Archive for October, 2009
Grading and Halloween
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on October 31st, 2009
This is shaping up to be a busy weekend. I’ve got two stacks of grading to push through, but I also have a wee lad to take to a couple of Halloween festivities.
This is the first year he’s been roughly aware of the holiday, and it’s been interesting seeing him process the whole thing. We eventually got him straightened out on the fact that he’d get to dress up this one day only, at which point he began to insist that he wanted to be a lion, for which a really awesome costume was acquired and constructed.
The past week, naturally, he started going on about being an elephant instead. And once we got that idea out of his head he informed us he was going to be a fish.
Sigh.
No, son. You’re going to be a lion. And you’re going to be happy about it.
For my part, the Hobbit has long insisted that I’ll be going as a giraffe, though I’m afraid that will not be the case. I’ll likely be a priest, since it’s one of the few costumes I have on hand. Unless I go barbarian again in order to scare up interest in my Tolkien class, for which I’ve started to distribute advertising fliers.
Almost Healthy
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on October 29th, 2009
This semester has been tough on the family health-wise. It’s hard all over this year, what with H1N1 and all, but I think we’re also suffering more than usual because the hobbit is in school. Pretty much anything going around there comes here, which means one of us usually gets it. And once one of us has it, everyone else will soon follow.
As a result, for the past many weeks we’ve been on a rotating schedule of sickness. If I’m healthy, the wife is down. If she’s healthy, I’m down. It’s like a tag-team in wrestling. The kids have been popping up and down, too, and for a few days earlier in the week in the family but me was on some good ol’ Amoxycillin to wipe out a strain of something-or-other that was skipping through the house.
Everyone seems on the mend now (knock on wood), which is perfect timing: I have two stacks of papers showing up tomorrow.
The Movies of My Life: 1978-1979
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on October 27th, 2009
I’ve been sharing a chronological list of the movies of my life. Not a list of the best films of all time or anything like that, but just a list of films that somehow made the memories that make my life.
1978
Revenge of the Pink Panther.
The Movies of My Life: 1976-1977
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on October 24th, 2009
I’ve been sharing a chronological list of the movies of my life. Not a list of the best films of all time or anything like that, but just a list of films that somehow made the memories that make my life.
1976
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
No shock here. As I have already said, Pink Panther films are a treasure chest of memories for me and my family. Like Young Frankenstein, there were a lot of clips I could have picked for this one. I’ll try to keep myself to two:
The Movies of My Life: 1974-1975
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on October 22nd, 2009
I watched the movie True Lies for the first time in years the other day, and I really enjoyed it. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I think I had a goofy semi-vacuous grin on my face the whole time I sat on the couch.
I’d watched the film countless times in my younger years, and it was, just as I remembered, a great piece of entertainment — even if I still had it memorized despite my advancing age. But I don’t think that was the real reason I sat watching it in wide-eyed happiness.
No. I sat there smiling because the movie was a memory. Many memories, in fact. Potent ones, of a powerful time in my life. As I watched the movie, it was like watching a younger me watching it: in my first apartment, in my house in Albuquerque, with missed friends, with sought-after girls, here, there … it was like a time-warping flood of movie-viewings. And it was wonderful.
Being the intellectual sort of fellow that I am, the experience got me thinking about the movies of my life. True Lies, after all, isn’t the only movie that has this kind of effect on me. In fact, when I started to make a list of memory-tapping movies, it turned out there were quite a few.
So over the next few weeks I’m going to share the movies of my life in chronological order. Note that these aren’t aesthetic choices. I’m not picking out the “best” movie of the given year. I might not even be picking out my favorite. What I am picking out is the movie that, for reasons I can or cannot explain, best acts as a key to the happy memories of my life (so you can forget Schindler’s List).
Project XK: 4xGuard Front Guard 4
Posted by Michael Livingston in Project XK (Jeep) on October 17th, 2009
In an earlier post I mentioned that my 4xGuard experiments with my father this summer had included the installation of a prototype Front Guard (version 1.5) that had never gone into production. As I wrote then:
Good for me, but not useful for anyone else. Not to worry, though: we also effectively redesigned the production Front Guard model (which would make it Front Guard 4, I think) and its bracketry in order to fit the XK with very minimal cutting. The results should be a win for everyone.
Well, Front Guard 4 has arrived. I just completed the test-fit on my Commander. It simply could not have gone better. Before I get to the details, here’s the latest shot of my Commander at distance:
My Jeep Commander as of 17 October 2009.
A Hobbit Spells His Name
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on October 15th, 2009
I seem to have been suddenly struck down with some sort of plague (flu, most likely), so I doubt much will be happening around here for a bit.
To tide you over, and to satisfy those in hobbit-news withdrawal, I thought I’d share the first recorded instance of Young Master Samwise spelling his name, which happened just after noon today, Eastern Standard Time:
Samuel spells his name.
The Hobbit is a remarkably clever lad, as you can see. He first color separated his refrigerator letters, then carefully selected those he needed and started to line them up in relative order. Remarkably, he apparently recalled that the English name Samuel derives etymologically from the Hebrew Sh’muel. Wisely noting that Hebrew reads right to left (opposite of English), he decided to monumentalize this awareness in his own spelling.
Brilliant, I say. Just brilliant.
(What, you don’t think he just screwed up and did it backwards, do you?)
Project XK: 4xGuard Matrix
Posted by Michael Livingston in Project XK (Jeep) on October 13th, 2009
I’ve mentioned that my father and I installed a Matrix brush guard from 4xGuard on my XK this summer — and it appears in a number of my Commander pictures — but I didn’t want to write about it in-depth until now.
Why not? Well, the Matrix was engineered for the WK (like 4xG’s Side Guard), and the experience of trying to install it on the XK revealed to me and my dad that some superficial design changes would help it fit the Commander much better (while leaving its compatibility on the Grand Cherokee untouched). I hacked and ground metal to make our experiment work, and then those changes had to go through engineering and then into production … and then had to be test-fit once more on my big red beauty (hey, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do). I wanted to wait until that was done before I wrote anything up here.
Since I’m writing, you know that the test-fit is done. And since I’m smiling (you can see that, can’t you?), you know that the test-fit went well. Here’s my Jeep as of this afternoon:
4xGuard Matrix Installed.
Nice, eh? (Oh, and for my friends and family in colder parts of the world right now, you may be interested to know I took this while wearing flip-flops and was quite comfortable.)
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