Way to go, Mama

A while back, I talked about the book 'The Disappearing Spoon' which tells the story of the periodic table of elements.

I'd put the book down for a while and returned to it yesterday. Here's a section that tells the story of Dmitri Mendeleev, the guy generally acclaimed for creating the first periodic table.

"Born in Siberia, the youngest of fourteen children, Mendeleev lost his father in 1847, when the boy was thirteen. Boldly for the time, his mother took over a local glass factory to support the family and managed the male craftsmen working there. Then the factory burned down.

Pinning her hopes on her sharp-minded son, she bundled him up on horseback and rode twelve hundred miles across the steppes and steep, snowy Ural Mountains to an elite university in Moscow - which rejected Dmitri because he wasn't local stock. Undaunted, Mama Mendeleev bundled him back up and rode four hundred miles further, to his dead father's alma mater in St. Petersburg. Just after seeming him enrolled, she died."

But what happened to the other 13 kids?

This will do

All right, spent a few hours fiddling with the template this morning and I have the blog in a decent condition.

I don't now if there will ever be quite enough control for my taste - I feel the need to be able to tweak every little element.

The fact that apostrophes and quotes are interpreted just fine by some of the 'gadgets' and interpreted as garbage by others (like 'Recent Comments') is truly vexing. Am I the only one troubled by stuff like that? Should I accept that formatting online will never be perfect?

I have a placeholder Flickr thing going, only about ten pics total in my photostream. I really need to go through the PC and categorize all of our pics, delete duplicates, etc.

I also need to call my folks - it's my Mom's Birthday and of course it's Father's Day as well.

Real Life Conversation #35

God, I love Excel. Look at this breakdown - Peak, In-Network, Out-of-Network...

Okaaayy... Very nice and all, but what does it tell us?

If cell phone minutes can be quantified as units of love, you're her favorite.

(Pleased) Really? Hmn - or I'm the most troubled and in need of help.

I don't usually remember my dreams.

I had a very odd dream this morning. My mother came out of the bathroom at my apartment. I went in right after her to find the walls entirely smeared with feces.

My shower back-scrubbing brush was on the sink, caked in more feces, and apparently was the tool used for the wall smearing. My mother is the cleanest woman you'll ever meet. This would never happen.

My attention was grabbed by bright flashing or strobing from the bathroom window. I climbed in the shower to look out and saw a beautiful deep space scene, with stars and planets and comets flashing and strobing and whizzing around in a dynamic show. It struck me as beautiful at the time, and eventually I thought to go get my camera.

I only got to take a couple of pics before the entire space-scene began to rapidly retreat away, as if it didn't want to be photographed.

Isn't spectacular stellar phenomenon a bad omen?