05/15/2003

As if we didn’t already have the most popular yard in the neighborhood (almost a quarter-acre of grass), we cracked out the 14-foot trampoline the other day. Almost instantly the neighborhood kids were over to try it out… and it was funny to watch a half-dozen little bodies trying to coordinate their bouncing so no one got launched into orbit.

Of course, the sad part is that in today’s world having a trampoline is almost an open invitation for a lawsuit. I’m waiting for the first time someone takes a dive and breaks an arm or something. Sigh…

05/09/2003

Isn’t it odd that the phrase “quite a few” means a lot… not a few?

Sort of like “inflammable” meaning the same thing as “flammable”, I suppose.

05/07/2003

Whenever I have the need to send a test e-mail message– one that I never want to see again, or one I use to sign up on some lame web site that requires an e-mail to register, I always use the same address:

god@heaven.org

Very clever, eh? (Heaven would be a non-profit organization, hence the .org extension.)

I always felt a little bad for the guy who owned heaven.org, because he would be getting all these random e-mail messages from whoever I happened to sign up with today. But then I checked the domain registry, and it turns out heaven.org isn’t owned by anyone!

Now I’m wondering if I should buy the domain, and what I might put there. The mind reels…

05/07/2003

Isn’t human nature fascinating?

Today I was driving along and I saw the guy in front of me toss his half-finished cigarette out the window onto the road. Now, this is a guy who probably wouldn’t think of tossing his candy wrapper on the grass at the park, but he doesn’t think twice about tossing cigarettes all over the streets.

By the same token, I wouldn’t walk into a music store and shoplift a CD. Yet I download digital music all the time and don’t really think twice about it.

And Laralee’s example: most people don’t dare run a red light, but have no trouble pushing the speed limit by 5 or 10 miles per hour.

Interesting, isn’t it?

04/25/2003

By now most people have heard the story of the $780 million in cash
stashed in various places around Baghdad (including, of all places, a
dog pound).  It’s certainly an interesting tale, and it has apparently
raised an interesting question: whose money is it?

Lt. Colonel Philip DeCamp, the commander of the tank battalion that
occupies the Republican Palace, asserts, “this money belongs to the
U.S. government.”

Lt. Mark Kitchens of Central Command says instead, “all money found is
the property of the Iraqi people.”

I agree with the latter, and find it intriguing that anyone would think
otherwise.  It should be fun to see if the U.S. government attempts to
take the money as its own…

04/17/2003

Remember that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when Sallah looks down into the big hole, turns to Indiana Jones, and says:

“Indy, why does the floor… move?”

To which our intrepid hero replies, “Ants… why did it have to be ants?”

That’s exactly what our kitchen was like a few days ago. Apparently our house was built on some kind of ant superhighway, because they started trooping through the house like they owned it. The kitchen was the worst– probably because there are always crumbs (darn kids!) laying around. You’d look closely at a spot of black on the floor and it would turn out to be about ten thousand ants swarming over an old Chee-to.

Anyway, the problem was getting to epidemic proportions when I said to Laralee that I’d used enough Kleenex to squash ants, and was tired of hearing the kids rev up the Dustbuster to take out one of the colonies in the family room. I got the can of Raid. It didn’t say anything about ants, but hey, as Laralee pointed out there was a picture of a dead ant right on the can.

I sprayed a couple of the places they were swarming from (under the baseboards, naturally). I figured we might get lucky.

Five minutes later it looked like someone had spilled pepper on the floor. There were dozens of little curled-up shriveled ants laying there, and dozens more kind of wobbling around trying to figure out what the heck hit them. Since that day I haven’t seen a single living ant in the house.

Mwah ha haaaaa!