Big Update

Boy, it’s been a while since we posted anything new, hasn’t it? I’ll try to catch us up a bit…

Furry 5k
Back on June 12th we walked the Furry 5k, along with event crashers Bonnie & Lulu and patrons of the animal arts Jim and Aurora (Aurora left her cat Dee Dee at home). The weather was nice, the dogs had a good time, and it was nice to perambulate in the great outdoors and catch up with Jim. His latest project is converting a Volkswagen Transporter into an electric truck with a bio-diesel engine to recharge the batteries. Word is once he gets his new eco-friendly vehicle running, he might just switch back to meat, so as not to overdo the saving of the world.

Here’s how Zoey enjoyed the big event (this and a few more photos can be found in Zoey’s Gallery:

Portland
We headed down to Portland last weekend to celebrate Father’s Day and the June birthdays of every single relative we have in Portland. (And a big Happy Birthday again to all three of you!) My parents bought a crib for one of the rooms upstairs, so much better sleeping was had by all, except for when the uncharacteristic thunderstorm woke Zoey up crying after she’d been asleep for only two hours. Rona and I were out at Barnes & Noble, so Grandma Evelyn rescued Li’l Z, and our princess was up and happily playing with Grandpa Earl when we got home, much to our surprise. We got her to bed a while later, and it was sleeping as usual from then on out.

The big event was when Zoey figured out how stairs work. There are thirteen steps up to the second story at my parents’ house, and Zoey spent quite a lot of time climbing up (hands and feet, one foot up a step, then the other up to that step, etc.) and down (same procedure reversed, heading down backwards). Zoey showed off her newfound walking skills, and fun was had by all, and we are forever doomed to be the parents of a fully mobile child.

Grass
The Big Seeding of 2005 is proceeding apace. I mowed the new grass yesterday for the first time! I used my brother’s hand-me-down push mower (as opposed to his hand-me-down gas mower–that’s for later). After I finished and was lifting the mower up onto the deck, the handle thingie completely separated from the mower-blade-wheel assembly thingie, which I found quite funny. I carried the two pieces of the mower into the garage, and will work on figuring out how to put it back together the next time I mow. Here are before and after pictures (before being after the ground cover was finally all gone):

We’ve Been Bugged!
For a while now our kitchen has been plagued by locusts–by which I actually mean tiny little caterpillar worms that turn into tiny little moths and are in fact entirely unlike locusts. They enjoy infecting dry goods such as flour, sugar, barley, dog treats, almonds, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Rona chucked in the trash as part of The Great Kitchen Reorg of 2005. She bought a bunch of plastic containers at Storables, and now our cupboards are sparser but labeled, and bug-free.

Coffee Crash
The morning after we got back from Portland I went to fire up the coffee maker and discovered that the carafe was quite warm, heated up by the part where the water flows up from the reservoir and gets heated up. This was despite not having used the thing in four days, and despite the switch being on Off. Uh oh. We unplugged the machine, and now have a shiny new Starbucks Barista Aroma Grande (they were having a sale). It’s pretty, and makes a fine pot of coffee, but the carafe must be inserted in one specific way into the area under the filter basket, or the coffee mostly runs out onto the counter and down into the drawers and all over the floor. As we discovered. After my fury subsided a bit and we had used up a roll of paper towels, I found the troubleshooting advice in an online PDF describing the exact conditions necessary to avoid this overflow. It seems to me that the actual instructions would be a good place for that information, but maybe that’s why I don’t work for Starbucks. Now armed with the secret of the Java Brotherhood, I hope to avoid future kitchen floods while enjoying lots of great coffee.

The Apple of Our Eyes
A shiny new 20″ 2.0 GHz Apple iMac G5 with 2GB of RAM and a 400GB hard drive will be arriving within the next couple days. We’re very excited (by which I mean I am). (Thanks, Robert!)

Father’s Day, Part Two
This morning we picked up Bonnie on Capitol Hill (avoiding the traffic caused by the Pride Parade) and went off to meet Robert and Barb for a belated Father’s Day breakfast at the Sunflour Cafe. The food was good (although I need to remember that I’m always disappointed by French toast other than my own), the company was great (if a little hard to hear at times), and Zoey was eating lots of food and trying out her full range of emotional expression. I got a couple nice Dad’s Day cards, and the entire 1-season (4-DVD) series of Joss Whedon’s Firefly to enjoy at my leisure (and now I can return Codrus’ set so he can enjoy it at his.

Fun & Games
I was testing out the Apache Web server on the Powerbook this morning, trying to figure out why I can view pages in the root directory but not my personal Web directory. One thing led to another, and I ended up writing a silly little game in Perl. The premise is that you try to pick the number that you think the computer will roll on a virtual 6-sided die. You select your number, and it lets you know how you did. To make it more interesting I added in a tally system to keep track of total guesses, along with the number correct and incorrect. I think (and I’m sure a certain Math Department Chair will correct me if I’m wrong) that you have a straight 1-in-6 (or roughly 17%) chance of picking the correct number by choosing randomly. (This could actually be a 1-in-36 chance, but I’m too tired to figure it out.) Logic would have it that if you’re prescient (or else able to read machine "minds") you should be able to predict the correct number way more often than that. Of course, math has always been my weak suit… Maybe you should just go play the game.