Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

I finally uploaded some new pictures to my flickr site. Since we are supposed to get a “warm up” into the 30′s I figured I take a few snow pictures. Here’s one of the backyard, it’s hard to tell, but that snow is about up to my waist.

Besides being able to get our cars out of the driveway, getting plowed out and having the snow piled up also makes for some nice hill to play on when it isn’t too frigid to go outside.

Since it has been so cold, we’ve been doing a lot of indoor play. Including some serious stacking…

I jokingly said that it will be time to break out the shorts if it hits 40 this week, but after the frigid temps we’ve had, 40 will seem like a heat wave.
Also, if you don’t follow my manic posting to del.icio.us you might want to check out these Zen stories, they are pretty interesting.

I’ve been following the story of the teacher who may face jail time for exposing children to porn pop-ups on a classroom computer. Here’s one article to read if you haven’t heard about this: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070214-8850.html

This is just so wrong. The schools concept of technology is horrendous. A Windows 98 computer with Internet Explorer 5? Seriously, even if they had kept up to date with their firewall program and virus protection, there really isn’t much you can do to secure a Win98 computer with IE5. That is just a pop-up nightmare waiting to happen. And unfortunately it did happen to this teacher, who is now facing up to 40 years in prison for the schools negligence. Even if it were the teachers fault, which I don’t believe, how can anybody justify 40 years in prison for this? Since when did technological ignorance become a crime? And how can technological ignorance be a worse crime than murder or rape? According to the Department of Justice the average prison sentence for homicide is 149 months and for rape is 117 months. 40 years equals 480 months. WTF?!?

The girls and I went out to play this afternoon. Stomping through the snow in our field I realized that it was consistently up to my knees. And while some of the drift points were as low as my ankles, some were as high as my waist. At least we don’t have seven feet though.

There is a travel ban today (at least there was this morning). We had whiteout conditions last night and probably got another 6 inches of snow. So I guess that winter is in effect. Personally I am getting sick of the constant snow and frigid temperatures. I don’t mind snow and cold, but it has been non-stop for over a week now. At least the sun is peaking out today.

This past Friday we went to see Tom Chapin perform at the Rockefeller Arts Center on the SUNY Fredonia campus. It was an excellent show. It’s always good to see a performance that is both kid and adult friendly. He played for about an hour and a half, no intermission. The only bad part was that the show started at 7:00 PM, which is right around when the girls normally go to bed. Combine that with the very warm (borderline hot) temperature in the theatre, and Bella spent a portion of the show not feeling very well. We wound up leaving at the last song, since by that point both girls were exhausted.

Having never heard much of Tom Chapin’s music I found the concert very enjoyable. There wasn’t any song that I felt was bad or boring. He and his band engaged the audience with many audience participation sections and towards the end he was joined by the Chautauqua County Children’s Chorale, which Bella found very interesting. Seeing all the kids on stage perked her back up.  So all in all it was an excellent show and I was very happy we got the chance to see it.