JournalApril 29, 2008 9:33 pm

I thought I remembered Karston’s infancy, but Cale reminds of some tiny details that I forgot. Finger lint! His tight grip on fabric allows him to get quite the build-up of lint between his fingers, on his palms, and sometimes between his toes.

Not that I needed to remember finger lint, neck cheese, angry face, and 10 diaper changes a day!

Child, JournalApril 28, 2008 11:16 am

I thought we were going through a lot of diaper changes and diaper wipes. In fact, we went through an entire tub of wipes in a fraction over eight days. Wow!

We’re using Member’s Mark (Sam’s Club) wipes at home right now, but the previous case of wipes and the travel wipes are Huggies. What Member’s Mark and Pampers wipes have over homemade wipes from paper towels and Huggies is durability and one-handed use. I’ve put my finger through a Huggies wipe (twice yesterday in fact) and same for wet paper towels. I have scrubbed a carpet spot with a Pampers wipe, and similar with Member’s Mark. Both of those also dispense one at a time readily for easy use with one free hand, while the former two often require two hands. So I’d choose the two better brands of wipes, or homemade wipes made from soft diaper flannel not from paper towels.

Tips, Journal, Unix, iPodApril 26, 2008 6:26 am

I like my iPod touch as a handheld web browser using WiFi. Yes, it’s expensive for that niche when you could probably use the slower Nintenndo DS Browser or other applications, but then you have an iPod for music, podcasts, or (my favorite) video podcasts.

However, I hit a stumbling block for a minute when I couldn’t find the tilde on the soft keyboard. Then I agreed, tilde (~) should not be used in Web addresses. Luckily I remembered %7E on my own, and I know that is URL encoding. You could use an online URL encode/decode page, a self-contained page that can be saved for offline URL encoding and decoding, sample JavaScript to write your own, or these excellent shell scripts called urlencode and urldecode.

Health, DietApril 24, 2008 8:58 pm

I read this article, 16 Secrets the Restaurant Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know, and my favorite line is

Not being able to tell what’s natural and what’s enhanced has always been a problem for us at Hooters.

The information was also interesting. I didn’t know that fast food is generally lower-calorie than a sit-down restaurant meal! Scary. I’ve never eaten out much, but as I’ve gotten older (or is it fussier and healthier about what I cook at home?), I can’t eat out much because I get an upset stomach and often sprue. We had lunch at a very friendly restaurant Wednesday, and my stomach revolted at the very normal restaurant food. There’s an episode of Married with Children where Al tells Peg that people who eat healthy food and exercise all the time are extinct like dinosaurs. If I had to live on that food, I’d be extinct!

Crafts, Recycle, DIYApril 20, 2008 9:29 pm

Wow, ideas to use dryer lint including firestarter, paper mache, and clay for sculpture. I thought I knew how to cover my recycling bases, but just look what I was missing. I could see using dryer lint as a layer for potted plants, though.

Journal 3:41 pm

I really wanted to take a shower during Cale’s afternoon nap, but he woke up every time I stopped touching him, he woke up to cry. So I took a nap with him; I needed a nap too. Karston knows he’s not supposed to wake Cale, so we found him asleep in the doorway so he could watch.

Just a few minutes after we all got up, it started to hail! with lightning! The hail came down so heavily so quickly that it clogged a gutter downspout by the sunroom. We’re all still on the sunroom couch watching the nature show. We could gauge the intensity of the rain by the height of the upward spray (spray-back) from the clogged downspout. What a show! Good time to stay home, to stay in, and not to grill dinner.

JournalApril 18, 2008 8:46 pm

For someone who often explains the ills of dehydration, I sure pulled a dumb one today. When I got home this evening and changed my pants, I realized that I had not adjusted my pants since I got ready for work this morning. Meaning I haven’t been to the bathroom (even now; Cale’s nursing) in more than 13 hours (and counting). I drank a lot of tea at lunch, but I ran some errands and sweated a lot too. I bet this explains why Cale has tried to nurse so much this evening. So I am trying to fill up on water now …

Let’s not do this dehydration anymore.

Journal 8:20 pm

Until this afternoon, I had never eaten ice cream served from an ice cream truck. We stopped by the Harris Teeter grocery store on our way home, and they were scooping free ice cream from a truck on a hot day (over 80 degrees!). Yum! We had a very short date-picnic with ice cream in the shade of a tree right there in the parking lot. Fun!

Baby, JournalApril 17, 2008 8:30 am

This morning, I put the last size 1 diaper on Cale, and he’s on to the 1-2 size. We’re going up a partial size just because we can buy 1-2’s by the case at Sam’s Club (convenience). It’s difficult to tell the difference between the sizes. In fact, the big difference is that the decorative band is wider! It’s also minutely wider and taller. (We’re using Pampers Swaddlers this time, what we liked best last time. The Huggies size 1s are distinctly smaller, though.)

Tips, Troubleshooting, UnixApril 15, 2008 2:58 pm

Aha! I can pass environment variables to sudo!
sudo env ARCHFLAGS='-arch ppc' python setup.py install
Or, more to the point,
sudo env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH sybase