uh-oh!" is the funny one. She says it a lot, but she gets a lot of opportunities to say it. Hardly a moment passes where she doesn't drop something she wanted to carry around, or has to try a few times to make something work. She used to get really frustrated when she wanted to do something and couldn't, so I started saying, "Uh-oh!" and telling her it was okay. Now she does the "Uh-oh!" on her own, and moves on with things.

It's all hilarious, though. Between all her actual exclamations and the squeaking and clapping and things, it's like having a little sound effects machine in the house. A tiny little sound effects machine that you have to feed and change, that is.

Review: Cocoa Peeps

cocoa peeps
Originally uploaded by cammom.

I've read a lot of smack about the new Cocoa Peeps, and I have to say, now that I've hunted down a pack of them and tried them, I don't see what's not to like.

Many people dislike traditional Peeps because they're too sweet, and there's no such issue here. The marshmallow on the inside is pretty mellow, and the cocoa on the outside is sweet without being overbearing.

Imagine a cup of cocoa with marshmallows, but with the ratio reversed...a lot of rich marshmallow taste, tinged with a chocolate flavor. And who doesn't like hot chocolate?

All in all, I liked 'em. Good luck finding them, though. I looked all over the place, all the places that normally carry the pink and yellow and blue variety, but it wasn't until I really hunted around the shelves at Target that I finally got some.

(And thanks to cammom who had a CC-licensed photo of the package on Flickr for me to put here so you'd all know what they look like. I forgot to take a picture of mine until, well, it was too late. I suppose I could take a picture of my hips, because that's what they look like now.)

Do You Listen to Many Podcasts?

Hoo, boy. If you don't, I can save you a lot of time looking.

I can tell you from experience that most of them are excruciating! They are either pseudo-intellectual claptrap, or they appear to be actively inciting people to either blindly give over their money (to "change their lives!") or encouraging them to do stupid, reckless, irresponsible, or extremely selfish things.

They instruct people on how to game search engine results (which I know many people do, but not quite as disingenuously as this). They talk about how to "get yours" and how to "not let other people get in your way". They ramble on about art in that way that makes my teeth grind, because they don't even have a clue what they mean and are much more interested in how to scoot through life doing very little work than they are in actually creating anything interesting.

Ugh. It's every stupid conversation you've ever overheard, only broadcast as though it's really, really, good advice.

And if you're wondering how I suddenly know this, I've found a way to make a little tiny bit of extra money while the B is sleeping by transcribing sections of podcasts. It really only works out if you can retain bits of text in your head while typing the bit you just heard a second ago, and if you type rather quickly and with few mistakes.

And no, I'm not telling you where. Most of you have "real jobs" for one, and don't need these micropayments, and for those of you for whom that's not true, I don't fancy the extra competition! The postings disappear quickly enough as it is.

However, it is nice to earn a little bit of money again, even if the amount is really small. Transcriptions are a bit like playing a game, sort of, but getting paid to do it. It's a game to see how quickly I can do it, how many times I can avoid having to rewind, how many of the names I can research quickly on Google to spell correctly.

So, in case any of you were wondering how I fill my time when the B naps, that's how I've been doing it for the last few weeks. But honestly, save yourself the time and avoid 90% of the podcasts out there. Some of them make me feel like my brain is trying to liquefy and seep out of my ears, if only to escape the nattering on.

It Struck Me As Odd

I couldn't work out what looked so strange when I braved the ongoing snowstorm to take an important letter out to the mailbox, but it finally occurred to me what it was after I got back in the house.



The snowstorm started about 7 or 8 a.m., and I took this picture at noon. No one has driven on the street in front of my house since the snow began. It's completely flat, undisturbed snow. I felt weird putting footprints into the snow in front of my house, making my way to the mailbox, but I wanted to bring the trash can up to the house anyway.

A Quiet Baby Moment

At what age are you too old to become overwhelmed with the world, slump against a wall, grab your sleeve, and suck on your fingers?

Because I think the world would be a better place if we didn't put an age cap on that sort of thing.