I braved Wal-mart with Kyrie again today. Got some groceries and some pretty yellow paint for our sunroom. I’ll probably paint it sometime this week. I’ve also got 5 of the 7 curtains for the room done. I just love clean refrigerators. I cleaned mine today. I think it makes everything inside look more appetizing. It’s beautiful outside… I wore flip-flops at the end of January! Sometimes I just love the south…

Well, Kyrie was supposed to have her 4-month checkup yesterday but because of a computer crash at her doctor’s office, our appointment disappeared and we had to reschedule for next Monday. That’s all right. She turned 4 months old yesterday and she’s getting more active than ever! I can’t believe she can move around as much as she does, considering all that chub. But I guess she’s got a lot of muscle under it. She rolls over constantly now, so I can’t leave her by herself on our bed or a couch. She’s also getting really funny about strangers. A nice guy at Wal-mart talked to her and she burst into tears. It was one of those cries that just breaks your heart. She’s also getting much more clingy and is getting a bad habit of crying like she’s going to die whenever I put her down. I still make her spend time on the floor, though. I don’t want to prevent her from getting her exercise.

Better get back to my girl.

At dinner, Rachel and I were talking about the book Thomas and I always talked about writing five years ago: Crafty Jesus: Biblical Deception in a Postmodern World.

That got me thinking about the joke we had up in Spokane about writing a book called Rick’s Biblical Position: An Argument Against Tim LaHaye’s Biblical Sexual Position in The Act of Marriage.

That got us thinking about really bad ideas for the title of my MAR Thesis, like Numbers in Numbers: The Symbolicness of Numbers in the Book of Numbers.

I should be institutionalized.

I was involved in sports from about age 5 until I hit graduate school. I played baseball from 5 to my freshman year in high school. I played soccer from 8-13. I played basketball in 4th and 8th grades. I started track in 6th grade and did that through high school. I started as the light-heavyweight (215 lbs) for the wrestling team as a freshman. I started playing football in 8th grade, and played through high school. I lifted weights through high school. As a senior in high school, I was a stunter for an all-star cheer squad that placed fourth at NCA Nationals (large co-ed), and cheered for Belhaven College and ULM, which has won at least three national championships in the last five years.

All that to say, I used to really like sports. They were a big part of my life. When I started lifting weights, I started to have trouble swinging a bat. My muscles changed, I bulked up, and my swing was never the same. So football started taking over baseball in my life. Well, I haven’t really lifted in seven or so years. I jumped on the bench press, and pumped off 300 lbs like it was nothing. Okay, so I am not completely weak.

But I am totally unskilled when it comes to any thing of finesse. I picked up a basketball on Saturday, and I shot from around the court. Airball. Nothing but backboard. Clang off the ring. Missed layup. A shot over the backboard. It was ugly.

So I walked to the free throw line. Airball. I missed 14 straight shots from the free throw line (let’s not forget I missed every single shot from around the court, and none of them were as far as the free throw line). 50 shots later, I had made 9 baskets. Nine. Wow. Rachel thinks she can probably do better. I’ll have to see if we can’t arrange a shootoff.

I attended an Internet research workshop this week put on by the Humanities Librarian at the university at which I teach. The workshop was quite informative, and I thought I’d pass on some pretty cool stuff for thos that aren’t in the know.

Teoma (Gaelic word for “expert”) is a Subject-Specific Popularity engine (ranks based on number of same-subject pages that reference it)
Vivisimo and Clusty are two pretty cool cluster engines.
Kartoo is a meta-search engine that displays in a visual map.

Finally, another sweet reference site for academic writers is BUBL.

Someone pointed this out on an email list: Google “French military victories” and click on the first link.

This picture didn’t turn out very well quality-wise because I was nervous that she’d topple over any second. She seems very proud of herself.

Kyrie flipped from tummy to back this morning as if she’s known how to do it all along, but didn’t want to until today. Who knows what she’ll accomplish next?

She’s fussing. Gotta go.

Last night Kyrie reached a milestone and rolled all the way over (back to tummy) twice! I’m excited that she’s finally getting more physically independent. She also just loves holding toys and analyzing them - then eating them. My little girl is growing up.

“It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying in Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have it no other way.”
New Orleans Mayor - C. Ray Nagin

Now you can get your “Willie Nagin and the Chocolate Factory” T-shirts from imnotchocolate.com