This the latest photo I have of my kids. We were at Lincoln Park Zoo last weekend. They all look so grown up!
My kids
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Tag Archives: keegan
Keegan turns 18
Well, the day that seemed so far in the future to me has arrived. Keegan turns 18 today. Wow. It is hard to believe that our eldest child is all grown up and soon to move on to college!
Last night we had his birthday party at Bryan’s. Here was the requested menu: Grandma J.’s lasagna, a “loaded” salad, a Caesar’s salad, Texas toast, strawberry cake, and chocolate eclair cake.
Proverbs 3:5-6 is an appropriate verse for this time in his life.
Happy birthday, Keegan!
Christmas time
I’ve mentioned before that I have mixed feelings about Christmas. In fact, sometimes my children and wife think I am Scrooge personified. There are a lot of complicated reasons for these mixed feelings, but this year I am looking forward to Christmas more than in the past. I’m not sure why.
On this, the first day of December, I am thinking Christmas-y thoughts. I recently put up Christmas lights on our house — something we haven’t done much since we lived in Indiana. The Christmas tree is already in the house but not yet set up. (I pulled it out of the garage when we were cleaning the garage on Saturday.) We hope to add a few more outdoor decorations in the next few days. The lights give the house a nice glow at night.
Part of the reason Christmas time has always been a bit negative for me is the onslaught of spending on gifts and such. Many years in the past, this has put us in debt. We are extremely fortunate to have a small amount of extra income at this point in the year, so I am not as stressed about the money angle as I have been in some years past, and that helps. Another stress in the past has been when we host Christmas at our house and kill ourselves trying to get the house cleaned up and decent enough for family to come over. We haven’t hosted Christmas for a few years now, and I don’t think we’ll be hosting it this year, either. That’s a good thing because our house is in need of major renovations and cleanup. Not having to host Christmas takes away a major negative aspect of the season for me, too.
More than anything else, though, I struggle with getting excited about Christmas or any other event that children get so excited about. My glass is half empty, not half full, which means that I tend to be negative in outlook. I hope and pray that this year I will join my children in their excitement and anticipation. I also want them to truly appreciate and focus on the reason for the season, which is the fact that God came into our world as a baby, in order that He might save us from our sins by dying on the cross in our place. Recently I’ve begun to pick a passage from the Bible to read to the three younger ones as part of putting them to bed each night. They seem to really enjoy this. I think I’ll plan to focus on Bible verses throughout this month that talk about Jesus’ birth and what it means to us.
On a rather sad note, I was thinking the other day about the fact that this Christmas may be the last one where Keegan is living at home with us. At this time next year — hopefully — he will be busy finishing his first semester in college. Where has the time gone? And more importantly, I ask myself, have I used that time well?
Hide and Seek
Below is a video I just uploaded to YouTube that was taken a few years ago. I attempted to really scare the little kids and the effort backfired. (The back story is that I did this once before, when Keegan was little, and practically scared him out of ten year’s growth.)
Wii…I like it!
Those who know me well know that I really, really dislike video games. That’s unfortunate especially for my son Keegan, whose world seems to revolve around them most days. As a combination Christmas and birthday present, he got a Wii from his uncle Bryan. He is pretty thrilled.
The other night I played it for the first time and — shocker — I actually liked it! This may change my outlook on video games altogether (Keegan hopes so). We’ll see. Anyway, Wii gets two thumbs up.
Guys day out with Keegan
Keegan and I are at home by ourselves this weekend because Michele and the younger kids went with her family to her uncle’s funeral. Uncle Donny died last week from an unknown form of cancer. I wish we could have gone to the funeral but Keegan had a test at school yesterday morning and I couldn’t take another day off of work on Friday to be able to go. Yesterday was a guys day out for the two of us. We had a lot of fun. Yesterday afternoon we drove downtown to the big Apple store on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I weakened my resolve and allowed Keegan to buy a Star Wars game, which he is currently deeply engrossed in playing on our iMac downstairs. After that we had supper at Heaven on Seven, a Louisiana/Cajun eatery that I like. Keegan was dubious about going (he’s not really fond of trying new foods) but he ended up liking it a lot. After that we bought tickets to see Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It wasn’t showing until about an hour later so we killed time by walking down to the Borders next door to the historic Water Tower. After we saw the movie we both agreed that it was definitely worth watching and that we really had a good laugh. I like the movie a lot except that it seems to be taking the Shrek approach to kid’s movies by slyly incorporating many adult-themed jokes here and there. I don’t remember previous movies doing that so much. It was late by the time we got home but we had had a really fun time together. I am glad we were able to do this — we don’t often get time to spend together, just the two of us. It seems like lately we have been in constant conflict with each other. Spending time together helps us reconnect.
Answers.com added to Firefox
Earlier today I upgraded to the latest beta release of Firefox (1.5 beta 2). One of the new features in the latest release is the addition of Answers.com as a search engine choice. Nice. This weekend, my son, Keegan, asked me what Columbus Day is for. I honestly couldn’t remember. (Me: dumb librarian.) Was it to commemorate Columbus’s birthday, or his discovery of America, or something else? A quick search on Answers.com gave me the answer.
Some family photos
My brother, Dan, digitized many family photos a while ago. I’ve chosen a few to show here.
Below is a photo of all of my family members on the afternoon of our wedding in January 2000, including my six brothers and sisters and almost all of my nieces and nephews and one of my cousins. This is the last photo taken that includes all of my siblings and parents. My sister, Becky, is married and lives in New Zealand, so it is very unusual to have her in a recent family photo. And then my father died almost exactly two years after this photo was taken.
First row from left to right: Dan (brother), Ben (nephew), Keegan (son), Pelle (nephew), and Nils (nephew); Second row: Lars (nephew), my mother with Kerstin (niece) in her lap, my father with Bjorn (nephew) in his lap, and Sam (nephew from New Zealand). Third row: Debbie (sister), Bradley (cousin), Linda (sister-in-law), Jeff (brother), Jocelyn (niece), Tim (brother), Petra (sister-in-law), Kevin (brother), Britta (niece), me, Michele, Becky (sister from New Zealand).
Here is a photo of my mother and father on their wedding day in September 1958:
This photo is of Grandma McCallum, my mother’s mother. I was really close to her and miss her even to this day. This is the last photo taken of her not long before her death in October 1982. The baby in the stroller is Nils, my oldest nephew:
Below is a late photo of Grandpa and Grandma McCallum, the only grandparents I ever knew (my paternal grandparents both died before I was old enough to remember them):
I like this photo of all of us kids (except Donny, my parents’ third child, who died of unknown causes at 18 months of age). Left to right: Dan (#6 and twin to Debbie), Kevin (#1), me (#8) in Kevin’s lap, Tim (#2) with Debbie (#7 and twin to Dan) on his lap, Jeff (#4), and Becky (#5). At this point we still lived in Nebraska:
My Kiwi brother-in-law, Martin (top), along with some friends, pretending to do a Maori war dance called the “haka,” on a beautiful beach on the North Island:
Finally, here I am for my third birthday:
We now have a teenager in the house
Keegan turned thirteen this week. Yikes! We now have a teenager in the house! See photos from his birthday here. Next up: Cohen turns one year old in a few weeks…
Readerware
A couple of years ago, I happened to read about a software program called Readerware that was created to enable users to catalog their home collections of books, CDs, videos, and DVDs. Being the library geek that I am, and with my background in cataloging, my interest was immediately piqued. I downloaded a 30-day trial version back then and was quite impressed with Readerware’s auto-catalog feature, by which it goes out to predefined sites such as Amazon, Powell’s, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and other sites, and automatically harvests metadata about the item you wish to catalog, using a list of UPC and/or ISBN numbers that you’ve scanned into the system in a batch. Metadata can include (but is not limited to) author, title, publication information, value, and even, when available, cover images. You can pick and choose which sites you wish for Readerware to search, and in what order. You can also specify that it merge data from disparate sites into one record. Furthermore, instead of or in addition to doing batch searching, you can even drag and drop from a webpage containing information about an item into Readerware and it will auto-catalog that item on the fly. E.g. you can use Alibris or IMDB to find a record for something you own, drag the URL over to Readerware, and it’ll automatically parse the descriptive data and create a catalog record. One of the better aspects of the system’s capabilities is that in addition to the auto-catalog feature, it also allows you to periodically auto-update everything, e.g. to keep up with changing values for items you own. The cost for the Readerware bundle (there are three separate versions, one each for books, CDs, and videos/DVDs) is $75. I think that’s a real bargain.
Last week I was finally able to purchase a copy of the software and use it “for real.” Along with the software, I also received a free USB version of the :Cue:Cat barcode reader to enable me to quickly scan in the ISBN and/or UPC information needed to do the auto-cataloging. My wife and my eldest son, Keegan, rolled their eyes as I excitedly worked my way through our collections. I could tell they were thinking, “Oh great, there goes Mr. Library Geek again, wasting time on something technology related!” When I stopped scanning things in for a bit and had only one more bookshelf to do, I decided out of curiosity to review some of the prices of some of our books, just for fun, to see how much they might be worth. I was astonished to find one or two were valued at over $100 or more. When I showed this to Michele, suddenly her tune changed and she said, “What are you waiting for?! Get the rest of those books scanned!!!!” Keegan got very excited when I told him that one of the books that was valued the most was one of his game books! So we’re now singin’ a different tune ’round here. <grin>
Anyway, I think this is great software and highly recommend it to anyone! I’m inspired now to see if I can dabble in buying and selling books on the side. My plan is not to make much money, but instead, to make just enough of a profit selling other books to enable me to collect the books I really want. I see a whole new hobby opening up for me (like I really have time for that)…