Trains, planes and automobiles

The corridor from Washington, DC to New York is well traveled, probably too well traveled. Last weekend a round trip to Baltimore, some 200 miles total took six and half hours. Given that most of distance was on interstates, we should have been able to do the trip in about four hours. Our average speed was just over 30 mph - and there were no major accidents, just volume and a fender bender off to the side.

Today I took the train down to Washington DC, 40 miles further away. The entire trip, office door to my hotel, local train to Amtrak to Metro, took just over three hours for an average speed of about 45 mph. And we spend $35 billion a year on the highway system (nationally - add in the local contributions and it's yet more)? The system seems near collapse in some locations - the I-95 corridor being one of them. Invest in trains.

Another shirt ruined

Lambs tend to arrive in the middle of the night, and last week at my dad's farm was no exception, new babies were found gamboling around the pasture in the morning. Yesterday, with afternoon temperatures in the 100s did not seem like the ideal time for the ewes to give birth. About 4 in the afternoon I hear my dad yelling for help from the back pasture, he's got a tiny baby lamb in his arms, so small it could slip through the fencing, another one back in the maternity pen, and mama loose in the pasture. I end up with the babe in my arms, while dad and various sibs and offspring herded mama into the pen. At the end, I was covered in mud and worse, but everyone was happily bedded down.

I drove the truck down to get the mail (and the latest Harry Potter), came back and was dreaming of a shower and a quick dip in the pool, when I hear my youngest say "Hey, Grampa! There's two new babies in the pasture." I grabbed the binoculars, thinking he must have mistaken the sheep in the grass for lambs. That would be, not! Two brand new, still wet babies were out in the back pasture. Out we go, I scooped them up, and all I could think about as I scooped up the bloody lambs was a quote from a favorite mystery series, "Another shirt ruined!".

Most of the stains have come out.

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Radcliffe Emerson, Egyptologist extraordinaire, is rather rough on his shirts and his wife Amelia Peabody Emerson is wont to remark, "Another shirt ruined!" at the end of many of their adventures. The Emersons are the creation of Elizabeth Peters, who has a doctorate in archeology. Read the first, Crocodile on a Sandbank

Be a statistic!

Crabby Patties

I picked up Crash Kid from camp this afternoon, and mentioned in passing that I had nearly finished my poster for the meeting next week. He responded brightly, "Does that mean you'll be less crabby?"

Why am I doing this again?

Jimmy Neutron lives here

I programmed a robot to drive forward for 6 seconds! Way cool...though in the interest of full disclosure I will admit the task was made easier by the fact that my 9yr old actually built it for me, I just did the coding.