BilikFamily.com

Forecast - Today's projection for this weekend:

The remains of Hurricane Ivan will be moving northward to the mid-Atlantic states by late Friday into the weekend. The cold front expected to bring showers on Friday will stall. The exact position of this front on the weekend will have a huge impact on our weather and the ultimate track of Ivan's leftover rain. If this front moves far enough south, we will see dry weather all weekend, but there is still an equal chance that the front stalls right over southern NH, which would result in a wet scenario.We'll keep you posted!

So, we could have a nice weekend or a rainy weekend. Complete opposites... all depending on the track Ivan takes. On a more serious note, say a prayer for New Orleans. Being a city below sea level, they could get really devastated by this.

Michael - Many families with small children have occasional occurrences of the "witching hour". It's a time marked with strong emotional mood swings, lots of noise from laughing to whining to crying. Parents with more than a few months under their belt just accept it and countdown till bedtime. Shortly after I got home tonight, there was a definite aura of the witching hour with the strongest emotions coming from Timothy. Sometime in the middle I heard Michael fall off the couch. I wasn't there but Claire witnessed it and she didn't think it was much to be concerned about. Michael was crying but no worse than if the threat of Timothy taking a Matchbox car existed. About a minute later I see him still in the fetal position face down on the floor bawling. A closer examination reveals that he's got a seriously bloody nose and he's letting it all soak into the carpet. Argh! Michael! Say something! Say "I'm bleeding!" Say anything! I rush him into the bathroom to clean him up while Michelle cleans it up from the carpet before it gets too permanent. Thank goodness for hydrogen peroxide. That, and we had already scheduled Stanley Steemer to come by on Saturday for the annual autumn deep cleaning.

Stray - Earlier that evening I got a call from Michelle. She said that they were all trapped in the house because a large, scruffy stray dog was roaming around our yard. I recommended she call the town and ask for animal control. She hesitated but later when the dog sat on our front porch and started chewing our furniture, she called and the police came and captured it. They briefly interviewed her and took the dog away. Whew!

Claire - Earlier this afternoon Michelle got a call from Claire's teacher. At first she panicked as you might if your child's teacher calls in the afternoon. The teacher said that the class had taken a lengthy math assessment test. Claire scored in the 98th percentile of her age/grade. With that, the school was recommending that they put her in a math program where there are some advanced topics taught by a different teacher. I congratulated Claire and joked about what great genes she inherited to have such a math ability at such an early age.

Misc - Tonight after the boys went down to bed, Michelle took the girls grocery shopping to get ready for Claire's upcoming birthday party. While they were out, I finished up the work on the aerator, exciting as that is. I'm thinking that if Ivan really has a 50/50 chance of dumping another weekend of rain, perhaps we should move up the priority of aerating and overseeding so that things are in place before the rain.

Nintendo - I've been following the news on the sequel to the GameBoy, named the GameBoy DS (dual screen). It looks like it'll be out for the post Thanksgiving shopping weekend and will likely be just under $200. Amazing! That's more than we paid for our GameCube console and this is just a handheld. Nevertheless I still plan on being an early user. The thing that's making gamers feel that the release is imminent is that WalMart.com has it listed as an item you can pre-order and have November 30th. I'd bet Nintendo is a bit upset at them taking orders before the product has had its formal rollout.

Reading - I'm currently reading a book with the most boring title: "Applied Economics". Unlike some dry college text book, this one is really interesting. It's written by one of my favorite writers, Thomas Sowell. He applies the laws of economics to current and historical situations and shows how it affects things to give outcomes people don't often expect. His big focus is denoted in the book's subtitle "Thinking Beyond Stage One" where you look at the series of events that occurred due to some law or practice put into place. He gives example after example of a program put in place (typically by a well meaning government) that exacerbated the problem in the long run despite the best of intentions.