Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:36:22 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/ Palsgraf.com en-us http://www.palsgraf.com/images/logo.gif http://www.palsgraf.com/ jng@gvafirm.com http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=184 To the chagrin, I believe, of my wonderful spouse, I fixed the orange chair upstairs. It is possibly the most-hideous chair I have ever seen, and I think she had hopes that its formerly imminent physical failure would provide cause to remove it from the house. She did not, however, count on my (1) reluctance to throw out something that could still be salvaged or (2) my resourcefulness. The chair was saved with a combination of the power drill, some old twinish rope, and an old roped bed pattern from the first Foxfire book. Something like the pattern I used is here, although I went through the top, not through the sides. I drilled holes from top to bottom through the seat of the chair (the "frame") and tied a knot in the rope. I strung it through the first hole from the bottom, and tied a knot in the tailing end to keep all of it from coming though the hole. I pulled the rope across the chair and went through the top of the hole across from the first, pushing the rope downwards. Staying on the same side but going over a hole to the left, I came out the top and went straight across to the hole next to the one I started with. When I finished step 1, I had straight rope lines going across the chair, front to back. I tied off the rope with another knot after finishing. I started on the "side" of the chair next, going across to the other side, working the same way as before, only weaving the rope through the existing work done in step one. This created a woven rope seat for the chair, with squares about 3 inches to a side. I put the cushion on top, et voila! The chair is sound and firm again. It will survive to annoy Mac for at least another 30 years. It is also quite comfortable now. Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:36:22 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=183 I think I created a DIY Centralia yesterday. I stuffed the fireplace insert with some of our firewood, carefully stacking it inside the insert so as to take up nearly all available space. This was done atop a hot bed of coals. It ran from 3:15 pm or so until about 10:00 pm without needing a refill. After going outside at one point to make sure I didn't set the chimney on fire or anything (it resulted in a fair amount of steam initially, as our "seasoned" firewood isn't), I was reminded of nothing so much as Centralia, what with the smoke and the endless fire. Unlike Centralia, however, I viewed all of the above as a positive experience. Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:23:16 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=182 The vermicomposting is going swimmingly. The primary problem I have encountered is that there is a lot of moisture in the compost. The vegetable matter that gets dumped into the bucket is fairly wet, and the set up I have right now does not "breathe" as well as I would like. I may try to add some holes. Alternatively, I might look for a muffin fan to run to aerate the bins fro time to time. Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=181 Age has surely caught up with me. Ah...I've got it back. I just brought home an older computer from work. It has been wirelessed and attached to our home lan. All sorts of work-related, but unnecessary to home stuff has been removed. It runs like new again. Woohoo! In any case, I'm adding bookmarks. One of which is a certain relative's blog. Not knowing the URL, I search for "[handle] martian [xxxx] poison." Bingo. First result. That's just money. Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:24:15 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=180 The hydroponic experiment is moving right along. Radishes are more or less ready for harvesting. I may pull a couple for salads this weekend. "Salads" meaning that both the greens and the root will be eaten, mixed with some other stuff. I may pull some dandelion greens from the yard to go with them. Too bad Stacey's out of town...I bet she'd be thrilled to try it out. Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:50:23 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=179 I recently found a bottle of my apple wine (technically cyser) from January 2007. It is in the fridge and will likely disappear this weekend. I will make some notes on how it has aged (it's roughly two years old now). This is from the same batch of wine that vanished without complaint at Christmas last year. The peach and pear wines were racked twice and are close to ready for bottling and aging. The sour cherry wine (thank you Cousin Heather) is in the primary fermenter doing its thing. I'll probably rack it in about another week and a half. Next on the list will probably be beet wine, which will be the first attempt at a vegetable wine. I will not spring it on the unsuspecting, so no worries there. There may also be a stab made at mead. The current limiting factor for production here is mostly the fact that I have but one primary fermenter. This is not a cry for a second one, though. I have been working one roughly one batch (for me this is about 1+ gallon per batch) each month. I drink nothing like that much wine. Twelve to fourteen gallons a year is p-l-e-n-t-y, even factoring in gifts and such. So...November = sour cherry; December = beet; January = mead. My next, and more serious, limiting factor is going to be bottles. Mead and vegetable wines need to age longer than fruit wines. If I end up with roughly 18ish gallons of wine in storage at any moment, I will need something like 80 to 90 bottles. And a wine rack, but that's my problem, or at least my table saw's problem. In any case, I may need you folks to start saving wine bottles for me. When the sour cherry is done, I will have about 12-14 bottles of wine to deal with out of the three batches that are more or less facing bottling in the near future. I do not have that many bottles. If you have any, please rinse them carefully and store them somewhere reasonably clean until you can get them to me. Please keep in mind next year as the bounty of spring and summer is upon you, that something like red/black raspberry wine would likely be a fun project. Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:36:20 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=178 Saw the item below at Economist.com in the reader comments section related to the failure of the bail out of the financial system. I am not usually a "me-too" poster, but I think that this may be a long-lost twin of mine, in so many ways. Jonathan Swiftboat, whoever you are, godspeed: "If the rest of the world is so torqued about having the U.S. bail out the financial system to save the house of cards, then why don't they send us the money? I'm tired of holding the back end of the rope on the world's financial system. Screw it. Let it burn. I'm kind of interested in seeing how bad it gets. Oddly, I have a feeling that it will go much better for the US than it will for most of the rest of you in third world countries like France. Going to stop selling us stuff? Fine. Who will Japan and China sell stuff to? Will the Arabs eat sand? No. They need our money and access to our market. If America gets pneumonia out of this, everyone else will get SARS. I thought it was very interesting today that the dollar soared. Thanks for the vote of confidence. Currencies aren't national (or multinational) scorecards or anything, but I notice nobody was beating a path to the Euro. That's interesting since the things that are vaporizing are U.S. assets. We just bought several trillion dollars worth of goods over the last couple of decades and we financed it with paper. Sorry that it's worthless now. Whoops. I really like my Honda, though. No, you can't come and get it, either. The 7th fleet won't like that. When we get done with the MBS defaults (and the revision in the bankruptcy code that will allow real estate cram downs), you'll find that you own exactly nothing. Wait till round II, where we do the same thing with all the T-bills everyone is buying right now. Your national wealth will evaporate, your economies will explode, and we'll be fine. All we need to do is to kick out Chavez and we have all the oil we need for a long time. I'm guessing that China will get India to set up its call centers as debt collectors to call the US Treasury every 2 seconds to ask Paulson for their money back. Good luck with that. In the meantime, they can eat greenbacks. They should have a $1,000 worth for each of their citizens. Too bad rice tastes better and has more nutritious value. Cheers, rest of the world. Enjoy. Please try to avoid making Hitlers like Germany did in the last Depression. We'd just have to bomb the crap out of your industrial base all over again. Then we can ensure another couple generations of American prosperity by rebuilding Europe again while at the same time demanding (annoyingly) that you thank us over and over again for "saving you from Hitler and Stalin." Try to avoid being snide while you do it, if you could. It's embarrassing. Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:49:59 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=177 We are trying the "worms eating our garbage" thing again. Last time we had the wrong kind of worms, a too-damp basement, and lots of other problems. This time through, we got red wrigglers (mail order) and 2 on-sale laundry basket sized bins with attached, closing lids. One tub was selected, had holes drilled in the side, and was then placed inside the other tub (with no holes). Inside the first tub, we shredded a bunch of newspaper (Duncan helped out). We moistened it with water so it was damp, but not soaked. Vegetable matter trash was added. I threw in a couple of handfuls of sand and garden dirt to add some grit. So far, the worms seem happy. The trash isn't stinking to high heaven or anything, and it appears as though the worms are eating the trash. It's kind of cool. I have an old coffee can with a lid that I've kept upstairs for stashing waste. When it gets full, I take it downstairs and dump it in the tub and bury it under some of the newspaper. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress of the project. Total cost of the project has been about $20.00. Most of that was the worms and shipping. To those who ask, "Why?" well, it's kind of cool. Also, the compost, when fully processed, can help out our pitiful garden soil. Upon fully processing all the newspaper and trash, we will remove some of the worms, dump the compost on the garden, and start anew in the tubs. Also, it keeps stuff out of the landfill. That's sort of nice, too. Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:15:33 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=176 Started a batch of peach wine last night. I will advise on how that goes. Should be ready in about 12 months or so. I am thinking of doing another batch of apple wine, partly because I have enough stuff to do more than one batch of wine at a time and partly because I have a ton of sugar that needs to be used up. Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:53:01 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=175 I had no idea about this until now, but I am part of rock and roll history. There is evidently an underground, cult movie about heavy metal. The website is here. I have not seen the whole movie, and I do not believe I am actually in it. I was, however, at that concert. Wow. Those people look really eighties. Yikes. If someone wants to get a copy of the movie, I would definitely watch it, cringing the entire time. Fri, 02 May 2008 20:27:44 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=174 I remember finding an arrowhead at the valley when I was a kid. The road had just been gone over by the road grader and I just found it. I recall it being made from shale, which I thought was odd then (and now) as this struck me as a really stupid rock to make an arrowhead from. I spent the better part of the evening looking for pictures of a similar one on Google, to no avail. I've lost the thing somewhere and the memory is faint at this point. In any case, I then spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what tribe was responsible for the arrowhead before giving up and concluding that it could have been thousands of years old, possibly. This fiddling around then made me dig into the rocks at the valley (figuratively) since I have been curious about the possibility of finding fossils in them and whether I could therefore look for same with the kids at some point. No dice, apparently. The ground is pretty much made of the Mauch Chunk formation (the red shale) and the Pocono Sandstone formations, neither of which are known for having fossils. Such fossils as may exist can include plants, fish things and occasional amphibians, such as the tetrapod discovered in plain view in the Reading library (I think). I'm too lazy to include the link now, but it was just last fall (2007). The nifty rocks that look like lumps of various cobbles held together with mortar are "conglomerate" and are often found with these two formations. The age of them is approximately 100 million years prior to the dinosaurs. The Mauch Chunk formation is often found below the coal beds in northeastern PA and therefore predates it, and the Carboniferous period, placing it in the Upper Devonian some 380 million years ago. As we all well know, 380 million years is enough time to leach out pretty much all the nutrients. That's a joke, people. Check the centerfold here. I may spend some time looking for some native american relics at the state museum and possibly locally to see if I can find something similar to learn a bit about what I found. Learning about the rocks was also sort of interesting. Wikipedia has a nice map of the US for the Carboniferous period, showing the area as, essentially, a swamp. Things change, things stay the same, I guess. The short version of this is (1) no fossils at the big house, (2) the soil sucks, and (3) it used to be a swamp (and the parts that you don't need to be a goat to climb still are). Who knew? Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:39:08 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=173 Some advice for all of you: 1. Never move your office without arranging for internet. Especially when you have to, you know, rely on internet access for email and legal research and scheduling and billing and pretty much every other fucking thing you do. Grrrrr. 2. This website is slow, slow, slow. It pisses me off, too. Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:00:35 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=172 Today involved a trip to Hersheypark. We got pictures taken for season passes, which was not, per the elder child, a highlight of the day. We had to.......wait......and wait......and wait. Ugh. There was much gnashing of teeth during this process. Even the younger of the two children, normally the better-natured of the two for such things, had her moments. She did not put her best foot forward for the picture, as I had to hold her up by her arms as she wriggled to and fro for the poor woman who had to try to get a headshot of Gwen as she thrashed. Gwen finally relented, though, and the picture taking was out of the way for at least another year. [Clickit for more]. Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:48:14 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=171 I was looking for a project recently that would let me bribe the boy into rewarding behaviors. He refused outright bribery when I asked him to play with flashcards last fall, for instance. I turned for inspiration to my mom's all-time favorite for making kids learn math: math football. Kids like to play games. They like games that remind them of "fun" things. So, thought I, let me try to take this idea and twist it to my own purposes. So I went to Staples and picked up a colored foam board about the size of a piece of poster board. I picked up some blank labels (name tags) without anything printed on them other than a small border. They lacked anything like "Hi! My name is:" They were just the right size and they had a nice little border. I drew up a little game board with about 25-30 of these tags and linked them with direction arrows with white crayon and wrote on about a third of them "Draw!" On a couple of the rest, I wrote "Wormhole" and made them into "skip ahead" spots where you could move up 5-8 spots on the board (marked with special white crayon paths). A few spots were marked with "Black Hole" so they went backwards. Chutes and Ladders, anyone? The "Draw!" cards were worked on with the boy (for the "Draw!" spots). They are 3x5 index cards with a question mark on the top and the back has the goodies. Basically, it's like a "Chance" deck from Monopoly. These have Star Wars stickers on them and they are a mixture of good and bad. To wit: "You are tempted by the Dark Side -- lose a turn"; "Yoda teaches you about the Force -- move forward 3 spaces"; "You are trapped by Jabba -- lose a turn while your friends rescue you!" I was able to resist putting together my own cards: "Watch Leia's tits jiggle as she strangles Jabba! Move forward 2 spaces!"; "Imagine Jar-Jar going to Fargo and being put into a chipper-shredder feet-first! Don't move forward at all -- that's its own reward!"; and "Watch Anakin and Padme's 'romance' in the Clone Wars again - vomit so hard you lose the game!." We behaved, however. The board is also decorated a bit with a couple of Star Wars stickers. The cards were from Staples and the stickers were sitting in a drawer in the boy's room. Total cost of project was on the order of $5.00 in new cash. Otherwise it was just stuff sitting around, except for the dice I had to buy, which were about $10.00. Dice? What for? Why did you pay so much for dice? The dice are the point. The entire point. I got two complete sets of "AD&D" type dice at the local comic shop out of their cheapo, ugly dice box. 10 sided dice, 12 sided dice, 20 sided dice, etc. Two sets of each. Here are the rules: 1. Alternate turns. 2. First turn is addition. Second is subtraction. Alternate throughout. 3. Player 1 rolls the two d10 (or two d12, or whatever). We've been using the "tens" d10, so we get a problem like: "70+40". 4. If player gets it right, the player rolls a d6 and moves his game piece the requisite number of spaces. We use Lego Star Wars guys or die-cast Battlestar Galactica ships. 5. If you land on a draw card, you draw. 6. If you land on a wormhole, you move forward. 7. If you land on a black hole, you go backwards. 8. If a draw card makes you move forward or backward to a wormhole or black hole, you go where the wormhole/black hole takes you. If your "Draw!" result takes you to another "Draw!" you do not draw, you just let the other person go. 9. I contemplated a combat system if players' tokens landed on the same spot, but I wanted to keep it reasonably simple, but you could easily add one. I played this a few days ago with Duncan and he did 40 math problems. Not once did he whine. He did eventually lose focus, but no sooner than he would with something like Stratego or chess or any other game he will play. It's actually pretty fun. We've played it a number of times. He got bored with the d10 (3+6, for example) pretty fast. The d12 was more interesting to him until he discovered he could do the tens. I don't think we'll worry about multiplication just yet, but there's no reason why you couldn't use it. We may also start to use the dice in combinations (the d10 can be used to roll for 01-99, and we have two sets, so we could do up to 99+99). We're not going to get too crazy just yet, though. We are going to work on a pirate game next. When I was at Staples, I found a poster board preprinted with a pattern that resembles a rolled parchment/map. It's just screaming "pirate game" to me. Arrrrr! Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:12:21 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=170 "wen the sun trns to a red jiint it will swolo up mrcre and venes. erthes wotr will evprat wen the sun gits to cos! aftr the suns red jint time then it will chansforn in to a wite dorth. then a diing black dowth. then the sun nevr will worm Erthe a gen!" Translated: "When the sun turns into a red giant, it will swallow up Mercury and Venus. Earth's water will evaporate when the sun gets too close! After the sun's red giant time, then it will transform into a white dwarf. Then a dying black dwarf. Then the sun will never warm Earth again!" Somebody's kindergarten teacher noted that "Your stories are very interesting!" on his nonfiction writing book. Wait till she reads his cosmology primer for the early universe. We have good days and bad days sometimes. I'm pretty sure we're moving in the right direction here, though. I'm pretty sure she'll be interested by our version of "Chutes and Ladders" which is actually "Wormholes and Blackholes". More on that later. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:47:00 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=169 This has been all over everywhere, but for those in my circle who may not know, there is a free violin CD available for free download for free use. Did I mention it was free? I heard about it on NPR the other morning and just got around to downloading it today. The performer is Tasmin Little, who, in a masterstroke of self-promotion (which I admire greatly), performed three pieces, including Bach's Partita No 3. for solo violin, and released them to the interwebnetmotron for free. They are good. By all means download them and enjoy. I think this is an excellent idea, and I'd love to see more of it. I hope she makes a mint off appearances. Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:18:15 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=168 I attended a performance by the York Symphony of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony tonight. In the words of Queen Victoria, "[w]e were not amused." So how did it go? Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:11:08 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=167 Wee, the new cat, is healthy. No feline leukemia or whatever. She will be it soon. The vet thinks she's older than we thought - maybe 9-12 months. He figures she's just little. In any case, she looks to be with us (or anyone who wants a cat) for a while. Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:44:11 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=166 Duncan has been listening to the Economist on my mp3 player. I think it's just the novelty of the headphones and such, but he'll sit and listen to it a fair amount. In addition to reading to him about the genesis of the universe (from Stephen Hawkings' "A Brief History of Time"), I think he may be on the way to leading an abnormal childhood. I hope I'm not doing any permanent damage here. On an unrelated note, Duncan and I are building a ship from the Star Wars prequel movies. It is quite rudimentary, but we are getting to use the table saw. It cuts plywood like butter. It is quite fun. Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:26:39 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=165 In case you were not aware of this already, the Economist allows you to download an audio version of its paper as read by actual UK dwelling readers. Getting them (the articles, that is) onto an audio CD with my crappy tools was a chore, but I think I can swing it. I may simply use a dedicated SD card for my memory card based MP3 player. Fie on those who suggest that I need better media-handling tools. FYI, an entire issue runs about 8 hours. That'll work during the annoying NPR pledge weeks. In fact, NPR may really lose out here, especially if I can find some other audio news in MP3 with, perhaps, an easy way to auto-download and (largely) auto-manage them so that they don't get too old and stale. Again, those who suggest that I get different tools for this or who mention the words "podcasting" and "ipod" will be soundly whacked. Our ipod is for tv, not to lug around in my car demanding to be stolen just because I'd like to listen to news. Also, I despise (*despise*) iTunes for anything other than getting tv shows. It is a fine example of LCD (least common denominator) software. In the words of the Dead Kennedys, "the dumbest for the mostest." The audio fetish is is to some degree the fault of my sister for reminding me that things (such as fiction) are downloadable in audio format. The relative dearth of audio books at our otherwise reasonable local library was a contributing factor -- I got used to listening to them from that source (the first one is free...), but quickly got through all their decent stuff. BTW, if anyone has my old Rio, I'd really like to have it back. In many ways, I prefer it to any mp3 player I've had since, even the ipod. The ipod is nice and everything, but it is basically a video storage device for tv shows we like to watch. My Sansa mp3 player is sort of what I want, but it has too many geegaws and the interface isn't nearly as slick as I'd like it to be. By slick, I mean painfully and totally bare bones - I want play, pause, stop, skip forward, skip back, random/no repeat, and scan forward/back. That's it. No playlists, no nothing. Show me the title only. No album art. Don't make a big fat complicated database for files or loading the thing up. Make it appear as a hard drive and let me copy files manually. Somebody needs, desperately, to "Firefox" mp3 players. Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:10:12 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=164 For an example of what I've been reading lately, check this out. It's by the Freakonomics guy. I read the whole thing in one sitting, which is something that I generally do not do with academic economics tracts. It's full of useful information about the economics of hooking in Chicago. Of course, as with all things Levitt, there are broad economics lessons to be learned. Just because it's the underground economy doesn't mean that the invisible hand isn't at work. Demand shocks, efficiency pricing, creating markets...it's all in there. It is a preliminary work which needs some...er...polishing, but most of the meat is on the bones, including some great charts in the back. Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:02:09 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=163 Much to the annoyance of my spouse, I have been keeping three plastic bags filled with crushed aluminum cans on our porch. Whenever the car gets a bunch of cans filling the passenger side seat, I take them out and, generally with the help of the kids, crush them and stick them into a 5 gallon bucket. When that is filled, they get dumped into a kitchen style trash bag and tossed on the porch. I took in three bags today, which came in a 15 pounds. The scrap yard here pays 65 cents per pound, so the kids will split roughly $5.00 each. Merry Christmas, kids! You can make a living selling stuff to the scrap yard! Here's a shopping cart! As an FYI, our scrap yard will not accept scrap delivered from a shopping cart. It must arrive in a motor vehicle. Shopping cart delivered scrap is evidently too shady for them. Must be all the crackheads stealing copper pipes from vacant homes. Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:03:35 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=162 We have a theme this year of "cleaning devices for Christmas" in which Mom got a vacuum, Stacey (or Joe, perhaps) got a Roomba and a Scooba, and Joe got a shop vac. None of these were delivered by Santa, as all are currently in use at their respective locations. The shop vac was the newest addition at our house last night. This is all very Christmas-spirited and clearly romantic. Stacey was ecstatic about getting cleaning devices which she strongly suspects were really for me, rather than for her. It's sort of like when Homer gave Marge the bowling ball. Duncan had a bunch of fun last night with the shop vac in the basement, although he refused to suck up the (living) spiders. As they are "useful" (since they eat other bugs), he conscientiously objected when I attempted to get him to vacuum them off the wall. We also worked on a project of his devising when we were in the basement. He wants to build a "dam" box that he can use in the bathtub. This is essentially a framed square with a piece of plywood on the bottom. I'll need to find some material that he can put in the box to make dams with that will not plug the drain when it inevitably comes out of the dam box. The material will go in the middle (dividing the box into two parts) to make a dam. You can then pour water into one side and break the dam so that the water flows into the other side of the box. The cool thing is that he saw something like this in one of his books and decided that he wanted to make it. He is instructing me on how to go about it. He's helping out some, and I'm learning useful skills, like how to make accurate measurements and cut straight edges. Practice makes perfect. I'd rather experiment on this than with the shelving and bookcases that are planned as house projects over the next several months. By the way, making a box is deceptively hard when you suck at cutting on a straight line. You also begin to notice how things like "kerf" can mess up perfectly good measurements. No matter whether he plays with the box once, never, or lots, making the box is the important thing. He's not watching the idiot box and he's not playing video games. That's a plus in my book. Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:12:39 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=161 This morning I was 177.5. I'm not moving down anymore, and I apparently need to start exercising again. Ugh. Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:59:16 -0700 http://www.palsgraf.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=160 On Monday, Duncan was asked by the baby sitter if he was"doing good" at a game he was playing. Duncan evidently told her that he was "doing well." Fortunately, he did not explain that "well" is an adverb and "good" is an adjective. We haven't gotten there yet, but the usage is becoming a habit for him. Something we still need to work on is "good, better, best." I hear a lot of "goodest" which is a source of no small amount of irritation to me. Regardless of issues that remain to be addressed, Duncan is well on his way to being able to annoy and alienate all who come into contact with him. I will work on the all-important "don't hassle people about grammar" notion with him. It is indeed important for him to do things the right way, but at the same time he needs to realize that others are not as enthusiastic about the topic as Dad can be. Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:58:00 -0700