Mike, Jill, Lucy, & Wubie!

One of the things we like to do with Lucy is make up stories. Not a day goes by where Jill isn’t improvising a tale for Lucy, and just about all of the stories are based on Lucy’s ideas. “Tell me a story about…Wubie’s food bowl on the ceiling!” Lucy will say, and Jill will dutifully start telling the story.

Another thing we like to do is illustrate Lucy’s ideas. We’ll gather in front of Lucy’s easel and she’ll start shouting out ideas like “We’re at the beach!” or “Wubert is in trouble with bumblebees!” As she does this, we’ll scribble frantically with crayons, hopelessly trying to keep up with our little girl’s imagination. Almost all of Lucy’s stories star Wubert, who usually plays multiple roles in each story. He’s also usually in some type of trouble.

Here’s one of Lucy’s stories…

“Doo is having a picnic at the beach with Wubert. They have a bucket and a shovel. They have cake. Wubert goes in the water (there are fish!) and Doo has to save him. Wubert’s sleeping. I’m tickling Wubert. I am walking with Wubert on a hill. I’m first. It’s really sunny, and there’s cake.”

One of the goofier things Lucy and I do most days is snail racing.

We go out to our garden, and check for snails on various plants, esp. the lemon tree. We pick our contenders. After watering the racetrack, we place the snails in a line with a goal in mind, usually the top of a nearby pot. And they’re off!

Racing snails is similar to cats…they take naps, go the wrong way, turn around a lot. So it can be quite exciting…you never can tell who will win.

Lucy put on a cat show last night. She made a podium out of some boxes, and the three of us judged the cats. Since there was a tie, madame had the deciding vote on the winners.

Here is the winners circle…little grey checked kitten won first prize, followed by yellow kitten and Jiji. Notably absent was…

Lucy and I had been wondering what was eating some of her plants…and yesterday we discovered an inchworm. We had a lot of fun getting it a leaf, watching it eat, and inch. We left it on the table overnight, and in the morning it had eaten a small hole in the leaf.

Afterwards we looked up some cool videos of caterpillars turning into butterflies…and the inchworm song.

Some pics of cats and computers (what else is there?)

In honor of the Apple Macintosh turning 25 today, I thought I’d scribble a paragraph or two about computers in general and the good ol’ Mac in particular.

I have a good friend, John, who was always into computers. His interest was so keen that one day back in the early 80’s, when he decided he needed a VIC 20, I decided I had to have one too. Yep, though I had no clue as to what I’d do w/ the thing, John’s interest and excitement was so infectious I thought,”yep, that plastic keyboard thingy is for me! Let’s go to Longs and buy it right now!” Needless to say, I never did a heck of a lot w/ that VIC20. I think I ended up giving it to John soon after.

Go forward about a decade. In the years since my ill-fated VIC 20 purchase, I’d given little thought to computers. However, at some point in the early 90’s, I started putting out a comic book newsletter (yep, very geeky) using a word-processing program (WordPerfect?) on one of John’s PC’s. It was during this time that I truly discovered the power and the majesty in never having to use Wite-Out—no matter how many times I messed up. IT WAS AWESOME!

Soon after my “no wite-out, EVER” discovery, I purchased my first “real” computer from John, a 386sx running MS-DOS w/ 4 MB of RAM and a 100 MB HD, for $100. Luckily, Jill had experience with computers, so she was my tech support during this time of transition. I later upgraded the 386sx to Windows 3.1 and a color monitor. Man, that was a pretty sweet set-up for a guy used to banging on typewriters.

Later, Jill’s stepdad Peter showed me his Macintosh IIci (thanks, Peter) and that was all she wrote. At that point my 386sx seemed slightly less AWESOME and I knew it was only a matter of time before I brave little toastered it to the curb and got a mac of my own.

Mike’s Past and Present Computers: Power Mac 7100/80, Power Mac 8600/200, Blue & White G3, Original Mac (found next to a dumpster), G4 Quicksilver, Power Book G4, G5 Dual 2.0, (and for PC’s: homebuilt tower, Sony Vaio Tower, Asus EEE 700 Series, T43 Thinkpad.)

For Jill: Power Mac 5400,  Aluminum iMac, and white Macbook.

And just for fun, here’s Steve Jobs introducing the Mac back in 1984…

I just read that Bob Wilkins recently died. Reading the article brought back lots of fond memories of watching Bob on Creature Features when I was a kid. I remember being totally psyched to watch “CF”, especially when it had old Toho Godzilla movies like Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla vs the Sea Monster, and Son of Godzilla. Back in the early 70s, if Godzilla was on, I was there.

Jill and I actually got to see Wilkins a few years back at a Wonder-Con. He and John Stanley had a slot where they reminisced about “the old days” of local television, movies, and creature features. I remember being pretty psyched to see the old guys, just like I’d been thirty(!) years before.

Cat on  a Roomba. I don’t think Wubert would do this for all the tuna in the world. He’s afraid of most gadgets that move around and make noise.

This is definitely cool. This is a video taken at the LA Museum of Natural History, Wouldn’t it be neat to see Wubert’s reaction if he rounded a corner and met this guy?

Here’s something that’s along the same lines: Walking with Dinosaurs.

Warning: this is another “old guy reminisces” bit, kinda like this post.

I’ve been using Jill’s iMac lately. Because of this, I thought I’d soup it up a bit and order some extra ram (because we all know you’ve gotta max out the ram when you’re doing heavy duty stuff like cruising web sites and answering email, right?)

Anyway, while researching and ordering the ram, I made the very pleasant discovery that ram is dirt cheap these days, and it reminded me of a ram purchase I made way back in the mid-nineties.

Back then, I had just purchased my first Apple computer, which came standard with a whopping 8 MB of ram. Because I was working with (or more truthfully, trying to learn how to work with) graphics and such, I knew I’d need a little more power. So, to acommodate the power lust I bit the bullet and purchased an additional 16 MB. This skyrocketed my Mac’s total amount of ram to a staggering 24 MBs.

“24 MBs! Man, I probably have more computing power than NASA had when they launched those dudes to the moon!” I remember thinking to myself at the time.

Well, to this day, I’ll remember that purchase, because Fry’s was having a sale on ram and I was able to snag my precious 16 MBs of ram for $500 before tax. A lot of money, but a pretty good deal for the time. The cost breakdown was as follows:

16MB = $500 or
1MB = $31.25

Well, thirteen odd years later, instead of trekking down to the neighborhood Fry’s, I did a quick online search (dealram and resellerratings were helpful), found a merchant, whipped out my credit card, and ordered 4GB or ram for $88.  Cost breakdown is as follows::

4 GB = $88 or
1024 MB (1GB) = $22  or
1 MB = $.023

Isn’t that cool? What was approximately $31 a MB a few years ago is now a little over 2 cents a MB! Boy, how some things change!

4 GBs! Man, I bet I totally have more computing power than NASA had when they launched those dudes to the moon!

Yep, and some (geeky) things never change.

Yay. We’ve finally completed our tax returns (yep, we did ‘em a bit late this year.) To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d recycle an old post from Wubert’s site.Yep, there are some taxes that never seem to go away…