May 21, 2003
Claire's "Informance"
Monday night I tried to get home a little early from work to see if I could cut the grass before nightfall. After changing clothes and pushing the tractor out of the garage, I realized again that the key was in the "on" position and thus the battery was dead. At first I figured the twins got into it again but later thought that I must be doing it by accident. There are actually two ways to shut the tractor: you can pull back the throttle all the way (like a mower) or kill the ignition (like a car). Out of habit from my walk behind mower years, I must be just throttling it off and forgetting to turn the key.
On the bright side the second replacement TiVo came Monday afternoon so I set it up that night. "Third time's a charm!" A new TiVo actually needs a few hours after you plug it in the first time for it to configure itself. So while it was busy doing its internal housekeeping, Michelle and I tried to watch Gladiator. We are so lame! I started to doze about half an hour into it and Michelle said she was feeling sleepy as well.
Tuesday evening I got home from work and went with Claire and Abigail to Claire's school to see Claire's "Informance". That's the word the teacher used to describe this little music recital. It stands for "informal performance". I seem to remember doing one of these last year with Claire at IJS. As with Claire's First Communion, she was again in the front row because she is so petite. Still she looked "a doorbell" and seemed to enjoy doing the performance.
When I got home I watched the season finale's of Everybody Loves Raymond and Smallville. The Raymond finale was funny because it had Robert finally getting married to Amy. You just know going into it that it can't go smoothly. The finale for Smallville tried to be more of a cliffhanger for next season but I didn't find it as compelling as last season's cliffhanger.
While I watched those shows I developed yet another "screen scraper" program. A screen scraper in modern times often refers to a script that can extract data from a web page and reformat it for use in another application. For instance, the weather on the right sidebar is extracted from Weather Underground by a screen scraper that periodically polls their website. The one I wrote last night generates an RSS formatted news feed from the HMS weblog. While I enjoy their collaborative Catholic weblog, it lacks an RSS feed that a news aggregator can use. Last month I did a similar thing with the Nashua Telegraph's online newspaper as well. Besides being useful to me, it's yet another opportunity to brush up on my Perl programming skills.
Other odds and ends: Today Claire took the bus straight from school to her friend's house to spend the afternoon there. The twins are really starting to mimic words so perhaps you'll hear a few things from them this summer. Also Michelle says she's feeling a ridge in Timothy's gumline and he's drooling a lot. Perhaps there's a first tooth on it's way. Abby is starting to understand telling time with analog clocks. At work I'm finally settled into my new office.
Final note: It looks like Cheaper by the Dozen is going to be remade for Christmas this year. The original version of "Cheaper" was one of my favorite "big family" movies along with "Yours, Mine, and Ours".