Team Wendorf Report

Recently I decided that our family needed a fire escape plan, particularly because we all sleep on the second floor. I bought a few hundred dollars worth of equipment but it has just been sitting, so I decided that the next step was to write up a simple project plan that included steps for what we still need to accomplish to be prepared.

I of course wrote this in all seriousness even though I included a few humorous items in the plan, but Kristina felt that the entire thing was funny. So funny in fact that she was doubled over in laughter about the whole thing. So much for trying to apply project planning to family goals.

Here’s what Team Wendorf will do in case of fire:

Equipment Available:

* Two fire masks – one kept under each side of the parents bed
* Two fire blankets – both kept handy in master bedroom
* one fire ladder – kept in Kai’s room

If we are awoken by fire during the night we will do the following:

* pee pants
* put on fire masks
* Kristina wraps Otto (and self if necessary) in fire blanket
* Kristina takes Otto to Lucias room
* Kristina takes Otto and Lucia out window onto porch roof
* Jason takes fire blanket and goes to kai’s room (wraps self in blanket if necessary)
* Jason puts ladder out window
* Jason carries Kai down ladder to yard
* Jason helps Kristina, Otto and Lucia off of porch roof
* Jason rushes into flaming building to save Russel (our basement renter)

What we need to do:

* learn how to use ladder
* learn how to use fire masks
* possibly buy one or two more fire blankets (to keep in kids rooms)
* possibly buy one more fire ladder for master bedroom as alternative escape option
* pray we never have to deal with this

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We had a rare treat/annoyance a few weeks ago. We got quite a bit of snow in the Seattle area, which is uncommon. The conditions have to be just right; usually a snowstorm followed by dry, cold air. The snow has to stick and then not be followed by rain, which is usually the case when it snows in Seattle.

(for more info about Seattle weather check Steve Pool’s awesome weather resource at the humbly titled www.stevepool.com)

The annoyance was getting stuck on our own street. We live on a steep hill that crests about 20 yards south of us, and gets steeper for about a quarter mile to north of us. After the initial snow the roads were fine at the crest of our hill, but in front of our house and down the hill was a solid sheet of ice, about an inch thick. We were literally stuck for almost a week because our front wheel and rear wheel drive cars couldn’t make it the 20 yards to the crest, and going down hill to the next main street was a quarter mile bobsled run littered with cars in ditches left by the brave and idiotic.

The treat was the beauty of the snow, which was stunning the next day as the sun came out (which we hadn’t seen for quite a few months). We took the kids out in the snow, which they didn’t really know what to do with, but it was fun anyway. I shot a video of the snow and the kids using the dv camera we got for Christmas (thanks mom and dad). I then threw a short video together using the automatic movie creation tool in Windows movie maker which, as it turns out, is a nifty little program.

btw, I know that the intro to the video says ‘Snow Day 2006′, but in reality it was 2007, so shut up.

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Just to make things official for those of you who don’t know, Kai’s middle name is Atticus. Yes, it is taken from the character Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. I’ll explain more about that choice in a later post.

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It’s been a while since we posted. Sorry to all 5 of you who keep tabs on our blog. There is lots to write about, so we are going to try to post something every day this week. We’ll see how that goes.

Also, Kristina has promised that she is going to give this blogging thing a whirl, so be on the look out for that.

To kick things off here are a few photos that we shot this weekend at the Mt. Si Nursery which is right next to Mt. Si, strangely enough.

(click on the photo to see more)

This is the third year we have driven up there to take in the scenery, look at pumpkins, and shoot pictures of the kids (only the last two Octobers for that).

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File this post under ‘isn’t the internet cool’, particularly wikipedia.

I watched a lot of cartoons growing up. The fact that after 20 years I can still remember scene by scene most Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons makes me wonder what effect these had in shaping my personality (many of these classic cartoons are posted on YouTube and other video sites). Watching some of these again for the first time in many years brought back many memories and prompted me to do a little research on the cartoons that I loved and still love (though for different reasons now, but that’s another post).

Something I learned very young was that there was a clear difference in style from cartoon to cartoon. I began to recognize that if the opening credits for a cartoon included names like Chuck Jones, Fritz Felang, or Tex Avery then the cartoon would be enjoyable. Within a few seconds I could decipher, based on color, music, font, print quality, and other cues whether a cartoon would be worth watching. I didn’t connect these differences to cartoons created over a span of several decades, by different artists, with different cultural influences. To me the how and why cartoons were created was a mystery, and I thought it strange that the cartoons didn’t always look the same.

One cartoon series where these differences in style is very apparent is the Tom and Jerry toons. The best cartoons were produced by, I believe, in the 40’s and/or 50’s by the Hanna Barberra team with Tex Avery thrown into the mix somewhere. These are drawn very similar to disney animation of the same era (in my opinion), but unlike disney are very violent in a cartoon funny way. The level of comic violence is truly amazing, but very very funny. The comic timing, music, and voices (primarily screams) are more funny to me now than they were as a kid. As an aside, I think it’s obvious that Tom and Jerry are the primary influences for the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons on the Simpsons.

But the Tom and Jerry characters had multiple incarnations over the years. There was an era produced by Chuck Jones, the guy responsible for many of the best Bugs Bunny cartoons. His T&J had a distinctive style that looked a lot more like Bugs Bunny than T&J. His mouse character also had these bushy eyebrows, and Tom looked at lot less mischevious. Overall the cartoons were less violent, and hence less funny.

In the 70’s there was a Tom and Jerry show that was awful. All the characters that were usually mortal enemies were suddenly friends going on adventures together. Jerry had this huge bow tie that looked like something the Don Knotts character on Three’s Company would wear. The annoying theme song from that show still pops into my head every now and then. Severely 70’s and severely unfunny.

If you watched these cartoons after school, like I often did, then usually the shows would be presented in half-hour blocks based around a set of popular characters, so usually something like the bugs bunny half hour, or woody woodpecker half hour, etc… Three cartoons would be shown in a half hour, interspersed with ads for cereal and toys. A half hour block of Tom and Jerry, for example, would show toons from all eras of the characters. If you were lucky they would show a few older T&J’s and then throw in a 70’s T&J at the end. My point is that if you watched long enough you would end up seeing many examples of the entire catalogue of Tom and Jerry.

Which brings me to the actual reason for writing this post…

(more…)

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The stomach flu stopped by this weekend to chew bubble gum and kick some ass, and it was all out of bubble gum.

It was one for the Wendorf family book of records. Lucia started on Friday. On Sunday evening Mom and Dad almost simultaneously started eliminating fluids in every way imaginable. Not a fun deal in a house with one working toilet. Apparently at one point I said to Kristina, while laying on the bathroom floor to give her a turn with the porcelein, that “it’s great that we can do things together”. I don’t really remember that though.

Kai poops and spits up a lot anyhow, so it’s hard to tell if he was really affected. As of tuesday evening mom and dad are doing better, Kai is fine, but Lucia is still pretty tired and was spitting up a bit in the morning.

As a family trying to understand and live the supremacy of Christ in all things, including puke and sore buttholes, weekends like this are good test of the foundations we build our house upon.

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This week was the start of the WASL testing for something like 85,000 students in Washington. Apparently this is the first year that the WASL will be official used to gauge a students performance against a set of standards.

I have been reading a book called “A Whole New Mind“. Author Daniel Pink is arguing that we are moving from the ‘information age’ to the ‘conceptual age’. The information age has been dominated by knowledge workers who excel at ‘left brain’ thinking. They are programmers, accountants, engineers. The conceptual age will be led by right brain thinking, people who excel at creativity, empathy, design, art, etc… Of course Right brain vs. Left brain is a metaphorical construct that Pink uses to paint his ideas since no person is in reality fully right brained or left brained in their thinking (although I think I know a few people who come close to one or the other extreme).

Pink talks about what he calls the SAT-ocracy; an outdated system of left-brain oriented standardized testing. The SAT and similar tests arguably creates barriers for those who do not excel at left brain specialties such as math, logic, sequential thinking, calculation. Interestingly, though, recent studies have shown that only 4 to 10 percent of job success is dependant on a persons IQ, at least how we traditionally understand IQ as measure of a persons left brain prowess.

Even more interesting is a study being run by at the UW called The Rainbow Project, which seeks to measure and quantify skills related to right brain thinking by asking students to write creative stories based on a given title (e.g. write a story whose title is “The Lion who Squeaked”), and by placing them in social situations such as trying to convince a group to help move a large piece of furniture. According to Pink the early results have shown the test to be twice as successful over the SAT at predicting a students success in college, and the performance gap between whites and minorities narrows as compared to the SAT. The point of the study is not to replace the SATs, but to supplement in order to provide a better picture of person’s strengths and talents.

I don’t remember my SAT scores, I know they were not terrible, but not stellar either. I do know that they helped overcome barriers that allowed me entrance into the UW. I also know that little of what I remember being tested on has had any bearing on my college career, work, or life in general. I appreciate Pink’s book as it is helping me provide a framework for understanding how I am wired to favor right brain thinking. As my daughter grows it will be interesting to learn how we can encourage her creative and ‘emotional’ intelligence. Of course she may turn out to be a logical genius who excels at systems analysis, but based on her parents genetics I don’t forsee that happening.

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