And the lesson for today is...

Plan ahead, but not too far ahead. And when you plan ahead, expect the unexpected.

We've been working on finishing the basement recently, with the idea that we'd turn it into a rec room / office. We had removed a lot of the clutter in the fall, then put up a partition wall to separate the laundry room from the rest of the basement.

We installed styrofoam insulation on the outside walls two weeks ago, and we're now ready to run the electrical. Right now, we only have two outlets in the basement, which are dedicated to the washing machine and the sump pump. For lighting, we have four functional -- but not attractive -- single-bulb fixtures which are typical of every unfinished basement I've ever seen. So we're planning to add about a dozen wall outlets and a couple of lighting circuits to give us some flexibility to place furniture and a television and to select lighting.

As I was saying, we're ready to start running electrical this weekend because I took the time around Thanksgiving to map every electrical circuit in the house. I spent most of a day turning off circuit breakers and then running around the house checking to see which outlets and lights were without power. I needed to do this because our breaker box is completely filled, and it was possible I'd have to combine some circuits to make room to wire the basement.

So what's the problem? Well, I'm notoriously disorganized. Scattered. I wasn't born with the place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place gene. Fortunately for me, my wife isn't just beautiful and smart -- she's also congenitally neat, and she's got my back. So when she advised me to put that map somewhere I'll be able to find it, I listened.

That's right, I put it in the one place I knew I'd be able to find it: in the home computer. That around Christmas. I copied the information into the PC and threw away the original hard copy. You can guess what happened next. The first week in January, the hard drive crashed and burned. Two months out of warranty, and me without a useful backup. This weekend, it looks like I'll be re-mapping all the circuits. And next weekend, I'll be backing up my hard drive. So, like I said, when you plan ahead, expect the unexpected.

Tag: computer problems

That's disappointing...

And I'm in Ohio.

Eric Florack reports that the House Majority Leader is John Boehner. via Fox News

Tag: politics

Groundhog Day

In an effort to prove that I am at least as prescient as a large rodent, I have two predictions to make:

1. There will be six more weeks of winter.
2. The day after tomorrow will end with the letter y.

Let me know how I did.

Ewww

Reversible? That's just gross.

I'm number one!

If you search for "grinding gears" on Yahoo, that is.
Simple gratification, that's what I'm talking about.

On the topic of birthdays...

Happy birthday to our daughter, who is four today. She was uncharacteristically patient in waiting for her brother to open his presents last night before digging in to hers. The girl deserves a prize.

Tag: family

Indoctrinate them while they're young

Our youngest son is getting a Fisher Price Imaginext playset for his birthday. It's sort of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Book of playsets. Comes with an assortment of parts which imaginative tykes can assemble however they wish so that the adventure is always new. They're pretty cool toys, really, and in my opinion a heck of a lot more interesting than LEGO's entry-level product, DUPLO.

I like the toy, and more importantly YS will too. But get a load of the text on the back of the box:

Imagine...a primitive civilization of humans and dinosaurs, living in a lush, green land.

Gets the reader thinking about the environment. OK, sure, humans and dinosaurs missed coexistence by millions of years, and a "civilization of dinosaurs" requires a lot of imagination, but then the kids who play with these toys have a lot of imagination.

One side--the predators--is using up its natural resources, wiping out everything and everyone that gets in their way.

Seems like they've set up the meat-eaters to be the bad guys, and not just because they eat other creatures, but they use up the natural resources? When I was in school, (a long time ago) I learned that the decomposed bodies of prehistoric life were the source of the things we think of today as natural resources. Was this copy written by the executive board of PETA or the Sierra Club?

The other side--the ecovores--wants to preserve their land. And they're willing to fight to make that happen.

OK, hold on right there. I let the substitution of "predators" for carnivores slide, because it's pretty accurate, but ecovores? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it sounds to me like they're implying that a vegetarian diet is more ecologically sound than a carnivorous one. The paragraph winds up this way:

The battle begins at T-Rex Mountain: Will the predators succeed in destroying the land, causing their own extinction? Or will the ecovores stop the destruction and make the land a place where dinosaurs and humans can live together peacefully for all time? In the world of Imaginext, anything is possible!

OK, so now it's clear they're framing the action with the idea that carnivores are at best self-destructive and at worst evil, and that the herbivores are wise, and salt of the earth too. Is there a political message there, or is it just a misguided effort to apply a good versus evil motif to a child's toy in order to make it more appealing to the parents?

I'm not really implying I think there's a conscious political motivation here from Fisher-Price. To a certain extent, kids think along the lines of good vs evil anyway, and when it comes to dinosaurs, the ones with open mouths and big teeth are going to be the ones on offense.

And I'm not worried at all that the text on the outside of the box will influence how our kids play with the toy. After all, I'm the only one who actually read the box. As for YS, he's two years old. All he knows for sure is that dinosaurs are big and scary and go RWARRRR!!!!

Tag: kids

An Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers

From N.Z. Bear.:

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Sign me on.

Tag: Politics

This is really cool.

The Music Genome Project picks songs based on the example criteria you give it. Give it a try.

Hat tip: Althouse.

Tag: Entertainment

Lions farm coaches in San Fran

If Hall-of-Famer Mike Singletary was to sign on at Detroit, he'd be the third member of the 49ers coaching staff in a row to jump to the Lions head coach position, following Marty Mornhinweg and the recently-fired Steve Mariucci.

Mariucci came off a great run with the 49ers. Mornhinweg, was an assistant coach, as Singletary is now. Is he ready? I don't know. Will it matter. Probably not.

Tag: Lions