New kitty!

Here’s the new kitty (the one Sarah brought home in the middle of Obama’s speech)!

Sarah was visiting her friend Julie; Julie’s daughter Haley had brought this little guy home the day before — I think a teacher at Haley’s school had found an abandoned litter.  We have not yet formally committed to keeping him permanently [...]

Barney Smith

I surged with Hoosier pride watching Barney Smith’s little speech.  Here’s a short piece about Barney, a former lifelong Republican who was fired from a t.v. tube factory in Marion, Indiana (to the Northeast of Indianapolis).
He was awesome! And such a Hoosier, totally authentic.  His wife worked at a high school cafeteria; cafeterias are [...]

Obama’s speech

That was really satisfying.  Every night this week I DVR’d the PBS coverage of the convention and started watching at 8:45 or 9 — that way by 10 or so I’d be nearly caught up after fast-forwarding through all the various functionaries.  Obama’s speech really felt like a culminating payoff to the week (although it [...]

Watching the Olympics with Celie and Iris

So far Celie and Iris seem to consider the kayaking to have been the high point of the Olympics. I think they only watched it for a few minutes at some point when we were out of the room. Ever since then they bring it up occasionally, always saying, “Daddy, if the kayaking [...]

Hoosiers, Craveables, & Riblets

Two recent news stories. First, Report ranks Indiana 11th fattest among states:
Indiana is still getting fatter, just not as much as some other states.
In an annual report released Tuesday by the Trust for America’s Health, obesity in Indiana continued to climb as a percentage of adults but once again dropped in its ranking among [...]

Professors Gone Wild

Impressive to realize how low the bar can be set for professional behavior by university professors.
An argument between two debate coaches escalates into a war of words, each showering the other with a string of obscenities before an audience of seemingly unfazed students. Before long, one coach has mooned the other, and the video — [...]

Freedom (from the internet)

Via my sister-in-law Miranda via Boing Boing via Lifehacker, I just learned about an application that I’ve been specifically looking for:
Freedom serves a simple purpose: It disables all wireless and Ethernet networking on your Mac for up to six hours at a time. After the time you specify is up, Freedom re-enables your network adapters [...]

Economic Terror

I thought this was amusing. #4 on CBS News’s “7 Worrisome Signs for Obama“:
Bad times could be good for McCain. If anger helps Democrats, fear advantages Republicans. A growing number of Democratic strategists worry that some swing state voters may opt for McCain if the economy veers from merely awful to downright terrifying.
Wow. [...]

Adirondacks

Our final stop on this summer tour was to visit our friends Melissa and Steve in the Adirondacks, an area I don’t know well at all. They recently acquired a pretty amazing place, a former 9-bedroom hotel from the late nineteenth century on a peninsula on Raquette Lake, the site of one of the [...]

Maine: Reading

My pleasure reading in Maine was mostly occupied by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the James Woods translation. I’d never read it, and I like to read a long thick novel in Maine — although the situation is prety different now as a parent of young kids, so I don’t have the endless uninterrupted [...]