Mysterious bones (Day 3 of vacation)

The Monday was a day of rest between the lake and NY. We did three loads of laundry and had planned to do something more productive like go for a family bike ride on the bike trail, or buy some supplies at Walmart and BJ's, but we simply didn't have the time or energy for it. Instead we spent the day eating and walking around our neighborhood.

What did we eat? Pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Actually, on the way home the night before, I called in an order at our local favorite Pizza Depot. We had it that night for dinner and then again for breakfast and lunch on this day. Chicken Pesto for the adults and cheese for the kids.

For our walk, I took out the wagon and Adam pulled Dova down the street. We were walking along and Adam was picking out leaves and grass flowers and putting them in the wagon. The wagon clinked clinked and went over what sounded like rocks, but Adam immediately stopped to see what it was. He picked up these white pieces and upon examination, they were bones!! It was definitely bones because on the underside you could see the porous marrow. We were definitely intrigued and Adam picked up the bigger pieces and kept them in the wagon.

We then stopped to play in the neighbor Joe's playground. The slide had just been put up and the kids had a blast flying off of it. When Joe came by, Adam immediately showed off the bones. Joe mentioned to Doug that cops were by just a few days ago looking in the woods next to the road. Doug wanted nothing to do with the bones but I felt that it was a such a cool treasure for the kids and they could also learn from them so I let them keep dem bones. When we got home, I carefully scrubbed and disinfected the bones and the kid's hands.

I still don't know what the origins of these bones are. They are way too big to be from a dog or other small wild animal, and just too creepy to think that they are human. Perhaps they are from the pelvis, in which case it would still be a pretty big animal. They were pretty much clean and appeared to have been there more than just a few days, although they were definitely in the road and not off to the side. The imagination can definitely go wild on this one.

Adam on the tube (Day 2 of vacation)

Here is Adam 3 years ago at age 2 and again this year.

Mom definitely was having a heart attack watching him being almost flung off the tube that she didn't get a decent shot of him in motion. Dad watched for his second round while I sat safe inside with Terry and Jenn getting their witness signatures for my legal docs.

Here are some shots of the boys (George and Joe) doing some water skiing as well:

The day was also filled with games of pickup sticks and bocce ball, which Adam was awesome at. Here he is throwing the pallino.

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Day 1 of vacation

August 19, 2006: Headed up to George's house around 1pm. Packing was a real chore with the crazy kids and then lunch got in the way as well. On the way past Pepperell Airport, we stopped and watch a planeload of skydivers landing. One guy did a loop-de-loop about 200 feet above the ground.

We arrived at George's the exact same minute as Jenn and family. They immediately headed out on the boat while Adam and Dova played on the beach, only to get completely soaked by rain a half hour later.

Inside, we played 4 handed cribbage, boys (Phil and Steven) against girls (Jenn and me), and the girls got skunked the first game. We were well on our way to winning the second game when we stopped for dinner (OK, we were only ahead by 2 points). After a dinner on the balcony and another boatride for Jenn's family minus Jenn, everyone settled down for a game of spoons with my "invisible cards". Adam didn't quite get the game, but he loved sitting on the same chair with his new pal Steven.

Our kids were totally wired that night and didn't get to sleep till after 11pm.  Doug and I were completely exhausted!

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Things that fly

I was asking Dova one night about all the things that have wings and she would reply yes or no. There were obviously funny wrong ones like frogs, fish, beds, etc. There were also tricky ones like ducks and airplanes. Then I thought for a second and realized that wings, by definition, provide lift for the purposes of flight and said "Just about everything that flies has wings." In my view, this includes helicopters, where rotor blades are simply wings that spin around (I can almost be called an expert since I did work in the rotors group at Sikorsky Aircraft for a year). Then she came back with, "But what about hot air balloons?" Holy smokes, she was right, Mom made the classic error in converse logic. I applauded her fantastic observation. This little 2 year old is a genius for sure!

Falling off the bed

This draft was originally from 3/1/05! One day I will be draft free and have nothing to blog about (not!). So here goes:

When you bring your first baby home, you often have preconceived ideas about how you will care for him, where he will sleep, etc. Originally I envisioned that Adam would sleep in a bassinet in our room for a few weeks until we moved him into his crib in his own room. I also thought that I would try cloth diapers, now that was funny! The very first night, I just felt that he was too cold sleeping in the bassinet and after a few minutes of crying, I brought him into our bed to sleep. Needless to say, he ended up sleeping in the bed with us, or rather me, for three months. It was just easier all around, I didn't have to check on him every 5 minutes and breastfeeding at night was easy (after the month of intensely sore nipples wore off). Doug preferred to get actual sleep at night, so he ended up on the futon in the next room. Now at the time, I didn't realize that newborn babies don't roll, so I was constantly afraid that he would roll off the bed. So this fear never wore off even years later, and I would sometimes have dreams that he was falling off the bed and wake up suddenly and try to "grab" him before he fell off. Even after 2 children transitioned safely into their cribs, I would still have these dreams. Most of the time, I would grab Doug instead, waking him out of a sound sleep, and immediately apologizing, "Sorry, sorry, I thought you were falling off the bed." So one night (probably in Feb 2005, Dova was 14 months old by then), I had another one of these dreams. I woke up and immediately lunged over my side of the bed. Doug apparently sensed that I was falling off the bed and then lunged over to save me, although I wasn't really going to fall off. I immediately came to my senses and reassured him, "It's OK, it's OK, I thought the baby was falling off the bed." He said to me, "But I saved you!" So that was a double save.

So I don't know whether I'm actually awake when I do the lunge, it could be "sleep lunging". Now I can add that to my sleep repertoire as well as sleep talking. Only once do I remember actually sleep walking when I was a teenager. I had wandered downstairs while my parents were still up and they asked me what I was doing downstairs. I was extremely confused and could only figure that I had been sleep walking. Thankfully, haven't done it since!

Footnote on the bed picture: This is our actual bed and Adam had arranged these foam shapes when he was just 2 years and 2 months old. His obsessive organization disorder (OOD as I've been labeled by friends) showed up really early in his life and is quite amusing to us all. Hmm, I think the red kitty should be to the left of the green airplane myself. Here is another picture just before his 2nd birthday where he lined up his cars in his crib before falling asleep.

Dova, on the other hand has absolutely no sign of this organization gene as she is the biggest mess maker I've ever seen. She can trash a room in 5 seconds flat and loses stuff left and right. If you ask where something is, her favorite reply is, "I don't know, I lost it!" with the cutest smile. The only thing you can do is simply cherish their differences and these precious moments.

Another puzzle

Here's another puzzle that I found years ago posted on a lab whiteboard at MIT.

Chicken McNuggets come in 6, 9 and 20 pieces. What is the maximum number of pieces that you CANNOT buy? That is, after this number you can buy each subsequent amount with combinations of 6, 9 and 20 pieces.

OK, this puzzle doesn't include the 4 piece meal which simply degenerates after 11 pieces (hmm, could be a hint?). To be legit, I think I saw this puzzle before they introduced the 4 piece Happy Meal in 1989. Good luck!

technorati tags:puzzle

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Dova has a picnic and sleeps in the yard

It was a beautiful weekend, but we forgot the camera until the very end (Angela without a camera? unthinkable!). We went to a pool party on Saturday and Doug took Adam to Tutto Italiano with some other friends on Sunday. Here are some pictures from last year's show. I tried to get tired, grumpy Dova to spend some time outside, and I finally convinced her by having a picnic in the front yard. We had chicken, grapes and yogurt among the nosey cats and hungry ants. I tried to settle her down for a nap, but Dad and Adam came home. Here is Adam showing off his hula hoop skills.

Finally she crashed and slept for 3 hours.

The lighting was just beautiful in these shots, so I had to post them.

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Mensa Page-A-Day Puzzle

I had gotten the Page-a-day Mensa Puzzle Calendar as a gift from a real Mensa member (I am too cheap to join such organizations myself). Usually I buzz through it quickly every day, but for some reason I had gotten stuck on this one from May 10th. It sat on my desk at work until just last week when I finally solved it. Perhaps I simply didn't have enough room on the calendar page itself to solve it, or I had too much work to do to spend more than 5 min, but more likely it was a fear that I had to perform quadratic equations or something. Speaking of quadratic equations, this funny segment from APM's Marketplace about comes to mind. Just listening to it made me cringe as I couldn't remember for the life of me what it was, only that it had ± and 4ac in it. Here it is to remind all of you who have forgotten:

for

In all my work experience, I hadn't even thought about the quadratic equation since high school. Is it really a necessary evil? Anyways, back to that pesky Mensa problem (hint, no quadratic equations are needed to solve it):

Eric is driving his car to the airport to pick up his wife. At his current speed, he'll arrive on time. If he drives 5 miles per hour faster, he'll arrive 12 minutes early, but if he drives 5 miles per hour slower, he'll arrive 15 mintues late. How far away is the airport?

I'll give a little prize to whomever solves this first (don't expect much, I mean little!). Post your answer in the comments and give me your email address if I don't know you.

There was another Mensa puzzle which I found had an error in it!

Kim has three vases in her living room, each containing the same number of flowers. Kim adds three fresh flowers to one vase, which now has two more than the new average. How many flowers were in each vase originally?

I gave this one to my friend, Jennifer, after giving her some post-op flowers and her response was:

yes - algebra while I'm recovering?

gee thanks Angela

of course, I laid in bed last night thinking about this...

And of course, Dave, the person who gave me the calendar, replied in all of 6 minutes.

X + 3 = 2 + (3X + 3)/3

X + 1 = X + 1

Any initial number of flowers will work.

Or, if you don't like algebra.
Adding 3 flowers will increase the average by 1, so the new vase will
always have 2 more than the average.

Those puzzle editors are a bunch of dopes! There was another minor error just last Saturday which they did fess up to on their website. We'll see what they say about the previous error.

technorati tags:puzzle, mensa

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How did I collect these Frappr friends?

Through some force unknown to me, people want to add themselves to my Frappr map. So go ahead pin me!

We won!! We won the Flickr Colour Contest!!

Imagine my surprise when opened my email to see a message from Quentin saying that he received a free month of Flickr Pro for his entries. Cool! I went to my next new message and that one said that I was one of the contest winners. What? You're kidding!! Then I went to the Flickr Blog post about the contest results and low and behold there are Adam and Dova busily coloring (or colouring) their Flickr entries (yes, that is the winner above!). Now, this photo was not even one that I thought would be a contender out of the (no less than) 39 pictures that I entered. I hadn't even titled this one! Between working and barely sleeping, here is the chronology of events that led to a complete obsession with this contest.

On July 19th, Flickr is down with these 2 circles and an invitation to enter a coloring contest. Bummer, I thought, a coloring contest? Not really up my alley. Quentin was online bugging me to enter. So I printed out a few sheets thinking that I would give them to the kids in the morning.

Flickr was up in a couple of hours and Quentin quickly posted his entry. It was really funny, so I was inspired to color my own. At this point, I didn't see any other entries up yet (could he have been the first?), but after about a 1/2 hour they started coming in.


This is my first entry. I scanned it, posted it and went to bed. I was really impressed by all the creative entries that were being posted so far and began thinking of cool entries that I could create the next day. The second circle of this entry reminded me of a moon, and I am moonfever0 as well, and wouldn't it be cool if I made the earth and the moon? Doug had fallen alseep in Adam's room, so my mind kept churning this idea around until I had no choice but to get up and head for the computer.


Not having Photoshop or Illustrator did not deter me from somehow figuring out how to get these graphics into the flickr circles using nothing but Paint. There is no such thing as a circular selection tool!! It wasn't easy and took me about an hour. So around 1 AM I posted my masterpiece. The next day, I got some great comments and it still remains on page 5 out of 54 of the "most interesting" entries. I'm still proud of that, not being a graphic designer and all, but just an imagineer.



The next morning, I set the kids into motion and the winning picture was taken in this session with their PJ's still on! They were happy to color first thing in the morning before getting dressed and eating breakfast. I went off to work and copied about 25 more pages for us to do in the evening.

While I was at work, a friend suggested that I use Powerpoint to create the images and I did another entry with Adam jumping in the circles. Still not simple to do, but slightly easier than Paint.


After I got home from work, the insanity started. It was a messy process (see Dova's hand) and luckily Crayola washable markers easily comes off the rug. After posting our crazy pictures, I even decided to play with fd's Flickr Toys and build a composite of all our efforts. I did the spider web one at work as well with a sharpie and highlighter. I didn't have a ruler to use, so I used the edge of a microtiter plate sitting on my desk.





Last but not least, my very last entry was posted 2 days after the contest. It was what I had intended for the 2nd circle of the first post, but for some reason couldn't do after many "practice" tries. I attempted to fit the entire rainbow in the circle, ran out of colors and continued in the next circle. Dova was doodling next to me as well, but by then I was all "contested" out.


Here are some things that I noticed about the contest.. Heather, a Flickr employee, added my winning photo to her favorites the day after it was posted. Nine of the other winners are also in her favorites (and she like Chihuahuas). Five of the winners were in her original Flickr lemons post. All of the winners were not "technically brilliant" (like the ones that I like below), but more "creative" and not over the top. I'm still wondering what it was about my photo that caught her eye, besides the cute kids. All this burst of creativity has really gotten me interested about graphic design and maybe taking a course in it. Alas, I will probably settle back down to earth and stick with making pretty dialogs in C# for work. Just as a side note on winning.. I really didn't need a Pro Account since I just paid for 2 more years last months (at 48 smackers), but I see no end to my Flickr addiction, so I'll take it!

Here are some of my personal favorites from the contest (2 are fellow winners):