Two most vibrant factors in your day-to-day existence…

Here’s an interesting thought I read recently…

The two most important factors in your day-to-day existence are: 1) your finances and  2) your weight. 

This my seem superficial. But if you think about it, when you can’t pay your bills and you can’t fit into your clothes, it ruins your day. 

I always like to make fun of the superficiality found in the the public eye: in the media, in our lifestyles, and in advertisements. But when I think about the things that are portrayed on a daily basis and the methods used to sell things, we mainly see two types of people in ads: people who are beautiful and who have money: Beauty and Wealth.

The beauty thing, in America really boils down to what things, as portrayed by the media?  Help me out with some comments here.  And likewise, how does the media get at the financial component of well being with its imagery?

So here’s the logical conclusion of this argument:  1) eat healthfully every day and 2) spend less than you earn.

What are your thoughts on this?  Is this the key to happiness?  What’s missing here?  I could go argue either side of this with and it’d be fun, but it’s time for bed.  Tell me what you think by clicking on the comments section.

I read this on Gary Fong’s site the other day the other day, by the way.  Also, in case you were wondering, the juxtaposition of the text in this post and the content of the photos was purposeful.

Another Pep Rally Video

Introduction of the Ball team by Ray Chapin, and beginning Michael Byer’s Speech.

I did not get the footage of Doug Olerud reading the proclamation by the Borough Mayor.  I had a miscommunication with the video man Jeremy Strong, and the camera was paused.  Oops.  That was a pretty cool part of the pep rally.

Pep Rally: Cheerleaders!

The Cheerleaders took first place at state in the largest division, beating out Service, Lathrop, Chugiak, Bartlet, Sitka, and others.

Go Cheerleaders!!!

The days are getting longer: Time for a Trip to the beach!

If we pretend really hard, we can imagine we have a nice, warm, sunny beach with soft hot sand and a snow drift twenty feet high…

The weather has been impossibly beautiful  out here in Haines lately.  The wind has been out of the north, bringing in the cool air from the interior so the skies have been clear and the sun bright.  The days have been stunningly beautiful, but quite chilly.  It was below twenty on a few mornings lately.

We simply had to go to the beach and give the boys some run-around and throw rocks time.  Having boys leads to that type of activity.

John Caleb is really thriving, he is starting to vocalize a bunch when surrounded by family and in a familiar setting and he’s gaining weight fast.

Physically, he’s gaining skills everyday.  Just today he started pushing his torso up to nearly 90 degrees, which is really good for a four month old according to the baby books we have on the shelf.

Luke is really learning to communicate well too and is getting his point across when speaking.  Although we have not made much forward progress on the potty training since we had him at the day care center with Kim Larson: she’s a miracle worker when it comes to potty training.

In other news, I went to the doctor to get his opinion on why my knee has been hurting and he things I have a torn left medial meniscus and didn’t think any physical therapy would help. His verdict was I have three options: 1) take up to three Ibuprofen per day four times a day to relieve the swelling and reduce the pain 2) have him remove the swelling by removing the fluid and injecting it with some cortisone 3) get orthoscopic surgery to have the meniscus smoothed out again.  He didn’t think footwear would make a difference. 

I do believe that the meniscus is torn, but do not think the pain is great enough to start in on any treatment at this point, but I am an active guy and may well rue the day I decided not to get surgery before the gillnetting season.

What I find interesting is that only one knee is bothering me.  Why not both knees?  I don’t remember ever having any sort of catastrophic injury on that knee.

Pep Rally: Ray Chapin

Here’s part three, after this will come the cheerleader’s presentation.

Pep Rally Part 2: Cheryl’s Welcoming Speech

This is Cheryl’s inclusive speech in the pep rally; She was the first speaker at the rally.

More of the Pep Rally

Please keep checking back for more video footage (filmed by Jeremy Strong this time, using my canon camcorder on a monopod).  I will get more of this pep rally up in the near future.  I have a three-wheeled tripod dolly that would have been great for this, if I would’ve thought about it.  Oh, well.  Jeremy did a fine job, all things considered.

Holly is singing John Caleb to sleep.  It’s been a busy day.  We had a nice day: the big-brothers-big-sisters fund raiser was today, then there was a party at Steven Galinski’s house, then a nap, then a nice evening at the Green’s house where Mark got to play outside a bunch.

Here’s the first clip of the Pep Rally video. It’s all on my HD right now, but it needs to be split up like this in 3-6 minute sections.  YouTube has a 100MB file size limit which is pretty small for video.  It helps if it’s already compressed and if it’s 320×240 at 30fps.  YouTube then recompresses it which reduces the quality.

Mother Goose!

I usually teach school during the daytime, but it was spring break last week, so I got to go to Mother Goose on Friday!

I went to one of Holly’s story hours, the Mother Goose story time (for 1-5 year olds).  It was multi-sensory experience!  She really does a fantastic job with all the little ones. 

If they come up to give her a hug while she’s reading, she just gives them a hug and sets them back down.  By then, the child’s parental unit has noticed them and has them sit back down in the circle.  More parents came to the story time than this, but I didn’t get up to take pictures near the end, as I had to sit down with Luke, as you can tell from the photo.

She sings songs, reads stories, and shows them the pictures during the formal ‘story time,’ then there’s a hands on activity designed to let them work on their fine-motor skills.  She knows all of the kids and mothers and sings a song at the beginning that includes each kid’s name, a different verse for each one.

I think one of the main reason the mothers keep coming, once they start, is to have some adult interaction time with the other mothers.

Of course, I knew all the melodies because I here many of the songs around the house, so I sang harmony while taking pictures. 

Mark is really getting his letters down.  he does power reading with Holly every day in the afternoon using the magnetic letters on the fridge.  The do a little song about it and work on the various one syllable sounds like bat, hat, rat, cat, etc.

It’s tempting to worry about his lack of accuracy with the order and arrangement of his letters in his name, as seen in the photo, but I think that’s just a normal stage that kids go through.  He’s finally interested, somewhat, in penmanship, so I’m definitely proud that he’s getting ‘into’ it, as they say.  You can probably tell from the picture that Mark found some scissors and shortened his hair a bit…  These things happen.

My mother said I used to write my name all backwards and upside down and such when I was a kid, and I’ve read that often people that turn out to be good with numbers and spatial manipulation do that when they are younger.  He writes them down in the correct order, they just don’t appear left to right, which is actually pretty cute, I think.  I like having a digital camera, because then I don’t actually have to keep all the crafts, just take a picture of them 🙂

Luke played ‘big brother’ to John Caleb, keeping him interested in something and smiling while Mark and I worked on the craft.  John Caleb has really come along with the controll of his neck and eyes–he can really make genuine eye-contact and is REALLY thriving!

I really can’t imagine a much better story hour for the kids.  I did put down the camera  to pick up Luke after he ran out into the middle of things, and I did help Mark do the craft at the end of the story time.  We ended up getting the movie “Brother Bear” by Disney and watched it on my PC.  That was my fault.

Being a good big brother is hard work but a lot of fun.  The older two sure like to make John Caleb smile!

Tablet hasn’t arrived yet…

I contacted him and here’s what he said.

I wrote an email to the dude that sold me the Motion Computing LE1600 and he said he was very, very sorry.  He’d had a family emergency and just wasn’t thinking straight.  Here’s what he said, “I only use the post office for my junk-mail and first class mail, so I only go to the post office about once a week.  So I mailed the laptop two Monday’s ago, like I said, then I went to the post office this post office, and I had a parcel, but the line was so long I didn’t bother to check to see what it was, then I went in there today and it was the laptop.  I’d return address mixed up with the ‘send to’ address and so it came back to me.”

We went on to apologize profusely and repeatedly, that his mom was dying, etc.  So I really had no choice but to wish he and his mom well and ask him if he’d sent the tablet PC to me yet.  He said he’d already sent it 2nd day air to me so it should be in by Saturday or Sunday. 

At least he didn’t send it Parcel Post.

First day after Spring Break: Huge Pep Rally!

This is a four day week at school with early dismissal each day.  a very busy week.  The sun is shining down on us here in Haines, both literally and figuratively. 

(Stay tuned for some YouTube video documentary footage shot by Jeremy Strong.)

At 11 AM we had a HUGE pep rally.  We got out the pep band, called in anyone from town that wanted to come, and really did it up right.  We’re proud of our boys.

A ton of people were there from around town plus all the students in the k-12 school.  We heard from the former Superintendents via email: Woody Wilson and Charlie Jones.  Ray Chapin spoke, as did Cheryl Stickler, and Doug Olerud read a proclamation by the Mayor, who gave the boys team the keys to the city.

In essence, we were celebrating the success our basketball team has had by sticking  with their basic philosophy: no matter what the score is, never, never, never give up.  This has been their approach to all their games and it has served them well. 

It’s a great philosophy to have in life and will serve you well, providing you’ve done the ground work and prepared yourself for trial at hand and it’s one of the essential ingredients to success

But it’s not the only thing that needs to happen: talent, vision, practice, hard work, proper personnel, being in the right place at the right time, and attitude all play a huge role and all contribute to mental and physical readiness.

I really can’t say enough about the basketball team’s performance at state.  They did what it took to get the job done. 

First, we were glad that they even made it to state, because they were not expected, by many, to beat Wrangell, as they had had a terrible time beating Wrangell’s full court press when they were played their games there away from home. 

Then the question was, if they got to state, how would they beat Petersburg.  I’m thinking that all the hard work the boys put in on beating that press paid dividends when it came to beating the presses the other teams showed us when we got to state.  I think many of the teams we played there were used to scoring a lot of points on steals after scoring, during the transition and then they were a bit suprised by their inability to more than score a few isolated points and wear both themselves and us down a bit.

Normally, I think of a team making it to state when the bulk of the team is sophomores and juniors then making it back to win state as seniors.  This team had a fair amount of seniors but we’d never been to the tournament before at all and were not really expecting to become the champions.  Of course, I think a big part of it was the coaching: there is the expectation with them that they are going to win a more games than the other guys and Steve is very good at adjusting to the looks the other teams give us.

I still can’t really believe that Haines won the State Championship.  It sill is hard to believe. But it’s undeniable.  They played a very guts tough game against a very athletic Eilson team, coming from behind to beat them in overtime without Ame, they played Heritage’s slower tempo game, not forcing up shots near the end but being patient (although still not as patient as Heritage was).

Of course we can’t forget that the Haines Girls won state back in 1985 (If memory serves, this was a tough one for Barrow, as I recall: Helen Albert, Gretchen Charles, Kirstin Bagne, and others were a bit down at the time, as I recall).

Of course we celebrated the success of the Cheer team, the dance team, and the individual success of Kelsi Gloyer in her solo performance. 

They did an excellent, first rate job, and came away with first places in their events.

And we also recognized, from the crowd, the excellent showing our JR High teams had at Juneau this past weekend, and also gave a nod to the Merchants how came in second at Gold Medal.