Solution: grab the scissor jack from the trunk of your car. This was a head-smacker for me, as in “why didn’t I think of that?” Some folks recommend using a 2×4 due to a “flimsy bottom” on the disposal. I didn’t have any trouble with that, but if the bottom of yours seems thin it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and would probably help with balance anyway (I just held the side of it). Anyway, this made the whole process so much easier I’d almost say it’s worth the twenty-five bucks to pick up a jack for the job if you don’t already have one.

For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the eight hours
supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
-Doug Larson,
Olympic Gold Medalist (1902-1981)

The I Do Foundation provides engaged couples with the opportunity to add a charitable component to their weddings through innovative giving options. The Foundation is dedicated to providing engaged couples with all of the tools necessary to raise donations for their selected charity.

Basically you set up your registry/ies through them at a selection of retail partners, and a small percentage of any gifts purchased go toward the charity of your choice. Retailers include Amazon, Target, and Home Depot, and the charities include the usual list of suspects — American Red Cross, Save The Children, Oxfam, and others, as well as a number of faith-based groups like World Vision, Compassion, and Church World Service (though you won’t find these on the main information list, you can search the charity database and turn up quite a few more). You can also create a direct charity registry, for guests to give a more straightforward “in honor of”-type gift.

The first is “Amateur – Lasse Gjertsen”, in which a talented artist performs a song for drum and piano. Only his talent isn’t in playing either drum or piano, but in video editing. Take a look…

What do you get when you combine a truckload (literally) of cornstarch, combine it with water in a cement mixer, and dump the results in a small pool? Quite a bit of non-Newtonian fluid, A.K.A an awful lot of fun:

Oh, alright. Truth be told it’s been a little over a year, but we’ve been a little busy. You can see one reason here: This picture was taken in May. Charis, the little cherub in the middle, made her entrance near the end of October, and has been a tremendous blessing ever since. Her two sisters adore her, though at times they need to be reminded how to play with her safely .

Then sometime in the spring (don’t remember when exactly, off the top of my head) I went over to Croatia to pick up this little guy and bring him back here for medical assistance.

And now?

Well, we’re now in the process of attempting to adopt not one but two babies from Ethiopia (“babies” meaning under 3). We’re near the end of our homestudy, and anticipate being able to travel sometime in the first half of next year. God has been and continues to be faithful through the process; right now the biggest thing we’re trusting him with is the financial side. It costs an awful lot of money to adopt internationally.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll post more on that, and many other things, as time goes on. For now I’ll content myself knowing that I’ve finally gotten my lazy bum back on here.

Web and programming technologies have enabled a huge degree of automated business interaction and processes. But eventually you figure out it doesn’t hurt to have an actual human keep an eye on things from time to time, or you’re going to end up with people trying to buy chopped fingers to defraud some fast food chain.

This time it was trying once again to put a cap on the firehose that is comment spam. I found James Seng’s plugin for using a captcha in the comment submission form, and after a bit of tinkering got it to work. Yes, it’s one more step for you to tell me what you think, and I apologize for that, but after several days of cleaning out hundrends of comments hawking all manner of things for which I can’t even begin to hazard a family-friendly description, I just got sick of it. There may be other solutions that won’t require the active challenge-response you see now, but…well, who knows when I’ll get around to playing with that.

For now, I’ll just have to keep an eye on my inbox and see if it worked or not.

After I get some sleep…

Let me explain. Two months ago Joel Spolsky, software engineer, author, and generally regarded Smart Guy, wrote a wonderfully informative and delightfully confusing post about product pricing that, among other things, finally explained to me why companies offer coupons and airlines charge wildly different prices for every person on the same flight. It’s an excellent article, and if you have even a passing curiousity about these things I highly recommend reading it. But to sum up, the basic idea is that you offer the same thing at different prices to (specific) different people so as to maximize your profit. Economists use terms like ‘Segmenting the Market’ and ‘Capturing the Consumer Surplus’. You do your market research and find out that most people will pay X for your widget, so that’s what you charge, but then you offer discounts to the sort of folks who wouldn’t pay X but were willing to pay X – 5 so as to at least get some profit from them, all while trying to hide from group X the fact that you’re giving someone else the same thing for less money. Because naturally, if you find out that your neighbor just bought the same widget from the same company you did and paid less for it, you’re going to feel ripped off.

Well, I feel ripped off.

This afternoon Andi was talking to a friend of hers who lives in the same area we moved from two years ago, which area I still drive through every day to and from work. Outside of rush hour, it’s about 20-30 minutes away from our house. Her friend casually mentioned the coupon on the front of this week’s Giant circular offering $5 off any order over $50. Curiously, said coupon was missing from the front of our circular. They started comparing other sale prices, and discovered a distinct discrepancy in the sale prices on the front page. We could get a pound of strawberries (in February?) at two for $5, she saw $1.99 each. Chicken on sale for $1.99/lb. for us, $1.79/lb. for her. Edy’s ice cream at half price at our store, better than half price at the other store. Andi’s friend has friends and family in other parts of northern Virginia, and it turns out our prices match those in areas like McClean and Vienna (areas closer in to the beltway and generally higher on the affluence-meter than others) even though we’re a good bit farther away. They’re not huge differences, but the whole point of coupons on our part is that twenty five cents here and fifty cents there adds up. And the difference must certainly add up to the store for them to go to the trouble of creating not only different pricing structures but different sale pricing structures for different communities.

And yet, even as I write this I feel myself slipping into suck-it-up-and-deal mode. Pricing-per-community is nothing new — gas stations have been doing it for years. And our area is one of the faster growing in the region, enough to justify a substantial and still under-construction shopping area with Target, Lowe’s, what’s shaping up to be a huge Pier 1, PetSmart, Starbucks, Panera, etc., a huge new firehouse right down the street, McMansions popping up like weeds, and a massive new development project in the works that promises to make the area all but unrecognizable in five years with more of the same and new roads to boot. So from a business perspective, it makes sense. But for a S.I.T.C.O.M. (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage) family that takes the time to clip coupons and look for sales, it feels like a poke in the eye. And the other Giant is right on my way home from work…