spugbrap’s blog

Over the weekend, my family and I went over to a friend’s house to carve pumpkins. I was a bit late, so by the time I got there, most of them were already done. Jena asked whether I wanted to carve a pumpkin, or a watermelon from her garden. At first, I was going to do a pumpkin, because I’d never heard of carving watermelons–at least not for making jack-o-lanterns.

But, then she sat down to try carving a watermelon, herself. It didn’t take long for us to realize why this was a great idea! Instead of scooping out pumpkin guts and throwing it in a bowl, we could scoop out the watermelon and eat it! So, I grabbed another watermelon, and proceeded to scoop out and eat the tasty insides.

When I was done, I had a hollowed-out green oval/cylinder shaped thing to work with. I sat for a few minutes, trying to think of something green to make it look like. My first thought was a Mountain Dew can, but I decided that it would be too hard to try and carve all of those letters into the small watermelon. Then, I thought of a turtle, and went looking around the house for turtle faces to imitate.

Luckily, Xander loves turtles, and I found plenty of possibilities. I finally settled on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, from the cover of a video game. Most of the TMNT faces that I saw kind of needed visible teeth-separations to look good, but I found one that had a good enough facial expression without needing tooth detail.

I started by drawing on the watermelon with a pen, which allowed me to correct mistakes by wiping off the pen with a wet paper towel. I’m not very artistically inclined, so I really didn’t expect it to turn out very good. I was very close to giving up and going with a standard pumpkin carving style, rather than trying to make it look like something in particular. I also came very close to asking Xander to draw a ninja turtle face, for me, because that boy is a great artist, and I’ve seen some of his ninja turtle drawings before. But, I actually managed to draw a face that I was happy with.

Then carved it out with the pumpkin carving tools. I couldn’t decide whether to cut out the whole ninja turtle mask part, or to just cut the eyes out. Dallin suggested cutting out the eyes, then the whole mask, and then putting the eyes back into place with toothpicks. I knew that they’ve done the toothpick thing before, with pumpkins, so I trusted that he knew what he was talking about.

The final product turned out better than I thought it would! It’s easily recognizable as a ninja turtle, and I think I consider it my best pumpkin carving, ever. Jena’s carved watermelon turned out great, too! It’s cool to see this different color scheme: green with red inside, rather than the standard pumpkin orange with yellow inside.

Here are some close-up pictures of the carved watermelons, as well as some pictures of the watermelons next to the pumpkins that our respective families carved/painted:

We all had lots of fun, and look forward to doing it again next year! We will definitely be carving both pumpkins AND watermelons again.

Well, I lived up to the promise I made when I posted about the 7-Eleven + The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart promotion — I visited the Kwik-E-Mart in Bladensburg, MD on 7/27/2007.

I almost didn’t get around to it, but I really wanted to go! Earlier in the month, I even tried to get my team, at work, to go as a combination weekly status meeting / team building exercise. But, I wasn’t able to get everyone on board with the plan. The main drawback was that it was over an hour away, under normal traffic conditions.

It was getting towards the end of the month, so Lacey and I drove up there with our 3 kids (Matthew, Skylar, Nikki), our friend Jena, and her son Xander. We didn’t even think about the fact that it happened to be opening day for The Simpsons Movie, until we were about half-way there. We were wondering if there would be anything special happening at the Kwik-E-Mart that day. As it turned out, there was…

When we got there, we took a bunch of pictures outside, then went in and took pictures of everything Simpsons-related that we saw. It was fun taking pictures of some of us standing next to the life-size Simpsons characters. There were lots of other people there, doing the exact same thing, too. It’s a good thing they had extra staff working during the Kwik-E-Mart promotion, because it enabled them to handle the high volume of customers pretty smoothly. We bought a few Squishees, half a dozen pink sprinkly donuts, and a bunch of hot dogs for lunch.

While we were taking pictures of everything, we ran across a man holding a large video camera, who was recording all kinds of things. We talked to him, at one point, and found out that he was recording video for Fox 5 News! He recorded us in several places, including Matthew and Xander getting their Squishees, Skylar and Nikki looking cute (I don’t remember exactly what they were doing), and me getting my 6 donuts out of the display case.

When we got home, I programmed the Tivo to record the 10 o’clock news, and the 11 o’clock news on Fox Channel 5. We actually watched the 10 o’clock news in realtime, hoping to see ourselves on TV. At around 10:55pm, they finally did a Simpsons segment, which was about 5 minutes long. We didn’t quite get the face time that I’d kinda hoped for, considering how much he actually recorded of us, but I know they had to condense their footage to fit within the 5 minute segment.

In any case, it was fun for us to see ourselves on the news on TV! I was looking into ways to get the video clip from my Tivo to my computer, but ended up finding it posted on the Fox 5 DC website. Woohoo! To watch it, yourself, see the links below.

Pictures:
Pictures from our trip to the Kwik-E-Mart

Video:

There are two ways to watch the Fox 5 News coverage of the Simpsons Movie opening/Kwik-E-Mart promo (in which we made brief appearances):

1. Download the 10MB .flv file to your computer (to view with your favorite media player application, if you’ve got the right codecs)

OR

2. View it in your web browser (from its original location, on myfoxdc.com)

If you look carefully, and especially if you pause at just the right moment, you can see all of us in this video clip. I have yet to find an easy way to extract just those frames from the .flv file, but hopefully I will get that done at some point.

Anyways, my hands getting donuts out of the display case, and my bright green shirt, can be seen at around 1:20 into the video (NOTE: if you’re watching it on the myfoxdc website, start timing *after* the horrible local advertisement).

From 1:27-1:31, you can see me, all 3 of my kids, Lacey, Jena, and Xander; we’re in the background, behind the kid who’s talking.

We received an ad in the mail, recently, which immediately disturbed Lacey and I. It’s a service that lets you create real, usable postage stamps with a picture of your choice. Sounds kinda cool, right? But take a look at the ad, and see if you can find what’s wrong with this picture:

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It seems like a cool concept, at first, to put whatever picture you want (as long as it’s yours/legal/etc) on stamps. But this ad is proudly showing a picture of a cute little kid, on a stamp. That would be cool if you’re just sending mail to your friends and family, and nobody was going to handle that mail in between.

But the reality is that several people are going to handle each piece of mail, and you’re probably going to send some to billers/rebate warehouses/misc. companies as well, and multiple people will probably handle the mail within those companies. If any of those people happens to like little kids, in a NAMBLA sort of way, then you’ve just given them your cute kid’s home address via the return address on the other corner of the envelope.

In other words, you’re announcing, “Hey, pedophiles! Here’s a picture of my cute kid, and here’s where to come get him/her!”

I remember Lacey talking about some online moms’ group forums where there was some controversy, a while back, when people posted their addresses (for swaps/co-ops/etc) publicly and had cute pics of their kids in their signature blocks. These stamps aren’t quite as bad, I think, because at least their exposure is limited to a few people handling snail mail, whereas the online message boards are googleable.

But, still, stamps.com might want to consider this before enabling proud, naïve parents to advertise their children this way. Art would be fine. Maybe even the family pet. But not children.

Baby monitors can be useful, but most have their issues. Of course, I’m saying this based on our experience with some monitors we tried about 7 years ago, so I suppose they may have improved in some ways. We tried a few, which had problems like excessive interference, lack of AC adapter or rechargeable batteries, reception range much less than advertised, etc.

We settled on one, which we’ve been reasonably happy with ever since (enough so that we used it for all 3 of our kids, and in 4 different houses [our old and new houses, and two friends’ houses]): Fisher Price Sounds ’n Lights (pictured at right).

However, the range was not always good enough. Sometimes we’d be a little bit too far from the transmitter, and we’d hear an awful lot of static. If we were just barely too far, then we could just turn down the volume to quiet the static, and still hear if/when the baby cried. But, for those times when the baby monitor was not adequate, I figured out a trick:

I could call my cell phone from the house phone, put the house phone outside the baby’s door, and carry my cell phone with me. Then, periodically, I’d pick up my cell phone and make sure the baby wasn’t crying. Since it was usually night time or weekends when I used this, I didn’t waste my cellular plan minutes.

Over the years, I made a few little tweaks to this procedure, and learned a few lessons. Here are a few tips, from my experience:

- Call mobile to mobile. If your cellular plan, and your spouse’s, both have unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, then leave one of your phones by the door, and carry the other one with you.

- Call FROM landline TO cell phone. If you’re doing landline to cell phone, always make the call from the landline, so if the call gets disconnected for any reason, the phone does not end up making that loud, evil, phone-off-the-hook sound.

- Make some noise. If you have some kind of noise in the house, like a TV/radio on somewhere, then it’s easier to verify that your connection is still valid. If the house is completely quiet, and you listen through your cell phone, you’ll just hear quiet, and may question whether you’d actually hear the baby crying.

- Use speakerphone. If possible, put your cell phone on speakerphone. If not, at least turn up the volume all the way, so you’re more likely to hear the baby crying/smoke detector/etc., without having to repeatedly hold the phone to your ear.

- Mute your cell phone. The point is to be able to listen for your baby, not communicate both ways.

- Lock the keypad. You don’t want to accidentally hang up the call or anything. If the connection does get dropped, you have to run back and call from phone to phone again.

MOST IMPORTANTLY:

- Don’t go too far away! This tip is to enable you to go beyond the reach of your baby monitor, but not to the grocery store!

Never leave your child(ren) alone in the house, without at least being nearby. The point is so you can go to the opposite corner of a big house, out in the back yard, or maybe to your closest neighbor’s house, for a limited time. In these situations, you can run to your baby’s aid if the need should arise, within seconds.

If you decide to make a late-night beer run… well, isn’t it a well-known fact that most accidents happen within a mile or two of your home? What if the one time you leave your baby alone in the house, some moron doesn’t stop at the stop sign a few blocks down? Or if, somehow, the house catches on fire? Or if someone gains unauthorized entry to the house (burglar, kidnapper, etc. likelihood may vary depending on your neighborhood, but the risk is there, particularly if you are not in the house). These are the scenarios that always went through my mind, and always kept me close to home.

I’m not sure what actually constitutes criminally neglecting your children, but I don’t believe what I’ve described here is it. I think driving away seems like a logical place to draw the line, if one needs to be drawn in this regard, and that is something I have not done.

I played Guitar Hero II over at my friend Clint’s house one time, last year, and it was really fun. Since then, I played it on two different occasions over at my friend Kipp’s house, and determined that I really wanted it. But, I didn’t have a PlayStation 2, so that was my first roadblock (we have an Xbox and a Gamecube). The price tag on the game, itself, was bad enough ($70-80 or so). But to buy a game console as well, just to be able to play it–that was just not practical.

Luckily, the PS/3 and the latest round of console competition has brought down the price on PS/2 systems. So, Lacey bought me a PS/2 and the Guitar Hero II game/guitar pack, for Valentine’s day, of all occasions. But I’m not complaining. Not at all! Not even when it overdrew the bank account. hehe.. Oops! (That was half my fault, though, because I was way behind on keeping track of money, so I wasn’t able to tell her what was available before-hand.)

Jena got the same thing for Dallin, too, which is cool because he lives right around the corner, so it’s pretty easy to bring one guitar to the other person’s house to play 2-player.

I’ve been playing it quite a bit over the past 2 weeks. Stayed up late on more than one occasion, to try to accomplish one goal or another. The night before last, I finished getting 5 stars on all 40 songs on Medium difficulty. Now I’m starting Hard, which throws in an 5th button for my 4 fingers to deal with, plus more notes to play, and faster speed. At this point, I’m getting boo’ed off the stage half of the time. But it’s fun!

Matthew likes it, too, and can do a pretty good job. He hasn’t gotten to play it that much, yet, but we were impressed with what he could do after just a few practice rounds. Lacey completed all of the songs in Easy with 5 stars, and is working on Medium now. Skylar has done the tutorial with me a few times, but she’s only 3, so that’s about all she can do for now. But at least she can play it in some way, which makes it officially “fun for the whole family”! Well.. Except for Nikki, I guess. But she likes dancing to the music, so I guess she’s covered, too.