Metaphors Be With You

A Day of Truly Miniscule Personal Triumphs

2008-07-30T02:54:34Z

I'm done with Tax! Well, the analysis anyway. (It's a work thing. Don't worry, I'm not planning to defraud the government. I did recently convince the IRS to give me back a wad of money that they owed me, which I'm told is no small feat, but it was wholly legitimate.)

When I got home my poor darling kittens were so hot that they began panting. I lugged the air conditioner down from the attic and got my bedroom set up as kitten haven. We are all comfortable on the bed now. I'm going to leave it this way tomorrow; I suppose they won't be crazy about the limited space, but it beats letting the poor beasties overheat. (They were actually hot to the touch when I got here. They had barely eaten for the past two days, but within 20 minutes of getting into the cool room they downed a whole bowl of food.)

Update - they're now running around like madkittens. They must be adequately cool.

The beasties have grown. Here are their photos as of Sunday:

Dylan

Shadow

When I got up this morning, I was hot, so I put my hair up in a ponytail. When I came home this evening, I was Really Damned Hot(TM), so I clipped the ponytail up off my neck. The result was a pleasingly, if accidentally, neo-Victorian updo:

Also, for the first time in literally twenty years, I don't have a single pimple on my face. (The one on my scalp doesn't count; it's above the hairline.) I don't expect this to last long, so shall celebrate it while I can. Acne is what causes me to grok the phrase "(to) plague one's life out."

Finally, a request: recommendations for English (the country, not just the language) books written between 1820 and 1890. Sometime in there the word "nice" went from meaning "excessively particular" to meaning roughly what it does today, and I'm interested in reading the nuances of the change, if such a thing can be done.

Thank you, and good night!

Argumentative Window

2008-07-28T20:29:44Z

Went to replace sash cords yesterday only to discover that the piece of the window frame that ought to hold the pulley for the lower sash is rotted out. C'est la vie. I think I saw the pulley lying in the back of a cabinet; at the time I didn't register what it was. I'll have to try to dig it up again.

Also, at some point in the semi-distant past, someone took a reciprocating saw or a pruning saw or something of the sort and hacked roughly away at the windowsill. I suppose that was when the bathroom was tiny; they must've been trying to cram a shelf or something in next to the commode. Even so, what could possibly possess a person to take a saw to his home's decorative woodwork?

Anyway, I'm not up to experimenting with this kind of carpentry, not just yet.

Fortunately, Ed has graciously consented to come by and take a look.

My Day. Whee.

2008-07-27T04:39:27Z

Today I decided that I was finally getting the TV antenna put up on the roof. The previous owners of the house had a "dish," and I've been eyeing it since I got my HD antenna (I know - just humor me) in January, thinking that its riser should be perfect for bolting a small antenna to, just as soon as I could get out on the roof and get the dish off.

The "getting out on the roof" part could have been easier. I pulled the lower sash out of the bathroom window (because the glass broke and needs to be replaced) and got the storm out, but discovered that I couldn't get the upper storm or screen out without moving the upper sash. Fine, okay. As expected, it was painted shut. Unexpectedly, some idiot had gone to the trouble of caulking thickly all around it. (One of my pet peeves is the abundance of horrible ways in which old double-hung windows have been "improved" over the years. But that's a rant for a different day.) When I finally got it to move I discovered that one of the sash cords was broken, so I pulled the upper sash out too, and then the storm and screen.

Once I was on the roof, swapping antennae was simple. The coax out there is kind of a mess - several cuts through the insulation - so I'm looking forward to replacing it when I have both a length of coax and a long drill bit. For now I've run it in through a convenient hole in the screen and used a grounding connector to hook it to the cable already connected to the television. I had to re-aim it a couple of times, somewhat further north than the 42 degrees indicated by AntennaWeb, but now I'm getting good signal for all the expected HD channels.

I returned the storms and screen to their places and hope to replace sash cords tomorrow.

I also repaired my vacuum cleaner: I had dropped the poor thing on its head, after which it clanked and whirred in a most unnatural fashion, not to mention spitting a couple of parts at me. I was obliged to wait to repair it until I could borrow a torx bit, as the machine purports to have "no user-serviceable parts".

Inside I discovered 1) that one of the screws holding the impeller guard to the motor assembly had never been installed (you can tell because they're thread-cutting screws in plastic) and 2) the bump had jarred loose a press-fit clip holding the impeller assembly in place, causing the vanishingly thin aluminum of the impeller to shear out around the motor shaft.

I thought for a moment about ordering a replacement impeller, then realized that it would almost certainly be cheaper just to replace the entire unit - I got this for $40 at Target.

So I grabbed a hammer and pounded the area around the center hole back to flat. Fortunately the impeller is not splined itself, but instead nests with a washer that is driven by the splined motor shaft.

I redrilled the keyholes until the washer fit properly, and began to reassemble things. I was momentarily stumped as to how to get the press-fit clip back onto the motor shaft, until I hit upon the idea of using a socket (and hammer) as a press. It worked beautifully.

I didn't have a suitable screw to replace the missing one, so I moved an extraneous one from the outside to the inside. I may replace the one on the outside later, if I remember to do so.

Lesson learned: Blacksmithing sure is easy when the material you're working is thin aluminum.

I was sorry to have missed the Saracura open house, but really need to spend some time by myself right now.

Wanted: Your Junk for my Super-Sekrit Project!

2008-07-20T13:50:25Z

I'm looking to scavenge pieces from a wide variety of largish appliances: washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, treadmills, dishwashers, and many others.

If you have any dead or retired appliances that you would be willing to contribute, would you be so kind as to drop me a note so that I can come strip them? If you need them to go away completely I may be able to arrange that as well.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-18T20:27:35Z

When I read Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” in the late ‘80s, I was struck by the vivid and unrealistic dystopia it portrayed: here was a society wherein every idiot had an equal chance of getting airtime for his ill-considered worldview and wherein the media chose to expound not the most true or even most relevant of these, but the most shocking.

20 years later, we live in that society.

One of the many pitch-perfect choices that the new movie “The Dark Knight” makes is to NOT focus undue attention on that aspect of its environment, but instead use an understated portrayal of Gotham as any American city in 2008. The result is wholly effective and subtly horrifying.

The casting is very good indeed. Now that I’ve seen Gary Oldman as Lt. Gordon I don’t think I could believe anyone else in that role. He strikes the perfect balance of instigator and acted-upon, of world-weariness and idealism.

Heath Ledger (may he rest in peace) embodies the madness of the Joker and makes the character more believable than I ever found him to be in the books (I don’t think I’ve ever said this about a movie before). Props also to the makeup artists who created his look - the makeup didn’t seem to get in the way of his facial expressions at all.

Aaron Eckhart initially completely captured me, but lost me when the events transpired that changed Dent’s character; I found the change too sudden and violent.

Christian Bale makes a wholly creditable Batman, and I won’t hold it against him that he seems a little too young as Bruce Wayne.

The only one of the leads that I have trouble with was Maggie Glyllenhaal, and I think my issue is with how the character is written rather than with Glyllenhaal’s portrayal: Rachel Dawes seems to come from a world somehow different from that of the characters around her, one less steeped in despair. Through most of the film her biggest conundrum is choosing a suitor.

The two elements of a movie that I usually have the most trouble with are the script and the score; here each was a pleasure. The writers showed a rare restraint (particularly for an action movie) in allowing what wasn’t said to speak almost as loudly as what was. As for the score, I didn’t even consciously notice it until the final credits. Maybe that’s not everyone’s ideal, but I’ve gotten so used to being wrenched out of a story by music that doesn’t quite fit that to me it’s a downright relief. Also, I’m almost certain it’s too faint of praise. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie again and letting my conscious mind go to work on the music.

Unlike most of the “comic book” films that I’ve enjoyed lately, the cinematography isn’t over-the-top. Colors aren’t garish, images are mostly realistic, and even the action sequences are only moderately larger-than life.

Of course I always have quibbles with every film I see. In this case most of them are so minor as to be ignorable: I was put off by the comic book image of a lowball glass smoking to indicate that it had recently contained poison in an otherwise understated scene. A couple were a little worse: the traitorous “inside men” were obvious almost from the first moment they were on screen, and even if you somehow managed to walk into the theater unaware of Harvey Dent’s fate, the telegraph arrived long before events unfolded.

That said, this was truly the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. I highly recommend it to anyone who isn’t afraid of the Dark.

My Superpowers

2008-07-03T23:57:22Z

Here are my known superpowers to date, in no particular order. Some are cool; some are lame:

Seeing blond where it doesn't really exist

The ability to sleep anywhere, under any circumstances

A surprisingly good (although not 100% accurate) internal clock

Catherding, literal and figurative (I can also say my name in Kitten)

What are yours?

How do you define "superpowers" for the sake of this conversation?
I'm defining my "superpowers" as skills, useful or useless, that I'm better at than anyone else, as far as I know.

It’s the stories - they’ve gotten out of their cage and they’re running around killing us!

2008-06-26T02:19:51Z

Something that went up on Making Light recently made me think more about how people use stories. A couple of conversations at Fourth Street this weekend brought these thoughts back:

We live in a world in which stories are much more powerful than facts. People’s choices about what to believe are made almost wholly on the basis of which narratives are most compelling and which are most often repeated.

If you would succeed in business you must show a strong aptitude in selling the job you’ve done. If you’re good enough at this, it doesn’t even matter whether you did the job well in the first place. (If you’re not good at this you’d better hope that someone cares enough about your success to do it for you.) And what is a sales pitch but a story? “If you hire me I’ll make you successful.” It works the same in the workplace and in marketing.

It can be fairly said that I hate advertising with a passion. One of the things I hate most is its bizarre relationship with the truth: “More models over 30mpg than Honda or Acura.” Well, okay, but so what? I don’t want to buy six different cars, I want to buy one car*. What do I care about any of the models other than the one I buy? I know that this company wants to be seen as an environmental leader, but let us not forget that it’s a goddamn car company.

Everything you hear on television is a lie designed to make you buy something, a lie designed to make you agree with someone’s point of view, a fiction designed to make a plot plausible, or a nature program. If you don’t believe that, check to make sure that you include “half-truth” in your definition of “lie” and try again.**

And guess what? They’re told as stories: if you buy this you’ll be sexy; this person knows all about medicine so it makes sense that he’s a good hypochondriac; everyone who believes in legal protection for the accused wants the terrorists to win; everyone who doesn’t think we need to reduce fossil fuel use is denying proven science.

The trouble is that the universe doesn’t work that way. Evolution, for example, isn’t a narrative flow; it’s a bunch of chemicals bumbling around in semi-random fashion until something happens. The result is no better or worse or more meaningful than what came before, except perhaps in the strict sense of “fitness for viable reproduction” that natural selection implies.

Even when it would be meaningful to put some kind of narrative around a situation, the narrative would be so massively complex that it would lose the snappiness that confers so much power to our most valued stories: “We have reason to believe that the mean temperature of the earth, as measured in more than half of a random distribution of locations around the globe is, on the whole, increasing more rapidly than previous models that did not account for human-related atmospheric change had predicted…”

Still awake? Good. Not as catchy as, “global warming is happening, doofus,” is it? Not even as catchy as, “global warming is a scare tactic created by commie tree huggers.” How many people who do or don’t “believe in” global warming can actually tell you what they mean by the phrase, and cite the evidence relevant to their conclusion?

We are so constantly bombarded by information that using stories to simplify it makes sense if - and this caveat is gigantic - you trust your sources.

Whom do you trust?

*Actually I don’t.

**And now I’m doing it: I’m sure that there are some things on TV that are true. I’m equally sure that they’re well under the 10% of content predicted by Sturgeon’s law, which probably doesn’t apply here anyway.

Book "Meme"

2008-06-25T22:53:06Z

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (reading it right now, ironically enough)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

xkcd ftw

2008-06-14T18:10:44Z

I love this xkcd series.

To Minneapolis Bicyclists of My Acquaintence:

2008-06-14T16:02:31Z

News Release

Contact: Casper Hill, Communications Department, 612-673-2342
Share your thoughts on making
Minneapolis more bikable

June 10, 2008 (MINNEAPOLIS) Bike lanes, trails and special events have all helped make Minneapolis one of the most bikable cities in the nation. Now, the city wants to hear your thoughts on making Minneapolis even more bike-friendly in the years to come.

An open house on June 18 will gather public input on the city's new Bicycle Master Plan. This plan, which expands on a plan approved in 2001, will include goals, policies, design guidance and a map of future facilities. It will also contain a prioritized list of projects and initiatives, and explain strategies to improve the bikability of the city.

Bicycle Master Plan Public Open House

Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 4:30 - 8 p.m.

Room 319 City Hall, 350 S. Fifth St.

Presentations will take place at 5, 6 and 7 p.m. Members of the City of Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee will be on hand to answer questions people may have.

Questions can also be sent to Donald Pflaum, the city's bicycle coordinator. He can be reached by mail at 309 Second Ave. S. – Room 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2268, by phone at (612) 673-2129, or by e-mail at donald.pflaum@ci.minneapolis.mn.us.

# # #

Communications Department
301M City Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55415

(ETA: Well that was quite a typo: the original press release stated their intent to gather "pubic" input. I suspect that's not exactly what they meant, and have corrected the above accordingly.)

What I did with my morning:

2008-05-17T18:48:41Z

Set up the fountain that I bought last autumn:

Also, cleaned the garage (no photos - not that exciting, just clean).

Furthermore, Kittens!

And BTW, kalikanzara, Eric is enjoying the rehabilitated scooter; he rode it over here last week.

I'm hungry - off to find lunch.

Open Question Number One

2008-05-16T22:58:53Z

As is usually the way of these things, having announced that I won't be reading LJ for a bit I find myself in desperate need of your opinions:

What songs shall I learn to play/sing for purposes of music partying? What would you like to sing along to? (Please don't throw rotten tomatoes at your monitors; it won't do anyone any good.)

Oh, dear

2008-05-15T05:28:51Z

You're all wonderful and I like reading what you write, but I just can't keep up with LJ anymore, especially now that the weather is getting lovely.

So if you want to get in touch with me, please use an alternate method (phone is best).

Not to say that I won't post here anymore, but I probably won't be reading much for a while.

On Success

2008-05-13T00:51:43Z

Usually when I talk about the common definition of success I offset the word in quotes, thus: His "success" as a businessman was undimmed by the qualms he had about working in his particular industry. The quotes represent skepticism, and an agreement to temporarily stipulate the prevalent definition for the sake of a particular argument or anecdote.

However, the definition of success that I live by is different. It's entirely personal. It is prioritized. It says this:

I will have enough money to meet all of my needs and some of my wants
I will not put myself in a position where I have to worry about my debts
I will be able to live alone in a comfortable but not extravagant home
I will have a job that I can leave at the office
I will routinely have 3-day weekends

There's more, of course, but those are the key work/life pieces.

I realize that right now the blended work/play lifestyle is all the rage, but currently I don't want one.

Maybe this is because I haven't found my calling, that thing I want to do all the time. Maybe it's because my to-do list has never, ever been done, and I'm not content to just leave things sitting undone while I can consider myself to be "working." Maybe it's a side-effect of feeling like I need to please everybody all the time (which itself is a classic side effect of being an alcoholic's child) - a compulsion which I'm getting over, but which requires constant vigilance not to skip back into. Maybe it's just that I like having large chunks of time wherein I don't need to deal with the input of other people.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time imagining that thing which, if it came with any kind of obligation, I wouldn't want to escape from sometimes. It wouldn't even matter if it was something that I currently do purely for pleasure; introduce the obligation and you diminish the joy that I would take in it. And I don't believe that I'm alone in feeling that way.

Well, that's kind of interesting.

2008-05-02T14:47:56Z

Total comments: 1273

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2	minnehaha	126
3	davidschroth	62
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9	kalmn	29
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15	chadvalentine	21
16	kalikanzara	20
17	mplsfish	19
18	lollardfish	18
19	drakemonger	18
20	ktig	17
21	neugotik	17
22	mrsmodew	16
23	laurel	15
24	short_angry	15
25	barondave	14
26	markiv1111	14
27	daedala	13
28	Anonymous	13
29	ts_charmer	13
30	lsanderson	12
31	shadowflyer	12
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33	miep	11
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Trying to fold up a down comforter while there are two kittens inside...

2008-04-25T19:21:11Z

...is difficult.

MN History Museum

2008-04-19T15:28:50Z

I've officially decided to hold off a MN History Museum trip until next weekend. More details to come.

Optimism and Joy

2008-04-18T04:32:06Z

It must be spring: my optimism and joy are back in force!

Who's up for a trip to the Minnesota History Center on Saturday? Their current exhibit is "The Enemy Within: Terror in America 1776 to Today." I've been wanting to experience it since I heard of it, and it only runs through May 4.

Unrelated thoughts:

I'm taking community education yoga classes two nights a week. Both of them are labeled "fitness yoga," but one is very meditative and eastern whereas the other is more dynamic and athletic. It's neat to see the two instructors' different styles of teaching as well as their different takes on yoga. I've never done yoga before and so far I'm enjoying it very, very much. (One friend asked why I wanted to be a short old green guy with big ears, but I think he must've misheard me.)

I'm also taking ballroom dancing. I found a class that didn't require signing up as a couple. Even so, I'm the only "single" taking it. It turns out that this works to my advantage; I get to dance with the instructor, which appears to be incredibly easy compared with dancing with someone who's just learning. So far we've had just the one class and by the end of it I actually felt as though I was dancing rather than just rhythmically putting my feet where they were supposed to go.

Yesterday morning I went to put my boot on and found that my foot wouldn't go all the way in due to something soft but firm in the toe. I pulled out first my foot and then a purple fuzzy sparkly ball. (I found this greatly preferable to a mouse, which is what Marble used to leave in my slippers.)

My house is completely infested with its multicolored fuzzy sparkly relatives. Some of them have migrated upstairs. One very persistent red one leaped on to my bed (possibly with help of a symbiotic kitten) no fewer than three times during the course of the night. For some reason the kittens seem to feel that it's very important that these F.S. balls are well taken care of, and even go so far as to pick them up like tiny kittens and carry them around.

Work is odd: If you ever want somebody to cook the books, I'm not the right person to ask. If you pressure me enough I'll make up the numbers that you want out of thin air, but then I'll remind you of it every time we speak until the project has died a violent death. Also, the phrase "business justification" is NOT synonymous with, "Here's our arbitrary decision. Now, come up with something with which we can rationalize it."

I do, however, cook a mean rack of ribs. I've never tried doing barbequed ribs in the oven before tonight. It worked remarkably well. Just rub the things with a nice spice mixture, keep the heat down low and keep draining the fat off, and you end up with tender, delicious, fall-to-pieces "dry" spareribs. Nom, nom, nom!

Now I'm off to play my guitar - something which I've been doing again just recently, much to my delight.

Good night, my friends! (Or, in Shadow's words, "Rrrrrrr-meow!")

Teh Cute, It Is To Dai

2008-04-06T14:18:47Z

This morning the kittens called for their breakfast in a perfect fifth harmonic interval (F#, I think).

Shadow is the soprano, Dylan the alto. (Yeah, I know they're boys, but I suspect it works differently for cats.)

American Airlines "Lifesaver" Awards

2008-04-03T03:51:31Z

American Airlines today presented Golden Heart awards to 19 flight attendants who have administered emergency medical attention by using onboard defibrillators.

One of these flight attendants refused the award. 10 points and a gold star to whomever can tell me WHY and cite evidence.

ETA: Found it!

tesla_aldrich @ 2008-04-01T21:13:00

2008-04-02T02:14:28Z

moar funny pictures

Bathtub Ball - the Movie

2008-04-01T15:48:46Z

Or you could just watch the video. (Disclaimer: It's 5 minutes of my kittens playing; nothing else.)

Bathtub Ball

2008-04-01T01:00:24Z

So the boys did make Bathtub Ball a tradition: three times in one day, no less. And then they lost their ball, and 10 minutes of crawling around on my hands and knees weren't enough for me to find it.

So on my way home today I stopped by Target and bought a package of ping-pong balls and a package of spongy rubber balls.

The ping-pong ball was a qualified success: they loved it so much that they kept batting it out of the tub. Since this wasn't supposed to be a game of "teach-Tesla-to-fetch," I replaced it with the rubber ball. So far this is also amusing, makes a different and altogether appealing sound, and has not yet been tossed out of the tub. But I'm not thrilled about this ball: it's smaller, and the texture makes me think that they might want to chew on it, which doesn't strike me as a great idea. I'll replace it with the ping-pong ball before I go to bed.

The package of rubber balls says "Made in China," which is surprising because they're very light; I thought that lead was supposed to be heavy.

tesla_aldrich @ 2008-03-30T09:16:00

2008-03-30T14:22:56Z

Last night I thought that bathtub-ball would be a novelty that I introduced and the boys played once.

This morning, while I was at my ablutions, they hopped right into the tub and started game 2.

I wonder whether they'll feel betrayed when I fill it with water again? I'll be sure to take out their ball first.

tesla_aldrich @ 2008-03-29T15:42:00

2008-03-29T20:45:47Z