Again, it’s been a long time since we’ve updated this. Life gets pretty hectic, and some things fall by the wayside.
The kids are doing great, and talking up a storm. Whoever calls the house these days usually gets the ‘treat’ of getting to talk to them on the phone for as long as they want to listen. Its cute to us, but probably not so cute to the sales people who cold call us. No, we don’t really do that. But we should.
Reece loves to play on the little V_Tech computers we bought them for Christmas. He can count (usually misses #4 for some reason), and knows a lot of the letters by sight now. He’s better at some of the games than I am already. But I still kick his but on the XBox. No mercy!
We got out of our routine for a few weeks around Christmas and New Years with parties (birthdays x 3) and holidays, and three of four colds that ripped through the area and made everyone miserable. I was going to say this is the first week since Thanksgiving that everyone has been healthy, but there’s a distinct possibility that the kids aren’t feeling well tonight. They were asking to go to bed at 6:45 (a half hour early), saying Elmo was tired. And there was all the poop today. That might be another indicator.
We try not to watch a lot of TV, but the kids do love Sesame Street as long as Big Bird and Elmo are on all the time. And they like watching Daddy’s Fire Truck show, an old drama I DVR from one of the Retro networks called “Emergency”. My mom and I loved that show growing up, and unlike a lot of old shows, it hasn’t aged badly. We’ll watch an episode on Saturday or Sunday morning sometimes.
Work is going well for me, but extremely busy, and will stay that way until at least the end of July as I am working on a big project. I’m learning a lot, but this is definitely the most high profile project I’ve ever worked on, and the pressure to get it right is going to be enormous by the end of it.
Lisa is still working as well, and actually added a few more hours per week (now 3.5 days instead of 3). She’s dancing a lot and going to another dance competition this weekend.
I finished writing my latest novel on January 1st, and have been going through my old writing and finishing off some short stories I’ve had laying around before I jump back in to a major effort again. I’ve been slowly editing it as well, and trying to find a publisher / agent to help me market it, but that, I hear, can be as much work as writing it in the first place. I’m not holding my breath at this point. Once I get this edit done on it, I may circulate it a little bit to see if people like it. It’s going to take me a month or two to edit it at the rate I am going right now though.
I haven’t done much reading lately, so no reviews today. We also haven’t seen any really good movies lately either. We’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica, House, CSI, and a pretty funny show on the CBC called Being Erica.
I started working in the garden on Sunday, pulling weeds and planning the vegetables for this year. But it snowed here today, so I might still be a little early. Only in the Pacific Northwest do the weeds grow bigger in the winter than in the summer. What a mess.
Anyway, that’s about it. I’ll post some pictures tonight too if any of the 300+ on our camera turned out. We’ll soon see.
Just a quick update on the weather.
We seem to have escaped the flooding in our neighborhood, though I was getting very concerned yesterday. Down river from us, close to Puyallup and Fife, they said the Puyallup River was 6 inches from going over the top of the levees. We have a lot of friends living in those areas, and some, I think , were evacuated, but I haven’t heard officially.
The USGS site today listed the previous record for January 8 for the flow rate on the Puyallup River at Alderton (just a mile from Sumner and 2 miles from my house) at 8550 cubic feet per second. The actual rate today: 53200 cfs. 6.5 times the previous record. That’s a lot of water. It’s the biggest recorded since 1917. I guess that is the hundred year flood.
Anyway, the rain is slowing down, and the freezing level has come down the mountain from 9500 feet to 2000 feet, so the snow melt has stopped. The river has crested, and the worst seems to be over.
Of course, the Sounder (the commuter rail system) wasn’t running this morning so I drove in. Not too bad considering everything going on. We’ll see how the trip home goes this afternoon.
I posted some pics earlier today, so i guess this counts as my third post of the day, which brings my daily average for the month up to … .5?
Anyway, the last few weeks have been rather hectic.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving (American Thanksgiving, that is) I went fishing on the Columbia River with my father-in-law Roger, and my brother-in-law, Eric. I drove out to Eastern Washington on Friday night, and arrived at Eric’s place around 11:00 PM. I made the necessary mistake of stopping at Starbucks in Ellensburg, Washington to get a cup of coffee around 9:15 PM, and therefore couldn’t sleep all night. We were up at 4:00 AM to get to the river. We stopped at McDonald’s on the way there for more coffee and a biscuit. Those of you who know me will be shocked by that admission. I haven’t eaten at McDonald’s since 1997, and had a very long streak of avoiding that place that I cherished. I hope I have now started another steak.
It was frightfully cold, but a beautiful day other than that. The stars were out, the coyotes were howling, and at sunup, the fish started biting. I landed a Steelhead at 7:15 AM, and Roger got one at 7:25. We took to the boat around 9:30 and Eric pulled in a Pike Minnow (aka Squawfish) and a Steelhead later in the day. We left the river around 2:00, drove back to Eric’s, gutted and filleted the fish, and I headed home, arriving around 7:15 PM, just in time to see my kids off to bed. I slept well that night.
The following weekend, Lisa did a dance competition up in Everett, WA, and I was left with the kids for pretty much the whole weekend. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. They tend to not act up as much when it’s just one of us at home. Not sure why that is.
Thanksgiving weekend we went to Lisa’s parent’s place for Turkey Day, and came back late at night, did our Christmas shopping on-line on Friday, and tried to take it easy. Unfortunately, while playing with Lorelai on Saturday morning, I took a spill and re-dislocated my right shoulder, something I’ve done four or five times in the past. This one was pretty bad though and I ended up in the ER on Saturday afternoon verifying that I had gotten it back into place correctly. I had, but it was still pretty sore for a few days.
This weekend, we took the kids to the Aquarium in downtown Seattle, and they had a blast. We got pretty tired chasing them all around, but they loved to splash in the tidal pool displays where you can touch the starfish, and it was fun to watch them point at all the fish. We also had lunch at a place called the Fisherman’s Bar and Restaurant down on the pier, and they gave us a free pass to the indoor carousel next door. The kids loved riding on the horsees and I had to pry Reece’s fingers loose when the ride came to a stop. We met up with Lisa’s sister Katy there and she took some great photos of the kids. Lorelai loved running around the pier with her (as you can see in the photos).
In other news, my work is going very well. I’m working on a really big project that is very high profile in my industry. It’s going to be a career maker if it works and I’m learning a lot about brand new technology that hasn’t even been released to the public yet, doing stuff I never thought I’d get into, and really enjoying it.
My writing is still going really well too. I’m not sure if I will meet my goal of finishing the story I am working on by Christmas since I don’t know how it is going to end yet, but it’s nearly two hundred pages long at this point and the words keep coming, so I’ll keep typing until they don’t.
My reading list over the last few weeks has included:
The Sunrise Lands (SM Stirling) – Book 4 in the Change series. Pretty good, but not as good as book 1
Down the Long Hills (Louis L’Amour) – An old west yarn about two kids lost in the prairies. Pretty good and a quick read
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King) – I loved this book about a little girl lost in the woods of Maine.
The Appeal (John Grisham) – Probably my least favorite JG book I’ve ever read, and I think I’ve read all his fiction.
Latest Movies
Definitely, Maybe -Yes it’s a chick flick, but a good one. I’ll give it 4 stars out of 5
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – not bad. I can see why it’s so popular, but the soundtrack is pretty bad.
First Snow – Not bad, but not great
Four Brothers – Horrible movie. Skip it
Casino Royale – Had to watch this before we went to see Quantum of Solace (which we still haven’t seen due to my shoulder injury.) Loved this movie.
Atonement – Pretty good movie, but a little hard to get into at the start
The Machinist – Freaky movie. Christian Bale dropped to 121 lbs to make this movie and looked really disgusting. The guy gets a little too into his part for my taste.
The Incredible Hulk – Actually a pretty good flick if you accept it for what it is, a comic book on steroids
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – A complete waste of 2 good hours.
Run, Fat Boy, Run– Not bad, but not up to my expectations for Simon Pegg
We took a trip to the Seattle Aquarium yesterday, and then had lunch down on the pier with Lisa’s sister Katy. Here are a few photos from the day.
Hello, Everyone! It’s Lisa with a guest blog entry. Joe’s sister, Cindy, purchased a new camera and was kind enough to give us her fabulous “old” one. I think she got tired of our slow fuzzy pictures taken with our old digital. I don’t blame her. I did, too. Now I actually enjoy taking pictures and am getting MUCH better shots. So, watch out – we may now overload you with pictures. Ok, promises, promises. I recognize it is one thing to take better pictures, and it is another to actually stop the laziness and post them. Well, for now here are a few pictures of two great fall activities of late…
Apple Harvest – Eastern Washington 2008:
That last one is of cousin Victoria and Grandpa in the orchard. Note to my family members — I took a number of family pictures. Check out the Flickr site here http://www.flickr.com/photos/taleof2/sets/72157608215328819/ for the entire group of photos. Mom, the pictures of your flowers can be found there as well.
Reece and Lorelai at the Pumpkin Patch:
(This is just a selection the full set can be found here http://www.flickr.com/photos/taleof2/sets/72157608216411179/)
So, I don’t know how this happens, but every time we bring out the camera, my mother disappears. We haven’t got one shot of her with the kids. Hopefully, someone else got some.
Okay, I admit it, I’m not the most reliable blogger, and I’m always full of excuses. Another month has gone by without an update, so I beg your forgiveness, we’ll see if I can get you caught up.
In mid-September, we took the whole family for a trip back to see my folks in Canada. We had planned for this long trip for months, and though we looked forward to being there, we were filled with all the fear out hearts could hold when we thought about the actual trip.
It’s about 45 minutes from home to the airport. It’s a 4 hour flight from Seattle to Detroit. Then it’s a two hour drive from the airport to my parent’s house. Combine that with getting through security, and getting a meal at SeaTac, and getting a rental car and getting the child seats installed and getting over the border, it makes a for a very long day.
We also had one of the bitchiest TSA agents in SeaTac I had ever come across. I try to put a smile on my face when I go through security, but the system they have set up there must have been designed by complete and utter morons. You show your id and boarding pass to this guy, and 15 feet further on, you have to go through the whole process again while your carry-on baggage goes through X Ray. And if your passes happened to get into the little tray the give you to put all your crap into while you’re struggling to corral 2 little toddlers, you get an earful from the TSA, adding to the stress of an already stressful event. I was half tempted to hand one of my kids to her and ask her to hold on while I found my passes.
After a quick lunch of Burger King (yuck in the worst way, but it was the only option in the decrepit hole that is the SeaTac South Terminal), we boarded the flight and hoped with all our might that the kids would fall asleep at some point during the trip. No luck.
While they weren’t the worst I could have imagined, they did go a bit stir crazy and I swear Reece was trying to tunnel out of the plane somewhere over South Dakota.
We spent four full days at my folks house, which doesn’t seem like a long time, but we packed a lot into those days, and saw as many relatives as we could. The kids just loved all the attention, and went into major grandparent with drawl when we got home, and were real little pains in the pa toots for days.
Reece came down with a cold on the third day, and Lorelai followed the next day, and it hit me the day we flew home, which made the airplane ride even more fun.
I ended up staying home from work the day after we returned as I was so sick I had trouble getting out of bed and couldn’t talk for all the coughing. Luckily Lisa didn’t catch the cold / flu or whatever it was, and was able to get everyone else healthy again.
We’ve been trying to get back to our normal routine the last couple of weeks, though this weekend we took a trip out to Lisa’s parents’ house to make apple cider and see the whole family. I think we had 15 kids running around at the peak of the activities yesterday, and by 9:30 PM, everyone was in bed, exhausted. Kids were passed out on the floor of the living room as the rest of us adults talked about how George Bush had screwed up the country the last eight years. At least that’s what I was talking about. I think the rest were talking about something else, being the Republicans that they are.
The cider is really good light and sweet when raw, and event better when cooked with cinnamon sticks and cloves. That’s an awesome treat on a cold day.
Those have been the big events, but things seem to be busy every day. I’ve been writing in every spare moment, and my latest work is closing in on 100 pages, and though I’ll have to do some heavy editing, I really like how it’s going.
I haven’t been reading quite as much these days as I’ve been writing on the train to and from work. I did read a book ‘Playing for Pizza’ by John Grisham in a single day while at my parent’s place. Not a bad read, perfect for a plane ride or a lazy day in a recliner.
I also read ‘Wizard and Glass’ by Steven King, the fourth book in The Gunslinger Series. Its a long book, but a good story.
As for movies, we watched ‘Smart People’, (2.5 Stars, not bad, and not as depressing as it could have been) and The Last Legion (1 star, really bad movie) and ‘A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints’, (2 stars, a ratty narrative, all torn up and hard to like).
Lisa has been teaching again at one of the local universities, so that has been taking up a lot of her spare time. Building up a syllabus, grading papers, reviewing lecture notes all takes a lot more time than you’d think.
The kids have been pretty good, though the aforementioned colds have been a royal pain. Kids get really needy and regress in their independence when they are sick, only now they are a lot heavier than they used to be, and carrying them everywhere is back breaking. Lorelai has been getting very precocious, if that’s the right word for not listening to anything we say, and fighting everything we do.
They’re picking up a lot of words now, many just after hearing them a couple of times, like ‘Yahoo’ and ‘apple’. They’re pretty shy at first around strangers, but if you offer to read to them, you won’t get them off your lap, unless they get up to go get another book. Lorelai’s favorite word is ‘read’, which she says over and over again until you give in. It was cute, at first.
The next couple of weeks should be a little more low key. It’s time to clean up the back yard and to clean up the flower pots and vegetables killed by the cold weather. It shouldn’t take long, but it’s just a matter of finding a couple of hours where the little munchkins are gone or sleeping.
Lisa and I are also happy to announce that we will have a new arrival soon, in our house. No, not more kids. Furniture. Real furniture. We finally broke down and bought a new couch and two chairs (with ottomans!) for the living room, and we’ve found an decorator who understands what we are looking for and actually has taste (we think). We’ve been in this house now for 3.5 years, and except for a little bit of bedroom furniture, we haven’t bought anything for the down stairs. It’ll take us a while to finish, as we’re trying to do this on a budget, but get good stuff at the same time, but now we will be able to have more than 3 people in our living room at a time without having people sitting on the floor. We can’t wait!
Okay, we have a lot of new pictures to post, and I hope to get that done this week. And again, I’ll try to update this more frequently.
I have a simple solution to solve the credit crisis, the national debt, speculative trading and the energy crisis. A very simple thing: a Speculation Tax.
A what?
A speculation tax. A sin tax on market speculation. Treat speculation like cigarettes, alchohol and whatever other sins the government taxes. Tell everyone they’re bad for you, and that second hand debt will kill you just as fast as your own debt so your children pester you to stop using your credit cards… but have it kick in for everyone. Including the big boys, like this.
If you want to make a short sell on the market, or trade in futures commodities like oil, soyabeans, corns, wheat, natural gas, derivative debt, whatever, anything that doesn’t involve a long term buy and hold in a company you’vre done research in and believe in thoroughly, then the government takes a non-negotiable, non deductible, no exemption for being ‘Native American’, over-65, under-18, minority, disabled, rich or poor, 1% tax on every transaction as it happens, and immediately applies that money to the national debt.
So if, as happened today, a bunch of nervous ninnies went and started selling shares in companies they owned for 45 minutes because the computers told them the fundamentals didn’t look as good as they did a few minutes before, a penny of every dollar bought and sold on speculation would go to the government until the debt was paid off.
So if billions of dollars a day are changing hands on the oil markets, then a few hundred million of that would be diverted every day to pay down the debt.
Those who think they could still make money speculating, would still do it, and the debt would slowly dissolve into a sea of capital pulled out of artificially created markets and back into the hands of the government, paying down the debt.
Those who didn’t want to lose 1% every time they made a transaction would look for good, long term products to invest in (solar, wind energy, clean coal, Mars exploration), make a determination of how much risk they were willing to stand, and invest more wisely. People spend more time evaluating products to whiten their teeth than what the companies in their mutual funds do. That’s just stupid.
The influx of cash back into the US government would loosen the credit markets as the US needed to print less money, and the return on T Bills dropped. Private companies looking for financing to expand operations would have better access to cash since the government wouldn’t be competing head to head against them.
As the debt shrinks, less tax is needed to pay for the interest on the debt, and lower taxes spur companies to remain in the US, where regulations may be tighter, but education levels are still relatively good.
The excess from reduced debt service would increase the flow of money into schools and infrastructure (bridges, roads, hospitals, mass transit, healthcare for everyone) to help boost productivity and long term goals.
And on the consumer credit side, the tax would apply to all credit card purchases. We all know credit is not the same as cash. Credit cards have been racking up 3-5% fees on all transactions for years. Now we just need the government to take their 1% off the top, and force the companies to fully disclose it. Pay cash, you pay this much. Pay with credit, you pay 1% more. Smart consumers would switch to cash almost immediately, and the credit card industry would be lowering their rates to compete with cash.
I’m not quite sure how to get this plan out there, but if anyone has Barak’s ear, tell him about this, and let’s see if the idea works.
Joe Beernink 