Touch Them All

In early December of 2000, President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the University of Nebraska. It was his first time visiting the state as president. In fact it turned out to be the only state he had yet to visit as President. In an 8 year period, Clinton had finally managed to visit them all.

The most state-visitingest president of all time was Richard Nixon, who ill-advisedly visited all 50 during his losing 1960 campaign (he might have been better served spending a bit more time in some battleground states). After his triumphant return and successful 1968 election, he became the first president to visit all 50 states. That sounds much more impressive until you realize there weren't 50 states until 1959. So Kennedy and Johnson both failed to do it, one had his term unnaturally shortened while the other probably had more important things on his plate. Things that started with V- and ending in -nam.

Ford managed to visit all 50 states in his first 16 months of office, as part of his apologizing for pardoning Nixon. I can not find info on Carter, but Reagan did not hit them all: he missed Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maine. George Bush, Sr picked up the baton and managed a full sweep in just four years. As of August 1 (last I can find a mention) George W. has still not visited the People's Republic of Vermont.

First of all you must be thinking: What can the Internet not find for you?

Second you are probably thinking, what brought this on?

A quick warning, if you find Blogs to be generally navel-gazing wastes of time, you will not like this one at all, which is self-indulgent to put it mildly. If this is you, you may want to skim down to the baby pictures.

I think we have all played this thought game at one time or another: "How many states have I been too?" While the game of "How many countries have I been too?" is significantly more interesting, what with they being different countries and all, it tends to be shorter in general and sometimes socially awkward. Let's face it, there is a wealth barrier to visiting most countries outside of Mexico and Canada, and one guy talking about all the places in Europe he has sojourned borders on the boorish. But outside of Hawaii and Alaska, the only thing keeping you from hitting the 50 is a car and miles and miles of open road.

So here are the rules:
1) Airport stops do not count. If the only place in Nebraska you have ever seen is the inside of the Omaha airport, you have not been in Nebraska. Similarly passing overhead or offshore of a state does not count either.
2) You need to have stepped foot on the ground. There are quite a few places where you can drive across the corner of a state and be out of it again in 15 minutes. If you did not at least breathe one breath of non-air conditioned air you have not been there.
3) Interstate-only journeys DO count, although you should at least acknowledge that you really have no idea what the state is like if all you have seen is the gas stations and fast food restaurants within 0.1 miles of the I-whatever.
4) The ultimate level of state-visitedness is whether you slept in the state somewhere besides a Motel right beside the interstate. If you put your head down on a pillow in a state, then you have truly been there. Not required to count the state, but something for the advanced traveler to shoot for.

So with no more ado here is my been list:

	Number	States
Slept In	30 + DC	Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, New Jersey*, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and the District of Columbia
Substantial Visit (No sleep)	1	Virginia
Drove Across Without Leaving Interstate	5	Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Indiana, North Carolina
Drove Through Without Stopping	3	Wisconsin, Delaware, West Virginia
Never Visited	11	North Dakota, Iowa, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Maine

*I have a nagging suspicion that I might have slept there once at or near the house of Ken Moon. I am fairly sure I visited his home, but it might have been a quick stop. I imagine there was drinking at some point, which would explain my dulled memory. Well, that and age. UPDATE: I have, in fact, slept in the state when I visited a cousin of my mothers. I think I also slept there when I was like 3 years old. Thanks, mom.

So altogether that is 36 states that meet the minimum visitation criteria, 3 that do not, and 11 that have never been even seen with mine eyes. One decent deep south tour would net me 6 states. A nice northern New England would get me 2 more. I do not know when I will make it to ND, IA, or MI.



I am still scrambling to get caught up on the latest in the remodel world, so I can't even take the time to come up with my standard awkward transition. That is just the state of things nowadays.

Chortle.

After a month or two of tug-of-war between the various house factions, we finally got our new roof completed. Our contractor was afraid the stucco guys would screw up the new roof, while the stucco guys were afraid of the opposite. Or probably neither was a real concern, but we held off doing it nevertheless. Here is a shot of it from above, down toward my street. A nice view except for the port-a-potty background right. This nice dark brown is known as "Mission" and was really the closest we could come to matching the previous shingles, which had been wood shake. It was sad to see the shake go, as such roofs are becoming historical relics. On the other hand, roofs made of dung or peat moss are as vintage as you can get and I am just fine not having them or their accompanying smell.



This is not an observation bubble for the attic gremlins, but the top of a Solatube. This clever little device gathers up ambient sunlight and reflects it down a tube into your house. It is an excellent, and cheaper, alternative to a skylight. It also can go where a skylight would just be impractical.



Here is the inside of my guest bathroom (girls' bathroom), which is located in the dead center of the house, the one room without any windows. Besides being the sleeping quarters of any future indentured laborers I might sneak into the country, it is also the room down into which we brought the Solatube. All that light is sunlight, which really does a great job of brightening up that room during the day. At night we plan to not enter that room, as it will be very dark and we have no way of making the sun return until the following morning... What's that you say? Incandes-what? Who is this Edison of whom you speak?



Here we have one of our stucco walls, the backside of the addition facing the street. Stucco has three stages. Scratch, Brown, and Final. At the scratch stage they cover your home in chicken wire and then cover that in stucco designed to stick to the wire. Then comes the Brown stage. I am not sure why they call it the Brown, as it is clearly the grey color of concrete. The Brown is the really substantial stucco layer, making up the bulk of the stucco mass. It also takes the longest to dry, 1-2 weeks. This is the stage the stucco in this picture is in. In fact that is still the stage my stucco is in, as there has been one of our typical 4 week epic arguments over the last stage, the Final stucco.



The Final stucco is the cosmetic layer. It may also provide the final water-proofing. The earlier two layers are entirely structural and will be the same for any wall made of stucco. The Final layer can be colored, smooth, or any number of variations in roughness, depending on the sand you mix it with. We are going with a colored stucco to try and save on painting costs, but that has required multiple samples and multiple headaches as we try and get a stucco that works with our house color concepts. In addition, our architects have been pushing for as smooth a stucco as they can get without jacking up the price. Well, actually the architects didn't care so much about price-jacking: that was our demand.

This final image shows the addition from an angle up above. You can see the trellis and tree form a big part of the total space. That large wall is where the wood siding will soon go. More on that in a soon-to-be blog, I hope.



For my birthday my father took me and the entire brood out to dinner at a place in South Pasadena known as the Firefly Bistro. It is run by a husband and wife duo that were both chefs, then fell in love and opened this restaurant together (ahhh).The food is quite original, with appetizers of B.L.T. Dunguness Crab Napolean and entrees of Crispy Fried Rare Ahi. To be honest the items Candice and I had did not thrill, but a good time was had by all. For things that do thrill Candice, be sure to check out her food blog.



Here is Candice, Kayla, and my dad at the dinner. We got highchairs, but the girls are only good for about 15 minutes in those things before they start to really squirm. Kayla looks slightly put out to be so bombarded with flash photography. Alternatively, she may just be baffled about the bags of water they had hanging in the outside covered patio area that is this restaurant. The bags are large clear plastic holding roughly a gallon of water. I failed to take a picture of them, but was told by the proprietor that they were being used to keep away flies.

This boggled my mind. Internet searches have told me two things. One, that a lot of people use them and Two, no one really knows why they work. And they don't always seem to work. The best answer I have found comes from the Straight Dope, which claims the flies are very nervous about any movement. Because the bag of water acts like a big distorted lens, any movement in the area will be visible in the bag of water, which scares the fly away. This argument sounds as plausible as any of the others I have heard (many involve temperature effects) and has one nice testable prediction: house flies apparently have some of the best eyesight of any irritating flying bug. The near-sighted gnats and mosquitos shold be completely unaffected by the bags. And they are.



I call this one, "What the Heck is Uncle Tim Up to?" Everyone seems intent on whatever Tim is about to do, including my babies. I think this is because Tim is about to feed my neice, Claire. Flies may have good eyesight, but they got nothing on a baby when it comes to milk. They can see it coming form over 3.7 nautical miles. That is a real statistic because you just read it on the web.

Let it never be said that I only show my babies on my blog. Here is Claire, my neice. See? Completely unbiased baby blogging.

Get a Grip... O'Saurus!

I am in a decidedly silly frame of mind today, hence this entry's title. I will not, in fact, be talking about an Irish lizardman responsible for the set up, adjustment and maintenance of production equipment on a movie set. There is a new dinosaur in town and he goes by the name of Gryposaurus monumentensis. This approximately 30-foot long duck-billed herbivore appears to have carried quite a substantial head, leading the paleontologists to suggest that this dinosaur would have been very massively built, the "Arnold Schwarzenegger of duck-billed dinosaurs."

He will not, however, be back.

Unless.... If we can find some of his blood trapped in amber... Get me Michael Crichton on the phone, stat.



Gryposaurus means “hook-beaked lizard”, while monumentensis refers to where it was found, in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of Utah. It lived in the Late Cretacious, which just wasn't as fashionable as the Early Cretacious, which really made a splash with its flowering plants and leafy trees. The Late Cretaciousites are really just boorish nouveau rich.

I should also point out that the initial find was made by group from the Alf Museum of Claremont, California. Wow. Some people are really serious about their alien puppet based comedy. Is that located near the Gordon Shumway Highway? Near the town of Melmac? Seriously I can make these Alf references all day, only I got to stop and get a bite of cat to eat. Hah! I could have written for Alf. Of course that doesn't mean much, as I believe a chimpanzee wrote most of season three.

And speaking of chimpanzees, they are the only primate still unselected in my hot, hot latest poll on what kind of non-human primate you would be. Right now we have a 7-way tie, making this the most exciting contest since "Be Xena, Warrior Princess, For A Day." Won't you be the one to break the tie and put the Titis over the top?



And speaking of Titis over the top... Hmmm. I can't think of a family friendly transition here, so maybe we should just move on. As is my wont, I have slipped behind once again on my schedule of house updates. So let me start with the doors and windows to the outside. Most of these were Milgard, which is a brand of windows and not one of the planes of existence found in Norse cosmology. We got two sliding doors, this one off the den and another off the future bedroom, which you can see in the next frame. The handles on these sliding doors are these big clunky, black plastic doodads that feel real nice in the hand and look god awful. We are presently planning on replacing them with something slick, modern and undoubtedly awkward to use. Outside you can see the side of the addition, which actually slants away from you. You can also see some scaffolding which will be discussed further in the next blog update, which hopefully will not take another three weeks to get to.



So here is the window and door off the master bedroom. This is actually the "loft area" where the ceiling goes up some 20 feet and should get a lot of light from above as well. In our original conception, this door was going to be a French door. Then my architect became obsessed with large squares and rectangles that were the combination of two squares (i.e. the ratio of the sides is 2 to 1). So she changed to another slider. And didn't tell us. Now to be fair, we didn't ask either. Several areas of the project became a bit too much to keep track of and we let the architect or contractor take over. This was one where we don't think we quite got it right, but were not quite so offended we were going to throw away an entire door and have it re-installed. Unfortunately we have lost our giant money making machine. If you see it, please let us know, as we need it for the final stages of the project.



Here we are upstairs with the loft windows. That one on the left is the biggest one in the house, and actually required a specially ordered, non-Milgard window. So if Vikings invade and ransack my house, I think we know which window they are coming through.



Here we have the loft skylight. If you look closely you can see a tiny metal loop at the base of the metal frame that holds the skylight in place. Using a stick with a hook on the end, you can reach up and turn the loop which opens and closes the skylight. Turns out that the stick is about 4 inches too short for Candice to use it to open the skylight while standing directly below it. I said use a chair, she said we should get a longer stick. We compromised with her growing 4 more inches. Marriage is all about compromise.



Here is the skylight, loft, and windows taken from the far corner of the loft. You may notice how smooth and white the walls look, especially compared to what they looked like in the last update. They are white because I have been priming the walls for weeks now. For the paint-impaired, a new, never-before-painted surface requires a starter coat of paint, known as primer. Primer is good for sealing walls and wood and making them a good surface for the later, high quality paint to stick to. I had a great deal of help with a big hunk of the priming, when a gang of my friends descended on the house for my birthday. Yes, I spent my birthday party painting my house. And it was awesome. Or at least inexpensive, which is a major factor nowadays (Seriously, if you have seen any sort of money making machine, please drop me a line).



Here is what the walls looked like in my future bedroom-to-be before the priming, but after the drywall has been taped and plastered. The plastering process is where the big mess comes in. The standard procedure is to nail the drywall to the wooden house frame. Then tape all the gaps with a special drywall tape. Then slather plaster everywhere there is any sort of gap or bump or line or divet. Then sand the plaster down to a flat surface. This last part produces A LOT of plaster dust. I feel like we have been sweeping and vacuuming and sponging up the stuff for weeks (because we have).



Here is the same area of the bedroom after the priming. And of course with a giant ladder standing in the middle. The ceiling you see is the very one my father painted at the sacrifice of his only back. Let me also shout out to my mom, Brundy, Glaplan, VG, the J-kens, Big Bob and little Angie, and of course my lovely bride. We primed the crap out of the house that day, in a mere 4 hours, too.

While sometimes it seems like the house remodel is consuming my life. I regularly get reminded that isn't true. My baby twins are consuming my life, and they don't let you forget it. The dynamic duo is up to all sorts of tricks, the main one being the beginning stages of walking. Kayla is now crossing rooms and Rylie is ramping up quickly (4-5 steps now) to follow. I don't know how we are going to contain them once they start running. I really don't.

Big stretches of industrial strength glue paper?

Maybe. Need to run that one past Child Protection Services.



Here are some photos taken from our visit to Kynan's 2nd birthday party. We got Kynan a soccer ball. No, not the one he is actually holding. The other one. Actually he seemed quite taken with the idea of playing with both at once, even getting fairly grumpy when Rylie tried to eat the ball he wasn't playing with. He might have had a point.

We were taking notes, as the girls' 1st birthday is coming up in just a week now. A full year with baby twins. Phew! We did it. One down, 17 to go. I leave you with a matching set of my babies. Kayla is with her mom, while Rylie is with some strange street person that we met in the park. She said she was low, which I can only assume means she is depressed because she doesn't have enough money to buy booze. I gave her a Jefferson and told her to get something red with bubbles.

Please, no Humanitarian of the Year awards are necessary. I just love to give.