Useless Blogging

Two child-related events of note happened yesterday:

Emma wrote a song entitled “Sunset”. Unlike most songs she writes, it is not a rehash of some existing song with silly lyrics; this one is actually about liking sunsets. Her music teacher apparently liked it so much that she’d like to have the class perform it at the spring concert toward the end of the year. Buy your tickets now.

Yesterday, around 2:30PM, Sara proved that she’s a growing girl yet again, this time marking the occasion by losing her first tooth (a lower incisor).

Pictures to follow, I hope. Congratulations to both of my girls!

So the last few days have been an interesting mix of purgatory and hell, health-wise. My symptoms would be tolerable and controllable during the daylight hours, and then jump straight into chills and a spiked fever when the nighttime hit. I finally but the bullet on Friday and stayed home to try to sleep it off, and it seems to have worked.

So if you’ve missed me, that’s why. If not, feel free to disregard. Coming later: thoughts on social networks.

Someone call me when players are done being whiny prissy cheaters, and maybe my interest for baseball will return to a point where it was in my youth.

I’m fairly well off, but I’m not horribly affluent. The economy affects me, but hasn’t crippled me. So I think I’m decently qualified to take a stab at what a decent stimulus package ought to do.

For the bored: Keynes is right. Tax cuts do jack, and in a time like this, they only stand to exacerbate the situation. Tax cuts come when everyone has money. First, we need to get some. I’m frankly loathing hearing anyone talk about tax cuts and how it puts money into the hands of the consumer. No, it doesn’t; leaving you with more is not the same as seeing that you have more, especially when people are scraping to get by (and are likely least affected by taxes in general).

Create work. Create jobs. Pay people. THAT puts money into pockets, and lets people spend again.

So everyone on Facebook has been managing a full 25, even if it took days to accumulate the full amount. This has successfully guilted me into rounding out this damn list.

1. I had two of my elementary school teachers at my wedding.
2. The teachers mentioned above chipped in and bought me the microwave for my dorm room after high school graduation. That microwave is right behind me, still functional, as I type this.
3. I failed one quarter of one course in all of my education: third quarter AP Calculus, mostly because I didn’t like doing the homework.
4. If I could pick my career, I think I’d still like to teach, preferably at the undergrad level.
5. I used to be a kick-ass Magic: The Gathering player, having placed tenth in a two-state tournament in Germany at one time (eighth and higher went to German nationals, so I barely missed the cut). I still think I could do pretty well, but you’d have to give me the deck. Creation was not my forte.
6. Favorite movie: Hudson Hawk.
7. Favorite game: Uno.
8. I’m organizing a company volleyball team.
9. Despite being a trash-brained trivia whiz, I actually read very little, bookwise, at least. I read most everything that’s not a book, though, like the backs of cereal boxes.
10. I couldn’t tell you how much money I make in a given paycheck.
11. One Defining Moment: In high school, I was rehearsing for a play (Of Mice And Men), and my acting was pretty flat. My director asked me what it was my character wanted at that moment, and I failed to produce an answer. He LAID INTO ME, telling me that if I didn’t know what the character wanted, I should get off the damn stage. Yeah. That had an impact I still feel.
12. In tenth grade, I organized a reunion of sorts for my fifth grade elementary class at Emily Liadakis’ house.
13. Twice (in fifth grade and in twelfth grade) I played the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’m fairly certain that the director in high school did AMND solely because I wanted him to.
14. My Facebook friend collection contains ex-girlfriends and girls on whom I have had crushes. This is mildly awkward, even now.
15. The semester my first daughter was born (yes, I was in college, if you didn’t know) was the only semester in which I made Dean’s List.
16. I always thought I made a better techie than an actor. As much as I like being in front of people, My vision of lights and sets is far clearer than anything I’ve tried to put together for a role.
17. I proposed to my wife about two weeks after our first date. She said yes. We did the proposal again six months later for two reasons: our friends said we needed to wait, and we needed a ring.
18. I have a Brown Sr. belt in Taekwando. I started three years ago.
19. I bought clothes at a retail store once in the past… three years or so. That one time, I bought shirts off the clearance rack, getting $26 shirts for $4. I normally buy clothes at Goodwill.
20. I can fix computers by merely being in the same proximity.
21. In high school, I was active on about a dozen BBSes and less-than-active on a couple dozen more. This is what the cheap kids did in the time when you paid for AOL by the minute.
22. I want to live near and/or on the water, but am relatively ambivalent toward swimming.
23. I want a boat, in a bad way. We ALMOST bought a boat at the end of last summer, but the math just wouldn’t work out well enough to keep everyone comfortable.
24. I like redheads, but have never dated one. I have however dyed my own hair red on a few occasions.
25. I have two shirts that say “STAFF” in large letters on the back. One is from working a Fuel concert in college. The other is from working a cheerleading tournament. The Fuel concert was easier.

The game is almost over, and only one ad has made Julie almost fall over with laughter: a Monster.com ad prominently featuring a moose.

That is all.