I’ve written here many times that one of the main reasons Celeste and I moved the family to North Carolina was to escape the traffic hell that is Northern Virginia. It really is a draining lifestyle.  Well, I just stumbled across some data that offers a little more proof that the situation in NoVa is pretty extreme.  From the City-Data website comes this list of 101 top cities that people commute from (largest daily daytime population change due to commuting) (population 50,000+) and I’ll paste in a couple of the results for you:

• #1, Burke, VA (Housing Pop. 57,737) -42.3%
• #3, Dale City, VA (Housing Pop. 55,971) -37.5%

Guess which two places we lived in or next to from 1993-2004?  So It wasn’t my imagination that I was fighting a virtual tidal wave of people every time I tried to make my way towards, DC and it’s suburban business centers.

FYI, suburban Maryland also has a few towns on the list, which does not bode well for the DC area in terms of livability. 

Steven Levitt, he of Freakonomics fame, taught his kids how to play poker (seven card stud) and was quited pleased when he came home to find that his daughter learned the game so well that she was able to stack the deck in her favor.  Hear him tell the story here.

This reminds me that I need to kick-start the poker education my kids started at the beach last year.  They were showing great promise.

We went over to the Figs’ house (lifelong friends) last night for Halloween.  The ladies took the kids around the neighborhood to beg for candy while the men stayed behind and watched sports between doorbell rings. After one visit Mr. Fig commented that it didn’t seem quite right to have a boy in an Austin Powers costume. Yeah baby!  I’d have to agree.  Over on his blog Ed Cone wonders how someone can dress their "cherub-cheeked blond boy" as "a cane-wielding floppy-hatted green-velour-clad" pimp.  Ed asks, "What does it say about attitudes toward race and sex for this
cherub-cheeked blond boy to be thusly dressed, beyond the fact that I
am getting old?"

Personally I think we’re lucky that no one thought to dress up the blond boy’s sister as a street walker or Austin Powers’ brother as Fat Bastard.  We may be getting old, but I don’t care if it’s 1947, 1977, 2007 or 2037, dressing a kid up as a swingin’ 60’s era Rumpelstiltskin, a pimp or a ‘ho just ain’t right.  Think maybe this is a little over reaction to a rogue parent with questionable taste dressing up her kid as Shaft’s arch-enemy?  Think again, because you can order your little Johnny his very own pimp outfit in a variety of designs right here among other places. 

Okay, I admit it, I am getting old.  But come on, pimps?  What’s next, meth-head masks?

This is a story that Chicken Little would love.  A piece of piping hot metal fell out of the sky, punctured the roof of a Delaware woman’s SUV and came to rest on the floor behind the front seats.  It happened to hit her SUV while she was shopping in a drugstore. The FAA and the military say that it didn’t come from a plane, and some of the people leaving comments on the story surmise that it’s space junk or something ejected from a machine in the vicinity.  I’m liking the space junk theory, what with me believing in Martians.

This is also one of those stories where you ask yourself if the person involved is lucky or unlucky.  If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person then you think she’s lucky because she wasn’t in the car when it hit, but if you tend to take a negative view on life then you’re probably thinking she’s the unluckiest woman around since she managed to be the only person on Earth that had an unidentified piece of piping hot metal pierce through the roof of her new SUV just a few days before her wedding.

Whether this gal’s lucky or unlucky if I’m someone in her wedding party I’m angling for the end of the line farthest from the altar.  No reason to push my own luck.

I get a kick out of listening to my teenagers talk.  Sure I’ve complained in the past about their mind-numbing ramblings, but they also remind me of how little perspective I had when I was their age.  Put another way they remind me about how I used to think anything that happened before 1975 was ancient history.  For instance last night we saw a commercial for a new mini-van (don’t remember which one) that had rear passenger seats that swivel and an expandable table on a post between them.  The kids thought that had to be the coolest, most innovative thing ever.  Obviously they haven’t seen re-runs of the 70’s era Hardy Boys show that starred Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy. If they had they would have seen a cooler-than-reality version of the kind of van that we who grew up in that era knew all too well.  It seems that every neighborhood had some kid who’s parents had one of those "customized" travel vans, often with the wacky portal on the side, that was the ride that everyone wanted to borrow for dates because, well, you figure it out.

I was thinking about the "everything old is new again" theme when I came across this article (via Sue Polinsky) about a doctor in NY who doesn’t have an office, only makes house calls, and schedules his appointments using his Google Calendar and text messaging.  This sounds radical, and in fact it is, but when you think about it one of the things that the people in the pre-baby boomer generation speak wistfully about is their old family doctor who used to make house calls.  I always assumed that they missed the house call because of the convenience, but really I think they miss the personal touch and attention that were mandated by house calls.  And guess what we all are looking for now?  A doctor who takes time to give us attention and doesn’t make us feel like we’re part of an assembly line.

Still in the "everything old is new again" mindset I read Dana Blankenhorn’s piece Who Is to Blame and segued into the related "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" mindset.  From Dana’s piece:

In many of the pieces I’ve written here on this subject, I have gone
into my own personal history. I have discussed the conservatism of my
teen-age years. I have discussed the lessons of my father. When you’re
thinking about current events, I bet you do the same. You reflect on
what has happened in your own life, what your parents taught you, and
the legends of your grandparents.

That’s really all history is. The word story is at the heart of it.
History changes with every generation, as we attempt to make sense of
the past in terms of the future.

That’s really why I enjoy listening to my kids.  They remind me of what I used to be, how I used to think, and how many times I’ve changed my mind over the years.  I view history very differently now than I used to, just as I view the world around me differently. Sometimes it’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not. 

When I was just a few years older than my kids are now I was working as an intern near Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.  Every day I would walk to the same deli to buy lunch and usually there was an elderly, blind homeless woman sitting outside the door begging for change.  I’d been admonished by my Mom not to give beggars money because they’d just blow it on booze or drugs, but this woman somehow tugged at my conscience more than any of the other homeless I’d run across.  I really didn’t know what to do, but one day it occurred to me that I could buy her a meal.  I bought her a chicken salad sandwich, some chips and a drink and handed it to her on my way out.  I never stopped to wonder if she even liked chicken salad, I just saw a woman who needed a meal and I bought it for her.  Today I’d think about whether or not she’s allergic to something in the food and if she got sick would I be liable?  I’d also think to myself that I donate some of my money to charity, give to my church and by extension I’m helping those in need.  Obviously my perspective has changed.

My kids, however, still see things as if they’re all new and ask questions accordingly.  Why are there homeless people?  Why don’t we just build apartment buildings to house them?  Why do parents get divorced instead of just working it out?  On the lighter side they’ll talk about some great song they’ve just heard and when I hear it I have to inform them that it’s a cover of a cover of a song that was first performed by some guy that died over 30 years ago.  It truly breaks their hearts to learn that most of their cool new beats are regurgitated from performers that are older than their parents.  Of course the same thing happened to me at their age, and it’s going to happen to my grandchildren in fewer years than I’d like to think about.

One of the co-founders of Wired magazine is a guy named Kevin Kelly.  He also has some interesting blogs that he’s running, including Cool Tools, CT2 and True Films.  On CT2 he’s posted a do-it-yourself calculator to figure out how many days you have until you die.  Fun, huh?

I followed his method and figured out that if all goes as the law of averages says they should I should kick the can on June 18, 2043.  To the left is what my own personal doomsday clock looks like.

Kelly sees this as a great way to motivate yourself to live your life to the fullest.  Personally I see that I have over 13,000 tomorrows to put something off til.  A procrastinator’s paradise.

When we first moved into our house we discovered that water was leaking through a door in my office on the second floor, running along a joist and then dropping through the ceiling in our family room.  We had a nice bubbling effect before the paint and drywall started falling onto our coffee table.  The picture to the left is from an apartment in Russia that has some kind of magical, water-holding material that caught all the water leaking from an apartment above and created what I’d call some significant bubbles in the ceiling.  If our ceiling had done that I’d have been tempted to repair the leak but keep the ceiling and paint a bra on it.