Dukes of Dixieland

Friday night we went out (without the boys, yahoo) to see the Dukes of Dixieland in concert. This was another in our old-timer concert series, where once again we felt really young next to the other concert-goers. As their name suggests, this group played a lot of New Orleans Jazz. Some examples of their music can be found here. We had a fun time and enjoyed a night out by ourselves.

Images - Play Ball

I took this picture of Dec a few years ago, but it was cute. After church he wanted to play baseball in the front yard and wasn't happy that I just wanted to take his picture. (taken 06/06/04, Lakewood, CO)

Pain at the dentist

In January we finally got access to dental insurance. It has been over 10 years since I've been to the dentist for a real checkup and things don't look good. I have five cavities, four of which are under previous fillings. One of these is getting very near the nerve and the dentist isn't sure if it will require a root-canal or not. Ouch. I mean the pain in my pocket-boot. I can deal with the pain in my mouth, but if this requires a root-canal it will really be expensive. While the insurance covers most of the cost of normal fillings, it doesn't pay anything toward major repairs (i.e. root-canals). Add my work to Dec's eight cavities plus the dental insurance premium and I'm really wishing that I had followed my childhood goal of becoming a dentist. If you need the X-ray crystallographic structure of your favorite protein, I'm your man, but currently that seems to be far removed from any practical real-life application. Can I start over in this whole career thing?

Images - Purple Flower

(taken 06/20/04)

More unspun info on global warming

No time now for a full post, but I wanted to link to a couple of good bits on global warming. Dennis Prager interviewed University of Pennsylvania professor Bob Giegengack (Gieg) about global warming. Gieg is a political lefty and is convinced that the earth is warming, at least partly due to man's activities, but says the hype is all unfounded. He predicts that it would take 1700 years of continued warming to reach the catastrophe state predicted by Al Gore. Doesn't sound like the sky is falling very fast.

Link to an article about Gieg and his views.

Aha, Crash Team Racing works on the PS2

Crash Team Racing (CTR) used to work on our original playstation, but quit working some time ago. I'm sure this may have something to do with all of the scratches all over the optical surface of the disc. Since it quit working, I've had to suffer through my boys wiping the floor with my carcass every time they challenge me at Crash Bash. Can does a great impression of the opening segment of the game, by the way. I'll have to record and post it sometime. It used to be that I could school the boys at any game we owned, for some reason, I just can't seem to compete at this game. It is really sad when Dec, who is only five, trounces me like I wasn't even trying, and believe me, I was trying hard on Saturday afternoon. So I had this brain flash, "hey, maybe CTR works on the playstation2." Hooray, it worked. Now it was my turn to do the trash talking. I blew past him like he was standing still. I even beat Sul (8), who is the best in the neighborhood at Crash Bash. It must have only been a bad day for him, because we had a tournament tonight for family home evening and both Mads (10) and Sul beat me. But I still kicked Dec's little behind. Take that you kindergartner.

The Rush to Peace - Why don't we stop and think about it!

I caught a few seconds of 60 minutes yesterday while waiting for the new Amazing Race season opener. I was privileged to see and hear Andy Rooney barf his lack of thought on the public airwaves. He was lamenting the fact that our governent is not a true democracy where every citizen gets to vote on every issue that comes along. His lament was a thinly vieled cover for his opinion that we are now stuck in Iraq because George Bush, with the help of his unamed advisors, took it upon himself to start a war that we (the American people, whom he feels he speaks for) would never have accepted had we been given the choice to vote on the issue. He dismisses the fact that in voting for George Bush, we, or at least the majority of we (who don't really count because he wasn't part of the we), chose the war. He ignores the fact, yes fact, that the majority of the members of congress, whom we also voted for, voted to give the President authority to do exactly what he is doing now, fighting a battle to prevent the larger war on terror from reaching our soil. He tries to muddle the issues by ignoring the fact that most Americans supported the war based on the information (which all of us, including the President, thought was valid) we had at the time, with the current national misgivings about how the war has been handled and what it is costing us in lives and dollars.

In typical modern liberal thinking, Mr. Rooney dismisses most of the facts in order to boil a complicated issue down into a yes or no issue. For instance, he lists a number of issues which could be put to the vote of the people, one of which is:

Iraq: Take all of our troops out of there immediately. Yes or no.

The problem is that it is not really a simple yes or no issue. I'm sure that every American would love to have our troops com home immediatly. However, anyone who takes half-a-second to look beyond his misleading question can see that there are so many more issues that are involved in this decision. One that comes to the front of my thoughts is, "what would be the consequences of immediatly pulling our troops out?" There is plenty of room to argue about what might occur in Iraq, the middle east and the rest of the world, including here at home, if we just left, but there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that the decision might come back to haunt us.

This is just another example of why I think that if the left would stop and think about what they say instead trying to rush to peace it might be easier to take them seriously.

You'd never know the rest of us are freezing

OK, so it's not truly cold here in NC like it is elsewhere in the states, but since we set our thermostat at 65 degrees it feels as cold in the house as if it was -20 degrees outside and we set our thermostat at 65 degrees. Why, you ask, do we keep the temperature so low if we are all freezing? Of course, anything we can do to try to slow global warming is worth the sacrifice :-). OK, its really more about slowing the financial drain on our checking account, but I can pretend to be as global warming conscious as those in the ivory tower in which I spend most of my time.

Yesterday Can decided he wanted his summer Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas on for his nap. When pressed about the cold, he finally made the concession of putting on his sleevless fleece vest, but spend the day wandering around like it was the middle of muggy summer. What you don't see is that the rest of us are in sweats and fleece jackets, with the occasional stocking cap, to keep us from succombing to hypothermia.