My father-in-law tells a little story from time to time.  Mostly when his family is trying to decide on a place to eat.  In this story, he tells of the sad tales of several restaurants that my in-laws would find and frequent, then find delightful, and then finally find closed not long after discovering them.

I am thinking of this story as I watch the latest episode of Kings on Hulu.  Kings, the story of the rise of King David set in more modern times (if in a fictional kingdom), seems to be destined for Cancellation Land as it’s banished to Saturday nights.

There’s five nines probability that Dollhouse is also heading out the door.  Though some people (who will remain nameless) might disagree, I thought the show showed great promise.  I was looking forward to see if Wheedon could take what was admittedly a weaker first season and build on the premise.

More than likely I will never know.

The threat of cancellation extends even to shows I’m told that I would almost definitely like like The Sarah Connors Chronicles.  It also stands on the brink of cancellation.

Battlestar Galactica negotiated a graceful termination, if gracelessly executed.

I could go on.

So what’s wrong with my tastes?  I want to blame the viewing populace of America, but given that I’m in the vast vast minority, the fault has to lie with me.

Then again, perhaps I should thank the great masses for killing off my shows.  I like ideas more than I like reality.  Ideas are always fresh and crisp and grand.  Reality is hard and dusty and sometimes a little boring.  Maybe it’s better for shows to die when they’re closer to ideas (Kings) then when they’re full-on reality (Battlestar Galactica).

Well, either way it looks like I’m going to end up freeing up time to discover other new shows to kill.

I was signing up for a free account with some Mind-Mapping software, when I was presented with a familiar site:  a captcha.

For those of you out there with less background in computer mumbo-jumbo, a captcah is a small computer generated image of numbers and letters.  Usually the image has some “noise” in it (random specks of varying colors preventing it from being a perfect image of text), or letters in wierd locations relative to each other (some up high in the image or down low), or random phrases, or whatever.

The point of the captcha is verification.  Not so much verification that you are who you say you are.  Verification that you are what you say you are:  that you are human, and not just some bot-program signing up for free accounts or sending random comments and emails, etc.

Recently I’ve noticed a lot more captchas using phrases of real words rather than random numbers and letters.   There’s a usability component at work here.  Today I was presented with the phrase “Coyest Sunday”.

There’s something about that phrase that just hit a note with me.  Beyond their basic definition and use, i’m not that familiar with the algorithms behind captchas.   I’m sure there’s some dictionary out there, and maybe there’s a bit of logic that randomly matches an acceptable adjective to an acceptable noun.

It’s hard to believe that a random algorithm could create something that’s so striking to me.   It’s seems rather poetical.

Maybe I should change the name of this blog.

From Ditigal Photography School‘s Weekly Assignment

A few weeks back, my family arrived back home after a long week of travel hither and yon.  Shortly thereafter, I discovered that my whole preconceptions about my neighborhood had changed while we were away.

It’s amazing how quickly I’ve become used to this place.   My mother, on one particular visit, once exclaimed to me that she half expected the cast of the  Andy Griffith Show show to come walking up the street.  The houses are all old, and homey.   The neighbors walk all over the place and share gossip.  Kids deliver newspapers, sometimes using wagons, sometimes with bicycles.  It’s quiet.

Shortly after our trip, I was walking the dogs down their usual route, when I happened to look over, and saw that one of the houses just two blocks down the street had been gutted by a fire.

I was floored.  Windows were knocked out and plywood had been posted over the gaping holes.  Black scorch marks crawled up the walls.  Apparently it had been an electrical fire, and fortunately no one was hurt.  But it’s the kind of thing that you just don’t expect to see on your street.  And certainly not on mine.

I thought about taking pictures of the house for this site, but it seemed too glaring…too personal.  They still had police tape up to warn people away.

My surprise continued a few days later.  Again, I was walking the dogs.  By that point, the wreckage had become almost normal.  I’d often see the owners sifting through this and that in the house, trying to reestablish their shattered lives.

And then one day, the house was gone.

Gone, completely.  A huge crater stood in the middle of the lot, with construction equipment looming over it.  I never heard it happen.  Never noticed anything unusual the day that they did it.  A house that had stood in the neighborhood for who knows how long was gone.

It felt less wrong to take pictures of the site at that point, but laziness won out, and I delayed.

And then the crater was filled in.  Now there’s just black dirt covering the site of the former home.  Trees still ring the site.  A swing still sways gently in the breezes.  There’s just a house-shaped hole in the horizon.

It’s sad and frightening.  That’s why I’m closing with this picture on the left.  I didn’t find the flowers in that particular lot, but some day that scar in the neighborhood will be healed, and flowers such as these might bloom.

Life goes on.  And even the timeless change.

My daughter has decided that she really likes the “flying game”.

You know that thing you do with small children where you lie on your back, fold your legs up, have the child place his or her weight against your legs and then lift them up on your legs?  Sometimes accompanied with phrases like “Whee!  You’re flying!”  or “Superman! Superman!”

Yeah, so after the twentieth time in a row of lifting her into the air, my exclamations were more wordless grunts of pain and exhaustion.

I may just end up with six-pack abs yet because of this kid.

My daughter kicked me out of her room today.

Dead serious, she kicked me out of her room.

How does a toddler, a two-year old being barely cognizant of the world, kick a fully grown person who is, in fact, her father out of her room?  And how does she do it while remaining in her crib?

Well I’ll tell you.

As I may have mentioned earlier, my daughter is ill.  We made the choice to burn one more PTO day and have her stay home, seeing as she’s still contagious for a little while longer.  She managed to sleep through the night just fine, but she was still exhausted.  Sleep deficits are hard on a little toddler.

In any case, we ran a few errands today, came home by 11:30ish, and had a bit of lunch.

Afterwards, I decided it was time for her to take a coffee break (to use our daycare provider’s turn of phrase).  She disagreed, but not too strenously.  So I left her in her crib.   Through the monitor I listened as her protests eventually died away, and she began playing.    She always does that at home.  Sometimes she’ll play quietly with baby or lovie for an hour before finally taking a nap.

After about a half hour, she starts calling out to me again.  ”Daddy!  Diaper Change!”

My daughter has a history of unloading a few minutes after we put her in a crib for a nap and walk away.  And it’s uncomfortable enough for her that she then doesn’t go to sleep.  So these days we attempt to change her diaper when she says she needs it.  Or when we can tell she needs it, even if she’s denying it.

I go up to change her diaper, which pleases her to no end.  She believes that she’s found her way out.

Her face grew horrified as I went to put her back in her crib to continue her nap attempt rather than taking her downstairs as she had planned.  She went into full freak-out mode.  I attempted to get her to calm down, but eventually I decided to cut my losses and just head down stairs.

As my feet passed the threshold of her doorway, she decided to kick it up a notch or twelve.  By the time I got downstairs she was tossing things.  She has a bad habit of throwing things away, even things that she dearly loves and cannot be without.  Namely baby.  After a few seconds her crying exceded my beliefs and went even more frantic as she realized what she had done.  Baby was now outside the crib.

I waited a few moments, listening to the freakout gradually die down to whimpers.  And then I went upstairs.

I found my daughter standing in her crib, her head resting on the railing, sobbing quietly to herself.  Without saying a word,  I picked up baby from the floor and handed it back to her.   I also gently laid her down on her mattress.

She looked up at me, full-on pout on her lips, sputtering and sobbing still.  And then she said, “Daddy…go away.”   It was actually more drawn out than that, but the intent was clear.  She was kicking me out.

I decided not to argue the point.  I told her that I loved her and left the room.

The kicker is that once she woke up from her three hour nap that followed she was still mad at me.  For 20 minutes she wouldn’t let me touch her or even acknowledge that she wanted to leave the crib.

So now I know what I have to look forward to.

Ok, my daughter has officially been diagnosed with Strep Throat…again.  And this time around…it’s personal.

…

This is what I’ve been reduced to.  Hardly any sleep in two days brings out the bad jokes in anyone.  As some would contend that all of my jokes are bad, I could be more specific and say that it brings out the REALLY bad jokes in anyone.

I spent part of the day quasi-cuddling with my autonomous heat furnace.  Another portion of the day involved watching videos, either from YouTube, home movies, or on one occassion, DVD.  The last part of the day was dedicated to battling the “No!  Mine!”  <SMACK><SMACK><SMACK> slapfest.   (Before I get protective services knocking on my door, it should be noted that SHE was smacking ME.  Of course, if you wanted to take ME into protective custody until her good humor returns…)

We are all exhausted.

Thus, no pictures today.

Once again, I’m utterly and completely exhausted.  It was a busy weekend.

We saw a lot of family.   My folks were in at Chicago for a Sedar my sister and her husband hosted on Friday.  Then my wife’s uncle and his family as well as all of AM’s siblings were in town for Easter weekend, so we raced up to Madison to see them.  We put quite a few miles on the Chevy this weekend.

If all that travelling and truly copious amounts of food weren’t enough, Micah took ill last night, and spent the whole night in our bed.  Which means that none of us got any sleep.

We’re all kind of stumbling along, really.

In any case, I put up two pictures from this weekend, both from a trip out to the Jelly Belly Factory tour.  Enjoy.

So here comes the lame excuses.
I’m not at home today.  So I don’t want to unload any of the pictures I took today.

So hopefully tomorrow there will be new pictures.

The drive back from Chicago this evening was difficult.  Considerably moreso than the drive to Chicago this afternoon.  And I was really tired for the drive to Chicago, so that’s saying something.

Some confluence of things are keeping me from getting a decent night’s sleep.  Maybe it’s work-related stress.   Maybe it’s allergies.  Maybe its my wife poking me in the back to let me know that I was snoring.  (She asserts that it’s usually about 30 minutes or so in between each poke, but I swear that I just blinked my eyes once and she’s accusing me of being asleep and sawing away.  Also, i don’t really remember signing up to be notified every time that I snore.  But what do I know?  I’m only a man.)

Maybe it’s my daughter, who inherited the same characteristics of being an early riser that seem to run in my mother’s side of the family.  My wife tells me that our daughter is not in fact an early riser as it takes her a good half -hour to really warm up after an extended or overnight doze.  I maintain that though I wake up  early in the morning and am capable of functioning at a high level, I myself am not pleased about the situation.  Being an early riser doesn’t make you happy to be one.

In any case, I’m tired.