It is an understatement to say that Kelly loves books. “Book” and her own declensions of the word book: abook, bookoo, were her first words, and until we trained her not to do so, Kelly used to wake me and Peter up by pounding one of us with a book and insisting we read it…
Author: cjbickford
Stress Makes Me Fat
I keep my weight under control for a variety of reasons, not least of which is I don’t want to buy “fat clothes.” I’m not obsessive about it. I have an ideal weight, at which I think I fit most of my clothes well, but I allow myself to fluctuate from it by about 5…
O.J. Confesses
In the New York Times. You knew it was gonna happen someday. And I don’t think he’ll have to go to jail, since he’s already been found innocent. Via Mental Floss.
My Comic-Con Reservation Army
In the past few years, Comic-Con has become too much for me to deal with. Each year, it’s gotten bigger and flashier, and since San Diego built a sports stadium downtown, almost impossibly crowded. I’m nostalgic now for the days when a few weeks before the Comic-Con, I could book at the Clarion, a modest…
European Culture Lesson #1
As they’ll tell you themselves, Europeans are better at foreign policy, cuisine, and fashion than troglodytic Americans. In order to help you, my readers, towards the path of becoming as suave and sophisticated as our betters on The Continent, I present to you a selection of European music videos to further your understanding of their…
Greg’s Superbowl Party
We’re not football fans in any sense, but Peter and I have a longstanding tradition about the Superbowl. Each of us has to pick a team to root for, and the person with the losing team has to make or pay for Valentine’s Day dinner. The person whose pick lost the previous year has first…
George’s Birthday Party
We love parties, and we especially love parties we don’t have to host. So when the effervescent Candace invited us to the birthday party she was throwing for her husband George, we were delighted to accept. It had people from our regular social circle as well as George and Candace and their associates. Two of…
The Smug Bicyclist
Every so often when I have the time, the weather is right, and I don’t have to haul anything too big to fit in my backpack, I’ll ride my bike instead of driving. As you might guess from my criteria above, I don’t do it very often. And Kelly weighs 35 pounds, so after 4 or 5 (flat) miles, my legs are quaking. At most, the choice to take a bike instead of a car saves me 50 cents in gasoline.
But I do feel very proud of myself for biking instead of driving.
l337 l
Shiaw-Ling likes to use Leet, a curious way of writing which requires you to replace Latin alphabetical characters with the non-alphabetical characters whenever possible. A typical example sentence looks like this: 7|-|3 [,]|_|1(|< |3|20//|| |=0>< ]|_|//|?5 0/3|2 7|-|3 |_42`/ [)09. To my complete embarrassment, I could never figure out what she wrote. I can’t tell…
Mission San Antonio de Padua
California state’s fourth grade history curriculum focuses considerably on California’s Spanish missions. Personally, I think it’s a terrific tool for learning early California history, since the story of the missions incorporates native American studies, European colonization, America’s independence from Europe (in early California’s case, that being Mexican independence), the separation of church and state, 1700s…