Just after Christmas, my wife was looking through the more than 300 photos on our digital camera that we had taken between Halloween and Christmas. Our four year old daughter had snapped about 30 photographs the day before and the camera memory was getting full. The battery was getting low too and the camera wasn’t responding well to the controls. My wife mentioned that she still hadn’t downloaded many of the pictures from the camera to her computer and that she better do it just in case something were to go wrong and we were to lose them.
She was struggling with the uncooperative controls, when all of a sudden she cried out “Oh NO! I think I just accidentally deleted all the photos!”
“What?” I responded. “How did you do that?!”
She didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but she was right. There wasn’t a single picture on the camera. All the pictures of Christmas Day, the pictures of the snowman I built with the kids before Christmas, the pictures of our family Christmas party, even the pictures from Thanksgiving—ALL GONE! She was devastated.
I panicked for a only a brief moment, but then the computer geek part of my brain clicked on.
“I think I can recover them,” I told her.
Merry belated Christmas and Happy belated New Year to everyone. I would have posted something at the appropriate time, but our family got Viral Influenza for Christmas and I am just getting over it (today is my first day back to work since the day after Christmas).
We were most concerned about our 10-month old son, who sustained a fever, vomiting, and serious coughing for five days. The first doctor we saw misdiagnosed him with ear infections and bronchitis. When the prescribed antibiotic had no effect, a return visit and a blood test identified our illness as the Influenza virus. Influenza can be very serious for young children because it can develop into pneumonia fairly easily. And because it is a viral and not a bacterial infection, it is not easily treated. Fortunately he has been slowly, but surely recovering. His cough has improved, has only had a mild fever at night, and is not longer vomiting.
As a kind of a follow up to my previous post on the family, I wanted to share a story about our children that occurred yesterday.
First, a little background:
A few years back, the Marriage and Family class at our LDS church was taught by sister Williams, who is a professional psychiatrist working with young, recently married couples at BYU. She had lots of wonderful insights, both as a marriage dynamics professional and a gospel instructor, that have stuck with me ever since.
Among the many topics she presented, one discussed studies that indicated that some parents were enforcing the virtue of “sharing” upon their children so much that their children were growing up with a deficient, warped, or even nonexistent concept of personal property. As a result, these children who lacked a sense of property were less likely to respect the property of others and more likely to steal or vandalize.
My own parents had been careful about how much we were forced to “share” our toys.
With our own children, we have tried to teach that their belongings really do belong to them, and that, while sharing is the right thing to do, we will not force them to share against their will. After all, what virtue is there in sharing unless you have the choice not to share? And if no property is ever your own to withhold, then what beneficence is there in giving?
A while ago I wrote about my fascination with Vaudeville and the talent of that era.
This mashup of video of some fellows dancing the Charleston in the 1920s’ with the electronic dance music of Daft Punk is too cool not to share:
Those of you who have known me in person for any significant amount of time know that I love to dance, though it wasn’t always so. Dancing is an important part of our family culture. I’m not talking about competitive ballroom dance or anything intense like that, though many of us have taken ballroom dance classes casually, and some have even competed on a novice level. When I was growing up it wasn’t uncommon for my parents to put on some music and dance, just for the fun of it. Now that we are all grown, when we get together we often dance—and it is blast.
We are finally back from our trip to California and while we are happy to have been able to see some close friends and family that we haven’t been able to visit in a long time, the trip itself was absolutely the worst road trip we have ever been on. I can’t quite call it a vacation because it was so stressful and expensive that it will be relaxing to get back to work deadlines for a change.
Our long time friend and fellow Maxed-Out Puppeteer, Sean, was scheduled to be married to his love, Kate, on December 30th in the LDS Temple in Oakland California. Despite the fact that my wife, Chastity, was over seven months pregnant, we decided that we would go anyway. We looked at plane tickets but they were much too expensive. Little did we know that events that were to follow would end up costing us a great deal more.
Well, I’ve been on vacation all week…sort of. We had planned to go up to Yellowstone National Park, but we canceled at the last minute because of a sciatic nerve problem that would have made the drive miserable for my wife. So I’ve been vacationing at home instead.
It is far too easy to putter away a vacation at home without actually doing anything substantial. You watch videos, surf the web, eat, neglect the laundry, sleep in, and before you know it you have wasted away the entire vacation.
While we have certainly done a deal of that, we decided to use this home vacation to do some fun things that we don’t usually have time for. The weather this week has been perfect so we have been out and about.
I apologize for the recent lack of posts.
The last week of June I was working extra hours (most days until 4:30 in the morning) to get the web-based application we have been writing at work for the last 8 months finished and released by July 3rd. I worked Sunday July 2nd from 2:00 in the afternoon straight through to 7:30 the next morning. It was exhausting, but we did get the beast into production.
I then took vacation from July 3rd through the 7th to decompress and spend time with my family.
If you have children of your own you know that they often become attached to a specific object or toy that, for a time, they prefer over all others. Our youngest daughter, who will turn three in August, has laid claim to a specific fork. I think that the reason why she likes this particular fork is that its tines are shorter than those of the rest of the forks. She calls it “my little fork” and her attachment to it at mealtimes is sometimes remotely reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum and his “precious.”
After my Spanish class ended on Tuesday, I hurried over to attend my neighborhood caucus for the Republican party.
Utah has an interesting way of doing elections. Every couple of years the members of each political party within an area roughly the size of a neighborhood, called a precinct, meet to elect delegates to their party’s county and state conventions. Between the caucuses and the conventions, the delegates meet individually with candidates for political office for their party, attend debates, and discuss issue and candidates among themselves and with the people in their precinct. When they attend the conventions, they then vote for the candidates they feel best represent the ideals and needs of the state and their precinct. Delegates serve for two years.
As if having a blog with a lab notebook grid-paper background wasn’t geeky enough…
Growing up, I always loved home experiment/science trick books like Bet You Can and Bet You Can’t . So when I ran across a web page on how to create a miniature Plasma cloud at home using a microwave, some old fax paper, paper towels, and a grape, I just had to link to it .
I apologize for the recent lack of posts. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. In addition to working to meet some pretty important deadlines at work, working on a contract programming job after work, providing some support for the recent release of my open source project, xajax, and fulfilling family responsibilities, I started school again last week.
I am disturbed and angered by an article today in the National Review Online by Kathryn Lopez entitled Defining Life Down . The article discusses improvements in the ability to detect Down Syndrome in unborn babies during the first trimester of pregnancy and how parents are increasingly using that information to justify killing their unborn children with Down Syndrome.
As a child I was a stubborn learner and spent my second grade year of elementary school in a resource reading group.
