Sunday, September 18, 2011

Sunday Grab Bag Back to School Edition

ENGLISH
As an English major, I am just as likely as anyone to pile on when the jokes start getting made about how it's kind of a pre-unemployment degree with very limited application in the real world except in the broadest sense. I did have a moment of minor triumph earlier this week, though.

The little guy had spent much of Monday pretending he was Nemo the clownfish; he has now seen the movie a grand total of two times and therefore can re-enact large swaths of it pretty faithfully. One of his favorite bits comes from early on in the story, when Nemo swims around the anemone's interior yelling "Dad, wake up! Dad, wake up! It's time for school! It's time for school!" It doesn't take much more than either his mother or myself lying down on the living room floor to get the little guy whipped into that particular frenzy. Anyway, Monday evening's bath time rolled around and I informed the little guy of that fact, which prompted him to look at me and say "Fish don't really sleep." (So just to connect the child-logic dots there: he was pretending to be Nemo, ergo he was a fish, ergo he didn't really sleep, ergo bedtime was a non-issue.) Without missing a beat, I informed my son that of course fish slept, that was why Nemo had to wake up Marlin and tell him "It's time for school! It's time for school!" - Marlin had been sleeping. The little guy (somewhat surprisingly) conceded the point and I started leading him upstairs. My wife commented that she was glad I knew the movie well enough to out-argue a three-year-old. And so was I, but it did occur to me that I had basically supported a position based on a direct quote from a text, a.k.a. what English majors do for four years. So, booyah.

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MATH (and/or PHYS ED)
So the football pick'em pool started last weekend - technically it started back on Thursday the 8th and the first round didn't end until the wee hours of Tuesday morning, but there you go. I did pretty well, considering how I find week one's lack of track records difficult to work around, going 10 and 6 when all was said and done. My wife went 9 and 7 and might have done as well or better than me if she hadn't (a) picked the Dolphins to cover the spread against the Pats or (b) picked Indy to do anything other than implode without Peyton. But we both did better than the coin-toss average, so that's a good start. Neither of us won the week, though, as that honor went to someone who managed to go an impressive 12 and 4. Still, what killed me on Tuesday morning when I checked the standings was this: 10 and 6 was good enough to put me in the top six, tied with two other people, and behind two 11 and 5s and the aforementioned 12 and 4. Out of all six of us, I was the only person who picked Jacksonville over Tennessee. Jacksonville did in fact win that game, but only by two points. They had been two-and-a-half point favorites. If Jacksonville had scored ONE MORE LOUSY POINT (not that there's a way to score one lone point in football, but go with me here) then I would have been 11 and 5, the other 11 and 5s would have been 10 and 6, and Mr. 12 and 4 would also have been 11 and 5. So I would have tied for first place AND I would have won the tiebreaker, too, on total points for the Oakland/Denver Monday Night game (I had 39; 12 and 4 had 34; the final total was 43). Clearly I can never forgive the Jaguars for this miscarriage of gambling justice.

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EARTH SCIENCE
Got some more weed annihilation done this weekend and this time instead of waiting for creative landscapin inspiration to strike, we just went ahead and grass-seeded the whole ... former flower bed? At this point I can't remember what half-ass purpose the former owners were trying to put it to. If the grass doesn't take and the weeds overrun that side of the house again I believe the next step will be to just build a 100 square foot sandbox there, which actually I bet the little guy would get quite a kick out of.

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U.S. HISTORY
You might have noticed that I haven't been complaining much lately about the Civil War sesquicentennial celebrations hereabouts, which is neither coincidence nor a sudden bout of tolerance on my part. The commemorations just seem to have completely evaporated. I guess once the Battle of Bull Run anniversary came and went, so too did the localized fervor. And I also suppose that next August there will be just as much (if not more) mania for Second Battle reenactments and whatnot. For now, though, things have quieted down and I am totally fine with that.


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WOOD SHOP
Our hardwood floor installation happens next week and right now we are living with tons of materials in our kitchen. It was delivered on Thursday morning because it needs to hang out in our house for a few days to acclimate, apparently. They had warned me on the phone that the pile of hardwood would take up about as much space as a small couch and that was no lie - I would go so far as to say it takes up as much space as a regular couch. It's all stacked against the outermost kitchen wall, displacing our dining table so that it's half-under the island (fortunately only three of us need to sit around it on a regular basis) and serving as a massive reminder that we need to spend at least part of the next couple days clearing out everything from the kitchen and living room except the biggest furniture pieces which the workmen will move themselves. Hopefully the install will go smoothly and quickly; I of course will update upon completion.

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HOME EC
This week my wife and I tried a new flavor of Turkey Hill ice cream called Double Dunker. The carton features a picture of an Oreo and a chocolate chip cookie simultaneously being dipped into a cup of coffee, and that's pretty much the deal: mocha ice cream with both chocolate chip cookie dough bits and cookies-n-cream bits. It is essentially the most ridiculously awesome thing in the frozen foods section. I just felt like everyone should know this.

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