Brain Dump

Just a couple of things I need to dump out here before I forget them. First, from the creator of one of my favorite parenting blogs, Z Recommends, comes Prizey, a simple contest aggregator. Subscribe to the feed, or check out the site, and you’ll get a bunch of contests to enter. Many are parenting related, but some are not (DVD giveaways, etc). You know me, I’m all about the free stuff.
Over the weekend, we had two big fun things going on. On Friday night, in the middle of a rainstorm, we were at the National Zoo for “Boo at the Zoo.” Trick-or-treating around the zoo was lots of fun, in spite of the rain. The most fun was seeing the different way the animals ate their pumpkin treats. The gorilla would pick it up with both hands and bite a chunk off the side, then scrape the flesh off while leaving the outer skin. The lion managed to get a hole in the top, and was sticking its head inside to pull out the juicy guts.
On Sunday, we got up early and drove up to Philadelphia for the day. Lisa’s choir was singing at St. Malachy’s Church. We got there a little early and were able to go see the Liberty Bell, but not much else. The concert was okay from the choir’s perspective, but the highlight was quite clearly the male soprano, Ryan Lowe (currently starring as Mary Sunshine in the musical Chicago on Broadway). The dude started singing, and everyone was looking around at the choir trying to figure out where the woman’s voice was coming from. It was coming from the dude! Crazy. Lisa said that world-famous soprano Renee Fleming once told him after a performance that he was better than her. I don’t know about that, but he was good enough that the audience will remember him, and not the off-day for the chorale.
The kids were really great in the car, but we were definitely wishing that we had a minivan by the end of it. The Civic is great for mileage and all, but there’s just not a lot of room, and no way to entertain them outside of playing music, which gets old after a while.
Finally, it looks like my favorite MovableType plugin, Media Manager, has been upgraded for MovableType 4, so I’m going to finally get around to looking at MT4 a little closer now. They’ve done a lot of work to improve it, and so far I like what I see. The only catch may be getting my stupid customized templates working properly. In other words, expect possible wackiness ahead.
Brain dump done.

Free Tacos!

Jacoby Ellsbury must be a Taco Bell fan. By stealing a base in last night’s game, he allowed everyone in America to get a free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco from Taco Bell next Tuesday, October 30, between 2-5pm.
I do love me some free stuff, but I’m torn over whether or not I love free stuff so much as to go to Taco Bell.

Free Tacos!

Jacoby Ellsbury must be a Taco Bell fan. By stealing a base in last night’s game, he allowed everyone in America to get a free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco from Taco Bell next Tuesday, October 30, between 2-5pm.
I do love me some free stuff, but I’m torn over whether or not I love free stuff so much as to go to Taco Bell.

Free Tacos!

Jacoby Ellsbury must be a Taco Bell fan. By stealing a base in last night’s game, he allowed everyone in America to get a free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco from Taco Bell next Tuesday, October 30, between 2-5pm.
I do love me some free stuff, but I’m torn over whether or not I love free stuff so much as to go to Taco Bell.

The Stolen Child

My Rating:

The Stolen Child: A Novel

by Keith Donohue

The Stolen Child takes the myth of fairies (or goblins, or changelings) in the forest and takes it in a new direction: Suburbia. This group of changelings lives outside a small town, and they change places with children in the town, and make the taken children one of their own. This particular story tells the tale of Henry Day and Aniday, who switch places, then spend the ensuing years chasing after each other, tormenting each other’s nightmares. For a while, they leave each other alone, but as suburbia encroaches on the forest, their paths cross more frequently, and to greater intrigue. A fine read for a more realistically based tale of fantasy.

Next up is The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

The Stolen Child

My Rating:

The Stolen Child: A Novel

by Keith Donohue

The Stolen Child takes the myth of fairies (or goblins, or changelings) in the forest and takes it in a new direction: Suburbia. This group of changelings lives outside a small town, and they change places with children in the town, and make the taken children one of their own. This particular story tells the tale of Henry Day and Aniday, who switch places, then spend the ensuing years chasing after each other, tormenting each other’s nightmares. For a while, they leave each other alone, but as suburbia encroaches on the forest, their paths cross more frequently, and to greater intrigue. A fine read for a more realistically based tale of fantasy.

Next up is The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

Perks of a Long Last Name

I’m not a big social network guy. I do have a Facebook account, and a while back I joined LinkedIn at the urging of my brother, but didn’t really do anything beyond sending invites to a bunch of people in my address book and letting it sit there. Over the past week though, I’ve been trudging through the list of people who work at my company and who went to MSU at the same time I did. The list of people who attended MSU at some point between 1992-1996 who are on LinkedIn is currently 8494 people long. Which brings me to my point. I am not likely to remember all the Tims and Johns that I went to school with, especially not when browsing through 284 pages of names. But I am likely to remember people with names like Cruikshank and Chapin, and those people are more than likely going to remember Dauernheim. As a result, in the past week, I’ve expanded my first degree “network” by 50%, and my third degree network has added over 22000 people since October 22. Interestingly enough, my connections go from DC to Pennsylvania, to Michigan, to Kansas, all the way out to California and Washington. Good news if I ever want to move to Seattle.
By the way, it is seriously creepy sometimes how LinkedIn figures out that you might know people. I guess because I let it pull my GMail address book, and GMail automatically adds people to the address book, even if you didn’t email them directly, but that only explains some of it. The woman my wife worked with when she moved to DC 10 years ago? Never would have thought of her, but as I said before, she’ll probably remember my wife’s last name.

Fifty-fifty

We played fairly inconsistent over the last two games on Saturday. In our first game, thanks to a pretty bad miss on my part, we gave up four points in one end, but stayed tough, scoring three back in the next end, and eventually coming back and holding on for the win. In our second game, I had a bad shot that cost us a bit, but we had a chance to tie in the 7th end, but our skip came up short of the house on his last shot and we only scored one point. In the 8th end, we came out and frustrated the other skip. We played three perfect shots in a row, drawing right down to the middle, where the other team could not get us out, behind protection from a guard. They finally got rid of the guard, but our skip missed the chance to put it back up pretty badly. They took advantage and cleared us out, but we still had a chance for a miracle shot. Our skip threw it darned near perfectly, but we just barely nicked a rock and spun away harmlessly, putting us down to defeat. We still stuck together and played pretty well, though inconsistently, even if we didn’t end up with anything to show for it.
My baseball team, on the other hand, was a complete debacle. While we somehow managed to scrape by for the first 6 innings to stay within 5-4, the floodgates opened in the 7th inning through a combination of the opposition’s good hitting and bumbling errors on our part (myself included, as I threw away a bunt attempt by our first baseman). We just haven’t had our regular lineup available most of the season, and we’ve paid for it. Unfortunately, I have to miss next week’s game, which will probably put our team in a bigger hole, as we are playing the “play-in” game for the playoffs.
The Indians suck. That is all about that.
The Giants are sneaking up on Dallas. They (knock on wood) could be 6-2 after playing Miami in London this week, going into their bye week followed by a rematch against Dallas.
The Spartans were lucky they didn’t get their butts handed to them worse than they did. Unable to run the ball, and unable to stop Ohio State’s run, they were fortunate to time all-out blitzes on OSU’s QB to stay close in a game they had no business winning. They still have to win two games against Iowa, Michigan, Purdue and Penn State to have a chance at a bowl game.

Fifty-fifty

We played fairly inconsistent over the last two games on Saturday. In our first game, thanks to a pretty bad miss on my part, we gave up four points in one end, but stayed tough, scoring three back in the next end, and eventually coming back and holding on for the win. In our second game, I had a bad shot that cost us a bit, but we had a chance to tie in the 7th end, but our skip came up short of the house on his last shot and we only scored one point. In the 8th end, we came out and frustrated the other skip. We played three perfect shots in a row, drawing right down to the middle, where the other team could not get us out, behind protection from a guard. They finally got rid of the guard, but our skip missed the chance to put it back up pretty badly. They took advantage and cleared us out, but we still had a chance for a miracle shot. Our skip threw it darned near perfectly, but we just barely nicked a rock and spun away harmlessly, putting us down to defeat. We still stuck together and played pretty well, though inconsistently, even if we didn’t end up with anything to show for it.
My baseball team, on the other hand, was a complete debacle. While we somehow managed to scrape by for the first 6 innings to stay within 5-4, the floodgates opened in the 7th inning through a combination of the opposition’s good hitting and bumbling errors on our part (myself included, as I threw away a bunt attempt by our first baseman). We just haven’t had our regular lineup available most of the season, and we’ve paid for it. Unfortunately, I have to miss next week’s game, which will probably put our team in a bigger hole, as we are playing the “play-in” game for the playoffs.
The Indians suck. That is all about that.
The Giants are sneaking up on Dallas. They (knock on wood) could be 6-2 after playing Miami in London this week, going into their bye week followed by a rematch against Dallas.
The Spartans were lucky they didn’t get their butts handed to them worse than they did. Unable to run the ball, and unable to stop Ohio State’s run, they were fortunate to time all-out blitzes on OSU’s QB to stay close in a game they had no business winning. They still have to win two games against Iowa, Michigan, Purdue and Penn State to have a chance at a bowl game.

First Game, First Win

We won our first curling game of the season last night. I think the final score ended up being 9-6, but it wasn’t that close. We played well, and the other team was a little off, which helped us to the win. Today’s game will be harder, as we’re playing a team we know, and they will not go down easily. I played pretty well for my first game in a long time. I only flat out missed two shots, though I was off on a few others. In short, it was a good start, and hopefully we can keep it up today. I’m counting the hours until I can leave work and get back out there.