### Zooish folk dancing

This was my first week at home with O-man in HI, and I've been doing my best to stay busy so I can avoid thinking about all of our stuff floating across the ocean. (Aside- our delivery is scheduled for Monday at 9 AM - woohoo!).

Thursday morning we went to the Honolulu Zoo. Right after walking in, there's a sign that reads "Best zoo for 2300 miles" and has arrows pointing to all the better zoos, thousands of miles away. I'm no zoo connoisseur, but I was actually quite impressed! We loved the watching the kookaburra splashing in its bath, growling at the tiger, and found that the zoo has the best playground on the island. Good thing our $25 annual membership fee will get us into the zoo to use it whenever we want! ($25/year pays for 2 adults and 6 kids. SIX KIDS!)

Owen at the petting zoo

Did I mention we shared some shaved-ice (strawberry and coconut)?

Today we got a care package from a friend and Owen fell in love with the bubble wrap! He started singing his favorite Jewish folk song from music class (It's titled The Wedding Song) while popping away. Here's a little video so you can see the beauty of bubble-wrap folk dancing:

mama mia said…
May I please see this video re-shot in the new Kaala Way apartment, with the music class cd playing as you unpack your photos and other stuff from the bubblewrap? That is the song I now have stuck in my head, and need to hear it just one more time for real. I don't do it justice when I try to sing it to the houston folks.
karinms said…
Look at your tan!! You guys look great! I love zoos...and I wish I knew what a kookaburra was. Love, love, love the youtube videos of Owen!

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…