September peanuts

• Today, Mommy taught Matthew and Melissa to pronounce "Mozart." Yesterday, Daddy taught them to pronounce "Ogre."
• "Oh no! Mommy burned it! Again!" "What do you mean, 'again?' Are you talking about the time she burned popcorn years ago?" "Yes."
• Isaac, 5, has figured out how to play Dungeon Defenders online from the PC. He likes this better than playing on the PS3 because then he gets "friends" to help him. [Update: after I created a PSN account for him, he figured out how to play online from the PS3 too.]
• London has wifi in the border control area. Like civilized people.
• My laptop disappeared at Javazone while I was getting mic'd up for my talk. Fortunately, it was just some concerned Norwegian who thought it looked abandoned and took it off to the Info booth for safekeeping.
• Isaac, waking up: "You eat breakfast?" Me: "Not yet." Isaac: "I'm not dying today, am I?" I'll be glad when this little obsession with mortality is over.
• Corinna came up to me: "I want gâteau." May have more success with the French with this one.
• Melissa is teaching her friend Abby how to play Dungeon Defenders.
• It was pleasant this morning in Austin. Maybe 66 degrees. Rachel took Corinna to pick up a basket of peaches. Corinna hugged herself and shivered. "I told! Mommy, I told! [cold]" Little Texan.
• Poor Corinna. She was so thrilled to go to school with Isaac after he missed his bus this morning, then all her hopes were dashed when I took her home with me again.
• Matthew: "Why are you listening to that song again?" Me: "Because they put me on hold again." Matthew: "Oh. Why don't they let you choose what song to listen to?"
• Rachel: "Let's see a concert while we're in London." Me: "We can see a concert here." Rachel: "Not by the London Symphony Orchestra!"
• Poor Isaac. He doesn't like going to sleep by himself. Matthew won't let Isaac sleep in his room. Melissa won't let him sleep in hers. Even Corinna shoved him away and said No! All his siblings have to do is be nice to him and he'd do anything for them.

August peanuts

• Isaac is using some French nouns but fills in the rest with English glue. "I want de l'eau with glaçons."
• Rachel told Isaac it's not polite to talk about his penis all the time. So he started singing about it.
• Rachel, playing Skyrim: "Lesson learned -- do not taunt the giants." (Rachel taught my dad Skyrim when he visited, but he decided it was too complicated.)
• Rachel and I were both tired this morning when Corinna got up early. We asked Matthew to watch her. When I got up I found paper towels scattered around the floor, a cereal box dumped out on the table, the pantry ransacked for prunes, chocolate donuts, and fruit snacks. Matthew claims that this didn't occur while he was watching her. My conclusion is that he wasn't watching her very often. In related news, Corinna wasn't very hungry for lunch.
• Rachel won a Dominion game with Duke/Duchy. She totally gloated about it, too.
• Matthew is taking a bus to Dallas. He made himself a lunch. Moments later, Corinna comes into the family room licking peanut butter off a spoon. I didn't even have to look. "Matthew! You left the peanut butter out!"
• Isaac is taking a bath. He soaps up his testicles. "There's something in here!" He pokes and squeezes. "Ow! That hurts!"
• Rachel: "You subscribe to a grammar blog? That's a whole new level of nerdy." For the record, I was just looking up the en-dash.
• Rachel: "Isaac, take your clothes upstairs. Corinna's got your basket, and she's too little." Corinna, paying more attention than we thought while pulling the basket: "No! I bih dirl!" [big girl]
• Rachel: "Somebody wrong on the internet?" Me: "No. Actually, he was right." Rachel: "That must be refreshing."

July peanuts

• "Isaac, quit scratching your butt with your fork."
• Rachel: "Are you wearing underwear, son?" Matthew: "Yes." Rachel: "I was talking to Isaac. I *hope* wearing underwear goes without saying for you."
• Corinna's phobias: Dogs. Strangers. Changing tables.
• Two weeks ago, as we left for the airport, Rachel asked Christine to take anything out of the fridge that she wasn't going to eat before we got back. We got back tonight. On the counter are half a dozen tupperware containers whose contents are in various stages of decomposition. Even over the fumes of the new clearcoat on the cupboards, the smell when they are opened is overpowering. Moral: Ellises are literal-minded creatures.
• Isaac peed in his pants this afternoon because he was too busy playing games to go to the bathroom. Then tonight Rachel was wondering why the bathroom smelled so strongly of poop just after she cleaned it. I happened to walk by Isaac and announced, "I found the problem." He was only wearing underwear, and the poop had soaked through, so I cleaned up everything he'd sat on while Rachel bathed him and cleaned out the underwear.
• Rachel's new range has a setting above "High" labeled "Power Boil." This one goes to eleven...
• Rachel: "Is someone on the internet wrong again?" Me: "No. Just replying to a friend." Rachel: "I just think it's funny when I hear you typing passionately." Me: "It's a mechanical keyboard! It *always* sounds passionate!"
• Me: Est-ce que tue as faim, Isaac? Isaac: Yes! [Still working on getting him to reply in French] Corinna: I faim!

June peanuts

• Things you don't expect to hear your wife say: "I'm not sure whose poop it is."
• Rachel: "Want an ice cream bar?" Me: "I already had two." Rachel: "Oh. That kind of day, huh?"
• Melissa is playing Moon Diver with Isaac. She's a fan of the character design. "I wonder if a girl made this, because they have wings. But they made it so boys would like it, too." I'm glad she's growing up with that attitude.
• Melissa: "This car is much easier to park than the MBW." "You mean, BMW?" "Yes. That car was huge!" "You mean, the Suburban we rented?" "Yes, that one!"
• Kirsti: "It's weird, thinking about turning 25. Was that weird for you, Jonathan?" Brian: "Can you even *remember* turning 25, Jonathan?"
• Rachel: "You know what camp my parents signed me up one Summer? Geography Camp." No wonder she's bitter.
• Survived the four hour flight to Seattle, no thanks to the sour old flight attendant who kept making helpful suggestions like, "Tell her that noise is not appropriate on an airplane."
• Rachel: "That guy's wearing tights! Under shorts! ... Wait, those are his legs. Very, very white legs. Welcome to Seattle."
• Seattle night one report: Rachel and I went to bed at Midnight Pacific time. Corinna woke up hungry and mad at 2. Matthew set the alarm on his tablet for 4:45. (Then a bonus 4:55 because I couldn't find it in his bag the first time. Matthew slept through it.) Then Corinna got up for good at 5:30, followed by Matthew and Melissa waking up Isaac at 6.
• Isaac, grabbing his crotch: "Poopy, poopy, poopy... !" I am not a fan of the poopy song.

May Peanuts

• Me: "I had a good date night idea, but I can't remember it." Rachel: "You wanted to go out for ramen, then get ice cream." Matthew: "Yuck! That's disgusting! I'm out of here!" I wonder what he thinks ramen means.
• THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. "Matthew, what are you doing up there?" "Destroying this whiteboard." "Why are you doing that?" "Because it feels good."
• Rachel: "Hey, that's pretty good. If I ever need to spam hundreds of people, I'll ask for your help."
• Achievement unlocked: take [Jonathan's] Mom to see Paul McCartney.
• Rachel: "Wow, tech recruiters are even more rapacious than real estate agents."
• It took 36 years, but I finally won a technical argument with Dad: the speed-of-light (round trip) latency USA to Europe is indeed around 50ms. "That can't be right!" he said, but then he stopped and ran the numbers. (I guess it wasn't much of an argument, but that's probably as good as I'll get.)
• The beginning of a trend: I ate 1.75 hamburgers. Matthew ate 2.
• I added Print to the toolbar in Isaac's Paint application. He is literally hopping with excitement as the printer churns out copies of his masterpieces.

Dr. No

drno, a photo by jbellis on Flickr.

I spend a lot of time telling people that they haven't thought through the implications of their favorite feature request and that it is, in fact, a Bad Idea.

So when one of the sales engineers saw that the projector's No Signal output aligned just right on my forehead, it was a sign from God.

The tie, of course, is because they were *sales* engineers.

April Peanuts

• [November: In April, I posted that Rachel dreamed we had another baby. I told her I wasn't treating that as revelation. In June, she conceived Baby Five.]
• Matthew: "What's a fax?"
• "Bad guys have guns. Mommy have gun, Daddy have gun, Isaac have gun, shoot bad guys. And zombies." The second amendment according to Isaac.
• "How old is that baby you were watching, Melissa?" "She's about... zero."
• "See all these red squiggles, Matthew? That's telling you where you mis-spelled a word." "That's why I usually turn spellcheck off."
• New bedtime plan: hide in our bedroom, lock the door, and wait until Isaac stops trying to get in and falls asleep. I am not a proud man.