Toby's Blog

We made it to Madeleine’s house last night. The first thing we realized is that Madeleine’s playful 18 month old boxer and 9 month old rottweiler don’t make good playmates for my chihuahua. The rottie is especially energetic, and although he means no harm, a 90 lb dog can’t help but hurt a 4 lb chihuahua when they play. Blue, of course is NOT happy about being here with those two big dogs, but I think they’ll soon get used to each other. Here’s a picture of Trevor trying to protect Blue from the other dogs:

From Colorado January 2010

We’re on our way to Colorado Springs to visit Madeleine and family. What a trip. We’ve been through LA, Las Vegas, some weird canyon place called the Virgin River in Arizona, and now we’re at a motel in Salina, Utah. It’s been a long, long drive today, and there’s not much to say about it. I’m bored though, so I thought I would put something on my blog.

I have always wanted to put special effects in my home videos, so I finally broke down, purchased, and learned Final Cut Express. Here are my first two videos. They’re both of Trevor because Ryana is camera shy.

I found myself writing the following paragraph this evening:

…and I am a technology professional of 15 years who learned programming in the 4th grade… so it says something when I don’t know how to “exchange fun gifts on Facebook!” Just send me an email, will ya? This newfangled Web 2.0 confuses me.

Weird.

A bit of history: One of my favorite shows on TV, is the Daily Show, which is a satyrical news cast on Comedy Central. The anchorman is John Stewart, who occasionally makes light of his Jewish faith. Here is one such segment that I thought was particularly funny:

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

Hmmm… weird… it seems like that might apply to something today, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. What could it be?

Do you know what’s really ironic? Abraham Lincoln was the first President to be affiliated with a new and emerging political party at the time. They called it the Republican Party.

I just realized today that October 31, 2009 was my last day in the Individual Ready Reserves. As of November 1, 2009, I am completely out of the Marine Corps, and I cannot be called back. My duty is done.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

-Stephen Hawking

Spiders are pretty scary. Scorpions are pretty scary. Centipedes are very scary. But there’s one bug that is the nastiest, ugliest, scariest bug of all…

Analyn works nights, so I leave for work when she gets home. This morning, I was helping Trevor with some last minute homework when Ana came home, and cried out for me. I went to see what was the matter, and there it was: the Mother of All Scary Creepy Crawlies, Stenopelmatus fuscu in all it’s disgusting glory; aka jerusalem cricket; aka potato bug. I got rid of it, but had to spend 20 minutes calming down the terrified kids. YUCK!