Fifteen Minutes of Delusion

It seems like last year I was driving the 50 miles to Dallas at least twice a week, and often even more. This year, I've managed to go for months without making the trip. So yesterday's Dallas drive was actually kind of a treat. While Kara was living in the condos, we met a family with a set of twins right about Anna's age, and the kids really got along well. So when Kara found that Noah and Olivia were back in town (and bored out of their minds) we decided to plan a Saturday afternoon excursion. I put the camera in the van, and managed to leave it there the whole afternoon. You'll have to settle for photos stolen from various sites around the internet. Our first stop was the Rock Barrell , a rock and bead store. Tons of rocks and minerals and fossils and beads. Anna and Olivia were in heaven. Noah enjoyed it too, I think, but seemed ready to go when Alyssa finally ran out of interest. We then went to the Galleria of Dallas - a huge shopping center on the north side of ...

The other day, as the girls and I were out looking for fossils and I found my umpteenth petrified sea urchin , I decided that our homestead needed a name. That name, of course, is Sea Urchin Ranch . "Find your own fossils at Sea Urchin Ranch." It has a nice ring to it, don't you think? I doubt I could charge admission, and I don't really want a bunch of strangers traipsing through our back yard scaring the bunny and tearing up the, um, wildflowers. But friends and family are always welcome. There are plenty of fossils for everyone. I've never been big on naming things that don't have a face. The one notable exception is Polu Manini , the little Ninja 250 I bought a few years ago to commute back and forth to work. That bike was a lot of fun, and she was really manini with the gas. I could ride in the carpool lane, which I thought would be a great help. But the lane didn't go all the way to my exit. Traffic usually moved well until the carpool lane ended, a...

When I was teaching computer programming as an adjunct faculty member at UVSC , I would emphasize to my classes that there are two kinds of computer users - those who have lost data, and those who will lose data. I'm not the best example of "save and backup", but I'm much better than I used to be. There are at least two copies of anything that is important to me. At least, of the things I have control of. Our email service has had a crash, and it looks like a few messages have been lost. Since the crash, I haven't gotten any new messages, except for a handful of spam and a number of messages from Prism support, each one assuring me that the problems have REALLY been solved this time. Now, it's possible that hundreds of fans of this blog have been trying to email me, with the messages just falling off into the ether somewhere. More likely, however, neither of the fans of this blog have tried to send an email. So as a test, I sent myself an email from my work ac...

Alyssa has turned into quite the little game master. On Friday night she moved all of the chairs into the living room and invited everyone to sit, which we did. She then proceeded to play a game something like Simon Says where she told each of us to stand up or sit down, and to put our hands on our heads or noses or ears. She did a great job directing the game. The only real trouble was keeping Anna from trying to take over. Tonight we found that four chairs had been set out, back to back, for a game of musical chairs. Anna, of course, didn't want to play. But with Alyssa asserting herself like this, we insisted. I put in Mary Poppins and skipped to one of the songs, so I could start and stop the music via remote. For the most part, we played with enough chairs for everyone, but we played a few rounds the "right" way. I made sure that everyone had a chance to win, and managed to bump Anna onto the floor a couple of times, which she thought was hilarious. In the end, Anna ...