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Corn starch removes vaseline from hair

The next time you and your sibling decide to empty a tub of Vapo-rub or vaseline on each other's heads, you'll be happy to know that simple corn starch will remove it. Just douse your head with corn starch, rub it in really well and let it sit for a few minutes. Now add some shampoo to the mix and rub it in well. Finally, rinse with warm water.

 

Results of my Personality ID test

Here is a link to the results of a Personality ID test I took tonight. While not 100% accurate, it is pretty darned close, especially this part:

"To maximize your talents, you look for situations in which you can have a high level of independence, with obstacles to overcome, challenges to meet and solve, without many details to handle."

Details....yuck!

View my Career Direct personality profile

Yellowstone Day 2

Today started at 6:30 a.m. in the Three Bear Restaurant with a bacon/sausage/ham/egg/cheese mixed skillet. The motel clerk assured us we'd want to be there by 6:30 to beat the crowd that would arrive at 7:00. When we left the restaurant at 7:30, there were about six other people in the restaurant. The restaurant probably seats at least 150. That quality of that advice is consistent with the rest of the service the staff here have been providing.

We got together again at 8:25 in the snowmobile prep room since our paperwork stated to be there and ready to ride at "8:30 PROMPTLY!" To our group of four, they added another group of six, only four of whom were there at 8:30. By 9:15, the other two members of their group arrived. I did not catch the two ladies' names, but Dumb and Dumber would turn out to be suitable nicknames.

Our guide for the day, Aimee, who has been guiding here for 13 years after moving from Pittsburgh, was quite a hoot. She's very comical, provided that you are one of the 99% of people on the planet able to detect obvious sarcasm and humorous statements. Unfortunately, Dumb and Dumber do not possess this gene. After Aimee finally cleared their confusion and helped them to understand that they really shouldn't actually run from a buffalo, nor should they try to stop wolves from eating young elk, we were ready to get underway, albeit it an hour behind schedule.

Before leaving, it's important that everyone understands the most important rule: be responsible for the person behind you. If that person has trouble, pull over and stop your sled. Each person will in turn stop his sled, and eventually all sleds will stop and your guide will know that something is wrong.

Ok, time to hit the trails.

Riding in Yellowstone is rather boring since you must stay on the trails and there is a 35mph speed limit. The scenery is terrific and does help pass the time, but it's a 30 mile ride up to Old Faithful, so with various stops along the way, it's about a 2 hour ride.

Our first stop was to see this young bison that was separated from it's mother a couple of weeks ago.



The mother is long gone, so as soon as the wolves find him, he'll become a tasty treat.

A few more miles up the road, we ran across these elk grazing along the river.



The rest of the ride to Old Faithful was more elk, then more bison, then more elk, then more bison and, of course, many mountains.




We finally got to Old Faithful about 15 minutes before the next release. It was pretty much just like I'd seen on television. It looked like this:




After watching the steam blow, we ate at the pricey restaurant next to O.F. I had a very dry $9.00 hamburger (no picture available).

After lunch we hit the sleds again to head back from where we came.

About 10 miles down the road, I noticed that the person behind me was slowing down, so I proceeded to do the same. Eventually he stopped, as did I, and everyone else followed suit. I also noticed that the person at the back of the pack, Dumb, was using a hand signal that we didn't cover in class -- a wave.

Aimee, our guide, noticed that everyone had stopped so she circled around and drove back to where I was parked. Dumb didn't pull over, she rode up to Aimee, so I had a front row seat to the conversation.

"Aimee, the two people behind me turned around right after we left Old Faithful," said Dumb.

"What?!?!" said Aimee.

"I've been doing the 'Oh Shit!' signal since we left, but no one would stop," said Dumb.

This is where the possession of that gene I mentioned earlier becomes important. See, it was clear to everyone else in the room that the "Oh shit!" signal wasn't an official signal. Used in this context, we all almost everyone understood this to be Aimee being humorous. "If a buffalo starts chasing you or you've gone off a cliff, do the 'Oh shit!' signal, which is waving both arms in the air frantically."

So, it takes at least one hand to drive a snowmobile, so when both arms are up in the air waving frantically, your snowmobile should be stopped. In theory, had Dumb just kept waving her arms, we'd have all stopped right away and the system would've worked.

Anyway, Dumber had left her camera back at Old Faithful, so rather than pull over and stop, which would've triggered a domino stop effect, she and her friend decided to just turn around and go back without telling anyone.

Well, Aimee apparently gets in a  lot of trouble if she lets members of her group ride unaccompanied in the park, so she's not a real happy guide anymore. She then tells the rest of the group to just stay put on the side of the road and she'll go back and find the other two people.

About 30 minutes pass and along comes another group of riders. The guide at the front of this group stops and asks Dumb, "Is this Aimee's group? If it is, I've got two of her riders with me."

So now we've got Dumber and her friend back, but Aimee is still off searching for them. The other guide says that she'll send a text message to Aimee telling her that she picked up the two lost riders, but that Aimee won't get the message until she stops her sled, which will be back at Old Faithful.

Fast forward another 30 minutes or so, and Aimee is back. Aimee doesn't say a word, but instead just queries the group with the "All ready?" signal and when she gets confirmation from everyone, off we go.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. We stopped to see more bison and a waterfall.







The ride concluded with giving Aimee a gratuity (I decided on $20.00, though I'm not sure what the norm is), taking a warm shower and then heading to the local watering hole. I spent the rest of the evening at the watering hole (drinking water), and finally called it at night at about 7:30 p.m.

Yellowstone Trip - Day 1

I began my day at 4:30 a.m., quickly ate a bowl of cereal, then left the house at 5:10 to drive to the Flint airport to catch my 6:40 flight. In the the past, I've never encountered any check-in or security checkpoint lines at Flint. Today, because I arrived at 5:55 a.m. - less than a hour before my flight - there were lines at both the check-in and security checkpoints. I finally made it through the security checkpoint at 6:38 a.m. and luckily my plane as at the gate immediately in front of the security checkpoint, so I boarded the flight at 6:39 a.m., and they immediately closed the door behind me.

I flew from Flint to Detroit, Detroit to Minneapolis, and Minneapolis to Bozeman, Montana. From Bozeman, I took a 3 hour shuttle ride to my final destination, West Yellowstone, Montana. A few facts I learned during the shuttle ride:

• Ted Turner owns the Flying D Ranch near Bozeman, MT. Flying D is the largest ranch in Montana and Ted Turner is the largest land owner in Montana. Ted is also the largest land owner in the United States.
• Flying D is one of 15 ranches that Ted owns in the U.S. On all of his ranches, he raises buffalo for commercial meat production.
• Ted Turner is the largest buffalo producer in the U.S.
• The elevation of West Yellowstone, MT is 6,666 feet about sea level.
• It's not uncommon for day time temperatures to be -30 degrees fahrenheit here during January & February
• 80% of the terrain in Yellowstone is tree covered; 80% of the trees in Yellowstone are Lodgepole Pines
• Land and homes in this area are insanely expensive, be prepared to write a seven figure check for a modest cabin

So far, I've seen the following animals:

• Bull elk with a monster rack
• Two golden eagles eating a dead bighorn sheep
• Bighorn sheep
• Wolf
• Mule deer

Aside from animals, I've seen lots of snow, Jack Pines and rocks. Mac would be in heaven here with all of the limestone formations to climb...the height and width of all the rock formations is impressive, dwarfing any man made sky scraper that I've ever seen. God has some architectural talent, for sure.

Today (Friday) we're snowmobiling inside Yellowstone park with a guide. While I'm not sure exactly where we're going, I know that Old Faithful is on the agenda. I feel like I've seen it enough on television that I don't need to see it in person, but oh well.

The temp this morning at 6:30 was 8 degrees, but it's supposed to get up to 25 today, so that will be comfortable riding weather. It's now 8:10, so I've gotta put on my gear and go pick up my sled.

The World Through Two Year Old Eyes - False Advertising

This morning the girls sat down at the table to enjoy their breakfast. Erin brought to the table a box of Life cereal & some milk.

Kassidy looked at the box and proclaimed in her excited, yet sweet tone, "Strawberries! I want the strawberries!"

It took me a minute to figure out where the comment came from, but when I finally followed her eyes, I saw that she was looking at the cereal box. Shown in the spoon and in the bowl on the front of the box are lipstick red strawberries, floating gingerly on the top of the cereal.

It's surprisingly sad to see a young child learn the reality that the message doesn't always represent the product behind it.

The World Through Two Year Old Eyes - Citrus In the Toilet

I've gotten into the habit of taking my vitamins at night before I go to bed. One of the vitamins I take has a high concentration of B2. B2 has a unique ability to make urine a very deep yellow.

Like most people, one of my first priorities after getting out of bed in the morning is to relieve my bladder. This morning, Kassidy burst into the bathroom as I was finishing my duty, peered into the toilet and proclaimed, "Orange juice!"

"Daddy, why are you flushing the orange juice down the toilet?", she asked.

And I've always just looked at pee as a useless waste to deserving only of a flush.

Give Less Trashy Gifts This Christmas

We (you, I and the rest of America) will generate an additional 25 million pounds of trash this year between Thanksgiving Day and New Year's Day. A large portion of that trash is in the form of product packaging, wrapping paper and Christmas decorations (trees, wreaths, crappy garland that we have to toss after one year of use, etc.). When I learned that fac tonight on NPR (National Public Radio), I thought it worthwhile to share the commentators ideas, as well as a few of my own, on ways to reduce trash this Christmas:

• Buy a live potted Christmas tree and plant it outside in the spring
• Wrap gifts in something you're going to throw away anyway, like paper grocery bags (kids would enjoy making those ugly brown bags look festive). Heck, I wouldn't care if my presents (presumptious, aren't I?) come wrapped in newspaper.
• Give gift cards. :)
• Use gift bags instead of wrapping paper since many people (Grandma, I'm thinking about you) like to reuse them
• Forego Christmas cards for 1/2 the people on your regular list and call those people instead. They'd probably rather talk to you anyway.

That is the list of ideas I came up with in the final two miles of my commute home tonight. Here are sights with a few other ideas:

http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/PublicEd/Holidays/NoWaste.htm - Some decent tips, some dumb ones, too

http://use-less-stuff.com/ULSDAY/42ways.html

http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/index.html (Wow, extreme, but maybe worth a try?)

http://www.etsy.com/ - A cool site for people to buy (and sell) handmade products of all types. Who wouldn't want a couple of these guys for Christmas?

http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/dc_occasions_december/article/0,,HGTV_3472_5565877,00.html - Some decent tips that are more practical for those who might just want to dip their toes into the green Christmas water

 

 

Peanut Butter Cups

As a kid, and even a college student (and even at that point I was still a kid by Henry Link's definition), my Grandpa & Grandma Wood always had peanut butter cups at their house when I visited. I love peanut butter cups.

I never gave it much thought as a youngster and I suppose that I just assumed my grandparents always kept peanut butter cups in their house. I think I know better now.

Thank you for all of the peanut butter cups, G&G. But more importantly, thank you for the memories that always bring a smile to my face.

 

When will I know I've succeeded raising my kids right?

I don't have a clue, really. But one quote that I recently read provides at least a beginning foundation upon which I can define some goals:

"Psychologically I should say that a person becomes an adult at the point when he produces more than he consumes or earns more than he spends. This may be a the age of eighteen, twenty-five, or thirty-five. Some people remain unproductive and dependent children forever and therefore intellectually and emotionally immature.” - Henry Link

Christmas gift ideas

Since several of you have asked for gift ideas for the girls, I've put together this short list of ideas.

http://www.jasonsherrill.com/articles/950.aspx

 

Christmas tree fun

I shed my scrooge cap and decided to host a dead tree in my house this Christmas season. We burned a few gallons of gas to drive to a tree farm in Applegate, MI with Sammy & family on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The farm is for sale, so I think they're letting the trees grow wild since few of them appear that they've been pruned recently, but we did end up finding one that passed Erin's criteria. What else can I say about cutting down a Christmas tree? You're right, nothing interesting, so here are the pics.

 

 

First Halloween outing for the girls

Halloween 2007 is now officially over and the girls are now recovering from their sugar hangover (is it possible to have a hangover from the one Hershey's Kiss that I let them eat tonight?). They (we) trick-or-treated in Dryden with Mary Rose and while expected they'd be bored after two houses, they surprised us by visiting about 20 houses. Kassidy wore out before Sydney, so Sydney's candy bucket weighs a bit more, but there's plenty of butt fertilizer for us all to enjoy for the next week.

Here are some pics:

 

 

 

Are you feeling stupid? Maybe you didn't get enough sleep when you were young.

Here's an article with fascinating research results on how lack of sleep physically alters kids' brains. This is one of the most interesting paragraphs in the entire article:

"Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University is one of the authorities in the field. A couple of years ago, Sadeh sent 77 fourth-graders and sixth-graders home with randomly drawn instructions to either go to bed earlier or stay up later for three nights. .................

.................Sadeh needn’t have worried. The effect was indeed measurable—and sizable. The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains."

Another little tidbit of research that will make you think:

"Convinced by the mountain of studies, a handful of school districts around the nation are starting school later in the morning. The best known of these is in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, where the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. “Truly flabbergasting,” said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results."

Halloween is just around the corner

We finally got around to carving our pumpkins tonight. Here's a quick photo summary of the events, in reverse chronological order, leading up to pumpkin carving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's with the DonorsChoose widget in the sidebar?

DonorsChoose.org is an organization that helps school teachers find funding for classroom projects that regular school budgets cannot cover. It's pretty simple and works like this:

1. Teachers post their project funding requests
2. DonorsChoose.org validates the request
3. Regular people like you contribute money to fund the project

I've found some projects that I think are worthy of funding and I'm inviting you to help these teachers create new opportunities for their students. If you don't like any projects that I've selected, that's ok, there are thousands of other projects that need funding and I'll bet that at least one will be near & dear to your heart.