T13 (5/∞): Keeping Riley Busy This Summer

Thirteen Ideas for Keeping Riley Busy This Summer Welcome to my 5th T13 (that's Thursday Thirteen)! Please use my "Mr. Linky" to leave a link back to your site (more traffic!) School's out for Riley for the summer, but not for me. Here are thirteen things we've got planned to keep him occupied this summer:

Vacation Church School mornings, Jun 11-Jun 15 Sports Mania Camp afternoons, Jun 11-Jun 15 at Life Time Fitness Swimming Lessons mornings for 30 minutes, Jun 25-Jul 6, at Life Time Fitness Visit cousins whenever Extreme LEGOS and MatheMagic mornings, Jul 16-Jul 20 Go For The Gold "Super Summer Camp" all day, Jul 23-27 at Life Time Fitness Go to the Minnesota Zoo whenever Go to the Park whenever Visit friends whenever Minnesota State Fair sometime during August 23rd to September 3rd Go to The Blast on one or more rainy days Go to the Minnesota Children's Museum whenever Go to the Science Museum of Minnesota whenever Fortunately for moi, number 6 on the list—the all day camp at Life Time Fitness—takes place during the last week of my "semester long" class they've managed to cram into eight weeks.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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Ooopps! Forgot already!
Matière du jour:
Cognitive Dissonance
(Category: Science)

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Comment Friday (Number 7/∞)

It is Comment Friday here at Love All Books and at BAYB (where I grabbed the idea from initially).

So, on that note, as long as you're here . . .

Please post a comment while you're visiting and tell me what you're up to. Tell me what you're reading and what you think about it!

As for moi, I finished reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster, and I'm still reading The Quilter's Apprentice by Jennifer Chiaverini (May's "Neighborhood Wive's Book Club" pick).

In other news, school is out for Riley (my six year old kindergarten graduate), but the summer session at Saint Paul College has only just begun. (Saint Paul College is—as I've mentioned before—where I am working toward a Web Developer Certificate.) This summer I'm enrolled in an online class, XML Programming.

I also met, yesterday, with my academic advisor there to discuss which of the elective classes I should take for this certificate. (The academic advisor is, coincidentally, my XML Programming class instructor for the moment.)

I had originally been leaning toward PHP and MySQL Programming, but he showed me the folly of thinking and I'll most likely take Java Programming 1 instead, followed up by the not required, but definitely advisable Java Programming 2 and Java Certification.

I can take the PHP and MySQL Programming at some later date to enhance by skill base, but PHP isn't nearly as, ahem, fiscally responsible (a phrase which here means providing copious employment opportunities) as Java.

Have a great Friday.

Oh, and head over to BAYB and leave a comment there!

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Thursday Thirteen (1 of ∞)

Thirteen Things Books Read By The Neighborhood Wives Book Club For a while now I've been thinking I should get involved in some memes—I started doing a Comment Friday a few weeks back—and I think Thursday Thirteen is another one that I can handle weekly, so I'm gonna give it a try. Since I'd like this to be, first and foremost, a book talk blog, here are thirteen books—in somewhat chronological order—read by the "neighborhood wives book club" that Julie has time to make it to some months (the books I've read, as a direct result of her participation there, are in bold): Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. I'm amazed that this book, a memoir, was ever written (a phrase which here means: "I'm sorta amazed Burroughs was still alive to write it!") A very strange book about a very strange childhood in a very strange family. I liked it, if only because it made my family seem somewhat normal by comparison. The Color of Water by James C. McBride. I enjoyed this book (subtitled A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother) even though I'm not black, not jewish, and not so many other things McBride is. In fact, it might be for that very reason that I did enjoy the book. To be honest, it has been a while and I don't recall it as well as I wish. What I do remember is that—as a wannabe writer—I found the following snippet of description worth keeping in my writer's notebook: You could see him coming from a distance, appearing out of nowhere like an angel, his silhouette seeming to rise from the ground in the simmering heat . . . The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Now here's a book I highly recommend. It reminded me a bit of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (so it goes!) Only different. Read them both and decide for yourself. Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg. I don't read all the books they choose for the book club. But there must have been something on the book jacket of this one, or something said at the bus stop when I saw Riley off to school one morning. Or perhaps I had Riley with me at the Library when I picked it up for Julie and (Riley being Riley) he was playing one of the games on the kid's computers there, so I just started reading it while I waited for him. But I did read this one when it really isn't something I would normally have picked for myself. I don't recall it completely, but I do recall enjoying it. Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. Another book I probably would have avoided for myself (or not—I do have a fascination with history, after all). A book about the plague? Yeah, that sounds like fun. But it was a surprising great book. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. I have reviewed this book a while back (I rated it a 9), so I'll let that stand for itself. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I also reviewed this book a while back also (and, again, rated it a 9). Frangipani by Célestine Hitiura Vaite. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. A Widow for One Year by John Irving. Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

1. West of Mars
2. Going Crazy Slowly

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Richard Adams & Mary Anne

Today, Love All Books wishes the happiest of birthdays to my sister, Mary Anne, and to Guardian Award winning author Richard Adams.

Richard Adams is the author of Watership Down.

Now a book about sentient rabbits might sound a bit too out there for some folks, but I'd highly recommend this book to everyone. I have fond memories of reading this book, and look forward to the day I share it with Riley (my six year old).

I also have fond memories of going to the DMV very shortly after the state I lived in went to seven character personalized license plates and trying to get HRUDUDU—the Lapine word for a car or tractor—for my car.

When I said "I hope it is available", the woman behind the counter looked at me as if I was from Mars and said "Of course it is going to be available! We've only been doing seven characters for a few days, and who else would want that?"

As displeased I was that she was wrong, I did love the look on her face when she saw that that combination was taken!

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Beverly Cleary

Today, Love All Books would like to extend birthday wishes to Beverly Cleary, the author of a number of fine children's books that I recall fondly these many (many, many, many) years later.

In particular, I was a big fan her Henry Huggins books, and look forward to the day when Riley is old enough to appreciate them.

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Blogging at the DCL

It's spring break for my kindergartener Riley, and I've gotten us going this morning in what is—for me—record time, and taken him to the Dakota County Library (DCL).

He likes to play games on the computers they have set up for kids (the games he doesn't have at home, few as they are), and I had a book to pick up for Julie (Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life by Susan Forward).

Knowing I would be here 29 minutes longer than I needed to be, I brought the laptop along, hoping that an attempt at using a public wi-fi hotspot would be more productive than last time I tried it!.

And it is (more productive): this post is being composed at the library right now!

As soon as I finish this post I can continue researching part 2 of the final project for my JavaScript class (er, excuse me, CSCI 2440, the Internet Programming - Client Side class) at Saint Paul College where (as I've said before) I'm working toward a Web Developer Certificate.

This part of the final project is really cool, actually. We're supposed to

integrate and demonstrate three javascript functions/effects from three separate third party sources.

I've pretty much decided that I'm going to employ effects that will be useful to me at some other sites I maintain. To that end, I've picked the following for the project:

• The connection manager at YUI looks promising, especially the weather RSS feed, which might look good on a blog.
• The horizontal accordion from mootools.net is something I really want to use for a special project I've got in mind.
• Another good possibility is the Typing Text Script from Dynamic Drive. I really don't have a real world need for this yet, but I bet it comes in handy at some point.

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Back Story (M): Summer Came To Visit

M is for Miscellanea, remember?

It reached the eighties here in the Twin Cities yesterday. That was—though deeply unusual (a phrase which here means "record breaking")—quite enjoyable, early in the day at any rate (more on that later).

I stunned my son Riley when he got off the bus from kindergarten when I said "I have to go back to the house for a few minutes, then how about we go to the park?"

First off, I don't think the thought had crossed his mind yet this early in the spring—and trust me, this is a kid that does think of the park very early in the spring—and secondly, even though I can usually enjoy taking him there, I never am the one to suggest it.

So off we went to the park for a while, and he was mighty miffed when I told him it was time to go so I could get dinner on the table before I had to leave for my class. (I'm taking Internet Programming - Client Side at Saint Paul College, as I work toward a Web Developer Certificate.) I finally got him to head for the car, but not without hearing about how we're coming back to the park again tomorrow (which would be today, now) and every day next week (during his spring break).

The bad part about summer showing up for a day is that folks at Saint Paul College had no idea how to switch on the A/C I guess. It was sweltering in our classroom, a condition made worse by all the computers turned on in the room!

Our first order of business at class? A quiz! I started off real good—I really know this stuff rather well—but then the heat started to get to me and I found myself struggling over stuff I knew that I knew. What an annoyance!

The rest of the class went well though; we're really getting into some cool JavaScript stuff now, which I cannot wait to apply to my Web Developer Quest site, not to mention what I might be able to do for this blog!

And being that this is primarily a "book talk" blog, I guess I could mention that the textbook we're using (New Perspectives on JavaScript by Patrick Carey and Frank Canovatchel) is really excellent for learning JavaScript from. And it is even better for learning JavaScript with a teacher, but I think most educated individuals could do quite well with only this book.

So—back to my story—summer visited, as I was saying.

For one day.

Today it is back to being what I—with my seriously thin blood—would have to call "mighty cool".

So guess where Riley and I wound up after he got off the bus today?

Right!

The park.

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E. B. White: Charlotte's Web (Rating: 9)

I finished reading Charlotte's Webto my son Riley last night. It is no wonder that this book is a classic!

This is the first time I've read him a book of this length; we read a chapter, more or less, at bedtime each night for the last several weeks.

Not that I haven't wanted to read a book this long to him, but he just turned six in January and is only now showing an interest in an ongoing story.

(This is a huge step up from the days when he wanted the same book read every night for a week or two on end!)

It also reminds me of my favorite story about my mother:

This will shock anyone who knows me, but I must not have always been a fan of books. In fact, I really wasn't at all interested in school around the time I was in second or third grade. I was doing so badly that year that I was going to be held back if I didn't go to summer school.

My mother decided, and off to summer school I went.

After lunch each day, the teacher would read a chapter from one of Jerry West's Happy Hollisters book (a series of mystery books for kids). I loved the stories, and was always very impatient to know what would happen next.

I must have said something to my mother about this because—even though we had very little money when I was growing up—she somehow managed to find enough to start buying me a Happy Hollisters book every month so I could read them for myself (and not have to wait to find out how it was going to turn out).

Because she did this, I really developed a love for reading and, for the rest of my young life—and often as an adult—I could usually be found with my nose in a book . . .

(The preceding is adapted from a memorial tribute I wrote about my mother for Julie (my wife), so she could put it into the first volume of the scrapbooks that she's doing for Riley.)

So? The point?

Well, first off, I'd have to say that I sincerely hope that Riley also acquires the reading bug the way Julie and I have (and thanks to the wonderful teacher he has at kindergarten—and without overly belittling the impact Julie and I are having on him as well—I think he's well on the way).

Secondly, I guess we have my mother to thank for this blog's raison d'être.

Thanks, Mom!

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Let's try this again [From my "Back Story" blog]

I thought I'd learned from my mistakes, but I guess not. At least this time the problem was an offline error. I had a really nice entry being edited yesterday for this blog, and got my machine hung before I saved a copy (I just saved what I've written in this post so far!)

So, now I'll try to re-invent what I wrote once already, and you can bet I'll be saving this puppy often as I do.

Before we get started with the back story that is the raison d'etre for this blog, I'm going to explain how I'm going to proceed with giving you some idea "what I'm about" in the most useful fashion.

I tend to be someone who likes my route well thought out before beginning a trip, and a plan of action before beginning any venture. As such, I'm going to lay out my plan so that you know what to expect.

My intent is to concurrently implement two techniques that I've been familiar with for many years:

1. The first technique (I was taught this a number of years ago by a salesman) gives you the ability to converse with anyone you'd like to get to know better (and, in the salesman's case, anyone you'd like to sell something to).
   
   This first technique is called FORM.
   
   FORM stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Money (or Message). If you introduce yourself to someone and start a discussion about your families, jobs, recreational interests, and then talk about whatever your message is (or what you're selling) you stand a better chance of investing that person in what you're saying.
   
   And since this blog will be (as I hope all my blogs are) a conversation between myself and my readers, I'm going to be using the FORM method to structure the information you learn about me.


2. But wait, there's MORE!!!
   
   The second technique I'm going to employ is something from my former life in the world of IT (information technology): spiral development. Yes, I'm going to iterate over the FORM areas of my life (mayhap not so much over the M), providing a high-level view of my life at present and how I got here, and then on successive iterations going into more and more detail (but not so much you get sick of me, I hope!)

So, beginning with Family, (iteration 1), I am:

• 50 years old


• a husband (to wife Julie)


• a father (to son Riley)


• a stay-at-home dad (for six years, come January)


• an orphan


• the fourth of my mother's six kids (I have an two older "half sisters" and a "half brother")


• the first of my father's three children (I have a younger sister and a younger brother)

That's enough of the first iteration on family. Next time I'll talk about my occupation (such as it is).

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Sad to say...

The sad part about this blog is that I'm a very slow reader, so please bear with me. I tend to be reading at least one or two fictional books at any given time (I just finished reading The Miserable Mill, book 4 in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events).

 

This is in addition to reading my Photoshop textbook, and the one or more nonfiction books I'm typically working on at any given time (at the moment, that's Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs by Biz Stone, and PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra.

      

It is also sad that I'm hopelessly outnumbered by the authors out there. I can really relate to Henry Bemis, the character played by Burgess Meredith in the "Time Enough at Last" episode of The Twilight Zone (and yet, not even I want time to read that badly!)

I hope Riley, my soon-to-be six-year-old kindergartener, is a faster reader than I when he grows up or I will feel somewhat awful that I'm turning him on to books; I'd hate for him to have to deal with the frustration I endure! But I gotta admit, it is great watching him learn to read! He read—almost completely on his own—Hop on Pop (by Doctor Seuss) to me last night (imagine: he had trouble with "Constantinople" and "Timbuktu"!)

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Hunhhh? [From my "Web MaJoR" blog]

Just when you think you've seen every variation of "webmaster" on the planet, including such lovelies as "webmaestro" and "webguru", along comes moi with this puzzler of seemingly random capitalization: "Web MaJoR". What's up with that?

It does make one pause, doesn't it?

"What is wrong with the term 'webmaster'?", you may ask. To which I reply, "Nothing, in the proper context. The term truly does apply—by my very uneducated guesstimation—to probably a good 0.00003728 per cent of the web creators out there.

(Oooh, raise your hand if you correctly deduced that the number I cited above is meaningless, that I totally came up with it off the top of my head. I do stuff like that; most of the time you won't even be told about it—I'll give you credit for the smarts to figure it out on your own. That's part of my charm. If that bothers you, get over it.)

My problem—if you wish to view it that way—with the word stems from the fact that I cannot apply the term master to myself as it is being used (follow the link above to the definition at the Free Online Dictionary). In this context it is supposed to mean "an expert", which I, most certainly, am not, even though I do most of the web site management and modification for a certain company in the Twin Cities area.

"So why 'MaJoR', then?" you ask.

Well, the number one definition for major at the Free Online Dictionary is "Greater than others in importantance or rank"; while I'd say I'm certainly not greater than everyone when it comes to web development—there are, as I said, actual masters out there—I'm better than many and have performed the task professionally. More appropriate is definition number six ("Of or relating to the field of academic study in which a student specializes"): I am, and of necessity must continue to be, an ongoing student of internet technologies. (This is one of the reasons I'm currently working on the take-home portion of my Introduction to Photoshop mid-term!)

"Okaaaaayyy . . ." I hear you wonder, "so what's up with the funky capitalization?"

Well, my first name is Michael, my wife's is Julie (there are some projects—web and otherwise—for which her help is indispensable), and my kindergartener is Riley (anyone with a kindergartener will understand that he'd want to be involved and express his opinion on our projects).

And so—to make a long story short ("Too late!")—MaJoR stands for "Michael and Julie or Riley.

Filed in: Web.Master Webmaster Web.Programming Web.Development Photoshop

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What Shall I Be When I Grow Up [From my "Techsploration" blog]

It occurs to me that any visitors that stray in from the web might have more than a passing interest in who I am, something more than what is in my profile.

I've spent the last few years trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, started writing a mystery novel that I'll finish someday, started more than a few short stories (and finished one that ain't half bad, ain't all bad, but still needs work) and then wandered away from that for a bit.

Next up, I thought perhaps I'd go finish up my schoolin' (I'm pretty much finished the equivalent of a sophomore year of college) and be a librarian when I grow up (short answer: "ACK!" Librarians have, by and large, an MLS, that's a Masters in Library Science to you and me!) Then I discovered that MCTC offers an "Associate of Science in Library Information Technology Degree", and that is probably what I'll do with myself once my son, Riley, starts kindergarten in the fall.

For now, in the spare time I manage to eke out for myself, I try to keep current on my way too many areas of interest.

Next up: I dunno; perhaps some discussion of my indispensable apps?

Filed in: Writing, Fatherhood

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