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Kyra is working on a final in U.S. History where she has to pick a decade and do a bunch of research about it. She picked the greatest decade of all time, which of course was the 80’s. For her assignment she interviewed me and Laralee about what it was like to grow up in the 80’s, including our favorite TV shows, books, music, things we did, and even phrases we used.

It was fun to reminisce about all of that stuff. Laralee was a huge Huey Lewis fan back in the 80’s… she had all of the albums (on cassette, of course), posters on her wall, and the highlight of her entire childhood was going to one of his concerts. I remembered that Dirk had one of the Huey Lewis albums, and we’d play it in his 1972 Plymouth Duster while we drove around getting beat up by kids on the highway by Taco Bell. Yeah, long story there.

Today Alex interviewed and was offered his first real* job. We’ve been encouraging him for the past few months to get a summer job, but he’s been sort of lackadaisical about doing it. (In his defense, he’s been pretty busy with homework, finals, projects, martial arts, Scouting, and church stuff!)

He went over to Papa John’s Pizza today, interviewed briefly, and was offered the job on the spot. He accepted and had to participate in some training where– according to him– the presentation focused largely on how much quality Papa John’s puts into its product while the other guys are basically feeding their customers something dredged from the bottom of a septic tank. He said they kept mentioning Domino’s and Pizza Hut by name, and how they’re not nearly as awesome as Papa John’s.

So anyway, he starts next week. It’ll be interesting to see how much pizza he brings home. Luckily Papa John’s pizza is pretty good… especially that garlic butter sauce, which I’m sure is chock full of quality.

* A “real” job means one where he’s not working for me or one of my friends.

Alex spent much of today running aerators to raise money for his high adventure Scout camp this summer. When he came home, he hopped in the shower and then decided he’d style his hair a bit.

I like this ‘do even better than his earlier experiments.

One exception to not huffing various spray cans is vanilla.

I was making some frosting for cupcakes, and couldn’t help but breathe deeply of the vanilla bottle. Wow, huffing that stuff is like snorting angels up your nose and having them play their harps inside your nasal passages. Or… something. Whatever, it’s amazing.

Today was one of those “get things done” days, where I did a whole bunch of stuff that’s been sitting on my to-do list for a while. One of them was to buy huge pieces of foam board so I could mount some new poster-size photo prints for my office.

I had to pick up some spray adhesive as well, which I sprayed on the foam boards before (carefully) laying the prints on them. I peeked at the warning label on the side of the can and hoo boy it was pretty serious.

This stuff contains hexane, acetone, propane, butane, toluene, and a bunch of other highly flammable gases. It has exciting warnings about how this can cause headaches and nausea, as well as permanent damage to the central nervous system. Wow.

I used it outside, because this stuff is super annoying if it gets on any surface (the surface feels tacky for the rest of eternity). Laralee told me I was going to be in trouble if the grass died where I’d over-sprayed the boards.

And I guess huffing this stuff is right out.

Wow, May 11 and it looks like this?

We only had a dusting… Boulder had at least six inches of snow!

I was reading an Amazon review and ran across this sweet quote:

And any time I think of sudo, I can’t help but remember the classic XKCD comic:

Ahh, memories.

Tonight was the annual Skyline High School awards night. Alex received an invitation letter a couple of weeks ago, which means he was going to get an award (he didn’t know what it would be). So he and I headed over there tonight.

As it turned out, he was given an award for excellence in the engineering program, as well as a second award for maintaining a 3.75 GPA for three years running.

Clearly, he was pretty excited about these.

I have the AccuWeather app on my phone and tablet. Generally it’s pretty good: it’s easy to use and provides the basic information I want. Is it going to be sunny tomorrow? Cold? Rainy? That’s really all I need from a weather app.

For whatever reason, the AccuWeather people programmed some sort of crazy fearmongering mode. Every now and then, it goes nuts and pops up all sorts of alerts about horrific weather conditions I should expect. At times during the winter, it was a daily ritual to see a warning about an EXTREME WINTER CONDITIONS, when in fact a few snowflakes were drifting down.

Well, today it warned that Longmont was under not only a SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING, but a TORNADO WARNING. Holy smokes! I was in Longmont all day, and I’m positive that at no point during the warm, sunny weather did I feel in danger of a tornado swooping down from the sky.

Methinks a better name for this app would be FearWeather.