Nontrivial Exercises

Mentos + Diet Coke Redux

My sister is taking on the strange-mint-diet-softdrink establishment, enlisting the help of her coworkers. Here’s the first edition.

Shooting at the Dallas Galleria

My Little Dirk Hosted on Zooomr

I love to take my kids to the Galleria mall here in Dallas on Saturday mornings. If we get there before the stores open, we go down and watch the ice skating lessons. We then go up to the new little playground and play for a while. We usually have a “discussion” about getting some kind of edible or drinkable item, but always have fun.

If only the Galleria had an Apple store, we’d be all set. For that we have to go to either the Northpark or Willow Bend malls - they love to site on the iMacs and play I Spy.

For more photos from our time this past Saturday, see my Zooomr smart set.

2 Parents, 3 Kids, 4 Pets

We are moving ever-closer to being fully integrated in American Suburbia, having now acquired our first dog. We actually were putting this off as long as we could – not because we do not like dogs, but rather because we do, but we had the following concerns:

• We do not want our house to smell like a dog
• We do not want dog hair all around our house
• We like big dogs (like labs), and have what is a relatively big back yard (for American Suburbia), but it is still not big enough for a decent sized dog to truly run around in and get enough exercise
• We do not want a little yippie, high-strung dog

For these reasons, we didn’t really want an inside dog (smell and hair) and we didn’t have enough real room for a decent sized dog. However, we also have 2 boys, one of whom is 4, and it’s therefore very hard not to have a dog.

We kept the Yorkie of a friend of ours at our house for a few days and kind of fell in love with her. She was small, but not high-strung. She didn’t smell bad, and Yorkies don’t shed – their hair continually grows. She was cute and cuddly even as a three-year-old, and we really liked her.

So, after looking around a while, on Saturday we found Diego, a four-month-old Yorkie puppy pictured above that we are now proud to call our own. This brings our family Suburbia metrics to the following:

• 3 kids
• 4 pets – 1 tortoise, 2 fish, 1 dog
• 1 minivan
• 1 child playing soccer
• 4 collapsible canvas chairs
• 3 scooters

My Son’s Christmas Party Video Slideshow

This is one of my first, humble (very humble) attempts to create a video slideshow. Over the holidays I used the simple and free Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft and assembled some pictures I took of my son’s Christmas party in his four year old preschool class on Dec 15, 2005.

The complete set of pictures is available as one of my Flickr sets as well. Enjoy!

Click on the download Windows Media icon to the left to download.

A Priceless Compliment from My Son

Children can communicate some of the most profound, poignant and provocative thoughts and ideas with just a few of their short words and phrases placed in just the right context.

Yesterday, a Friday afternoon, I came home early from work so I could be home when my oldest two children got home from school. My youngest, age 4, was already there since he’s not yet in kindergarten.

I just wanted to spend some quantity time with them, and they were fairly tired after school. They didn’t have any homework and we decided just to watch a tv show – Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends on Noggin, a very nice commercial-free tv channel aimed at pre-schoolers, available on digital cable and satellite.

We were about 15 minutes into the show and I was asking some questions to my kids to try to stimulate their minds a bit while watching (what do you think about this show, what is that animal’s name, etc.).

All of a sudden, Kevin, my six year old son, said “Something’s wrong – their daddy is never with them. He just stays home.”

Me: “Is that strange?”

Kevin: “Yeah”

Wow. I didn’t say anything else to Kevin, but just took a minute to reflect on this short but profound conversation. The fact that a dad would just stay home and not be integrated into his children’s activities didn’t make sense to his six year old experience-driven world-view. With that simple observation, in the context of me asking some simple factual questions about an animated story of a spider and her family, Kevin let me know the place I have in his life – basically that I’m significantly involved with his life.

As I thought more, I was reminded that there are so many choices that I have with regard to how I interact with my children. I don’t always make the best choice, but each choice that I make builds one more little piece into the structure of my children’s lives. I am so thankful that Kevin knows I am a significant part of his, and even more thankful and humbled that he told me so.

Hurricane Rita Info via RSS

For an interesting way to track the latest hurricane, the Houston Chronicle has set-up an RSS feed for Hurricane Rita information:

http://feeds.chron.com/houstonchronicle/rita

The current tracking data shows Rita is on its way to make a direct hit on southeast Texas:

Some of my wife’s family lives in Houston and is preparing to evacuate now. I’m hearing that the expected commute time right now for the drive from Houston to Dallas is 33 hours – this is about 250 miles and typically takes about 4 hours.

Even Giants Fall

My grandparents were to celebrate their sixty seventh (yes, 67th) wedding anniversary this August. There are countries that have existed for less than sixty seven years, much less marriages. This marriage ended, however, last Wednesday when my grandfather left my grandmother – and left the earth – to go to his true home.

My grandfather was a great man: He loved my grandmother, loved life, loved to laugh, loved to serve other people, loved his family, loved to tickle his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Wise in this life, he invested prudently and accumulated a vast amount of wealth. In fact, the exact value of his inheritance isn’t even known yet – and probably will not be for some time.

So wise were my grandparents in their investing and estate planning, that they have actually been able to pass along a vast amount of their wealth to their family already – without having to pay any taxes. In fact, they set-up an investment scheme that pays dividends, compounded generationally, whose principal is guaranteed and whose rate of return only grows with each passing year.

My grandparents invested in love, in faith, in service, in family. Yesterday as I watched his casket descend into the ground, I looked around. Standing around this hole in the ground were the initial returns of the investments they both had made: 1 beautiful wife of 66 years, 3 sons with their wives; representatives of 11 grandchildren, 9 of whom are married; representatives of 12 great-grandchildren. Each of these people represented many other lives that have been touched in some way by an element of love, service and goodness that we’ve been able to share – in large part because of the influence and example we’ve had from our family. None of us would have been there were it not for the investments made my my grandfather and grandmother in each of us.

Two summers ago we had a celebration of their sixty fifth wedding anniversary, and I had the opportunity to express my gratitude to them for all they had done for me. I told them that I and my cousins started life standing on the shoulders of giants, towering above most of our peers because we had a foundation of family stability, genuine love and concern for us from our parents and grandparents, and a spiritual legacy of faith in action on which to build.

Four days ago, this giant – my grandfather – fell. For us his family – his investment – sadness and grief come, but only for a time. The tinge of sadness turns quickly to admiration, gratitude, and joy as we look back on his amazing life, and forward to his current state of joy with his Saviour in his forever home, where streets are better than gold. His fall from the earth precedes his rise to everlasting life.

Thanks, Grandpa.

Robert Groves Hollingsworth

August 21, 1915 – May 4, 2005