My Muscles

/ Shane / Leave a comment

If Evie asks you to see her “muscles” you’d better say no. For some reason, Evie got it in her head that her “muscles” are on her bottom. Well, to be more specific, the whole thing is a bottom, but each cheek is a muscle. And who doesn’t like to show off their muscles?

Sara: ::Buuuuuuurp::
Evie: “Mommy, you said moo?”

Me: “Are you doing something naughty?”
Evie: “No. I’m doing something funny.”

Me: “I’m pretty hungry, I think I’m going to come back there and eat that cookie!”
Evie, getting upset: “No daddy! Don’t eat my cookie!”
Me: “Aw, I’m sorry, I was just teasing. I won’t eat your cookie.”
Evie, handing me the cookie: “You can have it daddy.”
Me: “Oh, no honey, I…”
Evie, yanking it back: “Just teasing!”

Make My Mood

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I was recently alerted to a new college humor-esqe website, Make My Mood. Basically, every day there’s just a new, completely random little picture of some sort to brighten your day. There seems to be no connection or theme, other than “funny”.

I was originally on the site to see this great 10 second rundown of a CSI episode (how do they get away with making that show a whole hour?), when I started clicking through the archives and saw a lot of other good stuff, including:

This unbelievable video of a guy almost getting hit by a bus:

And these totally awesome fire screens that make it look like you’re sacking a city:

If that isn’t enough to make you want to visit the site, I don’t know what you want from me.

There are some things money can’t buy

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I mean seriously, NOWHERE? For starters, there are like a thousand species of dinosaur.

Because, as we all know, I would totally ride a dinosaur, if I saw one.

Homer: He might have all the money in the world, but there’s one thing he can’t buy.
Marge: What’s that?
Homer: …..A dinosaur.

(comic via xkcd)

Closer and closer to Halloween

/ Shane / 1 Comment

On Friday, Evie and I tried our most ambitious baking experiment yet: a pumpkin roll.

Pumpkin roll is easily in my top 2 deserts all time. I could probably eat one by myself, in a sitting, if I had to. But this is the first time I ever tried to make one. People kind of talk it up like it is hard, so I was a little worried, but honestly it wasn’t really that much trouble. And it was deeeelicious (even though half of it was eaten by a bunch of barbarians).

On Saturday we hit up the Halloween thing at the Lincoln Park Zoo, where we are members. It was a cold, wet, miserable day like you wouldn’t believe. The kind of day where nobody should be outside, everyone should be inside, under blankets, with something warm to drink. So traipsing around the zoo wasn’t really the greatest idea. Especially since Evie couldn’t wear her coat, because that would have ruined her awesome bat costume. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but most of the indoor enclosures were closed for the day, meaning we couldn’t get out of the elements. Luckily the bat enclosure wasn’t closed, so we were able to get some pictures of Evie in her bat costume looking at the actual bats. We did not stick around for the music or trick-or-treating, but Evie did ride on the carousel, so she was happy.

Finally, on Sunday we carved pumpkins. Readers of this blog will not be surprised that Evie requested that her pumpkin be crying, with tears running down its face. That being said, I am quite proud of the way hers turned out, very sad looking. Evie was a good model, fake crying for me whenever I needed it, to get the look right. She wanted my pumpkin to be angry / scary and Sara’s to be happy. She helped do hers, but got bored long before everything was done. That’s okay, I had fun doing it. Plus I have a bunch of roasted pumpkin seeds to eat now!

One last thing to mention about the weekend, I opened my first jar of pickles! They were very good. If I had been given that jar by my grandma, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But, since I was the one actually making them, I was maybe a little over critical of them. They were a little vinegary and a little salty. Still, all in all, not too shabby for my first time out!

Fences

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When i was in college, I probably had 20 or 30 nifty little programs that I used for various things on the computer. Eventually over time, most of those programs were eclipsed by, or absorbed into, the standard set of software, in some cases by Windows itself. Also, I don’t use a computer the same way I used one back in college, so some of the apps probably became less useful to me personally.

So it’s not often these days that I come across a neat little program for the computer, but a co-worker referred me to one the other day, called Fences, which is used to clean up your desktop icons. Interestingly, the makers of the software are a company named Stardock, who make another program I used to use, a Windows skinning software called Window Blinds.

Basically, you make little areas called Fences, into which you drag and drop your icons. These areas can then be named with some logical name for the grouping, such as “Games”, “Photo Editing”, or “Random Junk”. Then the areas can be moved as a group, keeping icons logically together. You can also resize the fence to be smaller, which will give it scroll bars. For example, lets say your desktop is cluttered with a bunch of text files that represent notes to yourself. You can make a group called “Notes” and drop them all in there, and then make that group small enough to see only one or two icons. Then, if you want to see the rest of your notes, you can just scroll within that group.

Another nice side effect is that you can double click on the background to hide or show your icons. So, for example, if you have a really cute picture of your daughter on the desktop that you just need to show off, you can hide all the junk. You can also decide what to hide or show, meaning you can have sort of a normal mode with some icons and an advanced mode that reveals the rest of your icons.

I found it useful, both at home and at work, and I thought you might too.