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Well, that’s going to be an interesting Labor Day week: Daily Kos: We Have Four Days

I would like to propose that we take a few backhoes, just dig around the whole United States and separate the country from the Earth’s crust. Then grab a few oil-reserves from the rest of the world and propel the whole lot into outer space where we can become our own planet. Not only would it minimize the risk of future terrorist attacks, no, it would also bring peace to the rest of the world. And now that Pluto has been degraded, we could add the “United Planet of America” to the solar-system instead. It would also add tons of jobs in the space-industry, because we still need to import all those goods from China (and don’t forget the cars from Germany) via space-travel. The more I think about it the more attractive this idea becomes. I readying my shovel …

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Sunday morning we decided to go over to the Albuquerque zoo with our friend Heidi and her two boys, Miles (4 y/o) and Mason (2 y/o). We left early because we knew it would be another hot day and given that Albuquerque is usually some 10-20 degrees hotter than Santa Fe, we wanted to be done before the heat of the afternoon.

Three kids were packed in the back of a Volvo and I was again amazed how large families with more than 3 kids manage to chauffeur all of them around all the time.

Soon after 10am we arrived at the zoo and were pleasantly surprised by the small number of cars in the parking lot. Looked like it was a very good idea to head there early.

ABQ zoo: Pia, Mason and Heidi

I remember the last time I was there with Pia (just the two of us), she would get bored after two hours and wanted to leave the zoo. It was completely different this time with Miles on her side. The two of them are almost the same age (in fact Miles is 2 months older than Pia) and the two of them really enjoyed each others’ company.

We did the whole loop and I think we saw every single animal on display. Well, except for the chimps, because their “home” is undergoing restoration. One of the highlights was the camel-ride right next to the restaurant in the zoo. Miles and Pia were allowed to ride all alone on the camel and it was the cutest thing to see the two of them on the animal, hugging each other and holding on to the bars of the saddle:

ABQ zoo: Miles and Pia

ABQ zoo: Miles and Pia

Just a few steps away from the camel-ride is also a playground. A huge contraption allows kids to climb, swing and slide. That killed another 30 mins. It was around noon and the temperature was well into the 90s. How do you cool down on a hot day like this one? The zoo-people also thought about this one: next to the playground is a large green grille on the floor with water spouts below it. At seemingly random interval a spout shoots a splash of water into the air and all kids try to get themselves into the stream of water before it disappears again in the grille.

ABQ zoo: Miles and Pia

ABQ zoo: water fun

It took about 20 mins before both kids were completely soaked, but they were still begging for more - you can see them below waiting on top of one of the spouts for more water:

ABQ zoo: waiting for water

After a picnic lunch on the lawn, we finished the loop and topped it off with a train-ride through part of the park.

ABQ zoo: elephants

Just after two o’clock we were at the entrance again and made our way back to the car. Sitting for 4 hours in the summer sun, the temperature in the car had reached way over 100 degrees. It was almost impossible to touch the metal parts, let alone the steering wheel. We opened all windows and doors, switched on the AC and waited a few minutes before we put the kids back in the car.

15 mins into the ride back home to Santa Fe it was quiet in the back and all three kids took their nap for the entire ride back home.

When we left Albuquerque we saw some pretty decent thunderstorm clouds on the horizon and we knew that Santa Fe was about to get a nice afternoon rain. As we excited the highway at St. Francis Drive we could see that the storm had just dumped a massive amount of water over the city. Even some streets were flooded in areas, because the gutters couldn’t handle the load. What was most surprising was the temperature difference: we left Albuquerque we it was close to 100 degrees and the temperature in Santa Fe was 60 degrees after the storm - a 40 degrees drop in less than an hour - wow.

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I was running low on disk space for my main drive and needed to do some cleanup. Years ago I started to use WinDirStat and I’m still using it. This neat little application will scan your whole harddisk and will show you where you are burning the most disk space. Once all files and directories are scanned you get a treemap view of all files on your system. The larger a certain colored area, the more disk-space is consumed by that portion of your file system. Click on a color and it will tell what files are responsible for that color. Very easy to spot areas that can be cleaned up quickly to free up disk space.

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Pia had two of her friends come over last night. After some exercise in and around the house, the three of them ended up in the bathtub together. Yes, those are Popsicles …

Bath for three

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Bavarian goodies

… for the house warming party tomorrow evening. Need to resist the urge to sample them all …

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My sleeping is so whacked these days, I can’t even begin to imagine how I stay awake the whole day. Almost every day I wake up around 3-4am and have the hardest time falling asleep again. I drink enough water during the day, I get enough exercise, I eat healthy, but I still have no frigging idea what keeps me awake. Yes, I’m stressed sometimes, but not more than in the past when I clocked 7-8 hrs of solid sleep every night.

This morning I got up at 4:45am, cruised the web and soon after the caffeine of the first cup of coffee hit my system I started to work.

Then at 7:30am I started to feel restless and finally decided to do something about. Washed up, changed into shorts and jogging shoes, took the dogs and went for a run! Nothing to write home about, but it did feel right at that moment. It was less than half an hour when I was back home and I was huffing/puffing like a steam train, but still I felt differently the whole day. My skin was tingly (look, there’s the non-existent word again) and I felt great. Hmm - I guess I’m going to try to make that an institution from now on when I don’t have Pia … let’s see how long it lasts.

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I’ve been going through my ever growing photo collection for a few days now and I’m surprised by how many interesting shots I find that I did not consider post-worthy in the past. I don’t know if it is based on the fact that I’m becoming more familiar with Photoshop Lightroom or if I’m simply looking at things differently.

Here’s one shot of Cody’s face (see this entry), which I like a lot and haven’t posted before.

I’ll see what else I can dig up and post as I come across things I like …

Cody

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There’s an interesting article/presentation over at: The simFluence : Deep Linking Flex Applications Presentation at 360Flex.

It talks about how to implement deep-linking for your Flex apps. Traditionally moving from state to state in a Flex application, does not update the associated browser URL and hitting “back” and then “forward” will not bring you to the exact same state in the Flex UI, instead the application will be reinitialized. Using the ExternalInterface API you can now update the browser’s URL to match the state of your Flex application. This means that one can “bookmark” interesting spots deep inside the Flex application and can return to that bookmarked location later on.

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We are at the tail-end of the Perseids and apparently last night was the night with the most activity. I looked in the sky (east) when I let the dogs out for a last pee and I got a nice light-show. Try it again tonight and perhaps you can see some more of the: The 2007 Perseid Meteor Shower

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A long time ago I set my DVR to automatically record certain events. If nothing else is supposed to record and the DVR finds a program with my selected keywords in it, it will automatically record it. One of those keywords is “New Mexico”.

Last night I started watching one of those movies that had been recorded automatically. I did not even hear about “Dreamland” before I started watching it. You can get synopsis and more details over at imdb.com.

What a nice piece of work. I love all the actors and they do a fabulous job in representing a non-typical trailer-park population. At times they seem to be misplaced and one wonders whether the trailer-park is the right setting for the story. But then they seem to be so genuinely nice and warm, that the environment does not count any more.

If you have not seen it yet and want some New Mexico big-sky scenes, I can highly recommend it.

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