You might not know it, but I’m a pretty big Michael Jackson fan, as I’ve publically and shamefully confessed before.  In one of his biggest hits, he sings about how some kid is not his even though the mom says he’s the dad. 

I don’t think I have this problem.  And I have “proof”:

Yeah, I’m thinking the resemblance is there.

We just need to get the guy to learn how to grow a beard.  I guess now I know why they call it a “proof”.

I will now bring out my crystal ball and predict that someone with an affinity for pig rabbit combinations will say something about Hawaiian Shirts and likely lobby their senator to introduce a bill to ban them from all people with the middle name of Wayne.

Oh, and speaking of bragging about my kids, look at the Thank You letter Jaden wrote for his awesome Kindergarten teacher.

(click to enlarge)

Well, maybe just the haircut part.  Jaden turned 6 on Saturday (thanx to all of you wishing him a Happy Bday - it was great!) and he gave *us* a gift yesterday.

Jaden decided to cut his own hair yesterday.

update: here are the pictures

He came up to the wife and said “do you like my haircut?” and when my wife gasped (a purely natural reaction) Jaden’s eyes got all big and started welling up.

*awww heart string tugging* 

We made sure he knew that it’s ok, everything’s fine and we’re not mad, but please don’t take matters like this into your own hands.  You can dress yourself, tie your own shoes, make your own breakfast, brush your own teeth, but DON’T cut your own hair.

I even wrote a little song for him, that goes a little somethin’ like this

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape…
You don’t spiiiit, into the wiiind…
You don’t pull, the mask, of dat ol’ Lone Ranger
and you DON’T CUT YOUR OWN HAIR OFF YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU’RE SIX YEARS OLD!

We’ve scheduled an emergency onsite self-haircut-repair technician to come out to the house. 

The wife and I were trying to remember how old Caitlin was when she did it.  She was either 6 or younger… and she had much longer hair so it was more obvious, but this is definitely not something Jaden has a monopoly on.  I remember finding my first pair of trimmers when I was 12 and I cut into my widow’s peak and was absolutely surprised at how fast and easily it cut - I figured I’d have to chop at it a little bit but nooooo, it went straight up and inch and a half into my purely perfect coiffed hair in no time flat.  That was not the easiest thing to hide.

So now I turn the question to you:

Jaden turned 6 today, and we had EXTREME FUN at “Extreme Fun“, one of those places where kids jump in the inflatable moonwalks, run to their heart’s content, and have tons of fun.  Tons of EXTREME fun.

But I have an issue with one of their rules:

Look, this is a kids place.  Kids getting to jump on huge inflatable zipcode-sized bouncy things.  They’re gonna push.  And I think it’s ok to push.  What, everyone’s so fragile that they can’t push a little in the big soft inflatable lumps of air? 

First, Jaden had t-ball practice, so there was an hour or more of runing, fielding, hitting, running, catching, more running, and I love that he’s got this outlet for physical exercise.   

This is what we have left of the cake…

And this is what’s left of Jaden after the busy day:

Well for 21 weeks now, I’ve been giving you stuff you don’t want to MISC, which is my cheesy way of doing a weekly summary of stuff usually not important enough to be its own blog entry.  Some people use “Bullet Sundays” some have a “snacking” of various sorts, and others even do video.

This week I thought I’d mix it up. I thought maybe I’d MISC my own entry!  That’s right!  Sunday went by and no weekly summary from Wayne.  Were you all impressed with how creative I can be?  See how I turned it around?  Clever, eh?  I sensed thousands of you sitting at your computer waiting for my post and HA I tricked you!

Ahem, ok, well, on with your regularly-scheduled thought-provoking and incongruous hilarity.

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The Orchestra Concert was awesome!

I don’t think any other student had more people at her Orchestra concert than Caitlin.  We had twelve people there.  TWELVE!  And the music was amazing; simply amazing.  When you get the best of the best together, and they spend a couple days practicing with one of the best conductors around, it fails to matter that the musicians are in middle school.  It fails to matter that they’re at the beginning of their journey into true excellence.  It fails to matter that they’re entering puberty. 

I simply could not tell that I was listening to 13 year olds.

And then a couple of us stayed to listen to the High School Orchestra — and as you’d surmise, it’s made up of the best of the best of the high school aged chillen, and BOY were they good.  And I got a special treat in that they played a couple movements from Pictures at an Exhibition.  This song is special for me because back in *my* high school days, our band played a superb adaptation of this song as our marching band song and won several awards for it.  The music brought back many pleasant memories of practicing, marching, goofing off, and excelling with my fellow band members.  I can still sing and recite every word of the “Hallway of Men” song.

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Car fire on Parmer Lane

Here’s 13 seconds of a car fire I encountered on Saturday right before Caitlin’s concert.  This is my first successful youtube upload with my Samsung S730 camera.  I’m very impressed with the quality of video from such a small, cheap ($99) camera.  It’s 7.2 megapixels, too!  (battery life sucks though)

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Next

We watched Next, that movie with Nicholas Cage about a guy who can see two seconds minutes into the future.  I absolutely loved it!  I highly enjoy movies that take quite a bit of thinking and really good writing in order for things to come out right in the end.  It reminded me of the movie Primer - I mean, the writer had to really spend a LOT of time making sure things work out.

I’m thinking that kind of plot device could easily be made into a TV series.  And when I say easy, I mean it would be a success if it was done well.  It would be very difficult to write for and to come up with original story lines, but I know I’d watch it.

The movies special effects were great, Jessica Biel was hot, it had great action, it stimulated the brain, and I stayed interested throughout the entire movie.  What more could you ask for?

Well, I guess I could have gone without the Clockwork Orange flashback.  Ewwwwww *shudders*

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Cabling and Recabling

A co-worker of mine and I spent many hours up at work this past weekend during our big remodeling project for the Austin facility.  One of the things we knocked out was a significant portion of re-cabling for our facilities.  We’re not done yet, but you can probably judge for yourself how much of an improvement we made:

Before:

 

After:

 

Man it just plain feels better to have it looking good.  The spaghetti is more well formed.  We still have a few loose ends to tie up (as you can see) but those require a well-planned-ahead maintenance window.

*content sigh* there’s just something about a well-organized cabling architecture that gets me all warm and fuzzy.  Here’s the new rack we put in, minus some key horizontal cable management (still on order) but before we get any more cables in, we’ll have the cable mgmt in and we will be looking prett-ty spiffy.

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Jaden’s writing

How sweet is this. He wrote ‘elephant.’  *sniff*

This morning I volunteered and participated in “Pumpkin Math with Dads,” a great little 1 hour event in Jaden’s kindergarten class.  We had five (5) dads there, and each of us brought a pumpkin, some tools, and our time.

The kids split up into groups of 3 to 4 and joined a dad.  On our well-protected table, we had some “Record Sheets”, the pumpkin, and our tools.  The project was for the dads to work some math with the kids from their Record Sheets, and then have some fun carving the pumpkin up.

First we had the kids write their name on their sheets.  This was important and didn’t take near as long as I thought it would.  Seems these kids write their names a lot!  Sometimes Jaden comes home with his wrist taped up because of all the writing.

The second task was to have the kids estimate how tall the pumpkin was.  We had these little blocks that stacked up together and we could use them to measure things.  The blocks were a little smaller than an inch tall by my recollection.  After a little explanation of what one block looked like, and what five blocks looked like, I had the kids give their guesses.  One guessed 9, another guessed 12 and another guessed 20.  Actual pumpkin height: 11.  So two were very close and one was off by a factor of 2.  I tried explaining this factor principle to the kid, but he kept throwing pumpkin seeds at me.

The next task on the list was to estimate how fat the pumpkin was.  Personally, to avoid any issues with activists and the oversensitive, I probably would have named the task “guess how wide around the pumpkin is” but what do I know?  We used a piece of string to measure around, and then I asked the kids to estimate how many blocks would it take to be the same as the measurement.  The kid (mine) who guessed 9 before guessed 10 this time.  Evidently the estimation gig is a little beyond him at this moment, given that the pumpkin was clearly about three times wide around as it was tall.  I kept asking “are you sure this biiiig looooooongggg string is only one block longer?” but it got lost on him.  Another kid guessed 17 and another guessed 13.  The actual fatness?  41.  41 fat.  I like the sound of that.

Then we needed the kids to estimate the weight, in pounds, of the pumpkin.  One immediately guessed a hundred pounds and after he saw my look changed his guess to a more conservative estimate of fifty pounds.  One of these kids is barely 50 pounds.  My kid is 80.  I tried giving some more hints by picking up the fifty pound kid and then picking up the pumpkin and asking “is the pumpkin as heavy as this kid?”  They still said “yeah!”.  We clearly had some work to do here.  I then resorted to food - I told them that a properly made big daddy hamburger was about one pound.  How many hamburgers big is this pumpkin?  One (mine) estimated one pound.  Another estimated 50.  And the 3rd estimated 10.  The actual weight was 7 pounds.

We chose a design and did the carving.  I think our table had the best pumpkin, and that’s not just my paternal and territorial pride talking.  I did get sent to the principal’s office, however because they thought my pumpkin was a little “out of bounds” for what the school wants to teach.

I don’t understand what they were so upset about.

Should you choose to accept it, your mission today is to make a face at someone and have them make one back at you.

Jaden started it.

That’s what he’d like teh internetz to do for him today.

What’s your best “making a face” face?

Here’s mine:

I thought I’d pose a query to the masses (I’m pretty sure the space goes between the e and the m, and not the m and the a) about a recent situation involving a question Jaden asked me and the answer I gave.

The time I spend with Jaden (5yrs old at time of writing) in the mornings, getting ready and waiting at the bus stop, is priceless.  He’s so aware of everything (”look at that rabbit!”, “it’s cooler outside, Dad…”) and very appreciative of the things he sees.  He also asks those questions of life that adults don’t think about so much (”why is it so dark now?” and “do you like going to work?”) and is already planning his day (”we have PE today and we’re going to play with the parachute. I love the parachute”, “Can we go bowling after school?”).  Some of his comments make me wonder what the kids talk about at school (”yesterday the chocolate kid hit me”) so I perform interference and investigate a little when required.

Sometimes Jupiter waits with us, and that’s special in itself.

On occasion, Caitlin (now 13) will wait with us because she wants to get to school earlier than the bus would have her get there.  Despite the extra 30 miles it puts on our car and our budget, I sometimes submit to the request.  A dad’s gotta do what a dad’s gotta do.

This past week, Jaden made clear that Caitlin had gotten on his nerves.  I’m not saying it’s on purpose or one is right or anything; it just happens with siblings.  So one morning, Jaden just looks over and says “I don’t want Caitlin living with us any more. I don’t like her.”

Now, I *know* he doesn’t really mean it.  I think he’s testing out his thought processes and, like most children, hasn’t developed his internal filter yet.  Some people never do - you know who I’m talking about, probably — people who will say anything to anyone and not realize what it may come off like. 

So at the time, I reassured him, and said something like “oh, you don’t really mean that.  Caitlin loves you and [blahblah]”  Of course, I meant the words I told him; I just don’t recall the exact words I used.  But he was ok, I was ok, and all was right in the world and we could go back to our discovery of life, the bus stop and oooh, there’s a SPIDER!

Totally unrelated to the aforementioned encounter and conversation, over the two nights following this conversation, Caitlin spends the night at a friend’s house.  As a result, she’s not home at all other than to pick up toothbrush, clothes, etc, so Jaden doesn’t see her.

Jaden asks the next day “where’s Caitlin?”

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Now the dilemma.  I wanted to say something like “Well, you said you didn’t want her living with us anymore, so she’s not here.”  I want it to sink in how his words mean something, and realize how serious his wishes might be.  I wouldn’t have carried it too far - I just want to teach a lesson of sorts.  I can imagine his eyes getting big like “what?”.  It’s like when a kid tries a cigarette and the punishment is to make him smoke 3 of them in a row so he hates it and teaches him you don’t always realize what you want - except without the nicotine, not to mention second-hand smoke I’d have to endure.

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I didn’t.  At the time I just said, “oh, she’s over at so-and-so’s house”.  But I keep thinking about the answer I wanted to give.

What say you?

This is an untouched photo. Somehow, using red-eye removal tools on this just seems wrong.