A Month in Puerto Rico – Part 2 – The First Day

We flew from Dal­las to San Juan, which clocked in at around 5 hours. The kids were great on the plane and Pey­ton slept part of the way there, which made it eas­ier on us, and because of that we also got to relax just a lit­tle bit before we hit the ground running.

Our plane left at 1 pm and with the time change to EST we landed at 7 pm. Got our bags (one brand new roller bag now with a bro­ken wheel – thanks AA union thugs for the del­i­cate treat­ment of our lug­gage!) and waited for Enter­prise to “pick us up”. Read more

A Month in Puerto Rico – Part 1 – Getting There

Kim and I had wanted to take the boys some­where else pretty cool, much like we did last sum­mer when we vaca­tioned in Italy for a month, and that was an amaz­ing vaca­tion, but this year we were a lit­tle more strapped for cash than last year, and trans-Atlantic tick­ets don’t come cheap. Brain­storm­ing ensued, and we even­tu­ally set­tled on Puerto Rico, and specif­i­cally the Puerto Rican islands of Vieques and Cule­bra. Puerto Rico has a very rich and in some cases, very sad, his­tory, but Christo­pher Colum­bus “dis­cov­ered” it in 1493 and its had its ups and downs ever since. The peo­ple are friendly and they use the dol­lar, which was also a plus.

Vieques and Cule­bra are both known for their beaches, and since Kim has been pin­ing for a beach-centric vaca­tion for years these places were per­fect. Plus the kids could play in the sand and swim in the rel­a­tively shal­low bays that made up many of the beaches of both islands. Read more

The Blue’s Clues Ability to Skidoo Could Have Astounding Military Applications

On almost every sin­gle episode of Blue’s Clues the human char­ac­ter (either Joe or Steve, or in the UK, Kevin) and the dog Blue “ski­doo” some­where, which is an amaz­ingly sim­ple form of tele­port­ing (trans­port­ing one­self from one place to another instantly), whether onto the sur­face of a globe or into the image on a pic­ture or a com­puter game or into a dio­rama, but it always involves our human pro­tag­o­nist and Blue being trans­ported to some­where else that moments ago they weren’t. It seems that other char­ac­ters on the show can also ski­doo, like Mr. Salt when he needs to go to the gro­cery store.

And ski­doo­ing is an impor­tant plot point to the show, because while on their ski­doo adven­tures the char­ac­ters have learn things and get to play and also may find a Blue’s Clue, whichis  great and all, but you wanna know who else could really use ski­doo­ing, espe­cially in these try­ing eco­nomic times?

The mil­i­tary. Could totally help them out. Read more

“George is a Monkey, and He Can Do Things That You Can’t Do.”

My old­est son loves the Curi­ous George show on PBS. He laughs along with it and after­wards will tell me the intri­cate plot points that moved the show from point A to Z. He has his favorites and his not-so-favorites, but gen­er­ally he enjoys all of them, some­what, even if he doesn’t love all of them.

I think Noah likes the show because it reminds him of him­self. George is curi­ous, fairly bright, and always get­ting into sit­u­a­tions that he’d be bet­ter off not get­ting into. He’s smart and funny and cute, just like George, and he prob­a­bly smells bet­ter than George, even though TMWTYH bathes George regularly.

But the show does one thing that, the first time I heard it, I knew imme­di­ately what it meant when I heard it.
Read more

Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — A Postscript

I got my paper back from Dr. Sul­li­van the other night. For some rea­son, as with every­thing in this class the past semes­ter, I’ve been a tad ner­vous when receiv­ing some­thing back that has been graded; it’s just a thing with me, I don’t know why I’m appre­hen­sive about it. And when I got my paper back I saw at the top the grade — a 75. Wow. C+. Awesome…for real.

No, it wasn’t awe­some. It was kinda sucky.

But then I remem­bered that Dr. Sul­li­van has kind of a screwy grad­ing scheme, 100 isn’t always the top score that you can get, so I asked some­one, “What was the top score you could get on this paper?” And they replied, “Seventy-five.”

So I got an A+, a 100%, or as I said, “a per­fect,” and it only took about two weeks and some furi­ous editing.

And he said -

Excel­lent paper. I like the way you pre­sented the three inven­tors in the con­text of a broader pic­ture of inven­tion — and its influ­ence within the African-American experience.

And I feel good about the paper. Very good.

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At last night's Meet the Teacher we learned that our children will be celebrating "Early American Celebration Day" on Nov. 23. # 2010/08/30

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