Blogging Roller

Last weekend, my 7 year old son Alex, without any prompting from me - I swear, asked for his own weblog. Just about every day since, he has taken a little time after finishing his homework to do some blogging. He is not able to type very quickly, but he hunts down the keys he needs and gives each a solid tap. He can't spell all that well, but he is not afraid to spell things out phonetically. Luckily for him, his entries are so short that there is no need for formatting, but soon I imagine I'll have to set up a WYSIWYG editor for him or teach him some rudimentary HTML.

Andi and I have decided not to edit Alex's posts or correct his spelling and grammar errors. We want to be able to look back on his progress as a writer. We do sometimes add some notes in parentheses when his spelling is too hard to read. If you have read this far without hitting the back-button, then perhaps you are wondering just where Alex's weblog is. I keep it on a somewhat obscure server and to keep that server obscure, I'm not going to give you a link. Instead, I'm going to publish Alex's historic first week of weblog posts right here on my weblog. Enjoy!

Sunday - Locker dockers. Today I and my famliy went to mil brook hiy school. when we got home daddy lock us outside. flinliy we got in our home.I will see you soon today.

Saturday - duster busters. Today I got dust in my eyes in a tree. We watch a move (movie) of scooey-doo (scooby-doo). It is a good move.

Friday - too snowy. Today it is snowing 3 inchis high! We had a snowball fight. We made a fort. today linus has a weblog. Cats have a talie. Cats are diffrent colors. Luna is black and white. Cats have reytrackl clas (retractable claws).

Thursday - snowing. It is snowing outside! linus lovs the snow. I do too. How bowt you. Daddy said tomrrow we will have a snowball fight.

Tuesday - school. At school I had an ansebly (assemby) Linus got a reading t-shrit. Tonight Linus went to school to sing songs to their parints. I did not go.

Monday - school. Today I went to school. I made a clock that was coloerfull. It is filled up. I can not put one more coloer in it. then I got home. I cilmed a tree and made a amrgsc esit (emergency exit) if eneything hopons. last I did my homework. My homework for today was pick a book you have read. Then make a parugraph. I pick a book you have read. then make a pargragh. I picked the seakrits of droon (Secrets of Droon). Eric looks like harry potter in the move. My dad leat us see some of it. He is reading it too.

Sunday - My first weblog post. Today is my first day writing on a weblog. Today I went to my grandmother and grandpa's house. I got ice cream in the country. On the way home we played racer. How we play is if we pass cars we get points. Today we got 50 points.

I love it, but first, let me say that 1) I only locked Alex and Linus outside for a very short time and 2) the fact that we scored 50 points playing "racer" on the drive home from the country does not mean that I exceeded the speed limit at anytime. As you can probably tell, I'm a proud Daddy - a proud Daddy who will be reading his son's weblog very carefully.

And welcome to 2004. Here is a thumbnail review of the highs and lows of 2003 from my microcosm:

The growing boy.	The book that almost wasn't.	The cat we lost.
The house that would not sell.	The company that would not fly.	The new employer (that I won't mention).
The school boys.	The cat we found.	The home that we are improving.

For the past two or three months, a sweet little black and white cat has been visiting us and delighting Leo. The cat would appear in the backyard and Leo would start screaming "ditty! peas, ditty! peas" and running from window to window to catch the cat's every move. At 18 months old, Leo can't really talk yet, but he knows the word please and he uses whenever he asks for anything, so "ditty! peas" translates to "look everybody, there is a cat in the yard, can we please go out and take a closer look?"

Kids bring all sorts of wonderful emotions, joy, and laughter into your life. Like Matt, I never smiled so much and felt so much joy as I do with my three boys. But, before the kids I never got angry and I never yelled at anybody. Just something to keep in mind, Chris. Kids will get you in touch with your emotions and I mean all of your emotions.

I'm spending the weekend with a couple of friends in the mountains just east of Jefferson, North Carolina. Saturday, we went hiking in the Grayson Highlands, accross the Virginia border. It was cold, windy, and in some places the trail was covered with a sheet of ice, but we were rewarded by close encounters with wild ponies and a flock of wild turkeys. I'm sorry that I didn't bring my camera because the ponies were storybook beautiful and the turkeys were quite a colorful sight.

We were hoping to ride the Viginia Creeper Trail today, but we woke up to find a inch of ice covered snow on the drive way. The driveway is long, very steep, and ends about 30 feet from the New River. Obviously, we're not going any where by car today. Luckily, we've got plenty of food, a pool table, and as you can see I have my laptop and a connection.

We did the traditional tree routine last night. This involves lugging way too many boxes of ornaments, Christmas table-ware, various stuffed snowmen, and seasonal nick-nacks out of the attic; listening to the Peanuts Christmas CD; drinking spiked nog; watching the kids decorate the tree and goof around in front of the video camera. Here's the tree, for Russell:

<img src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/tree-2003.png" alt="our Christmas tree" />

Kindergardener Linus Johnson shares his famous Thanksgiving Turkey recipe:

Get a turkey. Get it out of the wrapper. Then get some spicy sauce. Then you get some peas and put them around the turkey on a plate. Take the turkey and put it on a pan and put it in the oven (a big fat one) at 4000 degrees. Cook the turkey for 5-7 minutes then take it out of the oven. Put it back on the plate that has the peas on it. Eat.

I spent a lot of time last week painting fishies and even more bubbles. I might just have to bid on the table myself.

Any similarity to Disney characters past, present, and future is purely coincidental.

That was a lot of fun. Thanks Mark!

Continuing on the childish theme, my 6-year old son Alex claims to have invented and popularized this silly chant at his school: "kids are the best, we know true, put us all together and we shout BOO!"

We spent the first week of September 2001 at Ocracoke, one of the North Carolina barrier islands. Ocracoke is a three hour ferry-boat ride from the coast and the town of Ocracoke is tiny, so it feels so remote, disconnected, and isolated from the problems of the rest of the world. At the crack of dawn each morning, I would go out for a run. When I returned, I would take one or both of the boys out for a walk down the road, past the cute little light house, past the pelicans, and down to the little harbour, known as Silver Lake. One morning we found a bunch of kitties in the woods by the road, one morning we walked to the other side of town for breakfast, and every morning we saw a beautiful sunrise. This is what I would prefer to remember about September 2001.

John Udell, InfoWorld: Programmer and author Dave Johnson shared an anecdote on his Weblog last year about what happened when his 5-year-old son walked up behind him while he was coding. "He saw the JUnit green bar on the screen," Johnson reports, "and said 'Dad, you did good.'" There's more to this touching father-and-son moment than meets the eye.

<img src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/D071503b0017ww.jpg" alt="Linus runs down the boardwalk towards the beach and a landing ultra-light aircraft" />

(C) 2003 Charles S. Johnson

This year we are vacationing in Emerald Isle, NC, about a three hour drive from home. My parents rented a big house about a block from the ocean and invited us to come along. With three kids, having both parents and grand-parents around is really, really convenient. There is always somebody available to take the big kids to the beach, somebody to stay home when the littlest guy needs to nap, and somebody to babysit so Andi and I can drive over to Beaufort for dinner one night. Dad, the expert photographer and physical chemist extraordinaire, brought along his big honking digital SLR camera and his assortment of telephoto lenses, so I don't even have to worry about taking pictures.

This is all great and the only thing really causing any stress is the ProJSP book, but I don't think I'll have to miss a day at the beach to wrap up my changes to my two chapters. My Dad and I have our laptops setup in the kitchen and the only thing that really interferes with my works is the constant derision and calls of "hey nerd-boys" and "get a life" from our wives. This really doesn't bother me at all. I always arrange to bring a laptop along on vacation. I'm not like Raible. My idea of a vacation is tinkering with all things digital, which, coincidentally, is also my idea of work. I'm the last of the great indoorsmen.

I do go outside occaisionally. I'm writing this sitting in a rocking chair on the porch overlooking the ocean. We watched a little motorized para-glider fly by just before sunset. Now we are watching some impressive amateur fireworks going up accross the street and trying to keep the boys from stepping on the tiny tree frogs that appear after dark. Damn, I can't see the keyboard anymore. Time to go back inside.

Hard to believe that it has already been one year. Over the weekend, we had a very nice cookout and party for Leo, who just turned 1, and Mark, who just turned 40. Here is Leo on his brand new rocking horse:

<img alt="Leo" src= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/leo-turns-1.jpg" />

Here is some Memorial day military history for you, courtesy of my great great grandfather and former Virginia State Senator John Newton Opie. This is an excerpt from Chapter XLIII of his book A Rebel Cavalryman.

After we returned from the Gettysburg campaign, the cavalry of both armies occupied our old ground in Culpepper County, until about the middle of September. We had a long rest here and no service except picket duty. Both sides, however, picketed in open country, with nothing between them. Our picket line ran along by Brandy Station, and immediately in our front, and in sight, was the Federal picket line. One day, being on picket, I waved a paper to a cavalry man on my front, and, hallooing to him to meet me half way, I rode out and he did likewise. We met and talked pleasantly for some time together, when, finally, I said, "Yank, got any Whisky?" Tapping his canteen, he said, "Yes, Johnny Reb." I pulled out some tobacco, and, in a minute, I had the whisky and he had the tobacco. This fellow amused me very much by saying that we did not fight fair. Upon my inquiring what he meant, he remarked, "The right way is to stand off and shoot, but you fellows run up on us." Well, I left my friend and rode back to my post, and pulled on my canteen frequently.

Alex, who is six and who can read, has a little brother Linus, who is four and cannot read. This weekend Alex was asking about names. "Does Matthew have a U in it?" he asked. "What about Leo?" After asking about the presence of the letter U in all of his friend's names and finding that only brother Linus has a U, he went back to his room. Later that day, we noticed the following sign on his door:

no budey cum in if you do have a u in side yor name. go a way u names.

What have I done wrong!

Alex(6) was busy working along side of me on what he calls a "craft" and making quite a mess of construction paper and cardboard all over my desk. I looked over at him and we had this little exchange of words:

Alex: Dad, I know what you're thinkin'.
Me: how do you know that Alex?
Alex: 'cause I got your brain inside my brain Dad.

Poor kid.