Entries Tagged 'Family' ↓

Today we took the family to the zoo. As a special treat it was a new zoo that we had never been to before – the Southwick Zoo in Mendon, Massachusetts. As I told the kids, when you to go a zoo for the first time, you'll often see animals you've never seen before. We were not disappointed.

In the Terry Pratchett scifi/fantasy series Discworld, there is a character who happens to be an orangutan. He is a librarian. One of the going jokes is that every book, somebody has to explain this to an incoming administrator. I wish I could recall which book it was, but at some point someone asks, "He doesn't go around showing his bum at people, does he?" to which the assistant replies, "I believe you're thinking gibbons, sir."

Now, I always interpreted this as meaning a monkey that just had a rather pronounced rear end. Ummm….no. Have you ever seen a gibbon? It dawns on me that either I've never seen one, or I've never seen a particularly active one. Today we found the gibbon. We didn't know this at the time, all we knew is that there was a family coming the other way saying, "Be careful, that's a very fresh monkey."

"Is he throwing things?" I asked.

"No," said the other dad, "But he's showing things."

And there, hanging onto the fence and putting on a show for anybody who was interested, was some sort of monkey who wanted attention. He'd hang out for a while, swing back and forth, do a little dance, make a little "woopwoopwoop" noise, and then for no reason, whammo, check out my ass. It's hard to really appreciate the move without seeing it first hand. It wasn't a traditional moon, like he spun around 180degrees and stuck his butt up in the air. It was all in the hips. He's there, he's talking, he's got your attention, and then bam, look at my butt. Just a quick flash, like he's playing a trick on you. Once you realize that you're looking at a gibbon and that's just their thing, it's pretty funny. You could almost imagine the little monkey thought balloon over his head with a "Psych! Showed you my butt!" caption.

In other news, an excellent zoo all around. They had wallabies, which I'm not sure I've ever seen in a zoo around here. At least half a dozen different kinds of monkey cages, including a whole "chimpanzee habitat". Lions, tigers and leopards. Elephants, rhinos and giraffes. Highly recommended. Don't go on the train ride, though, it's lame. All you see are "wetlands" (translation: nothing), and it's infested with hornets).

So tonight Katherine and I are playing 20 questions before she goes to bed. "I can make a camel with my leg Daddy," she tells me. Thinking that this is some sort of new dance move I ask her to show me. So she lays down on her back, bends her knee, and sticks her foot up in the air with her toes all scrunched together. "See?" she says, pointing to her knee, "There's where you ride, and my toes are his face."

"Who taught you that?" I ask.

"I thought of it myself," she says. Then she puts up the other leg in the same way and says, "See, you can have two of them. And if you put your hands up like this, you can ride them."

Soft Scrub rules!

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So while in DC I stopped at a few gift shops (hotel and airport, 'natch) to grab some stuff for the family. It's interesting to play the game of political souvenirs, because for every "Clinton in 2008!" shirt there's a "Dear God, Another Clinton??" shirt. Repeat for all presidential candidates, as well as the current president. I was wondering if you could survey the feelings of the shopkeeper based on the amount and distribution of the merchandise. That is, do all the pro-Bush items get the best displays?

Anyway. At the hotel gift shop, next to the cash register was a basket of candidate buttons. You know, the "Edwards in 08!" or "Vote Romney!" sort of thing. All basically the same size, all either red or blue, and basically just a big basket of buttons that appeared to all come from the same source. I asked the lady behind the register, "Which button sells the most?"

"There's no Barrack Obama in that basket," she said. "He's sold out."

She was right. There you go. Quick political poll. I thought for a minute, as per my comments above, that an anti-Obama shop could simply choose not to put his buttons out, but if that was the case then she wouldn't tell me that he was sold out and make him out to be the most popular.

(To be completely honest about the story I've translated pretty heavy for the poor woman who had trouble with her English. What she really said was something more along the lines of "Which one is black? His buttons all gone." Earlier when I'd walked into the shop I asked, "Do you have any sort of coloring books that I could take home to my kids?" and she said, "You want t-shirt?")

I believe it's a rule that if your router is going to die on you, it will do so while you're out of town. I appear to be back up now, but it was quite the weird experience.

I log in from my hotel room and notice that while I can ssh in to my host, I cannot get to the web site. I reset the website (sometimes that happens) but still nothing. I then begin to wonder if my cable company is causing me grief, as they just recently shut down my email server. Before I know it, I can't even SSH into the machine anymore which is strange because my ssh connection that is still open is, well, still open. But it can't communicate back out to do any nslookups or anything. So then I'm wondering if the DNS has gone down or something bizarre like that.

Eventually that window died as well and then for the last two days I've had no contact at all with my machine . My domain names are up for renewal (but I thought that was in a few weeks!) so I had a weird feeling that they'd disappeared on me. I checked that (I'm at a conference in the middle of a keynote using the meeting room wifi connection to check the status of my domain names :)) but as I thought they don't expire for weeks.

Then later Monday evening I'm talking to my wife and she says "The computer doesn't work, says it can't see Google or sometihng." At that point I realized that it probably wasn't the outside in (or at least, not only that) but something internal.

I just got home. Reset the cable modem, reset the router, bounced the web server, and I seem to be back up.
We shall see.

The new Pope has made it official – unbaptized babies who die still get to go to Heaven. This has been a theological debate for decades, and basically the primary reason for the whole concept of Limbo, a place between Heaven and Hell. Here's the deal: unbaptized babies still have original sin, and thus if they die, they can't get into Heaven. That's sort of the whole point of baptism to begin with. But nobody wants to believe that newborn babies have done anything to deserve a straight ticket to Hell, either. The official document now says that "grace has priority over sin, and the exclusion of innocent babies from heaven does not seem to reflect Christ's special love for children."

Oh my, the anti-Catholic folks are going to have a field day with "Christ's special love for children."

This morning has not been a good morning.  We're having a "take in everything that's not nailed down, and kiss goodbye anything that is" storm.  Since it's a holiday and the kids are on vacation I had hoped to take a day off, but with nothing to do on such a horrible day I might as well work and save the vacation day for a better opportunity.  But what kind of limbo is this that I'm in?  Go in to work?  No way.  Work from home?  Maybe, although that looks cheesy, like I'm really taking the day off and trying to claim that I'm working.  The power is flickering in the morning so I don't exactly want to leave everybody home in the dark.  I think maybe work from home is the best option even if it doesn't seem kosher.  As if on cue the cable goes out, taking the internet with it.  Looks like I'm driving in to work.  Wrong!  On the way to work I see a house that's been hit with *three* trees.  Ouch.  That alone should have been enough to turn me around.  But when I couldn't even get on the highway because the main road out of town is blocked, I decide to give up and head home, figuring it will just be a rainy day off.  On the way back I even see a car accident.  It is a lousy day out there.

So I get back home, explain the situation, and Kerry tells me that it's a good day for a coffee run.  She's a little bit more carefree with my safety when she knows there might be a medium french vanilla with cream and two Equal at the end of the rainbow.  So I go off to get the coffee.  As I'm pulling in to the parking lot my cell phone starts ringing, and I'm wondering if a tree has come down.  "Come home!" Kerry says, "I think there's a mouse under the couch."

"A mouse?  That's different," I say, glad that it's not a tree.

"Katherine won't look at it, and I don't want to," she says.  "I think it's dead, it's not moving."

"Well if it's dead, then there's no hurry," I tell her.

"Just come home."

So I get the coffee and bagels, and come home.  The kids are up at the kitchen table, and Kerry's feeding the baby. They all start telling me excitedly about the big black thing that might be a mouse.  Black?  Probably not a mouse.  I look where they show me, and whatever the hell it is, it ain't no mouse.  It's big, more like rat sized.  Definitely not moving.  You can see it sticking out from under/behind the couch.  My longtime readers might recall that I'm not great with mice, so the prospect of having a rat in my house is not exactly thrilling me.  I get the flashlight and take a quick glimpse, and it really looks more like a stuffed animal to me.  I'm not getting close to it just in case the damned thing does decide to move, but I'm pretty sure it's a stuffed animal.

"All right," I say into the kitchen, "I'm moving the couch.  Does everybody have their feet up off the floor just in case?"

The scream that came out of my wife was truly worth staying home for.  She tried to put her feet into the baby's high chair.

I pull the couch out from the wall, and sure enough it's a black stuffed scotty dog.  I bring it into the kitchen, being sure to hide it from Kerry long enough to keep the suspense up.  Katherine's only reaction was, "I was looking for that!"  Elizabeth's reaction is, "Where's the mouse?"

The fact that I can even consider an analogy with New Orleans after the hurricane does not bode well.

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Today is supposed to be rainy with a chance of a little snow. Having heard that on the news/weather this morning, here's Elizabeth's version:

"Spring has an appointment. Spring's not coming today. After Easter, Spring is not coming. Winter is today."

It's almost like a haiku.

Trying something different this year. As my birthday approaches, I finally got around to creating an Amazon wish list with some stuff on it. It's over there on the sidebar.

So if anybody reading this is planning on asking what I want for my birthday, there's a good place to start. 🙂 Maybe some random rich stranger who's a big fan of my Dancing with the Stars recaps will send me some toys? Yeah, sure.