Final Week! Well, "weeks". I've got a paper to write, and I suck at writing things with meaning, so... 

What better way to blow off studying than writing down meaningless crap!

Actually, I've got nothing. My week has been spent keeping my youngest daughter's fever down, while keeping my oldest daughter entertained while stuck inside the house with Typhoid Mary. I'm so mushroomed from being stuck inside that I have to keep an eye over my shoulder for the stoner kids who live three doors down.

The good news is that we're going on vacation as soon as I'm done with this stupid class... This stupid, godforsaken Philosophy class. We're heading off for a whirlwind cruise that covers Belize and Honduras, among other places. With my spiffy new waterproof camera in hand, I'll most assuredly have great pictures that cover better than average tales of adventure on the high seas, and massive amounts of overeating.

I'm looking forward to this vacation more than most vacations before it. It's greatly needed before this last sprint through the anals (spelling intentional) of Philosophy and Humanities... . 

Currently Gaming Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution By 2K Games see related

Congrats to me! I finally finished off the Harry Potter series! Very minor spoilers follow, so if you don't want to have minor spoilers you've been warned.

Really. Minor spoilers. You've been warned TWICE, now. So don't bitch at me if you keep reading.

I expected the last book to be total crap because of an observation I once made about movies. My observation is that anytime a movie comes out with massive fanfare and great reviews, yet nobody really talks about it after its release, you know that it actually ends like crap. Now, that's not to say that the movie has a "good" or "bad" ending, that's to say that it ends like crap. I've seen a lot of movies with bad endings that are great, and vice versa, but I have little tolerance for movies that have a horrible ending without any sort of payoff, or without any reason behind it. I'd go through a long list of disappointing movies, but that would also require a long list of spoiler alerts, and a long list of comments from people bitching about how I have a crappy taste in movies. Suffice it to say that a couple on my list are Oscar winners this year, and we'll leave it at that.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. That's what the last Harry Potter was like. Nobody talked about it. It was released with great fanfare and great reviews, yet the day after release you didn't hear people talking about how wonderful it was. You didn't hear people trying to release spoilers about it like the book prior. It just sort of... disappeared. Nobody on the internet said that it was the greatest story ever, nor did Lauren make a post that said, "OMG! I loved, loved, loved it!" Even my wife, who read the book in... oh... about two minutes, seemed sort of indifferent. The only thing she said about it was that she was still confused as to whether or not she liked it.

Now, my wife is really good about keeping secrets, which was in part what I think she was trying to do, but in the end it was enough to bring down my expectation levels so that it took me months to even start the book. Without fear of people talking about it and ruining the ending, it was easy to keep putting it off. In fact, I didn't even really start reading it in earnest until last week. 

Sad, I know.

But in the end, once I got through the first hundred pages, the book managed to draw me in to the point that I was using all my spare time to finish it off.  And my final thoughts were that the entire series had a fantastic finale, and was easily one of the best closures I've ever read. Consider that my endorsement for all you people on the line about finishing the series off, yourselves. I'll miss always having a Harry Potter book hanging over my head, but on the other hand it'll be nice to finally pick up something new.

Perhaps I'll steer away from a lengthy series for a while... Certainly one that isn't finished. Should it be a return to my old stomping grounds of horror/fantasy, and the collection of Ray Bradbury books that beckon? Or maybe try out some non-fiction reading... I've been eyeing The Devil in the White City for a while, now. Biography? I have a book on Walt Disney that is the size of an atlas. Or maybe back to the author who got me interested in reading in the first place, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I've read all those Martian stories, but I never read Tarzan, which is kind of sad when I think about it. There are so many choices that I don't even know where to begin. What an awesome position to be in...

Anybody have plans for July 4th? Last time I celebrated some twit in a minivan called the police because we were playing with sparklers in the front yard, which is apparently illegal. Of course, nobody at the Target we bought them from said anything about the fireworks they sold being illegal to light, but that's what you get when you live in Retardedville.

Anyway, this year we're going to have someone else entertain us with explosions and stuff. Since it won't be our house, I can run when the cops come...

Ooops. Accidentally made this post Private... Here it is somewhat belated. Sorry!

Update:

Knock on wood, everything from the ultrasound turned out fine, though it did not include a look at the appendix. But the doctor stated that she saw no reason to be concerned about that, and, in fact, my daughter said the ache was gone this morning. I'm keeping an especially vigilant eye on her for now, but so far she seems to be doing fine.

I have a theory about the appendix. I think that it might be where the soul is stored, and that everyone who has it removed also has their soul removed. Once yoinked from its resting place down there somewhere, the individual becomes part of a hive mind that is secretly hellbent on opening the gates for their evil demon overlord, and bringing about the Earth's destruction.

So if your loved one had his or her appendix removed, watch them closely. They're probably plotting your death. 

And if you've personally had your appendix removed, I'm totally on to you.

I'm still investigating the tonsils, but I have my theories.

Nina said it better than I could, so I won't bother repeating it. I've been up since five this morning with the inability to get back to sleep. I have a ton of homework due, and I couldn't focus on the textbook long enough to finish a page of reading. Instead, I'll count down the short few hours before the sonogram, waiting for my little girl to get up so I grab her up and squeeze her. I have little doubt that it's nothing, but I'm also the kind of person who worries about everything.

When I was a kid I used to think that touching the cat would infect me with some killer disease, or touching chemical bottles would poison me somehow (I blame that green Mr. Poisonface sticker), and I eventually overcame it by recognizing that I was better off dead than living like that. It's not nearly as easy when you're dealing with loved ones you'd give your own life for.

Anyway, on to more stupid stuff...

I only bring this up because every time he pops up in a movie, I have to bring up IMDb just to remember his name so I can tell my wife, "Yeah, that's Gary Oldman! He's the greatest actor EVER..." like I'd never forgotten his name in the first place.

...maybe to that weird show about the Americans doing a reality show in Japan. That show is awesome. You know there's two versions of it out there. There's what the Americans see, and there's what the Japanese see. On our end we get to see them do silly things, like eat bizarre food while running on treadmills before falling into a pit filled with flour, then bitching about how they broke a nail or whining that they have to run for more than three seconds. But on THEIR end, they almost assuredly have people yelling in Japanese, "Look at the stupid Americans eating our delicious cuisine, gagging, then falling into pits of flour like idiots! Fat stupid Americans!"

It's like a brilliant satire about everything bad about Americans, packaged up in a box, and decorated with a delicious bow of entertaining stupidity. I cringe in horror, yet can't look away.

This needs a bit of a backstory, first:

My oldest daughter is a Webkinz whore. She gets up in the morning, passing by the empty food encrusted cat food bowl, and insures that her virtual pet gets fed every morning quote -Or it will diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie!- endquote. She now has something like fifty acres of land developed at such speed that I can only assume it involved moving the headstones of buried virtual American Indians while leaving the bodies in place, and each house and/or room is fully furnished with some form of furniture and/or toy on every square of possible living space.

To make matters worse, my wife kind of digs the games, and so she goes on when she needs a break at work, or when she's watching some Patrick Dempsey show for the umpteenth time (but she only plays when he's not actually on in that particular scene) and wins buku bucks that just perpetuates the problem.

Anyway, I get told yesterday that the Webkinz server was down, but I had already brought up the page that clearly stated that it wasn't going to be down until the following day. An argument ensued that involved my daughter yelling, "You're wrong! MOMMY SAID SO!!!" and no amount of showing her that the site was actually working would stop her from screaming at me like a rabid harpy. When I told my wife this story she sent me the following email which includes follow up responses:

Her: And I was not crazy when I read the screen this morning:

Me: No. But you were crazy when you took a screenshot of it and sent it to me to prove that you aren’t crazy.

Her: I’m willing to accept that interpretation.

And this is just one of the many, many reasons why I love her...

I'm a pretty easy going guy, but I have one thing that irks me more than anything: I can't stand it when people won't try new things. Particularly, I can't stand it when CHILDREN won't try new things. I have no idea why parents let kids get away with it, but now that my older has become more social I'm encountering it on a massive scale.

Recently, we've had two different occasions where my oldest daughter has brought friends over. One had a sleep over, and when we started rattling off things in the refrigerator that she might eat all we got in response was a repeated, "I don't eat that. I don't eat that."
"What do you eat," I asked.
"I don't know... I like pizza and macaroni and cheese."
"Other than those?"
"No. Just pizza and macaroni and cheese."

So we decided that we would take them to a buffet, that way she could pick and choose anything she wanted, including pizza and mac. But once we got there, she merely nibbled around the edges of a small slice of pizza and that was about it.

Determined, I set out to convince her to try something, anything, new. Unlike some parents, I have no problem with kids taking a bite of something, bleching, and then tossing it back on the plate. Heck, I don't even care if they spit it out at the dinner table. All I ask is that they slide the food in far enough to hit the palate, and figure out whether or not they want it to go any further. So, I explained to her that she wouldn't know that she liked pizza or mac if she didn't at least try them once, "Right?" And so I started her off easily when she explained that she had never had honey butter.
"Seriously? You've got to try it! You'll probably love it!"
"No, it sounds disgusting..."
"Seriously. Just take a bite of it on a piece of cornbread, and..."
"Blech, no..."
But after a lengthy bit of continued prodding I think she realized that I wasn't going to cave and she took a bit. "Mmmm... That IS good!"
"See? That wasn't so hard, and now you've got a new food you like to eat. Are you ready to try something a bit more exotic, like an asian salad or a bowl of chili?"
"No."

And that was the end of that.

But, on the other side of the coin, my daughter's other friend was an incredibly picky eater as well. But then, one day when I dropped my daughter off for a playdate, her mother pulled me aside and said, "I don't know what your daughter's been doing, but tell her to keep it up." And then she explained that her daughter has been trying all kinds of new food since mine said that trying new things is fun, and made her try some of the sushi I made for her lunch. "Our entire family, grandmother included, asked what had happened to her that made her so adventurous! We were actually able to take her to a grown up restaurant!"

And so it was that I invited my daughter's friend along for a sushi lunch, buying her anything that I thought she might like and explaining to her that, if she didn't like it she could spit it out. I didn't care. And she did try it all, and only spit out one thing (which I can completely understand... it was spicy). She tried pretty much everything we sat in front of her, boba tea included. Most she hated, but others she genuinely loved. Particularly (and obviously) the boba tea.

When I dropped her off at her house, I showed her mother the pictures I took of the things she tried, and her mother was ecstatic. She thanked me again as we started to leave, and I turned around to say goodbye to the daughter. "Next time: Indian food?"

She beamed, and nodded her head.

If only more people would approach life like that.