Talking to Myself Again

The Pizza Machine

Pizza UFO, originally uploaded by Wally Hartshorn.

Dain, the son of our friends Bill and Mary, graduated from the 8th grade, so they had a graduation dinner for him at The Pizza Machine (in Vinegar Hills Mall at 1st and Cook).

The Pizza Machine's claim to fame is that they have very large pizzas. How large? How about 40 inches in diameter and weighing in at 25 pounds? How about large enough that they're delivered to your table by a crane that lowers them from the second floor?

And if 40 inches isn't large enough, they also have a 60 inch pizza.

This photo shows the pizza being lowered to our table. Go to my Flickr account to see more photos from Dain's Graduation Dinner.

In addition to the pizza, The Pizza Machine also features a spiral slide, a bunch of video games, a big screen TV, and a somewhat psychedelic industrial design scheme.

Lando loved it, particularly the slide. He and Sarah spent quite a lot of time running up the stairs to the second floor, then sliding down the slide to the first floor, then running up the stairs again.

Lando was also quite impressed by the pizza crane. While I was talking to Bill, Lando broke into our conversation several times to point out that "the grabber" (as he called it) was still visible, hanging from the ceiling. I'm not sure if he was concerned that it was going to grab something, or if he just felt that it should retreat out of sight after its job was done.

In any case, we all had a good time.

(In case you were wondering about the actual taste of the pizza, I think I would describe it as nothing special. It was okay, but nothing special. But then maybe I'm a bit of a pizza snob.)

CSA Week 2

CSA Week 2, originally uploaded by Wally Hartshorn.

Here's what was in the second week's bag from my CSA membership. Significantly more than last week, although still early in the season.

According to the letter included with it, this week's share included any of 3 varieties of lettuce (Tom Thumb Butterhead, Bronze Mignonette, and Flashy Green Butter Oak), one of 3 varieties of radish (French Breakfast, Cherry Belle, or Easter Egg); a spring mix; and a stir fry mix.

In addition to the Tom Thumb Butterhead, I think that this time we got Flashy Green Butter Oak (the variety that we didn't get last time). Although it doesn't look green, so what do I know. Actually, based on the photos I've found, I've got about 0% confidence in my identification of that lettuce.

Actually, we still have plenty of Bronze Mignonette from last week, because everyone in our household has been sick. As much as we like salad, it isn't what springs to mind when we think "comfort food"!

This week the CSA pickup was at the weekend Old Capitol Farmer's Market. We wandered around looking at stuff, as we always do. (Well, as much as we can with a 3-year-old in tow.) This time, however, there wasn't much need for us to buy anything else. We did pick up a couple of hydroponic tomatoes, but we know they're just not the same. Also, we saw one person with a sign that said "Strawberries Soon", so we're eagerly looking forward to that!

One update on last week's CSA share. While Dawn was preparing the rhubarb apple crisp using the rhubarb in last week's share, I tried raw rhubarb for the very first time. I'd no idea what to expect. I definitely didn't expect it to taste somewhat like a lime! I didn't get to sample much of it though, because the rest of it went into the rhubarb apple crisp, which was very good!

CSA Week 1

mood: energetic
music: silence

CSA Week 1, originally uploaded by Wally Hartshorn.

Here's what was in the first week's bag from my CSA subscription. As I expected, the first week was a bit sparse. This was both because it's still early in the season and because the wet weather meant that some stuff didn't get planted as early as they would have liked.

According to the letter included with it, this week's share includes rhubarb and 3 varieties of lettuce (Tom Thumb Butterhead, Bronze Mignonette, and Flashy Green Butter Oak).

Actually, I don't think that we got any of the Flashy Green Butter Oak. Instead, it looks like we got 2 heads each of the other 2 varieties.

No problem. How much salad can 2 people eat in one week? Anyway, I've no doubt that we'll be getting plenty more in future weeks!

Dawn was quite happy to see the rhubarb. She loves strawberry-rhubarb pie and often ate fresh raw rhubarb when she was growing up in Montana. She's found a recipe for rhubarb apple crisp, so I'll let you know how that tastes!

Whoosh! That was March. (Mostly.)

mood: busy
music: silence

At the end of my previous post (dated Feb 28), I wrote, "Other than the Very Important Topics, I'd also like to write about Springfield's planned winter farmer's market, rearranging our living room furniture, pizza toppings, and copying stuff from Tivo to DVD, but those topics will just have to wait for another day."

This is not that day. So here's a brief recap of how March went. A very brief recap.

Fri, Feb 29 - Vertigo

Dawn was sick with benign positional vertigo (aka getting dizzy and queasy every time you move your head), so stayed I stayed home from work to take care of Lando.

Sat, Mar 1 - Dinner with the Smiths

Dawn was quite a bit better, so we at dinner at Smiths' house.

Sun, Mar 2 - Vertigo

Dawn's vertigo was worse again, so we did pretty much nothing.

Mon, Mar 3 - Funshop Ice Skating

Dawn was quite a bit better, which was good news, because that morning was Funshop's ice skating event at Nelson Center. Originally Dawn had planned on putting on some skates and doing a bit of ice skating for the first time in many years, but the vertigo meant that would be a bad idea. As before, when we got there, Lando had no interest in going out on the ice.

We spent about 30 minutes with him in the lobby, where it was comparatively quiet (except for Lando, who was running around like a mad man), then another 30 minutes watching the other kids skating (except for Lando, who was running around like a mad man).

Just about the time we were thinking about calling it a day and going home, Lando decided he was ready to go out on ice. He only stayed out there about 20 minutes or so, but he quite enjoyed it. I took plenty of pictures, of course, but haven't gotten any of them posted yet!

Tue, Mar 4 - REALL

As usual, the first Tuesday of the month meant a meeting of REALL, the local skeptics group. I didn't have anything planned, so we just sat around and talked a bit.

Wed, Mar 5 - Funshop

Another Wednesday, another Funshop evening! However, due to the vertigo, Dawn isn't supposed to drive until at least a week after the last symptoms go away! That meant that, rather than meeting her at the Funshop building (which is not far from where I work), I had to drive home to pick up her and Lando, then drive back across town to Funshop. Not a big deal, but I normally have 30 minutes or so to read a book while I'm waiting. Oh well.

Thu, Mar 6 - Errands

I left work at 2:00 and ran a couple of errands. Exciting, huh? Um... I think I went to the post office. I bought stamps. Nobody died.

Fri, Mar 7 - Preschool Registration

This was something of a big day in Lando's life, and in ours. We went to registration for "Preschool in the Park" at Washington Park. This will begin in September, and will be just 2½ hours on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The "classes" are small (10 kids), so Lando will get plenty of attention. And because the classes are short, it will help ease Lando (and Dawn) into the idea of not spending the whole day together. :-)

Lando had plenty of fun playing with the toys that were out while we got him registered. Then when it was time to leave, he had a complete meltdown. *sigh*

Sat, Mar 8 - Moms Group Play Date

Dawn is running the Springfield Moms Meetup Group and had scheduled a play date at the mall for 9:00 am. White Oaks Mall recently installed a very nice soft play area for kids up to about age 6 or so. Scheduling it for 9:00 am meant that it didn't interfere with plans for the rest of the day, but it also meant getting up and moving somewhat earlier than perhaps some moms would like to on a Saturday. In addition to us, only 1 other mom showed up. She had 3 kids with her, so Lando had fun playing. Again, I took pictures. Again, I haven't posted any of them yet.

Sun, Mar 9 - Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time began! I don't care whether it saves energy or not; I like Daylight Saving Time! The extra hour of daylight after work just really helps me feel a bit less stressed out. Otherwise it feels like, "Get up, go to work, come home, time for bed!"

Mon, Mar 10 - Disk Drive and James Randi

I took the afternoon off to do two things.

One was to go to Best Buy and buy a hard drive. My PC has 600GB of disk space. Of that, it had reached the point where only about 5GB was unused. If you're wondering how I could be using 595GB of disk space, here's how: digital photos (I shoot in RAW format, which means each picture from my 8 megapixel camera uses about 7MB); digital music (I have about 300 CDs copied to disk); digital video; TIVO files; etc.

So, how much does half a terabyte of disk space cost these days? $130.

And since I was going to have enough space to actually do so, I picked up Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the first computer role-playing game I've bought in years.

The other reason I took the afternoon off was for a brief road trip to Champaign. Members of REALL and the Springfield Area Freethinkers carpooled over to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to see James Randi give a talk. Oh, and some Nobel Prize winner, too. :-) James Randi is a former magician who, among other things, exposed Uri Geller as being a fake, appeared on The Tonight Show numerous times, debunked dowsers, psychics, faith healers, psychic surgeons, hypnotists, etc. And he's a funny guy!

About 500-600 people turned out to see him. Afterwards he stayed around to chat, so I got a chance to talk with him a bit, had him sign my copy of his book Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions, and got my picture taken with him. That picture and the numerous ones that I took of him are still waiting for me to post them. (But you already guessed that, didn't you?)

(Oh, the Nobel Prize winner? That was Richard J. Roberts, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing". Now you know.)

Tue, Mar 11 - Disk Drive and Oblivion

I installed the new 500GB hard drive in the computer. I really like the physical layout of my computer. It was definitely designed to make it easy to get to the components and install stuff. What a nice change!

Installing the hard drive was a snap. Now all I had to do was move some files from the old drive to the new drive. About 240GB of disk space was being used for digital photos, so I decided to move those. I decided to play it safe and copy them to their new location, rather than moving them, so I could verify that everything worked before I deleted the old copies.

However, after I started the copying process, I saw the time estimate: 180 minutes. That's right -- 3 hours! Okay, forget that. I canceled the copying process, reasoning that if it was going to take 3 hours, it could do so while I slept.

So I installed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and played it instead. It's fun! And now you know part of the reason why I've been unable to find time to post anything on my blog for the last few weeks.

Before I went to bed, I started the processing of moving the digital photos to the new drive. Because the process was going to take 3 hours, I decided to be brave and tell it to move the files rather than just copying them. (Yes, I know. Don't worry. It turns out okay.)

Wed, Mar 12 - Disk Drive, Sick Son, No Funshop

I woke up early and decided to check to see whether the digital photos had been successfully moved to the new disk drive. I walked into the office and saw a dialog box informing me that one of the files to be moved was a read-only file. Did I wish to move it anyway? Yes, damn it! *grumble* Luckily the read-only file showed up with only about 30 minutes left in the process, so it didn't cause a big problem.

After the files finished their move to the new drive, I started Photoshop Elements, then went into the organizer to tell it where all of the files had been moved. That's when I discovered that I had messed up. There is no way to tell the organizer, "hey, all of the files in this directory are now located in that other directory." Instead, you have to specify the new location one file at a time! As you might have guessed, with 240GB of digital photos, that would take quite a long time. The organizer catalog contains all kinds of information, such as the captions and keywords attached to each photo, so just ignoring the problem and starting over wasn't an option.

It turns out, what you're supposed to do is move the directory from within the organizer. *sigh* So that meant I had to move all of the files back to their original location (which took another 3 hours), then go back into Photoshop Elements and move the files yet again (which took yet another 3 hours). So all together it took 9 hours to get everything moved to the new disk drive!

Everything worked out in the end, though, and now I have plenty of room on both drives!

Another Wednesday, another Funshop session. However, Lando was sick, so no Funshop for us! (That was sort of good, because it meant that I could stay home and work on moving those files around!)

Thu, Mar 13 - Oblivion?

I'm drawing a blank here. I must have been playing Oblivion. Actually, Thursday is Dawn's night to do stuff, so probably I was keeping Lando entertained. And wanting to play Oblivion. :-)

Fri, Mar 14 - Er... Oblivion?

I suspect an alien abduction. Or more Oblivion.

Sat, Mar 15 - Sick Son, Play Date, Freethinkers

Dawn tried another play date at the mall, this time scheduling it for 9:30. However, Lando was sick, so he couldn't go. Since Dawn was the one who scheduled it, she figured she at least had to go. Unfortunately, nobody else showed up. *sigh*

Also, it was the third Saturday of the month, which meant another meetup of the Springfield Area Freethinkers. There was a pretty good turnout this time. I think the receding winter weather is making people feel more like getting out, even if "getting out" means "going to the Buffet King and eating lunch."

I suggested that for the April meetup we get together somewhere quiet where we can listen to the CD of Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God. Remember the Saturday Night Live routine, "It's Pat"? That was Julia Sweeney. Anyway, she now does a standup act where she talks about her spiritual journey from being a Catholic to becoming an atheist. (Her transition began, ironically, with her decision to attend Bible study classes at her church. Oops.) Anyway, we'll be getting together at Janet's house to listen. And because Janet's house isn't a restaurant, it will be BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch).

Sun, Mar 16 - Um... Oblivion?

Nope, I can't think of anything that happened on this day.

Mon, Mar 17 - St. Patrick's Day, Early Riser

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I went to work, of course. When I left, everyone was still asleep. Later, Lando got up, went into the living room, and sat on the couch. Dawn eventually woke up to the sound of him calling out, "Is anybody home?" :-)

Tue, Mar 18 - My Night

We didn't feel like cooking, so I swung by Panera Bread and got us dinner. Every other Tuesday evening the Schwan's delivery guy comes by. We're pretty much limiting ourselves to pizzas and ice cream these days. Definitely not local and definitely not whole foods, but definitely very tasty!

Oh, and I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion until midnight.

Wed, Mar 19 - Funshop, Playing Outside, Super Size Me

Another Wednesday, another Funshop evening. The weather was nice enough that Lando was able to play outside for a bit after we got home.

At work, I have a 30 minute lunch and two 15 minute breaks. My computer has a DVD drive, so sometimes I'll bring a DVD to watch. Today I watched the first hour of Super Size Me. So far, wow! Here's the trailer:

To Be Continued...

I started writing this post a long time ago. March 19, actually. It's pretty much sat untouched ever since. Well, I'm not caught up yet, but rather than risk letting this sit around any longer, I'm going to go ahead and post it now. You'll just have to wonder how the rest of March turned out. Pretend that it's a cliffhanger!

Catching Up. Again.

mood: calm
music: silence

In my previous post (way back on January 27), I noted that I had fallen behind in my blogging and had some catching up to do. That was after a whopping 10 days of not posting. Well, it's now nearly a whole month later!

Some people have big gaps in their blog posts because their life had become too busy for them to post. That sometimes happens to me, but that's not my excuse this time. (Well, not my entire excuse.)

Instead, I had a few Very Important Topics to write about. Given that they were Very Important Topics, they would require Careful Thought and Finely Crafted Writing -- which I didn't have time the time or energy to do.

Where I went wrong, however, was in failing to write about the numerous trivial topics that I could have written about until I had time to write about the Very Important Topics.

That mistake will be corrected now. Prepare for a flurry (okay, a blizzard) of Pointless Trivia!

As a reminder of where I left off, on Jan 15 Dawn and I attended a showing of King Corn, which gave me even more reasons to think about eating local and changing my food buying habits. So what have we been up to since?

Fun Time Station

On Saturday, Jan 19, we skipped the monthly gathering of the Springfield Area Freethinkers and instead took Lando to something called "Fun Time Station" in the Orr Building at the Illinois State Fairgrounds. It's an annual event for kids, sponsored by the local PBS station, which basically involves a variety of games and activities that kids can do. Eric and Patty met us there, so Lando got to play with Sarah and Rose.

They had a small ball pit, tumbling mats, playdough, a sandbox, ring toss, beanbag toss, etc; a real police car and a real fire engine; and demonstrations by dancers, skaters, and musicians. In short, it's a way for kids to run around and burn off some energy, even though it's bloody cold outside!

Oh, they also had a couple of people dressed up like Clifford the Big Red Dog and Elmo, both of which we made sure to avoid, based on Lando's past reactions to seeing such giant surreal apparitions!

A Wedding Anniversary

Sunday, Jan. 20 was my Dad & Pat's wedding anniversary. I entirely forgot about it until just now. Oops!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Monday, Jan. 21 was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a state holiday, which means for me it was a day off. Hurray!

My Big Fat Greek Colonoscopy

No, I'm not going to go all gross on you here. Well, not too gross.

For the last few years, every few months I'd have some blood in the stool. Of course, as soon as you see blood in your stool, alarm bells go off! But then the next day there would be nothing. And nothing the day after that. Huh. Okay, it was just one of those things. And then after 4 or 5 months... blood in the stool! And then nothing. And the cycle would repeat itself.

Eventually I decided to stop wondering about it and told my doctor about it. She agreed that it was probably nothing, but recommended that I get a colonoscopy, just to be safe, so she made an for me appointment with Dr. Howard Chodash, a gastroenterologist.

Coincidentally, this was not my first encounter with Dr. Chodash. A few years ago, when I was attending the GIS in Illinois conference in Chicago, while eating lunch I swallowed a piece of steak that was just a little too large. It became lodged in my esophagus, just above the entrance to the stomach. It took a trip to the hospital to get it removed.

When I returned to Springfield, I had a followup visit with Dr. Chodash, who sent a camera down my throat to take a look around and verify that nothing was damaged. He also gave me a prescription for Prevacid, since the cause of my problem was stomach acid irritating the lining of the esophagus. Ever since I've been heartburn-free!

Anyway, back to the colonoscopy.

During the preliminary visit, he explained to me that the colonoscopy itself wasn't a big deal. It was a short, painless procedure, and I'd be back to work the next day. However, the preparation involved the day before the colonoscopy would be the unpleasant part.

Basically, I could have pretty much nothing to eat or drink the day before (with a few exceptions, like clear liquids and Jello).

In addition, at noon I was to take a stool softener, then that evening I was to drink 2 liters of Halflytely. It tastes... not good. When I drank the first glass, I thought, "well, it's not as bad tasting as I expected". Then I drank the next glass. And the next glass. And the next glass. And the next glass. And the next glass. And the next glass. And with each glassful, it tasted worse and worse, and my stomach became more and more full. And, of course, in between all of those glasses, I was sitting on the toilet.

It was not the most fun I've ever had.

On this day when I couldn't eat anything and was spending all of my time sitting on the toilet, some books that I had ordered from Amazon arrived, including (ironically) Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of DietingThe Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. (These are two of the Very Important Topics that I'll write about later. I hope.) I also received It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. I guess a book about getting rid of stuff you don't need is appropriate for reading on the toilet.

I weighed 256.2 pounds on the morning of Jan. 22; I weighed 252.4 pounds on the morning of Jan. 23, a loss of 3.4 pounds. I don't think Halflytely Bowel Prep was the "new science of weight loss" that Rethinking Thin had in mind.

Jan. 23 was the day of my colonoscopy, and as he had said, the procedure was short and painless. Actually, because another patient was running late, they started mine an hour earlier than planned, so I spent even less time waiting around than I had expected. I was awake throughout the procedure, but sedated, such that my memory is a bit fuzzy. I remember watching on the monitor, which was sort of interesting, but I wasn't very alert and paid far less attention I would have if I weren't sedated. The end result was that they found one polyp, which they removed and sent off to be analyzed, but other than that nothing.

By the morning of Jan. 25, I weighed 257.6. So much for that weight loss plan!

Rethinking the Diet

One of my New Year's resolutions was to lose weight. I had started off well, losing 4 pounds in the first 2 weeks.

One of the books I received on Jan. 22 was Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata, which explained that losing significant amounts of weight and keeping it off is just about biologically impossible. This is one of the Very Important Topics that I want to write about later. Remind me.

In any case, that sort of took some of the wind out of my sails and my diet has stalled. I can't blame it all on that book, because part of it was just getting busy and not counting calories, but it definitely removed a lot of my motivation. I haven't decided yet whether I'm convinced that it's hopeless; I'll have to research the topic some more.

Reducing the Stuff

Another book that I received on Jan. 22 was It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh. I decided to buy it after reading my brother's review. (Buying a book about having less stuff? Oh the irony!)

It was quite good, very motivating, and we've begun taking some significant steps in that direction. I don't know that this quite rises to the level of a Very Important Topic; perhaps I would call it a Rather Important Topic. In any case, I do plan to write about it more later.

Amazon's Return Policy

Of the 3 books I received on Jan. 22, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan definitely had the biggest impact on me. This is the biggest of the Very Important Topics that I want to write about later. (You've been warned.)

Unfortunately, when I received it, I noticed that this last 20 or so pages were miscut. They were smaller than normal and were still joined together. I could have just sliced them open and ignored the fact that they were small, but since I had 2 other books that I could read while I waited for this one to be replaced, I decided to return it.

I checked the packing slip for their return policy and saw that there was a web address to handle that. At that web page, I selected the book that I wanted to return and entered a description of the reason for the return. Amazon then displayed for me a postage paid return label to print and told me that a new copy of the book would be shipped to me. I would then have 30 days to return the old copy.

Nice! If I finished the other 2 books quickly, I would still be able to read The Omnivore's Dilemma while waiting for the replacement to arrive! (As it so happens, I did just that.) And as an added bonus, the box that they were shipping the replacement copy in would be exactly the right size to ship back the defective copy!

Making a return doesn't get much easier than that!

A Foot of Snow!

On Jan. 31, the snow began falling. When we awoke on Feb. 1, we had 11 inches of snow on the ground! The next day we got another 2 inches added to the total. The day after that we had rain and temperatures in the mid-50s (?!), so the snow didn't last too long, but there was a lot of it for awhile!

Home Expo

For whatever reason, every year Springfield hosts two competing home improvement shows at virtually the same time (sometimes on the same weekend). This year, for a change, one of the home shows decided to move up to early February, while the other will be held in early Mach.

On Feb. 3 we attended the Home Expo in the Orr Building at the Illinois State Fairgrounds. As usual in recent years, our primary goal in attending is to get Lando out of the house and give him a chance to run around and burn up some energy. (It never seems to work, however.)

One highlight this year was watching one of the exhibitors help Lando play bowling on a Nintendo Wii. Before Lando became obsessed with drums and then knights, he was a big fan of bowling. He has 4 sets of bowling pins, ranging from 1 inch tall tabletop pins to 2 feet tall driveway pins. We've also got a little bowling game on our Nintendo GameCube (Monkey Ball), and Lando loves watching us play. We plan on buying a Wii "one of these days", but not yet.

Schwan's is Going Bye-Bye... But Not Yet

After reading Plenty, I resolved to start getting more of my food from local sources. After watching King Corn, I resolved to eliminate corn-fed beef from my diet. After reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, I resolved to eliminate all industrial animal products from my diet.

But then on Feb. 5, the Schwan's delivery guy showed up, as he does every Tuesday. We still bought some stuff, but it was much less than we've bought in the past.

These things take time!

Funshop

On Feb. 6 we had our first Funshop session of the Winter semester. This will be the last time Lando will be in the 2 to 3 1/2 year olds class.

Dinner at the Davises'

On Friday, Feb. 8, we went to Eric & Patty's house for dinner. Patty had given up meat for Lent, which meant she was cooking vegetarian anyway, so they decided to invite us over to help with the eating. Lando, Sarah, and Rose spent the majority of the time down in the basement playing, carefully watched over by the wireless closed-circuit camera that Eric had installed.

I mentioned my new interest in avoiding industrial agriculture and buying more locally grown whole foods. That triggered some disturbing flashbacks for Patty. Apparently her childhood involved large amounts of boiled oats, corn meal mash, and lard. Somehow, when I think of fresh whole foods, none of those 3 items features prominently. Her mother was Amish, so perhaps that had something to do with it. I don't know.

In any case, if my weekly CSA box consists primarily of oats and lard, I'll skip it next year. I don't think that's very likely, however.

Amazon Prime

Also on Feb. 8, I ordered yet more stuff from Amazon: 2 books & 4 DVDs -- In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto; How to get your Kid to Eat: But Not Too Much; Who Killed the Electric Car?; Super Size Me; Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; and The Corporation. (As you might imagine, there was some Very Important Topics in there.)

And I finally broke down and signed up for Amazon Prime, which means free 2-day shipping on many items and free standard shipping on everything. It costs $79 per year, but given how often we're ordering from Amazon, I think it's worth it.

Lando's Links

On Feb. 9, I created a "start page" for Lando. In the last couple of months, Lando has become quite skilled at using the mouse, having mastered the tricky task of clicking and dragging. We had begun taking him to various web sites with Flash-based games, which he would then quietly play for 20 or 30 minutes. Given Lando's high-energy activity level, this was amazing! The only problem was, if he was playing at one site (say, The Backyardigans) and wanted to go to another (say, Peep and the Big Wide World), he couldn't do so on his own.

So, being the web geek that I am, I put together a simple HTML file with images that linked to the various web sites. Now he can just go to his home page and click on, say, Clifford the Big Red Dog to get to that page.

Yes, we don't want him to turn into a computer zombie, but it is handy to once in awhile turn him loose on the Internet for a bit so that we can enjoy a nice, quiet living room. :-)

Darwin Day Dinner

On Feb. 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. Here in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln is a very big deal and everyone is gearing up for next year's 200th anniversary celebration.

On the exact same day, Feb. 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born. Not surprisingly, the anniversary of his birth doesn't get nearly as much attention. However, some of us celebrate Feb. 12 as Darwin Day. I'm the chairman of the local skeptics group, REALL, and each year we have a dinner to celebrate not only Darwin Day, but also the anniversary of the formation of the group.

This year we got together a couple of days early, on Feb. 10 at the Pasta House. We had a nice turnout, with 30 people showing up, including 5 kids (Lando, Sarah, Rose, Andrew, and Matthew). I read a couple of excerpts from On the Origin of Species, passed out a quiz to check on people's Darwin knowledge, and we each had a slice of birthday cake.

In past years, we'd had a dinosaur-themed cake that said "Happy Birthday Charles". This year the dinosaur-themed cake wasn't available, so we went with the primordial sea cake, more commonly known as Finding Nemo without the Nemo and Dory figures.

Feb 11: 2 books & 4 DVDs arrive; order book, DVD, CD for Dawn

Lincoln's Birthday

As I mentioned, Feb. 12, was Lincoln's birthday. Another state holiday, another day off for me!

Funshop Valentine's Day Party

Wednesday, Feb. 13 was Funshop's Valentine's Day party. Okay, "party" is a bit of a stretch of the term. it was just the normal Funshop gathering, but the kids each had a paper bag with their name on it. Everyone brought a stack of Valentine's Day cards and dropped one into each bag. I'm pretty sure we didn't even look at the cards when we got home. But hey, he's 3!

Valentine's Day

Feb. 14 was Valentine's Day, the officially sanctioned day for being romantic. I, as always, was pretty much unprepared. I gave Dawn a book, CD, and DVD from her Amazon wish list. That was it. No flowers, no box of chocolates. She gave me pants. What can I say? We're an Old Married Couple.

Okay, I admit it. I sucked at the romance thing this year. I'm going to blame it on the 3 year old this time and try harder next year!

Freethinkers Meetup

Feb. 16 was the 3rd Saturday of the month, and for a change I made it to the Freethinkers Meetup at Buffet King. None of the food was local, I'm sure, and no doubt it was all industrial, but I ate least avoided the beef and pork, limiting myself to fish and some chicken.

I don't remember exactly how the topic came up, but at some point I started talking about The Omnivore's Dilemma. Yes, I've become that guy, the one who's constantly talking about whatever food kick he's currently on! I'll try not to be that guy for very long; I promise!

In any case, it's sort of a difficult topic for me to talk about, because it's complex and I find that I can seldom get more than a single sentence out before I'm interrupted. Given that I was raised not to interrupt others when they're speaking, I then find myself waiting for a chance to continue my thought. And after I get out a second sentence, I'm interrupted again! Part of it is my speaking style. I tend to want to lay out the evidence and then state the conclusion. This takes multiple sentences.

Okay, I admit it -- I can run on quite a bit. But if you got this far in this post, you already knew that, didn't you?

Presidents' Day

Feb. 18 was yet another state holiday! That's the good news. The bad news is that we don't get another one until Memorial Day (May 26 this year). For some reason, we have 8 state holidays during the 4 cold months of November through February, then only 4 state holidays during the 8 warm months of March through October. I think that needs adjusting!

Schwan's Delivery Shrinks Further

Feb. 19 was another Schwan's delivery. We cut this one back even further, getting just a couple of cheese pizzas and some ice cream.

Funshop without Dawn; Lunar Eclipse

Feb. 20 was Funshop night, and because Dawn needed a break, I had suggested to her that she take the night off and leave Lando to me. She agreed, so it was just Lando and Daddy!

Later that night we watched the total lunar eclipse. It was bloody cold, but we took Lando outside 2 or 3 times and showed him the moon. I think his basic reaction was, "Wow! The moon! I want to go in now."

Deer Herd

On the night of Feb. 26 (2 days ago), a bit before midnight, I looked out the back window and saw an entire herd of deer! Okay, it was just 4, but in a tiny backyard in the middle of a subdivision, that qualifies as a herd. This look like a doe and 3 "teenagers". Several months ago I had seen a doe and 2 fawns.

I don't know what it is about our backyard that attracts deer, particularly given that we are, as I said, in the middle of a subdivision. They were just passing through and didn't stay around for more than a minute or two, so I didn't get a chance to take a picture. I'm curious what sort of shots I'd get if I set up a motion-triggered camera back there.

Funshop

Yesterday, Feb. 27, another Wednesday, another Funshop. This time the theme was teeth and brushing them. So.... Okay, I really don't have anything to say about that. There were toothbrushes, a giant mouth with teeth in them, and some books about teeth. I really just can't get very excited about the topic.

Dawn's Sick

After Funshop we went to Bellacino's for dinner. To avoid industrial pork, I had to give up my favorite (the BLT grinder) and instead compromised with the industrial chicken (the chicken grinder, which sounds rather disturbing now that I write it).

That evening, however, Dawn was feeling very dizzy, with a sore throat and a sore back. Was it the food? Or maybe the flu? Whatever it was, I sent her to bed.

When I woke her up this morning at 7:00, she was still feeling dizzy, so I stayed home from work to take care of her and Lando. We went to urgent care and found that she had "benign positional vertigo" brought on by a head cold. Basically this means that the small calcium particles in her inner ear are moving around whenever she moves her head, making her feel dizzy and nauseous. They gave her a prescription and said that the symptoms could last for 3-5 days. Also, she's not to drive until a week after the symptoms disappear.

I'm Caught Up! More or Less.

Okay, I'm pretty much caught up. Other than the Very Important Topics, I'd also like to write about Springfield's planned winter farmer's market, rearranging our living room furniture, pizza toppings, and copying stuff from Tivo to DVD, but those topics will just have to wait for another day.

"King Corn" and Community-Supported Agriculture

mood: inspired
music: silence

I've fallen behind here and have some catching up to do, but I'll try not to do it all in one post. (It's better to avoid writing something so long that people fall asleep before they reach the end.)

A week ago last Tuesday (i.e. January 15), Dawn and I dropped off Lando with Rosie & GM, then went to the Liberty Brew & View showing of King Corn. By the end of the evening, I was giving up corn-fed beef, Dawn was giving up soda (well, cutting back at least), and we'd bought $500 of fresh produce.

Liberty Brew & View is a monthly gathering, organized by Will Reynolds, to watch a politically-themed movie (usually a documentary) while enjoying some dinner and/or drinks. It's held in the back room of a bar which used to be a one-screen movie theater. After the movie, there's generally someone to speak for a few minutes about the topic. Previous gatherings have drawn about 20-30 people. This one drew over 100!

King Corn was very good. It's a documentary made by a couple of recent college grads who, after hearing that theirs is the first generation of Americans that might have a shorter lifespan than their parents, decide to keep a detailed food diary of what they eat while on a road trip. They eventually have their hair chemically analyzed to learn what it says about their eating habits. When we eat, whatever our body digests eventually is used to make hair, so chemically analyzing a hair sample can reveal what it is we've been eating. In their case, they learned that most of the carbon in their hair came from corn.

Corn?

It turns out that corn is in a stunningly large variety of foods. For example, if you buy a burger, fries, and a soda, the burger is probably made from cattle that were fed corn, the fries were probably fried in corn oil, the soda is primarily high fructose corn syrup, and even the ketchup might well contain high fructose corn syrup. For that matter, even the juice that you buy for your toddler might contain high fructose corn syrup.

After learning this, these 2 college grads decided that they were going to move to Iowa for a year, raise 1 acre of corn, then follow it to see where it goes.

As I said, it was a very good movie. It was quite funny, as well as thought-provoking, and I learned plenty.

One thing we learned is that beef cattle tend to be sent to feedlots, where they are fed corn for about 3 months before they are slaughtered. Feeding them corn fattens them up more quickly (and in a much smaller area) than letting them eat grass. However, cattle evolved to eat grass, not corn. They'll eat the corn, but it does very bad things to their stomachs and digestive tract. If they aren't slaughtered quickly, they'll die within a few months anyway. In addition, to ensure that they stay "healthy", they are given large quantities of antibiotics. This kills most of the bacteria, of course, but the ones that it leaves behind are the ones that are resistant. These bacteria then are able to reproduce more easily, since they aren't competing with the other bacteria. The result is an increase in the population of drug-resistant bacteria.

After learning how the cattle are treated, Dawn told me that I wasn't allowed to eat corn-fed beef anymore. I was slightly annoyed by her remark, not because I disagreed with it, but because I had already been thinking along those lines earlier, partly as a result of reading Plenty. I'd much rather get credit for announcing the decision on my own rather than merely agreeing to a decision made by someone else! But that's just nitpicking on my part.

The end result is the same: No more corn-fed beef. So that either means finding grass-fed beef or becoming a vegetarian.

Actually, I'd already been toying with the idea of becoming a vegetarian again. I had been a vegetarian for about 8 months several years ago, partly just to see whether I could do it. I didn't go 100%, however. I described myself as a "private vegetarian, social omnivore". In other words, if I were out with friends, I didn't want them to have to make special arrangements to handle my eating requirements. If sausage pizza were ordered, I'd eat it. If there was a hotdog roast, I'd roast a hotdog. I've since learned that the term "flexitarian" describes what I was.

So I might well take the plunge and become a flexitarian again. We'll see.

One of the most interesting themes of the movie was the role of government subsidies in the production of corn. Industrial agribusiness operations are given millions of dollars, while small farmers growing fresh veggies get nothing. The sound bite for that was, "We subsidize Happy Meals, not healthy meals." When the guys start the process of raising their one acre of corn, they sign up for a federal government subsidy -- $28 for growing 1 acre of corn. Near the end of the movie, they total up all of their costs (renting the land, seed, fertilizer, herbicides), then subtract that from their proceeds from selling the 180 bushels of corn they grew, and find that they lost $19. In other words, they didn't actually make a profit from growing corn; they just made a profit from the government subsidies.

Anyway, here's the trailer:

(One of the guys you see in the trailer is Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which I had coincidentally just ordered before seeing King Corn. Small world, huh?)

After the showing of the film, there was a panel discussion featuring 2 local farmers, as well as 2 representatives of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. They discussed industrial agribusiness, organic farming, and buying locally-grown food -- topics that have very much been on my mind since reading Plenty.

One of the panelists mentioned that Hill Street Farms had 3 slots left in their community-supported agriculture program. I was quite excited, because that was one of the things I had specifically wanted to ask the panelists: Are there any CSAs in the Springfield area? When the panelists were done, I quickly went to talk to Andy Heck of Hill Street Farms, asked him for the details of the CSA, and told him that I would discuss it with my wife and then call him the next day. (Okay, so technically I didn't buy $500 of fresh produce that very night.)

So, what is "community-supported agriculture"? The short version is that you pay a farmer or group of farmers in advance for food that they will provide later. In the case of the Hill Street Farms CSA, it's $500 paid in January for fresh produce made available every Saturday for 24 weeks (from about mid-May until late-October). By agreeing in advance to buy the food, the farmer is able to grow a wider variety of foods, because he has a guaranteed sale.

For us, one advantage of participating in the CSA is it's a way to kickstart our "buy more local food, eat more fresh food" plan. Because we've already paid for the food in advance, that's a strong incentive to actually pick up the food and eat it. We have a Farmer's Market (and that's where the weekly pickups are), but to be honest there are some Saturdays where we've felt more like staying home rather than making the trip. And, when we have gone, we've tended to buy the same very small variety of fruits and vegetables each time (sweet corn, tomatoes, strawberries, peaches, maybe some broccoli). This will encourage us to eat more fresh produce, as well as a wider variety.

Of course, it will also require us to do significantly more cooking than we have in the past! I did a Google search on "beginning vegetarian cooking" and the top hit was Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. The reviews on Amazon were all good, except for a few that complained that it was too basic. Well, that sounded perfect for me! But before I had a chance to order the book, Dawn handed me one of her cookbooks -- Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison! Well, that saved me a bit of money!

Of course, before we can really start cooking, we'll need to find the countertops in the kitchen, but that's another story.

(Hey! Wake up! You've reached the end!)

The 100-Mile Diet

mood: ambitious
music: silence

I suppose you could say that I'm going through a midlife crisis. That term isn't entirely accurate, since it evokes images of guys buying red sports cars or something. Besides, "crisis" is far too dramatic a word. Perhaps a better phrase might be "midlife adjustment" or "reassessment" or something. Whatever.

Three books have played important roles as catalysts in my thinking.

• Jared Diamond's book Collapse got me thinking a bit more seriously about protecting the environment. I've long contributed to various environmental causes and have done my bit, such as recycling and replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescents. However, his book highlighted for me the importance of "sustainability" and of thinking more long-term. (Perhaps becoming a father also had a role in that.)
• Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone (and, to a lesser extent, the followup book Better Together, written with Lewis Feldstein) got me thinking about the importance of personal relationships and of building strong communities, as well as the need to address local issues rather than just "big picture" national and international issues.
• Lastly, Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon provided what I think is a small part of the solutions to the problems raised in Collapse and Bowling Alone.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

In Collapse, Jared Diamond examines several civilizations which rose, peaked, and then collapsed. He explores the causes of those collapse, with obvious parallels to today. The typical scenario is a civilization growing, reaching the peak of its power, then running out of some essential resource and collapsing, often quite suddenly.

Generally, a lack of "sustainability" is the key problem.

Suppose there are 10 million fish in a sea, and each year that number grows by 10% (i.e. 1 million fish). If you harvest 1 million fish each year (i.e. 10%), you'll never run out of fish. That's sustainability.

However, if you harvest 1.1 million fish each year, you'll eventually run out of fish, even though the population isn't noticeably smaller from year to year. It's an unsustainable rate. The population will slowly shrink, and eventually you'll have kids listening to their grandparents talk about how "there used to be so many more fish than there are today".

What really got me thinking about our situation is the explanation that, if the Third World were to achieve the living standards of the First World, the environmental impact would be the same as if the population of the world had increased by a factor of 12. In other words, imagine all of the resources required, the pollution produced, and the environmental damage caused by a population of 72 billion people. Obviously that's not something that would be feasible.

We are unlikely to convince the rest of the world to just accept their place in life, so the best alternative is to make the First World lifestyle sustainable.

Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documents the sharp decline in recent decades of a wide range of community participation. The decline includes involvement in formal activities, such as attendance at club meetings, volunteering, and voting, as well as informal activities, such as having friends over for dinner, or playing cards.

The term used for the value of social networks of friends and acquaintances is "social capital". Just like "physical capital" (stuff) and "human capital" (knowledge and skills), social capital is valuable.

Communities with high social capital have higher education levels, fewer teen pregnancies, less crime, more wealth, are healthier, live longer, and are happier with life. Conversely, communities with low social capital have more kids dropping out of school and skipping class, more teen pregnancies, more crime, more poverty, more health problems, shorter lifespans, and are less happy.

As a massive oversimplification, think of a high social capital community as being like a small town, where everyone knows their neighbors and helps them out, while a low social capital community is like a big city, where people might live somewhere for 20 years and not know anyone else on their block.

There are several causes of the steep decline in social capital in recent decades.

• One cause is the two-income household. Once upon a time, women stayed at home all day, which meant they had time to meet the neighbors, join clubs, get involved in their child's school, prepare meals to entertain friends, etc. Not anymore.
• Another cause is that we now tend to live in one community, work in a different community, and shop in yet another community. Before sprawl, we tended to live, work, and shop all in the same community, so we had much more of an interest in what happened there.
• A big cause is electronic entertainment -- TV, video games, and the Internet. We spend many hours these days interacting with one of those 3 screens. Add them up, then imagine what you could do with those hours.
• Lastly, and perhaps most surprisingly, is the passing from the scene of the so-called Greatest Generation. (Yes, it's an annoying term, but you know who I mean.) World War II had the effect of energizing lots of people to be involved in their communities. After the war, many people felt inspired to seek out some other Great Purpose to be a part of. As a result, large numbers of people joined clubs, volunteered, etc. In the decades since, there hasn't been a similar catalyst to propel large numbers of people to become involved.

There's much, much more to this book than I can summarize here. It's a book that I want to give to everyone I meet and say, "Read this! It will change your life!" (Maybe I'll go door to door like the Mormons or something, or start leaving copies in hotel rooms.)

Anyway, I feel pretty sure that the decline in social capital is a very big reason for the dissatisfaction that many people feel with "the world today".

After reading Bowling Alone, I was motivated to become more active in the local community. Previously, I had always focused more on national and international issues (in part because those are the ones you see on TV and read about in news magazines).

One bit that caught my interest was his description of "checkbook membership" -- in other words, "joining" some organization where your entire degree of involvement consists of writing a membership check every year. That definitely described my membership in numerous organizations. Activism has become professionalized. We no longer tell our politicians what we want; we pay professional activists to do that for us.

My interest in the environment led me to decide to join the local Sierra Club and to start attending meetings, rather than just sending money to the national organization as I had in the past.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

Lastly, I read Plenty and found another way to combine my renewed interest in protecting the environment with my new interest in social capital.

The short version is this: Eat more locally grown food.

How does that help the environment? Well, the ingredients in the average American meal have traveled anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 miles or more, on average, by the time they get to your plate. We're buying hybrid cars, recycling, and replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescents, but then we're eating apples shipped from New Zealand!

I remember seeing an article on the Internet several months ago that pointed out that, if you walk 3 miles to the grocery store, the energy used to produce the food needed to replace the calories you burned in walking to the store is greater than the energy that would be used to drive your SUV to the store instead.

This was immediately misinterpreted by the Digg crowd as a defense of SUVs rather than as a way to highlight how much energy is used to grow, process, package, and ship our food.

In addition to obvious (and probably defensible) things like importing citrus from South America in the winter, there are truly weird examples of waste. For instance, the peak season for importing strawberries to California is the same time period as the peak season for harvesting strawberries in California. Rather than selling berries grown right next door, stores are selling berries that were grown thousands of miles away!

Even more bizarre, many foods are harvested locally, shipped hundreds or thousands of miles away for processing, then shipped back for final sale to the public. For example, crabs caught off the west coast are shipped 4,000 miles to China, where the meat is removed from the shells, then the crab meat is shipped 4,000 miles back to the west coast, for a total journey of 8,000 miles for a locally caught food.

The authors of Plenty decided to go an entire year eating only food that was grown within 100 miles of their home. They called it the 100-mile diet and they found that, contrary to expectations, they ate a much wider variety of foods than they had before. Out of the 30,000 species of edible plants, just 20 species supply 90% of the world's food. It's a very good book, and I highly recommend it to everyone. (This is another book that I'll be leaving in hotel rooms all over the country.)

I can't find the quote now to confirm my memory, but I seem to recall reading that a regional food system could be 17 times as efficient as the global food system we have now (but don't quote me on that).

So that's how eating local is better for the environment, but how is it good for social capital? Well, if you buy locally grown food, you're more likely to talk directly to the farmer who grew the crop, raised the chickens, or tended the bees. Even if you buy at a specialty grocery store that sells locally grown food, chances are it's a small, non-chain store, where you're more likely to establish a relationship with the employees of the store.

I'm not ready to commit to the 100-mile diet yet, but I am interested in trying to eat more locally grown food. The dead of winter is not the best time to start, because what you tend to eat during the winter are things that you harvested and canned earlier in the year. Plus, since we're renting this house, planting a garden this spring is pretty much out of the question. However, we can buy locally grown food at the farmer's market when it opens in May, as well as buying directly from local farmers once spring arrives. And we can look into growing some things in containers (tomatoes, herbs, etc).

The biggest challenge for me will be learning how to actually cook, as opposed to "cooking" aka "reheating precooked prepared foods". Before I can really do that, we'll need to work on clearing out the kitchen and getting it a bit more organized, so that cooking doesn't involve more time searching for utensils and counter space than it does actually preparing the food!

Sierra Club Potluck and Emergency Room Visit

mood: nervous
music: Gypsy Guerrilla Band - Seneca/June Apple

(No, it wasn't food poisoning.)

Last night was the Fall Potluck of the Sangamon Valley Group, the local group of the Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club. Dawn and I have both sent money to the national organization in years past, but I've been wanting to get involved with the local chapter. This seemed like a good opportunity, since we could bring along Lando rather that trying to find a babysitter.

The event started off a bit slowly. We went to the council ring nearest to the Lincoln Memorial Gardens Nature Center and found that we were the first ones there. However, there was a pile of firewood and a jug of water nearby for the campfire, so we figured we were at the right spot. Lando climbed up on the stone ledge and began walking/running around it, as he does whenever we come to a circle. (It seems likely he'll run track, unless he decides that ovals don't count.) Eventually, of course, he fell of of the stone ledge and onto the stone floor of the circle. Ouch! However, he caught himself pretty well and was okay.

A few minutes later, just as the first people started showing up, he tripped while running and sprawled onto the rock floor. Double ouch! This time it was several minutes before he finally calmed down.

There were a few problems with the evening. First, it was dark and cold. Second, nobody had brought matches with which to start the campfire! Someone eventually located an ancient book of matches in their car, and they managed to get the campfire going in just one try, so we finally had a bit of heat and light!

Eventually about 10 people showed up. Sustainable Springfield was putting on an event that same evening (a "tour of the first US Green Building Council Certified Silver LEED building in Springfield"), so it is likely that some people were there who would otherwise have been at the potluck.

Dawn had made broccoli cheese casserole and caramel brownies, both of which are excellent! We had a good time chatting with the Sierra Club members, talking about (among other things) "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and the Illinois Clean Car Bill. I bought a 2008 Sierra Club desk calendar (I'm always blown away by the photography in their calendars) and grabbed a membership form. (I also did the photography geek thing and took a group photo, which I'll try to post soon.)

Update: Here's a photo of the group:

When we got home about 8:30 or so, Dawn looked at Lando and saw that he had a huge bump on his forehead! Apparently, when he tripped and fell that second time, his head thumped pretty hard on the stone floor of the circle. We hadn't noticed it because it was so dark out there. That had been 2 hours earlier and he still had a big lump, so we decided to take him to the emergency room, just to be safe.

Lando went to the ER 3 times in his first 14 months of life, but we had managed to go 20 months without a repeat visit, so I guess we were due.

Lando was very good during the various examinations at the ER. He let them take his temperature with a thermometer in his mouth (hurray!). He let them check his pulse and blood pressure. He let the doctor look in his mouth, nose, and ears. He was perfect while they were examining him.

It was during the waiting time that he ran around like a madman! It was way past his bedtime, and when he gets tired, he gets hyper.

Eventually a doctor examined him and asked whether he had blacked out or vomited, etc. He said that the only way they could do a CAT scan would be by sedating Lando. Since he didn't show any signs of serious injury, it wasn't worth the risk of sedating him. The doctor said just to partially wake him at some point in the middle of night. If we could do that, then that would mean he was fine.

As a result, we got home well after 11:00 PM and Lando didn't go to sleep until well after midnight. Zzz.... Dawn checked on him about 3:30 AM and he was fine. Unfortunately he didn't sleep in this morning, waking up about 7:30. Zzz....

Goodbye Summer! Fall is Here

music: Clandestine - Miner's Lullaby

Well, the nice weather seems to have ended. Today was cold and rainy. Tomorrow is forecast to be cold and rainy. Wednesday is forecast to be cold and rainy. Thursday is forecast to be cold and rainy. Friday... well, you get the idea.

Actually, I just checked weather.com and they're forecasting no rain for tomorrow. That would be nice, because tomorrow evening we're planning on going to the Fall Potluck & Hike of the Sangamon Valley Group, the local chapter of the Sierra Club. We've never attended a meeting of the local chapter of the Sierra Club, but this seems like a particularly good opportunity to go, since we could bring along a 2-year-old without causing too much disruption, which means that we won't have to get a babysitter. Assuming that it doesn't get rained out, there will be a potluck picnic, hike, and campfire at the Lincoln Memorial Garden & Nature Center. (Incidentally, that's where Dawn & I were married back in September 2000, although it was at a different fire ring.)

Today's Special - Self-Serve Banana Strawberry

Let's start off with a photo, shall we? Here it is.

That's Orlando after feeding himself banana strawberry baby food. Well, okay, after feeding himself a little banana strawberry baby food and smearing the rest on his hands, pajamas, and (as you can see) face. Is that one satisfied diner or what?

So the good news is that he was successfully able to (sort of) feed himself. The bad news is that we were completely unprepared for this.

He had been bathed and had been dressed in his dinosaur pajamas for bedtime, but hadn't had dinner yet, so I was just feeding him dinner. After the first bite or two, he started grabbing for the spoon. So I gave it to him. To my surprise, he stuck it in his mouth! I put some more food on the spoon -- and he did it again! Well, eventually. The spoon sort of wandered around a bit and he tried sticking the handle in his mouth first, but it did get in there eventually. He kept trying to grab the bowl, so we gave him another spoon, to keep both hands occupied.

There was no stopping him, though -- he wanted that bowl! The result is what you saw in the first picture. (Additional photos of this fine dining experience are over in the photo gallery.)

By the time he was finished, his pajamas were soaked through to the skin with banana strawberry baby food. We had to give him a quick sponge bath and put him in a fresh set of PJs. Ironically, his grandma had made him some bibs specifically for when he was learning to feed himself. They are basically long-sleeve, backless smocks that would provide good protection for his clothing. It's just a pity that we didn't actually use one of them!