Author: cosmo

Remember the much-maligned talking Barbie doll who said “Math is hard… let’s go shopping!”? Ahh, those were good times.

Fox news needs to go shopping, I guess.

For some reason, when we go on family trips they tend to be epic.

Last month we toured the deserts of Utah, ending up in St. George in the far southwest corner. The total distance was about 1,600 miles.

This week we’re heading to St. Louis, which is about 900 miles each way.

Our plan for early June is even more ambitious: Denver to Phoenix, hang for a few days, then west to San Diego and Sea World, north to Los Angeles and its beaches, up through Las Vegas, and back home to Denver.

On the map it’s 2,500 miles, but when you add all of the driving around the cities and so forth we’re probably going to hit 2,800. Not quite as epic as the famous 4,000-mile Seattle trip we made nine years ago, but still a lot of pavement to cover.

It makes our Yellowstone trip this August seem short by comparison: only 1,200 miles.

Although at times it might be nice to fly, the cost for all five of us is prohibitive. Plus, don’t get me started about the farce of traveling on the airlines these days. But all in all, I think driving is a great way to see the country. You really get to see the landscape change around you, and stop to see interesting or unusual places you might otherwise never think about.

I’m the kind of person who’s all about the journey, but Laralee is all about the destination. It makes for an interesting mix on these odysseys.

Luckily we have an Odyssey. Hah! Get it?

Alex and I are considering joining a local Tae Kwon Do class, so we went to the dojo tonight to see what it was like. It turns out we were told the wrong time, so when we arrived it was time for a kickboxing class. We shrugged and decided to participate anyway.

We worked on a few punches and kicks, then did some core strength exercises, then reviewed some self-defense moves, and then did more core strength stuff. And after that, some core strength stuff. All I can say is I apparently don’t have a lot of core strength. I’m flexible– I had no problem doing all the bends and stretches– but when it came to the bicycle moves and leg lifts, I was straining.

After an hour (we thought the class was only half an hour) we were pretty tired, but both decided it was a good time. We’re going to see if we can actually show up for tae kwon do in the next few days, and figure out if we want to get in the program.

Last week Comcast was awarded the Golden Poo Award for being the “worst company in America”.

They’re certainly earning that award today. I’m trying to update the credit card information on my account so I can actually pay them for their service, and after 30 minutes and about six transfers between agents, I’m still working on it.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

So some whack-job tries (and fails) to blow up a car bomb in the middle of Times Square. It was kind of a surprise, but I must say the response of the government is– sadly– completely unsurprising.

Of course they’ve labeled this a “terrorist incident” because these days, anything remotely dangerous must be the work of the boogeymen terrorists. There are no longer unbalanced individuals with a vendetta against the world, or just having a bad day. Every bad thing that happens, or almost happens, or is even just bouncing around the head of someone who’s particularly grumpy, is now a terrorist incident.

That notwithstanding, this scare gives the government the perfect excuse to expand the surveillance society they’re so keen to build. From a New York Times article:

Every vehicle. In the heart of New York City. It staggers the mind to consider how much information would be collected to facilitate this. Thousands (tens of thousands?) of security cameras will be needed, not to mention vast computation and data storage capabilities. Everyone in Manhattan can kiss their privacy goodbye.

But the real kicker for me is this move– like so many measures enacted by the government in the past decade– will most likely be completely useless. From the same article:

So we’ll spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, employ a huge staff, monitor millions of people, and get absolutely nowhere.

Stop the madness. Please.

Yep, that’s pretty much the truth.

I’m working on some server upgrades for a client, and kind of twiddling my thumbs while I wait for some of the processes to run. So I took a jaunt over to my favorite site for learning new and interesting things, Wikipedia.

Tonight’s fascinating thing I learned: there are fifteen different types of water ice. They’re all different “phases” of ice, formed at various temperatures and pressures (and transitions between temperatures and pressures, as it turns out).

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle he invents something called Ice-9, and as it happens there actually is a substance called Ice-9– although thankfully it’s not the civilization-ending beastie Vonnegut describes. Some of the later phases of ice were discovered only a few years ago… demonstrating that there’s always something new to learn, even about things as seemingly commonplace as ice cubes.

It was almost exactly 17 years ago that I bought my first car. I was a junior in college and picked up a 1982 Nissan 200SX from a Turkish grad student who was moving back home and needed to get rid of it. A week after buying it, I drove to the Smoky Mountains for spring break and managed to completely bash in the driver’s door by hitting a guardrail at 60mph. It certainly gave the car class… or something… along with the fuzzy blue seat covers I installed to hide the awful coffee stains (or whatever) that were all over the real seats.

A few months later, my friends Sarah and Nat bought me a set of baby keys to hang from my rear-view mirror. They told me the keys represented the keys of Happiness, Life, Love, Luck, and Lust. (Yes, lust… hey, I was a 20-year-old male college student.) I dutifully hung them from my rear-view mirror, and a few years later when I traded in the Nissan for a Saturn I transplanted the keys. After totaling that Saturn and getting another one, I again moved the keys.

For 17 years those keys have hung in my cars, often prompting questions from passengers. Over the years, sitting in the sun, they faded until you couldn’t really read the writing on them and the once-bright baby colors had become a uniform shade of beige.

Now I have my fourth car, and as I was cleaning out my Saturn (with a bit of a tear in my eye– heck, I’ve had that car longer than I’ve had kids) I took down the keys and decided it was time to retire them. But the idea still brings a grin to my face, so I bought a new set of baby keys and labeled them.

Love
Success
Life
Wisdom
Happiness

I figured maybe Lust wasn’t the best thing to display in my car, and now that I’ve grown older I feel like wisdom might be more useful than luck. But the idea is the same. Who wouldn’t want to have, say, the key to happiness?

So here’s my new set of keys.

They proudly hang from the rear-view mirror of my car, and remind me of two awesome friends who had (and continue to have) just the right mix of humor, goofiness, and wisdom.

We’ve been without a pet for a bit over six months now, and Kyra’s been making her case for why our family needs a little critter running around. Finally Laralee and I relented, and yesterday I took the kids down to Westminster so they could pick out some rats.

Yes, that’s right: rats. It’s easy to associate rats with the sewer-dwelling disease carriers, but in fact they’re smart, social, and very friendly. Apparently with enough work you can train them to come when you call them, and Kyra even claims you can train them to use a litter box.

Apparently they do best if there’s at least two of them– solitary rats aren’t very happy or healthy– so we decided to get three so each kid has one of their own.

Zack picked the biggest one and named her Chocolate:

Alex’s is sort of medium-sized and named Coconut:

And Kyra picked the baby (about the size of a mouse) and named her Bella:

We picked up a decent cage for five bucks via Craigslist (which sure beat the hundred-dollar cages at the pet store!) and stocked it with a wheel, some boxes, a little hammock, and a bowl of rat pellets. Yum!

So far they’re actually quite fun. Who woulda thunk?

Seen on Cracked: