mostly unimportant – Page 4

May 31, 2015

Boys and their Toys

Calvin and a lot of cars...many of them old... — Calvin and a few cars…

We’ve done our best to ensure that Meg and Calvin don’t get pigeon-holed into gender-specific stereotypes. That is to say, “princesses” were largely avoided for the first few years of Meg’s life (can’t avoid them now). We avoided pink clothes and toys for Meg early on (again…hard to avoid…). There were some toys that Meg fell into, like “Julia” (her doll that she was inseparable from for a few years), that weren’t exactly “gender neutral,” but we also made sure Calvin had a doll to play with (which he largely hasn’t). The idea was to allow them to choose the toys they want to play with without filling their rooms with princesses and superheroes, respectively.

Weirdly, though, Calvin likes cars. Always has.

Our house is near a relatively busy road, so shortly after he started walking, he made his way near that street. One of his first words was “cars,” followed shortly thereafter by “trucks.” Many afternoons, waiting for Mama to get home, Calvin and I sat on the corner waiting for her to drive up, listening for cars about to come up over the hill.

Since then, he’s liked playing with toy cars (including two small ones he fell asleep with tonight), he likes watching rally car racing on YouTube, and he’ll even watch me play Gran Turismo 6 with a PS3 controller in his hand.

It’s just one of those things we think about. With Meg, she’s started gravitating in the direction of princesses slowly over time as she’s met new friends, so now she has an interest (recently because of Sofia the First). But Calvin’s one year old, so he doesn’t exactly have meaningful conversation about whether an STI is better than an Evo.

So is it inherent that boys must like cars? Maybe. I guess there are just some things “gender neutral” won’t work for.

May 29, 2015May 29, 2015

A Return to Biking

I used to do a decent amount of biking, in another life. Growing up, we’d make relatively frequent treks to the Katy Trail in Rocheport, MO. I also had a paper route, and for the most part, made my deliveries on my bike. Once I went to college, after I moved off-campus my Junior year, I picked up a Trek 800 Sport to get around easier, and occasionally went mountain biking at Thousand Hills State Park near Kirksville, MO.

Since college, though, my biking has been pretty infrequent. Brooke and I went a few times after we got married, as we were close to a decent biking trail in Affton, MO. We also told ourselves that we’d bike the entire length of the Katy Trail back in 2006 (240 miles…and no, it totally didn’t happen…). But after moving to Soulard, we got out of the habit. Brooke actually rode her bike up in Iowa a few times with Meg, as there was a decent lake-side trail in Cedar Rapids to visit, but we still didn’t go biking as much as we’d used to.

Well, now that I’ve got more time in the summers, I figured it was time to get back in the habit. Meg got a bike for her birthday, so in an effort to get her a bit more interested so she’ll actually learn to ride said bicycle, I figured I should get mine back up to snuff. My poor Trek had been left outside for its first few years with me, so it wasn’t as well maintained as it probably should have been. I took it by a local bike shop and had them do some updating to it: new brakes, new brake lines, new road/trail tires, and a new grip shift system. It rides better than it has in a long time!

We live hear Sedalia, where the Katy Trail passes through, so I wanted to be able to take the kids down with me. As Meg can’t ride her bike with training wheels nearly fast enough, and Calvin is a toddler, I looked into trailers to attach to my bike. These things usually retail for around $500+ if you want a quality two-seat trailer, so I took to Craigslist to see what I could fine. After a few tries, I snagged one in south Kansas City for about $175, which I thought was pretty reasonable. It fits in the back of the Subaru, though I have to fold it down each time.

Once folded, it’s actually quite compact. In the image all the way at the top of the post, you can see how wide the thing actually gets. The seat belts are pretty secure and it has various windows and shades that can be optionally installed depending on what the weather looks like that day. Lastly, it also contains a rear compartment for picnic lunches, diapers, etc. It should hold about 100 lbs, so Meg and Calvin can both ride it this summer, and potentially next summer depending on how much they grow. Once Meg is actually riding her bike properly, then I can still keep Calvin in it until he’s ready to get on a two-wheeler himself.

I should note that I took the kids out for a spin in it when I brought it home this week. They made me go out in it again after dinner, so I think they’re pretty pleased with it. I think Calvin would have slept in it that night if I’d let him…

Speaking of the Subaru, the last piece of this puzzle involved getting the bikes from our house in Marshall to Sedalia. We’ve tried various bike racks over the years and have never been happy with them on our hatchbacks: they simply never feel secure enough when you’re driving 70 mph down the highway, and one of us always had to keep an eye out the back window to make sure we weren’t going to cause an accident.

Thus, we made sure that the Forester had a roof rack when we bought it so that we could put bike racks up top eventually. Actually, we want to put in a trailer hitch and then get a rear hitch bike rack, but that’s a $1000 (total) upgrade, so we opted against it for this summer. Instead, I picked up a few Rockymounts roof racks on sale at Amazon. They were pretty easy to install and, thankfully, are relatively easy to get a bike attached to. Brooke isn’t quite tall enough to get a bike onto the roof of the Forester, so it’s one of those things I’ll always have to do (at least, until we get a trailer system).

I’ll still be teaching in June four days a week, so I’ll probably take Calvin down with me on Fridays. If Brooke is available, perhaps I’ll take her bike along and steal her away from work for an hour or so to get some fresh air. Either way, I’m looking forward to getting back into biking, and hopefully getting the kids outside and away from the TV for a few hours each week. 🙂

April 20, 2015

Missouri Beer Festival

Lots of people at the Holiday Inn Expo Center

Brooke and Meg went to Girls Weekend at the Lake, as usually happens this time of year, leaving me all by my lonesome with Calvin. Thankfully, my wonderful parents were thinking of my plight and Mom watched Calvin while Dad and I checked out the Missouri Beer Festival. This event has been held for a few years now, switching venues once or twice as it has grown. The Holiday Inn Expo Center is among the largest available in Columbia, as other options on the University’s campus, wouldn’t allow the sale of alcohol.

Overall, for $25, we were pretty impressed with the selection of breweries and beers. The Festival opens at 1:00 pm (unless you lay $25 more for a VIP pass) and continues until 5:00 pm, yielding plenty of time to make your way around the Festival floor, trying the wares from the available breweries. Though their website has mostly comprehensive list of the breweries that were present, there were others like Civil Life, Stone and Abita that were also featured.

As part of the deal, you were given a tasting glass, where each brewery would pour somewhere between 2 and 3 oz of beer for you to try. Though this doesn’t sound like much, it certainly adds up over a 4 hour period. They also had food available for additional cash, and believe you me, that BBQ smelled pretty great. They also allowed voting for your favorite brew (apparently Rock Bridge won for their Option #2 beer), though the organizers took the ballots at 3:45 without announcing that they were doing so, and we weren’t quite ready to vote yet, so I guess we didn’t exercise our constitutional rights on this one…

Me, Dad and cousin Laura

The main thing I’d like to see corrected for next year’s event hinges upon the beer list. When we’ve attended Schlafly’s events in years past, they provide you with a list of the beers and descriptions for each, thus allowing you to cross them off as you move through the stations. It gives you a good sense of how many you had and which ones you liked. For this event, you were provided with a list of breweries (and their locations on the Festival floor), but no list of beers. Granted, you could always write that down, but with the complexity and length of some beer names, it’s not ideal. I’m not sure how they could easily fix this, as some breweries won’t decide which beer to bring until the last minute, but surely there’s something they could do. An 8×10 sheet of paper with all the beers listed, including style and alcohol content, would be just fine. It would also allow me to seek out the beers I liked far more easily, rather than requiring me to try and remember (during an afternoon of heavy drinking…) which ones were awesome and which ones were just so-so.

Overall, we had a pretty good time. We saw some familiar faces (Dad saw half of his office there…which was kinda crazy…), got to try some great beers, and had a pleasant time with a bunch of people we didn’t know. I suspect we’ll be back next year, so long as our babysitter’s available. 🙂

April 11, 2015April 11, 2015

A Beautiful Day

We haven’t had many absolutely gorgeous weekends lately, though we haven’t really had any terrible ones, either. Still, we took advantage of the weather and went to Van Meter State Park again to get a picnic lunch in and a brief jaunt down the trail. We went down a different section than the last time, heading down into a valley toward a lake set up for fishing, with a trail wrapping around it.

The trail is something like 0.6 mi long, and we didn’t get anywhere near that distance. We didn’t deal with putting kids in backpacks or anything this time, so we tried getting Calvin to walk as best we could. For the most part, he did fine, though part of the trail got a bit closer to the water than we’d prefer.

IMG_20150411_120846392 — Sitting on the dock.

We didn’t end up staying all that long. Maybe an hour and a half or so. I suspect Meg, Calvin and I will head back frequently this summer as an excuse to get out of the house and take in some fresh(er) air. We walked back up the hill to the car (Calvin had to be carried by this point, and Meg wasn’t too happy about her feet…) and headed home. Calvin took a nap after we got back, Brooke got some painting done, and I mowed the lawn. Meg had a birthday party at 4:30, and while Brooke took her, Calvin and I got dinner going.

In the end, I think we spent 8 or 9 hours outside today, soaking it all in. Lots of productivity, lots of play time. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so I guess we’ll just have to remember today while we’re stuck in the house tomorrow.

Speaking of “the house,” the next post will hopefully feature our next upgrade. Tonight, we were able to finish up the paint in “the music room,” though we have a little more work to do in mounting the guitars. By midweek, we should be good to go.

Onward and upward!

February 26, 2015

Linsenblog 2.0

…or 4.0, by now? I dunno…there have been a few iterations at this point…

As all two of you may have noticed, the blog has been effectively MIA the past few months. I’m hoping to change that and get back to posting more regularly, now that my schedule has kinda evened out at school, but also now that I’ve shifted the blog off of a server I’m running onto something a bit more professional, hosted by GoDaddy.

Since moving to Marshall, I’ve been trying to run the site on a Raspberry Pi, a super cheap Linux-based computer that is powered by a cellphone processor and is, thus, quite energy efficient. The problem, I found, was that a). it’s slower than I want it to be, and b). its limited version of Linux couldn’t reliably handle the database that this site relies on (hence the “Error Establishing Database Connection” that kept on showing up the past few weeks).

Rather than build a new Linux-based computer, I’m paying for off-site hosting now. We’ll see how this goes, but the performance is already leaps and bounds better than anything I’d built the past few generations. Hopefully, keeping the site up-and-running more reliably will also make it easier for me to post things on a more regular basis. As always, of course, the blog has been more of an outlet for me (and occasionally Brooke), so I’m not trying to garner additional web traffic or readership or anything…

…I just want it to work… 🙂

January 18, 2015

Furniture Projects

Shortly after moving in, Aunt Diane and Uncle Mike were looking to unload some old furniture from an outbuilding of theirs that they’ve had for awhile. By “old furniture,” I mean it was my grandparent’s set, and various parts were used by them and my Dad (among others, I suppose). It was a set they picked up in St. Louis sometime in the 1950s – it still had the furniture store’s information taped onto the inside.

Regardless, we’ve had quite a few furniture pieces in a bay of our garage since it all arrived. Two matching three-drawer chests made it into the house right around Calvin’s birthday, but some other pieces were taken care of over the break. The priority was a vanity that my Grandma Corine used. As with the other pieces, the wood was veneered in such a way that wasn’t particularly “modern,” so we sanded it down and repainted it in white.

The above is something of a “Work In Progress” shot. It actually took me awhile to complete because it was, well, really cold out in the garage and I could only tolerate sanding sessions for limited periods of time. I ended up putting a few coats on it as I was battling the effects of “drying” and “freezing” of the paint throughout.

In the end, it turned out pretty well! The mirror could use some restoration still, as it looks like a 60 year old mirror, but it fits perfectly in Meg’s room, as if that’s where it was meant to end up. I’m sure Grandma would be tickled to see Meg sitting at it. 🙂

The next piece of furniture was a larger, four drawer chest. We weren’t sure where exactly to put it initially, but Brooke thought the dining room would be a good fit. The weather was unbelievable today (almost 60 F in mid-January…seriously?!), so Brooke sanded it down outside and got a few coats of paint on it in the afternoon. Clearly, the paint could dry a bit more efficiently when the temperature wasn’t 15 F. The inside of the drawers weren’t all that spectacular looking, so Brooke used some blue paint (from the entryway…) to “spice it up” a bit.

Ultimately, the muted red color Brooke went with paired nicely with the wallpaper in the dining room. It’ll probably end up containing place mats, table cloths, etc. At the very least, it’s yet more storage space for all our stuff, so the more the merrier!

I’m just glad Grandma and Grandpa’s stuff has a new home!

…and glad my garage is nearly empty enough to fit both cars… 🙂

January 17, 2015

A Busy Christmas Break…

I’m hoping to queue up a few posts here, as we’ve been pretty busy over the past, well, few months…

First of all, as I now have the privilege of working for a college, that means I get a month off at Christmas and three months off over the Summer. Aside from the whole “much needed break” part, it also provides a substantial amount of time to get some stuff done around the house.

I should start by saying that this house is filled with wallpaper, most of which we’ll be pulling down over the next few years. In some cases, it doesn’t really look all that bad – tasteful, even. But in other cases, it’s simply got to go away. As we don’t have much experience with wallpaper, we started small, with the back entryway to the house [though, technically, we pulled down wallpaper in the bathroom first, but I’ll return to that in another post…].

Meg and Calvin actually got started with pulling down the wallpaper in the entryway a few weeks before, thus accelerating the need to do something about it. In the picture above, you can see the drywall along with some white “patching” I did to seal some cracks. I took care of this in an afternoon, as well as some patching on the ceiling above.

After it dried, we painted it with a light blue-ish color. The image above was taken without a flash, so it looks a bit deeper than it really is. However, this is a blue color we were considering putting in a few other places, especially the kitchen, so we’ll probably scale back our use of it. In the end, however, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out!

As a test run, it went pretty well. The wallpaper came down very easily, though it’ll be more challenging in other areas of the house where plaster predominates. More pictures will be on the way as we make various “upgrades” (including some of the projects we’ve already completed, of course), but next on the docket we’ll be covering the kitchen and what is to become “the music room.”

Onward!

May 2, 2014February 26, 2015

Pandora Revisited

That's still straight-up CGI... — That’s still straight-up CGI…

We were cleaning out DVDs a few weeks ago, largely because we don’t watch as many as we used to, yet also because Meg is accumulating more, so we need the room. Brooke pulled a few to get rid of, some of which I was fine with and others I had to put back. For the most part, these were movies that I/we hadn’t watched in a long time, so they were good choices.

But I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of Avatar. To be fair, I hadn’t watched it in a long time. Perhaps years. But it was a nice Bluray collector’s set and it didn’t seem right. Brooke and Meg were out of town this past weekend, so I took the opportunity to pop in Avatar again and see how it held up.

Avatar was released in late 2009. At the time, I was pretty high on it, mostly from the tech perspective. Having re-watched it, nearly five years later, I think it still holds up. The CGI characters still look pretty good, though perhaps not as impressive as they did in theaters (though, bear in mind that I saw it in 3D, “as intended,” so it could never look that good again unless I watched it in 3D). What really stands out to me is the world of Pandora itself. Many, if not most, of the scenes in the film take place in the jungle, all of which was done on a green screen. Like, literally all of it. All that stuff, in my view, holds up quite well. The characters still integrate perfectly into the background, looking as real as if they’d filmed in the Amazon.

Only a few CGI-centric movies age this well. Jurassic Park comes to mind. Perhaps even The Matrix (before CGI was over-used in the sequels, I’d argue).

So in large part, I still feel that Avatar is an important film. One of those that may not necessarily have the greatest acting of our time, or the most involved story (as evidenced by the nominees and winners from the Oscars in 2010). But the technology developed to make the movie in the first place changed film making. Heck, the tech used in Avatar has been integral to some of the greatest video games of the last generation. Motion capture certainly existed before Avatar, but not to the degree James Cameron took it. In many respects, this movie that took 15 years to make, has touched all blockbusters that have come after it. It’s a profound achievement.

That all said, it’s a long movie that I won’t be returning to all the time, perhaps for another few years. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen The Avengers close to 10 times in the last not-even-two-years now and I wouldn’t qualify it as “important” (however, it’s definitely more entertaining). Yet a lot of the tech required to make The Avengers happen in the first place was developed in order to create Avatar. Though one can absolutely enjoy other movies more, credit should be applied where it’s due.

It’ll be interesting to see how James Cameron does with the next three movies in the burgeoning Avatar franchise. Somehow, I doubt they’ll be as revolutionary as the first film…

…which I intend to hold on to…

February 11, 2014

For posterity’s sake…

Brooke and Calvin went to Kansas City this past weekend for a baby shower, so Meg and I were home on Saturday by ourselves. For once, Meg did a wonderful job of staying upstairs in her room playing after she woke up and didn’t come downstairs to wake up Daddy until 8:15 or so. Believe you me, this was great.

She comes into our room and points out the time, I ask her if she slept well, and we go through our usual morning routine. I then ask her whether she closed her bedroom door so that Sam doesn’t go in (as that’s where her fish resides and I’d prefer not to deal with a half-eaten fish). She says she closed her door, and Sam’s in Calvin’s room. She also said…

“There’s a bird in Calvin’s room.”

To which I replied…

“Uh huh…”

I turn on the TV for her, get her some cereal, proceed to check the internet to see what happened overnight. Nothing too crazy. But then she brings up the bird again.

“There’s a bird up in Calvin’s room.”

“Meg, there’s no bird in Calvin’s room. Please don’t make things up.”

“But there’s a bird in Calvin’s room.”

“Meg, lying is not okay. Please don’t make things up. It isn’t very nice.”

We continued with our morning. To help entertain her a bit, I grabbed a few games for the Kindle and she sat on my lap while I showed her how to play.

A bird flew from the dining room into the living room, landing on our window blinds.

“There’s a bird, Daddy.”

“…..”

Needless to say, I apologized to Meg for not believing her, followed by me locking Sam in our bedroom while I opened the kitchen door in order to convince the bird to kindly leave our home. Thankfully, it didn’t take long and he/she left without much of a fuss.

How did this bird get in the house? No idea. Our landlord poked around yesterday and couldn’t find anything obvious, either. Best we can tell is it came in through the basement somehow, and then during the night, made its way up to the main floor and then the top floor where, thankfully, Calvin wasn’t sleeping that night.

At the very least, I know to listen to my almost-4-year-old a bit more carefully when she makes wild claims. About birds being upstairs.

January 8, 2014

Review: The Hobbit – The Desolation of Smaug

Last year’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was something of a mixed bag. Fans of the book enjoyed it for the most part, and fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy generally liked it, but it ran long and was a tad boring for the wider audience. I thought it was pretty good, all things considered, but it was hard to judge it without having the “rest of the story” released in theaters. A few days ago, I finally got to see the second film in the series, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and I can safely say I liked it more than the previous outing.

The story of The Hobbit centers on the, er, hobbit named Bilbo (Martin Freeman), and how he joins a band of dwarves as they attempt to reclaim their ancestral mountain kingdom from a dragon named Smaug. The first film set up their meeting and initial travels, and its story suffers because of it: you feel like you’re just getting started in the story by the time the credits roll. There’s much more going on in this movie to hold the viewer’s interest. There are fewer obvious “comic relief” points cluttering up events. You aren’t being introduced to Bilbo for an hour on end. In short, the pacing feels much better in this film. However, as all of the introductions are now out of the way, the story shifts focus from Bilbo himself to the party and threat at large, adding some additional diversity to the tale.

I’m no Tolkien geek, but Peter Jackson definitely took some liberties with the plot this time around (he always does…but these feel a bit more egregious). Elves live longer than humans, and as this movie is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson took the opportunity to bring Legolas (Orlando Bloom) from the previous trilogy forward in time to play a badass in this new iteration. As the original trilogy came out 12 years ago, it’s pretty obvious he’s aged, but it’s still cool to see the character back on-screen. Jackson even created a new main character in Tauriel (Evangeline Lily) and I think it was a wise addition. The original movies had Sam Gamgees (Sean Astin) as an emotional character to help the audience know when they should feel sad, happy, scared, and so on. In the first Hobbit movie, I can’t say I felt much of an emotional connection with anyone. Tauriel adds some much needed empathy to the story and brings out some more emotion in the other characters. That, and Evangeline Lily made for a very awesome elf.

Basically, any action scene with the elves was awesome. Totally over-the-top and kinda stupid. But stupid awesome.

The last bit of “heavy changes” I’ll mention is the addition of the Necromancer, a character that’s only referred to in the book and never seen. Part-way through the book, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) leaves the party and deals with the threat of the Necromancer, then inexplicably, he returns later in the book after having battled him. We aren’t even explicitly told in the book that the Necromancer is really Sauron, the main villain from The Lord of the Rings, though Jackson makes it more clear here in the movie. I was hoping when they said that they’re making three movies out of a single book, they’d explain where Gandalf went for half the book. I’m happy they included it here.

The main dwarf character, Thorin (Richard Armitage), was improved over the previous movie. Perhaps it was because he was doing something rather than just sitting and brooding, but I felt like he was more fleshed out and interesting than in the first film. Benedict Cumberbatch also did a wonderful job voicing the entirely CGI character of Smaug. His voice was heavily obscured, but you could tell it was him in his phrasing and tempo. There’s only so much “life” you can bring to a giant CGI character and I thought he did a pretty good job.

The special effects were still great, as always, but while I saw a lot of New Zealand in the first movie, I felt like I saw a lot more green screen in this one. The locales just weren’t as expansive as in the first movie, or even the original trilogy. You didn’t need to see characters running across fields or climbing in the mountains. In this movie, they are literally going inside a mountain, so that can be done on sound stages and using heavy CGI. And it was pretty obvious. It still looked good, but not perfect.

In total, I enjoyed this one more than the previous one. If they can keep this up, the third movie will be even better. It’s a pity we have to wait until late-2014 to see it.