Help Name Andrew's New Game

Andrew invented a new game this weekend. He hasn't told us all the rules yet, but I know that it involves at least two people and two push toys (lawn mower, motorcycle, car). Each person drives their toy in a crazy combination of racing, playing chicken, backwards driving and bumper cars. I'm not sure how you figure out the winner, but based on all the hysterical laughter I think it's Andrew.

These pictures are a little blurry. We are so fast that no camera can possibly capture clear images of our new game.

Blast From The Past

I ran across this the other day while I was looking through our DVDs for videos to encode. It's one of my projects from a video production class I took in college. It was around 1996 I think. Wow, that was a long time ago!

On The Road

It's been pretty busy at work. My team is getting out of the office and planning visits to many of the colleges and universities that use our program. It's our way of checking in to make sure that things are going well and that each campus has what it needs from us. We just started this about two weeks ago. There are 103 campuses to visit between now and the end of May. When you break it down by major city, it's about 35 separate trips.

Now I'm lucky because I have a great team and won't be making all of these visits. But I will be making quite a few. I thought it would be interesting to keep track of the number of campuses I'm on during the next two months. I've started a tracker in the right hand column. Check it out and come back periodically to see where in the world I've been.

Upside Down Day

We desperately needed to go grocery shopping a couple of weekends ago. It got to be Sunday afternoon, and we still hadn't made it to the store. It was dinner time, and we needed a plan. Susie had the idea that we should have breakfast for dinner. So we had Upside Down Day! Mmmm. There's pretty much no better comfort food than pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sausage. Perhaps the most fun was that Andrew helped us make dinner...er, breakfast. You know what I mean.

It's hard to tell, but he's helping me crack eggs in these last two pictures.

"You look tired."

Someone I work with said this to me the other day. Now is there a worse comment you can make to someone? Isn't this basically the equivalent of telling someone they look awful. This probably wouldn't have bothered me if I actually had been tired, but I didn't feel tired at all that day. And it wasn't even the morning either so it's not like I was still walking around through a "morning daze". So I said, "No. I don't feel tired at all." Then I went and got some coffee.

Escalators at Target

After dinner last night, we made a trip to Target to buy Pinocchio on DVD. The Target by our house is a big store with a parking lot under the store. It’s basically a single level parking garage. There is an escalator from the lower level up into the store. I usually park down there because Andrew loves riding the escalator. Plus, the outside lot is small, and I don’t like people parking near my car. Last night Andrew held my hand and ran on up to the start of the escalator. He stepped right where two of the steps split so I had to catch him to readjust. About halfway up, he got really excited and started talking loudly and bouncing up and down. As we got near the top, I told him to get ready, and he held his foot up until the steps flattened out. Then he scurried off the escalator into the store. The people behind us thought it was great fun. After we bought Pinocchio, light bulbs, a couple of Cars cars (The King and Fillmore for anyone keeping score), and other random items, Andrew and Susie rode the escalator some more. In fact, they rode it down, back up, and then finally down one last time out of the store. Escalators are so much more fun than the elevator.

Building Blocks

Andrew developed a strong interest in Mega Blocks. For those who don't know, these are the big "lego" type blocks. He really likes building towers. We built several towers over the weekend, and as you can see by their height, he has gotten pretty good at it. And what's just as much fun is watching him dump the whole giant bag of blocks on the floor before getting down to the business of building.