Author: paddlefish

Take a little swim and make a sand pig? March 1st is official Pig day, you know…

Sand Pig

R.A.S. age 7 1/2.

Filmed on location in Sanibel, March 1st, 2000. Download.

My favorite part is the giggle when she is “pulling” me up the cliff face. Disclaimer: It might take a few minutes for it to finish downloading before it will play back. If you’re using Windows, you might need to install Quicktime.

As lil sis was growing up, when she did something particularly memorable, either in a cute way or in an otherwise memorable fashion, we’d say: “We’re going to tell this story when she’s 16 to embarrass her!” We had fun imagining lording it over her in that distant future…

But now it’s come (and gone!) and I almost haven’t the heart to recount any of those. But maybe a few of the more harmless ones can’t hurt…

I’m tall. The kind of tall that makes people say, “Wow, how tall are you” but not freakishly tall like pro basketball players. All through early childhood, she’d say, “When I grow up, I want to be as tall as Andy”. I’d give her anything if I could, but I can’t give her that.

When she was just a baby, I remember holding her. Being the youngest child growing up, I had never held a baby before. She was more sturdy than I though babies would be. She liked to grab my glasses (getting them full of baby fingerprints), and she’d giggle if you blew a zerbit on her tummy.

C has a sarcastic way of yelling “Crisis!” when someone is making a fuss over nothing. R.A. learned this but didn’t understand sarcasm, so one time when she decided to make a fuss over nothing (she wanted out of her high chair) she not only cried, but also yelled “Crisis!” in all seriousness.

The mess one chocolate cookie can make.

She’d come up to Slate Creek and we’d explore fun places like the old mine…

Sometimes we’d have a sleepover in the loft at the lodge and we’d stay up telling cooperative Goldbug Nelson ghost stories. Mr. Nelson was a previous owner of Slate Creek, and he made his living (such as it was) by mining for gold. Rumor has it that there is still hidden away somewhere a coffee can full of gold…

15 years ago or so, when Becka and I were separated by half the continent, we figured out how to email tiny sound files to one another.  Four of those were of my favorite little sister.  In celebration of her upcoming graduation, let’s take a nostalgic trip down memory lane…

Isn’t this the cutest little sneeze you’ve ever heard?

This one is her saying “Thank you much,” which we still use today in it’s colloquial form: “teetoomuss“.

Becka and I both love Jim Henson, and probably as a result of that (via Kermit) we love the color green, and also frogs.  That’s likely why little two-year old was caught saying, “froggy“.

And cutest of them all, who do you send running up the stairs to tell big sister it’s time to eat?  Becky, it’s suppertime!

With the landing of the space shuttle Atlantis Wednesday, the space shuttle program has officially begun its retirement.  Well, maybe… rumors abound that she might go up one more time next year?

We posed for a snapshot before the concert.  You can see me peeking out just behind Jim’s left elbow.

I just found a blog by Mike Ash.  These posts interested me:

• Dangerous Cocoa Calls : APIs you might not have thought could cause your program to crash.
• The Good and Bad of Distributed Objects : Having used DO a little, I’m a bit scared to see how risky they are.
• various ways to do interprocess communication on OS X : Various approaches to doing IPC on the Mac.

Edit.  After experimenting with the NSDate call mentioned in “Dangerous Cocoa Calls” I couldn’t get it to reproduce the weird behavior.  I believe that even if you change your clock or go to a different timezone, an already launched process won’t be adjusted.  Thus it is apparently safe to use timeSinceReferenceDate as a timer.

Can you solve this puzzle?

That was quite an adventure!  I’ll just take a rest here under the Lily’s of the Valley.  Then it’s off to cross the big “pond”!

…with anyone else but me!