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This weekend we set out on yet another round of cleaning and reorganizing. Over the years, Jo and I have come to appreciate organization and efficiency in our surroundings, and are trying very hard to teach that to Sam. I know a few people that seem to be born optimizers and organizers, but we don't seem to come by this naturally. However, with some dedication and good old family teamwork, we've certainly made great strides as the years have rolled on. It could be worse.

I was making our favorite breakfast this morning, bacon and egg sandwiches on toasted english muffins washed down with fruit smoothies, when I mentioned to Jo that bacon smelled like home. She smiled said something about "how Iowan" I was and puttered about, eagerly awaiting her sandwich and coffee, eyes still bleary from staying up half the night working on end of semester projects.

I know that bacon is all hip and cool these days, but as an Iowan, I claim first cool on bacon. I've eaten it my entire life. And as I barrel towards my 38th birthday, I may have shed most of my bad habits, taken up running and a generally healthy diet, I can't and won't give up bacon. It should be our state food. They should teach bacon appreciation in our schools.

It's that important. :)

I have to start by saying that Price Lab is simply a wonderful school for my son to attend. There are any number of reasons for me to feel this way, but one stands out. That would be the fact that not only do they get to do stop motion animation projects in second grade, but they get to do stop motion animation projects about zombies.

Yes, I said zombies:

I just finished up a late supper with Jo. We had one of our favorite meals: fresh baked baguette, camembert cheese and smoked salmon with fresh green onions on the side. A nice Riesling washes it down quite well. We've snacked all day on kumquats, had leftover beef stroganoff for lunch and started this sunny March Sunday with bacon and egg sandwiches and nice strong coffee.

We have a new policy at UNI that requires all hard drives that are no longer in use by the university to be securely wiped of data or in some cases completely destroyed. How do you destroy a hard drive? Well, one way is to us a big degausser to zap the read/write heads and all the data on the platters, rendering the drive intact, but unusable. And how do you break a degausser? Have a student shove a drive into it with the mounting screws still attached!

As much as I like Google Chrome, this is the type of trick that keeps me using Firefox as my day to day browser.