An interesting article: No Joke: Animals Laugh, Too from livescience.com.

Cliff’s post: Hanky Panky On The Farm.

Marty’s post: Kicker (another great post)

Transcript of the homily of the Pope’s funeral.

Speaking of that, I am curious about the relationship between the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. The Eastern churches got a few minutes in the funeral mass, which surprised me.

Yesterday was election day in Kansas, for a lot of local offices, plus a constitutional amendment. Here’s what you can expect if you live in my area:

First, you go to the park shelter house. It’s the only voting place in the area. They don’t bother with “vote here” signs out front because everybody knows where it is already. There was a small “vote here” sign on the front door, one that you could read when you were about 5 feet away.

When you enter, you discover three election workers and, probably, no other voters. Their first question is “city or township?” If you live within the city limits, you get a different ballot than if you live outside due to things like mayor races. I’m a township.

Next, they look up your name on the big printout, and you sign, and receive your ballot. The ballots are printed on paper around here.

Now it’s time to select a voting booth. Not very hard; all four of them are free.

Then comes the tough part: voting. There are two questions on the ballot this time. First, selecting 3 candidates from the 3 that are running for the school board. (I don’t know why that’s on the ballot.) Second, voting yes or no on the constitutional amendment. That’s it. Leave the pencil in the booth, put the ballot in the box, and don’t forget your “I voted” sticker.

Elapsed time: less than 5 minutes.

I think it was getting busy as I was leaving. There was one other voter in the building.

For about a month now, we’ve had this odd odor in our house. It started out in our laundry room, on the east end of our main floor. Then we noticed it in our bedroom, on the west end of our 2nd floor. Since then, we’ve noticed it in almost every room in the house on different days, but never all over at once. It’s always one or two rooms, but they could be on opposite ends of the house.

I few weeks ago, I realized that the smell was coming from the furnace vents. After some experimentation, I noticed that running the furnace made the smell go away. It got worse when the temperatures were warmer, and the furnace wasn’t running.

So we called out our local heating/plumber guy. After they were out here three times, they did find a couple of problems with our furnace, but no gas leaks or anything that could explain the smell — which, by the way, three different employees couldn’t identify. They even left an air charting unit with us, which ruled out things like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulates. It did helpfully notice that there were odors, but didn’t tell us what they were.

So here we are, still smelling this…. smell. It defies categorization. It mystefies experts. Something like a cross between dirty laundry, mold, and a skunk. And yet…. none of those, either. It’s weird.

I’ve taken to closing the vents in our bedroom before turning in for the night if the smell is bad in the evening.

So, I’m appealing to all the bloggers out there for suggestions, short of selling the place and moving to town :-)

Oh, and this is not the first time we’ve had odor problems here. However, the cause the first time was immediately apparent and thus could be eventually dealt with :-)

I read this at the memorial service for Alvin Goerzen on March 23, 2005.

For us grandchildren, our earliest memories of Grandpa are of visiting
him at his farm. It was always fun to be there. Family gatherings
were usually there, and he always made delicious food. Peter, James,
and I remember the Zwiebach, borscht, and monster cookies the most.
If any of these things were ever missing from a meal, I’d be
disappointed, even though the food was still great.

The family usually was at Grandpa’s place for Christmas. Grandpa’s
tree had the wheat-weaving ornaments that Grandma Goerzen made. I
don’t remember her, but I always admired those ornaments.

After dinner, we’d have our gift exchange. We’d all get our Christmas
presents, and then after it was all over, Grandpa would get a sly
smile and a little twinkle in his eye. He had “extra” presents for
each of us grandkids every year. No matter how nice the other
presents were, Grandpa’s always seemed extra special.

There were lots of things to do at Grandpa’s place. He kept toy
tractors and vehicles in a closet off his living room. They were
probably 30 years old, but they still worked fine. He also had a
large supply of board games. But the most unique thing was his air
hockey table. It was always great fun to play a game of air hockey
with Grandpa.

We have lots of memories of Grandpa’s yard and farm, too. The yard
was always good for exploring — an old implement here or there, or an
old vehicle. Or maybe some wasps if you look in the wrong place. I
never got stung, but I still remember what places to avoid because of
wasps or bees.

I remember the day I was exploring behind some buildings and found an
old John Deere tractor. I had heard people talk about this tractor,
but I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before. It seemed almost like
a legend to me, and I was quite excited to actually find it.

Grandpa’s creek at the edge of his pasture was good for fishing and
camping. The cows didn’t seem to mind the visitors, and sometimes
came surprisingly close.

Grandpa liked to be a bit of a tease. He’d greet us with “Hi, Skeezix”
when we’d arrive at his place, and he often called me Hanschen.

Grandpa was always interested in our lives. He was at all our school
concerts, recitals, and plays. Last fall, Terah had been sick, and
just as she was getting better, Grandpa was taken to intensive care.
We visited him there, and it was the first time he had seen Terah
since she was sick.

Grandpa looked asleep when we got there. Terah said “hi” and started
to ask him how he was doing. He immediately interrupted her. In the
strongest voice I heard from him in quite awhile, he said, “Terah, how
are you?” Grandpa refused discuss how he was doing until he was
completely sure that Terah was OK. It’s a special feeling to know how
deeply he cared about us.

Grandpa always wanted visitors, even when his illnesses made it
difficult. Terah and I often visited him after church on Sundays. He
wanted to know how we were doing, what happened in church, and might
tell us how he was doing if we asked. He sure wouldn’t say anything
if he thought it might interfere with hearing about us, though.

Sometimes, it was difficult for him to talk, but every time, he made
sure to say thank you for visiting. That made us feel special, too.

Terah remembers another hospital visit. Even though Grandpa looked
asleep, she held his hand and talked to him for awhile. When she said
goodbye, Grandpa managed to open his eyes for a moment and thank her
for visiting.

Last Thursday, Terah visited Grandpa at Bethesda. She called me at
work to tell me that Grandpa didn’t say “thank you”. She didn’t have
to tell me what that meant.

We hurried back to Bethesda that evening. Grandpa was still not doing
well. He said a few words when we got there, but by the end of our
visit, he was too tired to thank us for visiting.

That time, I was the one that said “thank you”. I thanked him for
letting us visit him so many times. He brightened all our lives.

The nationwide free credit report site is now live over much of the country. I’ll check it out in the next few days and see what it does.

It appears some local DSL providers are blocking Vonage simply because Vonage is a competitor to their own phone service.

Pictures are banned in Chicago’s newest park because taking photographs of a sculpture there is being deemed illegal reproduction of a copyrighted work.

It’s been a few days since my last post. I’m still here, working on my Haskell todo list. I’ll be writing an article for Free Software Magazine and I’d like to get some of these things done first, so I can write about them. I’ve implemented a low-level Haskell interface to Python, and have implemented most of my list using that already.

We’ve made it to season 5 catching up with Stargate SG-1. Excellent. That’s the best TV show I’ve seen since Babylon 5.

I got my Netgear WG602 access point set up. It came with a nifty GPL compliance notice poniting me to a URL for the source code. Sweet. There’s apparently a community around hacking these things, though not as big as the ones around hacking the more-powerful wireless routers.

For the first time in awhile, I won’t watch the State of the Union tonight. There’s a Purdue game on, so the TV will be otherwise occupied. (Guess I need to get my dual-tuner MythTV setup going.)