My blog

"Hey little baby, you are in a good family, we are nice.  Sometimes me and my sister fight, but you don't have to mind that,  because we will always love you and take care of you."

Tis the season for elections and gorilla assasinations. People are suddenly vocal about feelings, mostly on Facebook and blogs. It is also a time of sharing articles that describe how you feel about issues. I love that Facebook and blogs let people connect, debate, and share ideas. I don't love that those same tools can alienate and insult your loved ones. So before you click "Share" and type, "YESSS THIS!!!!" or "I'm just going to leave this here..." ask yourself: Is this a straw man argument? A simple definition of a straw man comes from Wikipedia : "A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent." A simpler definition comes from me: "A straw man is an argument that attacks ideas that you claim your opponent has, but actually...they don't think those things at all...

We went to Hong Kong for Trent's wedding! I felt like a little kid there, in the fun sense where everything is new and interesting, but also in the terrifying sense where I couldn't read anything, didn't know how anything worked or where anything was, no one could understand me clearly, and all the food was strange to me. For example, a giant bowl of corn at McDonald's: Luckily two of Bryce's brothers are very familiar with Hong Kong and they shepherded us around, argued with taxi drivers, and explained how to eat things, like good babysitters do. Here's a chicken foot which (somehow surprisingly) tasted like chicken: Of course my favorite part was being with family in the temple, and seeing Trent and Britt get married. But my second favorite part was taking pictures of random funny things: Surface Air Duct: So cute! But sometimes... As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced: ... I'm pretty sure Style No. 228 isn't ...

This morning I turned on "Curious George" to hypnotize my children, and trick them into forgetting to burn down our house, while I took a shower. That plan was a raging success except for when I emerged from the shower my kids had some kind of mysterious mania for windsocks. We've talked about windsocks before in a passing way, (like a: literally I drove past it at 45 mph while my kids asked about everything they saw out the window and one of those things was a windsock-kind of way.) I don't know what George did in that episode, but their passing interest in windsocks had bloomed into a full-blown obsession in the time it took me to wash my hair. They begged to make a windsock, and McBoy gleefully explained how he planned to hang his brand new socks, which he loves, on a nail outside...awesome... To save the footwear in our house, I convinced them we should make a cool fish windsock and I'm actually pretty happy with how easy it was and how cool it turned out. Ste...

My parents have been living in their house for about 15 years. During that time  zero dogs and zero cats have lived in the house. The previous owners put a doggy door in the door between the garage and house, but even if we had a small animal it wouldn't have been able to use the doggy door because it was boarded shut to conform with fire safety regulations. So this un-used and un-usable doggy door sat there for years and nobody ever looked at it or thought about it until one day my mom decided she wanted that door to be painted black. My dad painted the door and suddenly realized that he hated that defunct doggy door: Once he pointed it out we all wondered how we possibly walked past it for so long without doing anything about it, because now we all hated it. But how do you remove a doggy door? Google had lots of ideas for putting a doggy door in, but not for hiding one. So my dad made a plan to get rid of the doggy door: Using a bit of trim and some bead board he made 6 panels (3...

So literally her whole life, until recently, McGirlie has been babbling nonsense at me. One day, the nonsense babbling stopped abruptly, and she shifted to saying things that have actual meaning and need an actual response. Unfortunately this shift did not coincide with a shift to readily-recognizable-English. Also unfortunately, I didn't catch on to the shift right away. I feel kind of like the last kid on the playground to find out about cooties, or the last adult in the world to get a smart phone...wait... Anyway, the other day I was serving no-bake cookies to the kids and McGirlie kept saying, "Izzih'ot? Izzih'ot?" instead of eating her cookie. I responded in full-on exuberant baby-talk, "Yeah cookies! Yummy cookies!" and she just kept saying "Izzih'ot?" It took a while, with me babbling nonsense at her, before I realized she was asking if the cookies were hot! I am pretty sure this is how it looked from her point of view: So Mama made ...