me rite gud

So….   We moved again.  It seriously cut into my internet surfing time.   So here is my backlog of randomness from the past couple of months:

CGI Lady – Not exactly sure how they pulled it off but it appears to be flash based.  Maybe its time I learn me some flash again.

Decaying Theme Parks - My recent obsession with abondoned places continues.  The story behind Dog Patch USA was fascinating but a time consuming read.   Flickr pools are much more manageable.

Free Range Kids – Blog by

Lenore Skenazy who wrote the article about leaving her 9 year old in downtown NYC to figure out his way home on the subway.  Eden is 9 now. And I think she could probably do it.  But it still scares the crap out of me to not have the kids in view.  Which is completely irrational on my part given the amount of free range roaming I did when I was 9.  I did send Eden across Target the other day to go switch out a shirt for one with a price tag.  I had my eye on the doors the entire time and I couldn’t help thinking that she was lost the entire time.  But she managed to find the shirt and make it back to the register in one piece.  Not sure if the experience was more educational for her or me.

Okay,  time to go sort some more boxes out.  If you don’t have our new address, call us.  Our phone number is still the same.  Not sure how reliable the mail forwarding is.

… we had to walk backwards uphill in snow to school and back.
Unlike those young whippersnappers who entered college this year. From
the Beloit College 2011 mindset list, in the lifetime of the students graduating in 2011 (born in 1989):

• have never rolled down a car window
• Fox has always been a major network
• MTV has never featured music videos
• Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture
• High definition television (not to mention DVDs) has always been available
• Russia has always had a multi-party political system

As Annika mentioned, Nell, Andrea and I have undertaken the massively masochistic task of looking through all of our old letters and scanning the good/interesting ones. So far we’ve unearthed a few real gems.

One of Eden’s least favorite homework assignments is to write “summaries” of the stories she reads in reading group. It would probably be fine if they really were doing summaries. Instead her teacher is making them recite every detail from the story in their own words. Not sure what the other kids in her group end up with but in Eden’s case she usually writes out a two to five *handwritten, single spaced* pages. While I think its great practice for her to do this much writing, I hope once the year is over we can help her learn what a summary really is.

Letters. Summaries. So far I can summarize the majority of my letters that I’ve [re]read:

• My life sucks
• I am so bored
• [name of town] is the most boring place on earth
• I am trapped in the depths (yes depths) of despair
• Let’s make plans to go to [my house, your house, their house]
• No one understands me.
• Sorry for taking so long to write back
• I suck for not writting back sooner

I really don’t remember being unhappy when these letters were written. In fact I’ve always remember that time of my life as being the good old days when we had a ton of unashamed rockus good fun. We stayed out all night, hung out, lit stuff on fire, had inside jokes, dyed hair, pierced body parts, etc. But to read these letters you would think we were all depressed, tortured souls.

Makes me wonder whether thats just what its like being a teenager. In which case is this what my kids are going to go through? And how is it going to play out for them? We had letters. Now that I am almost 30, err I mean almost 25, I can look back at all these letters and see the contrast. Maybe even learn something about myself? But what will they have? Text messages? Blog comments? I hope teenagers now are saving something so they will be able to go back later.

“OMG life sux ROTFLMAO”