Frenzied Daddy

I’ve been informed that the pictures below are being used to scare small children into behaving; “Don’t nag me or you’ll wind up like this guy.” So, as of now- these are collector’s items. Get em while they’re hot, I’ll be replacing them tonight.

I’m confusing my mother.

Since I started buying my own clothes, I’ve been pretty much in a rut. Jeans and T-Shirts, Dockers and T-shirts. Occasionally a button-down shirt, but nothing really outstanding. About two years ago, however, I had an epiphany. I realized that the clothes I chose to wear for SCA events were loud; garish plaids made up of neon colors, I’d mix and match plaids happily. Something about relaxing and not worrying about what other people thought “went together.” And I started to consider… why did I only wear bright colors and patterns when I was “relaxing;” why didn’t I wear them normally?

About two weeks ago, I took a long look at my clothes- I was wearing ragged t-shirts to work, I was wearing one pair of shorts because it’s all I had that fit, and I realized something important. I needed to go shopping. Our budget is tight, so I went to GoodWill. I don’t like going there, because it’s admitting that I’m not wealthy, but I needed some clothes. Yes, I bought some “new” shorts and pants. But more interestingly, I bought some shirts. Patterned, button-down, not-quite Hawaiian short sleeved shirts. It’s one of the rare things I loved shopping for- I’m trying to walk the line between “AAAH My eyes!” and “Yawn” – and err on the side of my wife being seen with me in public .

My mom’s response; “Hey, nice shirt. I didn’t know you knew how to wear silk. (Mom, it’s rayon.)” “Hey, another nice shirt. What got into you?” I think I’m confusing the poor lady. But I’m having fun putting on my clothes.

My daughter and I just finished Junie B. Smells Something Fishy last night, and tonight she read a very short book called Ready, Set, Go. And I noticed something very odd, which I think I remember from my childhood.

When Brynnen’s reading, she has to move her body; she was laying on her bed tonight with her feet walking up the wall and kicking it; her arms were moving around. It’s interesting- I know that she’ll stop doing that sometime, because it’ll be hard to ride the bus and read if you’re thrashing about like you’re having a seizure, but I wonder if reading at this level takes so much of her attention that she’s unaware of her body’s doing that.

Brookes has put up a couple of new scrapbook layouts over on the 2Peas site; the one these pictures are from is a really neat layout showing the movies we’ve seen (and plan to see) this summer and logging the experience with entrance prices and how we rated the movies. I really liked this one because she downloaded movie posters from the internet, and then printed out miniature posters on our printer.

This other layout is really well done too. A while back, her camera was dropped and the back was broken; we tried to get it fixed a couple of times, but it never really worked properly afterwards. (She’s replaced the camera since then.) I don’t remember if these pictures were pink because of the camera or because the developer messed up the process, but she did a terrific job recovering from the mishap; these pink pictures of us at the beach are some of her best work.

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Figures that the kidlet would love the glasses. The movie was spectacle-ar. (laughs with glee). The wife and I would rate Spy Kids at about 2 and a half stars; the plot was kind of weak, and while the special effects were neat, the 3-Dness was kind of distracting.

The child, on the other hand, would give it 10,000 stars, no, 17,000 stars. No, she corrects me again- 18,000 stars. She thinks it’s the best movie this summer, easily beating out both pirate movies. She happens to be a big Spy Kids buff.

My vote is, just to take your kid to a kid’s 3D movie, the movie’s worth it, but you should make it a matinee.

No, not my belly. Sheesh.

Our friend, David Tubb, (Uncle David) is off galivanting. You can see his progress on the “Tubbtracker” (no jokes, please ).

This is a good example of a wiki — a wiki is sort of a collaborative web site, where anyone (or nearly anyone) can edit the pages. While the Tubbtracker’s main page is Tubb Updates only, there’s sort of a chat room behind the scenes.

Return home safely, David, after wandering the streets of your misspent youth. Someday I’ll be doing that- taking my wife and kid to the lands of Alaska, where I grew up.

When Stacy goes on her post-summer walkabout, I expect more pictures and more of a ‘blog-style journal. But it’s interesting to see other people’s take on what they would do with their “interactive” site. Kudos to Dave and Dave!

With weeds and bugs, and bits of mugs.
bountiful tomatos and flowering potatoes,
with beans, spinach, and nettle-itch.
That’s how our garden grows.

Don’t have a lot to say; it’s friday, I’m tired. I’ve been playing NeverWinter Nights and Everquest in the evenings. The kid has swimming today; and is ready to go, daddy (that’s her towel she’s curled up beneath).

Over on the left, there’s a link for “blogshares,” which is an interesting experiment in the relative “value” of links, and mapping how people link to each other and other websites. Other sites do similar things;Technorati is a good example.

I’m also “pinging” the weblogs.com site, to show when my updates are; they keep a rolling list of “updated ‘blogs”.

These two items came together in an interesting “feedback” experience. I was “ego-surfing” (yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like, shamefully ) and I hit the blogshares site, to learn that I had a new person linking to me. So I surfed over to his site. Imagine my surprise when I hit a wall of half-naked women, and an annoying (too literate to be aggrevating) post about Chirac. Nowhere on the site did I see any reference to a fairly tame, boring father-blog.

On deeper perusal, I found a link to a page on his site titled “Where is my Link?” It seemed appropriate; and here’s what I found: he’s using a Movable Type plugin that reads RSS, and is pulling the RSS feed of Weblogs.com to his site and displaying it!

What that means, is that every time I post something, at least one person has the possibility of including a link to me on his home page.

This doesn’t seem right- using it like this, one could mess with the values on Blogshares or even on Google, couldn’t they? — Both of these systems count the number of inbound links, and by making frequent posts, it would be theoretically possible to inflate the value of your links. I think the blogathon that’s about to commence will be an interesting thing to watch, don’t you? Because that’s what approximately 550 bloggers are about to do; post every half hour throughout a 24 hour period.