No More Minors in Our House

Well, when you take it a step, a day, at a time, eventually you get to the mileposts. Our most recent milepost marks the 18th birthday of our youngest Daughter. She's taking full advantage of her majority by staying out late every night. She will be graduating from high school in June, and then I think we'll be in for a wild summer ride!

Although it feels good to be free of the responsibility of raising children, I am not free from fiscal responsibility yet. It's a strange twilight, where we need to re-assess the roles we will play, and the amount of accountability we will assign to Daughter while she lives here (rent-free, for the moment.)

Owens Outpost - Aloha!

Many, many years ago, I burned a bunch of midnight oil learning to code web pages by hand. The result was the Owens' Outpost, which started on Netcom, migrated to Earthlink, and now resides on Comcast. Since then, blogs mushroomed and I created this blog and Ancestories essentially to supersede the Outpost. However, the last Outpost still lives on the Comcast site, and I guess it's time to take it down.

Hand coding is going the way of Underwood manual typewriters - remembered affectionately, but no longer worth the work, now that better tools are available. I can even blog from my phone now, though it's a bit of work for anything longer than a paragraph. And even the tedium of typing on those tiny, tiny buttons is relieved by the Dragon Naturally Speaking iPhone app: just dictate, copy, and paste!



The only drawbacks I can see are that I usually do my blogging after 10:30 p.m. and speaking out loud to the iPhone might be disturbing to others in the house. Also, it removes the privacy factor when everyone around me can hear what I say.

At work, we retired the grandCENTRAL blog this week, because staff is putting more emphasis on our twitterstreams and Facebook page. So I guess it remains to be seen how much longer the Halona blog will live on - I, too, have a twitterstream and Facebook page now.

Easter Sunday, and the Heat's Back On

This has been a longer winter than usual - I failed to meet my Thanksgiving benchmark for turning the heat on, and I failed to meet my Valentine's Day benchmark for turning it off. The weather warmed up for a bit, and I turned off the heat during the third week of March; but I turned it back on two days ago because we're in the midst of another cold spell and rainstorms. (Outside high yesterday: 59, low: 40, temp inside: 60.) Running the heater on Easter Sunday?! Who'd have thought that would happen here in Sacramento!

I bought a kirigami page-a-day calendar this year, replacing the tangram calendar I've had two years in a row. Kirigami is like origami in that you fold a square piece of paper, but then you cut out shapes to form artistic works. The creators have had fun with Valentine's Day (hearts) and St. Patrick's Day (celtic designs). Now we're into spring - can you spot the bunny in the picture above?

Try it yourself with an unseasonal snowflake application from Make-a-flake. Here's mine.