Family
I’m 1000% jokey and your 100% jokey. — Mazie
Dinner in New House
Today we closed on our new house. It was an exciting day filled with
activity and signing many, many sheets of paper. To celebrate the
closing we moved a handful of things into the new house including
Mazie’s play table and decided to have dinner at the new place from
Broder’s Deli.
We don’t actually move in for a little bit after painting and some new carpet.
Tuned into Pathways on WELY this morning. Nice cup of espresso to go along. Tammy’s making breakfast. Fire going in fireplace. Great espresso. Mazie coloring. Getting ready to smoke some pork.
After 5 days I have finally found my watch. Indeed, Mazie had been “tricky” and hid it, then promptly forgot!
Haven’t been able to find my watch all day. My guess is Mazie hid it and then forgot about it. Hmmm….
2009 State Fair
We had a great time at the Minnesota State Fair this year. This year was the first year that Mazie really got into it. Highlights included the butterfly house, carousel ride, cookies, skyjump and the butter heads. Mazie had an awesome time on the skyjump.
Mazie Photo Shoot
Last Friday Mazie and I had a super fun “Daddy-Daughter” day filled with many fun things. Part of our fun day was a trip to a store to get a new dress (we ended up getting two) followed by a photo shoot in her new clothes. We decided to do the photo shoot in our front yard, taking advantage of all the wonderful tall grasses and native plants. Mazie had a ton of fun, and so did I behind the camera.
Burger Jones First Impression
Tammy, Mazie and I joined my sister-in-law Angie, Mazie’s cousin Nora and Grandma Olson for lunch at Burger Jones today. We’d been meaning to try out Burger Jones since before it even opened and this was our first opportunity.
First impression was good, but unfortunately the whole experience just stayed there at just good. I got a burger because, hey, you’re at Burger Jones. I ordered the burger medium, but it came well without any pink at all. It was a pretty uninspiring burger and I would take a burger of my own off of the Big Green Egg most any day. We also tried the cheese curds as they were supposed to be very good. They were pretty good, when they had cheese in them. The way they were prepared made a lot of the cheese come out of the breading. Mazie and I decided to give the Nutella Malt a try and it was good, but how can you do a malt wrong. Lastly everyone split the stack of fries trying the regular fries, sweet potato fries (my absolute favorite) and waffle-cheese fry. The sweet potato fries seemed like they came right off of a Sysco truck and into a fryer. Another yawn.
For the cost, I would have expected something better. It was all fine, and everyone left happy, but there wasn’t anything about the food that left me wanting to return quickly.
Peppa Pig DVD Covers Part 2
Another contribution to the Internet for high-resolution cover art. Here are the front and back scans of the DVD’s for Peppa Pig: The Balloon Ride, Piggy in the Middle and Bubbles. Mazie loves Peppa Pig.
First Shot at Homemade Ice Cream
Cooking was definitely the action for this years Father’s Day gifts. Tammy signed me up for a couple more of the Grillmaster cooking classes at Kitchen Window. Mazie got me something I’ve wanted to play around with for a while, an ice cream maker. We gave it a go for the first time tonight with a basic vanilla ice cream recipe. Mazie put the ingredients together and I did the measuring, we then poured it into the machine and started it up.
The machine cranked away and the ice cream slowly came together. The machine has an open top so that you can add ingredients while the ice cream is still mixing, but it’s also handy to dip a spoon in and give the ice cream a test. The final product was delicious and it was a lot of fun to make.
This was a learning batch. I think I should have ran it in the machine a bit longer than I did. It was solid and held in place, but I think I could have gotten it a bit more solid. The biggest thing I learned was that in addition to freezing the ice cream makers bowl, I should also freeze the bowl I’m going to put the finished ice cream in. I placed it in a glass bowl and some of the ice cream melted right away on contact with the glass. Need to keep everything cold!
Happy birthday to not you. — Mazie
Unordered Lists to Comma Separated List
I was tweaking some layout in Tumblr today and I really wanted to take a list of tags and display them with proper grammar. For example, I wanted to have commas in the right places and to use the proper singular and plural forms as needed. My goal was something like.
At 9pm with tags Mazie, Baseball and St. Paul Saints.
Or, if there was only one tag.
At 9pm with tag Mazie.
The trick is that Tumblr only provides a way to iterate through the list of tags and you can’t do any funky logic in there. This is actually a benefit, since it forced me to figure out the right way to do this with CSS. After a little searching I found a really old post from 2005 explaining comma-separated list elements that was pretty close to what I wanted. I did some tweaking on it and came up with the following CSS block to do exactly what I wanted.
/* Styling for a comma separated list of values from a ul */
ul.comma-separated { display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
ul.comma-separated li { display: inline; }
/* Put the correct label in front, this should be plural for multiple tags */
ul.comma-separated li:first-child:before { content:"tags "; }
/* The comma we are looking for. */
ul.comma-separated li:before { content: ", "; white-space: pre;}
/* The last element should not have a comma and should be followed with a period. */
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:before { content:" and "; white-space: pre;}
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:after { content: "."; }
/* Special case required to handle a ul with only one item. */
ul.comma-separated li:only-child:before { content:"tag "; }
This will take a block of HTML like this
<ul class="comma-separated">
<li>Mazie</li>
<li>Baseball</li>
<li>St. Paul Saints</li>
</ul>
and display it exactly how I want.
This was a great exercise. I’m not a CSS guru and I don’t tend to look to CSS to solve this type of problem. I immediately wanted to start working some magic inside of a loop in the code and handle the logic there. This is much simpler, and has the huge benefit of being able to modify the contents after page load with Javascript and have the formatting dynamically adjust as needed.
Now I just need to move this super smart CSS into my WordPress site as well.
Up
Mazie was ecstatic to see Up. She was giddy running to the theater to see it. We all really enjoyed it.
Ya know what Dad? I actually don’t care. — Mazie (almost 4)
Yesterday our neighbors across the street daughter had found a batch of very small baby kittens. There were four kittens, and Mazie took a turn holding each and every one. She loved it.
No, we didn’t keep any of them.
Sea Monkeys
Tammy’s brand new, never played before, softball team has their first game tonight. I can’t wait to hear the recap!
Mazie decided to do a little project with all of the dog toys the other day. Pretty cool. (Don’t obsess about the door frame. This is a panorama off the iPhone that wasn’t intended to be a panorama.)
“Well, I’m full from food, but I’m not full from dessert.” - Mazie
Well, I’m full from food, but I’m not full from dessert. — Mazie