today i will be helping a mason install a five hundred+ pound stone bench in our neighborhood. when he asked for assistance he phrased it like this:

“there will be very little, if any, dead lifting of the stone. moving big stones without machinery- a favorite pastime of mine- is about leverage, gravity and planning.”

if i’m not back on monday you’ll know i’m in traction somewhere…

every evening our kids are put to bed together in one of their own rooms, typically ethan’s because right now he has the more comfortable bed.

at some point in the middle of the night they come independently or in pairs to sleep in our room. most often they cuddle up next to natalie and i am only disturbed by the sound of the door opening. but as the temperature drops the kids start to prefer sidling up next to me because as logan says “daddy’s hot”.

i don’t sleep well with another person touching me, especially when that other person is twitchy and is attempting to maximize the amount of surface area in contact with each other.

so last night when logan came to our room early in the evening and crawled past her mother over to my side of the bed i knew it was bad news for me. worse yet, at about 3:30am i had a weird hot flash on my arm and then felt like i was sweating profusely.

it took a second but i suddenly realized logan was having her first night time accident since we took her out of diapers about three months ago. its not quite fair to say she wet the bed because as i mentioned before there was an equal or greater portion of her in contact with me as there was with the bed.

just because i don’t own a car doesn’t mean i can’t put a new set of wheels in the garage.

the 2010 trek fuel ex7

my nine year old nephew is teaching himself how to code, on his own, without help.

i worked with him to take his very first effort and convert it to java – here it is.

public class SomeRandonPersonsWar {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		int i = 130;
		int e = 20;
		
		while (i > 30) {
			System.out.println("Kill unit " 
				+ (i/2) 
				+ " and unit " 
				+ (i+1));
			i = i - (e + 5);
			e =  i / 2;
		}

		System.out.println("You need " 
			+ i 
			+ " more bullets and " 
			+ (i + e) 
			+ " more units.");
		
		while (i < 50) {
			System.out.println("Unit " 
				+ i 
				+ " has capitulated.");
			i += 5;
		}
	}
}

and here is the result:

Kill unit 52 and unit 106
Kill unit 24 and unit 49
You need 19 more bullets and 28 more units.
Unit 19 has capitulated.
Unit 24 has capitulated.
Unit 29 has capitulated.
Unit 34 has capitulated.
Unit 39 has capitulated.
Unit 44 has capitulated.
Unit 49 has capitulated.

backing out of the garage and in to the driveway i heard something crackle and crunch. i looked at natalie and asked “what was that?”

before she could answer from the backseat logan said “a nut!”

apparently the check for toys and bicycles behind the car has now also got to include looking for experiments that may be lurking under the tires…

i’m late with today’s post because i was out late last night partying with the falcon faithful.

i’m not a fan of the innovation challenged riaa and it was disappointing when metallica chose to be their front men. so i have boycotted metallica and no longer listen to any of their music.

but i’ve had a bad week and their style of gritty, hard driving rock soothes my soul and it became impossible to continue living this boycott after i found out my son’s preschool teacher appeared in their whiskey in the jar video.

for all the talk of role models in the nfl, occasionally there are.

“I’ve spoken to the Commissioner [Roger Goodell] and I understand that this ownership consideration is in the early stages. But sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.”

- DeMaurice Smith, in an email to union’s executive committee opposing a bid to purchase the St. Louis Rams by a group which includes Rush Limbaugh.

our children seem to go through alternating phases of being evil and angelic. there is some moderate behavior in the middle but each phase is punctuated by its respective alignment.

by some miracle, or the children’s own survival instinct, the rhythm of these phases has never landed both children at evil for more than a day or two. this past week was the first exception.

thank goodness they went back to school this morning.

i’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback, some positive, most negative on writing without capital letters.

this by far is the most compelling argument to date, from the urban dictionary on capitalization:

Capitalization is the difference between “I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse..” and “I had to help my uncle jack off a horse..”

I had to help my uncle jack off a horse..