Peanuts

• Another nerd dream: I was teaching SICP, but I wished my friend Paul was teaching it instead of me. (Paul wrote a lisp-to-python-bytecode compiler, only that part isn't a dream.)
  
• Need to blog about the birthday party we had for Melissa's invisible friend.
  
• Rachel: "you know what Firefly reminds me of? Cowboy Bebop." She's right. It's a live action Cowboy Bebop with more soap opera and less action.
  
• Isaac's morning ritual: diaper change, nurse, walk to the ps3 and eject whatever disc Rachel or I was playing last night, unplug Daddy's laptop.
  
• Flew to Atlanta for the NoSQL East conference. (Didn't speak, this time -- just wanted to meet potential Cassandra users.) I've never been called "dearie" more times in my life than by the waitress at the greasy spoon for breakfast. In a Southern accent, of course. On the way back, Delta fubarred the seating assignments somehow, assigning half a dozen people to the same seat. Chaos ensued. Good times. Isaac was _very_ happy to see me when I got back.
  
• Isaac isn't as into horseplay as his siblings were, but things like driving a truck over his arm totally crack him up.
  
• 20 minutes late to the ward halloween party was not late enough for it to have actually started. It was a madhouse: they combined parties with the neighboring High Country ward, and the line for food stretched around all four walls of the gym. Fortunately we were near the front of the "people with small kids" group, and were done eating forty minutes later (when the line had shrunk to two and a half walls). They had a "trunk or treat" there but (a) it was going to be another hour before everyone ate and (b) we had to go to do real trick-or-treating. So we did.
  
• Bishop Cowart: "Our youngest son went away to college in August. I've got to say... [He pauses, and he looks like he's going to get emotional] it's been nice."
  
• My friend Ellis's brother is in China. They have church meetings over Skype. Cool.
  
• Matthew is in little boy heaven: Uncle Jeremy sent him a Sansa music/video player, and preinstalled Rockbox (so it has games, too). Matthew is having fun with the games but more fun figuring out everything it can do. Also, the songs Jeremy loaded, including "the Mahna Mahna song." So we had to show him the Muppet Show source. Seven-year-old (and four-year-old) comedy GOLD. The phone call brought down the house.
  
• Rachel rescued a couple of her 12 year old "young women" from waiting at church an hour early for the temple trip. At the table, one asked the other, "is Paris in Italy, or Italy in Paris?" I kid you not.
  
• I realized that if practice could make me good at writing, it would have happened by now. That's me over here, proving talent does matter.
  
• Another thing I thought went without saying: "Matthew, don't squirt your brother with the water bottle!" Isaac is soaked.
  
• Someone left a bunch of gumdrops where Isaac could reach them this morning. He was a happy pumpkin -- happy, and sticky. (I guess that's step 5 on his morning to-do list: check for anything sticky and/or crunchy within reach.)