Carrots, carrots everywhere.............

I've been really worn out recently due to lots of guests over Christmas and taking care of Kali while she's been sick. Certainly, I reached the pinnacle of parenting yesterday. I was carrying Kali 0.10 out to the car. Just as we started to enter the garage, a cascade of carrots came out of my daughter's mouth. It was a very solid stream and managed to get just about every piece of her clothing and every piece of my clothing. Just to make sure the job was done right, she managed to somehow send out another large stream of carrots.

I handled it like a champ. I sat her down for a moment and ran into the kitchen to grab a roll of paper towels. I ended up stripping down to my underwear and I stripped Kali down to her diaper (which was the only thing that didn't have carrots covering it). I tossed the pile of carrot-flavored clothes into the washer and got that all cleaned up.

I was hoping to get a good night's sleep last night with Kali starting to feel better. Kali did a great job of sleeping through the night. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that the sickness that Kali had was contageous. I was up at least every hour all night long, on my knees worshiping the porcelein god (otherwise known as the toilet). It has to be one of the most miserable feelings a person could endure. The morning after is nearly as bad, as you try to remain awake and avoid getting sick again.

This day is going to be an awfully long day. Hopefully, my stomach can settle down a bit and avoid a repeat performace like last night. I could really use a good rest. Perhaps a nap with Kali is in order when I get home.

Trashy snow..........

I'm amazed at how much trash is generated by a Christmas gathering. We had around 10-12 people at our house for Christmas. Out of that group, we managed to create 12 large bags of trash and 3 full recycle bins. Most of the recycled stuff was cardboard boxes.

I got some clothes that were much needed. I also got a new vacuum (hair from Mrs. Lime and the dog always seems to bust my vacuums, so I always need a new one). Toss in a TV and it was definitely a good Christmas.

I managed to drive my Mustang to work today on snow-packed roads. Slow and steady works just fine. Left it in 3rd gear and drove 30 MPH the whole way to work. I did have some issues getting up the last hill to get to the building where I work. The only two roads to get to the building are both uphill. Both were snow-packed this morning, which is brutal for rear-wheel drive vehicles. It took me 10 minutes to get up a 1/4 mile hill. I just kept the car moving and eventually I wiggled my way to the top of the hill.

Great X-mas present.........

Our family received a wonderfuly Christmas present. Kali 0.10's grandma received a kidney in a transplant only a couple of days before Christmas. Great timing as everyone was in town and was able to be here when it happened. Hopefully this is a reminder to anyone who reads this post to always fill out the donor information on the back of your driver's license as it could save someone's life.

We think that the kidney came from a high school-age child. While it's a great time for us, we hope that the family of the donor finds some comfort in that they've helped a lot of people with their gift of life to others.

How to goof with a 10 month old..........

Here's a good trick for those of you that have a 10 month old baby.

1. Start by sitting down on the floor with a bunch of toys.
2. Let the baby play for a couple of minutes with those toys.
3. Introduce a rubber-coated 5 pound dumbbell to the baby.
4. Pick up the dumbbell and wave it around as a fun toy then set it back down.
5. Watch with amusement as the baby tries to pick up the dumbbell and then looks at you dumbfounded, wondering why they can't pick up the dumbbell like you just did.

Signs you've made the transition to being a parent............

1. You sing songs from 'Elmo in Grouchland' to all of your friends at the monthly poker game.

2. You walk up to the cashier to pay for something and pull a pacifier instead of cash out of your pocket, prompting the cashier to say "we don't accept pacifiers as payment at this store".

3. You generally don't care nearly as much if a child is fussy at a nearby table in a restaurant.

4. You admit to friends and family that the Gerber Turkey & Gravy jar food doesn't taste bad at all.

5. You can do a full cleanup of the toys in your living room in 1 minute or less.

6. You're able to anticipate the stupid stuff that your baby does before they even get to attempt it.

7. Your dog no longer even tries to run from the baby's attacks and instead just deals with it as best he can.

8. Your female co-workers force you to print multiple baby pictures to cover the walls of your office. Having a picture on the desktop of your computer is not good enough.

9. You have no problem wiping snot from your baby's nose with your bare hand and then wiping it off on your shirt or pants.

10. You assume that the socks your baby is wearing will only remain a pair for the initial wearing. After that, it's just a bunch of orphan single socks in the drawer.

Exciting weekend (for all the wrong reasons).......

Lots of excitement at the Lime house over the weekend. Kali 0.10 decided that she would get sick and spike a 103 degree fever. So we had a couple of visits to various hospital facilities to keep everything in order. Mrs. Lime mentioned a couple of times what a mess she was when it was her own daughter sick despite being a doctor. I suppose that's to be expected.

Kali 0.10 still has a snotty nose, but she's acting much more like herself now. Once the nasal problems run their course and clear up, she should be good as new with all new and improved immune defenses. This was our first major sickness for the baby. I'm hoping it will be awhile until we have a second one.

On a sidenote, we hosted the monthly poker tournament over the weekend. I ***shock*** actually won the thing. I was down quite a bit early on when I tried to bluff into a newer player who had a big stack (that never works and I should have known better). But I made a couple of good plays along with a couple of key folds (sometimes just as important) and managed to win the tournament. I seem to be playing well right now. Hopefully that continues.

Locks of Love..........

Mrs. Lime did something the other day that will no doubt make a sick child much happier in the coming days. She had her hair cut and donated the clipped hair to the 'Locks of Love' charity. For those that don't know, 'Locks of Love' takes donated hair and creates hairpieces for children to improve their self-esteem. The vast majority of kids who receive the hairpieces suffer from a incurable disease called "alopecia areata". It causes the children to lose all of their hair and can lower the self-esteem of an otherwise healthy child.

People who donate their hair must cut at least 10 inches of hair, so you have to grow out your hair quite a bit. Mrs. Lime had just enough hair to donate without cutting her own hair too close for comfort. Her hair will grow back out eventually, so it's only a temporary loss. For the child who receives the hairpiece (often donated to families who can't afford them), it can be a life-changing event.

I'm sure Mrs. Lime wouldn't want to get any special attention for her donation. I'm hoping that this post will spur others who have longer hair to make a donation that can really help a kid who wants a full head of hair, something that the rest of us take for granted. Below are some examples of the impact a hair donation can make...........

Before:



After:



Before:



After:



Below is the website with all the details for those that are interested in finding out more about the charity.

Locks of Love Website

Random musings............

1. If you're a man and you wear white briefs underwear, do not tuck your shirt into your underwear. If you do that and you bend over at the salad bar, there'a an awfully good chance that your underwear will pop right out of the back of your pants.

2. If you own a cafeteria in the state of Missouri, remember where your business is based. Do not make the decision to hang up KU and K-State pennants and not hang up Missouri pennants. It's a good way to make the natives pretty restless.

3. When installing child locks on your cabinets, do not drill all the way through the cabinet door when it's not needed. It only creates more work to do than what was required.

4. If something smells 'poopy', assume the worst and take your baby directly to the changing table before a natural disaster occurs.

5. A 4-wheel drive SUV in the snow handles very well. A 4-wheel drive SUV on ice is a very heavy sled.

6. If you're a lady of at least 40 years of age, you should know better than to make out with a man in a car in the casino parking lot. Better yet, you should be sober enough to realize that your shirt is off and the guy getting into a vehicle next to your vehicle likely can see everything that you and your fling are doing.

Version upgrade: Kali 0.10 crawls like a ninja.........

Ah yes. Kali 0.10 is now officially 10 months old. Her crawling skills have improved over the past week. She has little to no interest in being held or sitting in laps. She has one goal: Go somewhere that she's not supposed to be going.

We have an area to walk through on either side of the couch separating our kitchen from our living room. In past weeks, when Kali headed for the kitchen through one of those spaces, I had plenty of time to walk over and block her off before she could break through the kitchen defenses. Now, she's too damn fast.

Worse yet, her intelligence has increased by leaps and bounds. When I blocked her path before, she would unsuccessfully try to crawl over my leg or body and become frustrated when she couldn't do so. Now, she simply turns and sprints for the other end of the couch to use the other entry. I'm all for having an intelligent baby, but it requires much more work than a dumb baby. I guess I'll have to count my blessings in that regard.

One other word of warning for anyone who happens to see Kali.......do not put your fingers near her mouth. Those new teeth will leave a mark and she hasn't figured out that they do damage yet. On a positive note, she's now eating dry cereal on her own. She's also eating oranges, but she doesn't fully eat them. She just chews the juice out of them and then leaves the leftover mangled pieces for Mrs. Lime and I to pick up. Playing the role of Kali's trash collector is a thankless job.

Kali 0.9 returns from another adventure.........

Mrs. Lime and Kali 0.9 are back from their latest trip. This time, they went to New York City to do some shopping and take in the sights.

Kali 0.9 behaved well for both of the flights. The only exception was a tumble on the plane, where she cried for a few minutes. Outside of that, she did very well. She was extremely excited to see Nova 7.9 when we got into the car. She stared at him all the way home from the airport and climbed onto him a few times when we got home. Nova seemed to put up with it as usual. He's used to her antics at this point.

Distractions and Sports Betting..........

I headed over to the local casino poker room this past weekend. As is often the case, the table had a wide mix of players at the table. On this particular night, it seemed that the more odd and seedy characters decided to show up.

On the opposite end from where I was sitting, there was a guy who sat down with about $500. He immediately started a discussion at the table with a couple other guys about sports betting. He was SERIOUSLY into sports betting, which obviously is illegal in our area. I'm guessing he had a bookie. They talked about parlays, spreads, odds........on and on it went. I'm somewhat of a novice better (i.e. I'll bet on a game or two when in Vegas), but these guys were planning on making money off this stuff. Note to these guys.........there's a reason why the bookies end up with quite a bit of money.

The $500 guy apparently was a gambler in more ways than one. He sat down with $500 and burned through $300-350 of it in just over an hour. He was playing all kinds of hands and more than happy to bluff with every one of them. He was having fun initially until the stacks started getting shorter. He started talking a whole lot less and kept looking down at his chips. By the time I left the table, he was down $300.

Another player was an easy read. He was likely in his 50s and it appeared that he hadn't played live poker much. Every time he had a winning hand, his hands would shake as he placed the chips out to bet. It was easy to see and it easily saved me $50 on a couple of hands that I would have lost more had it not been for his shaking hands.

There was a young woman who sat down at the table that provided most of the entertainment for the evening. First, she was wearing a shirt that exposed her navel and provided plenty of cleavage. We quickly figured out that she wore that shirt with the full intention of distracting the players at the table. It works to some extent, as several of the players started flirting with her. I even saw one player accidentally knock over his chip stack as he was chatting with her.

It also became pretty obvious that she was a pretty weak poker player. She was playing hands that were often behind. Unfortunately for the rest of the table, she kept getting lucky and taking people's money. I was personally up about $120 at one point in the night. I ended up facing off in a hand against her. With one card to come, I had a strong hand and I knew I was up against her. Unfortunately, she hit one of only two cards that she could win with on the river and took a big pot from me. I was pretty frustrated, but I'm not sure that I played the hand wrong. Unfortunately, I just got unlucky.

She also had a lot to say during the game. She constantly talked about 'sleeping with her cats'. She must have had quite a few cats, as she had all kinds of stories about them. I really could have done without her stories about changing the litter box. Note to single women.......guys aren't turned on by the thought of dirty kitty litter. She did, however, score big points with her conversation about Vegas.......

Girl: I just got back from Vegas.

Guy: Oh yeah? What did you do out there?

Girl: I went out there for a weekend to hang out with some of my girlfriends.

Guy: Do anything exciting?

Girl: Yeah, we went to a strip bar.

Guy: Guy or girl strippers?

Girl: Female strippers.

Guy: Really?

Girl: Yeah. I can tell you for certain that the female strippers are much better in Vegas than they are in KC.

Guy: (displays look of wonderment) Oh, I see!


So, this girl established that:

1. She likes to play poker/gamble.
2. She's been to see female strippers in Vegas.
3. She's been to see female strippers in Kansas City.

When you talk about women in a casino/poker room, that's about as good as it gets on a male degenerate gambler's attractiveness scale. She might as well be crowned with the title of 'Miss Casino 2007'. Better yet, she ended up getting in a verbal fight with the guy next to her. He evidently made a sexist comment that rubbed her the wrong way. She tore into this guy verbally like one of her cats would tear into a scratching post. It was a pretty immature spat, but it made for good entertainment from the other end of the table.

For the night, I played 8 hours and won a grand total of $13. Certainly not much of a profit, but it's never a bad deal if you can have that much entertainment and get paid to do it.

Let the blood flow.............

As I usually do when Mrs. Lime is out of the house, I decided to watch some movies that she's not interested in watching. That ususally involves two genres: off-the-wall comedies and horror slash-fests. Mrs. Lime just doesn't get some of the humor at times, so I know to not bother watching certain movies with her. Horror and thriller movies give Mrs. Lime nightmares, so I generally avoid those as well.

Last night, I watched Hostel II. Now I'm a big fan of the first Hostel movie, so I was excited that they now have a second one. Basic premise of the movie is that people in a Scandinavian town have a hidden secret. They lure outsiders into the city with thoughts of wild parties and lots of attractive men/women. As a result, innocent young kids come to town in droves. What they don't know is that the hotel that they stay in is a front to a black market where people come to town solely to prey on these young kids and eventually torture and kill them for nothing more than sport and a thrill.

As a kid, I loved movie series like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, etc. Good fun gore-fests (preface: I was smart enough to know that the images were not real). I was always amazed at the makeup effects that were produced.

In Hostel and Hostel II, the effects are ratcheted up 10-fold. Copious amounts of blood and knives. Even more over the top is the spraying blood, which doesn't even come close to reality most times. The opinion of most horror directors is that the more blood there is, the better the flick.

In the end, Hostel II had a few twists, but wasn't quite as good as the original. But a horror movies should be judged on the gore, not the plot. The 1,000 liters of blood sprayed during this movie (probably not overexaggerating) make this movie a great slasher B movie.

Moving at the speed of light..........

Mrs. Lime and Kali 0.9 headed to New York City for the weekend to hang out with Kali's aunt. There going to hang out there for a couple of days and buy cheap rip-off goods in the back alleys of Chinatown.

Meanwhile, I get a couple of days to get a full night's sleep and get a few things done. Early list is.......

-Decorate X-mas tree (lights are already on tree)
-Install baby locks on cabinets
-Go to Mizzou/Purdue basketball game
-Find time to take in a session of poker at the casino
-Sleep

The baby locks are a definite need at this point. Kali has suddenly become fully mobile. She crawls at a sustained speed of roughly 25 MPH (I've used a radar gun and can accurately confirm that speed). As a result, this is now my new routine when Kali plays on the floor........

1. Set Kali down on floor next to toys.
2. Look up to watch 15 seconds of the show currently on TV.
3. Look back and find Kali roughly 50 feet from where you set her just 15 seconds earlier.
4. Run over to grab her and bring her back to the starting point before she does something dumb.
5. Go back to step #1 and repeat.

Given that she's also learned that handles on drawers and cabinet doors are very useful for getting into things, the baby locks are now a must to save Mrs. Lime from pulling her hair out daily. With Mizzou football done until New Year's Day and the Chiefs being so bad, I should have plenty of time this weekend to get those installed.

The results are in...........

We had 4 candidates who got interviews for the open position in my work group. Interestingly enough, I was the one that helped the project manager interview all four candidates. My project manager is a nice lady, but tends to offer up softball questions in interviews. I think she's also fully aware of that. I'm just the opposite. I'm certainly cordial to the candidates, but I usually ask some questions based off the discussion that cause them to squirm quite a bit. As a result, we make a solid "good cop, bad cop" team in the interviews.

The first candidate was just not someone that I liked all that much. She spoke a lot about how great she was technically, but a review of her resume indicated otherwise. She also appeared to be overly friendly. Normally, that's not a bad thing, but some other things gave me pause. She seemed to be a 'right-fighter'. What that means is that she's often rather be right in a discussion/conflict rather than come to the best or correct conclusion of a situation. When asked about her mistakes that she had made in the past, she turned the question around and pointed the finger at another co-worker as a reason for the problem. She also showed some passive-aggressive tendancies in some of her comments that were a bit frightening. I left that interview hoping for better candidates in future interviews.

The second lady was an improvement over the first candidate. She was very good technically. She had the right answers for those questions. She wasn't quite as good from a social standpoint. We got a lot of one-word answers, which is always a concern when interviewing a candidate. Part of the problem was a bit of a language barrier, as she is a native of India. But she certainly was cordial. Only negative was, when asked about any mistakes in past jobs, she replied that she had not made any mistakes in past jobs. It's a good way to find out if a candidate is telling us what she thinks we want to hear or if she's speaking openly.

The third candidate was very nice as well. Her only issues was a bit less experience than the other candidates. It quickly became apparent that she wasn't as strong as the second candidate technically. She also had similar issues with the question about mistakes she might have made in the past and how she resolved the situation. She just said she had never made mistakes.

The final candidate was very nervous when he first came into the interview. As the interview progressed, he really did well. His technical skills were very good and the conversation was great. He also did something that none of the other candidates did......he actually admitted multiple mistakes in previous jobs. He also did a great job explaining those situations and what he learned from them. That's the kind of candor that you love to see when you interview a candidate.

We ended up hiring the final candidate. His technical skills were great and he was very up-front in his discussions with us on previous jobs. There's no substitute for a good interview and this guy did extremely well in his interview.

What is this sleep you speak of?

Mrs. Lime had to work late last night, so I was the parent-in-charge last night if anything went awry. Normally, not a big deal, but Kali 0.9 has teeth popping through her gums in roughly half of her mouth. It's not a pretty thing. I made the obvious mistake of failing to give her some Tylenol before putting her to sleep. I ended up waking up several times to put her back to sleep over the course of the night.

I'm guessing that, between Mrs. Lime's late night of work and Kali's lack of sleep overnight, there's going to be a lot of napping today at the house. Meanwhile, I sit at my desk like a zombie, trying to figure out why I can't type worth a damn.

Kali 0.9 picture blowout!!!!!!!!!!!!

Another blowout of the cutest 9 month old on the planet.......

Smile!



Waiving to everyone...........



Time to eat........



Reading her first Halloween card.........



Then eating her first Halloween card........



I see you!!!!!!!!!



More pictures? Geez, daddy.........



Nova 7.7 smiles for a picture with Kali 0.9.........



Nova going solo........



Joking around with Grandpa...............



Giving Nova a hug..........