Peanuts

• Isaac has discovered grinding his teeth. I had forgotten how much that makes my skin crawl. It gives Rachel the heebie-jeebies too.
• After considerable thought, I decided that the best video games ever were Starcraft, Planescape: Torment, Master of Orion (the original, although a lot of people prefer MOO2), Grim Fandango, and Uncharted. The last is a little iffy, or maybe it just seems premature to call it a classic after only a year, but the list of games I've wanted to play through more than once is very very short. And I'm trying to spread the genres around a bit; sorry KotOR.
• Isaac has slept much better the last three nights, which is to say that now he only wakes up 3 times a night instead of countless. This is what passes for normal for our kids until they are almost two years old. And happy Isaac is back during the day! He is really enjoying pushing his walker around now (only in straight lines so far).
• I mowed the lawn Saturday. My eyes itched for four days. And Rachel wonders why I think mowing the lawn every two weeks (or, if possible, three) is Quite Good Enough.
• Matthew has learned to whistle. He's quite pleased that at six he is a couple years ahead of his old man. Unfortunately he has not yet learned how to modulate it; he can only whistle one note. But that does not temper his enthusiasm! Reactions include "Matthew, you're hurting my ears" from his teacher and "This is a no-whistling afternoon" from his mom.
• My office is having a ping-pong tournament. This is the first place I have worked with enough ping-pongers to make having a tournament worth the trouble, and also the first where someone has been able to take a game off me right-handed. (But I have not yet lost two out of three!) I didn't realize that the tournament format was round-robin so I signed up both right handed and left. There are 15 people in the non-scrub category so that is a lot of matches.
• Melissa jammed a pez into her ear canal this morning, so Rachel spent a couple hours at the urgent care clinic. While there, Melissa peed her pants. Happy mothers day. (Melissa is really on a roll this week, isn't she? Rachel asked. When you count locking us out of all the bathrooms in the house so we had to make an emergency trip to Lowes to get a slim screwdriver, yes, I have to agree.)
• Brian IM'd Rachel from Brazil to say the phone cards we sent him didn't work. Not to worry: I set up SkypeOut on my iphone and Rachel was talking with her brother in no time. SkypeOut is cheap enough that maybe we should drop some minutes from our cell plan and use Skype for outgoing calls.  $3/m unlimited calls ($6 if you want to get an old-school phone number associated with Skype too) in the USA and with one of these you don't need your computer either.