_MWife_ and I have been several times in Galveston. My parents, during one of their visits, some years back even rented a beach house there and we visited them over two weekends. It was a very nice place indeed.

Well, doubt the house will be there tomorrow morning; in fact all the evidence suggests that Galveston is about to get a repeat of its 1900 ( Read more... )

It appears that mankind is becoming ever more accomplished at being really clever chimpanzees.

Current legislation in congress that would protect sharks against overfishing could receive a boost by a declaration of public support. Jim Toomey, artist of the Sherman's Lagoon comic-strip, has devoted a Sunday cartoon to the issue, which provides a template that people can print out and mail to Dr. James Balsiger, director of the US National ( Read more... )

The family drives through the half-empty parking lot to drop Daddy off for work. The perceptive four year old daughter spots a bright-yellow gas guzzler of a pickup truck that the family had talked about earlier.
DaughterThis is the truck that Daddy doesn't like because it eats too much dinosaur soup (= gasoline). DaddyThat's right, because ( Read more... )

Where the two slabs of concrete meet that form the floor of our garage and the driveway respectively, there is quite a bit of a gap. Turns out that below the concrete garage floor slab, there is another gap. And so the children and _MWife_ and I were able to watch a rather sizable toad (in the vicinity of a medium sized apple) squeeze herself down into ( Read more... )

I usually dont post during working hours, but this one got me annoyed enough that I took a break from work to do it. Fisher-Price just was forced to issue a recall of toys made in China that have lead in the paint! You gotta look at the list, this is the who is who in toy land. I mean, Dora the Explorer? Elmo? Elmo with lead?

Oh, this isn't good ( Read more... )

After talking over lunch with co-worker InferenceArchitect, I now know what the thing is to do to deal with our collective guilt (that is, _mwife_ and mine) about our gas-guzzling baby transporter: buy a TerraPass.

InferenceArchitect, whose car is even bigger than ours (two kids more ...), explained it as follows: Basically it is a way to impose upon ( Read more... )