The tradition in the Free-Ride family (passed down from my family) is that, on Christmas morning, no one gets to start opening presents until everyone is awake and ready to start opening presents. It doesn’t matter how early the kids are awake. Until the last sleepy parent is ready, you just have to wait.
Santa does leave filled stockings on the foot of each bed, so there’s something to keep you occupied, but that only keeps you satisfied for so long.
The fact that we are visiting the grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment introduces an interesting complication to the power struggle between sleepy parents and impatient children.
Category Archives: Personal
Can you go home for the holidays?
Having filed grades and extricated myself from the demands of my job, at least temporarily, I have come with my better half and offspring to the stomping grounds of my better half’s youth.
Well, kind of.
Green gingerbread construction.
As I mentioned earlier, the sprogs and I decided to try our hands at building an entry for the contest to build a gingerbread house using sustainable building design practices. We read up on principles of sustainable design and stocked up on unsulfured molasses and powdered sugar.
Here’s what we did and what we learned.
Celebratory end-of-semester meme.
The grades are filed! I have officially dodged the bullet of delaying the family’s get-away with my incessant grading (since it turned out to be cessant, I guess).
It seems only right to mark the occasion with a meme — the “seven random things about me” meme, for which I have been tagged twice.
Here are the rules:
Department of poetic justice.
Grades are due this Friday. Last Friday, the grader assigned to one of my courses was supposed to get me the grades for the online reading discussions that he was weeks behind on grading.
He didn’t.
Year-in-review meme.
When I partook of this last year, I thought it was a one time thing. But by golly, John Lynch seems to have established this meme as an annual tradition, and I kind of like traditions.
The rule: post the first sentence of the first post for each month.
Caroling mice: words of advice.
Today I stumbled upon a story the elder Free-Ride offspring wrote. Possibly intended to strike a Charles Dickens-like tone, I think it ended up a bit closer to Dostoevsky.
Of course, I have to share it:
When Mice Go Caroling
A question someone ought to study.
Do furnaces break more frequently in the winter than the summer, or do people just have occasion to notice non-functional furnaces when the weather gets really cold?
(Why yes, our furnace has broken, and our temperatures have been dipping below freezing. Why do you ask? Is it my pathetic chattering?)
The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme.
Taking a very brief break in the dungeon of grading to partake of this meme, with which I have been hoping to be tagged for months. (Indeed, I wasn’t really officially tagged — Julie was, but she’s busy writing papers and stuff, so I’m helping her out by pinch-hitting for her on the meme.)
No mere time-waster, this meme was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
The rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
- You can leave them exactly as is.
- You can delete any one question.
- You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.
For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”. - You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”
- You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
My ancestry:
Kids today!
If you’re “writing” a philosophy paper and you’re going to plagiarize, why would you plagiarize a sub-optimal source like Wikipedia? Why wouldn’t you at least rip off a top-notch source like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
It seems to me there was a time when cheaters took more pride in their craft.
Disclaimer: Regardless of the quality of your source material, plagiarism is wrong. Don’t plagiarize!