Caturday 3/21/2009

The LOLcats are off hiatus!


moar funny pictures

(Don't tell me you've never heard this line from this movie!)

Haircuts

Tonight Mikey and I got new matching, REALLY SHORT haircuts. After all, tomorrow is the first day of Spring!

(This is possibly the shortest my hair has been in my life, since birth!)

Merry Christmas, Tulsa!

For most of the day today, March 12 2009, it was SNOWING in Tulsa! Generally in Tulsa we don't get snow until after January 1, but it's a little unusual for it to snow this late in the winter. But it did give me a good excuse to do something I've been needing to do anyway... post our family pictures from Christmas! Here they are... or take a look at the whole set here!

        

CPAP: week 1

Last Tuesday afternoon, I finally got my CPAP machine. What the hey is that, you may ask? Well, you may remember that I've been diagnosed with sleep apnea, which means that I sometimes don't get enough air sleeping and briefly stop breathing at night. The most common and probably least invasive solution is a CPAP machine, which helps keep your airway open so you don't gasp for air at night. I think I've become adjusted to the mask itself (which is a big hurdle!) but I'm not quite sure I'm adjusted to the actual treatment yet. I saw an ear, nose, & throat doctor last week, and he basically recommended surgery to clear my airway, which is partly blocked just because of my anatomy (not a growth or anything). Cathy and I haven't yet decided whether to go through with the surgery or whether to continue with the CPAP machine instead; I'll be going back to the E.N.T. doc in a few weeks and then we'll decide on a course of action.

Mikey got his Bear rank!

Last night at the Pack 137 Blue & Gold Banquet, Mikey received his bear badge! He did a lot of work earning it, and had a lot of fun! The blurry picture below is just after he got the badge (blasted digital camera with dead batteries in low-light conditions!)

Personal Globe

We're home-schooling Mikey this year, which has led to some interesting situations, and some fun projects. This weekend Mikey had some science projects assigned which required turning off the lights and shining a flashlight on a globe... to help him learn about how time is different in different parts of the world.

Our globe... Mikey took the continents
off right after we finished our experiment,
but I notice that he missed Australia!

Well, I have a globe somewhere, but for the life of me I couldn't find it, and there's a nice globe at our library but we couldn't very well ask them to turn off the lights for us so we could do a science experiment (!), so instead of buying a globe and having to figure out where in our tiny house to put it, we decided to do things the fun way. A few days ago Mikey pulled out a big red jumper-ball thingy with Spider-Man on it, and we decided to MAKE a globe for the experiment! Saturday Mikey and I had a Cub Scout trip to the Tulsa Historical Society, and on the way home we stopped at the library and picked up a good atlas. The idea was to trace pictures of the continents and stick them to the ball to build our globe. Well, for several reasons that turned out to be harder than I had thought. The original idea was to trace the continents out of the book, but we couldn't see through our paper, so I drew them out freehand, using the book as a guide (Mikey drew them too along with me, but ultimately we used mine.) Then as anyone who has studied globes and maps knows, because of the distortion of making a flat map of something on a round Earth, maps become more approximate as they cover larger areas, and pasting a flat map to a sphere is a sketchy proposition. Both of these problems were especially bad on Asia, which covers a good hunk of the real globe... Europe got kind of slighted on our globe because I was sketching from a map of Asia and Europe was kind of an afterthought on the left-hand side (I'm pretty sure I left thousands of people from the western coast of Spain homeless.) But we got it made, did our experiment, learned what we were supposed to learn about time, and we learned some cool facts about geography in the process! After Mikey was done with his write-ups of the experiment, I showed him the World Time Server Web site, which you can use to find out instantly what time it is anywhere in the world... pretty cool!

We had two other interesting experiences while we were at the library. We were looking at the globe and talking about various parts of the world, and an old guy came over and told us he was a WWII veteran and showed us the places in the Pacific Ocean where he was stationed back then in the Navy. Then we saw our children's librarian friend Marianne, and Mikey showed her the book they gave him at the Tulsa Historical Society, and she showed us something about the book that we didn't know... her daughter had drawn a picture of a covered wagon back when the daughter was Mikey's age, and it had been printed in the book! Ms. Marianne laughed about it, because her daughter is getting ready to graduate from college now... but it was cool to see that in the book Mikey had just gotten!

Two Doggies

This is the picture that greeted me from the top of my computer monitor at home this morning. I'm pretty sure that when someone put those doggies up there, they were side by side. I guess even toy doggies gotta get a little sniff in now and then!

(If you want to know why he has "press here" on the side of him, click here.)