Google smackdown

I'd like to thank the person who found my blog while searching for "where would my parents hide my Christmas presents." It's amazing what this internet thing can be used for.

Shoes untied

I really don't just do it because I like to piss off anyone will a maternal sensibility, but most of the time that I'm walking around one or more shoes will be untied. And, despite all I've heard, I rarely if ever trip over them. And I'm pretty clumsy.

About the only time after I dress myself that I look to see if they are tied is when I go to the men's room.

Tagged, 5 weird habits

I've been tagged by Josh so here goes nothing...

Five weird habits that I'll admit:

• After I blow my nose, I'll check the Kleenex to see what color came out. While gross, it also gives me a good indication of how healthy I really am.
  
• Most dishes that I cook only ever require one dish. From the infamous Yellow Meal (baked curried chicken, corn, and potatoes) to my frequent chilis, one dish is all I ever need.
  
• I use much more shampoo than is required to wash the amount of hair that I have.
  
• Don't send me out to buy food for a party. I'll end up buying enough to feed everyone 2-3 times over. The same thing happens for when I'm cooking dinner.
  
• I often imagine the worst thing that could happen. I think I use it as some sort of superstitious ward against that thing actually happening.
  

There you go, 5 weird habits that are fit for publishing. I'm going to tag Jacob Albers, Paul Boal, and Andi.

My office football pool

Someone in my office organized a football pool that I really like. Each week of the football season you pick a team. You score the number of points your team scores. You can't select that team again. This is the sort of run of the mill office pool, but what I like about ours is that it pays for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 10th, 20th, 30th, and last. So even if you are never going to come in first, there is still something to shoot for. Can you be just mediocre enough to slide into 20th place? If you are in 20th place, how many points to you need to stay in 20th place? Yes, you can treat the whole thing as a crap shoot, but there are a lot of different ways to play it if everyone is trying to win a prize.

This year I've been actively shooting for last place (again). Unfortunately 2-3 other guys have also been shooting for last place. I find myself 10 points out of last with two weeks to go and have no shot of shooting up to 30th place. So this week I find myself rooting for Denver. Oh, the humanity...

Attention Ebay shoppers

A couple of months ago I came to the decision that I was going to start selling cards on Ebay. Well, that hasn't quite happened yet. First, I wanted to build up some feedback so I wasn't asking buyers to blindly trust me. Second, I wanted to see how the process worked from the buyer's end. And third, I haven't quite got around to doing anything yet.

I've spent the last couple of weeks perusing the Magic listings for good deals. A couple of times I saw something that I wanted to pounce on, but I hadn't set up my Paypal account, so I let them go by. Finally last week I got off the sidelines and set up my accounts. By the end of the week I had won (go me!) three listings. And I had learned some lessons about Ebay.

The first thing that I learned is that items that seem like bargains are only so until you calculate how much you'll spend in shipping. For example, I was looking at a Reaper miniature that usually retails for between $3-5 at the store. The list price on the figure was $.99. OMG! What a deal! What do I have to put in shipping? $4.00. Not such a deal. However shipping costs don't directly scale with the number of items so when I bought 3 miniatures at $1.04 with a shipping cost of $5, I was still keeping even, if not coming out ahead. But people seem to in some cases disregard the shipping cost and wind up spending more than they had planned on spending.

The second thing that I learned is that the listings that I was most interested in were not the ones that looked like "L@@K! L337 GEAR HERE! H@T!!!!!!!!" but rather the ones that told me what they contained ("3 Reaper miniatures"). The items that I was most interested in were the ones where I was told exactly what I would get. In the Magic listings there are a lot of "repacks," or a grab bag of cards that *might* but most likely *won't* contain a high dollar card. There are a lot of these, so they must be successful some of the time proving that there is a sucker born every minute.

The third thing that I learned is that setting a low price isn't always bad. Frequently I came across a listing that I might have been interested in at a lower price, but when their first price started near my max price I wasn't interested any more. A lower dollar amount can stimulate interest. You can implement a reserve price to make sure that you get your amount, but if you set it too high then you can get screwed. Besides many dealers appear to build some of their profit margin into the shipping costs.

The last and most obvious thing is that Ebay can be addictive. It is so easy. You can find just about anything you are interested in and have it shipped to your house. And on the flip side, it seems like it would be so easy to make money using it. All you have to have is something to sell. The promise of a sucker out there willing to take your junk and give you cash is almost irresistable. It's like a garage sale where you only have to haul all of your junk out of your house when someone tells you that they will in fact buy it.

Not that whatever I'll eventually be selling will be junk. Far from it. It'll be invaluable.

From the TMI department

Have you ever been throwing up and thought to yourself, "I should have made soup instead?"

The War on Christmas

On my way home from work, I'll frequently tune in 590 AM. The afternoon drive hosts are Kevin Slaten and Bob Ramsay. Checking out their pages will give you an idea of how the show works. Kevin is the star of the show and Bob is his Ed McMahon. At his best, Kevin is insightful and asks probing questions of his interview subjects. At his worst, he is an opinionated blowhard who verbally abuses his callers. And every evening as I drive home, he gets an opportunity to be at his worst. Kevin and I would probably disagree on everything except sports. He likes Bush, views white men as persecuted, and is dogmatically conservative. Given that it is obstensibly a sports call-in show, you'd think that I would not have a problem his Kevin's views. You'd be wrong.

One of Kevin's latest pet peeves is the custom of saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." As Sarahlynn pointed out, the custom of saying Happy Holidays is partially meant to convey "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year." Yes, part of it is also meant to convey "Happy Chanukah/Happy Kwanzaa/Happy Festivus and Happy New Year." And I don't have a problem with either. In an increasingly diverse ethinic culture, there is no reason to offer offense to someone who is definitively celebrating one holiday or another or none of the above. That said, if you do guess and miss the holiday I don't think that anyone should be offended. Likewise if I choose the more succinct greeting, I don't think you should be offended. Let's save our offense and indignation for important things like being lied to about intelligence to convince us to support an unnecessary war.

But the issue of the day is never really about what the loudest are complaining about. They are complaining about the exclusive secularity of the government and the secularization of society as a whole. Christmas is just a convenient stepping off point. It's a cute adorable puppy of an issue meant to erode support for the secularization of government and society. After all who doesn't like Christmas. It's warm and fuzzy, makes cute songs, and is generally loved by most people. The people who don't love Christmas are as small a minority as people who are allergic to dogs. It is certainly a much warmer and fuzzier issue than the 300 lb gorilla of abortion who is sitting in the corner.

Bottom line: The freedom of religion also means the freedom from religion at least in terms of government. It's fine if you want to have prayer in schools as long as you would be equally accepting of mandatory circumcision for males, garbing of women in burkas, five daily prayers to Allah, and the ritual sacrifice of doves in our schools as well. As I can picture the majority of the prayer in school types have a problem with one or more of these activities, I wonder why it is okay to use one particular form and style of worship over another. Does the answer have anything to do with what your god told you or what you practice?

A Year in review

We've started getting the year-end cards from our friends. It's nice to see what people have been up to when I don't get a chance to see them very often if at all. We'd send out cards, but we're not that organized, so instead, you get a year in review blog post.

Last December was obviously very exciting. Oliver was born. It was only a year ago and it was just a year ago. After his birth, I took the rest of the year off to help around the house as Oliver and my wife and I got to know each other. We settled into a routine where she was responsible for the input side and often I was in charge of the output side. Since I wasn't going to work, we all floated our hours to different parts of the day and night. Christmas and New Years past in a flash and it was time for me to go back to work.

When I got back to work I started going in by 6:00 so that I could leave by 3:00. It was a bit of an adjustment to get used to it, but it worked well for me. The early morning hours were productive and the after lunch hours were available for helping others. The other advantage of this schedule was that I was able to start picking up Oliver from day care once my wife went back to work in mid-February. Later in the year, we switched roles and I went from day care savior to day care drop off.

In February, I started this blog. By September, I had logged my 100th post. Now I'm closing in on 150. I've enjoyed writing about my life for the four or five of you that tune in to read it. Thanks for the encouragement.

I celebrated my 30th birthday in early February with another Thank(Rock) party. It's been interesting to see how the younger crowd grows each year. There were almost ten children at last year's party with more on the way. By next year's party most of those kids will be moving around, either walking or crawling. Watch out!

In April, I participated in the River to River Relay, an 80-mile relay across Southern Illinois. It was a blast! Once again I teamed with a group of Hashers including Mother Mary Nipple, Blows Like a Freight Train, Dead Squirrel, Halley's Comet, Necrofeelyass, Just Nicole, and Fuzzy. The run was a great success and I'm looking forward to doing it again this year.

I got to celebrate with my friends Aum and Bob at their wedding in April. It was a good trip, and it was the first time that my friends in Chicago got to meet Oliver. In May we took a trip to California to see Jeni and (her husband) get married in Napa. While we were out there we took Oliver wine tasting with us. At the end of the summer we took a work trip for my wife to Phoenix. While we were there, Oliver started crawling.

The fall was marked by a number of developmental milestones for Oliver. Crawling. Going up stairs. Going down stairs. Hauling himself up on things. Cruising. Drinking from a cup. Feeding himself. It has been miraculous to watch his development from an infant to an almost-toddler. And on Sunday, he had his first birthday and started walking.

In some ways this past year has flown by. In some ways it has crawled. But in all ways, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Oliver's birthday weekend

This Sunday was Oliver's first birthday. My brother, his girlfriend, and my mother came down for the weekend. My wife's family came over to our house at noon for the party. We had almost the entire family (missing five kids). I made three pots of chili - mild, spicy, and vegetarian. Everyone enjoyed my chili, even if they thought the mild was too spicy. My wife made Oliver a "cake" with a fruit-filled inside (blueberries, bananas, cantaloupe) and "frosted" it with a mixture of carob and sweet potato. If Oliver knew that it was healthy, he didn't show it as he dove into the cake face first. After he finished eating and we cleaned him up, it was time for presents. I got to open them as Oliver's proxy. One of Oliver's two year old cousins evaluated the presents and let us know that he wouldn't soon be outgrowing them. After the presents, I drove my mother to the train for her to go home. When I got back from the train station, the party was breaking up. I got to hang out with my brother and his girlfriend until it was time for them to fly home. It was totally Oliver's best birthday yet!

Googling myself

I got bored today and tried to google myself. Then my son. Then my wife. Then my usual alias. And finally my blog. Here are the results:

Me: Page 7, 16
Son: Not found
Wife: Posts 1,2, 5, 6
Alias: Posts 1,2,4,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,19,20,21,22...
Blog: Page 22, 47

All I can say is that I learned that other people who have my name get a lost more press than I do, that Oliver didn't get a single mention, and that my wife has an unusual name.

Review of Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

On Saturday, my wife's company treated us to a preview of Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. We dropped off Oliver with some friends and headed out to West County for the showing.

The movie opens during one night of the London Blitz as the Pevensie family scrambles to their bomb bunker as the bombs go off all around. The next day the kids Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), and Lucy (Georgie Henley) are shipped off to the country to live with Professor Kirke and Mrs. MacReady. At the Professor’s house, they entertain themselves by playing hide and seek. As Peter counts, Lucy ducks into a room that contains a large wardrobe. She ducks into the wardrobe to find herself in Narnia, a magical land in the grip of a hundred year old winter. She meets a faen named Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy) who invites her to tea in order to kidnap her, but later relents and sends her back through the wardrobe. Back on the other side of the wardrobe, she finds that no time has passed. When she tells her family about her experience, they don’t believe her. Later that night, she goes through the wardrobe again. This time her brother Edmund follows her. While she meets up with Mr. Tumnus, her brother Edmund encounters the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), who charms him into helping her. When the two children get back to Earth, Lucy tells everyone about it and Edmund denies that it happened. But the next day the kids find themselves looking for a place to hide. They climb into the wardrobe and end up in Narnia.

The children are quickly brought up to speed on events in Narnia by a talking Beaver (voice Ray Winstone). Aslan (voice Liam Neeson) has returned to the land to put an end to the reign of the White Witch. The children have been prophesied to be the saviors of the land. Initially the children want nothing to do with this war, but when Edmund runs away to join the White Witch, the other children have no choice but to join the struggle.

Visually the movie is stunning. The special effects mesh well with the live action shots. Special care was taken to realistically depict the non-human races and animals. The battlefield scenes are especially realistic, perhaps not a surprise as WETA did the special effects. And as in Lord of the Rings, New Zealand does a good job standing in for a medieval fantasy landscape.

I really enjoyed the movie. Andrew Adamson did a good job with the pacing of the scenes and maintained the tension of the story well. There were a number of instances where I found myself literally gripping the armrests. I did find the movie perhaps a little strong for a PG movie. PG-13 might have been a better rating, but the script would have to have been more complex to interest a PG-13 audience.

Running into people in the grocery store

I like my friends. I just don't want to run into them in the grocery store. When you first see them you chat for a bit and get to day most everything that you wanted to say to them. But then it gets to be uncomfortable when you run into them a second, third, and fourth time while you are scooting up and down the aisles.

Just a pet peeve of mine.