In Pajamas

The kids have been out of school for about two weeks. Today, the last two weeks were evident. BB didn't get out of his pajamas until after lunch. I didn't take a shower until right before noon. The family room looks like an abandoned beach filled with the detritus of consumer castoffs. We could start a cargo cult. It's hard when the weather is so uncooperative. It's cold and grey most of the time, and a real chore to leave the house.

BB has been busy with his sculpture-like set ups. After being introduced to MythBusters this week, he's taken to setting up anti-gravity machines and personal flight devices. The key ingredient is tape, lots of tape. There are strange surprises. The flight machine has a piece from a space shuttle toy, a small plastic fuel tank, sticking out like a phallus - fearlessly facing the future. These creations really are beautiful. They are totally nonfunctional and created simply to recreate the look of things.

LB has started talking even more, although one gets the sense from him that he doesn't have much need to talk to us. He's surrounded by five years of BB's toys and feels completely secure with his environment. I really see the differences in birth order right now. LB's world is just a lot more settled and natural.

For the new year, here's some German hippie music from Can.

Old reels

AO recently had some old 8 mm film transfered to DVD. There were reels from both sides of her family, going all the way back to the late thirties and ending sometime in the seventies. It cost an incredible amount of money for about 3 GB of film. Making it even worse, the local company doing the job mastered the DVD with some corrupt files and an insanely backward and confusing menu structure. I actually think they expected that customers would go to them to get additional DVD copies, for a charge. In any case, first I couldn't get the TS_Folders to copy to additional DVDs, so I ripped the original and went through conversions to AVI DiVX and then to MOV format using ffmpegX. We had a playable and burnable movie. The only trouble is that when we actually watched it about a third of the material was missing. I went back to the original files. In addition to about 30 chapters, the DVD was also split into three sections. Very confusing. I had neglected to get the last two sections. In any case, I used a different approach next, cracking the VOB files open with bbDEMUX. This is apparently a lot more difficult when you are dealing with audio. Since these had all been silent 8 mm audio wasn't an issue. I then authored a DVD of the cracked VOB files (now MPEG-2 files) with Toast. We now have complete copies with a much more sane menu structure. To edit this material in iMovie I'm sure we'll have to convert the mv2 files again, but at least we are able to send the in-laws off with watchable copies.

Moon shot

We have a new (the real thing) telescope, thanks to my in-laws. It's very cool. Now, if we could only have more than one clear night a week. Here's a shot of the moon taken through the telescope.

Bad weather

I drove through a snowstorm and then slushy rain to get home today. The big event on the way: a pickup truck with a ball sac -testicles - hanging from underneath. I almost made a profane gesture at the fool. What kind of moron goes to the trouble to attach something like this to their pickup?

The job interviews went as well as expected. Big name university committee was rather grim. Sub regional university was defensive. Other than interviews, it was nice to be in a big city for a change - alone. It was like I had a room of my own.

I'm looking forward to teaching again. Only four months until I'm scheduled to defend the dissertation. I'll be happy to be able to talk about teaching with some real examples, rather than the hypotheticals I've started to spout.

My oldest son spent two days watching Youtube starwars lego videos with his uncle. My youngest likes to hit his cousin, while complaining over sharing toys and territory. They are a month apart and so jealous of each other. The sound of 18 month-old discontent is like cats wailing at each other in the night.

Friday robot blogging

Jolly times

I'm getting ready to travel to a conference the day after christmas. I'm not thrilled about leaving the warmth of holiday family life for a hotel room in a major U.S. city, but work is work. I'll only be gone two nights and hopefully survive the couple of job interviews that I have.

AO's sister is visiting with her husband and son and we had friends in from another smallish midwestern city for christmas eve, so there were three 6/7 year olds and two one year olds storming through the house. It felt like a real holiday. I hope the years of BB being the only kid for christmas are past us.

The people visiting are Jewish, so they choose not to do christmas. I'm jealous that our tradition is so mainstream, but since I support AO's desire to create a good vibe rather than perfection for the day I count myself as one of the lucky ones. She's not running around in a holly leaf sweater pressing chex mix on her guests. We'll have no football games on christmas day, nor masses to attend. We will have lots of presents. My brother-in-law has also promised good star gazing tomorrow night and he'll set up the telescope he dragged on the plane with him.

BB chose to go straight to bed tonight. He believes in Santa.

Meltdown

I'll admit that our house is barely functional at this point. I've had close deadlines and now job interviews coming up. I've stopped cleaning, stopped doing dishes, and stopped making dinner. My current situation is not unlike my son's. He's lost three sets of mittens and gloves over the last week. Today he went to school with what we had left, a mitten and glove, and those didn't make it home with him either! The local red spot is out of mittens, so we stocked up on three sets of gloves tonight. BB also lost all of his Pokemon cards today. I'm afraid to even think about the scenario, but he took a bunch of cards loose in his backpack to school and they are not there now. Kudos to momma for trying to keep us all sane.

The holiday is coming and we'll have a full house for christmas eve. No grandparents, just siblings and friends. Bring it on.

Friday robot blogging

Waiting for Fedex

LB has passed his cold on to me, so I feel slightly feverish and very, very tired. LB's daycare also shut down for the week. We have someone coming in to look after him while I try to finish up my work and get ready for interviews, but today I wish I had the house to myself. I'd crawl into bed and not look up.

I'm proud of my imaginative older boy. For his class' christmas party, many of his friends were doing songs on their chosen instruments. My boy, not to be outdone, invented a song called "Rise of the Cobra," which he plinked out (improvised, mind you) on a keyboard. We need to figure out if he wants to be doing some kind of music.

I've got a refurbished iMac on the way, so we can give our poor, overworked MacMini a rest. We do too much music and photos to get by anymore with the Mini. Fedex's tracking is being less than helpful, however. Will it arrive today? Will someone be here to receive it? I've taken to reading "Fedex sucks" comments online. Pitiful, I know. But what's the use of having a tracking number if it isn't being tracked?

Kitchen sixties

This always seemed like the right anthem for the sixties: "I'm wasted, and I can't find my way home." There is no video of Blind Faith (Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood) doing the song. Here's a kitchen cover.