This was certainly a baseball weekend! Saturday night was Mercer night with the Macon Pinetoppers. Sunday we went to the Braves game, part of Kimberlie’s birthday present. On Sundays, kids are invited onto the field after the game to run the bases. They get a t-shirt and certificate and it’s free! On top of all that, it was kid’s day at the game with tons of stuff to do.
Enjoy the photos below:
This has not been a good month for technology at my house.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that my Macbook would no longer charge. Then I discovered that my cat had chewed through the power cord. No biggie — I was a little ticked off (especially since this is not the first time that its happened), but I ordered a new one from Amazon. Small setback. Nothing major.
On Tuesday, I we discovered that we couldn’t channel surf past channel 20. We technically only pay for channels 2 – 19 for a measly $16 a month. A long long time ago, when we had high-speed internet installed, the tech “forgot” to put the trap back on. The lack of this trap allowed us to go all the way up to channel 70. That’s $52.00 worth of cable for $16.00 a month. Do the math and that is $3168 for savings since we moved in. Of course, we are very dependent on those upper channels — CNN and History for me, TLC and HGTV for Kimberlie, and of course, Disney for the kids. Restricting us to local and public access channels really sucks!
We went tubing in Helen two years ago and had a great time. This Saturday, we decided to do it again. I wanted to take the small point & shoot camera and my beloved iPhone with me. I knew it was risky so I took a ziplock bag to keep them safe. On the way down the river, I took photos and tweeted and checked email and facebooked. Everything went fine. At the end, it was time to get out so I put the camera and phone in the bag and proceeded to get out of the tube and wade to the riverbank. The water was only about a foot deep so I put the bag in my pocket. All of a sudden, the river got really deep. The water was so cold that I wasn’t concerned with my technology. Somehow, the water seeped through the bag and ruined both: my $170 camera and my iPhone 3G.
Needless to say, this has not been a good month for technology in my house. It looks like we will be going with Dish Network in the very near future to get our channels back. And, since I’m eligible for an upgrade with AT&T, it looks like I’ll be getting the iPhone 4! To cover the costs, I’m dropping my $30 data plan to a $15/month plan. The only problem: there is a 3+ week wait to get the new phone. I am about to lose my mind here!
With Toy Story 3 taking over the theatres, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the toys from my own childhood. We recently visited the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia and found that they had many of the toys from my childhood in mint condition. Please forgive the photo quality. All of these toys were photographed from behind a glass case with horrible lighting conditions.
These Fisher Price blocks popped up around 1976 and I popped out three years later, so naturally I had a set:
I also had one of these, although it remained at my grandparents house:
I miss my Construx set. It was like an erector set for kids:
The Spirograph was awesome:
I have this exact set of Tinkertoys (on the right) in my attic:
My favorite toy growing up were Legos. I still have thousands of Legos in my parent’s basement. I wish I had room for them at my house.
I also had this Snoopy Sno-Cone machine. It looks like this one is missing a piece — the red shovel. The Snoopy on top served two functions. You pressed it down to push the ice through and you turned it upside down to squeeze the syrup through.
I had this Popoids before I got into Legos:
I still remember the jingle “Pogo Ball is what you call it”. And I had one:
I also had this exact Tonka truck. Tristan has something similar, but it’s bigger and the quality is much less.
SuperSoakers were the watergun that every kid wanted. I remember the SuperSoaker 50, SuperSoaker 100, and SuperSoaker 250:
My sister and I had lots of Little People sets. Little People are still around, though they’ve evolved over the years. She had the nursery set, seen below:
My sister was also very much into Barbies. She had the McDonald set seen in the next two photos. I’m trying to do whatever possible to steer my daughter away from Barbies.
So what does a museum do with surplus toys? Build sculptures of course! This is a real size sculpture of the arm/torch from the Statue of Liberty, constructed of old toys:
This is an life-sized elephant, also constructed from toys:
Who know’s what the next popular toy is going to be? Right now, “Silly Bandz” are all the rage. If you’ve looked closely at photos of my kids recently on this blog, you’ll see that they have an arm full. The museum even had some on display, and they’ve only been around a few short months!
Of course, this is not my complete “Toy Story”. I had tons of cool toys. But visiting the museum and watching Toy Story definitely brought back memories!
Two weeks ago, we spent almost a week in Philadelphia. I had a work-related conference across the river in Camden, New Jersey so I brought the family along to see a new city. We flew to Philadelphia, but decided to try something new (or old) and take Amtrak back to Atlanta. It was a great experience. If you ever get the chance to travel by train, take it! It forces you to relax and enjoy the scenery.
Since I’m so far behind on blogging, I’ve decided to just post photos from the recent trip.
One of the highlights of our recent trip to Philadelphia was visiting the Please Touch Museum. It’s similar to the Imagine It! children’s museum in Atlanta, but on a much grander scale. It is housed in a building that was constructed for our nation’s bentenial celebration in 1876. The grand building looks like it belongs on the mall in Washington D.C. You would never guess that it has a museum for children inside.
Philadelphia had many first class attractions. I only wish we had arranged to stay longer and see more of them.
In case you haven’t noticed, I have blogged nearly every day this week. And some days (including today), I have blogged multiple times. I still have lots of things to post, including Mackenzie’s 3K graduation from last month. I think I’ll go have a cookie now.
If it’s not obvious, I’m clearly avoiding school-work by blogging. (I have two more projects to turn in before Tuesday. One is 75% done and I haven’t started the other.) I’m also considering promoting this blog more to my friends, etc. via facebook and twitter, so I need to populate it with lots of content.
Next week, I’ll be blogging live from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Camden, New Jersey. Stay tuned . . .
This past Saturday, we skipped town and day-tripped up to Stone Mountain. No t-ball, yard work, chores, or errands. I loved the ropes course (Sky Hike), although it was one of the scariest things I’ve done in my entire life. When did I become afraid of heights? If a picture is worth 1000 words, then you have a lot of words below:
Earth Day is right around the bend, and everyone seems to be on the green bandwagon lately. It seems respectable to want to save the planet. I’m all for it when the price is right. I’m just not going to buy a “green cleaner” when the regular cleaner is half of the price, especially when the regular cleaner has been used for generations without the earth imploding. I did make a choice to buy a vehicle with better gas mileage, although that was more for financial and political reasons, so the environmental reasons are just icing on the cake.
Businesses are jumping on the bandwagon as well. Hotels don’t want to wash your towels and sheets every night, but again, that’s probably more for financial reasons than for environmental reasons. Other business decisions, such as recycling are practical and noble. There is, however, one place where businesses should not “go green”: the restroom.
My biggest pet-peeve about the whole thing is when paper towels are eliminated in favor of the air dryers in restrooms. The paper towels that most public restrooms have are the brown ones anyway, made from previously-recycled materials. So by providing them, you aren’t completely anti-Earth.
First of all, they are loud and they scare the crap out of small kids. Trust me, I know. If the kids were to dry their hands before using the restroom, it would make them wet their pants. It’s a good thing they wash their hands afterward.
Yesterday, we visited Stone Mountain and Tristan had an accident. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say that the accident was so bad that I lost my lunch during the clean-up process. That is not an exaggeration. Some messes can not be cleaned up with cheap toilet paper. When we left, that restroom stall was thoroughly violated. I honestly would have cleaned up the mess had paper towels been around. Unfortunately, some minimum-wage employee had to do it.
I was once, in my grocery store days, the guy who had to clean up comparable messes. I always wondered how someone could “violate” a restroom like that. Now I know. In this case, it’s because someone tried to go green.
I had the priviledge of accompanying Tristan’s kindergarten class yesterday on their annual field trip to Dauset Trails. I was initially hesitant about going becuase I’m swamped at work, but I decided that being at my desk for those four hours wasn’t really going to put a dent in the mountain of work anyway. There’s more to life that technology. Right?
If you noticed in the pictures, Tristan is the star student for his class again!
That’s enough about Tristan for this week. I promise that the next blog post will not be about him!
I took a little heat, on Facebook and at work for the last post. I certainly wouldn’t have posted that video on YouTube if Tristan had been injured. So to make amends, here is a typical Saturday in the life of Tristan.
10:00 AM: T-ball game. Tristan batted twice, scoring once.
5:00 PM: After riding 1.5 hours in the car, then sitting through a long country wedding, Tristan dances with his sister at the reception.
7:30 PM: After eating a fabulous amish dinner at Yoder’s, but right before feeding a goat, Tristan kisses the goat.
Don’t worry, Sunday will be just as busy. We’ll relax next weekend.
My Latest Run
