avocado8

Thursday Miscellany

I may be adding to this post as the day goes on; random thoughts that aren't worthy of entire blog posts keep popping into my brain.

• Al's back has been killing him from lifting/carrying the Beaner so much, to the point where he was barely able to hobble back and forth to work yesterday. Consequently, I did all the lifting/carrying yesterday (well, the parts that happen before and after Hannah arrives, anyway). Guess whose back is hurting today?
• Last night I had a dream where two different children approached me and acted as if they were mine. They weren't really talking yet, but all their grunts and gestures indicated familiarity. It was clear they were claiming me. Both times, the parents of the child came up to me a few minutes later and explained that their babies had been switched at birth (not with each other—the two families were totally separate and unrelated), and that ever since, the child had instinctively been searching out its "real" mom. After the second set of parents told me this story, I remarked, "I had no idea baby switching was so common!" Both families were East Asian or possibly Northern African, and both children were girls.
• It drives me totally nuts that you can't search your Movable Type entries based on whether comments are open or closed. Ideally, I'd like a way to turn off comments on posts as a batch operation, but failing that, I'd at least like to search for posts on which comments are open. (I seem to remember that there was an MT plugin that automatically turned off comments on older posts; I should see if anything like that exists for MT3.2.)
• Even if you don't care about Seattle parks at all, it's worth reading Matthew Baldwin's piece on the subject at the Morning News for the section on Ravenna & Cowen Parks, which contains this little snort-inducing gem:

  Occasionally we would round a bend in the trail and find a full-scale melee in progress around the running path. Upon seeing us, one of the combatants would shout “Reality!” and everyone would lower their weapons and step aside, allowing us to pass. (The idea of shouting “Reality!” during one of our staff meetings at work has occurred to me more than once.)

• Since our lives are so fully integrated now, I find that I don't post separately at lori-and-al anymore. (Would this have happened had we not had a kid, I wonder? Probably.) I'm trying to decide whether to shut down that blog and redesign the lori-and-al site so that it's just an archive of all the old stuff, or whether to import all the lori-and-al posts into avocado8. It's hard to think through all the consequences of integration ahead of time; I remember at one point I thought it was a good idea to put all the old hockey blog entries into Movable Type, but in the end it didn't feel right at all. For the sake of simplicity, I'll probably just go the archive route.
• Via Sweetney: Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell Of a Commentary on Rumsfeld. The audio on the WMV version I watched sucked, but the commentary was nothing if not forceful and well-argued. It's also very dense, so it bears watching a second time.