Quote Monday is growing fast

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “I must be like an adult now.”
Me: “Why’s that?”
Evie: “Because my clothes are getting too small, and Nala keeps biting me.”

It’s true that Nala bites Sara’s ankles like it’s her job.

Me: “Are these shoes okay? They’re not too small?”
Evie: “Well, they’re not too big, either.”

Evie spontaneously made up a new verse for the old rhyme below. I thought it was pretty good! Making the move from singer to singer/songwriter?

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,the birds began to sing;
Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house, counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird and snatched off her nose.

***Evie’s new verse***

The cook was in the kitchen, stirring up a brew,
When down came the blackbird and snatched off his too!

Seriously?

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Best picture? The Artist? You’ve got to be kidding me!

So THAT’S what you do with old CDs

/ Shane / Leave a comment

There was a time in college when my friends and I found ourselves in possession of several trash bags full of worthless cds. We never really knew exactly what to do with them, other than throw them at things (and people). Well, if I had it to do all over again, now I know what to do with them: make ridiculously awesome sculptures.

It’s amazing what you can do with a lot of time, a lot of artistic talent, and a lot of cds, none of which I have at the moment.

Click, *Boom*

/ Shane / Leave a comment

This email will self-destruct in 5 seconds…

Self-destructing emails, available for free at One Share. It works like this:

You put in a message of any kind on their website. The data is encrypted, and stored that way on their server, so even One Share can’t read the message themselves. A special hyperlink is sent to you. When someone clicks on the hyperlink, it decodes your data, showing it to the users, and then deletes the information from their server. That way, even if someone else manages to get the link, it has already self-destructed, and they cannot access your data.

This seems really cool, and I’m sure it has some kind of application that I just can’t think of right now. Obviously it is good for sending sensitive or one-time-only emails, however, I very rarely need to send anybody on a Mission Impossible-style mission or assassination attempt, and I do not communicate with Charlie’s Angels. Therefore, I can only think of three possible uses:

  1. You could put things that you don’t want to store on your computer up there, such as a list of all your passwords, and then email yourself the link. If you forget your password, you could get it from that link.
  2. You could use it as a one-time FTP server, sending someone something, but ensuring that it doesn’t hang around on the public Internet for all time.
  3. You could run for public office and then use it to email people pictures of your junk, without the possibility of the media intercepting it (or at least without them intercepting it without you knowing it).

Any other ways you can think of? Again, this seems cool, but I don’t know why.

The most important part of potty training: your cat

/ Shane / 3 Comments

(Notice the colon in the title there, I’m not talking about potty training your cat)

Sara pointed out that Evie was potty trained by the time she was Oliver’s age. Potty training Oliver started well, then immediately went downhill. Absolutely no luck with that one. It had gotten so bad, we decided to lay off for awhile, to try to avoid putting pressure on him.

One day I remembered a trick that we had used very successfully with Evie: use the cat. Nala likes to “listen” to hear pee pee go in the potty. At first, Oliver was very excited about this. “Nala listen! Nala listen!” he’d say. I thought, “The cat potty trained our children,” and prepared to write this blog post. However, Oliver’s ardeur has since re-cooled (although I did one time get him to go poo poo by having his toy fish listen instead).

Le sigh.

Everybody says that boys harder to train. Is this true? It seems silly to me, and the differences between Evie and Ollie seem to be just regular differences in their personalities, rather than gender differences. Evie was just more interested in the potty. Also, Oliver was using the potty back before we had to quit on cloth diapers, but Evie always had cloth diapers. The theory goes that it is easier to potty train with cloth diapers, because they feel more uncomfortable when they are wet. So maybe that’s the difference. But then again, here we have a boy who is a little behind where the girl was at, so maybe I’m just trying to justify it. I don’t know.

Like I said, we are not putting the full court press on him at the moment, but when we do we will certainly try putting him back in cloth diapers for a little bit. It will be a race to see which happens first: he learns to go on the potty, or his diaper rash / eczema gets so bad that we feel too awful to keep him in cloth diapers. Hopefully the former, rather than the latter.

Anyway, long story short, so far Ollie is a no go on the potty, but if you are potty training you should definitely consider how best to use the family cat to your advantage.