The Associated Press: Dog Saves Family From Fire Blamed on Cat
This is bad news for the pro-cat lobby. Clearly dogs are looking out for us, while cats continue to assassinate us.
Sphere: Related ContentFundraising T-Shirts Banned At School - News Story - KCTV Kansas City
This is pretty funny!
Friday is here at last. Sweet Friday.
It turns out that this weekend, like most, will offer little rest. Lately it seems like my weekends have gotten away from me. I blame mostly scouts. Although the kids swimming and soccer also have a stranglehold on big chunks of Saturday.
This evening I intend to engage in some focused loafing. I think there isn’t much for me to do tonight unless I want to organize the candy … which may not be a bad idea considering how quickly I am running out of time. See, on Saturday mornings the whole house gets up at 7am and goes to 8am swimming lessons. Our tradition has included breakfast at McDonalds as a treat for the swimmer kids. Yes, I am trying to get away from it, but they’ve come to expect it.
Then I have scheduled the den leaders of Melrose Pack 615 to come to my house between the hours of 10:30am and 1:30pm so they can pick up the fundraising candy for their dens. Most dens are between four and ten scouts. Each are expected to sell two boxes of candy or make a donation of $35. Me? I think I will probably ditch the candy and just buy my way out of the obligation with the thirty-five dollars. Although maybe I will bring in a box for sale at work. I hunted around and found some pretty cool prizes for kids who sell three or four boxes:
I went to the national scout store and found, what I thought were some pretty cool items. They’re all very “scouty” in nature and if I were a cub scout I would be excited about several of them. Especially the knife, which we intentionally reserved for only the oldest scouts. But everything there is decent.
The reason I mention this is because my wife was recently chatting with some parents who were complaining about how chintzy the prizes were this year. In years past if you sold, for example, 12 boxes of candy (600 bars) you got a $75 gift certificate to Target. Some of us thought that this might seem like a herculean task to some kids, so we figured that the pack might make more money if we could get everyone to try a little harder by selling only one or two extra boxes rather then being discouraged by the long distance to the first prize level.
The complainer apparently thought the prizes had been put together by some national organization, but that wasn’t the case. It was just me. I picked them out and chose the prize levels. We’re not going to make a lot of money on this, but it will also be cool for so many kids to get prizes for a little extra effort. So phooey on them. I think its a good idea and I hope it turns out well.
Grace has soccer practice at 2pm. The kids always like to go and play on the playground or in the woods. So that’s a nice thing to do. I think that by then I will be ready for some down-time.
On Sunday the cub scouts have scheduled a hike over at Breakheart reservation at 2pm. All my kids will want to go to that - well, except for Ben, the oldest. He will probably pretend that he’s too old for that sort of thing. I haven’t decided if I will let him stay home with his mother. I guess I will - I mean I don’t want to force anyone in to a nice walk in the woods.
That’s about it for me - I hope your weekend is quiet and restful.
Sphere: Related ContentYesterday Ben came down with some kind of stomach bug. It wasn’t nausea, said, but a sharp pain that made him very uncomfortable. Liz had already agreed to go with Chloe to Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in
My new employer is pretty good about letting you work from home if its necessary. I understand they went through a phase few years ago when a lot of their best people left for greener pastures, so they became more flexible about the time and location of peoples’ work.
Liz called me at work around 7:30am and asked me if I could come home to look after Ben for the day. Fortunately, I was able to go home and spend the day with Ben. All the other kids were off at school and Ben was reading on the sofa when I arrived. After making sure he was ok and everything was normal, I went downstairs to start my work.
After an hour or so, Ben wandered in and idly complained that there was nothing on TV. I recalled that when I was his age (6th grade) there wasn’t much on TV during the day either. “Card Sharks” was one of my favorites. “The Price is Right” wasn’t a fave, but it was better than the soaps that were on. My secret favorite show that was on during the day was “Love American Style”. Don’t tell anyone.
Ben is eleven years old and I knew JUST the thing. All the other (younger) kids were out of the house for the next five hours, so I ran upstairs and told him to follow me and that he was in for a treat! I’ve said these kinds of things to him before and he never seems to have the same kind of appreciation for The Maltese Falcon or Vertigo. So he came with me cautiously.
I went to our tiny video library and pulled out Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring! It was perfect. He already thought he knew what happened from playing a Lord of the Rings game, but it turned out he knew very very little of it. Incidentally, this wasn’t the namby pamby general release. This was the THREE AND A HALF HOUR extended (REAL-MAN) release! I decided that since it was PG-13 I had better offer some “parental guidance” by watching it with him while working.
He winked at me and understood.
We spent the next four hours watching Gandalf kick orc-ass all over middle earth. We had an excellent time! And by the time everyone returned we were just coming down from our LOTR-high. The end of that movie is a cliff-hanger where it looks like everything is coming down around the hobbits’ ears. Ben was DYING to start watching the next movie (two towers). So I think I have him hooked.
I also got a call from someone who ran across a website where I described my skills and my interest in part time consulting. They were interested in hiring me for some work, but it required some travel, which I’m avoiding right now. So it wasn’t right for me. But I was really excited that someone had tracked me down! Maybe the whole part-time consulting thing will actually get off the ground!
So yesterday was pretty good!
Roadfood.com - Recipes - Butter Burgers
“… there is no such thing as too much butter on a Milwaukee butter burger.”
for real?!
Nigeria: Woman Accused of Genital Theft
This story reads like the outlandish plot of … well, something on the order of Repoman. This could never be the plot of, for example, Stargate because its much too wacky and unbelievable. Do you remember the original Lost in Space shows? The black and white ones? Remember the one where the family bumps in to a travelling space circus? This story from Nigeria makes even less sense than a space circus.
Sphere: Related ContentI’m exhausted now so I can’t spend too much time writing. I hardly slept a wink last night. Gabriel had a GREAT time at the Webelos in the Woods event. He and Ben and I drove down to Plymouth at about 7:30am and helped get the troops set up so they could teach first aid to hundreds of cub scouts. While they did that Gabe and I went around and he got to shoot some BB guns and do some fishing (didn’t catch anything). I really LOVED fishing. I have GOT to take him more often. He has a lot of enthusiasm for it and he’s got a good hand at casting. I think his favorite activity was archery. He must have stayed there for an hour or so firing arrows!
It got cold last night. It got down to about 40 degrees and we didn’t like it much. Gabriel had managed to forget his heavy winter coat so he was starting to get pretty cold when I gave him the liner to my coat. We sat around a campfire while different boston-based packs presented songs or skits or jokes. But as we sat still it got colder and colder. Eventually we decided to turn in. We had put gabe’s sleeping bag inside another sleeping bag, so he was snug as a bug in a rug. My own sleeping bag was also equipped with a fleece liner. I was suprised by how warm I was. In the middle of the night I was stripping off layers of clothing.
Despite my tossing and turning Ben and Gabe slept like a rock. Nothing bad happened to either kid and they both had great times.
Our baby sitter said that she has a standing rule - she likes to babysit for her free to her clients on their wedding anniversary. That’s so nice. She’s an older lady whose kids have all moved out of the house and haven’t given her any grandchildren yet, so I think she misses kids. Anyway, we’re such squares. We couldn’t figure anything out to do so we went to dinner at the cheesecake factory, then spent some time touring the local Barnes and Noble followed by perusing new projects at Lowe’s. Some crazy night, eh?
Now I’m so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open.
Oh, want to see pictures of the camping trip? They’re over at Flickr.
cub carnival - Google Image Search
Tomorrow is the camping trip that Gabriel has been waiting a year for. Last year he couldn’t go to the “Webelos Woods” event in the fall because he wasn’t a Webelo. Normally I don’t think he notices the relatively small age difference between him and Ben, but he sure felt it last year. In many other regards he is Ben’s equal and I think it upsets him sometimes when there’s some threshold between him and Ben.
So this weekend is his chance to go camping alone with me. I wish it had been last weekend when we might have had a long weekend instead of a shorter one. So on Saturday morning me and Ben and Gabriel will drive down to Camp Massassoit in Plymouth, MA to spend the day and night doing scout stuff. I’m looking forward to it. I think it will be fun. Gabriel is a fun guy and I can’t wait to see how much fun he’s going to have.
I got a phone call from another parent in the den who thought the food would be lousy and wanted to plan on doing our own cooking. She didn’t have to ask me twice. I love that stuff. She said that someone else would be bringing hot dogs and hamburgers and she was bringing marinated chicken and tomatoes and pita bread and some other stuff. I thought she had the bases covered but volunteered to bring the desert. I decided to do some kind of dump cake in my dutch oven. I’ll show off my scout-cred.
Ben will get to try out his new sleeping bag. We got it last night and I hate it. Both he and his mother hate the idea of a “mummy bag” – I must have goofed when I explained it. I don’t know. Because they both had the idea that it feels restricting to sleep in one and every time I tried to explain why a mummy bag was better I was argued down. So I gave in, which was a mistake because now we have a big (relatively) heavy silver bag that’s only rated to 20 degrees. I stewed about it for a while and I am considering calling REI to see if I can exchange it even thought the box is gone and the plastic sleeve is gone. Otherwise I just have to get over it.
I made the same mistake with Ben’s bike. A couple of years ago I let him pick out a new bike. He really liked a trick bike. It resembles an old-style “dirt bike” (BMX) except without the knobby tires. They’re slick for street riding. At the time he didn’t understand all my admonitions about gears and considering what he would use the bike for. I knew that he would regret getting a bike that didn’t have any gears but I let him get it anyway. And since then I have watched him struggle with long tall hills while Gabriel could zip past him. I always regretted letting him get a bike that I knew he wouldn’t like. But I was afraid of imposing my preferences over his. Grrrr…
We will have to miss swimming and Grace’s soccer. Liz will take the girls to those events. We will go off and have a good time camping and whatnot. Then we will come back on Sunday morning. This is important because its my anniversary and our babysitter says that she has a standing policy of free babysitting for her clients on their anniversary.
I have to try and figure out what we’re going to do with our event. I am sure we’ll go out for dinner. We would like to see a movie but I don’t think there’s anything good playing.
In short, I have a lot of play-time coming up.
Sphere: Related ContentThings are fine at work. Overall, I have to admit that I am somewhat puzzled at the relative lack of work. Most of the time, when I have started a new job, either as a consultant or as an employee the people are eager to put me to work and start squeezing hours out of me.
Here: not so much. My first week was really super quiet. And this week things are slowly picking up. The good news is that if this keeps up I will have plenty of time to continue (and maybe increase) my involvement with the boy scouts. Based on how I see other people working I think that will be the case.
I am not entirely surprised by this – in fact, it was one of the reasons I came here instead of a high-stress environment where I am the manager. Those opportunities are available to me, but its still important to me to have a life at home, separate from my work.
Speaking of scouts, we finally got the information we needed about where we are going to be camping this weekend. I helped them get things organized and get ready. They’ll be fine. There’s some excitement in the adult leadership ranks – the current scoutmaster is doing a lousy job and the committee chairman is ready to toss him out on his ear. He’s actually very interested in going, but knows that there’s nobody to replace him.
Yet.
I’m thinking of taking the job. It would be a lot more work than I am doing now but I don’t think it has to be overwhelming. There’s actually a lot of involvement from the other parents and there are, relatively speaking, a lot of assistant scoutmasters who could be very helpful. So I’m thinking about being in charge.
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