It turns out I wasn't responsible for my kindergarten teacher's pregnancy!

I had two kindergarten teachers. The first one went on maternity leave in the middle of the year, right after Christmas.

I don't know where the idea came from but I or several of the kids decided that it was our fault that she was going to have a baby. We had all given her candy as Christmas presents. You know, women who eat lots of candy get fat and women who are going to have a baby get fat. Logically, the only conclusion was that our candy caused her pregnancy.

My mid-year report to parents was prepared Jan. 6, 1961, by pregnant Mrs. Thomas. The introduction to the report explains that "a child's first year in school is probably as important a year of educational experience as he will ever have. The forming of good work habits or the lack of them will influence his entire life both in and out of school." That appears to be true.

I got the hoped for Generally or Not Yet check marks for most of the items in the report. The Sometimes items seem to have predicted the rest of my life rather accurately.

Under the Mental Growth's Oral Expression section I got Sometimes for:

• Does he express himself freely?
• Does he ask pertinent questions?
• Does he share his experiences vocally?

Nope, I still can't function vocally very well, especially with people I don't know. Small talk with strangers? Can't do it.

In Mentally Mature as indicated by the way he listens to stories, poems, songs, and group conversation I got Sometimes for Does he retell short stories. I can't remember stories very well. I can't remember the story of a movie unless I've seen it at least two times. Novels? Forget it. I can't remember two pages back in a book and can't keep the characters sorted out. (Oh, I'm very different from my sisters!)

Emotional and Social Growth: Sometimes ratings for:

• Is he self-confident?
• Does he have a healthful attitude toward group approval? (I don't know what that means.)
• Is he too submissive?
• Does he take the initiative in social situations?

Mrs. Thomas had me figured out from the beginning.

My year-end assessment by my second teacher, Mrs. O'Flaherty, told mostly the same story. I got a flat-out Not Yet for Has Leadership Qualities. That still hasn't shown up.

It looks like it's true that All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. Or, really, if I haven't learned it in kindergarten it's never really going to catch on.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Napkin rings. Two from L'Objet and one from Jay Strongwater.

Letting the days go by

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself — Well...how did I get here?

— "Once in a Lifetime" by David Byrne

Well, how did I get here?

When I started this little blog, I showed how we use some of our gadgets. I've been running out of gadgets to show off.

I've used it to tell what fun things happen to us. Lately it's been: Work, Eat, Sleep. Repeat.

I've shown pictures of goings on in the yard. Once is usually enough. If you want to see what this spring brought us (or what next spring will bring) you might as well look at what I showed you last spring.

I make some random observations of things that strike me as bizarre. I hope more bizarre things happen now and then. They're fun to share.

I've shown pictures of our turtles. This will continue forever. We'll never reach the end of them. I just scheduled the Tuesday posts into October. But that's about all I've been posting for a few weeks.

I've been letting the days go by with nothing from me.

The second largest collection of posts is my memories. This might be where I'll take this blog now.

I think that I'll dig into my souvenirs boxes and try to explain more about how I got here. I'm sure I will often be complaining about some of the less-than-happy events in my childhood.

I'm not sure what the point of that really is. Maybe it's to give parents who read this blog advice on what not to do. (But my only regular readers are friends and family who don't need parenting advice from me.) Or maybe it's to tell parents that they don't need to obsess over being perfect parents, that kids can turn out to be fine citizens even with some not-so-great parenting.

But there are some happy memories in these boxes. I'll restart this blog with one of them.

The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory had a few open houses where they let people into the lab to give us a glimpse of what goes on inside those secure walls.

They had one of them on the 15th anniversary of the Trinity Test. I was five. I got to match wits with a computer! I got a printout that shows how I did.

The computer could count 1,700 times faster than I could. I must have been counting very fast since its claim about how many additions it could do during my life had it doing about 42,000 additions every second (they said it did a million additions per day).

I guess this experience played a role in bringing me where I am today.

They had another open house five years later. We got to look inside a reactor from a door in its top. It had a beautiful glow coming from deep in the water. Nuclear power was scary but beautiful! I was looking forward to seeing that again in five years when they would have another open house but they didn't do it again.

Ah! Those were happy times for a future nerd.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Little turtles sitting in the drawer of my antique National Cash Register cash register. (More about the cash register in about three years.)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Three turtles perhaps from children's literature. The rightmost one is Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise from "The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher" by Beatrix Potter. I'm not sure of the other two.

Even Microsoft admits what everybody says about Vista

I installed Microsoft's Service Pack 2 to my weather station's god damned Vista system yesterday. (The software that manages the weather station's data runs only on Windows systems.) I figured that this update couldn't make things any worse.

After it was done I checked that it had actually done the update to their crappy operating system. It said it had and had a link to their site where I can give Microsoft even more money to get even more crappy software.

On that site they had a field where you can search the web using their "bing" search engine. I had never used it (and plan to keep using Google). But, since I was in a foul mood about Microsoft's crappy software, I did a search using their search engine:

The Windows Vista home page is the Number One result from bing's search "windows vista is a piece of shit."

Ain't it the truth?

No, Dolly, it's not a vibrator!

Why the loving look at her flashlight?