Hello April

Why do I almost always fall for Google’s April Fools Day schemes? Last year it was about retrieving emails after you sent them (like days or weeks or even months after); this year it was CADIE, which was some kind of bot that would match your voice and automatically respond to your emails. I found myself nodding along to the description posted on the Gmail homepage and then finally realized at the end: oh. It isn’t real. Today is April 1. (It was worse last year; last year I think I believed the joke for about a week.)

My mom, sister, and I started a self-defense class today. Now I’m scared to park near vans, walk in parking lots by myself, or go out to the mailbox in broad daylight. Okay…maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. We learned about five or six techniques today, and I hope we never have to use them…for obvious reasons, plus the fact that I am probably going to forget them all because we still have six hours of training left in which we will learn even more techniques.

I realize I must sound like a total geek, but CSS is really cool, and today I made an amazing unordered list. (Well, with the help of that book I was talking about in the last post.) Hopefully the following isn’t copyrighted — I did code it myself, but with the book’s images — but I want to show it off. This is just an unordered list with some images. SWEET!



This has been a really random post. The following is a lot less random, and more on the serious side, so it seems kind of weird to end this way. But I digress. I read this Proverb this morning and wanted to share. It’s something worth chewing on:

For the LORD gives wisdom;
From His mouth come knowledge and understanding.

Proverbs 2:6

It just got me thinking…where do I usually look for wisdom? School, other people, the internet, books, television, you name it. Not that those things or people aren’t helpful; to be sure, they are, but where did they get their knowledge? Who gave them understanding? It struck me that I have never really considered God as being the One who has more wisdom than, say, a university (typing that out sounds ridiculous, but it’s what I thought!).

When I consider that God constructed everything — everything — it makes me realize that He has wisdom beyond what I can imagine. And He gives it! (Proverbs 2 talks about how you should look for it.) It’s a humbling and amazing thing. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, and I don’t want to sound preachy, but I’m throwing this out there because this verse stuck to me today. Here’s hoping it sticks to you too.

"Let's go randomly sing together!" — Dylan.

We watched Seven Brides for Seven Brothers tonight, and watching it reminded me of when we first saw it 11 years ago. Dad saw it on TV and told the rest of us about it, and after buying it, we went to the library (then the only internet source) to research the movie. I remember signing in at the librarian's desk and then squeezing in with Mom between two thin partitions to use the computer. The monitor was one of those mile-long, yellowed CRTs, and you used either Internet Explorer (aah!) or Netscape. I didn't even know how to go back. I'd go to a page and get stuck there. (I told Dylan about that tonight, and he couldn't believe I didn't know how to use a back button. He's 11 now, the same age I was at that time, and knows how to do a heck of a lot more with a computer than I did at 11.)

I remember using a text browser at some point too. The screen was entirely black and the text came out lime green (early Myspace anyone?). 11 years and we've gone from text browsers, IE (unfortunately, it's still around), and Netscape to IE (yeah, someone do something about this), Firefox, Opera, Camino, and whatever other minority browsers that are floating around out there. (Side note, Opera is good. Except for when it crashes, freaks out on Apple's and Myspace's CSS styles, crashes, doesn't export certain things, and crashes. I jumped ship to Firefox.)

The day of the text browser was the time when I was into acting and singing, not long before my siblings and I were in local productions of The Sound of Music and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, and… (insert other random 11-year-old memory here.)

We watched a lot of musicals back then.