Samwords

Sam is talking nonstop now. We went to Publix the other night and he spent the entire trip talking, pointing, asking questions. By the time we got to the checkout line, we got knowing smiles from all the checkout folks.

Anyway, here's an updated glossary of what he says and what he means.

• Ay-un: Aaron, his cousin.
  
• Hih-hee: Timothy, not to be confused with ->
  
• Hee-hee: Cheez-Its. This causes no end of confusion.
• Uh-Uh: Jonah. It took us forever to figure out this was what he was saying. Sam usually does not deign to speak of his immediate predecessor.
• Op-ih: Stop it. I was singing various selections from Oklahoma! this morning while working on work-type stuff. Sam walked into my office, sat down to play, and said, "Op-ih," very matter of factly. I stopped singing and looked at him questioningly while he played on the floor. Then, when I started singing again, I heard, "Op-ih." Everybody's a critic.
• Nemo: any fish (including whales, dolphins and other cetaceans). May also apply to shrimp, clams, crabs, and other seafood.
• Ee-ee-ee-ee: Tinky Winky, who is the large, purple, purse carrying ->
  
• Tuh-bee-tuh-bee: Teletubbies. Which he must watch at least once per day.
• Ah-ooh: Sparkles, our cat, or any other cat.
  
• Beep-beep: car.
• Duh: truck.
  
• Choo-choo: train.
• Eh-eh-ayd: Lemonade. Sam is not a big fan of consonants.
• Ahn-kul: Bionicle. It has begun.

And today, while out shopping, we went to Burger King for lunch. The boys got toys, which led to our last entry: Da-da-doo, which is Dr. Doom from the Fantastic 4. Nerd 'em up.

On Walking

I had a dentist appointment this morning at 8:00 AM, but my wife needed to leave at 8:30 to go to VBS (Vacation Bible School for you non-southerners out there). Since we only have one car, I obviously could not drive to the dentist. Since she was on a tight schedule, she could neither drop me off nor pick me up.

So I walked.

It's only a short distance away, 1.2 miles by Yahoo! Maps. It was a pleasant walk through the representative residential and commercial areas of South Suburban Tucker, as we like to call it. Only one major (i.e., lighted) intersection and not too much traffic at 7:45 in the morning. It took about 20 minutes each way (woohoo! 17-minute mile, beat that, you . . . well, never mind).

Two things bugged me, though.

First, while there are sidewalks throughout the entire residential portion of my walk, they ended abruptly once I crossed the boundary into the commercial zone. Grrr.

This a) made my walk a little less comfortable and a lot more dangerous, and b) is indicative of my least favorite thing about sprawl: the assumption that if you are going to do anything "real" you must be in your car. "Let zem walk among zair leetle 'ouses," the Marie Antoinette of DeKalb county DOT says, "but surely zey must drive to get zair cake, no?"

No.

Second, there was no place to grab breakfast or a drink along the walk route. The intersection I crossed has lots of cars coming through it every morning, from multiple directions. One street is a main feeder road to the Interstate, the other has a school on it, which generates copious amounts of morning traffic.

Currently occupying the corners of that intersection are 3 automotive businesses and a fruit stand (which wasn't open). A bagel shop there would get plenty of folks stopping in or driving through in the morning, especially when school's in. If they had chocolate-chip bagels, I'd walk there at least once a week. My wife would probably go there daily to get morning coffee, since I don't drink the stuff and she won't make it for just herself.

C'mon folks, that's [counting] $10 a week, right there. What're y'all waiting on? Of course, my first priority is a Fellini's Pizza in downtown Tucker.

Dinner

After much postponement, and several gazillions of pixels worth of "electronic mail" (as they are calling it now), we finally had our 3rd of July dinner with Dignan and his family, which included the lovely Mrs. Dignan and their wonderful offspring. (I'm not sure how much personal information he wants out there, but I have now outed Dignan as a straight male who has reproduced successfully; I hope that's okay).

Lest one think that this is some kind of new era of anti-gnostic blogging, it was actually something that used to be called "dinner with friends." You see, Dignan and I have known each other for several years now, and only recently discovered one another's blogs.

In fact, one of the interesting things we discovered tonight (while eating food and sitting across the table from one another; you should try it) was that we have traveled along through several of the same social spheres now for the past 20 years or so and have probably bumped into one another many, many times.

Other things we discovered in common:

• We are both fans of Adam Sandler's early work, specifically Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and The Wedding Singer.
• We were both at ISFest back in the early 90's when Adam Again played, and specifically when Gene Eugene sang "Ain't No Sunshine" with Piltdown Man. Good times, good times. We miss you Gene.
• We have both had almost as many careers as jobs since leaving college, and both need to be counted on more than one hand.

All in all, a good night. As the lovely 4 Boy Mom said on the way home, "How daring. Out late [8:30 PM] on a Tuesday." We'll almost certainly do it again, if not at least to give his family an opportunity to wreck our house the way we wrecked theirs. But I probably won't blog about it, because, honestly, it's a bit of a snoozer.

Unless there's a fight. Then you'll be the first to know.

HP6

Good book, if short. 26 hours. Can't talk, gotta re-read.

Update:
Okay. I've had some time to think and mull it over. My review/thoughts/comments are in the comments section.

Warning: Blinding, book-ruining spoilers in there! Do not click into the comments section if you have not finished the book.

The farmer and the cowman should be friends . . .

The people we are buying our next house from are a lovely couple. He sells books and she is an artist. By this I mean that she makes interesting objects that other people buy. But I also mean that she has The Eye.

You know what I mean. Some people have a knack for something. Part experience, part innate gift, The Eye lets them just look at something, figure out what's wrong, and fix it or make it a million times better. Whether it's computers, engines, haircuts, clothes, etc., these people make doing something (and doing it superbly well) look totally effortless. And it probably is for them.

But The Eye cannot be taught. It's like the tech tree in Homeworld: if you have ability you can make it better with practice. But if you don't have that starting instinct, no amount of work will raise you to Eyedom.

Case in point: my wife and me and home decorating. We watch no end of design shows on HGTV. "Divine Design" is great, plus we get to make fun of the way Canadians talk. "reDesign" is fun, and the . . . um . . . enthusiasm of the guy is interesting. "Design On A Dime" is one of our favorites, because it makes us believe we can do a really great job at redecorating with very little money, which is a total and complete lie. We cannot, but our neighbor can.

She has The Eye.

When we bought some new furniture recently, we cleared out our entire living room for it. I tried two different arrangements over the course of a couple of weeks. I looked up stuff on the Internet (coughNERDcough) and watched countless hours of HGTV. Nothing worked. Our neighbor walked in and had it completely reset in two hours. Some things she moved a few inches, some things moved across the room. But it felt completely different.

So we asked her to look at other rooms and make suggestions. And she did. And she seemed to be having fun doing it, as well, whereas my wife and I struggled and fought whenever we tried to arrange things.

As a professional nerd, I get paid to work with computers. Sometimes I hear other nerds complaining about having to help out someone else with their computer. But I don't buy it for a minute. They love it. I love it. I enjoy trying to find out what's wrong with someone's computer and to get it working again. Nothing bothers me more than not fixing it.

My neighbor is the same way. She's artsy and she loves it. It's why she does what she does. When we asked her to help us out, her face brightened.

Here's the thing. If your circle of friends includes nothing but nerds, your computers will run well but you and your house will look awful. If your circle of friends includes nothing but artsy folk, everything will look great, but if something goes wrong with your computer or your car, you'll all be standing around it, poking and screeching like those guys at the beginning of 2001.

Just a thought.

Territory folks should stick together,
Territory folks should all be pals.
Cowboys dance with farmer's daughters,
Farmers dance with the ranchers' gals.

On Children, Bedtimes, and Water

For future reference.

When a child asks, after already being put to bed, if he can get up to get some water, it may be necessary to state explicitly that the water in question may not be put into a watergun. Or, in this case, a Spiderman swim glove that squirts water.

Twice.

That's right. Learn from my experience, folks.

Competition 2: Return of "Carlotta"

Thanks for all your comments on the first post on sibling competition. They were excellent points, all.

I guess the issue here is not so much competition (which I believe to be healthy and productive), but praise. Is there a way to praise success by one child in an endeavor in which another child has not had similar success?

I don't know, and I don't know how. But I agree that getting rid of competition in order to prevent such sticky situations is insane. It simply can't be done. Next we'll be "outlawing" war.

I still stand by my assertion that winning and losing is not something that parents can teach as well as older siblings.

Another, similar event happened today. We were at the lake and the big boys were learning to kneeboard. One child went first and, unable to get it after two attempts, decided to get out of the water and sulk in the boat. Rather than wait for him to come around and try again, the other boy wanted to try.

This one fared no better at first, and failed 4 times before finally getting up on the board. Then he did wonderfully, riding for 10 minutes in one stretch and successfully handling increasingly difficult conditions like wakes and tight turns. Note: it wasn't the one you'd think.

During the whole time the second rider was up, the first rider became increasingly sullen. As we hooted and hollered for the one actually riding, it became apparent that the first boy was not going to get back in and try. And he did not try that event again for the entire day.

I think I've decided to praise both for effort and for accomplishment. If that means that kids who succeed get praised doubly, then so be it. I think praising only for accomplishment is cruel and that praising only for effort is foolhardy.

This parenting thing is hard, in case you haven't guessed.

Competition

A parable.

A man had two daughters, Carlotta and Josephina. Both girls loved skeet-shooting. They enjoyed shooting skeets purely for recreation, but, at the urging of their parents, the sisters joined their school's shooting club (they lived in Texas, with which one does not mess).

At first, both girls enjoyed being on the team, since both the practices and the meets gave them the opportunity to release their frustrations by obliterating all things skeet. But as time went on Carlotta began to realize that the competition was actually quite intense and that she was not doing well. Josephina, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the competitiveness, while actually being very good and winning many events.

This perplexed their father, who was stuck with this conundrum: how do we praise Josephina without making Carlotta feel worse? To put it another way, Josephina's achievements are good, and worthy of recognition. But how could they call (justified) attention to Josephina's accomplishments without having them cast a glaring light on Carlotta's non-accomplishments. Merely saying, "you did your best" didn't seem to work.

Here's what he decided. If Carlotta chose not to re-join the skeet-shooting team the next season, she could. But she would need to find another organized activity to take its place. She would not be allowed to quit in the middle of any season, but she could try different things until she found something at which she felt more comfortable (such as drag-racing, which she had already been doing in the off-season).

Of course, Josephina stayed on the shooting team, and Carlotta continued to slaughter skeets for recreation.

Perhaps this was the right move, perhaps not. Suggestions are welcome.

House tales

As a living example that there is no such thing as normal, we, on our way to our fourth house, have never had a normal real-estate experience.

I found our first house in the AJC Sunday paper, which I bought and perused on Saturday (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, your source of news from the day before yesterday). In what would become a pattern for later in life, I looked through the paper, made a list of possible candidates, and then did some driving. Only one house looked promising.

My wife stayed home that Saturday. The next day, on the way to church, I drove her by that one house and something must have caught her eye, because she called the next day to go see it. Once we saw the inside, my wife loved it, mostly because the guy was a Delta Faucet rep, and all of the faucets in the house were new and very nice. So, house #1: faucets.

We found our second house while on the way to a party in Tucker. (We were selling our first house to my wife's sister and her husband.) We had been looking in Tucker because it was closer to my work and to our church, and so we had seen a lot of houses around that area. As we were cutting through a neighborhood on the way to the party, we saw a FSBO sign.

Again, something caught my wife's eye, so we took down the number and arranged to see it. In this one, she liked the smooth ceilings and crown molding in each room. So we bought it. House #2: smooth ceilings.

The third time around (our current home), the house never went on the market. It is right across the street from our good friends (the same ones whose house we were going to for the party above), and was owned by an older couple. We had seen the house many times before, and I had made many not-very-nice comments about the brick, brown, and lime green exterior.

Regardless of the color scheme, it was a big house in a nice neighborhood. We had 3 boys in a 3 bedroom house and needed to move (this was before we learned about "stacking"). So we offered to buy the house and then tried to sell ours ourselves. This turned out to be very difficult, and after a several months (including two with two mortgages), we sold it to a very mean old lady with one leg.

(I kid you not, she was the meanest person I have ever met face-to-face. I'm talking Eisner-mean. At the closing she refused to even look at us and utterly ignored the several attempts my wife made to engage her in conversation. Plus, the thing about only having one leg . . .)

Anyway. House #3: four bedrooms and a separate dining room (and no pirates; okay, I'll stop).

Which brings us to our current adventure. Again, we are buying a house that did not go on the open market. This time we're buying from friends (as opposed to selling to family), but it's still making half of the experience much more palatable.

But we've learned our lesson, and are selling with a realtor. It's just not worth the hassle to me, and I'm not libertarian enough (Int 18, Wis 3, Cha 3) to believe I can do a better job on my own.

At the very least, my house is now ridiculously clean. More houseblogging tomorrow. Yo-ho-ho, it's exciting stuff!

Movie meme

First, I'm typing this on the Mac. So if I [whoops] mess up typing [aw crap], you'll understand it's because I'm on a weird keyboard with none of the Control or Alt keys where 10 years of touch typing have taught my fingers that those keys should be.

Second, okay, the book meme was fun. But it gets a little high-falutin', because books carry so much weight. People put down non-fiction, or else throw in heavy hitters or "serious" fiction, etc. What they don't tell you is that they like Faulkner for the naughty bits (note: I have no idea if a Faulkner book has any naughty bits in it; I've never read one).

And I have a sneaking suspicion that everyone pads their book meme just a little bit. I mean, the fact that I spent January through April reading Salvatore novels didn't even come up. (This is the point at which my wife will IM me, asking, "Why did you write that? My friends read this.")

[Note to Apple: Control+Left Arrow goes back a full word, Control+Right Arrow goes forward a full word. It's in the corner, for crying out loud; it's a mile wide and a mile high. Also, the Home key takes you to the beginning of the line in a text editor, the End key takes you to the end of the line.]

Where were we? Ah, yes. Book memes make liars of us all. So let's do movies, and let's change it up a bit. None of this "means the most to me" crap. That implies that a movie has meaning. Bad Boys and ID4 have no meaning whatsoever, but are a lot of fun to watch. Ditto Road House, which is even more fun to watch if it's the TV-edited version with the sound turned down and you're talking over it, a la MST3K. Good times, good times.

Also, no counting. No "how many movies do you own," etc. It proves nothing.

Moving on.

Movie meme:
1. What was the last movie you watched?
2. What was the last movie you bought?
3. What was the last movie you went to a theater to see?
4. What is the movie you have seen the most?
5. What are the 5 movies you like the most?
6. Tag 5, yada yada.

Ok, rules. Gotta have rules. Right:
a) "movie" is very broadly defined and can include TV shows that can be bought on DVD or VHS
b) you have to know the name of the movie; none of this "I saw this great little arthouse film in SoHo once, but only Andy Warhol knew the name, and he wasn't telling," etc.
c) don't use the word "film." It's like the word "space" in interior design. They are movies and rooms. To call them otherwise is pretentious. You know it and we know it, so knock it off.

Ready? Here we go
1. What was the last movie you watched?
Hitch, with Will Smith. Very good, and highly recommended, if just for Kevin James' facial expressions alone.

2. What was the last movie you bought?
[gotta go look] That I bought, The Incredibles, which is indeed incredible. We watch it constantly.

My wife got me So I Married An Axe Murderer for Father's Day and I'm sad to say I haven't watched it yet. I was going to watch it tonight while putting hinges back on the kitchen cabinets, but the hinges were the wrong color and I can't find another excuse to sit on the couch for 2 hours by myself watching a movie.

3. What was the last movie you went to a theater to see?
Batman Begins. Wow. We don't get to go out very often, so we save our theater movie events for things that will look really good on a big screen. This was a lot of fun, even if my wife spent the rest of the afternoon complaining about the idiots who brought little kids. It's PG-13 people. Lots of crying and screaming in our theater that day, I can tell you.

4. What is the movie you have seen the most?
Not by my own choice, but probably either The Road Warrior, The Natural, or Monsters, Inc.

My cousin lived with us for a while when I was a kid, and he had The Road Warrior on video. He claimed to have seen it over 100 times, and I was there for a good chunk of those. This is quite possibly the genesis of my post-apocalyptic fixation. 50+ easily

When I was in late middle school (7th & 8th grades), I went to a tiny little private school. Our PE teacher was also the Youth Group leader at our church, and he loved The Natural. So if it was raining, we watched it for PE. We also watched it at lock-ins, youth group movie nights, etc. Also 50+

(Ladyhawke was foisted upon us similarly, but partial viewings don't count, and that's all I've really got for that movie. We'd stay for the fighting and leave during the kissing. Plus the music was awful.)

Monsters, Inc. is a contender because this is what was on the in-house TV non-stop when Stephen was in the hospital with pneumonia in Christmas of 2002. Three days in ICU, two days in a regular hospital room, I went out and bought a copy immediately after getting him home, and we spent a large portion of the next few weeks sitting on the couch together watching it. He doesn't even like it now.

Excuse me, there's something in my eye . . .

5. What are the 5 movies you like the most?
Note: none of these movies changed my life. In no particular order:

1. Apollo 13 - makes me cry. Seriously.
2. Anything by Pixar. It's a total cop-out, I'm sure, but pick any one of them and I'm there. Even Bug's Life.
3. The Ref - it's a Christmas tradition for my wife and I. Mom, don't watch it, the language is awful.
4. When Harry Met Sally - for that one scene when they're in New York in the fall. You know, when she's dropping off letters . . . Come on. Gorgeous.
5. The Music Man - which is a favorite of my Dad's. I sing it around the house all day.

Honorable Mention:

• Casablanca - the movie my wife and I watched on our first date, when she invited herself to dinner I was having with some friends. I'm glad it worked out.
• It's A Wonderful Life - Only gets better and more weepy when you have kids. That's right, I'm crying during It's A Wonderful Life. And not just once, but all through the thing.
  

What? No Bad Boys? What about Star Wars? If it were a top 10, maybe those would be on there. But our limits are what define us. Cough.

Also, I'm not saying that these are the best movies ever made. But if you were sitting down somewhere with one of these movies on, and I happened to walk by, I would probably sit down and watch it with you. That crazy Bjork movie where she's blind, in prison, and dies at the end? Not so much.

6. Tag 5, yada yada.
Dignan
Splitcat
DAW
Georgia On My Mind
Pig In A Pen

Mom, I would tag you, but you have yet to write one single entry in your blog. Hop to it.

Funny, but not ha-ha funny

I'm re-doing the check book in Quicken, which I do about twice a year. You see, if you don't balance your check book or enter items into Quicken with some regularity (read: at least once a month), then it's just easier to start over.

Right. Forgetful and lazy. If I were just a little more overweight, I'd qualify as a Loser Hat-Trick.

Anyway, one small joy of starting over is that you can re-evaluate the categories and their names. For instance, we support (in a ridiculously small way) the ministry of our friends, the Hannas.

But in the tiny, sans-serif font in Quicken, this looks like Hamas. And that's just unnerving. Really, it was a shock to open Quicken and see that in there. So I changed it.

So, perhaps, my involuntary, subconscious revulsion of opening Quicken will go away and I can manage to balance my checkbook more often.

But probably not.

Musical Beds

One of the (gazillion) weird things about kids is their mix of utter fluidity and absolute rigidity. Examples abound. Jonah loves peanut butter toast right now; it's all he'll eat. Breakfast, lunch, dinner = peanut butter toast, cut into 4 squares. He even had it in lieu of cookies the other day.

But this is a recent development, maybe 4 months old. And next week he could change to something else. Overnight he could switch from peanut butter toast to egg salad sandwiches and we would be powerless to stop it. Plus, my kitchen would stink.

Sam, on the other hand, likes hot dogs for lunch. Except when he doesn't. So we make them for him every day, and he either shrieks and attempts to throw it or eats the whole thing in less than a minute.

(Note: there is absolutely zero philosophical discovery or larger point here. This is just an observation.)

Given this, the sleeping arrangements in our house have been remarkably stable. Stephen and Jonah sleep in a double bed in one room; Timothy and Sam sleep in another room, Sam in a crib and Timothy in the top bunk of an otherwise empty bunkbed.

This configuration came about due to several factors:

• Timothy likes to sleep alone
• Stephen and Jonah do not like to sleep alone
• Sam used to cry a lot at night
• Timothy can sleep through anything, Stephen and Jonah cannot

The previous setup was Timothy on the top bunk, Stephen on the bottom, Jonah in a double bed in another room that he shared with Sam (who slept in a crib). But Jonah and Stephen would not stay in place. Stephen would climb up and get in bed with Timothy (after he was asleep and couldn't therefore complain), or else go get in bed with Jonah. Or Jonah and Stephen would both end up in the bottom bunk, which would mean that someone was falling out of bed in the middle of the night.

It was madness, plain and simple. Okay, scratch that. It was actually okay, except that Timothy was getting miffed about invasions of his personal space, and I like to know where the kids are in case of a fire, etc.

So we sat and thought and came to the present arrangement, which has been in place for more than a year.

But recently Sam has been showing signs of wanting to sleep in the big bed with Stephen and Jonah. He's in there with them for nighttime stories and prayers, and it has been very difficult to get him out of there for the past few nights.

So we thought we'd switch things up: Sam and Stephen in the big bed, Jonah on the bottom bunk in the other room with Timothy, our rock of Gibraltar, our immovable object up in his top bunk.

Why not Sam and Jonah in the big bed? Are you insane? With sufficient cause, both of these guys could stay up until 2 AM and any one of them can destroy a room without batting an eye. They're like two barely sub-critical masses. We don't put them together.

And if we put Stephen in the bottom bunk by himself, we knew it would be about 8:05 before he was somewhere else.

So how did it go? To be brief, it was awful.

Sam, exuberant in his newfound freedom, was out of bed every 3 minutes. Several spankings later we had convinced him to stay in bed, where he turned his attention to Stephen, who then started getting out of bed every 3 minutes to come tell us that Sam was bothering him. Sam of course followed and would stand behind Stephen, smiling. Cheap grace, indeed.

In the other room, Jonah was bringing Timothy up to speed on everything in the world. Timothy, unused to conversations at night, kept calling out to us to do something about it. Jonah, who had not gotten out of bed and was not jumping on it, could not understand why he was in trouble.

After a while, we attempted to switch Jonah and Sam, which was a disaster. Jonah wanted to stay "with Timothy." Sam would not go back into his crib without much shrieking.

Eventually, after much cajoling and promises of various treats, everyone ended up in Timothy's room. Timothy on the top bunk, Sam in his crib, Jonah and Stephen in the bottom bunk. Thankfully, nobody fell out of bed.

The next night, everything was back to normal. We'll try it again later, I guess.

Oh hell, trouble is coming . . .

One of the great things about listening to AM radio is that you can "hear" an approaching thunderstorm. The lightning produces a burst of static in the radio signal, so as the storm gets closer, it gets harder and harder to hear the radio program through the storm.

My wife kicked us all out of the house tonight so that she could clean up. We've been painting and rearranging the house in advance of a realtor coming by tomorrow. The first floor of the house was a total wreck when we left, and she promised that it would be spotless when we returned. (It was, yay!)

All 4 boys and I celebrated this Mandatory Boys Night Out by going to my parents' house. We stopped a Zaxby's on the way to pick up dinner and actually got to their house before they got home from work.

The boys ran through all the field events of the Grandparent Decathlon:

• search for and find "hidden" toys
• stare and pick at dinner long enough to get credit
• drink sodas from the downstairs fridge
• eat fudgcicles
• eat cookies
  
• play in the backyard
• take a bath in The Big Bathtub
• watch crap on TV

All this in 90 minutes or less, which I believe is a new world record. All that were left were the bed events: whining, jumping, switching, and falling asleep mid-sentence. The Bigs got to stay over for the night, but we had prepped The Littles beforehand so there was hardly any crying.

Then we stopped of at my in-laws to drop off some books, chat, play with the dog, and share some iPod figuring-out time. Finally, we drove through the bank to deposit my paycheck.

So it was 8:30 or so when we hit the road, and there was a huge thunderstorm over North Atlanta as we were headed down 400. Listening to the Hugh Hewitt show, we could hear the lightning get more and more frequent.

At about Windward Parkway we could begin to see the sky light up with each flash. Sometimes we could see the bolt itself; most times the gray clouds just turned orange in a certain direction. Jonah, sitting in the way-back, could see the lightshow through the front windshield and would call out "Wow!", "Awesome!", or "Cool!" with each spectacular display. Even Sam would say "Look" every now and then, and then use his Laa-Laa doll to point out his window.

In a car, an approaching storm, lightning in the sky, air cooling quickly, flashes of static on the radio. And suddenly I'm 4 years old again, in the back seat of my grandmother's car. I'm sitting in the floorboard playing; my cousin Michael is in the car. We're on a backroad highway somewhere in Alabama, probably coming home from picking him up to spend a week at our house.

I remember the feeling of tension and fear. There's a storm coming up behind us and the adults are trying to decide whether or not to leave the road. At some point a decision is made. We're going to try to beat the storm.

I stand up on the seat to look out the back window, and I see the sky. Blue above us, behind us are white clouds fading to gray, and then darker to black at the road. Lightning is there in the cloud, and sometimes we can hear the thunder from a close strike.

Faster and faster, we finally beat the storm as I watch out the back window the whole time.

It's a vivid memory, even now. The Crowded House song In The Lowlands always reminded me of it.

Judging from the cheers and chuckles coming from behind me tonight, it seems Jonah and Sam will remember this night differently.

Books

Tag, I'm it. There's this book meme going around, where bloggers pass along a set of related questions to one another. On one hand, it's like a chain letter, clogging up the Intraweb with useless personal information. On the other hand, it's nice to get to know something more about the folks whose blogs you're reading.

On the gripping hand, it's also fun. So, here goes.

1. How many books have I owned?
2,374, no wait, it's 2,378. Including textbooks. Actually, that's a lie. I have no idea how many books I've owned. It's a large number. Most of the boxes in my attic are filled with books, and every available horizontal surface in the house has a stack.

I like to buy books almost as much as I like to read them. And I do not get rid of books. So I have several hundred books that I've bought but never read and probably never will. Honestly, one of the things I most look forward to in Heaven is being able to talk to people about the books they wrote so that I won't have to read them.

My wife also has a large amount that she contributed to the family. So we have more than 1,000, easily.

2. What was the last book you bought.
Let me check Amazon. [time passes . . .]

I bought these for work and read all but the last one:

• User Interface Design for Programmers - Joel Spolsky
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability - Steve Krug
• Code - Charles Petzold
• Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master - Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
  

3. The last book that you've read.
I can't remember. How about what I'm reading now? Let me check around the house. I keep different books in various places. Did I mention that I'm ADD? [time passes . . .]

• Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman - a great book, even if you're not designing anything. It explains why the things around you cause you so much frustration. Hint: it's not your fault.
  
• Life as a Vapor - John Piper - my wife got it for me for Father's Day. I'm not normally into devotional books, but this one looks nice and easy.
• The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production - James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Danial Roos - I'm re-reading the first few chapters that deal with the change of the automobile industry from craftwork to mass production. Why? Because I'm a nerd.
  
• 50 Simple Steps You Can Take to Sell Your Home Faster and for More Money in Any Market - Ilyce R. Glink - because we're selling our house.

No fiction on the list, which is odd. We're in a bit of a fasting period right now, waiting for the new Harry Potter book. Frequent readers please note, there will be no blogging the week of July 16.

4. List 5 books that have meant a lot to you.

1. The Bible - duh. It only gets better with each read-through. I have an NIV Study Bible and the cheater notes are very, very helpful. To date the only books I have not read are Isaiah and Jeremiah, but I try to re-read Romans once a year.
   
2. The Collected Works of Craig R. Higgins, which doesn't really exist. But 5 years of weekly conversations ought to count for something.
3. Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis - good, basic theology that is readable and memorable.
4. The Vision of The Anointed - Thomas Sowell - helped me understand why I'm a conservative and why liberals think and act the way they do.
   
5. The Lord of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien - good clean fun.
   

Honorable mention:

• Starship Troopers - Robert A.( for Anson) Heinlein - ridiculously quotable. The guys in my Bible study always look at me weird when I use examples from it, but it works.
• Excluded Americans - William Tucker - Great book on how intrusive government policies screw up people's lives. Helped me realize just how much of a free-marketeer I really was.
  

5. Tag five people that haven't played yet.
Hmmmm. Since 5 is an arbritrary number, I'll arbitrarily change it to 6. Out of sheer, selfish curiosity, I hereby tag the following:
BoyGrandmother
PigInAPen
Georgia On My Mind
DAW
Splitcat Chintzibobs
Curt

However, why stop there? Let's twist this meme around. How about you, dear reader? Post in the comments section and leave your name and/or a link to your blog.