Carp Hunters

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I can’t stop hearing about the Asian carp and what a menace it is. How it will get into the Great Lakes and cause the end of life as we know it. I have no reason to doubt this, and I’m kind of an expert on the subject since I’ve actually seen the movie Snakehead Terror not once, but twice.

Nobody has a good method of stopping this fishy invasion…nobody, that is, until now. I give you the Carp Hunters. These guys have found their own way to combat the carp, and it involves swords and water skis.

Perhaps not the most efficient (or scalable) way to tackle a fish invasion, but at least they’re doing something. I mean, the guy skewers a flying fish with wolverine claws while water skiing. That’s not something you see every day.

Do the fish really jump out of the water like that when you’re water skiing?? Why? I guess they really ARE a menace!

Link via Sara.

Zombie Proof House

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Just to prove that you *can* have your cake and eat it too, someone made a really awesome looking house that can go into total, zombie-proof lock down mode. The first ever zombie-proof house!

This house can go from open-and-airy, like this:

To total concrete bunker, like this:


This place even has a drawbridge to the only entrance (which happens to be on the second story):

I think it’s awesome. If you told me you were building a zombie-proof, concrete bunker, I would tell you it was a great idea, but I never would have imagined something that actually seemed as nice and livable on the inside as this. And notice some of the nice features, like the concrete wall running around the property. They don’t give many details about the other required features of a zombie-proof house, such as generators, food storage, access to clean water, etc., but it seems like the kinds of things you would have included if you went to the trouble of making foot thick, concrete blast doors.

I’m not really sure if this is zombie-proof, but I think it’s got about the best chance of any real place I’ve ever seen.

Link via Ben.

First Steps

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Last Tuesday, May 3rd, Oliver finally took his first steps.

You might be wondering why it took me so long to get a blog post up about this, and that would be a good question. The thing is, he has just been so reluctant to do it on a regular basis! I was hoping to get a good video, and I’m still waiting!

We were so sure he was going to walk shortly after his birthday. He was doing everything but walking. He really seemed like he was ready. But day after day, he just didn’t quite get there, despite all of our encouraging. Of course, when he finally did walk, I was in Detroit for work. Sara called to tell me he finally took a few steps, and I could almost hear strains of Cats in the Cradle playing in the background. I felt pretty terrible about missing it. But he only took two steps the first day, and really wasn’t in a hurry to repeat it.

It was so different than Evie. It’s kind of funny because, personality-wise, Evie is a pretty cautious person and Oliver seems to be more of a risk taker. A bit more rambunctious, perhaps. So you would expect that he would be the one trying to let go and do it. But, in fact, it was kind of the opposite. When Evie figured out how to walk, she was all about it. She was pretty much done with crawling at that point, it was all walking from that point on. Oliver’s preferred method of locomotion is still crawling. He’ll walk from one thing to another now and again, but if you try to get him to walk, he just drops down to his hands and knees right away. With Evie it was more like she felt pride in mastering the challenge, but to Oliver it’s all about the practicality of getting to where he wants to go, and crawling is much more efficient at this point.

Still, he’s getting there, and he’s walking more and more. I think the most I’ve seen so far is eleven steps, but he’s more comfortable in the seven or so step range. I try to practice with him by holding his hands and letting him walk, but he rarely wants to go in the direction I want him to go in. Again, for him it’s all about getting where he wants to go. He’s not content to march up and down the hall for practice, he wants to lead you over to something he wants to get at.

Obviously the first birthday was a big, recent milestone, but somehow walking seems so much more official. He’s really old enough to walk? Where does the time go?

Blog Appearance Changes Underway

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Hello all,

I am once again tinkering with the look of the blog. I liked how it looked before, but it always made me feel a bit uneasy to be using just a standard template, instead of something more unique to this space. When I found out there were 253,916 blogs using the same template as me, I couldn’t take it anymore.

So bear with me while I’m experimenting with different things. If you, like Sara, log on and see Kevin Bacon’s smile stretched creepily across the banner or replicated endlessly in the background, don’t panic. Things will stabilize soon. In the meantime, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions on this thread.

That is all.

– The Management

Quote Monday is not the answer

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “Why can’t I [wash my stuffed animal’s paws]?”
Me: “Because.”
Evie: “Because is not an answer.”

Evie: “Dandelions are weeds??” – She couldn’t have been more surprised about this. As far as she’s concerned, they’re about the most beautiful bouquet one can have.

Evie: “For Mother’s Day, I think we should have a cake. For breakfast.”
Sara: “I think that’s called ‘Daughter’s Day’.”

Evie: “Miss Laura said we should give mommy a big hug on Mother’s Day, but she’s not the boss of our family!”