A Random Pattern

After some inspiration courtesy of www.fury.com, I set off with family in tow….

Actually they set off with me in tow….

Anyways, as we watched fireworks booming overhead, I saw it all on a tiny lcd screen. Clicking frantically, waving the camera in the air, accidentally turning on flash (I’m sure everyone on the lawn LOOOVED that), the very definition of an American holiday.

The end results are available online in our Picasa photo album. Give’em a look-see, let me know what you think. I’m thinking there’s a few marginally good ones in there.

Thanks for the inspiration, Rachel!

p.s. Yes, I know it’s spelled photo, not foto.

p.s.s. Yes, I know I need to crop and cut and otherwise pretty up my shots. I figured if I didn’t just pick the good ones and put them up now, it’d never happen. So deal.

In a rather depressing, but very eye-opening excerpt from “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers And Fathers Are Going Broke,” by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, America’s struggling middle-class situation is laid out in black and white. Here’s a few of the most interesting paragraphs (check out the excerpt on MSNBC for more details).

The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today’s dual-income families have less discretionary income — and less money to put away for a rainy day — than the single-income family of a generation ago. And so the Two-Income Trap has been neatly sprung. Mothers now work two jobs, at home and at the office. And yet they have less cash on hand. Mom’s paycheck has been pumped directly into the basic costs of keeping the children in the middle class.

At the same time that millions of mothers went to work, the family needed the stay-at-home mom (or a costly replacement) more than ever. The number of frail elderly, most of whom must depend on family for daily care, spiraled upward. Hospitals began discharging patients “quicker and sicker,” expecting the family to pick up the task of nursing them back to health. With Mom in the workforce, parents were faced with a painful choice between paying for expensive care and taking time off work. At the same time, the divorce rate continued its upward climb. This situation was compounded by a leaner-and-meaner business climate that closed plants and laid off workers with alarming frequency. In this tougher world, millions of two-income families learned the price of living without a safety net.

Inevitably, the Two-Income Trap affected the one-income family too. When millions of mothers entered the workforce, they ratcheted up the price of a middle-class life for everyone, including families that wanted to keep Mom at home. A generation ago, a single breadwinner who worked diligently and spent carefully could assure his family a comfortable position in the middle class. But the frenzied bidding wars, fueled by families with two incomes, changed the game for single-income families as well, pushing them down the economic ladder. To keep Mom at home, the average single-income family must forfeit decent public schools and preschools, health insurance, and college degrees, leaving themselves and their children with a tenuous hold on their middle-class dreams.

So what’s the state of your union? Are you caught in the “Two-Income Trap”? How can this knowledge influence your votes and your actions as a citizen and member of society?

More cheery fireworks pictures to follow.

I hope everyone had a happy Fourth (American holiday). Here’s one of the better shots I got last night, as we watched and listened to firework explosions.

Explosions had a different meaning and feeling when the first Independence Day happened….. 

Selah’s first word is “Uh Oh”. I suppose that says something about us as parents. Not sure I want to know what though.  

Here’s a screenshot that sums up where we were – a few weeks ago. Follow the link to see pictures of where we are now.

Unfortunately our cabinet guy delayed on us (again). So now due to travels and schedule conflicts (which we specifically had planned to avoid) we will be waiting another week or so for cabinets, followed by a week or two (or three) for countertops.

Yay July 4th. Here’s hoping we have a kitchen….. 

As usual, we’re in the midst of transitions. There’s one transition in particular that I’ve decided to blog about, mainly because I expect it’ll be of interest to lots of people on the web. There will be at least a few posts here before I exhaust the subject. So, here’s the change:

We’ve switched to Mac OS X from Windows XP. Well, switched isn’t quite correct. We got a new Mac Mini, and hooked it up to a 4-way KVM switch, so we can use one monitor for the Mac Mini and the old eMachine XP. It’s been a week or two now, so how’s it going?

Well, we don’t switch to XP much. Of course, I also have a work laptop running XP, so I use that all day. But when I come upstairs, if I need something on our personal computer I mostly use the Mac. Of course, being a tech guy I switch over and check settings or mess around with the different setups, but to do anything I mainly use the Mac Mini.

During the first week, after I did the initial setup, I was getting the Mac Mini on our wireless network. Easy, by the way. Easier than XP. Then I got it to talk to the XP computer. As I was doing this, I noticed that I was feeling a little more out of control than on Windows.

Now I’ve used Windows for years now, pretty much all the way back to DOS (I remember the monochrome computer in my room with Monopoly and a spreadsheet program!) And though I “used” Macs in high school, the class was fairly lame (my football coach taught the computer class). So I don’t think I got a good introduction to Macs.

Back to my narrative: So I noticed that I just didn’t know how to do things, even “simple” things, that I knew on Windows. Even though there’s tons of help, and I’ve since discovered most things I was trying to do are easier / better on the Mac, they were different. So all of a sudden I wasn’t the power user I had felt like on XP.

Now my wife’s been slightly skeptical of the whole thing, and likes to poke fun at my “obsession” with Apple and how I regard Microsoft as “the devil”. So I was trying to acknowledge that the transition might not be the easiest thing in the world, and mentioned that it was a little harder than I thought. She didn’t sympathize at all, so I asked if she was finding it difficult. Her answer caught me by surprise:

“No, not really.”

My wife, surprisingly, doesn’t switch to XP hardly at all! The one program she switches back over for is Paint Shop Pro, which is a windows-only program that we paid for and use to edit our photos. But for her, once I got Firefox on the Mac and our photos copied over to iPhoto, she was good to go.

So here’s the deal: for someone who just wants to get some stuff done on their computer, and isn’t a “power user” (read: geek), it’s no harder learning to get around OS X than it is trying to get around XP. In fact, because things happen faster and the same way every time, it’s actually easier even to someone who knows XP!

Now me, I’m still trying to find out how I can control the Mac’s subnet masking…..

Jungle Fever
Originally uploaded by random4444.

Yes, I need a mower. Yes, Tessa survived the jungle that was our front yard. Yes, I have a mower now. No, the yard is not yet tamed. It’s a reel mower – and no, that’s not a typo. Maybe I’ll put up a picture later.

Check out more pictures on my flickr page – see link below, or click on this pic.

(too good to caption)
Originally uploaded by random4444.

Add your own caption below. Certain words come to mind for me, such as

“nanoo nanoo”

and

“yoda”

Kitchen Remodel and Balcony
Originally uploaded by random4444.

Current state of the kitchen “mod”.

This is the short version of what I’ve spent the last week doing. Expect to see more pictures soon at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ransomedhome/