Monday, July 17, 2006

scanR

Send them an email of a digital photo that you took of a whiteboard (which I do quite frequently), and they'll send you back a nicely rebalanced color sketch. One of the best, free, web apps of the year!

Sunday, July 09, 2006

It's a beaver... It's a badger... It's a...

Woodchuck!?

Yes, indeed, there's a woodchuck living underneath the neighbor's shed. As we were headed out to dinner tonight, I say a thing run from the middle of the neighbor's yard and hide under their shed. "What was that?" I would have thought a raccoon, but it wasn't big enough. The raccoons around here are about as big as a basset hound. "Was it a badger?" I knew it wasn't a badger. They're more vicious than this cute thing. "Did it have a flat tail?" Well, sort of, but it clearly wasn't a beaver! That'd be a silly place for a beaver to live. But it did have an unusually broad tail. It was gray, though. Beavers are more brown.

Despite growing up in Wyoming, I'm a city boy at heart. Someone had to warn me that we had quite a few vines of poison ivy growing up the tree in the front yard!

On the way home from dinner, we saw it again. This time, Sarahlynn stopped so that we could get a better look. Sure enough: quite a big bigger than a squirrel. not a raccoon, not an opossum, not a badger. Kind of looks like a a big overweight prairie dog.... "Maybe it's a woodchuck!?"


Sure enough: woodchuck.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Baby on Board

The other day, Mommy came home, and Ellie ran to greet her at the door with a big "mama!" and a hug. Then she patted Mommy on the tummy and said "baby!" Ellie's been a great secret keeper!

We are indeed expecting #2, and now feel comfortable sharing the news with the world. Being the information gluttons that we are, we've had some prenatal testing done to learn that this child will only have 46 chromosomes rather than the 47 that Ellie has. Due date is approximately Jan 10, 2007...

Speaking of Jan 10th, I tinkering around with dates the other day and realized that Jan 10, 1001 has a clever translation if you write it out as MMDDYYYY and then translate those characters from binary into hexadecimal. Juvenial geek humor.