I’ll stop soon, but how could I not show mother and baby?
동장군의 기승같이 세상에왔구나 난 천군만마를 얻었다 제일 용감하고 강한 흰말타고 끈임없이 달리는 너의꿈처럼.세상의 필요한 큰사람이되어라 바다의 거친파도 너의앞에서 잠재울수 있는 지혜와 용기를 가져라.사랑해
And the kid is so darn adorable.
Except…that young man has stolen my wife away. Grandma is leaving me tomorrow to fly off to New York state and spend 3 weeks with him, and without me.
Any financial types out there who like browsing through 990 tax forms? I don’t understand this stuff at all, but I’ve been sent the publicly available stuff for Ken Ham’s organizations: the 2015 AiG 990 and 2015 Crosswater Canyon 990. It’s all fairly mundane. All I learned was that AiG’s total revenues went up by about a million dollars over the previous year, to about $22.5 million, that the Creation “Museum” is losing money, and that Ham employs 8 relatives on his staff. Nice racket.
I don’t see anything otherwise dodgy in the report, but then I wouldn’t. Anything jumping out at you tax wizards?
Say hello to Knut Zachary Myers, son of Jihae Park and Connlann Myers, freshly arrived on planet Earth.
Another photo of father and son.
Watch out — I might just turn this blog into daily pictures of grandchildren.
There will be no further blogging until this state of uncomfortable tension breaks.
Tenterhooks, by the way, are hooks attached to wooden frames used to stretch woolen or linen cloth while drying. I’m pretty sure they’re also used to torture cenobites.
Will explain later.
How nerdy and SJW can it get? It’s called Potlatch, and it’s a game written with the assistance of Indians to educate people about a misunderstood principle.
Potlatch, the game is a strategic, educational card game based on indigenous philosophies. It is designed to meet K-12 educational standards for teaching about native history, economics, culture, and government. Potlatch, the game, was developed as a community effort with local elders and language experts. The game is written in both English and Lushootseed, the indigenous language of the Pacific Northwest. Game mechanics are based on sharing resources to meet other players’ needs for food, materials, technology, and knowledge.
What sold me was this recommendation, though:
“A big change in thinking from other games. I started out thinking about what I was getting and by the end it was more important the way I was sharing.”
Oh my god. If it’s any good, can we buy a bunch of copies, and then lock all the billionaires of the world in some rooms and force them to play until they grasp the concept?
I tried something different this year: jollof rice and hot pepper soup, with naan on the side. I have no idea how authentically Nigerian they were, but they were delicious, especially the soup. Something about the base — onions, habeneros, and garlic — was particularly tasty. +1, would cook again.
Dessert will be in about an hour, and I reverted to an American traditional: hot apple pie and ice cream. Come on over, there’s plenty to go around.
Also, much of my highly domestic day was spent scrubbing floors and moving furniture, and I now have a splendid home office, with room to sprawl and lots of bookshelves. My wife is already calling it my man cave, despite the fact that it’s a corner room with lots of windows, and isn’t cave-like at all. In retaliation, I told her that the living room which is now empty (or almost empty) of my junk can be her woman-cave.
Who am I supposed to thank? Should I just be shouting “thank you” into the void, or feel generically grateful without cause or purpose, or be looking for some reason to feel I owe it to the universe to be praising it? Because I’m not feeling it.
This isn’t my kind of holiday. What day is Blamesgiving? Because I’d rather be snarling at a few evil bastards and punching them in face. Donald Trump, Ajit Pai, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, the Alabama Idjit Brigade that’s lobbying for Roy Moore, all the people who picket Planned Parenthood, Republicans in general, Betsy Devos, Ken Ham…my list is endless, and just thinking about them all is making my punchin’ arm tired.
It’s probably a good thing my wife is me clean house and confining me to the kitchen to cook today’s dinner, because otherwise I’d just be boiling in frustration and bitterness.
Maybe you can thank her for keeping me out of your face today.
Mike Hughes has built a steam-powered rocket, which is kind of cool. It takes some skill to assemble that kind of thing.
Mike Hughes does not trust in science, which is kind of stupid.
According to the AP, Hughes says he expects his new rocket to hurl him through the skies above the Mojave Desert ghost town of Amboy at up to 500 miles per hour for roughly one mile, attaining a peak altitude of 1,800 feet before it deploys two parachutes. Hughes is a proponent of the Flat Earth theory; the Research Flat Earth group is his main sponsor. Hughes does not “believe in science,” which he told the AP has “no difference” from science fiction.
Now that is a curious statement, because he claims to be doing this stunt in order to test a scientific claim, that the earth is round, which means he is purporting to do this for a scientific purpose. If he actually knew anything about how science works, though, he’d be able to think this through and realize that launching himself 1800 feet in the air to snap a picture a) doesn’t actually test his hypothesis that the earth is flat, and b) has been done safely and intelligently many, many times before. He could attach his camera to a weather balloon that could easily loft itself to 100,000 feet and take many pictures.
So this exercise makes no sense at all, and will probably get him killed. He launched himself before for a shorter distance and came out physically wrecked from the acceleration and the rough landing. Now he’s pumping up his steam rocket for even more acceleration.
What an absurd way to commit suicide, for such a pointless purpose.
This video is a surprising history of those sea monkeys that you used to see advertised in comic books — I raise them routinely and mundanely to feed to fish, and I was surprised by a couple of things. First, the “instant life” gimmick was faked — they lied about the contents of the little packages you got when you ordered them (I never did that part, I get the eggs direct), and the other surprise…well, if you must know, skip ahead to around 11 minutes in the video.
Now I’m just glad I never ordered them from the original company, and Braunhut never got a penny of my money.
We live in a somewhat unfashionably old house — not old enough to be exotic, but old enough to be a bit, well, shabby. That’s exactly the right word for it. It was built in the late 1940s by the Wohler family, who were sort of a big deal in these parts, since they owned the most important bar in town, the Old #1. It was sold shortly afterwards to Ed LaFave, a banker, who was also one of the civic leaders who led the effort to get the University of Minnesota Morris built here, in the late 1950s and 60s. So anyway, we’re sort of connected to small town royalty through this house.
LaFave had bought it for his mother — his home was across the street — and she lived her for several decades, which means, of course, that our home is known as Granny LaFave’s House to all the locals. That’s fine, none of the subsequent tenants, including us, have had her endurance, so she earned it. Unfortunately, while the interior was quite nice, the exterior had gotten a bit run down over the years. Here’s what it looked like a few years ago.
There’d been a few poor attempts at tidying it up. One of the worst was that it was covered with nice cedar shakes, but they were painted over white, and that paint was flaking off, and some of the windows were in less than pristine shape, and there were those odd wooden strakes protruding over the windows (I think they used to have some kind of screening over them) that were simply falling off.
So this summer we hired a contractor to give it a complete make-over.
We had the old shakes stripped off and replaced with siding. New windows everywhere, with better insulation. The deck was resurfaced. Some of the stonework was patched up. Now it looks completely different!
Strangely, at the same time all this was going on, the county sent us a notice that they’d decided, for some obscure reason, to change our house number from 300 College Avenue to 209 College Avenue, so now we can pretend we’ve moved to a completely different house with none of the hassle of actually having to move the contents.
Oops. I just doxxed myself.
I made a brief video of walking around the house. Most of you won’t care, but I’m sending this to family — this is the house where my youngest two kids grew up, so they might be curious.
Right now, the interior is cluttered because we had to pull everything away from the walls (because they were doing some major work with new windows), and most of our posessions are piled up in our living room. One of the things we’ll be doing this long Thanksgiving weekend is de-cluttering and moving everything back to where it belongs.
Also, most importantly…that room with the bay windows used to be our daughter’s bedroom, and I’m taking over. We had the interior redone (most importantly: grounded 3 prong outlets everywhere), and I’ll be setting that up as my home office. Yay! Electronics will be neatly organized, I’ll have a quiet writing space, and it’ll have wonderful light!
No, the house is not up for sale, and this is not an advertisement. We’re planning to stay here a good long while yet.
