Wild Kingdom

Spring has officially come a close, astronomically speaking. Here are some noteworthy events from the season past:

We were eating dinner one evening, looking out the bay window, when a small fox trotted out from the side of our house. We'd seen him once or twice before, always disappearing around the front of our neighbor's house. This time he stuck his head into the neighbor's wood pile and came out with a big egg in his mouth. He took it to the opposite end of our yard, buried it among some flowers, and went right back to the wood pile for another egg. This one he buried in the yard across the street and then came back for egg number 3, which went in a different neighbor's yard. He went back and forth, burying eggs in various yards (I think we wound up with 3 in our yard). We counted 10 eggs in all. At this point Wendy connected a few dots and remembered we always see a duck with about 10 ducklings in the pond each year. Probably not this year, we thought! It turns out we did still see a mama duck with 9 or 10 ducklings this year, so who knows if they were duck eggs the fox found.

Another annual event we always see is the migration of a giant turtle across our yard. Apparently she lays eggs in a neighbor's back yard (not one of the same ones the fox buried eggs in), and then in a painstakingly slow process, migrates back to the pond, always across our yard. And somehow we manage to see her every spring. The neighbor always comes out when she gets close to the road and shepherds her across. This year I shot some action-packed, jaw-dropping video of the event:

Finally, we bought some patio furniture a few days ago, and today spent part of the afternoon sitting out on our deck reading (and playing Nintendo DS). This is something we never considered doing with our old deck, so I take it as a positive sign that our home improvement projects are headed in the right direction.

I Heart Weather Data

Anytime we have interesting weather I love to pore over the data my weather station is collecting. The past two days have given me lots of chances to do just that.

On Friday we recorded our first 80 degree high of the year (84.4, to be exact):

The WGN Weather Blog reported it had been over six months since we last saw temperatures that high. Now that I've recorded about 10 months of weather data via WeatherUnderground, I pulled up a chart of temps for the last 6 months:

A quick scan verified that stat. Early October (the 12th, the be exact) was the last time temps were as high they were on Friday. The chart also reminded me just how cold it got in mid-January!

And then Saturday's weather was even more interesting. Here's a chart of temps:

We had two big temperature drops during the day: a 15-degree drop from 12:30 to 1:30, and a 10 degree drop between 4 and 5. These drops coincided, as you might imagine, with a change in wind. The first temperature drop happened right as the wind shifted suddenly from the SW to the NE:

While the second drop occurred right when the wind picked up again, after having died down for a couple of hours:

And, finally, we got about half an inch of rain over the afternoon and evening:


Wendy and I spent the first half of Saturday working in the yard, removing dead bushes, transplanting hostas, and pulling up weeds, so we got to experience the 15 degree temperature drop firsthand. Eventually the rain, and our stomachs crying out for lunch, forced us indoors.

After the 10 degree temperature drop in late afternoon we were forced to close all the doors and windows, because it was just cold with the wind blowing through our house.

Springtime in Chicago

Channeling the Cold

For the record, it was -22 degrees at our house this morning. Yesterday the high was -2. My favorite weather site, the WGN Weather Blog, has had all kinds of fun weather stats lately:

• Yesterday was the first day in 13 years that the high did not break zero in Chicago.
• It was colder in Chicago yesterday than it was at the North Pole (8 degrees).
• As of January 12th, we've already received a full winter's worth of snow (and we're only halfway through the meteorological winter).

We also learned that schools around here do indeed close due to the cold. Most schools were closed yesterday and today thanks to extreme wind chills of -40.

On an unrelated note, I've discovered a whole batch of cable channels that I didn't know we got. My favorites so far are Toon Disney and History International. Toon Disney has all kinds of cool animated shows like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and The Jackie Chan Adventures. It's being re-branded next month as Disney XD, which will basically be "Disney for boys," while the Disney Channel will remain "Disney for girls". Hopefully they'll keep all the animated comic book fun.

History International has had some interesting shows, too, ranging from the German Autobahn, to what our society learned from the Victorians and the Tudors, to a documentary called "How William Shatner Changed the World" hosted, of course, by William Shatner.

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. Ours was good - allow me to update you!

We visited both families this year for Christmas, and decided to drive instead of flying. This turned out to be a good and a bad decision - good because we avoided the major delays all the airports seemed to be having, and bad because the delays were due to weather which we ended up driving through. The day before we left, we got 9 or 10 inches of snow here, and areas south of us got ice. The roads were pretty much fine by the time we left, until it started snowing as we were driving through Iowa. Then they were not so great. What made it even scarier were all the cars we kept seeing in ditches from the previous day's ice storm. Luckily, thanks to some skillful and careful driving by Randy, we made it to Kansas City for the night.

The hotel we stayed at was recently remodeled and was, no joke, possibly the nicest hotel either of us had ever been in. The bathroom was gorgeous (I know! A hotel bathroom!), there was a beautiful built-in armoire/computer desk thing, and it had a 33" flat panel TV, which is both bigger and fancier than the one we have here at home. We kept checking the (pretty cheap) rate quoted in our confirmation e-mail to make sure there hadn't been a mistake. So, if you are ever looking for a hotel in Liberty, Missouri, I definitely recommend the Hampton Inn!

The rest of our Christmas was good, too. We saw both sets of parents, and had a lot of fun hanging out with Abby and her boyfriend Matt at my house, and with Joy and Cory at Randy's house. Both of our parents have "new" houses, and it was awesome to get to see all the changes. My parents' house was actually new last year, then they had a fire and were displaced for nearly 6 months while basically everything in the house was repainted, restored or replaced. So, "new." Randy's parents' house was actually new almost 20 years ago, but they've recently had non-essential (but nice!) things like trim and bathroom vanities installed. The kitchen's also been completely redone, and is gorgeous now. So, again, "new."

As much fun as it is to see our families and get nice Christmas presents, it is also very nice to be home again. It is less nice to have to go back to work, but such is life, I guess.

Here's what else we've been up to, in handy list form (now with bonus exclamation points!):

- This is our third winter in Illinois, and it is off to a rollicking start. Last winter was extremely snowy, and this one is already on pace to outstrip it! Um, great? Our mail box was damaged by a snow plow a few weeks ago, and the township road department brought us out a replacement box, free of charge. However, the ground is completely frozen, so right now it's sitting in a bucket of sand right next to our old, currently unusable mailbox. Classy! They've promised to come back and put it in the ground once spring arrives, which will probably be sometime around mid-June.

- We recently switched to VOIP for our home phone service. It's the T-Mobile @ Home service, and it's only $10/month, since we both already have cell phones with T-Mobile. This is especially exciting because apparently local and state taxes make it impossible to get the most basic of basic phone services in Illinois for less than about $45 a month. What a deal!

- While we were in Oklahoma, Joy and Cory asked us about our water softener. The water where they live is very hard, and they're thinking of getting one. We both recommended it, but I have to say, now that we're back home, I recommend it even more. A water softener makes for very nice hair. I guess it's good for other things too, but hey, shiny hair!

I leave you with these final words of wisdom from Jackie Chan, courtesy of an interview we saw on Toon Disney. Don't say you don't like something without trying it - that's not polite. "Try it before you don't like it."

I hope you like our blog, but please at least try it before you don't like it!

Caveat Emptor!

Last year we decided to start a yearly tradition of going to an OU football game each season with George. Last year it was OU at Iowa State; this year it was the OU at K-State game a few weeks ago. Our record so far is 2 - 0! We got to see OU beat K-State handily, in what was a very exciting game for the first half: 83 combined points in the first; only 10 combined in the 2nd.

While we enjoyed our trip to Manhattan, it was fraught with numerous adventures that taught us valuable lessons at every turn. Behold:

The Ticket Fiasco

We bought tickets about a week before the game on ebay, as we did last year. Unfortunately, we did not have the same luck. The tickets were not shipped as advertised and therefore did not arrive in time. The seller was also incommunicado. It was the day before the game, we were about to fly to Kansas City, and we had no tickets. One last look on ebay revealed a different seller who said we could pick up his tickets in KC, so we gave it a shot, and we scored. The guy was very friendly and organized, and it was a pleasure to do business with him. So if you're in need of tickets on ebay, check out bradinkc. We left him very favorable feedback.

When we got back (which is another story), we filed a complaint against the original seller. It turns out Paypal has a very nice system for handling these disputes, designed to get both sides to communicate and come to an agreement, and if that doesn't work, to allow a claim to be filed which Paypal then investigates. Unfortunately the seller was still incommunicado, so we had to file the claim. After 10 days, Paypal decided in our favor and reimbursed us the full cost for the tickets.

The Rental Car Scam?

We weren't sure if we wanted to rent a car for the trip, but when we saw it would only be $60 total from Budget, we went for it. The car itself was fine (a Kia Spectra), but when we turned it in, we were charged more than twice the quoted price. We went to the desk to ask about it, and the guy immediately saw the problem: we'd been charged the wrong weekend rate. He claimed that the computers sometimes pick the wrong rate on the weekends, and they only know about it if customers bring it up after getting their bill. Some weekends, he's seen as many as 8 out of 10 people get the wrong rate! He quickly changed our bill to the right amount, but the whole thing seemed a bit shady.

The Airline Torture

Our plan was to fly home Sunday afternoon on United, but about half an hour before the flight took off, they announced it was canceled because, when the plane was flying into KC, passengers noticed that there were cracks in one of the wings. Yikes! There was a mad dash to get into a really long line at the ticket counter to switch to another plane, but there were no other planes available on United. We tried switching to another airline, but even that didn't work. Eventually they announced United was flying another plane into KC just for us. The plane arrived around 5pm, but by 7:30 we still hadn't boarded. Finally, the captain came out and announced he believed it was illegal for him to fly the plane because he would exceed his daily duty time. United disagreed, and union lawyers got on the phone with United lawyers to try to figure it out. Around 9pm, the union lawyers won, the flight was canceled, United gave us a hotel voucher and said "Try again tomorrow." No one was happy, of course. We'd just spent almost 10 hours in the airport and gotten nowhere. So we tried again the next morning and finally made it home.

The Smartphone Realization

At one point while we were standing in line at the airport, they told us we could call 1-800-UNITED1 to switch flights. So I pulled out my phone, dialed 1-800 and stopped. I had no idea what to dial next. Wendy and I both have smartphones, with a keypad that doubles as a qwerty keyboard, so we no longer have the standard letter to number mapping.


I had never realized this. Despite the phone's obvious technical wizardry and sophistication, the embedded operating system, the built-in camera, the SD card, wi-fi, internet browser, etc, the phone just can't do the simple task of mapping letters to digits in a phone number!

We tried to figure out what the digits to UNITED1 would be, but when we called the number we came up with, an automated message invited us to call a different number for "stimulating conversation." We declined the offer. For future reference, the number 1 doesn't have any letters; they start at 2 and go three letters per number, except for 7 and 9 which have four letters. Now we know!


Finally, the weekend wasn't a total loss. OU won, and we got to hang out with George and with Wendy's family. But most importantly, George bet me a quarter that this weekend's OU-Texas Tech football game will see more points scored than the next OU-Texas Tech basketball game!

Summer Rundown

Here's what we've been up to recently:

* We got a new deck! Our old one was, well, old. And starting to rot. So we had it torn down and rebuilt. Here are the results:



* Wendy got me a super-cool birthday present a few months ago: a personal weather station. It measures wind speed, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, among others, and it connects to a computer. That, combined with a free service from Weather Underground, allows me to check the weather at our house over the internet. Check it out here.

It's a lot of fun to play with. Check out this chart from August. We were woken up by a morning thunderstorm. You can see right when the storm rolled through. Just before 7am, the temperature suddenly dropped, the air pressure started rising, the wind shifted direction, and then it started raining. Very cool!

* I took a continuing education class recently called Investigating Ghosts and Hauntings, taught by a local paranormal research group. It was very interesting, and as it turned out, a couple in the class were taking it because they thought their house was haunted. So we got to go and see the group perform an investigation. They used a staggering amount of equipment: multiple video cameras, eletromagnetic field meters, geomagnetic field meters, positive/negative ion detectors, random number generators, etc. It was quite a production. Nothing especially unusual turned up, but before we learned anything about the house we took a tour, and several of us felt that if any part of the house was haunted, it was the top floor. And we later learned that's where most of the unexplained events had occurred.

* Wendy's Mom came to visit a few weeks ago. We took a trip down to Chicago to see the Field Museum. We had planned on going on a Sunday, but thankfully the night before realized the Bears were playing a home game that day, so there wouldn't be any parking (the Field Musuem is right next to Soldier Field). We went Monday instead, and it turned out to be free admission day.

* Allergies have been terrible this year. I've wondered if it has anything to do with the trees around us; they produced a huge amount of acorns this year. We literally have a carpet of acorns around parts of our house. At times last month we could hear them fall onto our house and roll down the roof. Thank goodness for the gutter screens we put up last year!