Yoga Schmoga

Who needs to uses these blocks for Yoga when you can make beds and airport hangers.

First trip to the duck pond

The chilly air managed to keep this a short visit. As did BigE dumping about 2 lbs of food in a pile at his feet. But in the end the ducks were feed, and BigE was happy.

How to travel in style

Nuff said.

PS Note that those are noise cancelling headphones.

Waker

"Dada I have to tell you something. I ... um ... dada I'm a waker"

What the hell is a waker? Well turns out its a kid at Day Care that no longer takes a nap. They get to go outside or they watch a video downstairs. There are sleepers and wakers.

When BigE heads to bed he realizes that, he as a waker, should not be in bed. "but but I'm a waker". To which we reply

"But even wakers sleep at home at bed time"

A Generational thing

The setup:

One badly recorded Dora The Explorer episode (we've named Dora helping friends). I believe it was due to some heavy snow fall on our satellite receiver. (That and we don't have it covered).

So the first 5 minutes is gone. Then there is a chunk in the middle (about 3 minutes) that is un playable. The PVR stalls when it hits the beginning. It requires a fast forward or skip to get past it.

After watching it we're having our milk before bed when

BigE: We have to fix Dora Friends

Dada: Next time we see Dora Friends we'll tape it.

BigE: You mean we have to tape it? [Doing a "Pulling tape off a reel" hand motion ]

I.e. "You mean we have to masking tape on the PVR to fix it?"

Dada: No ... Uh ... Next time we'll record it.

BigE: Ohhhh

The little photographer

Here's a typical "Look Mama I took a picture"

What was he thinking?

So I come out and see this



Hmmm. I look over and there is BigE.


Notice the clip is hooked onto the gas cap. BigE knows what that is for. He often fills up his tank with the hose. Nope not putting in gas. BigE smiles and says "he had tied his car onto the T-Ball bat so it wouldn't get away. "

Somebody must have tried to explain horse power.

Lunch with Antie Bevie

Nothing like a lunchtime visit to Auntie Bevie. After all she's a lot of fun. Then again maybe it's the helicopter!



Not to be out done, Mama got into the action

Bird Update

So after running through a CSI style photo session of my new Bird's nest I figured I had scared them away. Well imagine my surprise when I startled a bird out its nest this morning when I went to get the paper.

The little sucker was back a couple of hours later when I headed off to work. I wonder if they will settle in while we are gone.

Facebook

Ma-ma has discovered Facebook.

What is Facebook?

It's what they call a social networking site. I.e. if you register you create your own little profile page. Then you can make connections to all of your friends. You can see and connect with your friends friends. And so on.

They do things like ask you when you graduated high school or university. Then you can search through their active members and see if an old class mates have joined.

That's the theory anyways.

Related sites that you may have heard about
MySpace
Classmates.com (Although this one is focuses on school / university classes rather than just social networks.)

Flickr

Flickr is coming.

What is Flickr? (Pronounced Flicker, it's kewl internet speak). It's an online photo sharing site. It was bought by Yahoo! (way back) in 2005. You can login into flickr with your Yahoo ID, you don't have to create a special account.

It's soon going to be offering up a lot of our photos so read carefully.

What can it do?

• Store your photos
• Share them and post them to your blog (like this one!)
  
• Allow you to add tags (keywords) to your photos
• Add notes to little parts of the picture. I.e. to point out something.

There is a free account that limits you to

• adding 100 MB (or around 100 high resolution) pictures per month
• Only see the last 200 pictures upload
• Can only access limited sized pictures. You can't see the full sized originals.

Upgrading to the pro account removes those limitations. The Big downside for a Canadian right now is the lack of printing directly from the site. You can always download the picture and print it on your printer, or with your favourite online service (see www.harvardphoto.com for a comparison of the players). Everyone does it these days like Futureshop, Loblaws/Dominon, Walmart, and Costco.

The best thing is to head over to Flickr.com and take a look. You don't need to sign up to take a look around.

First non BigE post

Just thought I would quickly point out that the previous post was the first one not soley on BigE. Now if it wasn't about the house we would have meet the "Family" mandate in the "The Bussey Family". Instead it's still the "BigE Show"

Place is going to hell

Funny, you don't go out your front door for about 24 hours and suddenly you have squatters. We don't live downtown so it's not that kind of squatter. Image my surprise when I opened the door and bird flew right in front of me. Here I was thinking "What the hell ... What is he doing".

Then I notice something to my left.



There's a birds nest on my light fixture. Now during the Christmas session we use this light near the door as our plug to the Christmas lights. One of those light socket to ac plug converters. Well seems as I left the top off. So the birds moved right in.

Go figure.

Now I do want to add this picture to show the work done in making this nest. That's pretty impressive.




UPDATE: It should be pointed out that without Government subsidies, proding by Stephane Dion or any Green party hack we are using CFL bulbs. 69W vs 300W to light the outside made easy individual economic sense. Imagine all that without regulation.

What's hot?

Favorite Colors:

• Yellow
• Yellow
• Yellow

Toys:

• Helicopters
• Airplanes
  
• Toy Motorcycles
• Play Mobile Fire truck
• Scoop and lofty trucks

Sports

• Soccer
• Hockey in the driveway
  

Gardening

Today we tilled the soil in the vegetable garden. After getting BigE his own shovel we decide to get the hoe. Fortunately BigE knows how to use it because of an episode of Max & Ruby. Now who says cartoons can't be educational.

Max is Ruby's trouble making little brother. Ruby seems to take care of the pair without any parental units anywhere to be found. She makes lunch, tends the garden, takes Max on the bus to their grandmothers. Well just about everything. Along the way most of the calamity ensues when Max heads off on his own to reap destruction. Apparently at some point this happened while Ruby was working the hoe.

Update: Added picture

Ready for Soccer

Ready for Soccer, originally uploaded by pbussey.

Forgot to post this little gem. As we were getting ready for soccer BigE decided to wear his sunglasses. This is pretty novel for him. But not only that he wanted to pose for his picture. And here it is in all

its glory!

Soccer practice #2

So we're just back from soccer practice number two. Thankfully we were a few minutes early and practice was late starting. That gave us time to "warm up" to the gym, the scary coach, and the other kids. This time BigE was running and kicking away. He's even starting to understand dribbling. Actually doing little kicks so he can run with the ball. Not every kick has to be a "giant big one".

I say thankfully that we were there early because the first 15 minutes of the practice had them sitting around. Which tends to be a little tough. I would say the average age of this class is only 3.5 years old. They just don't get drills.

Now if your still reading here is a moral in this story. Don't use an imaginary dragon as motivation to get the kids to run around an obstacle course. And running over hockey stick "snakes" ... well ... that wasn't probably a hot idea either. BigE was fine but there was one little girl who was not going back inside because of the dragon.

But I guess that's what you get with a city run program. At least I'll get 15.5% back from the Children's Fitness Tax Credit. Could be worse.

BigE Soccer action shot

BigE Soccer action shot, originally uploaded by pbussey.

Here we are kicking the soccer ball around the backyard. Haven't been able to catch that action kicking shot quite yet.

BigE decides to take some pictures

BigE decides to take some pictures, originally uploaded by pbussey.

Here's the best shot of his guy and drinking cup.

Another day, another kite adventure

After work we took another trip to the field to fly the kites. This time we brought both kites. So when I was launching BigE's I could also be holding mine and that packaging at the same time.

This time it was fun for over 20 minutes. The wind was a little bursty causing many crashes. But that seemed to increase the fun. One thing I never thought would be fun was seeing, and chasing, the kite's shadow on the ground. I never realized you could spend 5 minutes flying a kite and not even look up.

I think the interest with airplanes has thoroughly infused kite flying. Soon we can start looking into zero wind kite kits. Say something like this. I've have to put a call into my only kiting friend AB for more info.

What is this RSS thingy?

If you have a customizable web page (say a My Yahoo! page) you can add theBusseyFamily.ca to it. That way when you open your web home page there is a little box that like this one that has a list of all of the recent postings.

It's an easy way to keep track of the site without visiting or typing in the address everytime your online.

You can automatically add it to your My Yahoo page by clicking the link on the right hand side under RSS Feeds.

I got my kite!

I got my kite!, originally uploaded by pbussey.

"Dad-da I want a kite"

"Dad-da I want a kite"

Repeat 100 more times.

Here we are. You'd never know we had over 10cm of snow 24 hours ago. But here we were at the local park running on the very wet and muddy field.

It was a blast. For about 10 minutes. Fortunately running in circles underneath the kite turned out to a great game that extended the outing another 20 minutes.

What are labels?

Do you see the little label column to the right of the blog entries?

How about below each blog entry?






Do you know what is label is? If no keep reading.

Labels are a simple way of tagging individual entries with one or more topics. That way if you ever want to find all blog entries on a topic you just click on that label to retrieve all entries. No matter how old they are. The label is also listed below on each post.

In general all of my "Help, how does this internet thingy work posts" will be tagged with the help label so that you can easily find them.

Notable other labels are:

• BigE - is well Big E
• QOTD - Quote of the Day
• IDIM - I Did It Myself
• pic - Entry with a picture

I did it all by myself

I did it all by myself, originally uploaded by pbussey.

Look I put my coat on all by myself.

What do you mean it's upside down? And backwards? How is that possible?

QOTD

What do you want to do today?

I want to watch lots of TV.

First Soccer practice

Today was BigE's first soccer practice. 15 kids all around his age at the local community center. The catch no parents. BigE wasn't too sure. Was this some kind of weird new daycare? However having littleM with him brought out the bravery.

Now Picture trying to run a real soccer practice with a bunch of pre-schoolers.

However BigE was out running around. Not necessarily going after the ball. But he was running. There was one fantastic play on the ball. A sliding tackle slash stiff arm of littleM. No surprise BigE ended up with the ball and littleM on his face. We took striker off the probably list of positions.

In the end was it a success? If he wasn't so tired I bet he really meant that he had a blast when he said "Moma I don't like this" and "What's on next?". (Perhaps he understands the TV just a little too much.)

PS Hanging out with the parents outside brought two types: (a) trying to coax their kids into interacting with the practice (b) already on the phone trying to find a private coach muttering "they're running a terrible practice, he's not going to learn anything here!"

Quote of the day

I'm going to dribble the ball to you. Then you dribble the ball back to me. Okay?