Young Love

This is second-hand hearsay so it can't be used in a court of law but it's cute anyway. Here are pictures of the two main characters:

First we have Jillian (with chicken)

and her cousin Nathan (with cow),

and finally the two of them together (with little brother Joshua looking on.)

According to Jillian's mom Jessica:

Jillian (5) and her cousin Nathan (4) have been fond of one another for several years now, and often say they are going to marry each other. But sometimes Nathan balks at the idea. He must have have told Jillian that he didn't want to get married this morning. We were out playing/working in the back yard (it's 68 degrees and sunny here), and as I walked by, Jillian told him:

"But you have to get married! Grown-up boys marry grown-up girls. And I love you! You're cute and funny and all that stuff!"

Should I tell her it's a little early for desperation?

Thanks, Jessica, for a cute story.

Suicidal Ants

Lately we've seen a new phenomenon around our house - suicidal ants. The picture above shows a spoon that I had used to put margarine into our popcorn popper and then inadvertantly left the spoon on the counter. The next morning it was covered with ants as shown by this picture. Note that most of the ants are actually immersed in the margarine. They have suffocated or gotten stuck to the point that they're not going anywhere.


Now look at this picture. It was taken a couple of days before the other one. I had been making "nectar" for our hummingbird feeder and had left a couple of large drops of sugar water on the stove top. Sure enough, after several hours there was a group of ants surrounding the drops. But rather than taking the food back to their nest, they appeared to be gorging themselves to death. What you see in this picture are ants surrounding a now-extinct drop of sugar water (make that two drops that had touch and therefore merged into one like a figure eight.)

In both situations we looked for a path back to the nest with ants coming and going, transporting food from the stove area to their nest wherever it is. But there didn't seem to be a significant trail.With ant killer now that lets the ants take the poison back to their nest before they die, maybe we're developing ants that are immune to such tactics.

Just a coincidence?

This is an example of what I do on Tuesday mornings in doing the "pick list" for the library. As shown, the listing on the right gives enough information to positively identify the book requested. The most confirming data is the barcode as it is unique to each book..

(If this close-up is still too small, click on the image for a larger version.)

The reason for showing this particular image is that it is an example of a book that I have read and now find on the pick list. I would guess that about 90% of the days that I work at the library, the list that we work with has one or more books, tapes, disks, etc. that I have previously checked out. I read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" 40 plus years ago but I have also recently listened to this cassette version. When you consider that the average number of books on the list is about 180, it's amazing to me that there is so much overlap.

Of course, even more frequently I note books that I've picked for others that look interesting to me. I request a hold on them and usually I get next in line.

Warning: Proud Grandpa alert!

My children are starting to discover a couple of the ways into their father's (or father's-in law) heart by either (1) maintaining a blog in which they regularly show off their offspring (or 4-footed friends in the case of Lisa); or (2) emailing me pictures that I can include on my blog. (It doesn't hurt to hint strongly that "these pictures can be used on the blog".)

Stacie and Libby decided that Libby could use a new look that showed off her lovely face and would be a little easier to comb and brush out.

This was taken last summer at Lee and Staci's wedding. Of course it had grown some since then but I don't have a good picture of her just before her haircut.

And this was taken four days ago. Kinda cute, don't you think?

Flat screen TV

For a couple that rarely watches TV, we have a plethora of them - one in each bedroom and one in the family room. And they're all outdated. One doesn't even have the capability of using a remote control as it doesn't received infrared signals. The set we've been using in our bedroom was given (loaned) to us by Ed and Tiffany back when we thought Carolyn might have to recover in bed after her thymoma operation. In fact, I remarked to Carolyn the last time we watch a DVD that that set had beautiful surround sound.

But last night as I turned on the set in our master bedroom to watch an episode of "The Daily Show" we had TiVo'ed, instead of the little whirr sound indicating the picture tube is beginning to warm up, I heard a snap, crackle, and pop. Strange, I thought. I waited but no picture, no sound, I pulled out the TV plug to defeat the "always on" property of the TV.

An hour later, I plugged the TV back in and it actually came up with a picture but it lasted less than a minute. I certainly can't complain as we got the TV for nothing.

I think the time has come to buy a new flat screen TV to replace the dead monster. Any experience anyone would like to share with me about what to look for, how to avoid lemons, where to get the best deal? Any information will be appreciated.

Thanks.

A Grandma on the Roof

We recently had a rather severe windstorm in the night and every once in a while it sounded like we were being encircled by a tornado like Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz". The next day I was looking around the house and yard to see if we had suffered any damage like having our trees blown down. There didn't appear to be any problems like that. But as shown here,

several of our wooden shakes were looking warped and sort of like they'd like to join the wind. From the looks of some of the shakes, I really couldn't understand why the neighbor's roofer had looked at our roof and and recommended against replacing or even rehabilitating it. About then I noticed two shakes in the sand box outside our kitchen. Either someone had moved a couple of shakes from around the side of the house or there was some roofing damage involving those two shakes.

I spotted a likely place where the shakes could have come from - a gap on the ridgeline of the bedroom wing of the house. I asked Carolyn to come look at the situation ( I needed that second opinion again) and she suggested we get out or handy dandy multi-purpose ladder so that she could climb on the roof and inspect it closer.


The pitch on this roof is higher than any house we've had before so I didn't feel like making the inspection but after determining which part of the roof had more traction, Carolyn climbed up on the roof like a pro. She walked a little more cautious over to the ridge I had mentioned. There was about a six foot length of missing shakes. The felt roofing underneath appeared to be intact but she thought that if we had any nails, she would try to nail the missing boards back in place.

While Carolyn was creeping back to the ladder, I fetched my carpenter's belt, a large handful of nails, and a hammer. Luckily I had some nails that were the same length as the staples holding down the shakes now. Carolyn snapped the belt in place around her waist and, using the hammer and a shake as balance guides, moved back to the damaged area.

In addition to the two shakes in the sandbox, there were a couple on the roof like the one you see behind her feet in the picture above and there were a couple more on the other side of ridge she's working on. Initially, Carolyn thought that she'd need a couple of shakes from those we got from our neighbor but it turned out she had all the ones that had blown loose.


At first Carolyn was a little shaky, but after a while, she looked like a pro measuring and fitting the missing shakes, then hammering them in place.

Finally, she was through with the repairs to the ridge shakes. But she still had nails left in her belt pouch. So all the way back to the ladder, Carolyn nailed loose shakes in place as well as nudging some up where they should be before using another nail or two on them.

I'm taking these pictures from the top of the ladder. You can see what a beautiful day it was for working outside. It was cold, probably in the high 40's, but as long as the sun was shining on you, it was almost comfortable.

Finally, Carolyn ran out of nails and, although I offered to get more for her, she seemed happy to finally come down the ladder. We were delighted that the ladder worked like it was supposed to.

As it turned out, she probably saved us a $150 service call and she showed how possible it was to get on the roof. Still, we were both glad when she was finally on the ground again.

Goodie Box

When I told Carolyn that I had finished importing all our CDs and cassette tapes into iTunes for downloading onto our iPods, she asked, "Have you looked through the grey box in the library closet?"

I didn't even know or remember that there was a box in that closet. After emptying the box and doing a little sorting through, I took the above picture. Talk about a grab bag. There were no less than 8 cassette players, 7 AC adapters, 5 headsets, and a couple dozen tapes in various shape. It looks like maybe half of the cassette players are usuable and most of the headsets. The AC adapters all work but none of them produce the stated output voltage - they're all higher. I'm always afraid of ruining something unless the voltages match perfectly.

As for the cassette, there was two, maybe three that I wouldn't mind spending the time importing into iTunes. Carolyn might want a few others saved and she might have to do them.

Always interesting to see what we still have stored here.

Happy Valentine's Day

Yeah, I know that it isn't Valentine's Day yet but since Carolyn and I just got each other our Valentine's Day gift, I thought the least I could do would be to forward the greeting to the rest of you. (Actually, theh least I could do is much less than that.)

Today was (as Carolyn put it) a "Cat in the Hat" sort of day. The kind that is wet and miserable outside so you want to do something but aren't sure what. You get in the car with no particular goal in mind. Maybe you even change your goals several times while driving. Finally, you end up at Costco because you're getting hungry and their Polish hot dog meal is fast and inexpensive. Unfortunately, there are lots of things in Costco that are no inexpensive.

Meet the newest ornament in our house "Girl and boy reading". It was love at first sight as we thought this caught the image of our house so well. Our house is a house of reading. We did debate about where the statue should go. It's built to withstand weather so it could go outside. The front porch and the arbor in the back yard were both considered. But when it came down to it, we wanted to show it off but not have it in such a high traffic area that it gets damaged quickly. Hence the living room. Although the statue looks like brass it is just a brass paint finish over a weather resistant resin.


Here's a closeup of their faces.

Why do I blog?

I attended a dinner party this past Christmas season and the topic got around to blogging. It was well known to half of the guests at the party (the half who were my coworkers) that I had been blogging for a couple of years. Among the other half there was even some question about what a blog was. After several explanations one of the guests exclaimed, "Who the hell would want to do that?" It was a bit of a conversation stopper to say the least. When I admitted that I was an avid blogger the most natural question (I can't remember if it was actually expressed) was "Why the hell would you want to do that?"

Since that evening I've given the question a great deal of thought. Of course there are the usual reasons one does anything - it's fun, it's challenging, it's a good way to exercise one's writing skills, etc. I think it's all that and more. Like journal writing, keeping a blog trains one to look for the unusual and the interesting in life. Of course "interesting" and "unusual" are relative terms as I'm sure readers of this blog will attest.

In my thinking about this subject I checked out a book from the library called "Blogging for Dummies". A review (or at least a mini-review) has been written about it in particular which I posted yesterday on this blog. It surprised me how little there was on this topic in that book. I would have thought it natural but I suppose the author decided you wouldn't be reading the "how" unless you'd already gotten past the "why".

I also found an interesting reference at http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/04/is_blogging_a_g.html. The author of that blog answers the why question very well for the professional. And the answers carry over to a large degree for personal blogs like mine. I still find myself a little frustrated explaining something for the umpteenth time especially when there is a perfectly good explanation complete with pictures on my blog. And I am overjoyed when someone brings up a topic that I have discussed in my blog and notes that he has read my take on the issue. I don't care whether he agrees or disagrees, he HAS READ MY TAKE. We can start at a completely different level than we would otherwise.

There's also something scary about writing your thoughts down for all the world to see. Some people don't mind causing offense, some actually take delight in being offensisve. I'm not afraid of being controversial but generally I try to steer a careful line between not saying something that needs to be said and saying it in a way that will be misunderstood.

That being said, why do you or would you write a blog? Or why would you NOT write one?

Blogging for Dummies - book review

With so many of my family and friends now blogging, this is probably a good time to review this book.

I didn't pick up Blogging for Dummies by Brad Hill because I felt I was a "dummie" about blogging, maybe a little insecure, but not a "dummie". And after reading the book I feel like I have no reason to feel insecure or dumb. For one thing, blogging is a fast moving activity that is being redefined even as you read this blog entry. Many of the references in this book are already out of date. Half of the resources mentioned in the last chapter were either "under construction" or 401 (not in service). In fact, I just noticed that a later version of this book by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley just came out Jan 10, 2008. If you buy the book, make sure you get the updated version.

Brad Hill would have had a better time with this book if he had clearly identified the different types of blog and tailored the book to let people know which kind the particular chapter spoke to. For example, the folksy, diary-like blog like mine doesn't really care about advertising or rss feeds or really much of what else is happening in the blogosphere. Newsy, updated-10-times-a day blogs need to know about design features, advertising and customer trapping. MySpace and their look-alikes want things to be fun, attractive, and Coooooool.

But I don't want to be hard on Brad. The first person who wrote Internet for Dummies must have felt the same way. Only now are most of us beginning to see some of the potential in the Internet that was there all along. I think blogging has the same potential.

Sweet stories of the past

As I think I've mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago, Carolyn and I are the party people for our local church ward. Well, to be honest, Carolyn is the party person and I'm the sidekick. Yesterday, we went out looking for Jacks, the little six-pointed metal thingeys that girls (and some guys) used to throw on the ground and pick up while bouncing a ball. Our next party is a 1950's "Sock Hop" and to go along with that we wanted some 50's games like marbles, jacks, hopscotch, etc.

But when we got to the 99 cent store, we discovered candy of the 50's: Pez candy and dispensers, bubble gum, Chiclets, Boston Baked Beans, Junior Mints, Sugar Babies, and whatever up in the picture I've missed. Of course some of these are still favorites but they all were back then.

We'll keep you informed about the party - do come in you're in town February 9 at 7:00 pm.

Never Be Lied to Again - book review

The title of David J. Lieberman's "Never Be Lied to Again : How to Get the Truth in 5 Minutes or Less in Any Conversation or Situation" strikes a sympathetic chord with each of us. After all, who hasn't been in the situation where someone is telling us a bald-faced lie but because we don't know that or have no way of verifying it, we have to accept their word and then suffer the consequences. Now, most of us aren't private investigators or detectives that have to get the truth out of people as part of our jobs. But we spend a surprising amount of time acting on information from friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc. on the assumption that they're telling us the truth. As a supervisor I once had an employee who had the uncanny ability to lie through her teeth about the need for time off but each time I checked up on her, she had an air-tight alibi.

In the first part of the book Lieberman describes the physiology (physical signs) of someone who is lying which leads to the second and third sections where he gives us the recipes for detecting lies and for hanging in there until you get the truth. He doesn't claim any of the methods are fool proof and there are people so skilled at lying that none of them might work. But having an arsenal like Lieberman provides raises your odds significantly against those who aren't so skilled.

Snowing in Long Beach??

I really don't know much about the details of the event but my son Philip was kind enough to send us a bunch of pictures that he took last weekend at Stevely Whaley Park in Long Beach. Four of our kids and 11 of our grandchildren live in the area and it looked like they all got involved. The youngest, Gavin looked like he was a little puzzled about the whole thing.





Michaelson looks like he's figured snow out and is now looking to share that knowledge with someone. But Jillian is having plenty of fun discovering snow herself.




Sage and Perry look like they're cooperating on their project while Brooke and Libby are doing the same just a little ways away.


Looks like Ben and Michaelson were working on some structure.

I hear that a good time was had by all.

Friends of the Library

For as much time as I spend volunteering hours for the Friends of the Sacramento Public Library, I certainly haven't spent much time talking about it in this blog. This is partly to correct that.

No matter where you live (in the USA at least), you probably don't live far from a public library. And the chances are pretty good that there is a non-profit agency associated with that library called the Friends of the _____________ Library (insert the name of your library). That's how widespread the organization is. Originally, the Friends had two purposes: 1) find homes for all the books that the library has to dispose of regularly; and 2) raise money to help support the library. Many, if not most, Friends organizations have combined these two purposes and run book sales throughout the year. Some have annual or quarterly sales that tend to be really big events while others might just have a rack of books in the library foyer that is stocked and for sale every day the library is open. And the books for sale are no longer just what the library has discarded. People are constantly bringing in boxes and boxes of discarded books for the Friends to sell.

Larger cities might have a Friends organization for each library or they might have a more complex organization like we have in Sacramento where there is a System Friends which directs and coordinates 28 Branch Friends. As the System Friends we have an annual budget of around $100,000 and assets of $1.1 million. The Branch Friends add about $300,000 to the annual budget and $0.5 million to the assets. As you can see, there is serious money involved here.

Of course, it's not all about the money either. People involved with the Friends also tend to volunteer for the library, providing hours and hours of valuable service. I've enjoyed my service as treasurer for the System Friends as well as my time volunteering at the Carmichael branch library.

A Warm Welcome to Lisa

I am both proud and pleased to welcome my daughter-in-law to the world of blogging. You can find her blog at http://for-bunny-or-for-worse.blogspot.com/
She promises to blog daily and, judging from her first two entries, it should be an interesting and fun. Actually, anyone with a 6 bunny editorial board, has to be interesting and fun.

iPods revisited

iPods can be a lot of work! Sure they're fun to listen to and even show off your grandchildren with but they take a lot of work setting them up. As of now, we have uploaded into our computer (and subsequently downloaded into our iPods) 4,615 songs/tunes, in 318 albums, representing 11 days of continuous listening material, and taking up 14.4 gigabytes of our computer storage.

There's a special (free) program that we use to read, store, and index our music so it can be downloaded into the iPods. That program is iTunes. As those of you who have undertaken this process know, CDs are like CD-ROMs in that they can be read much faster than a regular music CD player plays. This is in the order of 6 to 16 times as fast, on our computer at least. That means that a 48 minute CD can be read and interpreted in something between 3 and 8 minutes. Not only that but there is a gigantic database of CDs that iTunes accesses to get the track information. The iTunes program and the iPod Classic also let you store the CD "cover artwork" (picture of the cover) with the uploaded music. A smaller database of this cover art exists for some, but certainly not as many, CDs as the tracklist. The bottom line is that it takes 10 to 15 minutes per CD to get it from the CD rack, into the computer, and back into place.

Yesterday marked a kind of turning point with the iPod music project as we pretty much finished up our CD collection and began on our cassette tape collection. I had previously taken most of our good quality reel to reel tapes and converted them to CD's so they're already in the computer. Tapes, either reel to reel or cassette, can only be converted to computer storage in "real time" plus editing and processing. So the minimum time a 48 minute tape can take is 48 minutes. And that's assuming the interpreting software can tell exactly where the "spaces" are between songs. Usually, I've had to do some "tweaking" to get the tracks to line up with the directory. Also, iTunes won't use the track identification database unless the music is coming in from CD. That means I have to manually enter all the track data.

This all means two things - one, we're going to be more careful about which cassettes get into the system; and two, the project is going to be going much slower from now on. I'll probably set a goal of 1 or 2 tapes per day. We've also found that life has been hard on some of our tapes. The sound quality just isn't like it was the first day we played them.

Nights of Rain and Stars - book review

There couldn't be a better title to review on this rainy night in California. However, Nights of Rain and Stars by Maive Binchy is not about rain and stars as much as it is a careful study of personalities, families, and the interaction of individuals with their family and friends. A group of five foreigners visiting the tiny Greek village of Aghia Anna happen to be dining at a taverna at the same time and witness a tragic fire just outside the town's port. Too far away to help or even give immediate solace to the victims or their families, they nevertheless manage to convey their sympathy. The group consists of a young man from England, a young American man, a beautiful, talented German woman, and a young couple from Ireland.

Rather than continue with their vacation plans, the group begin to bond and to explore each other's life situation with the help (or meddling) of Vonnie, another displaced foreigner who has lived in Aghia Anna for years. Each person can see solutions to others' problems but cannot see the similar solution to their own similar situation. Not everything works out but enough things do so that the book is both an upper and realistic.

Here are some pictures of the island of Aigha Anna which are entirely consistent with the word pictures painted by Maive Binchy. Makes you want to spend weeks not just days there.

I listened to the book on CD and marveled at the reader Terry Donnelly's command of the English language in 6 dialects and different characters' voices in each of those dialects. There was never any question about who was speaking because each voice had a different dialect or p itch or inflection. The book would be a delight if only to listen to those accents. Highly recommended.

Learning Resource Center

When I first signed up for German 401, the class location was listed as ARC Main LRC. I thought "What kind of alphabet soup is this?" When I found out that LRC stood for Learning Resource Center I didn't feel much better. I figured that was just a fancy name for the Library and there could be dozens of classrooms in the library. I hoped they would make it easy to find.

As it turned out, the LRC is NOT the library. It is not even in the library. It is a brand new building that is bulging with individual PCs. As you can see from the schematic above (you can click on it to see a larger version), almost half the building is dedicated to one large room, like a library reading room but with a computer on every desk. This area is designed for students who don't have other access to a computer or need the quiet, library like setting of the LRC.

Off to the side of this large room are a number of small office/cubicles meant for individual tutoring. And there are several such small rooms on the other side of the building. One thing that hit me right away was that in this building there are few right angled walls which must give the carpet layers a real challenge. Well, the placement of the computers gives teachers a fit.

Someone decided that a computer would be a big help to language instructors as the students can listen to exercises spoken by native speakers. The only trouble is that is such a small part of language classes today that most of the time we end up with an inflexible seating arrangement and a desk with no writing space.


The classrooms would work great for classes that are heavy in computer usage. But the less the computer is used, the more it is just in the way.

I was impressed with a very nice plaque at the building entrance which gives credit to all those who were somehow involved with building the LRC. And just in case you missed that tribute on the bottom of the plaque, here's an enlargement.

Just a spoonful of sugar

School bells are ringing again for me - quite literally this time as I stood outside the brand new Learning Resource Center (LRC) at American River College and listened to the carillon bells being played so beautifully. It was a rainy day and since I had never taken a class in the LRC I arrived early enough to comfortably find a parking space, find the building, and find the classroom. It turned out that all three were relatively easy to find so I found myself as the first student to arrive for German 401 - Elementary German.

The computers were locked with software preventing my playing around with them but it was more interesting to converse with Frau Doktor Susannah Martin while she did all the little things that teachers do at the last minute to get ready for class. She had written a list of things that she wanted each student to write on a 3 x 5 card so she could get to know us. Beside that list she had written "Write largely and clearly". I chuckled and she asked why. I pointed to her directions and said that I didn't think "largely" fit there. She first erased the "ly" but then said she couldn't do that because she needed an adverb and large was an adjective. Then she said to no one in particular "...it is largely understood..." and then said that largely must be an adjective also because it modified "understood". I was about to correct her again when I realized the last thing I needed to do was pick a fight with my teacher on the first day of class. She asked if I had anything more to say. When I didn't, she erased "large and", feeling, correctly, that "clearly" was sufficient.

So how is Frau Doktor Susannah Martin? If you can imagine Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins without the magic touch but with my daughter Jessica's sense of humor, you'll come pretty close. Frau Martin's command of the German language is impeccable. She began immediately after all the preliminary paperwork and roll call was complete. "Stehen Sie auf." "Lesen Sie." "Hoeren Sie auf!" "Setzen Sie sich!" "Schreiben Sie!" She mimicked the commands she was giving - stand up, read, listen, sit down, and write. Those of us with a little German vocabulary caught on quickly and those brand new to the language weren't far behind - not with Drill Sergeant Martin continuing to bark orders.

Next came the alphabet. She wandered around the room listening for any deviations from the way a good German would say the alphabet and if you weren't speaking loudly enough she singled you out for a solo. But only a short one. She told us that 99% of German verbs are regular in the present tense and gave a brief lesson in tense for those who didn't know what it meant. One got the sense that she was listening to every student and gauging her teaching speed to fit the class. You also got the impression that this was one teacher you didn't want to
cross swords with (or umbrellas to use the Mary Poppins analogy). Numbers from 1 to 99 and introducing yourself were also thrown into the mix tonight. I think the pace and the content of the class will be sufficient to keep me interested and working hard.

"You're invited...

... to the Playboy mansion" the subject line reads on an e-mail I recently received. Now as we all know from getting spam in our inbox all the time, an outrageous subject such as that is not really unusual. However, I'm more likely to get a message inviting me to a retirement seminar or a discussion on reverse mortgages.

[hostesses at last year's event according to the email]

But this is the real thing. I am invited to a party at the Playboy mansion. All I have to do is fork over $850 for a ticket (which is a real bargain as the price will soon be going up to $1,000). The event is the Marijuana Policy Project's Third Annual fundraising event on June 12, 2008. (I can just imagine now my family members reading this blog and trying to figure out whether they're shocked more about the Playboy mansion or the Marijuana Policy Project.)

Fear not, I haven't gone over the deep end, yet. It's just that the selection of charities I contribute to must fit a certain profile. So although I've never smoked marijuana (breathing in or not) I think there's a good case for decriminalizing it and there is no reason whatsoever for outlawing non-smokable hemp. But would I really spend that kind of money to endorse the lifestyle? Not likely. Back to your profiling, guys. You missed on this one.

Eggnog or Ice cream?

It was one of those perfect evenings where we had had a wonderful dinner and were looking forward to sharing a cup of eggnog made from recipe that we had gotten from Monique's blog. Grandma had substituted a couple of ingredients like Dream Whip for the whipped whipping cream and maple flavoring for vanilla (this substitution was unintentional). Then someone got the idea that we should try making ice cream out of the leftover pudding mixes that we had used for Tim's birthday party.

After a long but successful hunt for our ice cream maker we noticed that one of the recipes for ice cream looked a lot like the eggnog Grandma had just made. Well.... why not?

Edward volunteered (?) to crank the ice cream maker since it is electric. But that turned out to be a significant amount of work making sure the ice and salt mixture was just rigiht.


Ed did a fantastic job as the creamy mixture started thickening after about 20 minutes and 5 minutes later it came to a halt. According to the ice cream maker directions, that it supposed to happen between 20 and 30 minutes after starting the machine.

Tim and Jake didn't quite know what to make of this process. They still thought you make ice cream by tossing bags of ice cream mix surrounded by ice and salt. But it didn't take Jake long to appreciate licking the dasher and Tim to enjoy licking the container.
I suspect the ice cream maker won't stay as hidden as it has been for the past 6 years. We still have the pudding mixes available.

One failure - one success

We had our youngest son and his wife visiting with us this weekend. It is always fun to share their enthusiasm and interests. This time they came with a couple of suggestions for eating out which included a hamburger joint and a sandwich place.

The hamburger joint "Squeeze Inn" (just off Power Inn Road on Fruitridge in Sacramento) had recently experienced a re-release of a favorable television review on TV Food Network's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives (Monday evening at 10) so we shouldn't have been surprised when we arrived at 1:30 on a Saturday afternoon to find a line longer than the hamburger shack itself. The crowd was generally in a jolly mood. Everyone we asked was there because of the TV review, not because they had been there before. After half an hour we had moved about 6 feet and the line ahead looked as long as ever. Then a group of 5 came out to see on the bench in front of the place. We asked how the food was. The answer? "Oh, we haven't eaten yet. We've just placed our order and we were told it will be another 20 to 30 minutes before our food is ready.

Making a quick calculation, we figured to would be 3:00 at the earliest when we would eat and we had early dinner plans for the evening. We had to scrap our plans for a hamburger at the Squeeze Inn, at least for now.

On the drive back home we spotted the second place that Steve and Lisa had talked about. This time it was a chain sandwich shop called Lee's Sandwiches (also on Power Inn Road in Sacramento). They apparently have one in Santa Cruz and several places around southern California. It's a mix of traditional American sandwiches and Vietnamese fare. This time we were served within minutes of coming through the door. In fact trying to pick from their large menu took almost as much time as the food preparation. In addition to familiar turkey, ham, and tuna sandwiches there are Vietnamese egg rolls of 3 different kinds, 15 different Vietnamese sandwiches, Smoothies, pastries. Should be a great success. We were all happy.

Dead Certain - book review

Dead Certain, the Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper looked like the kind of book that I would just hate, me being a registered Democrat and all. But it turned out that I rather liked the book and I think I could ever like the man as long as we didn't get on the subject of politics or current events.

The author doesn't exactly sugarcoat Bush and even points out many of the errors or mismanagement events in his presidency. But they come across as errors that we all make to some extent, his just affect the entire world. Bush has been criticized for his "swagger" the author explains but then lets Bush answer by saying, "In Texas we call that walking." And he's probably culturally correct. It's just that a Texas swagger on some streets in New York or Los Angeles will get you beat up or worse.

The author describes Bush's vision of worldwide democracy as "dead certain" among other things that the president is certain of. It is perhaps a naive, certainly simplistic view that everyone would see what he sees if they were in his position and knew what he knows. It's a view that fits someone in a bubble which the president is in, but not someone who reads a lot which Bush also claims to do. Maybe his reading list is also bubble-like.

But I was most impressed by what seemed like an almost "spin-less" account of the Bush presidency to date. No one was demonized and no one was sainted. The Patriot Act was designed, apparently by well intentioned people who felt all the provisions were necessary to fight against and stop terrorists. The war against Iraq was to make the world a safer place. I don't agree with the premises in the book but I can see better now how one could believe them and still be a reasonable person. I would probably give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Gavin!

We were just notified this afternoon that our youngest grandson has started a blog. Of course at 8 months he has a little trouble with the keyboard so he is channeling his thoughts through Jenny or Philip. You can reach Gavin's blog at http://mydaddytalksfunny.blogspot.com/
Here are a few samples of pictures available on this brand new blog.


Gavin really enjoys his food - eating it or wearing it.

This summer at camp with two cousins who were much older. Looks like Gavin could hold his own.



At birth he needed a little exposure to reduce his jaundice so he got to wear these cool shades.

See more including a riveting video of Gavin rearranging his own furniture at http://mydaddytalksfunny.blogspot.com/