Cell phone rules

Be Safe

• Never give your cell phone number to a stranger. We don’t want strangers calling you.  When you call someone, they will have your phone number whether you want them to or not.
• Do not take embarrassing pictures or videos.  Any picture or video you take can be forwarded onto strangers.  If it is something you or someone else wouldn’t want your parents, teachers, friends, enemies, or the President of the United States to see, don’t do it. We are allowed to see what is on your phone at any time.
• Answer our calls or texts.  We will worry and get upset if you ignore our calls or texts.

Don’t waste money

• You can send and receive texts, pictures, videos, and instant messages on your phone as much as you want, but do not download other stuff or use the Web browser/Internet.  That costs extra. Unexpected charges will come out of your allowance.  If you want a special ring tone for your phone, ask me and I can get it for you.
• Never enter your cell phone number on a website.  There are lots of websites out there that make money by tricking you into giving them you cell phone number.  For example, websites that offer ring tones, quizzes, coupons, etc.  Once they have your number they can bill us even if they say they are FREE.  It is very hard to cancel these charges.
• Do not text anyone unless it is okay with them.  Many people don’t have messaging plans and it will cost them money even if it is free for us.

Be Courteous

• Only use your cell phone where you are allowed to.  Silence your cell phone when people ask you to. For example, in movie theaters, during school and at the dinner table.
• Most things are more important than your cell phone.  Do not use your phone if you have homework or chores to do. Do not use your phone after bedtime. If you are talking to someone, don’t text someone else.
• Text or call us if you go somewhere.  For example, a friend’s house after school.

I agree to these rules and understand that I might have to give up my phone if they are not followed.

Name: _______________________________________  Date: ________

Did I miss anything?

Dear Litt Red Riding HOOd I’m so sorry for eating you.I should be punished for a long time.I will never eat you again. I will just eat pinapl. From: Wolf

When our girls were younger, their daughters would babysit for ours.  Later, our girls would show up at their backyard fence and beg to use their trampoline.

For the past four years, Marissa has wanted her own trampoline.  The trek three doors down has, apparently, been very arduous.  We relented on her January birthday and I said I’d get one as soon as the weather warmed up.

I looked at the local sporting goods store and the only one they had in stock looked overpriced for its size and quality.  They had a wider selection online, but no one in their right mind would buy one over the Internet because the shipping on a $300 trampoline is $170.

At the local wholesale club they had one that was larger and nicer.  With sales tax instead of shipping, it was also cheaper.  So this morning we started assembling it.

Claire playing with the trampoline box

Assembling a trampoline was pretty quick and the girls helped putting the puzzle pieces together, but once the jumping surface was attached they stopped assisting me. I ended up attaching the padding and enclosure by myself.

Marissa invited a friend over and all the pre-teen kids on the cul-de-sac bounced, in different permutations, all afternoon.

Marissa, one of her friends, and a vibrating Claire

After watching everyone bounce, I felt motivated to exercise too.   While waiting for my bike computer to initialize, I glanced over to Ed’s house.  Now that his girls were older, he had begun to disassemble his trampoline.

For our family, its about two miles.

As I mentioned a month and a half ago, Chris was due to have the stent from her last procedure removed before we went to Vietnam.  So we left for Indianapolis Thursday night, and just as we were about to enter the freeway we realized we forgot to grab the GPS.  Since this was the third time we’ve done this, we decided to wing it.

As we crossed the state border, Chris wanted to have her final meal and she chose Cracker Barrel, the chain restaurant where the gift shop commemorating your meal is larger than the dining area itself.  The hostesses asked that quaint 20th century question we don’t hear in Ohio anymore: “Smoking or Non-?”

My family and I want to thank Ohio voters for deciding years ago to make restaurants non-smoking, but it seems smokers on the western edge of the state must drive to the nearest restaurant in Indiana so they can light up while dining.  The restaurant just reeked even in the non-smoking section.  Even I, who have no sense of smell, nearly gagged.

After dinner we headed to the hotel.  We have to stay overnight because the procedures are always early in the morning and we are so far away from the specialist.  My wife intended to stay at the same hotel as the first trip, but we accidentally ended up with reservations at different location of the chain.  We had the new address, but no map to find the place we’d never been to.  By sheer luck Chris saw the street name on a highway exit sign. I suppose my wife’s GPS would have been handy.

The wired Internet connection in the room, while complimentary, was non-functional.  The blue Ethernet cable jutting out of the wall was just there to taunt me.  I’m sure it was karma’s way of telling me just to go to bed.  We had gotten there late in the evening and we had to get up at 4:50am anyway for the morning procedure.

All the AC outlets in the hotel room were underpowered.  Before going to bed, I plugged in my cell phone charger and my phone’s display would continually alternate every 3 seconds between “Charger Connected” an “Charger Disconnected.”  Since it bleeped for every state change, I couldn’t charge the phone and still get a good night’s sleep. In the morning, the underpowered outlets would not heat up Chris’s curlers.  We left before the continental breakfast opened at 6am.

Without the GPS, I guessed how to get from the new hotel to the hospital. I guessed wrong so I had to stop for directions after going the wrong direction on a road. The gas station graveyard employees didn’t know exactly where it was, but they pointed me in the right direction.

Chris’s operation was uneventful, but they wanted to monitor her afterward for several hours, most of which she slept off while I sat in the recovery room’s little chair reading Newsweek.  By midday she was allowed to eat ice chips.  My wife would ask for a crushed ice chip and five seconds later, after I had chance to put down my magazine and scoop up an ice cube from the Styrofoam cup into a spoon, she’d be back asleep.

Before Chris was discharged mid-afternoon, the surgeon stopped by for a few words.  It had taken him only 4 minutes to take the stent out.  Before she went under he had given Chris the option to replace it with a larger stent that would have to be removed in another four months.

Chris declined. I’m sure she realized that would have meant that we would have had to forget to bring the GPS to Indianapolis a fourth time.

Back then, I was with another engineering dad and we watched helplessly from the sidelines as our daughters team built something that, as we found out later, couldn’t hold a single brick.  Both my daughter and her friend had a good time, but they complained on the way home about a bossy teammate who wanted to control a design that turned out to be inferior.

I to this year’s event today with both Marissa and Katie.  They made homemade chalk, stretched bubble gum, and assembled a doorbell buzzer.

Katie and Marissa at OSU

This year, however, they wouldn’t allow the parents to follow their daughters around so I wasn’t able to get any good pictures of them being engineeringesque. The adults were sequestered in the lecture hall for a few, less compelling talks.  There was however a team exercise in the middle of the day for the parents which just happened to be the same brick levitating task given my third grader two years ago.

Each team had to keep track of the number of 3″x5″ cards they used, the number of cards that had to be bent or folded, and the number of staples what were used.  These numbers went into a formula for the “cost” of the design.  The goal was to see who could achieve the highest ratio of bricks held to the overall cost.

Knowing what designs did work two years ago, I felt I had insider information.  I become the leader that I’m sure my teammates found annoying.  :-)  Unfortunately the other teams of adults knew about cylindrical shapes too.

While I’m sure we would have humiliated teams comprised of 8-year-olds, we ended up in the middle of the pack of the adult competitors.  Our design wasn’t too expensive and it held a respectable 6 bricks, but it wasn’t enough.

Right before it fell...

The guy you see in the background on the right was from the team that won.  Their design only held one brick more than ours could, but theirs was constructed with half the cards and without any staples!  Since the cost of their design was about one third of ours, we would have had to hold twenty bricks to have beaten them.

Takeaway lesson: never ask a software engineer to do hardware.

Yesterday, after we foisted parental duties onto grandma, I drove Chris back to Indianapolis for an MRI and another consult with the surgeon.  We were then planning on driving home before the girls went to bed.  We arrived a little early in Indy so we hit the downtown mall to kill some time.  Without the kids in tow, Chris had the luxury of actually trying on clothes in the store before buying them.  She bought a pair of jeans and five pairs of underwear. We promptly got lost heading to the hospital because we had wandered off the little map that they mailed to us ahead of time.  Our GPS never left the minivan back in our garage at home.

The MRI didn’t reveal much, but since the procedure did seem to help before (at least for a little while) it was agreed that it was worth another go around.  And, as luck would have it, there was spot available for surgery the next morning.  Not wanting to deal with stomach pain over in Vietnam this spring, Chris quickly agreed.  It also saved us from another trip to and from Indianapolis.  The only real problem was that we weren’t prepared to spend the night.

After a last minute downtown hotel check-in, we drove to the local Pharmacy in the evening for emergency overnight toiletries.  My wife and I have differing levels of toiletry emergencies.  I grabbed travel sizes of:

• Toothbrush
• Antiperspirant

I talked myself out of getting a disposable razor blade and shaving cream.  The cheap, non-tilting blades scare me and I didn’t think it was worth the hassle of buying a nicer shaver.  Meanwhile my wife grabbed travel sizes of:

• Toothbrush
• Toothpaste (to be shared with me)
• Mascara
• Eye pencil
• Compact
• Blush
• Hair spray
• Antiperspirant
• Moisturizing shampoo
• Moisturizing conditioner
• Liquid makeup
• Comb
• Curling Iron (full sized)

She almost got a hair dryer too, but I suggested that the hotel room might have one built into the bathroom wall.  And even though we probably could have re-worn the same clothes for the next day, we went back to the mall for a clothes.

I went to Eddie Bauer and got a shirt, socks and underwear.  They literally only had one pair of medium underwear in the entire store.  In the back, on the clearance rack, they had thin, yet stiff blue boxers with dogs on them.  Not my first choice, but I figured they would do.  Meanwhile Chris, who was going to spend almost the entire next day in a gown anyway, went back to the store where she had just hours earlier purchased jeans and underwear and got a sweater, camisole, socks and pajamas.

It was an early surgery so we set the alarm clock on my phone for 4:45am.  And we promptly got lost again trying to get back on the map that only displayed the two blocks around the hospital.   The surgery seemed to go just fine.  Instead of a sphincterotomy, they put a stent in the bile duct this time.   We found out in the recovery room, that it is a temporary stent.  So we will be driving back to Indy in a couple of months to have it removed.

But this time we will be prepared.  I will pack the GPS.

And briefs that don’t bunch up when you’re sitting in the little chair next to the recovery room gurney.

Caked in snow, I told her to take off anything that was wet.  She promptly stripped down and announced from another room:

I’m only wearing a bandaid and my hair.

Hayden shared:

Bacteria are the biggest germs (bigger than viruses).

Madison learned:

Not all germs are bad. There are good germs in yogurt.

Michaela reported:

There are medicines for bacteria but not for viruses.

My very own daughter, Claire, said:

Don’t pick your nose.

I pretty much have everything I want and certainly everything I need. My family knows not to get presents related to my interests (bicycling, music, computers, board games) because I am pretty particular with my tastes.

Because of this, my wife announced two days ago that she had gotten nothing for me for Christmas. I printed off my Amazon wish list to give her suggestions, but told her it really didn’t matter as long as Santa has presents for the girls. But with the Amazon wish list in hand, she went to Target one last time to find something for me and found none of the music or games at the store. This was no surprise to me because, again, I do have unusual taste. If the Target down the street (or the other one up the street) carried it, would probably have it by now.

So with two days to go before the holiday, Chris said I should just get something for myself for Christmas. Less than willing to brave the last minute crowds, I suggested she use the two-pack CFL light bulbs I just bought at Lowe’s as a present, but she was not amused.

When were first married, the situation was reversed: I had no idea what to get her. For awhile there I ended up getting her a bulky sweater every year.  I(t) was pathetic.  It doesn’t help that my wife’s birthday is also in December.  I now prepare by maintaining a gift list throughout the year and I pull from it this time of year

But with Chris at work today and all the other presents taken care of, I actually hit the mall to shop for myself.  I did get another gift for Chris and even presents for my cat and the mother-in-law’s dog, but I couldn’t find anything for myself.

Then I realized Chris has already given me the best Christmas gift of all…

The gift?

“Understanding husband” points redeemable for the next time I forget something about her.  Priceless.

(BTW, the one of the CFLs didn’t work and I had to return them.)

In the meantime feel free to peruse the annual holiday letters from 2008 and 2007.