matching tracksuits

Wet, Wet, Wet

Thursday 12 July 2007

After visiting the aquarium and walking around town a bit

we headed back to the hotel room for a bit of a break. And then the rain started.

That's when we decided to make use of the accident of our booking -- a room with a king-size bed (poor J slept on the most uncomfortable couch in history) with a jacuzzi in the room.

Naturally, with the Girl joining us, the water was not as not as it should have been, but that was offset by the joy of her splashing.

More at Flickr and YouTube (short video that includes a portion that has nothing to do with rain or a jacuzzi, but is amusing nonetheless).

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Saw Fish

Wednesday 11 July 2007

After a little sightseeing in Chattanooga, we heading out for Pigeon Forge, where we'd be saying for the next two nights.

Our day in Gatlinburg began at the aquarium.

The initial impression -- a little cheesy. Fake sky with fake birds and fake clouds painted about the main tank.

Then we went through the tunnel, and it all made sense...

The underwater tunnel was so enlightening that we decided to go through it a second time before leaving.

It was a lot of fun, but I found myself wishing L was about two or three years older, so that she could enjoy it more. As could be expected, there was a kids' area where visitors could touch horseshoe crabs and crawl into amusing, picturesque fish tanks.

L couldn't crawl, so I helped.

Still, it seemed she had a pretty good time -- she slept, she ate, she saw a few new things. Overall, a success.

There are more pictures at Flickr. And of course there's a film.

Swimming, Redux

Tuesday 10 July 2007

The video is fixed — don’t know why it wasn’t playing, but I just re-“compiled” it and it seems fine.

Update: Some folks tell me the video stops halfway through. I give up on this one…

Rock, Preferably Without the Roll

Tuesday 10 July 2007

Soon, J will be flying back to Polska. K and I wanted to take her on some kind of semi-extended semi-vacation before she left, but where to go?

Our trip had several constraints from the beginning

relatively inexpensive (we are, after all, buying a house),
relatively close (we don't, after all, have a lot of vacation time), and
relatively interesting for J.

So we did the logical thing: we went kitsch.

America is filled with kitsch, and the common view from Polska is that "Americans like kitsch." There was only one place that fulfilled all our criteria: Gatlinburg.

But we knew that it would be relatively expensive to do much there, so we sandwiched it with a half-day in Chattanooga and a day in Cherokee.

Our stops in Chattanooga were about as kitsch as could be, in some ways: Rock City

and Ruby Falls.

Very American: take nature, and improve it with sidewalks, elevators, and safety barriers. And above all, make it auto-accessible.

We had fun, though. Rock City brings out the little boy in everyone, and Ruby Falls, while overly theatrical (not to mention amazingly crowded in the summer), is a fairly impressive sight.

Photos of our adventure are available here.

Mill

Sunday 08 July 2007

Swimming II

Thursday 05 July 2007

We’ve been taking L to swimming lessons at the local YWCA. Within a few weeks, we’ve gone from calmly moving her about the pool (“Dig, dig, dig! Kick, kick, kick!”) to dunking her under water after blowing in her face. She doesn’t much like the former, and the latter sets her to screaming more often than not. The instructor suggests that it’s the water running down her face when we pull her back up that upsets her.

Still, we take her regularly and follow the instructor’s advice, on the hopes that it’s the unfamiliarity of it all that is bothering L.

There’s a progress report at YouTube.

That’s Some Ideology

Wednesday 04 July 2007

iDontCare

Tuesday 03 July 2007

For the last several months, I’ve been hearing more about the iPhone on NPR while driving to work than I really cared to.

The phenomenon is a fascinatingly, achingly-perfect example of our consumer culture. All of the reporting I heard on NPR was about the wonderous technology and gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.

Or sometimes about people who feel they’ve gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.

People standing in line; people paying people to stand in line. Lines, everywhere — if reports are to be believed. People waiting to buy; people waiting to try: to the former, “Do you have nothing better to do with your money?” and to the latter, “Do you have nothing better to do with your time?”

I really just don’t get it. It’s a phone that plays music, and accomplishes it without a keypad. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing that turns our conception of the universe on its head. Bohr, Plank, and Einstein would have all been impressed, I’m sure.

Perhaps I’m just one of those “old fashioned” types that thinks a phone that is just a phone is sufficient. My phone is two years old, and if I don’t have to get a new one to renew my contract, I probably won’t, because I just don’t care. It rings; I talk — end of story.

If I want to listen to music, I’ll use my iPod…

Survey Says…

Monday 02 July 2007

Over the weekend, we made a survey of the property we’re in the process of buying.

And of course, I made a video.

Our House

Sunday 01 July 2007

is a very, very fine house, though without the two cats in the yard…

Perhaps it’s a bit premature, for we haven’t closed yet, but people have asked about what “our house” (though, again, it’s still technically still not ours) looks like…

From the street, it looks a little like a mini-Brady Bunch house. But that’s only an illusion, for this is a coveted “tri-level” home, whereas the Brady’s house was conceptually a bit more confusing…

The back of the house includes a fairly spiffy bi-level deck. There are doors to the deck from both the dining room and master bedroom, making the Friday night cigar tradition a little more convenient.

The back also also includes a fairly un-spiffy outdoor parrot cage (?!?) that will quickly be converted into something. Ideas? Nah, I didn’t think so. It will be one of the first improvements completed on the house…

Yesterday, we spent the day surveying. We learned a few things.

First, it’s hot in Greenville.

Second, the rear property stakes are all but impossible to find. One is at a fence, making a metal detector fairly useless. The other is God-knows-where in the back left corner. Half an hour with a metal detector only turned up the metal eyelets of my boots…

Third, doing surveying with an inexperienced “surveyor” (i.e., me) makes the process a fair bit more labor- and time-intensive.

Fourth, it’s really incredibly hot in Greenville.

And the final thing we learned: working on your own (though, technically, not really) home makes otherwise-unpleasant tasks almost enjoyable.

Update

Saturday 30 June 2007

I don’t think any of us could have anticipated L’s success on the potty chair. In the past ten days or so, L has done her messier business almost exclusively in the potty chair.

So, she’s potty trained, right!? I mean, a couple of accidents, statistically speaking, are fairly meaningless. And the fact that she’s not telling us that she needs the potty chair is a function of her age and development and nothing more. After all, she knows what it’s for — every time you put her on it, she does her best to have a BM.

Well, admittedly, she’s not potty trained in the truest sense of the term, but I think we’ve laid a fairly sure foundation for a quick, painless training when the “real” time comes…

Ron Paul

Friday 29 June 2007

Ron Paul is Exhibit A in the case of why we need more than two viable political parties. Granted, there’s the Libertarian Party, and that was RP’s party of choice some years ago, but now he’s running for the Republican party nomination — even though most of the Republican party shuns him.

He does seem fairly un-Republican in some ways. His ideas about Iraq win him more applause from Bill Maher than any of the Democratic candidates.

If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. […] They don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there. (Republican candidate debate)

I don’t know of any Democratic candidate who’s talking about blowback and 9/11. It sounds like something out of a Chomsky book, as do his comments about the folly of spreading democracy with a gun.

And yet, Paul was talking to Cobert, he indicated that he’d be more than willing to have a small a government as possible, eliminating various agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security.

What he is, in reality, is a real Republican — an isolationistic, small-government, states’-rights, federal-government-butt-out, old-fashioned Republican. The Republicans have strayed so far from their original principles that a “real” one stands out.

Roan Mountain

Thursday 28 June 2007

Over the weekend, we took J to see the rhododendrons on Roan Mountain.

The blossoms were a little past peak, and some of them were already wilting, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Color Blinded

Wednesday 27 June 2007

Now that we have a house under contract, K has joyfully jumped into the wide world of paints. We have swatches and brochures and booklets lying all over the place.

Since I’m colorblind, I can’t really offer that much constructive input. After all, I did once buy a dark blue fleece jacket that turned out to be mockingly purple. And I did think for years that my friends’ parents had a gray car, only to learn, after I’d confused everyone by suggesting we take said gray car, that they didn’t own a gray car — it was light green.

Still, I’m glad someone in the family is interested in it.