Fun Stuff

Baby day(s)

/ Shane / 2 Comments

So last Friday Sara had her first day back to work, which means I worked from home and took care of Evie.  Everything went pretty well, I managed to give her all her bottles and put her to sleep for all her naps.  It was nice to spend the day with her, but it is hard to get any work done!  I probably only worked 3 hours during the day.  In the future I think I will try to get some done Thursday night so I don’t have to do it over the weekend.  It was fine this weekend, but we are busy a lot of weekends.

This week I took vacation to push back Evie having to start at day care for one more week.  So I will have her today, tomorrow and Friday.  It is a little easier though when I’m not trying to work.  Well it is really easy today because so far she has only slept!  Sara is pretty sad about having to leave Evie at daycare.  We went to visit yesterday and there were a few babies crying the whole time.  We don’t want Evie to be crying the whole time! 😦

Also, Evie finally got too big for her bassinet.  We weren’t quite ready to banish her from our bedroom, so we moved her crib into our room.  This meant disassembling it because it couldn’t fit out the door.  Now our room is very crowded!!  You kind of have to squeeze everywhere or crawl over the end of the bed to get in!

Okay, this thing is crazy.  Do you see the lady spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise?

It seems like a stupid question, right?  Well if you see her turning clockwise, then you are right brained (creative, emotional, etc.) and if you see her turning counter-clockwise, you are left brained (logic, order, etc).  It seems crazy because how can someone see her turning a different way, but Sara and I each saw her turning a different way!!  So I guess it works.  If I concentrate I can see her turning either way, but naturally I see her turning counter-clockwise.  Sara can’t see her turning any way except clockwise.

I just thought that was interesting!

Dart Throwing Monkeys

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I’m sure lots of exciting stuff happened since the last time I posted but I’m too tired to think about it.  Halloween was pretty uneventful since we got no trick or treaters and Evie was a little too young to appreciate the holiday.  I’ll put some spooky ghost pictures up on myspace sometime.

I haven’t posted any games on here in a long time.  You know I like Tower Defense games because I post them all the time, so here is the latest take on that.  It is called Bloons and instead of the standard Warcraft/Starcraft ripoff this one involves dart throwing monkeys that pop balloons.  I appreciate the new take on the old concept.  Also I like how you always know how much “power” something has by the color of the balloon.  Anyway, I think I actually like Bloons 2 a little better.  I haven’t beaten any of them yet, but I can get into the 40s.

So, enjoy!

Marie Digby

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So last Sunday morning Evie woke up with her first cold.  I felt sooo bad for her!  Imagine that you’ve never been sick before in your entire life, you just wouldn’t know what to think.  Why did my nose stop working?  What’s all this crap leaking out of my face?  She was pretty miserable.  In retrospect we were probably pushing it a little too much to hit up Wisconsin, Michigan and then Indiana 3 weekends in a row.  This also means that Evie wasn’t in a very good mood for our big magazine photo shoot Monday night.  More details on that in the future I’m sure.  So now I don’t know if I caught what Evie had or if I got it at the same time as she did but it took longer to get its hooks in me since I’m so much bigger than her.  But I’m pretty much a wreck at this point.

Okay, now for the title of this post.  So I’ve been hearing on the radio this version of Umbrella that was not by Rihanna, but instead was by someone named Marie (pronounced mar-ee-ay) Digby, whoever that was.  I kind of liked the version better than the original but I was kind of annoyed by it because I was like, “Isn’t there more than one song in the world?  Why would multiple people record exactly the same song?”  Well I happened across it today on YouTube.  Apparently this is a YouTube sensation, so if you spend more time on YouTube than I do, you’ve probably already heard of her.  It turns out she just has a bunch of videos uploaded that are just her singing and/or playing guitar/piano.  She has an awesome voice (and it doesn’t hurt that she is drop dead gorgeous) and there is a good mix of original songs and covers.  Anyway, it appears that her popularity on YouTube turned into radio air time, a guest shot on Last Call with Carson Daly and I think even resulted in her cover of Umbrella being played on The Hills.  There is something very appealing about how simple the videos are and it is an awesome story of just filming yourself in your living room and through the power of the Internet you get discovered.

She really is amazing and I recommend you check her out.  Here’s the original video:

Google Street View

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Today Google went live with Street View for Chicago.  It is really cool!  I don’t know if you played around with it when they first put NYC, Las Vegas and San Fransisco, but if you haven’t you should definitely go check it out!  Maybe it won’t be that interesting unless you live in Chicago (I certainly wasn’t interested until it came to Chicago) but at least give it a try.  I already checked, we’re not dancing in our underwear in the windows or anything.  They also added Philadelphia at some point.  They didn’t go far enough out for me to check out my apartment or job, but I did sit and gaze at Jim’s Steaks.  No, I really did.

And as long as you are checking things out, you might want to take a look at Read a Book by D’Mite.  Best song ever!  Sometimes when you want to teach important lessons, you have to speak to someone in their language (think Lil’ John) which in this case includes some foul language.  Be forewarned!  But I think the message is more important than the way it is conveyed…lessons such as personal hygiene, your body’s need for water and the importance of investing your money in land.

That is all.

Oh, sweet internet

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Our DSL modem inexplicably quit working Sunday night, so we have been incommunicado for a few days.  After dealing with AT&T’s phone system and tech support for a frustrating but acceptable amount of time we got a replacement modem and everything seems to work okay now.   Unfortunately, since I had Internet at work and Sara has been cooped up with no contact with the outside world, I think the Internet is still inaccessible to me at home. 🙂

So last weekend we went to WI because my uncle was visiting from CO and my grandma had a get together.  So Evie got to meet her great grandmas as well as many great aunts and uncles.  More importantly she finally got to meet her uncle Nathan!  I want to put this down here so that it is forever recorded in history; despite being like 2 1/2 hours away, uncle Nathan didn’t meet her until she was about 2 months old.  I guess that’s why he’s the bad uncle (he is, ask him).  Although, to be fair, he doesn’t have a car. 

Speaking of my brother, I don’t devote enough time to him here.  Certainly there are more good stories to tell about him than anything that happens in my life!   Maybe I will write some of the classics in here sometime if I haven’t already.

 So my brother went out to the bars with some of my uncles when they were visiting.  When it was time to go home he walked out to the bus stop and my uncles all left.  After waiting for awhile, he realized that the buses stopped running at midnight and he didn’t have a ride home.  So he called a cab and he told the guy, “Look.  This is all the money I have.  Can you just start driving in the direction of my house and stop when my money runs out?  This is all I have, so don’t forget to tip yourself.”  So the guy started driving and when they were about 4 blocks from my brother’s apartment he stopped and said, “This is as far as you get.”  So my brother at some point realized he had in his pocket a snickers bar and he says to the guy, “If I give you this snickers bar, will that get me 4 more blocks to my apartment?”  The guy thought about it for a while and then he took the snickers bar and dropped my brother off at home.  That’s good bartering!

Okay I found this a very interesting theory.  It is from Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a weekly article that is about football and a lot of other things.  It is a very long winded column, so you might just want to read the excerpt:

“The apparent absence of artificial radio transmission in the galaxy suggests that intelligent life, at least in its technological stage, might be rare. Regardless whether we owe our existence to divine offices or natural forces, if there are millions of Earth-like worlds, you’d think either God or evolution would have put thinking beings in many places. Have other intelligent beings come into existence, only to wipe themselves out with war or evolve beyond the physical? Perhaps intelligent life takes a very long time to arise, then rapidly either destroys itself or ascends to a higher plane. After all, it was 3 million years from Lucy in the Olduvai Gorge to controlled agriculture, then 7,000 years from controlled agriculture until Guglielmo Marconi sent the first high-powered, long-distance radio signal, then a mere 60 years ’til the United States and former Soviet Union possessed doomsday arsenals sufficient to end human life. Perhaps across the vastness of time there are only brief intervals in which civilizations exist in the technological phase — transmitting radio and television signals, launching spacecraft, and searching for others who are doing the same. Right now, we’re transmitting like crazy and firing rockets as fast as they can be built. Maybe a thousand centuries ago another civilization on a nearby world was doing as we do now, then either destroyed itself or evolved beyond such concerns. Maybe a thousand centuries hence, a civilization will arise in the Gliese 581 star system but find no evidence of us because by then humanity will either be extinct or have chosen to leave corporeal limits behind.”

It is interesting to think about, I don’t know why I’ve never seen that mentioned as a possibility before.

Anyway, I will leave you with a Leno-esque slide show of reasons not to hyphenate your last name, courtesy my first name is not Dabu.