"Even-tempered Kate beyond Thunderdome"

Tonight was the city wide elementary school choir festival. They hold this annually, each elementary school has their choir sing one song in the festival. In previous years, this was held at the Provo Tabernacle, but the Tabernacle is unavailable right now, because it burned to the ground six months ago.

Enter the Thunderdome! One of the High Schools in town are the "Thunderbirds", their gym is called the Thunderdome. It was the best place they could find to hold the festival.

Anyway, Kate sang, seemed to enjoy herself, and only has one more week of getting up early for choir practice before they knock off for the year. Here's a video:

(No zoom on the video function, sorry. We were also really not close at all, so no clear pictures.)

Now, about the Thunderdome. For some reason, the bleachers have incredibly tall seats. I'm not sure why, I imagine the guys that built it were all seven foot tall. My feet barely touched the ground normally, I had to sit kind of funny to get my feet on the ground. This made my legs go to sleep. The reason why they resort to battle to the death format in post-apocalyptic Thunderdome? Because the seats are so uncomfortable. At the end of the choir festival, the kids stomped their feet and made a lot of noise to cheer for their teachers. You could almost hear them chanting "Two men enter, One man leaves". Despite all this, and the fact that it was a choir festival, no sign of Tina Turner tonight.

It wasn't that bad, really. The adults mostly tempered their urge to talk to the captive audience, for the most part, and they kept it to just the other side of one hour. We just need to find them a venue that allows the audience to keep the use of their limbs afterwards for next year.

Anyone want to send a girl to camp?

Kate wants to go to a 5th grade summer camp. It's 'only' $100 for a week, but they want it this week. Andd they want you to hurry and sign up - space is limited! There's nothing like a high pressure sales job against a 11 year old.

Anyway, we've got a lot we can do with the $100, we haven't decided if it's worth it yet. We are giving it a couple of days to think about it. Kate really wants to go, and is willing to pay the $3 she's got in her pocket.

I have the money, I could pay for it, but we have other things we would like to do with the money as well. Like pay medical bills when the baby is born. And register the van. And buy a new refrigerator. And we already paid for passes for them to do stuff this year. (Water park, mini golf, baseball games, etc.)

So, anyone want to put their two cents in? Do we pony up the money in the next day or so and send her off? Kate has $300 in her savings account. Do we have her pay for it if she wants to go that bad? I don't think she knows she has the money in there right now, but now that I think about it, maybe that's the way to go, make her pay for it...

Or, does someone want to sponsor her? I have a link on the blog - "Send a girl to camp". Also a link here on this post:

Dirty Rotten Stinking Allergies

Nearly every year I spend a little bit of time complaining about allergies. I don't remember having such problems as a kid. It seems like every year, I have a week or two in the early Spring, and a week in the early Summer, when I get hammered by allergies.

Last weekend (8-9 days ago), I was knocked off my feet by something. Saturday night I did not sleep well. Sunday morning I woke up with a splitting headache, I was dizzy, overheated, and ached everywhere. I slept about 18 hours on Sunday. I stayed home from work on Monday, and didn't really leave the couch for the better part of the day. I was headed for another sick day on Tuesday, but some things came up at work I needed to deal with, and I went in.

The headache continued through to this weekend. Then last night, I was sitting here in the house, and realized that for a good part of the week, my eyes have been all kinds of itchy as well. Allergies. Why didn't I think of that sooner. It's not like I haven't been dealing with them all this time. I have a strong suspicion it's a bush in my back yard that gets me. I hacked it to bits several years ago, but I didn't dig the roots out, and it eventually grew back.

Last night I took a Benadryl before I went to bed. I felt tons better this morning. In the last few hours, I've started into a stuffy nose, the headache is back, and it's so much fun. Hopefully it passes in the next few days.

It's better than it used to be. Before I started poking my head into bushes around the house, I used to spend a week flat on my back in bed...

Dinner and a Show

Tonight we went to dinner and a play with our friends, Matt and Talia. For dinner, we went to this new little hole in the wall Mexican restaurant in town called Laura's Kitchen. We had their carne asada plate. It was pretty good. They also serve tamales for $1.25 each, but only on the weekends. I asked if they included Friday evenings in the weekend, but sadly, they did not.

The play we went to was called "Persuasion". It was adapted from the Jane Austen story of the same name, and written by a high school friend of Tara's.

I read this on Twitter a week or so ago, I though of Tara:

Heroin is a drug;
heroine is a female hero.
Jane Austen fans are prone to heroine overdoses.

The play was about time travel, love once rejected, sailing and adventure, pretty people with mirrors, and had just a little bit of "Naval language".

That makes Jane Austen sound more exciting than it seems to be to me, having never read any of the books and only peripheral experience with the countless versions of the stories that Tara has on DVDs. As far as I can tell, they all have a lot of walking, some dancing, talking, brooding, and more talking. I don't know. But I love my wife, and I go with her to the plays.

Anyway, this one was well acted. We were up at the top of the theater, which is a change for us, we normally sit down on the front row, we switched our normal tickets to a different night. I sat right next to the production booth, which had a kid running it that seemed to be paying very little attention to the play itself. For a while, I couldn't really tell what he was doing, but I figured out towards the end of the play that he was running the microphones. He had a computer screen with the inputs that needed to be on in each scene, when it was time to make a change, a blue string of lights came on at his station.

The set was also pretty interesting. They had a large semi circle in the middle, which turned back and forth. They would rotate one scene, and stage the next off stage, when it was time, a little curtain went up, and the rotated the scene in.

One last thing. About two thirds of the way through, one of the characters falls and gets hurt. She jumped and crumpled to the ground. Matt busted up laughing, and made half of the rest of the audience laugh with him. I think it was supposed to be a serious scene, but it wasn't tonight...

Ball Night!

The BYU basketball team so nearly made it to the Elite Eight tonight. Then they blew it in overtime. They had a great season. Now the Jimmermania here at the house can die down a bit.

Hopefully Coach Rose sticks around. (He evaded the question on the radio tonight.) If they go somewhere else, maybe they'd sell us their house at a 75% discount...

In other news, the BYU Baseball team had their home opener tonight. We had free passes. They sent four free passes to all BYU employees, good for one of the three games this weekend. I ended up with something like twenty of them. There were maybe a hundred people at the game tonight. I chalk it up to the fact that the basketball team was playing in the Sweet Sixteen game at the time (It was halftime when left for the game), and it was cold and potentially going to rain. (It didn't rain, and wasn't super cold, really.)


They ended up winning, beating San Diego State 8-4. I took Kate, Mary, and Emma to the game, they seemed to have a good time. After the game, they were handing out more tickets. We would go back tomorrow night, but Tara reminds me that we have other plans tomorrow night. I forgot about them. Maybe we will go back on Saturday. I've got about a dozen extra tickets for tomorrow night or Saturday, if anyone wants them.

The first pile of "baseball game peanut shells" of the year...

New superpower

I discovered today that I have a new superpower - I'm completely invisible to the Boy Scouts of America!

Six months ago, I tried to register as our local troop and pack chartered organizational representative. Seemed pretty straight forward - fill out the form, send it in. I had our cub committee chair take it in for me, she was headed to the district office anyway. They wouldn't take it, I hadn't taken the online Youth Protection Training.

I took the training. I gave the form back to her, she was headed up there again. Seemed to take that time. They took the form, and acted like they would process the application.

Several weeks later, I get the form in the mail, with a note that I needed the Youth Protection Training done, and the certificate from it with the application. Stapled to the application was the Youth Protection Training certificate. This was a bit odd, I thought, but we had a Roundtable meeting a few days later, so I took my form with me. I showed it to the district executive, he wasn't sure what to say, but took my application to take back to the office.

Six weeks later, it's time to recharter. Our scout committee chair tells me that I'm not on the online leader list, but maybe it's just lagging behind a bit. He planned to head on out to the district office to charter the troop, or something like that. Turns out the Scout office claims no knowledge of me, and I have to fill out another application.

I'm not a big fan of filling out forms, and especially not when I've already done it once, but I do it again. Things seem ok, they took the charter documents.

Now it's about three and a half months later. Today I got an email from the district executive that our unit's charter had gotten sent back, they needed to get my application to resend in the charter. I tried my very best to keep my filter engaged...

I called the district executive, and while I didn't express my aversion to filling out forms, I did talk about this little history lesson I'm sharing here. He still wants a new application filled, since they don't know where either of the others are.

I went online, they have a form online that you can type your answers to the form, but it only fills out the first page, and not really all that well. I ended up filling out the new form, going and finding my training certs again, and getting everything ready. I suppose this one I should take up there myself, and get them to sign some sort of form saying the received delivery of the stinking thing.

I fully expect to get a call soon, where they tell me they have my form, but they don't believe I am a real person...

Suddenly my laptop is a bully

Message from my laptop:

"Out of power. Plug in within 30 seconds, or be suspended to RAM." (Something to that effect)

I moved faster than I have all day long, and plugged the thing in. The laptop essentially said, "thanks, but I am shutting down anyway."

Not one to take to bullying, I am typing this post from out desktop PC...

Book Review

52
Greg Cox

Another Comic Novelization!

I've been reading a non-fiction book off and on for longer than I would like to admit. I don't know why it's taken so long to finish, maybe it's because the author is British, and he is writing with an accent. I've got maybe a half dozen books I am currently somewhere in the middle of, and will eventually finish up. Last week I got this book from Amazon, and decided to take a break from the other book I was reading.

This book is a novelization of the year long DC comic series that followed "Infinite Crisis", but came before "Final Crisis". (I wonder what the next 'Crisis' event for DC will be.) After "Infinite Crisis", Superman didn't have his powers, Batman was away trying to be less paranoid or something, and Wonder Woman was busy trying to be a normal human for a while. The world was left to other heroes for a year.

The book primarily deals with the Booster Gold, Batwoman, The Question, and Black Adam story lines of the comic book series. The book is pretty violent, and the there were things about the book I definitely didn't like, but they are also story elements that are being pushed in the comics these days, I hear.

Reading the book makes me wish there was a way for the comic novelization genre to succeed. It would be nice to have some well written comic novels to read from time to time. I don't have the time, money, or really the inclination to collect comic books. I do like Superman / Batman / etc, we have on DVD a number of the TV series that have been done.

Anyway, the day was saved without Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. But only barely. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming...

Teach me how to "Jimmer"

It's "Jimmer Madness" here at the house, and has been for several months. I think there are several members of the house that might swoon if Jimmer came to the door.

Any way, this weekend, Lily's been walking around the house singing the "Teach Me How To Jimmer" song. This evening, Ruth came up with this little move that is her version of teaching people how to Jimmer - around the back, then through the legs...

Gutters

I haven't been up on top of the shed in a number of years to clean gutters and the top of it off. In hindsight, I should have. The gutters are a mess. Our neighbors have a big box elder tree that hangs over the shed and part of our back yard, and it drop tons of leaves and seeds every year. It wouldn't break my heart to see it go. Those trees also attract box elder bugs, which are all over the place with this tree.


I worked on the thing last week, at the bottom of the picture you can see spots where I had pulled debris out of the thing. Towards the top of the picture you can sort of see where flashing is bent upwards. My shed floods with water every time it rains now. This has slowly gotten worse over the last couple of years. I suppose it's mostly my own fault, for not cleaning our the gutter.

I cleaning up some, I found that the flashing was bent so bad, that it allowed about four inches of space where the shed was completely exposed. Add the leaves and stuff to it, and water must have just been flowing in ever time it rained. For now, I have the flashing bent back into close to the right shape, and used a brick to hold it down. We will see what happens on Monday or Tuesday when it rains...

Kate's play

Kate had a play last night for her class. It sounds like her teacher is a fan of depressing WWII plays. (I'm not sure there are really 'happy' WWII plays...) This one was about a concentration camp for children. Before the presentation last night, the teacher was telling everyone about how her entire class was in tears after a performance on Wednesday night. Is it really a good thing to have your entire class of 11 and 12 year old kids in tears? Isn't that something that could be considered at least on the road to emotional abuse? (Maybe that's too inflammatory of a statement. I'm sure if I said that at the school, I would end up in a meeting with the principal, the teacher, and likely someone from the district, and I am sure the school doesn't want that...)


Anyway, Kate says she is ok, she seems to be, I guess. She was "Child #6", and had a few lines. Any other time she was on stage, her part was to look scared, sad, wishful, and more sad. She did a pretty good job.

Some things I never connected (or knew) until the last week or so

Dishwashers:

Sometime last week, I came home and loaded up the dishwasher. Having a dishwasher full of dirty dishes that won't start is almost as bad as a washing machine full of laundry that with won't drain or won't spin. (Or both) I would press one of the buttons on the front, and the dishwasher would display some set of buttons that had absolutely nothing to do with the button I pressed. The thing definitely didn't want to start.

After doing some research, lots of people on different forums talked about bad controllers boards doing this. I tried killing the power from the breaker box, but that didn't help, really. I found a site or two that talked about "showroom mode" for dishwashers. One that was talking about a sort of similar model as ours said that if you pressed the rinse button (which we don't have) five times in five seconds, then "showroom mode" gets enabled. They talked about hitting cancel twice in succession to get out of it.

Cancel wasn't really working all that much, so I started pressing different buttons five times in five seconds, followed by other buttons a couple of times in succession. I was able to eventually find the right permutation to get the dishwasher to act normally again.

"Showroom mode" - who knew.

Nuclear Meltdown:

For some reason, before this past weekend, I never realized that a nuclear meltdown involved actual melting. I'm not sure why. I hope things over in Japan don't get worse.

Something I read on Twitter, it made me think of my wife:

Heroin is a drug; heroine is a female hero. Jane Austen fans are prone to heroine overdoses.

The school thinks we have nothing better to do:

Tomorrow we have what I have been calling a "non-optional after school activity". Kate has a play for her class, they perform tonight and tomorrow. It's something about the Holocaust. (She also studied the Civil and Revolutionary wars this year. Not sure who picked that trifecta.) Last week we had the annual Kindergarten program one night. We got there early, but there were no seats. We sat way in the back. We couldn't see or hear, it's a good thing they don't change the program ever. We also have one or two choir performances coming up in the next couple of weeks. I don't think our kids are really over scheduled at all. They have Activity days, piano lessons, and choir. That's about it, but the school seems to think we should be over there all month. Parent/Teacher conferences are next week, but I'm not going. (It's better for everyone involved if I don't...)

Our gutters

I should have cleaned out our gutters about two years ago. Every time it rains, the shed floods. I started on Saturday, and filled out huge yard waste can, but only put a dent in 20 feet of space above the carport gutter. I haven't even started in on the gutter there itself. There is a Box Elder tree in our neighbor's backyard that makes a mess every year. Looks like it might take several more weeks worth of yard waste cans full of gutter debris to finish up. I don't want to really toss it in the garden, I don't want ten thousand little Box Elder trees in my garden later in the summer.

It's actually kind of hard to walk on two feet

I watched part of a robot marathon a couple of weeks ago. (I lead a wild life, don't I?) These little robots were walking around this track. Every once in a while, one of them would either veer way off the track or would just fall over. After they fell over, they would try to pick themselves up. If they couldn't get up, suddenly you would see 4 or 5 slightly excited engineers all gathered around the robot on the ground. (It kind of reminded me of the time on my mission where I hit a parked car with my bike. I couldn't get up, all the people around me were talking about the car and the bike...)

Anyway, at one point, one of the robots fell over and couldn't get up. 4 engineers came over, picked the robot up, and set it on it's feet. The robot fell over again. They picked it up again, it fell over on the other side. They picked up the robot and took it to the back where a table was. It was over there for a long time. Walking looks hard. I don't expect to see an army of robot soldiers marching through the streets any time soon.

That's all I've got for now

Normal pictures from a perfectly normal child....

"Happy girl on a boat"

"Happy girl in a forest"

"Happy bug on a bunny"

"Giant Monster Vampire Bee"

Pi day (Yesterday)

Yesterday was Pi day. A couple of days ago, Kate asked if we were having pie for pi day. It had the start of the "teen aged daughter voice" to it, but not completely in that voice. (I'm not sure what that completely means going forward, but I do know that I am edging ever closer to having a teenager in the house...)


Anyway, for dinner last night we had shepherd's pie and lemon meringue pie. Reviews were mixed in the house, but reviews are mixed in the house for every meal.

What makes this noteworthy? It's the fact that I went to the store to get the lemon pie, and the shelves at the store with the frozen pies were in large measure empty. They tried moving the pies to the front and standing them up for a bunch of them so it looked like the shelves were still stocked. (Empty looking shelves are bad?) There had been a run on frozen pies yesterday. That's how I know I live in a nerd town. (Says the man that was also at the store buying a pie for Pi day...)

Double Rainbow

When I was a kid, someone showed me a picture of a double rainbow they took in someplace like Ireland, Boswana, or something like that. They went on and on about how rare double rainbows are.

I don't know why, maybe it's the mountains that are so close, but we get double rainbows a lot. Here is one from our front porch. The second rainbow has already started to fade. Usually the second one fades pretty quickly...

Apple Tree!

This week at Costco, they had fruit trees for sale. They were $10 for regular trees, and $15 for trees that had grafts of differing types of fruits on them. $15 for a fruit tree seemed like a pretty good deal to me, so we got a combo apple tree. (They had plum and cherry as well, but those seemed kind of messy...)


I planted the tree yesterday. Hopefully the kids will let it grow a bit. I don't know if it's in the best place that it could be, but it's in a corner of the yard, and gets full sun just about the entire day, so we will see what happens. (The second picture is kind of hard to see.)

The tree has a branch each of Honeycrisp, Fuji, Gala, and Golden Delicious apples. I don't know if the trunk is one of those, or if it's a fifth variety. We will just have to see.

Flower Garden

Last year, after the funeral, we planted a flower garden in the back yard. I tried to get a mixture of flowers for it, so that we would get some during this time of year, some as it get more towards real Spring, and things to blossom in the summer and late summer. Our first flowers of the year came out in the last few days, right on schedule.

Hope's birthday

Yesterday is the day we are calling Hope's birthday. We had planned to celebrate it with the kids, but piano practice and a thing at the school meant there was only an hour later yesterday. We went over to the cemetery today, everyone got to leave flowers. The little kids are still a little bit confused, I think. Afterwards, we took the kids out for dinner.

It's been a year now, and Tara is pregnant right now. Not too many people have known until recently, but I think I told all my family, so there it is. We've been for a couple of ultrasounds already, things seem to be going well. Tara had an appointment with her doctor yesterday. (If I had been thinking, I might have scheduled the appointment for a day that wasn't March 10th, but it worked out ok.)

Happy birthday, Hope.