Conrad's Personal Weblog for Friends and Family
Overheard in the locker room at the Y this morning:
“I’ve finished the Japanese. The Spanish is next.”
“That’s something.”
“Yeah, it’s what I decided to do.”
“That’s one of those real things.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s the right way.”
“My father drilled that into me, and I’ve always tried to live it. Never cut corners on tattoos.”
I love that old Bing Crosby song.
A few of the things I am thankful for, in no particular order:
I am so confused.
Directions.
When we lived in Houston, my wife used to joke that if something wasn’t on the freeway, Westheimer, or Montrose, Conrad didn’t know how to get there. I could argue that if something weren’t on the freeway, Westheimer, or Montrose, then you didn’t need to get there, but nonetheless, if I had to, I could find my way around town as nearly every Houston street is laid out on a grid.
But streets in Louisville were laid out, I think, by cows. Or squirrels. Or something like that. There doesn’t seem to be any street that takes you from where you are to where you want to go: you have to go somewhere else first. You simply cannot navigate by the seat of your pants; for example, taking two right turns is usually equivalent to taking three. I’ve been here eleven years and still cannot reliably find my way around.
I have recently found a handy Python library that shows this problem quite clearly. Here is a plot of Chicago streets by their orientation. You can see how nicely nearly every street lines up on a north-south grid. Given an address in Chicago, it is straightforward (so to speak) to figure out how to get there.
Here is the plot of Houston streets. You can see the downtown street grid is a little off north-south, but still, most streets adhere to a orthogonal grid.
Now, here is what you get when streets are paved higgedly-piggedly. Little rhyme or reason.
It’s National Dental Hygienist Week, which happened to coincide with my regular checkup.
After the usual digging and scraping came the standard question, “What flavor do you want today? Orange, mint, or strawberry?”, none of which struck me as appealing.
But I have discovered that she keeps other flavors “under the counter” – if you ask. Today I got Nutella!
Life just gets better and better.
We went to the park today to feed the ducks.
I didn’t realize my hair was so grey
There were baby ducks, too.
Including this very little baby which kept wandering away from its parents.
For some reason, everybody called it “Conrad”. I don’t know why.
It was “Dress as your favorite animal day” at camp.
GC1, and GC2 in the bunny costume GC1 made for her.
A special day today – we were invited to three birthday parties!
The first was the saka dawa celebration at the Buddhist Compassion Center. Saka dawa commemorates the Shakyamuni Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death. This was a rather somber affair as birthday parties go, but the girls did get party favors and they met the Buddhist monks.
Then it was off to Indiana to another little girl’s birthday party. Her father had rented a large, wonderful water slide that was quite a hit with all the kids.
And there was cake, pie, candles – all the usual accoutrements.
Back to Louisville for a party with one of the neighborhood kids. He got a water rocket (which was fun for both little and big boys).
Finally, their father had a birthday today (actually tomorrow, but he’s on the other side of the Date Line). Of course, we could only talk to him on the picture phone, but I suppose it was the fourth birthday of the day.
I tried to take a picture, but hey, it was night
We took GC1 & GC2 out into the backyard this evening as night fell. There were lots of fireflies to try and catch, and soon (probably attracted by the fireflies) several bats appeared and swooped among us. A bunny rabbit was spotted out for late silflay, too.
Like a lot of people, we have one of those home phones that announces the caller id when the phone rings. Like a lot of people, we get robocalls.
“CANCER! SOCK!”
“POLICE! BENIFF!”
“UNASSIGNED!”
“ZERO!”
and so on.
Today the phone rang and it called out “AWARENESS!”. I have to admit I thought really hard that maybe I needed to answer that one.
NASA when I was a little boy. No kidding. Really.
You go to Houston, you have to visit NASA. I hadn’t been in many years, certainly not since they upgraded the visitor center (read: now you have to pay). There are more exhibits now, and an awful lot of staff – if you want to ride the elevator to the shuttle display, there are two people on each floor, one of whom pushes the button to call the cab for you. We found that a little excessive. It’s not really a white glove kind of place.
Us and the Mercury Redstone
We saw artifacts from the space program that we remembered as kids: an actual Gemini capsule and a Mercury Redstone like the one I watched launch Gus Grissom.
A better view of us
