Steve over at theSneeze.com has a new rant about The Wiggles. Steve is funny, as usual, but while I was reading his post, it hit me that I wasn’t familiar with the details he was ranting about. Praise the Lord! It’s been at least a year since The Wiggles has played in our house. Not to mention such other grating early-childhood TV shows, such as the Teletubbies and Elmo.
No, our kids have finally moved on. Granted, they’ve moved on to some Disney Channel fare of equally questionable quality, but nothing is as painful as repeated preschool shows such as The Wiggles.

Katie and I are spending a few days in Galveston (by ourselves!). See you next week.

We have a dewberry patch not far from the house (sorry, I can’t reveal its exact location), and today we had our first picking of the season. We had a very wet winter, but we haven’t had hardly any rain the last month or so (until today), so the berries are quite small compared to last year.
Hannah, Samuel and I picked for maybe 20 minutes and got 3-4 cups, which we ate tonight with some fresh strawberries and a little sugar (and a little Bailey’s for Katie and me). It was a nice dessert for our mother’s day dinner.
Last year, I must have made six or seven big cobblers, but not so this year, unless today’s rain showers make the next round of ripening berries much larger than the ones we picked today–which I doubt.

Make Easter bunny ears from items found around the house–in this case, from items found in the bathroom cabinet (from the photo archives, Easter, 2003):

I’m putting this photo in the file with the naked bathtub photos, to show to the boyfriend when she’s a teenager!

I would like to offer a sincere, heart-felt apology to all those people who have recently offered me an innocuous ‘Hi. How you doing?’, expecting an equally innocuous ‘Fine, and you?’, but who, instead, received a 10 minute exhortation on my recent weight loss and exercise successes (currently 30 pounds, and running 6-10 miles 3 times per week, respectively). I’m afraid I’ve become an even more insufferable boor than previously.
I’m understandably excited about my diet and exercise, but I realize that you may not share my enthusiasm–or no longer share it, having heard about it day after day. Again, I apologize; I’ll try to do better.

I ran across a link today to one of my favorite essays of all time Malcolm Gladwell’s Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety. I hadn’t read it in a while, and took the time today to re-read it.
We know someone who typifies the mindset that Gladwell profiles. She drives a bright red Chevrolet Tahoe, and she says she would not be caught dead driving a minivan. I sent her a link to this essay and others, and have repeatedly tried to point out the fallacious nature of her reasons for driving a large SUV–all to no avail. It’s crazy. For her, the feelings associated with driving an SUV–perceived dominance on the roads, perceived safety–trump all reason.

On Friday, the mother of one of Hannah’s school friends called to ask whether we were coming to the party at her house on Saturday.
After the call, Katie told me that she vaguely remembered an email invitation earlier in the week, but had forgotten about it. We were planning to have several good friends over a little earlier on Saturday.
Katie said that she had agreed to go because she thought that these parents were making an effort to get to know us better, since our daughters are friends and we just live a few blocks apart. Katie had told the mother that we would come over as soon as our friends left.
So, as soon as our last friends got in their car on Saturday evening, the four us of ran over to these people’s house. A woman whom we didn’t know answered the door; she was wearing a name tag and holding a role of raffle/game type tickets. I immediately knew what was going on. We walked in, and my suspicions were confirmed: a group of women was sitting around a table with a bunch of candles on it. The mother of Hannah’s friend said that her husband and kids were not at home, and tried to hint that the invitation was only for Katie.
Turns out, it was a Party Lite, which is apparently the current trend in home sales parties.
The kids and I high-tailed it back home, leaving Katie stranded. I felt really bad for her. When she got home a little later, I asked her the damage: the said she had bought the cheapest item, $15, and had refused to get on the mailing list or host her own party. Actually, I was proud of her. I know it’s tough for her to say no under such circumstances.
If Katie had realized the nature of the party earlier in the week, I’m sure she would have not gone.

Our dog Tippie just got her summer shave. We did it ourselves, so it doesn’t look great, but it does help to keep her cooler. Tippie is half German Shepherd, half Husky (a ‘Shepsky’ to us), and she has incredibly long, thick fur–which makes her very hot in the Texas summers. Her undercoat is very light, so when we shave her, she is a completely different color. We call her ‘beige dog.’
Before and after pictures:

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the red collar with the black box is her shock collar for the invisible fence. We have a wooden picket fence around the back yard, but Tippie tends to dig under it and/or chew her way through it, so we keep her from the wood fence with an invisible fence. She’s a special needs dog.

Since satellite photos were added to Google Maps a few days ago, a lot of bloggers are showing ‘memory maps’: satellite photos of places they’ve lived. Here’s my contribution.
In 1970, when I was eight years old, we moved from Wichita, Kansas, to Spring Branch, Texas, north of San Antonio in the Texas hill country. We moved to Cypress Lake Gardens, a subdivision that had been started in the mid-1960s and was planned as a high-class resort with golf course, airstrip, etc. When we moved in, few houses had been built, the golf course was unfinished, and the streets were all still caliche (dirt). A year or so later, the developer was murdered, so the subdivision went into bankruptcy and receivership. Consequently, it remained in pretty much the same state until I left in 1982.
It was a pretty lonely place to grow up. Since I traveled twenty miles to elementary and middle schools and eleven miles to high school, I saw most of my friends only at school–at least until I got a car and a driver’s license.
On the other hand, my playground consisted of thousands of acres of undeveloped Texas Hill Country. The satellite photo shows a creek running through the area. This is Rebecca Creek, which features clear springs, incredible remote canyons to explore and one of the greatest swimming holes I’ve ever seen.
Differences between then and now: there are about twice as many houses now–though it’s still pretty sparsely developed–and the golf course was finished and opened a few years ago. The side streets of my old subdivision are still caliche. That big road with several cul-de-sac streets coming off of if at the bottom of the image looks like a new subdivision (looks like the streets were still being developed when the satellite photo was taken).
I identified our former house with a star. Click on the image below to see a larger version (Warning: it’s big: 375KB):

I’ve been an avid runner since my teens, and I was active and fit through my twenties. Grad school was good for that: due to my flexible schedule, I could run when I wanted, and my bicycle was my primary transportation around town.
But right after I turned thirty, that all changed: I was no longer a full-time student; I got my first sit-on-my-ass-all-day job in software development; we moved from sunny Austin to New Jersey; and, within a few months, we had our first child. As a result, I struggled with my running, and consequently, my fitness and weight. Moving back to Austin helped a little: I ran the half marathon in 1998 and 2001, but my running routine remained very up and down.
This situation improved somewhat when I took my current job last summer. Our office complex has a small gym with treadmills, so I started coming in early on Tuesdays and Thursdays to beat the traffic and run before work. And now that it’s spring, I’ve run at the Town Lake hike and bike trail a few times instead of on the treadmill.
Last fall, when I saw my family physician for my annual checkup, she noted that I had gained a couple of pounds a year for the past ten years–starting at about age thirty.
In November, Katie and I decided that we would try a low-carb diet and really try to improve our family’s eating habits. We already ate pretty well, but there was still room for improvement, we felt. We did some research and decided on the South Beach diet.
We started our new eating regimen at the first of the year. I weighed 235 pounds at the time. I’m 6 ft, 1/2 inch tall, so that gave me a body mass index of 31, which is technically obese. It was a struggle to run 3-4 miles at a time on the treadmill.
I’ve since lost between 25 and 30 pounds, and my usual treadmill run has increased to five or six miles. This morning, I ran one hour, four minutes on the hike and bike trail, which is between seven and eight miles.
After this morning’s run it hit me: I’m back! I feel like I’m in a good running routine for the first time in years.