If you caught Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, then you probably still have the A Man's Gotta Do song stuck in your head (if not, you can buy it from iTunes or hear the song on youtube).
You can nominate me for Father of the Year if you want, but we watched all three acts of Dr. Horrible with Pete over the weekend. He thought it was pretty entertaining, and stayed engaged through all 45~ minutes. Then, yesterday I caught him singing "A maaaaaaaaaan's gotta do what a maaaaan's gotta do" under his breath. As if that weren't funny enough, last night while he was taking a bath he turned to me and said, "I've gotta do what I've gotta do. 'Cuz I'm a man, right Dad?" As I tried to keep myself from bursting out with laughter, I asked him what he thought he had to do. "You know," he said, "Man stuff."
I'm hoping that doesn't involve peeing in the back yard, but I wouldn't count on it.
I mentioned awhile back that I was going to try and grow a garden for the first time in my adult life. I also mentioned the rain barrel system I had constructed to keep the garden a-growin' all summer. My dad warned me up front to not over-plant the plot, as it only stands about 6' x 12'. Sensible advice, I thought. So, I planted two tomato plants, two cucumber plants, and three green pepper plants. I think I even used the spacing directions from the plant tags, but I can't remember for certain.
So, this is what I've got going on back there now. The cucumber plants (which are covered with yellow buds) have taken over the world, and are now growing over and through the rabbit fence. The two tomato plants have grown out of the tops of their cages, and I have a third "volunteer" (?) tomato plant that's doing well without a cage of its own. The pepper plants, which look sickly to me, produced a pepper that Amanda picked this afternoon.
I'd like to be able to claim that I did something special to produce these results, but the only thing I've put on the plants is the rain water from the barrel system.
As promised, Elsie and I went on a date last night. She loved her pink earrings, and she had all the pizza, salad, breadsticks, and soda that she wanted at Olive Garden. On our way back out to the car she decided we should dance together in the grass for awhile. I kindly obliged.
This evening, a couple of our friends from church are getting married, so I'll get to dance with the *original* princess tonight. What a lucky guy!
Elsie's about 2 1/2 now, and our nursery at church only goes up to age 3. Even if that weren't the case, She's getting to the point where she can control herself well enough to participate in worship without being a complete and total distraction. So, last week we kept her with us through the point in the service where we corporately confess our sins. Each person kneels quietly, in prayer, and then the pastor prays for us and asks God to forgive us for Jesus' sake. Very good stuff. Except when your daughter picks the quietest time in the whole service to throw her fit. There's nothing like hearing your daughter screaming "I don' wanto paay!!!!" as she's being carried out through the back doors.
A few moments before that she showed me that she had lost her earring while she was in the nursery during the Sunday school hour. I told her I thought it was sad that her earring was missing. "That's OK, Daddy," she said, "you can just buy me diamond ones, OK Daddy?" Amanda let her know that there are also pink diamonds. "You get me those. Pink ones, OK Daddy?" I'll be sure to get right on that, Else.
So, tonight I'm taking her out on a date. She's finally at that age where I think it will be fun for both of us, and I've always thought it important for a daddy to date his daughters. I told her that we could go to Cici's Pizza to have pizza, noodles, soda, and cinnamon rolls. "No," she told me, "you take me to Olive Garden."
On my way home tonight I'll be stopping by Claire's to see about some pink "diamond" earrings for Elsie to wear on our date to The Olive Garden. What can I say? She's daddy's little princess. And may she never forget it.
For my Aunt Linda's birthday (May 29th), I decided to build her a website to display her photography. As far back as I can remember, every memory I have of every family event involves Aunt Lin behind the lens of her camera. A few years ago she went digital, and following each gathering she would faithfully send a link to her uploaded photos at walgreens.com or some similar upload-and-print service. I thought it would be nice for her to have a better way to display and archive her best shots, and so far she's off to a good start.
I'm a WordPress guy, so I decided that her site would be a good practice run with the new version 2.5 that was recently released. I looked at a couple dozen photoblogging themes, and finally decided that Nishita would be a good place to start. I immediately added jQuery support, and put it to work in an accordion menu in the sidebar of the archives page, and in the post metadata bar (Comments and More Info are hidden by default, but can be revealed by clicking on their respective links). I think I want to do something a little different with the "Complete Archives" page that shows every picture ever posted on the site, but that will have to wait until there are a few more images there to work with.
I also added a random image bar just above the footer. It displays eight random thumbnails that link to the individual posts. Each thumbnail image is 75×75, thanks to the new thumbnail processing functionality built into WP 2.5. This should give visitors one more way to explore and find new pictures on the site.
Since WP is built for blogging, and this site was intended to be an overgrown image gallery, I had to think through how the posts/images should be organized. As it stands, there are basically four different ways to view the site's organization.
The first is by date, which is the default presentation. The most recent post is displayed on the front page, and you can navigate forward and backward between posts using next/previous links. The archives page can also be viewed by month.
The second way that Linda will be able to organize her photos is through the use of categories. These categories will be large "buckets" that will help to group her images by type. So, she might end up with categories like Family, Nature, Holidays, and so on. These focus more on the type of image than on the actual content of the image.
The third way is by using tags. Linda will use tags to describe the contents of the image. So, if an image is of Mike, Ben, and Ryan during Thanksgiving, she might tag it with "Mike, Ben, Ryan, Thanksgiving". In the archives, visitors can browse by tag to see, for example, every image tagged with Ben's name.
Finally, I used the In Series plugin to give her the ability to add images to a specific series (called a Set on the site). The other three organizing methods are open-ended, meaning that the Family category will expand with every new post categorized as such. Not so with sets. Each set will only contain images specifically assigned to the set, and sets will be very specific. For example, there might be a Thanksgiving tag that will show images from 2008, 2009, and so on, but she might also have a Thanksgiving 2008 set that will only contain images from that one specific event. If a specific image is in a set, there is a link below it that says which set it belongs to. Clicking on this link expands a "Table of Contents" list that links to all of the other images in the set. You can also navigate to next/previous images within the set. The Archives page also has a dynamic list of all sets available on the site.
This has been a really fun project for me. I've enjoyed having to re-think the way that the content is presented and organized, and it's been a unique challenge to keep the site as simple as possible so Linda can easily use the without any complicated coding, etc.
If you don't mind, I'm sure she'd appreciate it if you stopped by the site and left a comment. I would also appreciate any feedback or ideas you might have, or any bugs that you find on the site.
Context: In the bathroom after viewing Prince Caspian last week…
Rachel (Amanda's 9 yr. old sister): So, was the White Witch really going to help them?
Peter (my 4 1/2 yr. old son): Aunt Rachel… did you even see the first movie? The White Witch put Edmond in a cage, AND she killed Aslan, but he got alive again. No, she wasn't really going to help them.
Don't look now, but the Wittmanns are going green. Well, sort of greenish, anyway. For some inexplicable reason, I've had an incredible urge to grow things this spring. I think it started when I aerated the yard and put some grass seed down. After that I re-potted a couple of plants (with mixed results, I should add), decided to grow a garden, and even kicked around the idea of building a window garden in our dining room so we can have fresh "greens" for dinner all winter long.
I think maybe it goes back to some sort of subconscious connection with my childhood, where I vaguely remember my dad dragging me out to the garden to help pick tomatoes, or weeds, or whatever. Now that I've got my own little helper in tow, I kind of like the idea of dragging him out there to participate in all the micro-agricultural fun.
There also seems to be something deeply therapeutic about growing plants. Sure, there's always something you can do to help them along (watering, weeding, etc.), but there's no way to rush them. The tomatoes will be ready when they're ready. Deal with it. When everything else in our lives continues to gain speed, this stubborn refusal to be rushed is kind of refreshing.
So, now I have a 6'x12' garden behind my garage. I turned it all over with a shovel, and then ran a small tiller through it to get it broken up nice and fine (or sliced up, which is more accurate when referring to the clay content of the soil back there). So far all I have planted are a couple of tomato plants, but we're planning on growing peppers, carrots, and cucumbers from seeds.
We've also been saving leftover fruits, vegetables, peels, egg shells, and coffee grounds to mix into the garden somewhere along the way. Once I start mowing our lawn, I plan on bagging the grass and using it as mulch around the various botanical exhibits in the garden. I've even got a nifty little rain collection system built (more on that later) so I can conserve water this summer and still keep the garden a-growin'.
Now, don't go and tell Al Gore about his latest convert just yet. I'm still not buying into the whole anthropocentric global warming hoopla, and all the asinine (and dangerous) solutions being proposed by our environmental high priests. Still, it does make sense to me to conserve wherever possible, to reuse whatever we can, and to even produce some of our own food along the way. I think the key is to remember that we serve the Creator, not the creation, and that He put it here for our use. If you keep those things in their right places, I think you're doing OK. Once those get flipped, you're bound to end up somewhere a little screwy.
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