Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Yay!
We got the nice 3 bedroom apartment we looked at in Middleboro! More details later when I get a chance.
Your Daily Sadie
And one for today! This is from several days ago, when Sadie climbed on the open dishwasher door to check it out.
Your Daily Sadie?
Oops! We didn’t post yesterday! So here’s a picture for yesterday…
This Has Been Sitting Waiting To Be Posted
A not so goofy quiz…
| You Passed the US Citizenship Test |
 Congratulations - you got 10 out of 10 correct! |
Go me!
Via Steven Taylor, who is also a perfect 10.
NOW can we all agree that this guy is an asshole?
Turns out there’s more to the rude doctor story I mentioned here. John Cole has the update:
The state is investigating a doctor accused of telling a patient she was so obese she might only be attractive to black men and advising another to shoot herself following brain surgery.
“Let’s face it, if your husband were to die tomorrow, who would want you?� the state Board of Medicine says Dr. Terry Bennett told the overweight patient in June 2004.
“Well, men might want you, but not the types you want to want you. Might even be a black guy,� it quoted him as saying, based on the woman’s complaint.
[snip]
In a telephone interview Tuesday from Rochester, Bennett denied any wrongdoing and defended his message to her, saying he has read polls that say black men prefer overweight women.
That would explain the medical board folks’ interest.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Happy Birthday
To blogger Baldilocks, who as it turns out is another one of us special 1961 people.
Your Daily Sadie
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Siblings
This is a rare picture of all five of us in the same place at the same time. Somehow that happened yesterday! So we had to get pictures, as my sister suggested. Wayne (1967) is standing to the back. Left to right it’s Gary (1954), Me (1961), Lynn (1957), and Michael (1971). I never thought much about birth proximity until we had Sadie and planned on the next one(s). We were generally quite far apart, to the point where there’s little or no sense of having grown up together as part of the same generation between Gary and Michael, or even Wayne. My oldest nephew is just two years younger than my youngest brother. Even if our ages as parents weren’t a factor, we’d have chosen to have Sadie and her sibling(s) fairly close together as a good experience for them.
Anyway, the picture…
Your Daily Sadie
Remember to click for a larger version! The driver on the left is Julia, my grandniece. This was at a family gathering at my grandmother’s house yesterday, from which I may post other pictures.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Happy Birthday
To master blogger Glenn Reynolds, who is taking a deservedly light blogging day.
Your Daily Sadie
Friday, August 26, 2005
I Think It’s Fun…
Watching Sadie explore things in an almost scientific manner sometimes, learning about the world. We’re at the office, while Deb gets harassed by the doctor about her blood pressure. Sadie is wearing pink shorts with a shoelace-like pair of drawstring ends trailing down the front. She sat between my feet, playing with her strings, untying one of my sneakers, and holding a lace up next to one of her strings, feeling and examining both, comparing them side by side. She seems to be good at making logical connections, like this is a string and that’s a string, and they behave the same even though in some ways they are different. That happened with switches, too. The monitors all have different power button shapes and locations, but once she got what the power button on a monitor was, she extrapolated and the square versus round, or different location, didn’t matter.
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
Caltechgirl has the latest Carnival of the Recipes, with a back to school theme.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Your Daily Sadie
Recipe: Cereal Flake Cakes
This is another in a series of recipes my sister jotted down for me years ago, recently found. I have no idea why the name ends in “cakes” when they are in fact cookies. Many years ago, my mother gave me this same recipe, but left out the flour. I nonchalantly prepared it, assuming it was right because it came from the authority. My mother made these regularly when we were kids. They’re yummy! The result was something amounting to gooey cereal flake candy instead of cookies. I recommend leaving in the flour.
Cereal Flake Cakes
3/4 Cup shortening
1 Cup brown sugar
1 Cup sugar
2 Cups wheat flake cereal, crushed (after measuring)
2 Eggs
2 Cups flour
2 Cups coconut
1/2 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon vanilla
1 Teaspoon baking soda
1 Teaspoon baking powder
Cream shortening and sugars. Add eggs and vanilla. Add coconut and dry ingredients. Mix well. Fold in the cereal. Drop on cookie sheet by spoonfuls. Top with piece of cherry or nut. Bake at 350° until golden at edges but still looking a little rare in the center.
These should not be made more than a couple of days ahead, as they get stale.
Phone Phobia
There was a “quirk” meme going around last week, which I never got around to participating in. One thing that seemed a common quirk among bloggers was phone phobia. That was one I would have listed. I had trouble thinking of enough other quirks to make a meaningful list. Surely they must be there.
At any rate, the phone phobia thing is very much on my mind at the moment. It has affected our apartment search, which has consisted primarily of spreading the word that we’d be looking, way prematurely as we didn’t have the money yet, in hopes of something especially good landing our way through word of mouth. I’ve only ever landed one apartment through newspaper ads, and that I moved out of after four months without the promised working refrigerator. Entirely apart from the phone thing, I tend not to trust answering ads as a method for finding a place. Odd, as that’s the norm and seems to work for people.
The next apartment, after the aforementioned slum, I found through serendipity, seeing a sign as I drove by. Since I am far less terrified of pulling into a strange driveway, locating the person, asking about and seeing the place on the spot, that was cool. Well, and I didn’t have a phone at the time.
While I’ve been tempted to do some random driving around, looking for rental signs, I decided to try a more logical, organized approach instead of trusting entirely in luck and vibes. Plus it’s a way to combat nervousness. If I simply picked up the phone and started calling with the ads in front of me, I’d forget to ask things and might lose my focus.
So I have the possibilities listed in Excel, with the specs known from the ads or to be determined in neat columns. I figure I won’t miss anything important, and can have that as a focal point. It also organizes the places by their specs at a glance. I have the town, size, price, price plus heat to make a comparison between includeds and not includeds (I’m using the $150 a month average it costs us here, which makes this place $1200, the same as the most expensive prospect, which is a bigger 3 bedroom place), floor, whether there are washer/dryer hookups, etc.
The lowest cost place on the list would save us $300 a month. I’m gunning for the 2 bedroom mobile home, though. That would save us $175, solve the problems that can come of other people being in the same building, and presumably make parking not a problem. We could be genuine trailer trash. I’m wondering if there are any gotchas to that deal.
I’m trying to gather my enthusiasm to counter the phobia. How bad is it? The closer I come to the point of actually having to pick up the phone and make the calls, the more physically sick I feel. Obviously the Effexor isn’t doing its job yet, or this presumably wouldn’t be so bad.
I wonder where the phone phobia comes from for everyone. Mine grew primarily out of doing phone-based tech support. I was one of the smoother customer service oriented people when I picked up the calls, but I thought I would die every time it rang. That was true the whole way through my second support job, except my very first day. The phobia developed during my first support job, which consisted of callbacks rather than live incomings. Less than a year of that and phones were never the same for me again.
14 Weeks
I’m feeling both lazy and linky-lurvey, so I’ll send you to what the divine Miss Margi posted at this particular milestone if you’d like the “how your baby is growing” specifics. 
All is well. I’m getting more than a touch exasperated with the continued bouts of nausea, but it’s so much better than the first four weeks or so of it that I can’t really complain. With Sadie, I think I had it from weeks 6-10 and then it just went away. Evaporated. Disappeared entirely. This time it started at 6 weeks or so and started getting better at 10 weeks but neglected to get itself completely gone. It’s stuck like Pooh in Rabbit’s doorway and I’m hoping I won’t have to get skinny to make it fit the rest of the way out.
Wow. That was a tortured metaphor. Have I mentioned the brain-scrambling effect is stronger than ever? 
Sadie up and weaned this last week, and now that I’m past the initial adjustment I have to say that I’m glad. My supply was shot anyway, and it’s nice to lose that additional stress on my body. Between the continuing nausea, the meds I’m on for blood pressure, and ragweed season (for which suffering I am forbidden to take anything at all, grumble grumble), I’m sort of a mess. Not always the most pleasant person to be around, either. Heh. I’m hoping that the legendary second-trimester energy fairy visits me soon.
It’s all worth it, of course, and I know I have it fairly easy compared to what it could be. I just miss feeling good. Especially with Sadie to chase around.
Appointment with my primary doc tomorrow. I haven’t been weighed in nearly a month, so it’ll be interesting to see if I gained anything (or too much...I’m expanding so fast I have no sense of whether it’s going to baby or backside). Next midwife appointment on September 6 and the big ultrasound is Spetember 26, so lots of exciting stuff coming up!
Social Engineering: Your Mileage May Vary
Glenn caught up with us on the whole SUV issue. Even if you saw his original post, it’s worth returning as he has added massive amounts of links and reader e-mails, focused largely on the safety constraints issue we keep bringing up whenever the “why should anyone need an SUV or minivan” crowd rears its ignorant head.
We’re getting along with the Sentra for now. However, to go to Plymouth last week, we put the stroller in the trunk, and that’s become its new home. It lived in the van, but since that was supposed to be hauled away for possible repair…
The stroller takes the entire trunk. All of it. Barely fits. I had to spend several minutes completely rearranging the tools and such (Deb observed “you’d be a great person to get stranded with."), and had to remove a little of it. The trunk as it was would hold several bags of groceries, or something like a jumbo box of diapers and a few bags.
So. No more trunk.
The car seat takes up almost half of the back seat, in the middle, which is both easier and safer than to one side. If I am alone, there’s plenty of room for stuff, though enough of it and I’m still working around the presence of the car seat. If we are all in the car, we have the space on either side of the car seat, and maybe a little room at Deb’s feet. We’ve had Sadie pretty well surrounded by stuff a couple times.
Now add another kid.
No more room in the back seat. Maybe a diaper bag or two on the floor, but that’s it. They are required to be in car seats or boosters until an absurd age or size, which takes that much more room.
Granted, the specific item taking up the trunk now needn’t remain there, but space there remains limited for stuff that isn’t people. In the longer run, it only barely computes for two small kids. Never mind if there are twins lurking in there, or if there’s a third later. Heck, I’ve seen what it looks like when my sister, brother-in-law, two kids, and all their stuff for traveling are in a minivan. It’s full.
We’re not in the days of the baby riding on mom’s lap in the front seat anymore. All the more so with those dangerous airbags saving us from ourselves. We’re not in the days of the kids tumbling around the back seat any which way. We survived it when we were kids. Ditto for riding in the backs of pickups, as we did many times. That was even kind of a treat. Was it safe? Probably not. Should we encourage people to try to be safer? Sure, no harm in that. Should there be massive regulations propping up the car seat and SUV industries? Not on my planet; maybe on yours.
On my planet, there’s the market and the minds people were born with to weigh costs monetary and otherwise.
Received In E-Mail
Attributed here.
Here is one man’s very imaginative way to deal with a pesky telemarketer:
The phone rang as I was setting down to my anticipated evening meal, and as I answered it I was greeted with, “Is this Wilhiam Wagenhoss?” This didn’t sound anything like my name, so I asked, “Who is calling?” The telemarketer said he was with The Rubberband-Powered Freezer Company or something like that and then I asked him if he knew Wilhiam personally and why was he was calling this number. I then said off to the side, “Get really good pictures of the body and all the blood.”
I then turned back to the phone and advised the caller that he had entered a murder scene and must stay on the line because we had already traced this call and he would be receiving a summons to appear in the local courthouse to testify in this murder case.
I then questioned the caller at great length as to his name, address, phone number at home, at work, who he worked for, how he knew the dead guy and could he prove where he had been about one hour before the made this call.
The telemarketer was getting very concerned and his answers were given in a shaky voice.I proceeded to tell him we had located his position at his work place and the police were entering the building to take him into custody. At that point, I heard the phone fall and the scurrying of his running away.
My wife asked me as I returned to our table, why I had tears streaming down my face and so help me, I couldn’t tell her for about fifteen minutes.
My meal was cold, but oh-so-very enjoyable.
~ Rancher Chuck
Happy Birthday
To blogger Michele Catalano.
Update:
Michele has a post regarding the special day, which is also her third anniversary. Congratulations!
Your Daily Sadie
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Google Talk
I meant to point out, seen via Rob Sama late last night, that Google has indeed gotten into instant messaging (and voice) as has been speculated it would. Intriguing.
You Heard It Here First
Regular readers know that the possibility of a housing bubble is one of my pet topics, in which I come out on the “yes, at least regionally” side of things.
Via Jane Galt, who says I told you so, who got it via Alex Tabarrok, who asks can you hear the pop coming, Robert J. Shiller wanted to know, so he built his own benchmark.
(Click on the picture for a readably large version.)
What he showed through a lot of effort and analysis is what I perceived almost intuitively, then anecdotally “proved” by reference to a price adjustment index and selected prices now and then. The only things really open to question are how regional it is, and if so, where, the causes, and whether or not any of the causes ameliorate the degree or consequences of adjustment presumably to come.
One possible factor in prices going to a permanent new level is dual earner families. However, that started well before the current steep trend.
Another possible factor is regional brittling of traditional elasticity in prices. For instance, you work in San Francisco, and ideally would like to live there, but there’s little enough housing, you can’t afford it. So you get a place you can afford in the suburbs. But there’s a price in the form of a commute. When the ring of practical commuting range is built up fully, where do you go? That’s price pressure, and it won’t be so elastic anymore. Will we telecommute and villagize so much in the future that the pressure subsides? Maybe, but I can’t see it that soon.
Some might note the trend toward larger new constuction; the McMansions. Well, that can’t help, but how much of the market is new construction of that sort, and how much impact does higher end new construction have on demand for and prices of older, existing properties? I’d guess some, but not remotely enough to account for the bubble.
We stand to see some interesting times, perhaps even if it lets us down gently.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Your Daily Daredevil
For Useful Carnival Knowledge
Free Money Finance has an interesting analysis regarding blog carnival hosting and participation, with suggestions for how hosts and entrants can optimize the experience. It’s a relatively long post, but you’ll probably find it worth your time if you are interested in such things.
I had never realized that Monday was such a boost to carnival traffic. Carnival of the Capitalists was one of the first such things after the original Carnival of the Vanities, and we chose Monday for a few reasons unrelated to expectations about traffic.
First, it wouldn’t conflict with Wednesday, which was CotV’s day. Now there are so many carnivals that several might occur the same day of the week. Of course, “Monday” was only to be the official “edition” date, and the CotC could actually be online during the weekend. The wider window we originally envisioned has narrowed to no earlier than late Sunday afternoon, and usually late Sunday night or relatively early Monday morning.
Second, it corresponded with the business week, essentially arming the reader at the start of the week with a “magazine” of business and economic “articles” from the week just ended.
Third, it gave the host the weekend to do the bulk of the work involved. Which is good, as the thing has grown to significant size. I didn’t count how many made it into the lastest CotC, but the more than sixty e-mails received for the 8/22/05 edition is a record turnout.
I have no idea why other carnivals chose one day rather than another, but that’s what we were thinking almost two years ago.
I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist.
Here’s a rather amusing anti-SUV screed from our dear Mr. Sullivan. Normally I wouldn’t note this, as I find it a bit over the top, but since having a child myself I’ve become more and more frustrated with the vehicular requirements inherent in thing in the current regulatory environment. What he suggests is impossible: you can no longer just pack your kids into the back seat and make do, unless you’ve taken care to space your children in such a way that your collection of carseats and boosters fits neatly. I long for simpler days, myself. Any desire I had for a large vehicle has evaporated now that I live in this weird paradise of narrow roads and bad parking. I felt compelled to point out, though, that there are valid reasons for driving such a thing. But I hardly think that driving an SUV, no matter your reason, qualifies you as a traitor.
More blogging than you can shake a stethoscope at:
Grand Rounds 48 is up at straightfromthedoc.
Packing Lunch Recipes?
Speaking of food, Sharon is looking for ideas (scroll down to the 8-22 entry) for lunches to send to school with the kids. Which is really the same thing as looking for variety in bag lunches to pack for anyone.
One problem is that the old standby, peanut butter, is verboten because other kids might be allergic. Well, they’re requesting rather than demanding, but some schools do insist. Another is plain old sandwiches get boring. Cold cuts all the time gets expensive, too, and the idea of bringing lunch most of the time is to save money.
I suggested almond or cashew butter as a more costly surrogate for peanut butter, but beyond that I was at a loss.
Feel free to comment here or at Sharon’s with your “lunch box recipes.” She’ll see them either way.
Fun Straw Poll
Patrick Ruffini has an August Republican straw poll that is quite extensive and interesting. After you vote, you can see the results by state, referring blog, red or blue, etc. The poll has two parts; a list of more likely candidates, and a list of fantasy candidates you might opt to switch to should your candidate of choice enter the race. Condi is doing well, as I would have predicted.
Mmmm… French Fries
I have to thank my nephew for the idea of making homemade french fries. When we were swimming Saturday, he told me they sometimes do that; just slice up raw potato and cook in hot oil for 9 - 10 minutes.
On the way home Saturday, we stopped at Sunrise Gardens in Plympton and I bought five small to medium potatoes, along with some green beans and summer squash. We had the beans the night before last, along with peas, stuffing and chicken.
Last night we had burgers. Sadie is definitely my daughter; she loves ketchup on hers. Along with them I made some of the best fries I have ever eaten. Just potato cut up and cooked in Crisco in my cast iron frying pan. Five not very big potatoes made all the fries the three of us could eat. Well, Sadie could have eaten more, but she also had leftover peas, beans, chicken, and stuffing.
Looks like we have a new item in our “things we make regularly” collection.