A garage sale for your mind

Sign in Subscribe

Topic

family

A collection of 56 posts

Starlink Mini for the Park

A Starlink Mini and battery are headed for my desk. The parks we can reach have little or no cell service, and a normal work schedule means most of the year it's dark by EOD. With internet at the picnic table, I can stay at the park as long as the kids want.

Finally Running

I don't love running, but I love that it just requires clothes and shoes. Months of persistent plantar fasciitis pain, and then one day at the park I realized it was simply gone. Time to slowly reintroduce running, minus the downhill that started it.

The Birth of the Girl

My wife was in labor when the texts started coming: a 103 degree fever, then a double ear infection, then a grandmother who tripped and caught the flu too. I delivered the baby news and then went home to triage the house.

The Birth of the Girl

The Taste of Betrayal

Carob chips were the 1980s anti-chocolate health craze, a mother's tool for disappointment dressed up as nutrition. Some sites still insist they deserve a spot in your pantry. No. No they do not.

The Taste of Betrayal

Kids & Personal Space

The baby drools like a fountain on one arm, the four year old has turned my legs into a jungle gym, and the six year old has claimed the rest of me. Kids help cure you of your silly need for personal space.

Kids & Personal Space

Happy Birthday!

My six-year-old wanted ice cream for her birthday, with a notary and UPS Store stop along the way. At both, strangers wished her happy birthday and she ate it up, gliding out with a polite "thank you." Who knew running errands could be so impactful?

Happy Birthday!

A Science Project with the Kids: Learn, Design, Construct & Test an Antenna

I need an antenna tuned to 1090MHz. I could just buy one, but with patience I can turn it into a project for a couple of my kids: learn the electromagnetics, design a quarter-wave ground plane, construct it, then test whether our reception improves. More to come.

A Science Project with the Kids: Learn, Design, Construct & Test an Antenna

Visiting the In-Laws; Seashells

Things I value in a bathroom: counter space. Things I do not require in a bathroom: bowls of seashells.

Visiting the In-Laws; Seashells

The Evolutionary Biology of Learning English

We use WordlyWise for vocabulary and I've been pleased, until today's lesson, a short story so rife with evolutionary biology I couldn't salvage it even by scratching out questions and skipping a paragraph. Whatever your views on evolution, you can teach English vocab without it.

The Evolutionary Biology of Learning English

Meta Quest 3

My employer's surprise gift store had me pick a Meta Quest 3, mostly for the virtual desktop feature. Setup was seamless, but the 1920x1080 limit keeps it firmly at toy-level usefulness. So I handed it off to the kids, where toy-level is exactly perfect.

Web Analytics