A mother in New York left her 9-year-old son in Bloomingdale’s with a Metrocard and a $20, and said, “See you later!” The son got home, in one piece and “ecstatic with independence”.

Of course, half the people she tells this story to want to turn her in for child abuse.

I just did the math, and I must have been 9 when I would take the Smith St. bus alone up to Mr. Falciglia’s for clarinet lessons. I truly doubt that the world is any more dangerous now than it was then: we’re just more aware of it, thanks to 24-hour news channels that need to fill programming time. I regularly post pictures of my daughters online, and proudly announced their births on the net — but any pictures of them that also show my brother’s kids have to be shared as friends-only, since he’s worried about people finding them on the Internet.

To try to get Erin to settle tonight, I played her our recording of Aztec Two-Step’s “Rabbit in the Moon”. It used to be her absolute favorite song, but tonight she told me that she thinks she’s outgrown it. I told her that I know what she means: I try not to listen to the Randall Thompson Alleluia (random recording from Google) too many times, because I don’t want to ruin it. (My gold standard is when the Brown University Chorus and as many alumni as they could pack on the stage sang it for Bill Ermey’s memorial service. He was the conductor of the Chorus, but died of AIDS in the late 80s/early 90s. (A close second is the band arrangement that I was surprised by when Donna took me to hear the UMaine Symphonic Band for the first time.))

In any case, about halfway through the piece, Erin decided to dispute my characterization of the Alleluia as “beautiful”. “That’s not beautiful, Daddy: that’s pretty. Pretty is better than beautiful. Beautiful is when you look at it.”

When we moved in to our last apartment, we knew the building was for sale, but we needed a place to settle down fast, and the price was reasonable – even if the condition of the place left something to be desired. We had more or less decided that even when the place sold, we wouldn’t have to worry, since nobody would want to live in our unit.

However, last month, while my brother and sister-in-law were visiting, we got a note slipped under the door (the landlady wanted to talk to us in person, but we were out gallivanting). They had a buyer for the house, and they wanted to live downstairs. We had 30 days.

We decided that we didn’t want to use it all, so we started hunting immediately, and found a nice place. While it’s no longer easy walking distance to the girls’ school(s as of next year), with less than a week left, that’s not a major issue. All the windows are custom double-paned ones that stay up when you put them up, all the light sockets are filled with CFLs, the appliances are less than 2 years old, the light switches are in reasonable locations (and they all have switchplates), the bare-wood floors are, if not hardwood, at least varnished, the previous tenants did not practice knife-throwing at the doors… well, you get the idea. And, with the included heat, it’s really not much more expensive than the current place — come winter, it may well be less.

If you’re on my flickr friends list, you can see before shots in my photo stream: as we settle in, I’ll be posting more-representative ones. (I’m rather annoyed at myself: once we got the old place cleaned up, I wanted to get pictures, since I had never wanted to show the place off as it was. Each of the last couple of visits, though, the camera was at the new place.)

One of the LOLCat pictures on I Can Has Cheezburger? shows a picture of what is presumably the lolrus’ bucket, with the caption “In Soviet Russia, bucket misses you.” (Which is, of course, a Yakov Smirnoff/Slashdot reference.) I explained this to the girls after scrolling by the picture.

One of the few Gamecube games we’ve actually purchased, instead of just renting, is ”Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door”. I’ve gotten close to the end, but haven’t yet defeated the Shadow Queen or gotten to level 80 of the Pit of 100 Trials. I was taking another run at the Pit the other night when Donna called me away for some reason. After the girls got bored waiting for me to come back to finish, I heard the following line floating out from the living room:

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Eric Sink ordered too many t-shirts for SD West, and decided to give away the rest. The only requirement was that recipients had to be willing to send pictures wearing the shirt. I figured that Ael could do the pose a lot better than I could….

Well, that answers my question about whether the construction guys finished fixing the roof last week…

Tomorrow, I’m starting a new full-time job as a Programmer/Analyst at Penobscot Community Health Care. While this isn’t a Fox position as such, my boss is leaving me the flexibility to decide if a particular case could be better handled by VFP than the existing tools. I’ll be working closely with the QA department to help them get the data they need on patient care, and I’ll also be working to make sure the data goes in as smoothly and cleanly as possible.

I’ll probably also get pulled aside to do things like help set up new offices, as well as fixing random employee computer problems as time permits.

I’m starting to get excited about this. It may be the best job fit I’ve had in years. :-)

Wish me luck!

If anyone is planning on spending a lot more on my next birthday present than I think they are, I’d really like to get a good digital camera, instead of just the standard PhD (Press here, Dummy!) ones that I’ve been buying. Cory@BoingBoing says that the FX07 is really cool, but I want something I can actually adjust.

Flickr would be even more fun that way. :-)

I’m running around the family room emptying buckets. Fortunately, the leak started in the middle of the room, so we had time to get the electronics out, and there’s no rug in there to be ruined. I had to run the cable out to the next room to get connectivity to post this…

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Alex Feldstein tagged me for the “tell us 5 things about you nobody knows” meme. Let’s see, what haven’t I brought up on the blog before?

1) I was mugged by goats at a petting zoo once, when I made the mistake of going to the food dispenser without my parents.

2) My first appearance on TV was at a Bryant College (now University) reunion, where a cameraman caught me running my finger down a list of events in the library.

3) The first play I remember seeing was a local production of “The Miracle Worker”. While I remember the play, I don’t remember the story my mom tells about me being so engrossed in it that I actually went up to the stage (which was a raised area on the gym floor) and sat on the edge to see better.

4) When wandering around campus during freshman orientation my sophomore year, I met a Menudo fan club leader named Celia Tan.

5) My next-door neighbor in West Quad freshman year, Claudia Nenno, was responsible for getting me into Star Trek novels by lending me Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky.

I’m not going to tag anybody in particular — unless nobody responds, in which case I get mean. :-)