It has become my heart's desire to participate in a flash mob like this:

Yesterday I had my first experience teaching kids Scratch, free, downloadable software created by MIT that allows kids to create interactive stories, animations, games, etc. and share them online. It's pretty neat in that it's essentially introducing them to computer programming, but in a way that's visual and easy to understand.

The class was intended for kids entering 5th and 6th grades, but somehow some younger ones snuck in (one was even going into 2nd!), making for quite the squirrely experience, but they did well. It's really amazing how quickly they could absorb some of the more complex ideas at so young an age.

For your enjoyment, here is the gallery containing some of their projects. It's amusingly crystal clear at this age which projects were created by boys and which by girls. There are two more classes scheduled, so more projects will be added later in the summer.

I also tried my hand at creativity prior to the class, and put together this little number.

Ordering pad thai at Pei Wei to go garners you almost twice as much pad thai as if you had eaten in the restaurant, so you can have it for two meals. Just so you know!

Jonas was offered a job this morning and accepted. I'll share more when all the details have been confirmed.

Can you believe that Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still functional?! They landed on Mars in January 2004 and their missions were expected to last only a few months. They have been tooling around the Martian landscape for 5+ years! Just recently, Spirit has gotten itself stuck in some soft soil, so its immediate future is uncertain, but I can't imagine what the rover team must feel like, having a project like this succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

I just recently learned that my 6th grade English teacher, Mr. Millimaki, has died. Sad, he was only 66. He was one of the most memorable, witty and congenial teachers I can remember from my childhood. He seemed quite short (but maybe that's because I was 11 years old), but he often sat on a tall stool and wore a horseshoe moustache.

That year we read Where the Red Fern Grows. It seems a little funny looking back on it -- he read the entire book aloud to us while we followed along in our own copies. Were we too old to be read to? Is anyone ever too old for storytime? I enjoyed the book, but the most singular thing that stands out in my mind was that it contained the word entrails, a word I had never encountered before. And funnily enough, every time since then that I see the word entrails I think of that book and Mr. Millimaki.

Here he is, the goofy guy on the far left, scanned just for you from my 6th grade yearbook:


(click for larger)

Somebody shoot me if I ever purchase a battery-powered vehicle or scooter for my child. My own two feet were good enough for me when I was a kid. It's no wonder this country has a obesity epidemic.

When we were kids, my neighbor had what I considered the neatest toy ever. I'd like to find out what it was called or even see about acquiring a retro copy. Has anyone ever seen anything like this?

First, it was a track you put together -- the sort you could set up for race cars, except that you could only set it up in one compact, maze-like configuration. The tracks were wide with grooves that would guide the vehicle in the right direction. The battery-powered vehicle that traveled on the track was, in its simplest form, just a big yellow-orange(?) rectangle. On other parts of the track were 4(?) "vehicle toppers." When the vehicle would pass under one, it would snag the topper and thus turn into that vehicle -- the toppers I can remember for sure include a dump truck, a bulldozer and a backhoe.

Completing an entire circuit of the track involved the vehicle picking up a quantity of pellets as a dump truck, dumping them somewhere, transforming into a bulldozer and pushing them somewhere else, transforming into a backhoe and dumping them back into the original receptacle, then turning back into a dump truck and starting over again. It would do this indefinitely, with no involvement necessary on our part whatsoever, at least as long as it had battery power.

I'm not sure why this toy fascinated me so much, possibly because we got to play with it so rarely. It was terribly clever for a toy of the time, being designed so that an autonomous vehicle shaped just so reacting with the shapes of objects it passed by would trigger either a flow of pellets or the signal to shed its topper for a new one.

What was this toy?

Many items at Lakewinds are actually less expensive than at Rainbow. This was a huge surprise for me today. Of course, fruits and veggies are still more expensive, because they're organic, but most other items we price-compared today were less.

Still working on my enormous family photo scanning project, and last night I came across this precious photo of me and my sister (left) circa 1983. The most striking thing is our really terrible haircuts. My questionable outfit also suggests I may have dressed myself for the event. I wonder if every child in my generation had a mullet at some point. I don't remember it, but this photo is the sorry proof. Did you?

I've just become the adoptive parent of a geocache. A River Runs Thru was the very first cache Jonas and I ever found, on July 15, 2004 (our 5th wedding anniversary). It was also the first cache ever hidden in Chaska. Recently, the original cache owner has lost interest in maintaining it, so rather than see this little nugget of nostalgia disappear, we offered to officially take it over and the owner agreed.

This is the first time we've ever adopted anyone else's geocache. It needs a new container, and for some reason the info page still lists Zilla731 as the owner, but we're eager to get it up and running again. Yay!

I've recently started reading a book titled Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment. Religious fundamentalists shriek daily about how a society that distances itself from God will be immoral, self-destructive, rife with crime and otherwise miserable, maintaining that it is religion itself that provides our only sense of morality. Incidentally, this kind of reasoning boggles the mind -- I want to ask, "Are you seriously telling me that you hold yourself in such low esteem that you would run around murdering people unless someone told you it was wrong?" But I digress...

The premise of the book is a fascinating study of two of probably the world's most non-religious countries, Denmark and Sweden. These two countries also happen to consistently rank higher than the United States in the UN's Human Development Index, rather than suffer untold death, corruption, pestilence, destruction and other calamities as some would have you believe.

The author interviews dozens of people about life, death, happiness and the meaning of life -- and boy, we're not in Kansas anymore! Have you ever read a book that you wish everyone you know would read so you could discuss it? This is that book for me. I'm finding myself scribbling notes and marking pages containing meaningful passages (no, not IN the library book!). Let me share one:

The author is interviewing a Danish man, who is relating a conversation he had with a friend:
Suddenly one night we had a few drinks and then he said to me, "I have a confession to make." "Okay," I said, and then he told me that he believed in God. And I was quite surprised. I never expected anybody to tell me something like that. I almost fell down off the chair and I didn't know how to react, and then he said to me, "I hope you don't feel I'm a bad person."

Wow. Just...wow. It's the last sentence that is the kicker for me -- the irony! You know what the nature of this conversation would be in the U.S., don't you?

I start to long to live (again) in a society where religious leanings are either non-existent or so personal that it is considered inappropriate to share them with others.

I'm not really a fan of live albums and almost always find them a disappointment. A live performance provides an opportunity to really find out who has phenomenal talent and who is "studio enhanced."

Having said that, Panic at the Disco ...Live in Chicago is superb! Quite possibly the best live album I've ever heard, with a clear, strong polished sound -- it's hard to believe Urie still has his voice left by the end. So that's what I've been listening to for the last two weeks in my car. I'm ready to return it to the library, but not before highly recommending it to PatD fans.

In other news, barn swallows have been spied swooping around the neighborhood, and today Jonas purchased a nest box for them. With any luck, it may keep them from building a mud nest above our front door as they have done the past two years. He also bought a bat house, so we are super excited to install that on the side of the house and acquire some chiropteran neighbors!

Why o why aren't there more hours in the day?

Ladies:

Has anyone heard of, or even tried, this? I'm a little bit intrigued.

I have the greatest idea for an iPhone app ever!

OK, well, maybe not ever, but I think it's a pretty damn good one, and I'm sure there is someone out there who would pay $5 for it.

You know how Google now has voice-recognition search capabilities via phone? You utter aloud the keywords you'd like to search for, and then it returns results based on what it thinks you actually said. Kind of neat, also kind of hilarious at times.

What I propose is a bird call identifier. Here's how it would work: You do your best mimicry of a bird call into your phone. It would then compare the resulting sound pattern to a database of bird calls and give you a list of the most likely results. How cool would that be? I know! It's genius! And it would have really helped me out the other day when I could hear -- but not see -- a bird I couldn't identify.

So someone get on that, OK? And don't forget to credit me!

Jonas just won $432 for losing 30 lbs in two months, winning a Biggest-Loser-type competition sponsored by his previous employer. He's looking quite slim and trim now!

The ticks are out! I picked up my first of the season.

Julia: 3
Jonas: 0

How come they liked me better? :(

After concentrating on a few, but very widespread, caches for most of last year and losing ground, I'm excited to announce that Jonas and I have broken back into the top 20 among Minnesota geocachers. We hit 3,224 today. Although it's tempting, it probably isn't realistic for us to ever reach the top 10; many of those people either are retired or have opportunities to cache while traveling for work. The chase is still fun, though. :)

Every Wednesday evening in the metro area a mini-geocaching event is held, essentially just an excuse for a group to find a couple of caches together and then socialize at a restaurant or bar afterward. The group search dynamic is not really my style so I rarely attend, but tonight Jonas talked me into it.

Tonight's group was about a dozen people, geeks ranging from about 30-60 in age with a ratio of 4:1 men to women. As we were all strolling down a residential street in St. Louis Park, I saw a family of 3-4 out for an evening walk and coming our direction down the block. I couldn't help but giggle when the first thought that popped into my head was that we should all start swaggering and snapping our fingers à la West Side Story.