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.

Goodbye old truck

Followers of this blog know that I stopped driving my truck in November because it didn't pass inspection. It needed a minimum of a new windshield, muffler, and tires. I didn't have the money to fix it up, (we had to get tires, a radiator, and catalytic converter for the van in the last couple of months) and I have toyed with the idea of putting the truck into a demolition derby.

The demolition derby idea wasn't going to work for me this year. It's pretty expensive to get the thing ready for a derby, and from everything I read, the regulars target the newbies in a derby, you are pretty much guaranteed a broken thumb or two on your first demolition derby. Demolition derby forums kind of indicated that you should watch 8 or 9 of them first, and visit with people that have experience. I'm not willing to have a broken thumb right now, and the money to get it ready would have been about the same amount to get it on the road again.

Today I decided to post the thing online, and see if I got any nibbles to sell the truck. I posted the thing on the ksl.com classifieds, and accidentally put the wrong mileage in. I had four emails on the thing before I could even get the mileage corrected on the post. In the first hour, I had ten emails about the post.

Someone came over this afternoon, test drove it, and bought it for $800. Maybe I could have gotten $900. They paid cash, I sign`ed the title over, and the money is in my bank account already. I'm a little surprised it went down so fast. Maybe the market for 18 year old trucks with over 200K miles is a good one these days...

Either way, I can stop pretending at this point that we aren't a one car family. I made a key to the van for my keyring on Saturday, so I guess I had bought into the idea. (I went two years without a key to the van...) I guess I will have to stop being lazy, and really take up walking now.

I have some circuit breakers listed on ebay, if anyone out there is interested. Three days left, no bids yet.

Dr. Who scarf #3

Shortly after making Emma's scarf, I was walking to work, and it was cold. I started a scarf of my own. Then I hurt my hand, and took some time off from it, but it warmed up a little here. I got cold over the weekend, last night I came home to rain and slush, and it looked like the morning walk to church was going to be fairly cold, so I finished the scarf.


It's 15 feet long, which is just about right. The girls thought it was too long, but it's just long enough to wrap around all six of the kids...