Words Of Wisdom

If our society is set up to reward, not the people who make things, but the people who place bets on the people who make things, then eventually there will be more speculators than speculatees. Market forces, right?

I understand that I am fighting a battle that was lost 50 years ago. Values are not going to change; the underlying system is not going to change. One could, though, adjust tax policies so that the very rich were paying more of the crippling medical costs the very rich are creating by rewarding insurance and pharmaceutical companies for maximizing profit. Just a thought.

From Jon Carroll.

Way Neat

This guy does a new drawing every day. What makes it real neat is he video tapes the drawing and lets you see the creation as it unfolds (each drawing is between 1 and 2 minutes).

Hat tip to Ze who is also doing his own daily show.

More firsts

Today I fed Simone from a bottle (good breast milk, lovingly pumped) and it went pretty well. And just yesterday she ate her first solid food - just a little bit of sweet potato.

Things are changing fast.

Half a year old

Simone turned 6 months today. And to celebrate, she decided to roll over, from her front to her back. It happened very fast but I was lucky enough to see it. Mary and I pestered her for a while afterwards, but she couldn't quite do it a second time (she tried hard).

And I just received this great picture of her from Mary's mom:

6 months - 4 days

Simone will turn 6 months in 4 short days.

Her favorite new activity is drinking from a glass. More correctly put, gumming the edge of a glass, sticking her tongue in it/under it like a proboscis. She gets very excited, quivery even, when the given the chance to drink from a glass. We're thinking of doing without a sippy cup (no binky has worked well so far).

Simone is very close to rolling over, and her coordination has gotten very good. I still beat her in thumb wrestling and rock-paper-scissors, but she's getting better. She now realizes that a dropped toy hasn't disappeared from the universe, but is likely just out of sight, right by her head.

She's very interested in the world and in other people, usually giving her cutest smile anytime a stranger comes along. She giggles a few times a day, and has this odd coughing (sounds like the fake cough little kids do) when she's excited.

As it has always been, Simone gets very excited at diaper changing time. Heaven help us if we need to change her in the middle of the night because she'll wake up and start playing the "I'm so cute" card. It's very hard to not giggle with her (which would mean staying up for an hour).

She's still pretty thin - a number of other babies born around her time are 6 or 7 pounds larger than her (but they're gargantuan), but we're not worried b/c she's eating like a champ.

All in all, we're very lucky to have such a cute, healthy, happy girl.

YASOGO

Yet another sign of getting old.

We had a date tonight, the second since Simone was born (a lovely friend of ours offered to baby-sit. We stopped by Safeway on the way home to pick up some brussel sprouts for dinner tomorrow (they, like all other stores in the area have none). A bottle of wine seemed like an appropriate gift as we are going to Mary's folks place. When the scanning machine chimed to remind the cashier to check my id, I offered it. She stopped me by saying, "I don't need that, you're old."

Of course, she topped it by mentioning my gray hair a few sentences later.

Old I tell you, old.

Study on WIC's promotion of infant formula instead of breast feeding

I'd heard a lot of this information before from Mary (given her background, that's to be expected). But I didn't realize that WIC was so intertwined with infant formula.

There are so many reasons people should breast feed their babies, and I certainly don't appreciate the government influencing people away from breast feeding.

The article is here.

Fun Fun

I saw this way back when it was created, but now it's got its own domain name and everything. What's real fun is all the videos people have made. The first few are really fantastic.

Amazing what such a simple concept can spawn.

LineRider

Simply Beautiful

The 2006 winners of the fractal art contest.

A few months ago, Mary and I were at an art fair of sorts, and a guy was selling his fractal art. It was nice, but nothing like the images in the link above.

Unbelievable

Just last week I wrote about names. Just a couple days later I heard the worst name ever you could give someone:

Dick Hyman

Another Milestone Reached

Sigh....

Further evidence that I'm old.

Right now, as I type this, I'm wearing my leather slippers and white socks. Yes, at the same time.

In my defense, I was just wearing the socks b/c I'd taken my shoes off (we're a mostly shoe-free house). I was padding around the house in my socks, happy as could be. But then I needed to divvy up the beef, which is in the garage. I was too lazy to take my socks off, but I didn't want to get them dirty. Plus, the extra insulation would be warm (the garage is cold).

So I didn't plan to wear them together, it just happened.

Hmmm... that applies to getting old as well.

It's What's For Dinner

Mary and I just bought 1/8 of a cow. Actually, we bought 1/4 cow with Miles and split it. The meat is grass-fed and local and all that - everything we've bought from them has been uber-tasty, so we're just buying in bulk now.

We recently bought a freezer (kind of a necessity when you're going to buy 100 pounds of meat). The freezer is in the garage - I got to be Mr. HandyMan and cut out 3 feet of the existing shelving to make space for it.

I picked the meat up on Thursday and took stock of it today - splitting evenly so Miles gets his fair share. He wanted the ribs, and I didn't really care. Surprisingly, out of the 100 pounds of meat, only about 5 were ribs. Maybe I had visions of Fred Flintstone's rack of ribs in the intro to the show.

Anyway, 1/4 cow got us about 100 pounds of meat (from about 162 pounds hanging weight), 40 pounds of it is hamburger, about 13 pounds of steaks, 5 ribs, 8 pounds of stew meat, 7 pounds of soup bones, and the rest as a variety of roasts.

Now the trick is to make sure we actually eat it, and don't just hoard it like we seem to do with food.

Pacman funny

http://themot.org/gallery/d/58721-1/pacmanchart.png

s1m0ne

Just this week we were talking about names at work, and how people get teased or get nicknames.

Miles had a bunch (I can see for miles..., miles from nowhere..., kilometer, etc.)

Andrew didn't want to relive the horrors of his youth.

A favorite of mine was a variant of the one-armed/one-legged person jokes: What do you call a man with no arms and no legs sitting in a cafeteria? Trey

Of course Jeff had us all beat. His last name is Weener.

But, working at Intel, everyone thinks they're just clever as all get out when they call Simone s1m0ne.

They're not.

Ha, Math Humor for the Day

Check it out.

Happy Halloween

Simone did get dressed up for Halloween this year. We weren't really planning anything - she slept through the trick-or-treat festivities downtown. However, Mary and I thought it'd be nice to take a walk before the rain started.

My mom found a cow outfit a few weeks ago, and we figured it would be perfect to keep Simone warm and to dress up. Sure enough, it fit like a glove. Here are some pics from the Halloween night.

First she had to get a bath to be ready for dress-up.


Then she gets dressed up in her cow outfit.


And lastly, we're outside.