Since Berta started her new job this summer, I've been responsible for getting the kids to school. I wake both kids at the same time, if Abby doesn't get up on her own, and get them both ready in time for Abby's bus. As the seasons change and the weather gets confusingly colder, it's been difficult getting Riley ready for school in the mornings.

Riley is very picky about the clothes that he will wear. There is no pattern to his preferences as far as I can tell. He will seem to like the shirts with motocycles on them, and then the next day, hate all shirts with motorcycles. Also, I have to watch carefully to make sure that he doesn't re-wear the Spiderrman socks day-to-day, since he seems to love those. But the biggest challenge in the colder weather has been switching to long sleeves and pants.

Whether or not it's true that Berta put away all of his short-sleeved shirts for the fall/winter, that's what I told him, and he seemed to be ok with that. The pants have been a real issue, though. In an effort to appease him and keep my sanity (he does this crazy thing where rather than tell me his problems with his clothes, he'll just sit in his room and not get dressed, throwing off the whole morning schedule), we've made a little deal.

The deal is this: If I make him wear pants on a day that the temperature goes above 70 degrees, I will take him out for ice cream. So far, this deal is utterly failing to avoid ice cream.

The problem is the uncooperative weather. I'm not sure what the deal is with this weird weather where it's 50 degrees in the morning, but then 75 in the early afternoon. I guess that's fall.

I'd think he'd be more comfortable standing outside in the morning in long pants. I do remember tolerating the weather differently when I was a kid, so I'm trying to be flexible when the kids say, "But I'm not COLD!" Still, I would like some absolute measure of tolerability that we can all stand by to get the morning going. I should make a chart and put a thermometer in his room.

Meanwhile, Abby completely dresses herself. She's going to be one of those kids in high school that wears the somewhat questionable "artistic" clothing styles. That's my prediction. But at least she accounts for the weather. For everything but her shoes. If I see those blasted Crocs one more time... I should just accidentally drop them in the trash.

So yeah, ice cream. That's the deal. And we've had to go out for ice cream inconveniently on demand at least once already.

In case anyone wonders, I did eventually find a reasonably reliable source of historical temperatures, which is useful when you're trying to prove to your 4-year-old that the temperature did not, in fact, exceed 70 degrees. You would be surprised how hard this information is to come by. You can find the historical weather (at least for the current day passed, which is all I wanted) over at the Weather Underground.

Ah, I've finally made it out of the house. I've been cooped up there all week for one reason or another. Until yesterday, I hadn't even been outside of the house other than to get packages of of the covered porch - a crime, considering the weather. But today, today is a good day.

Clients seem appeased, and work - although steady and challenging - is not frantic and stress-inducing like it often has the capacity to be. Also, we've got new projects and new people coming in, which is exciting. I'm particularly pleased with a little side project I've been coding for use at work - a Drupal module that replaces and vastly improves on Campfire's chat capabilities.

I've been able today to run a couple of errands, too. I got a note into Abby's school to let her stay for her Girl Scout meeting this afternoon, and also payment for her class photo. Currently, I'm finishing lunch at Stadium Grille, which I've missed since I stopped taking Abby to Kindergarten every other day. I'm really jazzed about not having to eat another Hot Pocket. My burger was phenomenal. As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the same can be true for food that you like.

Tonight we're going to try to get the scooter running with a new spark plug. I really hope that's all it needs. Soon then I'll be puttering around Chester Springs more often, just to have an excuse to ride the scooter. After that, Dad is going to sit with the kids while Berta and I got out for dinner and maybe a movie. We did go out on Berta's birthday, but these dates without kids are infrequent enough to still be notable.

And the weather today... It's amazing. The trees are all starting to get that green haze on them, and the temperature is just on the hot side of Spring. It's nice.

I don't know what plans the rest of the weekend holds, but I hope there's room to appreciate it and fill it with activity like today.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has had this question, especially in this age of Tivos and DVRs: Where can I get a schedule of things that have happened?

It's interesting. I've completely given up on the printed TVGuide. Why pay money for a weekly throwaway schedule of TV shows that doesn't even cover well all 100+ channels of programming that I receive? I wouldn't, especially because I can get that information directly via my TV tuner or, if I'm desperate, through the internet. But the printed TV Guide has one advantage over these digital mediums - it keeps near-term historical information.

If I wanted to know what I missed on TV tonight now that it's 1am, I really can't think of a way to figure that out. I can only hope that my DVR recorded the programs that I wanted to watch. Since I don't have a Tivo, it's not quite smart enough to follow around the shows that I like if they change time slots or whatever. So it's of some small value to me to see the passed evening's, or even yesterday's or the day before's, schedule. And this isn't the only thing like this.

Another great example of data that expires and falls completely off the map is weather data. Abby has a homework assignment this month to keep track of temperatures and precipitation. Of course, if we have a really hectic weekend like we did recently, we don't think to record that information. Finding yesterday's temperature might not be impossible, but it is nowhere near as easy as what you might think.

Even RSS feeds that offer weather data somehow manage to expire the feed for yesterday's weather. So you have to subscribe already in order to have yesterday's feed data around. That seems kind of weird. If weather data is being offered in a blog-like syndication format, then shouldn't today's entry show the current weather, the forecast for later today, and the forecast for the rest of the week? Instead, they somehow manage to have separate entries for forecasts and no data for yesterday's weather. It's interesting to me that I fail to reason out why this is the case.

I wonder what other scheduled or time-sensitive data is lost when it expires. Surely there is a record of this stuff somewhere. I mean, they record the minutia of baseball stats with swiss-watch-precision. But why is it so hard to get to? It's like the people with the data are purposefully putting it away so that we can't use it, and that seems strange, considering how open they had been with it when it hadn't happened yet.