Gecko Bloggle

Hello everyone.

Another long rambly thing from me. Feel free to skip. I won’t be hurt. Heck, *I* probably won’t read this thing again after tonight.

This week has been a good one, even though the (sudden. actual.) snow here in Raincouver has been messing with my commute. I’ve been playing with the “real” version of Vista (downloaded legitimately, via the Microsoft Developers Network), and now that I know a few of the keyboard shortcuts, I’m starting to feel like it’s not ALL bad. Of course, there’s still a lot of “I could do that before, using free utilities” feelings, but for the most part, I’m somewhat amazed at how many devices and things work just fine, with drivers installing on the first plug. Perhaps the term “Plug and Pray” will revert to what it was supposed to be “Plug and Play.”

F’rinstance, I plugged a PCMCIA Adaptec Firewire card into this laptop in order to attach my Western Digital external drive *AND* my Maxtor external at the same time. Hear that, world? I’ve currently got 750GB of drive space attached to this little laptop here. When you start thinking of available drive space in terms of “Three Quarters of a Terabyte,” you start to get a little wobbly remembering that first PC I had with the whopping 110MB of space. These days I carry ten times that in my pocket in the form of a USB drive.

…and don’t get me started on the Commodore 64 my mom bought us back in the day, when she splurged the extra $400 (or was it $600?) for the 5.25″ floppy drive (as opposed to the current-gen standard of the TAPE DRIVE) that was single sided, single density. That’s 180K, if I recall correctly.

Yeah, so, I’ve been more of a techie this week, and less of a manager, which is good. What’s funny is that feeling of getting back to where I’m comfortable in my imaginary stealth chopper. I’m better at figuring out how to deal with some of the more… Office Political… parts of my job. The problems and people I have to deal with that are “less tech / more talk” are easier to work with/around if I’ve had my daily dose of geekery, first (or know that I can geek out later in the day).

Something comes back to me while I transfer the 232GB of Shitoshi’s recovered drive image, and download the squippy-lookin’ build of Linux that looks like it could probably be the Vista/OSX-For-Linux-Users (Kororaa). This was said to me while I was sheepishly talking about some of the software (some data-recovery and forensics applications) I’d acquired via, let’s say “unconventional” means, and what I was learning to do with said software (and I’m paraphrasing):

“As a samurai, you must keep your blades sharp and practice your craft, in the event that you may be called upon to ‘Save The Day,’ so that you may have no fear in your heart as you descend into battle.” (The Electric Gumshoe put it better, but I’ve forgotten it now).

and I think about that idea of sharpening my blades, and it makes me think of something I call the Intruder Complex, which is that feeling one has in a job where they don’t feel totally comfortable, and they’re not really sure what they’re doing just yet. The feeling is that any moment now your boss/co-workers/girlfriend/child will figure out that you don’t know what you’re doing, and blow you out of the water right there and then. y I remember quite well the sensation that Cam (my first boss in my first techie job, where I learned my way around 386 PCs, Windows 3.1, and Novell servers) was going to haul off and punch me in the face because I had screwed something up on An Important Machine. It would never have happened, of course, ’cause Cam was probably feeling not much different than I was – he was a techie who started a company on the top floor of his father-in-law’s machining shop, and mostly he assembled computers and servers for small companies of about 10-20 users. I was his second employee, ever.

So I learned my craft, and every time I *didn’t* screw things up, I felt a little better, and the better I got at troubleshooting (and/or recovering from my own mistakes so fast nobody noticed I didn’t know it the first time), the less and less I felt like I was going to be fired on the spot. That complex goes away after a while. But it sure comes back every time you get moved on to something new.

And then you move up and up in the ladder of technicians, across the line into guru or mad scientist land. You start pulling craziness from the magician’s hat, only it’s not always a cute little bunny you pulled out of that hat, like people might have expected you to. It’s this horrifying multi-legged gibbering *thing* that came from the deep blackness of the net, and it might eat every machine in a 50-foot radius if you don’t handle it properly. And nobody knows how to handle it properly, and everyone who knows enough about such things knows enough to be a little scared.

I guess that’s the thing: In order to be really good at your job, you’ve got to be crazy enough to handle the dangerous stuff, but strong enough to get yourself out of the bad stuff if the fur starts to fly. If you never do the dangerous/scary stuff, what you do won’t show up easily on the radar (your boss’, your partner’s, your co-worker’s, your kid’s, your own). Even if it’s not in a good light all the time, at least you’re being noticed. I’ve screwed things up before, and come clean most of the time. Fail faster, I’ve been saying over the last few months. If you’re not going to make it out of a technical/political brawl you got into, let the others around you know as soon as possible. If they’re really on your side, they’ll slam their back against yours and start fighting too.

Always have a backup piece. A good backup. It helps to have a bigger and scarier friend you can turn to if things get really out of control, too.

What I sometimes forget is that some of the techies I work with don’t like the scary stuff. It scares them. Scares them back to that horrible “I’m gonna get punched/fired” feeling. I want to be brave for them, but that doesn’t work. My only advice for them is “You have to enjoy the sensation of not knowing. This job is too difficult to do if it isn’t fun. Even if it’s kinda demented that you find the difficult stuff *fun.*”

So what the heck am I talking about again?

I’ll sum up, and since I’m not even making sense to *myself* any more, so I’ll do it in StarWars-ese:

1. Be brave. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
2. Keep your lightsaber nearby (and know how to use it, even with the blast shield down).
3. Find yourself an Old Ben Kenobi (from Episode Four, not One).
3a. and a Yoda (from Episode Five, not One).
3b. and the odd Han and Chewie, just in case.
4. Know what the Empire is building, just don’t mess with it until you know how.
5. Stay on target… STAY ON TARGET…
6. The Force might always be with you, but it won’t help if you’ve got it pointed the wrong way.

That’s all from me for tonight, ’cause my brain’s full of stuff that’s even hokier than that was.

Next post will probably be about my new super-reinforced-stitching button-fly jeans. (I kid you not).

and now, since this post is all about hired assassins and royal bodyguards (what? it wasn’t?), here’s a quote from the film GhostDog, in which a great big black man (Forrest Whittaker) becomes the most believable samurai an American film has ever produced:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

So I walk into the bedroom, and I’m grabbing some socks (in our place, with the dying hardwood floors, socks are more of a necessary sacrificial object, lest you get a toe or two sliced open, instead of a sock or two), and I look into the crib and see Tate sleeping in pretty much exactly this position.

Minus the crayon, and lying on his back. A-heehee…

Jake Ludington has put together a very cute little video of How to Make Chopsticks Kid-Friendly, which saves us the hassle of having to carry around the plastic rhinoceros-topped plastic chopsticks whenever we wanna go get sushi at the local all-you-can-eat sushi place, or even the local Mongolie Grill.

I don’t know where we’re supposed to get rubber bands though.

Last time *I* had any dealings with rubber bands, it was one of those rubber-band-balls, and I accidentally bounced it off someone’s head (seriously: NOBODY could have made this “thrown side-arm, off the fake drop ceiling, off her head, while someone was standing close enough to her to be blamed” shot). So yeah, I stay away from rubber bands nowadays, for the most part.

So today we got up around 10am localtime, which is 7am PST, which is still “First Thing” Ripley-mean-time.

Breakfast consisted of fruit-sweetened cheerio-like things, and I gotta say: if that’s fruit-sweetened, I’m afraid of what unsweetened would be like. Coffee-bag (like tea bags) took the edge off, but I just couldn’t seem to get moving. Maybe it’s that this vacation is actually setting in a little, ’cause wow, did I ever zone out for a while there today. The heat here’s pretty intense, but it’s not because of *just* the heat, it’s the humidity.

Okay, maybe it’s mostly the heat. 89% humidity at 72 degrees is totally fine, but not when it’s 89 outside. I’m not going to go look up how to convert that to CDN temps, ’cause I’d probably be embarassed to find out it’s 22 or something mild like that.

Tate sat around on the (slightly pointy) grass for about five minutes before he decided it was either too hot or too pokey to continue, but I managed to get a quick shot of him bein’ cute and stuff.

It seems that the most common question about Tate is “is it a boy or a girl?” ‘Cause he’s just so damned pretty, I guess. I refrain from responding with “You should see him at 11:45pm, when he decides he doesn’t wanna sleep until after the Colbert Report is over.

I gotta say though, it’s better than “You named your baby Cake?”

Ripley got out into the backyard, and ran around a lot, with many rounds of “run to the front of the house and ring the doorbell,” which reminded me of Doorway to Summer, with the idea of cats trying to find the door that would lead to a nice day outside, instead of the crappy rain we usually have in BC. Rip worked up a good sweat under all that hair, and

I’m pretty sure I’m going to vaporize at least one rubber lizard when I get out there with the lawnmower tomorrow (heh, I’m gonna do YARDWORK like a REAL MAN in the SUMMER HEAT). Little do they know I’m going to be all “ewww, my shoes are all grassy now,” when I’m done.

It’s because I look stupid in baseball caps, isn’t it? Dead giveaway.

Next up, we went for a walk to Goshen College, which explains the GCScience wifi I occasionally see from our topfloor bed, ’cause it’s about a block and a half away.

Pretty, and quiet, with some nice wind and trees, and sprinklers Ripley danced around in. Especially fun was the one pop-up sprinkler that didn’t pop up, and instead built-up pressure from it’s rather pedestrian six inch drinking-fountain height until it did a full-on ten-foot jet of liquid comedy, drenching Ripley entirely and sending us and three cyclists running away laughing, thankful for the water on such a muggy day.

We schlepped back home, and I was getting a headache. Headache, plus sunglasses, plus new haircut equals “undercover CIA agent” disguise, I’m told.

So in the afternoon, we went out to a “Super” market of some note (most notable that it was “New” in Grampa’s eyes, *AND* there was a Starbucks inside). We were no fools though, and passed by the $1.75 Charbucks coffee for the higher-octane deli lunchcounter coffee, which was about a buck cheaper, three times the size, and would have left most Seattle yuppies vibrating under their collective moon roof, wondering why this “cheap crap” packed such a punch.

Arwen mentioned about five minutes later that she literally saw me “come back online.” We were meanderthals in this warehouse of food (maybe it was the coffee talking, but American supermarkets are just more colourful), looking at the weird stuff for sale that you can’t buy in Canadian supermarkets to wit:

1. The “Hispanic Foods” Isle (not sure why this felt weird, when Vancouver markets all have an “Ethnic Foods” section, but it felt weird nonetheless).
2. Patriotic Cookies (and similarly Red!White!Blue! yogurt covered pretzels, which Ripley dubbed “pigs nostrils when he found strawberry ones a month ago, so I’m calling them that from now on) and tablecloths, and stuff. And other stuff. Oh, and this thing over here, too. Including bunting. Maybe it’s only because the 4th of July is coming soon, but even when you think you’re ready for flag-waving to wander into the cookie aisle, you’re not. Maple-flavoured cookies don’t count. At least, not to me.
3. Coke Black. (Tried this, and it doesn’t suck. Take a bottle (glass, small) of Coke Classic, dump it into a Tim Horton’s small double-double, and you’ve got the same thing). Maybe I just like that it was more coffee.
4. Booze. Not just $4 bottles of wine that would cost $11 in the BCLD, but crazy stuff, like $11 4Litre vats of Sky Vodka, and what looked like “stubbies” of Becks.
5. “Mexican Coke” which is Coke-flavoured-Coke, but in glass bottles. Just like we used to get before some testing house somewhere started tipping them over on cement floors with broom handles, causing them to explode, and we were forced to buy “safety Coke” in plastic bottles that could happily bounce three feet high in the back of the minivan.
6. Parsnip flavoured orangutan toes, in sauce. (No, not really).
7. Tamarinds, in sauce. With guys in sombreros on the label, so they wouldn’t be confused with “Non-Hispanic” foods. We’ll see what happens there. What’s a tamarind?
8. “Spicy Candy” See #7

Next we drove around while my mental compass made whooshing noises (there’s no mountains, and no ocean, so where am I supposed to look for milestones?), and went to some sorta Amish tourist version of an all-you-can-cram-down-your-laughing-gear, complete with tour buses outside. I tried to convince Grampa that it would be okay, ’cause the tourist buses had their doors open in their best “dinner’s over, let’s go talk loudly to each other about something ELSE that’s not like home” pose.
We passed a cloud of loudness in bad shirts as they left. Disaster averted.

The food was this, and they kept bringing more.

1. BIG plate of chicken. Fried, meaty. Good. (We could have done beef too, I understand).
2. Bowl of green beans. Cooked, buttery, good. Almond & bacon snippets, too.
3. Bowl of mashed (mashed? put-near creamed!) potatoes.
4. Bowl of Breaded Stuffing.
5. Bowl of Monster Oversized Noodles in chicken broth that would make the Campbell’s people cry.
6. Pitcher of gravy. (Seriously)
7. Pie. Pie gooood. I refrained from quoting “Weebl & Bob” with “When come back, bring pie.”

The ride home was an all natural lightshow of the likes you just don’t see in BC. At least, not near the ocean, you don’t. Crazy right-angle rain that bounced a good six inches off the ground, and made me feel like I was driving through the world’s largest carwash (oh yeah, I was driving, ’cause it was FUN, honest!) and we ran into the house once again soaking wet. Yay for air conditioning.

The evening was nice and relaxed, with Arwen and Grampa Virgil talking about religion, and family, and life, and Virgil once again blowing my mind with how many things he’s done/been/seen. He’s 84, and done 300 years worth of living, I tell you. If he ever has any sorta near-death experience, it’s gonna take a good long time to have that whole life-review thing, and we’ll need schematics, and diagrams with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

Ripley and I stole a National Geographic at bedtime, and read about Polar Bears, NewYork Grand Central Station’s “Lost and Found” department, and street dogs all over the world. Tate continuously threatens to start actually crawling instead of his current “yogic flying” sitting up and hopping on his butt to get around.

I’m not totally relaxed, but I’m getting there.

I didn’t check my Blackberry at all today, and I’m not sure I really want to any more.

And now, I’m going to see if I can hop onto someone’s wifi, and send this post off.

We’re here, and it’s late (for here), and so this’ll be short.

We were only “those people” with “those children” for about 15 minutes during the first (and longest leg) of our journey, so all in all, it went really well. Ripley looked out the window at stuff, and Tate was just cute and sleepy most of the time, and there was a moment where were were a little row of three nerds, playing Mario Kart on a fire-engine red Nintendo DS (Ripley), Sudoku on a sexy blue/black Nintendo DS SLIM from Japan three months before they were available in North America (Arwen) and Burnout Legends on a funky PSP (Me). Sometimes, it’s good to work where I do.

DORKS!

Look at us: We hardly look insane at all!

Okay, maybe a little.

Three hours in the back row of a 757’ll do that to a person.

Multiply that time by three for each child under 6 you’re traveling with, and we were in the air for about… nine days.

Mostly though, things went great, and here’s some pics to prove we were in the AIR!

See that? Mt Baker looking all majestic and stuff, instead of that sorta grimey look it gets when looking at it from my patio on the 19th floor at work (through the smog of 90 gatrillion commuters-worth of cars). It was beautiful up there.

After the trip to Cincinati, we ate at the Outback, and Arwen and I had to actually pull out my Blackberry to find out what STATE we were in. So much for making fun of Americans for not knowing anything about Canadian geography, I was totally lost.

…and I sorta enjoyed that feeling.

After a 2.5 hr stopover, and some time where Ripley could play with his multitude of rubber snakes, lizards and spiders, we were back on a much smaller Delta Connections flight, with Ripley having a seat to himself, and Arwen and I on the other side of the isle. Watching the sun go down when you’re *just* above the clouds is beautiful – something I haven’t remembered seeing since my trip to New York when I was about 12.

When we were landed, and taxying (sp?) into the gate, I spotted fireflies, and when Ripley saw them out HIS side, he got so excited he started yelling (his ears hadn’t popped yet, and hey, he’s four) about “I’ve never seen flier fies before ever!” then we were off and standing on the ground…

Another one-hour car trip along the various highways of Indiana (why do I always feel like I’m driving West when there’s no Ocean, Sun, or Mountains for a BC boy to navigate by?), and we arrived at Grampa Virgil’s house in Goshen. He mentioned as we were pulling up that he paid $11,000 for the place 60+ years ago, and figured it’s be worth maaaybe $80G now…

This house, my friends, would pull an easy $800,000 in Vancouver’s market right now… Guh.

After much conversation about airflow, and new paint, and putting fans in the windows upstairs while opening the windows downstairs, we’re all in bed now.

So I’ll sign off now with this little bit of highway wisdom: When you hit a firefly on the highway, the little glow bit gets left on the windshield.

and this little bit of airplane wisdom:

People who fly have a different view of the world than those who spend their lives on the ground. A very wise man once wrote a poem while he was flying, and he called this poem “The God’s Eye View,” and he said that this view was entirely different than the view he always had on the ground, which he called “The Bug’s Eye View.”

Out there, somewhere, in the air we fly through, exists an old Persian legend much like this poem about a bug who spent his entire life in the world’s most beautifully designed Persian rug. All the bug ever saw in his lifetime were his problems. They stood up all around him. He couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool in the rug to find the crumbs that people had spilled on the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this: that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life inside something which had a pattern. Even if he, this bug, had even once gotten above the rug so that he could have seen all of it, he would have discovered something – that the very things he called his problems were a part of the pattern.

Have you ever felt like that bug in the rug? That you are so surrounded by your problems that you can’t see any pattern to the world in which you live? Have you heard anybody say lately that the world is a total mess? That, my friends, is the Bug’s Eye View, and seeing only a little of the world, we might be inclined to think that this is true.

Edit: Oh, and if anybody was wondering: “linksys” in Goshen is an unsecured WAP. Thank you, whoever you are, and I promise not to do anything alarming on your node.

So, on the first night of our adventure, we stayed in Kent, at the quiet and reasonably-priced Best Western “On the Green,” which means every room (that’s not overlooking the parking lot) is overlooking the uh… golfers. Actually, it was mostly overlooking the ducks, and the occasional golfcart. I had visions of Rip and I sneaking out in the middle of the night and recreating scenes from CaddyShack, but then decided against it due to my hurt back (managed to mangle something in my lowerback during a particularly rousing round of “Laundry Bucket Street: Overload Extreme 360,” which Arwen tends to perform using a stroller, but I like to do bareback, ’cause that’s how I roll).

So anyhoo, we get everything into the room, and since we’re all starvin’ like Marvin, we decide to wander into the wild streets of Kent’s golfing district, and see what there is to eat.

Ripley saw the chinese food place next door, which I won’t name, lest Google unleash its daemons on the place, and start associating it with terms like “suck” and “gross” and “unintentionally comedic,” but here’s a picture.

(Note the single vehicle parked out front – should’ve been our first hint).

We walk in, and were seated as far away as possible from the only other occupied table, probably a bad sign, and we should’ve kept going to… oh, anywhere. The sports bar next door sounded pretty good after this place, I’m serious.

So we order a combo plate thing, at $12/person, ’cause it’s got Beef & Brocolli, which is my personal fave, and sweet & sour pork, which is Rip’s fave. I don’t know if there was anything Arwen wanted in there or not. We were all in for a real… buncha plates of food…

First comes the wonton soup, which was very very MSG-y, and contained ONE! ENTIRE! WONTON! per bowl. Okay, so maybe that’s not their forte, or something. It’ll get better, we keep telling ourselves. Rip liked it (salt AND sugar? where do I sign up?). Next arrived the sweet and sour shrimp, which was from the EAST combo, not the SOUTH combo that we ordered, so we sent that back. Not a problem, just a little mixup. While that’s being fixed, a plate of deep fried and heavily glazed something (I think I was supposed to be ginger chicken, but who knows, really?) arrived, along with a plate of sauces…

So what do we have here? There’s the plate of ginger something at the top left there, and then the sweet & sour sauce, which came with the spring rolls (to be fair, those were edible, if very greasy), but that little trifecta plate there on the right? Know what was in that?

Sesame seeds. Ketchup. And of course, that cornerstone of Asian Cousine: Dijon freakin’ Mustard.

These things arrived with the warning that they were very very hot, and when I said “Hot – spicy?” the guy went into this elaborate hand-gestured thing about how it was so spicy, that if Ripley were to touch it with his fingertips, it would probably burn the skin.

So I start thinking “okay… now we’re talking. HOT stuff. Like chillis and stuff. Things that’ll blow the top of my head clean off…”

No, he meant heat-hot, not spice hot.

When I tried the ginger chicken, risking the blazing hoop of doom, Arwen asked me if it was “that spicy,” and I responded “I could probably put this in my eye without it being annoying.”

The sweet and (not-at-all) sour pork finally arrived, and we ate (some of) that.

But oh good lord, it was bad.

We scuttled back to our hotel room, and Arwen and I thought we’d wash down all that salt & sugar with some coffee. How can we go wrong?

It tasted fine, dear readers, even if the little grounds & filter thing looked like something that should come with a DustBuster (I fully expected to see the words “HEPA Filter” on the bag somewhere).

It was good though, (Note to self: Next time I find some, I gotta buy & try some Coke Black, which is Coke with Coffee in it – no, seriously).

So we drank that, and watched Ice Age II, during which I had a shower that had enough water pressure to blow my eyebrows off.

Everything, including the kiddies and (only!) ten toys for Rip into my mom’s car, and away we went.

We drove from our place in downtown Vancouver straight through to Bellis Fair, where Arwen got a whole schwack of stuff she’s really happy about at maybe 30% what she would’ve paid for the same things in Vancouver. Rip shared toys with other kids, and we saw a 8.5mo kid who’s already crawling (even up slides!) so now Tate seems very small. Still cute & happy as a clam though.

Now, we’re at the hotel in Kent, and watching the Cartoon Network, which makes Rip look like this:

Yes, those are toys all over the bed, but the commercials (omigod, commercials?) are totally flooring our kid.

Tate seems unphased, and started opening drawers (something he can’t do at home, ’cause they’re usually crammed full o’ clothes).

Work’s only *slightly* freaking out due to some things that were impossible to finish before I left, so I’m quickly feeling less like “leave me alone,” and more like “somebody ELSE can deal with it, I’m OFF.”

Tomorrow, we fly. Pray for sleepy and/or happy kids, so we’re not “those parents” with “those children” during the flight.

So, about two weeks ago, Riplechip and I watched part of Baraka on the computer, and I thought it would be interesting for him to see/hear this incredibly beautiful film. He was rapt. From the Ramayana monkey chant to the crazed high-speed footage of traffic in New York and pedestrian crosswalks in China.

I wanted him to see how freakin’ big and amazing and beautiful the world is, even if it’s a little scary at times. The volcanic craters and clouds moving over mountains. The sun in full eclipse, and thousands upon thousands of flamingos looking more like gnats than birds. The tribes from all over the world with their dances, and how movement and music and animals and Earth all intertwined.

Here’s a little clip that blends a bunch of the movie together, but only one song. It doesn’t do the entire work justice, but gives you an idea of what sorts of things Rip was having poured into his little brain.

I really enjoyed trying to explain the guy that’s “walking zen” with the little bell, and bowl, and awesome hat. We talked a little about meditation, and I tried my best to explain to Rip that he (the monk, not Rip) rang the bell to remind himself to be in the moment, and not to think about anything else… Rip looked at me as if to say “Well, yeah…” and then asked “Then why does he need the bowl?”

“…”

Q: How does one explain zen to a preschooler?
A: How doesn’t one?

…so we got about halfway through the thing two weeks back. Tonight, we watched the other half while I folded clothes, and Tatertot (now 8.5 months old) did these great faceplanting attempts at crawling on the bed, and unfolding the laundry daddy was silly enough to put within frogleaping distance.

We started around here, with some funky Brazillian (?) music and subways, churches and all sorts of craziness, and it was really cool… He even made the connection between the thousands of chickens being sorted and moved via slides, and the people commuting into subways, and after I assured him that the baby chicks weren’t being hurt when their beaks were being burnt (I know I’m gonna have to explain that to him as soon as *I* understand it myself), he was totally into the movie again…

But then there was some sequences that were about, well… death, dying, war, destruction. Pyramids. Temples of long-forgotten gods. Funeral pyres. Auschwitz. Piles of skulls and bones. Photos of thousands of people up on walls. Faces of kids not much older than him staring back in staggering black and while. People who are no more, and children who never had a chance.

Cars/trucks/tanks blown to bits. Roads engulfed in flames. Guys with rifles standing next to piles of RPGs and 50cal rounds.

We talked as the movie kept going, and we tried to make sense of burying statues with people, and why you’d need a standing army when you’re dead, and he said “If I died tomorrow, I’d be pretty sad.”

“Me too kiddo, me too…”

Q: How can one explain war to a preschooler?
A: Historically, I hope.

But we got through it, and put him to bed.

See? We don’t just watch fun stuff together.

Folded Space has a great colleciton of links for video clips from Sesame Street.

Awesome.

From the site:

I state quite confidently that this is the best entry I’ve made in five years of weblogging. Go away if you have work things to get done. This is an enormous time-waster.

Below you’ll find a fantastic collection of Sesame Street video clips. These are great. I remember many of these from when I was a kid. I’ve tried to organzize them as best I can. If you know of more Muppet/Sesame Street clips, please let me know.

Just now, ’cause I’m such a HUGE sap, I teared up when I heard the a-b-c-COOKIEMONSTER! clip when Kermit storms off the set ’cause the little girl keeps saying “CookieMonster!” instead of the letter, and she replies with “I love you…” and then Kermit comes back and she gives him a kiss on the forehead.

And then there’s THIS: