Daley Ponderings

6/18 - Talking at the dinner table about what something tasted like.  Mommy: "My tongue said [it was yummy]."  Jonathan:"My tongue said, too." Noah: "My tongue said, one!" 6/25 - Fire safety lesson.  We learned about Stop, Drop, and... (More)

I keep forgetting to post this.  A friend who currently lives in China wrote: It has been interesting to hear some of my former students express excitement and intrigue about the presidency of Barack Obama. The reason it has captured their attention is because it proves to them... (More)

We are the happy recipients of two used swingsets - one from a family at church and one from the next door neighbors.  It is loads of fun and we're planning on building monkey bars between the two sets. Recently, when I was reading one of our storybooks about Noah and the flood,... (More)

I guess I fail the test , since I answered "no" to both questions, though I suppose Brad Andresen from college (the one who always said of me, "You're more liberal than you think you are.") would be happy to hear that I'd be more likely to think it alright to slap my dad... (More)

So, I know you can't believe anything you read in a newspaper, but if the newspaper calls you and tells you something, then can you believe it?  How about if both Pittsburgh newspapers call? We've heard that Judy was acquitted of two of the three charges brought against her, but... (More)

Would you send your nine-year-old on a New York City subway by himself?  Would you send him on a horse from Oklahoma to New Mexico and back by way of the deserts of Texas - taking his five-year-old brother along? It can be frustrating sifting through the chaff at the children's... (More)

Our printer finally died.  Or actually, it didn't really die, but required more money, so I decided (somewhat hesitantly, since the HP Laserjet 6L is the best printer ever made, according to most sources) to replace it.  The 6L lasted 13 years , so the longest lasting printer I've... (More)

I haven't looked at how much time it took us to do taxes this year - I thought we were doing pretty well, time-wise, until we blew 8 hours or so today finishing them off (or is it them finishing us off, I'm not sure which...) I noticed a number of places where the strange, complicated... (More)

We finished our taxes today, and the kids were around while we were doing it, and then we went out to the Olive Garden, since we didn't feel like cooking at 8PM when we finished the taxes.  On the way home, we were talking about how much the meal cost (Jonathan has various data points on... (More)

Speaking of news, I forgot to post here that the closing arguments for Judy's trial are scheduled for tomorrow, and I'll be heading to Pittsburgh to hang out with folks who will be there in her support.  Of course, this might be the first time a scheduled meeting actually happened when it... (More)

2/10 or earlier - Faith can transfer an item from one hand to the other. 2/10 - Jonathan, studying a penny, "This coin says 1 - 9 - 9 - 9.  That's super long ago!"  (I knew my kids would think anything before 2000 was ancient history.) Since coming home from... (More)

We are missing a movie, and so went looking around the house for it (the boys had all the movies out the other day, lining them up to look at all of the covers (as well as taking all the Mancala marbles and throwing them around the house)) - see what happens when Mommy leaves for the... (More)

Since I am a lazy Debian user, I am not used to compiling things from source.  (sidenote: It is interesting to me how many people from other distributions are fairly used to mucking around in source code, spending hours working on getting a simple package installed)  But, clusterssh... (More)

The IRS hasn't published their calculator yet, and I have been reading about lots of people trying to figure out what to do with line 70 on their 1040 (ie. the famous RRC that is causing probably more time wasted than was worth the money that was sent out last year. So, I wrote a... (More)

Heather and I spent several days over the last week at our old house, cleaning and fixing various things that our previous tenants broke. It is pretty annoying to have people totally not care about your property, and live in pretty disgusting conditions, presumably to get back at me for... (More)