We watched Finding Nemo tonight and then it was bathtime. While I was drawing the bath:
E: Dad, you’re the daddy fish. I’m the little fish.
I shouldn’t really read too much into that, but you know what? He’s exactly right. … Read more
E: Dad, what’s that?
ME: That’s called a waveform.
E: A waveform?
ME: It shows you what sound looks like. See, the more lines there are and the bigger lines there are, the more sound there is.
E: That’s what sound looks like?
[pause]
E: Dad, what does sound taste like?
ME: Chicken.… Read more
We had to spend an unnervingly large amount of my wife’s paycheck on a vet visit for Xena the other day. She hasn’t been the same since the weather got nice again and we let her go back outside – well, it’s more like we had to push her outside.
And therein lies the problem. … Read more
So you want to program a subroutine in BASIC, but your bose is dopped ub because you hab a code? Little E has you covered. Allow me to introduce… … Read more
I put Evan to bed tonight and he kept on talking to himself for quite a while, so I thought it was worth checking out. I’m getting better about being a “quick draw” with my phone’s camera, and as I peeked around the corner into his room, I saw this little face:
But what the heck was he still doing up with that light on? … Read more
Little E already has his first invitation to a birthday party this weekend. Wow! This means his social calendar is 100% more busy than his dad’s. Apparently the theme of this shindig is going to be Batman, so there’s no telling what the boy wonder will get up to.
Every day at work I see a commercial for some hair coloring product where a grey-haired guy says “My hair says experience,” while his darker-haired doppelganger says “My hair says energy!”
All I can think of is: “…and my hair says AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!”
Guess you kinda have to be there.… Read more
Little guy really didn’t like my suggestions that his little tired butt needed to go to bed tonight after a long cranky day of refusing to take a nap. He was also kinda difficult to have any kind of a conversation with:
LITTLE E: I don’t want to do what you say. I just want to watch cartoons.
ME: Well, I’d like to win the lottery without the morally reprehensible and mathematically inadvisable step of buying a ticket, but we don’t always get what we want.
[pause]
LITTLE E: Can I watch cartoons?… Read more
Tonight as the bathtub was draining:
ME: Okay, buddy, get out of the tub.
LITTLE E: But dad! I chased a bear away!
ME: A bear? In the bathtub?
LITTLE E: It was a scary bear.
ME: How did I not notice a bear in the bathtub?
LITTLE E: He was hiding.
Gentlemen, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.… Read more
LITTLE E: Dad! This [stuffed] puppy turned into a tiger! RAAARRRRR!
ME: Puppies don’t turn into tigers.
LITTLE E: This puppy turned into a tiger. [pause] RRAAAAAAARRRR!!
ME: Puppies turn into big dogs like Xena.
LITTLE E: THIS. PUPPY. TURNED. INTO. A TIGER!!!!
ME: Okay, if the puppy started out as Catherine Schell, then it can be a puppy that turns into a tiger.
LITTLE E: RAAAARRRRRR!!
I can see we’re not quite ready to tackle stuff like genetic drift and mutation just yet.… Read more
Christmas this year didn’t go quite as planned, as I wound up having to work most of the day on short notice. We opened gifts at our house on Christmas Eve. The runaway favorite among Little E’s goodies was his very own digital camera.
To say that he has photography in his blood is probably something of an understatement. I’m a video production geek, and both my and my wife’s maternal grandfathers were professional photographers. I remember going to my Grandpa Harvey’s place in New Jersey and seeing all of his photo gear and thinking that maybe I did have a kindred spirit in my family after all.
Little E’s camera is a Little Tykes model, built to withstand a not-inconsiderable amount of punishment. It has 640×480 resolution and can hold 1,000 pictures in its flash memory. There’s a “trap door” that hides a USB connector so these pictures can be dumped to the nearest computer. I’ve made it a point to try to “borrow” the camera every couple of days while the little guy’s asleep (even though he complains bitterly about not being able to sleep with it) to check out his work.
The verdict: he’s three years old and he’s right on the edge of cranking out photos that aren’t documents of blurry motion. As soon as he gets a handle on the basics, he’s going to be leaps and bounds ahead of me in this department.
I think back to my friend Jason and Mike, who ran the darkroom in the yearbook department when I was in high school. I wonder how old they were when they first had something like a Polaroid instamatic camera thrust into their hands. My son is not even going to have to worry about developing pictures, emulsion fluid, or any of that. He is never going to have worked with film. Anything he does will have always been in the digital realm.
I have some useful ‘shopping skills that I can pass on to him as he gets older, but I have no doubt he’ll quickly exceed my abilities there too. I hope so.
One other thing: if one needs an example of how far digital photography has come, consider this. My first digital camera, purchased in late 1999, was a Sony Mavica, or as I affectionately call it these days, the “floppycam.” It used 3.5″ floppies to save its pictures. These days, you can’t find a computer that can accept or read 3.5″ floppies. So the boy’s first camera is the equivalent of the state of the art about a decade ago – no, actually, in terms of storage and data management, it’s superior to my first digital camera.
I really am getting old – by the time I get anywhere near the state of the art, the state of the art changes its address and doesn’t leave a forwarding notice.
Here, then, are some of Little E’s first pictures. … Read more
