Monthly Archives: December 2004

You want to know a quick formula for feeling old? Go to a museum and see some of your childhood toys on display. My folks have a bunch of stuff in the local library’s seasonal exhibit of “Timeless Toys.” Some of it is stuff of theirs, some of mine and some used to belong to my grandpa.

This was his little toy horse on wheels. We’ve got a photo of him at age six playing with this. We’ve got another one from the same era showing the huge spreading elm trees on the farm…
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Three reasons why the JT’s Shaft Trivia person can go piss up a rope:

1. Insulin is produced by the pancreas. The liver has nothing to do with it. You don’t need a degree in endocrinology, just ask any diabetic.
2. If you want to know how to divide up a Rubik’s Cube, be specific about what you mean. If you want to know how many cubes are ‘on’ a cube, count the faces and you’ll see there are 26. If you want to know how many cubes are ‘in’ a cube, add the center cube and you’ll get 27. Don’t confuse ‘on’ and ‘in’.
3. According to the Mars Society you can get from the Earth to Mars in six months. You’d burn all your fuel doing it, so it’d be a one-way trip. That’s fine for a robot probe, but if you’re asking about a manned mission, you’ll either need to do a slow burn transit (which uses less fuel), or have fuel waiting when you arrive. A slow burn transit would take twelve months. If you send a robot factory ahead so that there’s a refill waiting for you, the mission time expands to two years.

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We did the long haul North from Saginaw! We made it up without going off the road, but we did get to see a couple of flipped over snowmobile trailers and stranded trucks. It was kind of slick in the northern Lower Peninsula but there wasn’t any snow falling until well over half-way across the U.P. Just west of Autrain there was a wall of lake-effect snow that we drove into. Big fluffy flakes in mass quantities. Exactly the sort of thing to make the last half hour of an eight hour drive really exciting.
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Hey! The hotel in Saginaw has an internet connection! Kinda. Sorta. The free wireless in the dining room doesn’t seem to be up and running, and we didn’t even try the one in the the lobby, what with the noise from the pervasive Christmas special TV and the guy checking out who was lawyering up about how he was going to contest his credit card charge.

Instead I’m borrowing the network connection in my folks’ room. What’s really fun is that it’s not even labeled as anything other than ‘cat5’ in tiny black-on-black letters. I’m re-routing the connection I’ve got via my wireless card so that my Wife can get on-line too.
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Last night while I was corking the apple wine, I realized that I had “White Christmas” stuck in my head on infinite repeat. I tried my usual tricks for evicting unwanted lyrical hitchhikers (singing aloud, translating the words into out-of-practice German, etc.), but nothing worked. I was trauming with every Weihnachts card I wrote for close to six hours, non-stop.

And today we woke up to six inches of snowfall in sweeping drifts.

Talk about a white Christmas.
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Egad it was tough getting out of bed this morning. I didn’t get to sleep all that late or anything. I just didn’t want to leave the nice comfy sheets. My wife was in a similar mood. And once we got moving we got strange. We started taking turns singing songs snippets at each other, strategically substituting some of the lyrics with the word “pants.”
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I got the last spot in the parking lot this morning. There were two big SUVs, one on either side of this space, and a big ol’ Caddy Escalade jockeying to try to fit between them. I couldn’t get past them to get out of the lot, so I waited for a minute or two while they did the slow back and forth dance of someone who doesn’t want to lose their rear view mirrors.
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