Every year, Abby's school does a basket raffle to raise money for the school association every year. They mention that it's a popular event at the orientation meeting, but you don't really get a sense of why until you actually see the basket contents.

They sent home a green packet and an envelope with Abby one day. In the envelope were ten raffle tickets, which we had the option to buy at $1 per ticket. The greet packet of paper described the contents of the baskets. There are 21 baskets in all, and a ticket must be purchased for a specific basket (you write the number on the ticket when you return it with payment).

To give you a general idea of what's so amazing about this thing, I'll reproduce the list of contents for basket #21, "Ocean Getaway":

• Polaroid 5.0 megapixel Digital Camera i533
• Clompus, Reto, & Halscheld Vision Assoc. Eye exam and Glasses ($375 value)
• $50 gift certificate courtesy of Carey Burke, Silpada Designs Jewelry
• 5 Admission tickets to Brandywine River Museum ($30 value)
• $25 TGI Friday's gift card
• Brown, microfiber duffel bag with removable shoulder strap (24"L×12"H×9"D)
• Adult-size umbrella courtesy of ABC News WPVI TV-6
• $10 gift card courtesy of Super Wok
• $5 gift card courtesy of Dunkin' Donuts/Baskin Robbins, Rte 113
• Sudoku puzzle book AND Crossword puzzle book AND Puzzle fun book
• Two red leather luggage tags
• Four canvas zippered travel bags
• Travel combination lock
• Large and mini photo albums (holds 320 + 40 photographs)
• Old Virginia soy candle - "Soft Cotton"
• 2 canisters full of Fuji apple chips
• Ladder picture frame (holds three 3×3 photos)
• Picture frame (2×3)
• Two picture frames (4×6)
• Sunscreen/toiletries
• Avon manicure-pedicure kit
• Avon Skin-So-Soft bug guard spray
• Rand McNally 2007 Road Atlas
• Two black passport holders
• Telephone/Address book and travel journal
• Vera Bradley cosmetic bag
• Mini first aid kit
• Deck of cards

Yes, that's one basket.

The other baskets are similarly filled. There are a couple of baskets with a Nintendo DS in them, there's one with a DVD player, and one with a 30GB video iPod.

When Berta first gave me the list of basket contents and said, "I picked five, pick ones you like," the first thing I saw in the list was the Green Machine. Yes, there is a giant bigwheel in the first basket. This is not surprising though, since one of the other baskets is a whole bicycle kit, including helmet, lights, lock, water bottle, and - oh, yeah - a Trek 220 mountain bike with 24" wheels.

It's no wonder this is such a popular fundraiser. Some of these baskets are fantastic. There are a couple of kitchen-oriented baskets that include not just cookware (pans, utensils, appliances, you name it) but trips to these new meal-planning centers that Berta has been interested in. Two of the baskets include copies of Microsoft Vista and Office 2007, along with some tickets to a dinner theater.

These baskets are crazy!

After sifting through the list, it seemed important to know that additional raffle tickets were available for purchase in the school office.

Here's a silly card trick I learned while cruising about the internet. I don't expect it's difficult to figure out how I did it, and I could probably perform it a bit better than I did (the camera shot was a bit restrictive), but here it is.

I have a few other tricks cooking that I'd like to share, too. Hopefully I'll find a better way to produce the video. Maybe have Berta record it with the DV camera or something instead of the QuickCam.

Enjoy!

This week has already gone atypical. Yesterday, Abby was off school for President's Day. Her being home while I'm "at work" left me with one of those feelings of a void day. It felt like Tuesday when it was happening, and I stressed out over how much I had to get done to complete the week. And then today, it's like yesterday never happened since it's Tuesday again, with the exception that a lot of the stuff I had needed to accomplish today is mysteriously already done.

This week is Abby's Top Dog week at kindergarten. Every week, her class has a "Top Dog" who they profile. They get to bring in a show-and-tell item and talk about photos on their Top Dog poster.

Berta and Abby have een assembling her Top Dog poster for a couple of weeks. It's supposed to be special, covered with things that illustrate Abby's personality and hobbies. Berta got a bunch of scrapbooking stickers to apply to the poster, and glued some other things to it too. She's got little cutout dominoes and ballet attire, the program from her camp play last summer, and photos of Abby and Riley, and rollercoasters.

Abby also took her camera with her to school today for teh show-and-tell part of the program. For Christmas I got Abby one of those disposable digital cameras from CVS. She eagerly took pictures with it, and they came out pretty good. So a few weeks ago, I saw a digital camera on sale at Walmart for $50 and dropped it in our cart. It's got an LCD screen, flash, and uses SD cards. It's actually a pretty capable little camera at 4 megapixels. But she's been taking pictures with that thing like crazy and dumping them to her computer when she runs out of space. She's been going through batteries like crazy.

Riley is causing plenty of lost sleep - at least for Berta. The boy completely refuses to go to bed. Berta has to lay with him to keep him from getting up and running around. With Abby in a pretty solid routine for falling asleep at bed time, having Riley up and bothering her disturbs this good thing.

Worse yet, he's been a bit sick lately, and is generally irritable. His cold has caused him to take naps at weird times of day when he's just too worn out to go on, and then he really doesn't want to sleep when it's time.

As a result, Berta has been in a weird sleep pattern. I would like to get to a place we can put the kids to bed at a reasonable time, without taking overlong, and have a couple hours in the evening to ourselves. As it's been, Berta and I hardly spend any time alone.

Tonight, Nana is going out for Fat Tuesday. The Grille where I have lunch most Tuesdays and Thursdays is now offering fish on the menu as a standard item, so you know Lent is imminent. So let's all go out and indulge on food tonight!

I never did write about the weekend. I'm getting bad at reviewing our monthly Philadelphia meetups for WordPress and Blogging. There are a lot of conflicting feelings there. On one hand, I enjoy meeting up with other people and talking about blogging. On the other hand, I've gotten to the point where I don't have the patience of an effective organizer, especially as my interest in the specific subject matter (WordPress) wanes. I try very hard to at least be pro-WordPress during the hour that the meetup is scheduled. After that, all deals are off.

Several things are becoming more clear as I talk to people who's business is "blogging". First, people are starting to catch on to the WordPress-for-profit idea that I've been complaining a lot about. I don't begrudge Automattic for making a little coin off of their work. But I've always felt (check the IRC meetup logs) that it's kind of underhanded to include a plugin with an open-source applicaton that is tied to a specific commercial service.

Seriously, this sounds so much like Microsot bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. If Microsoft bundles a free browser with their OS, then what chance do other browser vendors have to thrive monetarily by offering a competing product? In parallel, if WordPress includes a plugin to a commercial spam prevention system, what chance do others have to create a competing product?

I'm sure there's someone who would explain it better, and I'm sure there's a pat response to spin all of the above. These days, I don't have the energy to fight the machine. It's not that I don't care, but that I see it as very unlikely that Kvetching is going to change that process, if you see what I'm saying.

In any case, while it's nice to meet with people who are involved in WordPress custom development that see the same thing going on, it's still kind of disturbing that I'm managing the meetup at all when I have these thoughts. Others have pointed out that doing Habari is a conflict of interest with participating with WordPress, but I don't think that's true. I think the conflict of interest is with WordPress' business practices in general.

I installed Delphi again on my desktop. I've got some projects that I'd really like to get out of my head. I'd like to rewrite the Flickr Uploadr so that it's a good program and not the piece of crap they've handed us. It might also be neat to write an APP client that doesn't suck. And a few other ideas. I miss Delphi a bit.

Over the summer, my friend Bob moved to Idaho. Or someplace.

A few years ago, we would spend every Saturday evening in Bob's basement, around a table playing D&D. We'd play an assortment of games on the weekend, actually. Sometimes Bob would run the game, sometimes one of us.

Our games were pretty relaxed. One of the great things about Bob in particular is that he seemed to be into the game for the same reasons I was. Sure, we both enjoyed the game itself, but we were just looking for an escape from the day-to-day -- something extraordinary to think about that a simple TV show or movie just wasn't going to do, and yet involving involving other people. At least, that was my impression.

The games led to some memorable scenarios. Frequent "smoke breaks" in Bob's back yard led to many interesting non-game discussions. I have fond memories of sitting on the swingset there in the summer and talking about gaming, and barbecues, and movies.

Bob offered many interesting "had to be there" moments of his own at the game table. "Is that food?" is a common refrain when food appears at our games, referring to the occasion when I brought some mini pastries to the table to share, and Bob proceeded to scarf them all down. Also memorable is the time that Bob somehow forgot the word "mouth" while trying to describe a particular scenario, and used the phrase "speaking tube". We still use that to this day.

Bob's kids were roughly my kids' ages, though Quinn is a bit older than Abby. They played together now and then.

Sometime a couple of years ago, Bob just stopped coming to the game, after we relocated it across town. We kept urging him to come, but I guess he had his own issues to deal with.

This past summer, Bob called me out of the blue, asking me if I'd like to take (and move) the D&D stuff he had out of his basement. I guess a couple of our other group members has said they'd do it, but never came back for it. So I came over and grabbed up all of Bob's gaming materials.

He helped load up his livingroom TV into my car too, since it would take up too much room on his trip to Idaho. Or wherever.

And then he was gone.

We were out to lunch over the weekend and saw this photo of Bob and Quinn on the kid's record board. They take your picture when you eat their largest size burger, and apparently Quinn had eaten the largest kid-sized burger. There they were on the wall. Still here, but not quite.

I spent some time over the weekend drowning myself in faerie - again.

I've been having very strange dreams as a result of reading more of Neal Gaiman's infuriating collection of short stories, Fragile Things. What's so maddening? They all end improperly. They're all perplexingly curiosity-inducing, and then yank the rug out from under you just as you round the corner to the end.

I've come to wonder if I ever understood any of his writing, or perhaps if I'm losing any ability I once had to understand it. Is it a result of growing older? I would think after the strange dreams I've had this weekend that this is not the case.

Saturday afternoon, we also saw Pan's Labyrinth. Not much of a labyrinth, really. A nicely told fairytale.

Later in the evening we were asked what is it about. This part is hard.

A fairy princess gets curious about the world above, and upon leaving her world and entering ours, forgets all about the place of fairy. They know that her soul will eventually return, and so they set watchers to wait for her.

Towards the end of World War II, a girl is taken with her mother to stay with a cruel army captain as they wait for her to birth his son. She wanders into the woods and finds the Labyrinth, where she learns from a faun (a creepy guy that doesn't look much like Mr. Tumnus from other fantasy stories) that she must perform three tasks before the full moon to prove that she has not become mortal. If she does so, she can return to the land of fairies.

The movie is very, very graphic. It is scary in parts, but interesting throughout. It is "sad" in the end. I suspect that all good fairy stories end "sadly".

And it's all subtitled, if that means anything to you. You really won't notice.

But the zombies...

There had been a recurring zombie theme this weekend. I could give you specific examples, but maybe it would sound crazy. First with one of those blasted short stories, then with people and the radio and just general wandering thoughts.

It pleases me to think that I haven't been so un-zombie-like for so long. Maybe I've finally kicked that feeling. Then again, as the short story says, you might not even notice when you cross the line, but then you've crossed it.