We had a ridiculously busy couple of weeks, with going back and forth to Hannibal and whatnot, but we’re back in the dinner groove now!! Stu’s visit meant homemade pizza and salad with an orange-vanilla vinaigrette. Emily, I realized while I was making the pizza that i never sent you the recipe for the crust! I use this one and it never fails!! It also makes really good breadsticks with some roasted garlic and parmesan cheese!
Again, I’m behind on Dinner posts. This one was tilapia, peas, and noodles from a packet. I got a little impatient with the noodles, so they were a tad crunchy. Oh well.
Stu has been meaning to come up and visit since we moved up here over a year ago, so now that he’s shifting jobs and moving in the next few weeks, he was able to get some extra time for the 4.5 hour trip from Columbia to Swisher. We time this such that Meg was in Hannibal for last week with her grandparents, then Brooke went down Friday night to get her. Needless to say, Stu and I got into only a little bit of trouble…
Mostly, the weekend was taken up by games, BBQ and frolfing. Lots of frolfing. I haven’t played this much in years.
Jason joined us for Saturday’s romp around Cedar Rapids. We hit up Jones Park first, followed by Shaver Park. Both were 18-hole courses, where the first (picture above) had a good number of open spaces, while Shaver Park was almost entirely in thick forest. Thankfully, we played Shaver second, as it was getting rather sunny and hot out. On Sunday afternoon, when it was infinitely more hot and humid out, we “only” played another 18-hole course, Legion Park. I guess you could say that Legion offered the most variety of the three courses we played this weekend, but it was so disorganized that it was probably the worst experience we had the whole time. The signs were few and far between and the holes didn’t seem to be organized in any logical order (i.e. we played through hole 6, couldn’t find hole 7, found hole 10 after doing holes 11-14, and play hole 17 and 18 before finding 15 and 16…ug…).
Regardless, my legs are pretty tired after all that. Good times, though.
The weather held together pretty well the whole weekend. We BBQed Friday night while the ladies were out of town, then again on Saturday night after they returned from Hannibal. Brooke’s thus far unnamed chicken even came over to visit while we were sitting by the grill. This is the first weekend we’d seen the chicken venture that far from the coop, but it was nice to see her out and about.
Meg was mostly in good spirits, but she needed to “reset” her sleeping clock after a week with grandma. She slept until around 6:15 am on Sunday morning, but made it until around 7:30 Monday morning, so it didn’t take too long to get her back on our usual schedule. Now that she’s “toddling” much more effectively, she’s also getting in to things we don’t really want her to. Case in point, she has discovered Brooke’s pots of dirt, and loves tossing them in the air and on herself. I grabbed this picture above and Stu suggested a “sepia hue” to pull out the dust bowl aesthetic. I think it worked pretty well.
Not sure how this makes her parents look, though…
Otherwise, much console gaming was had. We really weren’t up all that late playing, which is probably just a testament to the fact we’re getting older…or the copious amounts of beer we were having… We played through almost all of Killzone 3 in the co-op campaign, only to have the save file get corrupted at the second-to-last chapter of the game. Grrrrr… Otherwise, we played quite a bit of Mortal Kombat and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, so I think we did a good job scratching the “heavy game session” itch.
In all, a pretty spectacular weekend. Thanks for visiting, buddy.
I’ve been paying attention to this fight over the debt ceiling to an extent. Not a huge one, not a small one: just “an extent.” I certainly have my view on the subject (i.e. make some cuts to entitlements, raise revenues on the top 5%), but that’s not what this particular post is about.
This is about the mythical “American People.”
I listen to NPR’s “On Point” program on a regular basis and, on more than one occasion, they’ve had politicians on talking about what “The American People” want. They apparently want a balanced budget. They want the government to act just like a family does. They want Big Business to pay their fair share. They want to be Pro-Life. They want to be Pro-Choice. They want to lower taxes.
Where are these people?
Frequently, when politicians talk about “The American People,” they’re talking about The Majority. They fail to mention that The Majority only represents 51% of the actual voting population of America: there’s another 49% that’s statistically just as big.
With regards to the debt ceiling, let me just go ahead and summarize what the actual American People want for those politicians that apparently don’t know:
There are probably more things I could list, but this is a good start. The American People just want things to continue going as they are, or to go better. They don’t want things to change, unless they will get better. “The American People” that most politicians seem to be talking about don’t actually exist, except in the polls they use to win their election.
I’m getting a little tired of “The American People.” I want The American People back.
Way back in the dark ages of 2004, I joined Facebook. At the time, the idea of a “social network” was foreign to most people, though the advantages it gave you, especially in the college setting, were immediately apparently. At the time, you could “Friend” someone, post on their “Wall,” “Poke” them, share pictures, and basically just see what everyone was up to. Initially, you could only do this if you were at a college that was supported by the network, but it expanded to anyone over the age of 13 in September 2006.
It was all downhill from there, as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t get me wrong, I still use Facebook all the time…and likely more than any healthy, rational person should. It’s still very addictive, it’s still the network where most of my friends congregate, and it lets me post my inane political rantings where I can annoy as many people as possible. It’s just that there’s all this extra stuff that clutters up the whole thing. I feel like I constantly hear people complain about Facebook, yet they still use it because they have no alternative to what it does best: posts, links and pictures. Sure, there are alternatives, but few that allow you to look up a person and see everything they have posted in a semi-organized manner that doesn’t require you scrolling down an endless feed of information.
In recent years, I have delved into Twitter and LinkedIn, two other social networks that serve vastly different audiences. My LinkedIn profile is, by far, the least used as its primary purpose is to serve as a sort of online resume. I think it tends to be more useful in the business community than it is elsewhere, but it’s something I have so I can check out other people’s profiles. My Twitter feed has gotten more use recently, but I still mostly use Twitter to “follow” celebrities, blogs, and a few select friends that actually use it. Again, while LinkedIn is good for your personal information, Twitter is good for status updates. Neither is particularly good about posting pictures and videos. Facebook does a reasonable job of tying all those together, but then you also get the extra problem of FarmVille updates in your News Feed.
This week marked Google’s (second) entry into the social networking sphere in the form of Google+. Yet another social network to join. Google is making the smart decision to really tie together their web presence with Android, seamlessly linking communication between these disparate entities as best as they can. Google+ involves a “Stream” news feed (just like your Facebook news feed), “Sparks” that let you follow particular interests, and “Huddles” and “Hangouts,” text-based and video-based chat systems, respectively.
The primary innovation, in my mind, is the idea of “Circles.” This is the thing that Twitter and Facebook don’t really do at all, let alone well. Circles allow you to group your Friends together in subgroups that you can then easily post to. So, for example, I tend to post political videos and articles on my Facebook wall. Everyone sees those unless they have removed my updates from their wall. In Google+, I can specifically designate who gets those posts by putting them in a Circle. You can still send posts to everyone’s news feeds, but at least there’s a mechanism for limiting who your comments go to.
Google has used various humorous examples to describe Circles, including having Circles specifically for co-workers and not your boss, or your family, but not your in-laws. It is also this feature that many analysts and journalists are most excited about. While Circles may be innovative, the other trappings of Google+ aren’t all that revolutionary, yet the system does a good job at replicating the Facebook experience without the stuff you hate about Facebook. From Ezra Klein:
That’s where I could imagine Google+ coming in. It’s not that any of its features are so revolutionary. It’s not that it’s better at doing social networking than Facebook. It’s that it’s an opportunity to start over, to build your social network with years of Facebook experience in mind, rather than having to face the accretion of mistakes and miscalculations you made over almost a decade of trial-and-error with a new technology. It’s not Facebook’s fault that “what it means” to have a Facebook account has changed four or five times over the last few years, even as most of us have only had one profile over that period. But it is an opportunity for Google.
The Mobile App, which integrates a variety of functions from within Android, is also pretty slick and much faster than the Facebook app. For a walkthrough of the Mobile App, you can check out various sources, including ArsTechnica. To me, the most interesting function is the “Nearby Stream.” Think of this as your regular “Stream,” or Facebook News Feed, but this one pulls down your GPS location and gives you the posts of random people near you. It may not be the most useful feature all the time, but I can imagine going to a baseball game and getting fan reactions from random people in the crowd to what’s going on, all through my phone. Other than that, it’s an app that’s very similar to Facebook’s, without all the “clutter.”
As Klein wrote in his article, Google+ is a “cleaner” way to have a social network, one that isn’t cluttered by 7 years of Applications, Groups, Likes and Pokes. Whether it will gain any traction remains to be seen, but this is the first full-on assault by Google on Facebook, and Google+ seems like a pretty good attempt and wrestling control of The Social Network from the folks that made history with the concept.
We’ll see how it does. I’ll certainly give it a go. While there are some good ideas in there, it seems almost too much like Facebook to really pull people away. People hopped on Twitter because it did one thing that Facebook does, but did it better (News Feed…). In that respect, you could justify having both accounts because you used each one for different purposes. Google+ really serves the same purpose as Facebook. So in that respect, I’m not sure it presents much of an attractive alternative.
But then again, I use Google products on a daily basis, and so to millions of other people. I bet they’re all willing to give it a try. If the flood of invites rolling out isn’t indicative of their curiosity, I don’t know what is.
Spaghetti and garlic bread.
Grilled chicken, butter beans, and sweet potato chips.
I was hoping Meg might like the butter beans. And she did. She liked to smash them in her high chair seat. Her dinner this night was a half-eaten who-knows-how-old cookie that she had hidden in between the cushion and the seat of her chair. YUM!!
French toast with homemade multigrain bread, sausage, and peaches.
Andy’s birthday dinner. I didn’t think it was going well while I was making it (huge flames shooting out of the bottom of the grill didn’t seem like a good sign), but it ended up pretty good! Chicken “grillers” with red peppers and mozzarella cheese, cous cous and quinoa, broccoli, and beer bread made with our mild ale.
Meg’s ear appointment was supposed to be last Wednesday, but somehow, the hospital over-booked and we were bumped to today. If you recall, we were getting ear tubes put in to help limit or eliminate her countless ear infections, hopefully spurring her to start walking and put on some more weight (she’s skinny!). The procedure is outpatient surgery, something neither Brooke nor I have really had much experience with, so the whole thing was rather interesting.
We got a call yesterday afternoon that instructed us to have Meg here at 7:00 am. So, Brooke and I got up at 5:30, got everything ready, then woke Meg up and hopped in the car by 6:15 to head down to Iowa City. We got here a bit early, but got checked in pretty quickly and was moved back to the pre-op area. All the nurses and doctors were very impressed with Meg’s demeanor, as she was being shockingly good compared with the other toddlers that they usually see. Honestly, I was pretty surprised too, as Meg couldn’t have anything but clear liquids before going into surgery…and she could only have those clear liquids 2 hours prior to the surgery. Therefore, Meg hadn’t actually ate or drank anything since 7:00 pm the night before. That, and to get her there on time, we had to wake her up a good hour before she would normally wake up. All things considered, she was very happy.
We had to keep her entertained for 30-45 min before they took her back for surgery. She got her oxygen levels checked on her toe and her blood pressure done on her leg, all while I tried distracting her with a book. Worked pretty well, really. Meg did not want to be weighed, and wasn’t a fan of having a stethoscope on her chest. Other than that, she did alright while being poked and prodded.
…but she was pretty upset when the doctors had to take her to surgery. Unfortunately, we couldn’t accompany her back there unless one of us got dressed up in a surgical gown, etc., so we just let the doctors do their work. Brooke and I had to sit in the waiting room for another 30 min or so while the work was being done, then the doctor called us in to talk about things. Meg did quite well, apparently. Tubes put in, went under anesthesia just fine, and seemed to be coming out of it well, too. After Meg was awake, the doctors brought her in to a post-op recovery room where we had to sit while we waited for her to be allowed to leave. They had to do the same oxygen, heart rate, etc. tests again, but nothing was different. In the picture above, you can see the cotton balls in her ear, but we removed those shortly thereafter.
Oh, and Meg was very thirsty. As in, 20 oz of apple juice in about 15 min thirsty. And she liked the hospital graham crackers very much. 🙂
Because Meg was so good, the nurses brought in a few stuffed animals for her to choose between. While I would have chosen the blue, furry monster, Meg went with the smaller, less interesting yellow bear (?) with sunglasses. She didn’t ask me, though. Oh well.
All in all, the whole morning went very well. I was still able to make it to the lab by 10:00 am to get some work done, and Brooke took Meg home, still in her pajamas. We have some ear drops to use for the next week or two, and she should only need Tylenol today, but we’re told she should be mostly back to normal by this evening, already.
Hopefully she’ll sleep well. She had a big day. And did great. 🙂
