Some Blog Site

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Mom has a couple of dictionaries she won back in school for being first place in the spelling bee. I think that’s backwards – the spelling bee loser should get the dictionary.
• Someone asked me “If Cinderella’s glass slipper was a perfect fit, how did it fall off?” And the answer is that it was a slipper not a sticker.
• The person who coined the phrase “when one door closes, another door opens” must have had a refrigerator like our old one. The top freezer door kept popping open when the main fridge door is shut vigorously. This one was compliments of Delta – I don’t know if he made it up or heard it somewhere.
• The mosquitoes here are pretty bad, but the other day no matter how many I swatted I kept seeing more. It turns out I just had a bunch of eye floaters, no wonder I couldn’t hit them.
• What if I want further ado?

When the boys get to high school age, we give them their own laundry basket and tell them they’re responsible for their own laundry. So we have only one child left who throws his dirty laundry in our hamper.

It makes it much easier to sort now, before that I had to check if this shirt was Gamma’s or Delta’s.

And socks. Socks were the worst because there aren’t sizes to go from like the shirts and shorts.

But sorting is easy now – my wife’s stuff is pretty distinct compared to mine and Delta’s. And I know which clothes are mine, so anything left goes in Delta’s pile.

Until…

We were at Costco and someone remembered that Delta needed new socks. Well, he had seen my Weatherproof socks and felt them and they were comfortable so he asked for those.

I was against it – I thought he should get a set of socks that were unique to him. But I lost that one and he got a set of socks that matched mine.

I thought I would be able to tell his socks apart from mine because his would be newer and wouldn’t be getting threadbare in the heel and ball-of-the-foot areas.

Not all my pairs of socks were worn enough for that to be foolproof. But I did find a foolproof method.

He takes his socks of by peeling them off, so they’re always inside out in the laundry. I always takes mine off by sliding them, so that they don’t go inside out and that saves me work later because I don’t have to turn them back inside in.

So now it’s simple – any socks in the basket that are inside out go into his pile, and any that are outside out go in my pile. Hasn’t failed me yet.

Having recently watched the Star Wars series with Delta, I was reminded of how odd the flight controls are for the Tie Fighters. Or maybe just Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter. Or maybe it’s just the targeting control.

Either way, it always struck me as awkward how he does the little twisting movement with his fingers, like he’s unscrewing a bottle cap. It would be pretty easy to mess up when you’re in the middle of a dogfight, I would think.

Here is what it looks like normally:

And this is what it reminds me of:

It never was really clear to me what he is supposed to be doing, but to me, he’s practicing chalking up his cue stick.

In the last week or so, we had the announcement of the 2024 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2023 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Los Angeles Chargers = 13-4
• Miami Dolphins = 8-9
• Tennessee Titans= 4-13
• Washington Commanders = 7-10

How they actually did was

• Los Angeles Chargers = 5-12
• Miami Dolphins = 11-6
• Tennessee Titans= 6-11
• Washington Commanders = 4-13

Those predictions were kind of all over the place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a very poor resolution timelapse of a robin’s nest.

April 16:

April 16:

May 2:

May 8:

May 14:

For those who are keeping track, this is very similar to the post I wrote 9 years ago about a robin who made a nest over our front door.

And now I have a sample size of two for how long it takes robin eggs to hatch and the birds to grow up – still 2 weeks from hatching to flying away.

Meanwhile, the dove who made a nest in our gutter has been sitting on her eggs for this whole time, about 5 weeks now. I might have to break the news to her that her eggs are bad and will never hatch. The gutter was a bad choice, because every time it rained, the eggs were sitting in cold water, which I’m sure was the reason for their demise.

We have a variety of wildlife in our yard, mainly squirrels and chipmunks and a lot of birds. My favorite are the wild turkeys, then cranes and herons (can’t tell them apart), ducks, then cardinals and woodpeckers, then robins and others. Not so favorite are bluejays (I like their coloring but they are not friendly to the other birds) and Canada geese (messy and noisy and mean, no redeeming qualities).

I’ve noticed that birds have 3 main ways of walking. They either waddle or hop or strut. And by strut I mean they can’t walk without moving their head fore and aft.

Good examples of these categories of bird walking are these:
Waddle – duck
Strut – chicken
Hop – any of those little birds that hang around the food court at the amusement park

I pointed this out to my son, that birds have 3 ways of walking. And as we paid attention to birds walking for the next day or two, oddly enough we found one bird that seemed to walk like any other biped. Except he didn’t swing his arms when walking. But his gait was just one step in front of the other.

We didn’t figure out what kind of bird it was – it was a smallish bird, which I was expecting to hop everywhere, but it just walked. Since then, I looked up other birds, and a good example of a bird that walks normally is a flamingo.

I haven’t figured out what goes into making a bird need to walk one way versus the others. If a biology major needs a research topic, feel free to use this.

Subtitle: in which I improve the government’s records

Allow me to introduce to you the 2023 SFS List of Baby Names that Combine Similar Pronunciations. That baby name list is the place to go in case you are wondering what are the most popular baby names in 2023 regardless of how they are spelled. The Social Security baby name list does not adjust the rankings based on alternate spellings (like Catherine/Katherine), but SFS does.

It is almost Mother’s Day, so the SSA released the name rankings for 2023. Last year’s champion, Liam has repeated as the most popular boy’s name in the US, for the second year, so the trend is official. Liam and Noah are still heading upwards, but Oliver and Jackson are on the decline.
No controversy for the girls – it’s Sophia again, and by a similar margin as last year.

Some Stats

• In the top 9 names for the boys, names 3 and 4 switched spots, and then 5-10 have a bunch of shakeup except names 6 and 9 stayed in place.
• The top 11 names for the girls are the same as 2022, and in the same order for the first 4. Then 5-11 get all mixed up.
• Again, Liam has the title of the highest-ranked boy’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 1.
• Again, Emma is the highest-ranked girl’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 4.
• Girl names still have more spelling variations than boy names (238/1000 vs. 167/1000 alternates)
• Kayson once again took the prize for the most spelling variations for the boys at 9.
• For the girls, there is a 7-way tie for most spelling variations. Madelyn, Layla, Kehlani, Charlie, Aria, Adeline, and Aaliyah all have 5 variations.

2023 Improved Baby Name List

Click on the link above and peruse to your heart’s content!