Life

Here is my pumpkin. Its tough to tell but its an OSU football player with his helmet on. Can you see the Buckeye Leaf on the top right? Those were the toughest things to carve out.

Here is Jack with Granddad Jack. He was a happy boy all weekend.

I think its official, Jack is now crawling. It opens up a whole world for us. Next up, gates and constantly making sure that there are no small items on the floor.

I fly Southwest Air a lot. It's the best way to get to Chicago for me and St. Louis. Its a nice airline but has a quirky way of seat assignments: you have to check in online or get to the airport early to get a ticket with an A, B or C on it. A tickets get to board first, then B then C. If you have a C ticket, chances are you are sitting in a middle seat, A tickets get the aisle and window.

On my way to Chicago yesterday, there was a huge lady sitting in the emergency row. Now, on SW, the emergency rows really don't give you anymore room so she wasn't getting what she thought she was when she sat down. Furthermore, all I could think about was that this lady was going to be the one who was going to help people out of the plane in case of an accident? She couldn't even lift a small child up and certainly was going to be liability in that position. I take emergency rows seriously, especially flying into Midway which has shorter runways than most airports.

On the way back, I had my normal aisle seat and the flight was full. There was someone in the window seat and the C passengers started coming on board. At that point, you are just hoping for a small person to sit next to you but of course, I had some huge guy who said "I'm sorry, I'm going to grab that seat, I'm sure you were hoping for someone a bit smaller like a 14-year old girl". I said, "yeah, I was hoping for someone a bit skinnier". I'm not sure if that was mean or not, he brought it up first, but I DID say it nicely. Regardless, I was uncomfortable for the 50 minute flight because this guy can't push his way from the table at Hometown Buffet.

So I'm proposing to Southwest Airlines that they issue a new pass. The O pass. It's for obese people who can't fit their 300 pound frames into a normal airline seat. They should all have to sit in the same aisle with their bodies pressed up to others who are similar sized rather than touching me and others who are average sized. Oh, and they should require everyone to take showers the day of the flight.

Here is Jack trying to crawl Sunday night... And here he is tonight.

Yesterday we drove over to Perry County to look at some property. For some reason I have a bug to buy some land. I'm just tired of saving money for retirement. I feel like I am on track and have Sarah on track and certainly the boys college education is off to a great start. So I want to do something fun with the extra money that we have. I wish we had a thousand lakes like they do in Canada or that we were closer to a place that does. But we just don't have a lot of that stuff near us in Central Ohio. The few lakes we do have are priced above what we would spend for a weekend get-a-way. At least lakefront and I think that's what Sarah would like.

I was thinking something like 75 acres or something. I'm not thinking that anymore. I'm not sure if I just didn't like the two we looked at but a lot of it just seemed like it was wasted acreage. Maybe I am thinking about something flatter, I don't know. Anyway, now I'm going to start looking for something about ten acres in size. I'd like it to be within an hour of where we live so may look east or northeast of New Albany. Maybe buying a cabin with some acreage is the way to go? With the housing market the way it is, that might be something to look at.

I told Sarah this morning that she hadn't lived in Ohio long enough to know about the Cleveland curse. I'm sure every Cleveland Indians fan was worried after going up 3-1 in the playoffs. Losing didn't shock me at all, I expected it. I'll root for the Colorado Rockies now. They are a great story and I would hate to see the team with the second highest payroll in baseball win the World Series. For a while now, I hoped that the Yankees and Red Sox would win every World Series. I hate both teams but I thought if that happened then the powers would realize that baseball is broken.

Today we went to the Circleville Pumpkin Festival. It was the first time for all of us and was fun. It was pretty much like a giant street fair, a small county fair maybe, with all the food wagons. The only difference was the pumpkin related food, they put pumpkin in everything down there. We got down there at 10:45 and stayed until about 12:30. Henry rode a pony and I think he enjoyed it. Photos are on Sarah's camera but hopefully I can post some tomorrow. Traffic was backed up a couple miles on St. Rt. 23 as we were leaving. Note to self: If you ever go back, go back early so we don't have to wait in that line going south.

I went to the Social Security office today in downtown Columbus. That's always a treat. I needed to get Jack a SS number. After showing an i.d. and emptying my pockets and walking through a metal detector, they let me in the building. When I got to the office, a security officer tried to help me. He told me I would need more than a birth certificate to get a number, did I have a medical card or something else with his name on it. No I didn't. I waited anyway to see if they would let me slide. After ten minutes, my number was called and I approached the lady. Nope, they couldn't process my application without some sort of alternative id.

I mean, seriously. What kind of id does a baby have? Military? Drivers?

As I was almost out of the building, I had a thought. I figured Voinovich or our new liberal left wing Senator Sherrod Brown would have an office in the building. Luckily for me, Brown did and I went up there. I told the guy what I needed and called Dr. Whitaker's office and asked them to fax me a copy of Jack's immunization records. They did, I thanked the Senator's staffer and went back to the SS office. I only had to wait 5 minutes this time before being called and they processed the application.

Jack should have a social security number in 10-14 days. That's frankly amazing that the federal government can move that quickly. But I'm happy. We can open bank accounts, enroll him in college savings programs, etc. as soon as he has a number.

Here is a 20-second clip of Henry scoring a goal in soccer last night. He has scored 4 goals in three games. He's great!

I'm posting this in honor of the possibility of Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his propaganda of a movie. Imagine if the world had bought into the below and spent billions, no trillions of dollars on global cooling. Yes, I said cooling. See the last paragraph, they actually proposed melting the Artic ice cap to warm the planet. I hope we don't make the same mistakes today but I'm afraid we are going down that path.

Here is the text of Newsweek’s 1975 story on the trend toward global cooling. It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels. A PDF of the original is available here.
A fine short history of warming and cooling scares has recently been produced. It is available here. — D.D.

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Yesterday I turned 42 years old. 42 isn't much of a birthday, it's not a big one like 40 or 45, doesn't quite get you to the "mid 40s" tag and still leaves another year before you get to that point.

I didn't put a lot of thought into my 40th. I guess I meant to but in the end there was no point. I'm happy where I am in life and that's all that's really important to me.

Now Sarah, on the other hand, will be turning 30 next year. I'll have to start planning that "surprise party" in January. Should be a blowout. It's complicated because of her December 21 date but I'm sure we can work around that by doing something on a different day.

Can you guess who this is?

Well that seems to have worked and was painless to do. In case you are wondering, Henry thought I was taking a photograph and not film, hence the expression on his face. I could upload a photo of Sarah before she had Jack but I suspect she would kill me. Let's see what else I have...

I'm going to try to upload a short video clip. I think it works, give it a shot...

Henry has been playing soccer at the YMCA. It's actually more of a practice where they learn different skills but they scrimmaged today for the first time. Henry scored two goals, the only two his team scored. He's going to be a great athlete.

Sarah in the news. Yesterday's Plain Dealer:

High Energy lobbying targets electric bill legislation
Posted by Mark Naymik , October 01, 2007 17:13PM
They showed up to fight over your electric bill. Nearly 100 of them, all with connections to Ohio lawmakers, some wielding Blackberrys, talking points, press releases and even an opinion poll.
So many came that the meeting -- the first hearing on Gov. Ted Strickland's energy plan -- was delayed so it could be moved to a larger room in the Statehouse.
Utility companies, manufacturers, unions, farmers and environmentalists hastened their representatives to Wednesday's meeting because Strickland's energy plan, introduced in the Ohio Senate, has unprecedented ramifications for Ohio consumers, the economy and the environment.
Strickland describes his plan as a "jobs bill." While he can't yet point to the cost of the plan or to the number of jobs it specifically will create, one thing is clear: It already has become a full-employment act for lobbyists.
The four major electric utility companies have a combined 43 registered Ohio lobbyists, including their in-house ones and well-known former Democratic and Republican officials working as hired guns. And more are being hired almost daily.

FirstEnergy, for instance, which has 17 lobbyists on the books, just added two more last week: former Congressman Dennis Eckart, a friend of the governor's; and Sarah Briggs, former political director of the Ohio House Democratic Caucus.
Large manufacturers combined have dozens, some in-house and others working through trade groups, which have hired among the best known lobbyists in Columbus.
Other companies are further behind the scenes. Take the Columbus-based Boich coal mining company. It just hired Mike Dawson, a well-known number cruncher and policy expert who was an adviser to former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine.
"This bill is an important test of whether policy gets set by an army of lobbyists or by Ohio stakeholders," Strickland's energy adviser, Mark Shanahan, said after giving his testimony before the Ohio Senate's Energy & Public Utilities Committee.
There are so many interested groups that House Speaker Jon Husted's office has "more meeting requests than we can get scheduled," says spokeswoman Karen Tabor. The House is expected to take up the bill next month.

From Forbes Magazine: NASA scientist James Hansen has gotten lots of attention for his claim that most of the ten hottest years have occurred since 1990. However, a blogger (not me) recently discovered an error in those calculations, which has put the heat on NASA. The space agency now claims that:

• The hottest year on record was 1934, not 1998
• The third hottest year was 1921, not 2006
• Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940

Thus while global warming might still be a problem, the warming trend apparently started before the real expansion of human caused carbon dioxide emissions. And if humans didn't cause global warming, it's not clear how much they can do to stop it.

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Not a lot of anything to write. Henry had his 4 year check up today and got a flu shot. He looked surprised when the needle went in but he didn't cry. I was proud of him.

Just a note on the photo at the top left of the boy in a devil's costume. That's me, circa 1968 I imagine. Henry is going to be a red Power Ranger this year. He's got a cool costume that we got a couple weeks ago. I'm glad he forgot about it though or he would want to wear it to school.

Speaking of school and Henry, he will likely not go until he's almost six years old. With a September 5 birthday, he would be the youngest in his class and almost every teacher we've talked to has recommended starting him later. His current preschool teacher thinks he's ready though and he's been taking special pre-kindergarten classes with the other children who are going next year. We will likely pull him out of Children First next September and enroll him in pre-school in New Albany next to the education buildings. It's more of a learning experience and he could actually skip kindergarten and go right to first grade if the teachers think he is ready. Although, again we are 99 percent sure we will start him late.