Friday, January 23, 2004
My daughter is selling Girl Scout cookies, which is to say that I've been required to bring in an order form to work. (That is not an advertisement. Just stating a fact. Though, if you want to place an order, it's $3.50 per box. Stop by my desk or shoot me an e-mail @ Smatt76@hotmail.com.) You can't send kids door to door as you might have in years past, because you don't know who is out there anymore. Well, lemme correct that. The Girl Scouts orginization hasn't said that you can't, but the general view by society is that you might as well clean and gut your own kids to save time, since you never know who might be hiding behind those doors.
Sorry to be so brutal. There is some frustration about raising kids today, and having to protect them around every bend. Sometimes it seems like there is sooo much to protect them from, that it seems almost impossible to get them to adulthood unscathed.
When I was a kid (in my best curmudgeon voice, not unlike Walter Matthau), we sold candy door to door for YMCA Summer camp. I can still remember the sales pitch: Hi, my name's Matt, and I am selling candy to go to Summer Camp. We have saltwater taffy, or Caramello's and they sell for $X. Would you like to buy some please? "
I still have an ingrained mark from the camoflauge bag I carried the candy in. By the end of the day, I was dragging it from door to door, tired from carrying it for hours on end. It was a schoolbag (but not a backpack) that had pockets on the sides for various things. Even pencils. Sooner or later, each of those pockets got stuffed with money because I was never good about keeping it in one place. Loaded with candy, it weighed about one ton. Kinda like Oprah.
And after selling candy every night, and walking up and down street after street, what did I have ot show for it? A week at summer camp, where I got to try out archery, and ride horses, do skits, a barn dance, etc. I think the real payoff was for my parents though, who got a week at home of peace and quiet. I can fully understand that now as a parent myself. And it also explains why they pushed us to sell as hard as they did. If my sister and I happened to develop a sense of professionalism, instill a work ethic, and proof that success comes if you work hard enough at it.....so much the better.
Now, it DIDN'T work, at least as far as I was concerned. But it was a nice try anyway. So I'm doing my fatherly duty by bringing in the order form for Girl Scout cookies. I recognize how annoying it is to others, as they feel obligated to purchase, even if they don't want to. So I'm not offended if people don't buy, and I usually try to return the favor if someone else brings in order forms. I just think that the kids are missing out on something by not selling door-to-door. Specifically, painful feet. If I had to suffer, somebody else should too!
(Postscript: One year, my sister and I sold candy togeather, and we came in as the top sellers, which won us a free TV! With Remote Control! The battle still wages on today as to the true owner of that TV.)
Word from Mars is that there is no word from Mars. Either the rover has software problems which are fixable by NASA, or it has hardware problems, which are not fixable by NASA. And the worst part? The closest NAPA auto parts store is a few million miles away. Oh sure, there are some gas stations with repair shops on Mars, but their charges are out of this world! (OK, I admit. That was lame.)
Hopefully it's something they can fix via modem. I'd hate to think that it was crushed by some rock, or the solar panels got dusty, ro something. Course, if it is hardware, you're gona ahve all of the conspiracy people running around screaming bloody murder.
Worse, what does it mean for Oppurtunity, which is set to land in 3 days? If it's a hardware flaw, they won't bother wasting time with the rover in getting it off the pad. True, it needs time to build up energy stores form the solar panels, but it seemed as though they wasted time dealing with that danged landing bag on the first. If it's a software thing, you can bet they'll be checking those flaws out as soon as it's landed and confirmed that it's still alive.
Well, here's to the NASA scientists sweating it out as we speak. Best of luck to all of you. It's got to be extremely frustrating, since they were just about to start drilling into a rock, and do some further tests on the soil and so forth.
According to an article somewhere, this is the year of the sequel in movies, with Shrek 2, Spiderman 2, A sequel to the princess diaries, so forth and so on. The articles point was that there are no new ideas in film based off of what we see, and I can see their point. But you can say the same about music as well. Name one band, JUST ONE!, that you can see sticking togeather and developing the legacy of the Rolling stones, or Aerosmith, or bands of that ilk. It's just doesn't happen any more.
As for Spiderman 2, it brings in probably one of the most famous Spiderman villians, Doctor Octopus, or Dock Ock. Now, I was never a big comic book guy growing up, but even I was aware of him, and thought he should have been the main villian in the first movie. Kinda like Batman, with the Joker. What I really hope is that the Spiderman series of movies goes on long enough to include Venom, a liquid alien being that Spiderman uses as a suit before he finds out it has some rather evil intentions. Later on, it splits even more to form another more evil versrion of itself in Carnage. With teh computer animation as it is now....that would be an extravaganza.
Ok, time to put nerd-boy away for awhile.
I'm going to Twins Fest tomorrow. I'll have my hot dog, and be able to daydreama bout the upcoming season. It'll give me a chance to immerse my girls into the world of baseball, and hopefully get them interested in it. And if we're lucky, maybe we'll go snow tubing on Sunday. maybe we will, maybe we won't. Depends on howmuch now there is, but we'll get it done somehow.
Have a good weekend everyone.
Sorry to be so brutal. There is some frustration about raising kids today, and having to protect them around every bend. Sometimes it seems like there is sooo much to protect them from, that it seems almost impossible to get them to adulthood unscathed.
When I was a kid (in my best curmudgeon voice, not unlike Walter Matthau), we sold candy door to door for YMCA Summer camp. I can still remember the sales pitch: Hi, my name's Matt, and I am selling candy to go to Summer Camp. We have saltwater taffy, or Caramello's and they sell for $X. Would you like to buy some please? "
I still have an ingrained mark from the camoflauge bag I carried the candy in. By the end of the day, I was dragging it from door to door, tired from carrying it for hours on end. It was a schoolbag (but not a backpack) that had pockets on the sides for various things. Even pencils. Sooner or later, each of those pockets got stuffed with money because I was never good about keeping it in one place. Loaded with candy, it weighed about one ton. Kinda like Oprah.
And after selling candy every night, and walking up and down street after street, what did I have ot show for it? A week at summer camp, where I got to try out archery, and ride horses, do skits, a barn dance, etc. I think the real payoff was for my parents though, who got a week at home of peace and quiet. I can fully understand that now as a parent myself. And it also explains why they pushed us to sell as hard as they did. If my sister and I happened to develop a sense of professionalism, instill a work ethic, and proof that success comes if you work hard enough at it.....so much the better.
Now, it DIDN'T work, at least as far as I was concerned. But it was a nice try anyway. So I'm doing my fatherly duty by bringing in the order form for Girl Scout cookies. I recognize how annoying it is to others, as they feel obligated to purchase, even if they don't want to. So I'm not offended if people don't buy, and I usually try to return the favor if someone else brings in order forms. I just think that the kids are missing out on something by not selling door-to-door. Specifically, painful feet. If I had to suffer, somebody else should too!
(Postscript: One year, my sister and I sold candy togeather, and we came in as the top sellers, which won us a free TV! With Remote Control! The battle still wages on today as to the true owner of that TV.)
Word from Mars is that there is no word from Mars. Either the rover has software problems which are fixable by NASA, or it has hardware problems, which are not fixable by NASA. And the worst part? The closest NAPA auto parts store is a few million miles away. Oh sure, there are some gas stations with repair shops on Mars, but their charges are out of this world! (OK, I admit. That was lame.)
Hopefully it's something they can fix via modem. I'd hate to think that it was crushed by some rock, or the solar panels got dusty, ro something. Course, if it is hardware, you're gona ahve all of the conspiracy people running around screaming bloody murder.
Worse, what does it mean for Oppurtunity, which is set to land in 3 days? If it's a hardware flaw, they won't bother wasting time with the rover in getting it off the pad. True, it needs time to build up energy stores form the solar panels, but it seemed as though they wasted time dealing with that danged landing bag on the first. If it's a software thing, you can bet they'll be checking those flaws out as soon as it's landed and confirmed that it's still alive.
Well, here's to the NASA scientists sweating it out as we speak. Best of luck to all of you. It's got to be extremely frustrating, since they were just about to start drilling into a rock, and do some further tests on the soil and so forth.
According to an article somewhere, this is the year of the sequel in movies, with Shrek 2, Spiderman 2, A sequel to the princess diaries, so forth and so on. The articles point was that there are no new ideas in film based off of what we see, and I can see their point. But you can say the same about music as well. Name one band, JUST ONE!, that you can see sticking togeather and developing the legacy of the Rolling stones, or Aerosmith, or bands of that ilk. It's just doesn't happen any more.
As for Spiderman 2, it brings in probably one of the most famous Spiderman villians, Doctor Octopus, or Dock Ock. Now, I was never a big comic book guy growing up, but even I was aware of him, and thought he should have been the main villian in the first movie. Kinda like Batman, with the Joker. What I really hope is that the Spiderman series of movies goes on long enough to include Venom, a liquid alien being that Spiderman uses as a suit before he finds out it has some rather evil intentions. Later on, it splits even more to form another more evil versrion of itself in Carnage. With teh computer animation as it is now....that would be an extravaganza.
Ok, time to put nerd-boy away for awhile.
I'm going to Twins Fest tomorrow. I'll have my hot dog, and be able to daydreama bout the upcoming season. It'll give me a chance to immerse my girls into the world of baseball, and hopefully get them interested in it. And if we're lucky, maybe we'll go snow tubing on Sunday. maybe we will, maybe we won't. Depends on howmuch now there is, but we'll get it done somehow.
Have a good weekend everyone.
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