Alex Looses Another Tooth
Jan 21st
Rough Night with Wonder Pets from the Twlight Zone
Jan 19th
We watched a full episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse but before that we watched a number of shorter videos on the “Wonder Pets“. Andrew’s a fan of the Wonder Pets and with the right amound of coaxing will even sing the theme song. For those not familiar with the show there are three classroom pets Linny the guinea pig, Turtle Tuck, and Ming-Ming the duckling who travel around on a makeshift toy sailboat and help out other baby animals that have gotten thenself in trouble.
In just about every video they played some portion of the theme song,
“Wonder Pets! Wonder Pets! We’re on our way
To help a baby elephant (or whatever bably animal they are saving that day) and save the day!”“We’re not too big.”
“And we’re not too tough.”
“But when we all work together we’ve got the right stuff!
Go, Wonder Pets! Yay!”
It all seemed very innocent until it turned out the that I had the theme song going through my head over and over all night long. I woke up at least a half a dozen times from a restless sleep and all I could remember dreaming about was the song with Linny, Tuck, and Ming-Ming, flying through the air in the flyboat. I couldn’t get that dream out of my head all night and work up feeling tired and just a little freaked out this morning.
Here’s to hoping Linny leaves me alone tonight so I can get a decent sleep.
Joke of the Day
Jan 7th
“Arrr…” says the pirate. “I’ve got a bounty on me head!”
2008 Year in Numbers
Jan 5th
mfdc in numbers
It was a record year for web site traffic this year with 79,870 hits from 1,803 unique visitors. In the overall scheme of web site volume 79,000 visitors isn’t all that many but the target audience for this site is meant to be small and this still works out to 218 hits a day which is fine. When I include all the auto crawlers from seach engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, we had a total of 108,858 hits.
By month the trend looks like this:
I would have assumed that the huge tickup in traffic in November would have come around the time I posted the Disney vacation pictures but after looking at the traffic that wasn’t the case. Someone from France (see below) pretty much went through the entire site in about 10 minutes so it was probably some type of automated collector even though the browser type doesn’t indicate that’s what it was.
Top visitors to the site came from addresses ending in .net, followed by a chunk of unknown, then .com. The next three largest groups came from France (1,961 – 857 being the suspected automated web site crawler from above), Poland (827), and Mexico (772). You Canadian visitors came in 7th with 744 hits.
Excluding the home page, blog home page and rss feeds the most popular page was the January trip to Great Wolf Lodge, Christmas pictures from 2007, and Alex’s Matisse.
The top browsers used to visit the site were Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (mainly mac users), and Opera. There were 23 hits from a Lynx user which surprises me since Lynx is a text based and out site is pretty much graphics driven. (Then again it was only 23 hits, only for the home page, but it spanned from January to September so whoever it was kept coming back.)
Blog Posts
Compared to previous years I managed to get out a couple more blog posts then years past with 70 items. That accounts for 24% of all posts and I’ve been posting on or off since July of 2004. It’s hard to beleive that it’s been that it’s been that long which got me thinking how long I’ve had this site up. Looking at the WHOIS record I’ve owned mfdc since October of 2001. Holy cow, 2001. I remember I got the site while Jen was pregant with Alex as a good way to share pictures with the family. (And now she’s pregant again….cue twilight zone music.)
Swim Numbers
Ever since I was in high school I’ve more or less kept track of all my workouts. It’s a habit one of my old coaches got me into and it’s been impossible to break. It doesn’t feel like a complete workout until I’ve written it down and recorded the yardage.
This year I swam 290,600 yards which works out to about 165 miles (265 km). February and March were really down months since I took them off due to surgery so I’m relatively pleased with how far I went. The thing that’s aways a little surprising to me is that it was only 165 miles for the whole year since it sure feels like way longer while I’m in the pool. On a map 165 miles doesn’t look all that impressive and depending on which way I go from our house it doesn’t even get me out of the state.
So instead of ploting how far I’ve gone horizontally how about looking at it vertically. According to Google Earth this is what the view of our house would look like from 165 miles up. More impressive if you ask me.
Netflix
According to Netflix we rented 61 movies last year and I wactched 1 online using the “Watch Now” feature. That works out to more movies then remember watching in previous years and now that I know how many it is I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth even if I’m not one of those 260+ movies a year type person.
There you go, the 2008 ocd numbers summary.
Christmas 2008 Pictures Posted
Jan 1st
I updated the web site with pictures from Christmas to finish out 2008. Enjoy.
1977 From Germany
Dec 14th
As I was looking through the pictures I come across three post cards that my mom put in the section for the trip I took to Germany with Omi and Opa in 1977. The first one is of a Lufthansa DC10 which I’m going to assume was the plane I probably flew on to get there. I have some vague memories of the trip and on the flight I remember they showed an in flight movie but I was so short I couldn’t see over the seat in front of me and and they kept trying to prop me up on blankets. I can’t remember what the movie was about but it was in German (go figure) and part of it took place in a midevil castle.
Omi writes,
“We are in Herrenberg, it is snowing, and today is Derek’s birthday. Derek is fine. The first night he slept 15 hours.”
The card is cut around the edges so that it would fit into the spot in the album so it’s hard to follow what’s written. Apparently the plane was very full because British Airways was on strike during that time.
This is the first postcard of three so I figured I would start with the beginning of the trip but it turns out that this 1977 card isn’t the oldest one of the three. When I pulled them out to read the back one of them is dated 1975. It’s a picture of Herrenberg which is a place I visited but was sent by Omi and Opa when they were on a previous trip to Germany.
Spaghetti With Santa
Dec 13th
Alex still won’t have anything to do with it so we don’t force it but Andrew was really excited and wanted to tell Santa what he wanted for Christmas.
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Just how old are you?
Dec 9th
- Donate snacks to a charity
- Donate food to a pet shelter or to the food pantry
- Sing songs for a nursing home
- Bake cookies for the crossing guard
and so one.
Alex is reading it over and he gets to one item “Read a book to an elderly person.” and he says,
“Hey, I know what I can do for this one, I can read to you mom.”
Thanksgiving in New Orleans
Dec 7th
The following day we took part in a New Orleans tradition and went to the Fair Grounds to do a little wagering on the horses. We didn’t end up winning any money but let me tell you, we were this close. That night we finished up by going to the opening night of Celebration in the Oaks at City Park. We rode on some rides, we walked through the light displays, and took a night time train ride around the park.
I’ve posted a couple pages of pictures from the weekend which you can find here.
And, since I haven’t had time to sit down and sift through the post card collection I figured I would add this one of the St. Charles street car which we picked up last year to send but never got around to it. I think my collection of “purchased with the intent to send” postcards is as large as the ones that I’ve received. This one even has the stamp on the back so this one got reasonably far in the process.
What’s happened in the past couple of years is that we let Alex and Andrew pick out a couple cards with the intent that we’ll sit down and write them to grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and we usually get one out the door and consider it a success. The rest end up in the lonely pile of forgotten postcards.
Fall Campout
Nov 28th
A couple of weeks ago Alex and went with our Adventure Guides troop on our Fall Campout to Oklahoma. Alex always enjoys going on the campouts so he had fun even though it was very cold. We went hiking, horseback riding, did some archary, and for the first time they actually cooked their own dinner over the fire. Usually we just eat the food in the mess hall but this time the boys roasted hot dogs on sticks over the fire.
You can find the pictures here.