Big Friendly Vegan

Danny Finegood died recently aged only 52. When I read about his death it made me strangely sad. I had never met the man and in fact had never heard his name before, but what he did was important in a way that I find hard to explain and his death is a loss to the world. Danny was an artist. Learn about his work here.

Danny and his work strongly reminds me of Arthur Stace.

This post is basically just for myself. At some point in the future I will come across this post, my memory will be jogged and maybe then I will be able to explain why I think these guys are so valuable.

I just did an on-line personality test (Myers-Briggs). Why? I don't know, but here are the results for all of those who don't read this blog.

Your Type is INTP
Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
78 38 62 33

Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:

* very expressed introvert
* moderately expressed intuitive personality
* distinctively expressed thinking personality
* moderately expressed perceiving personality

What all this means, I don't know but at least it has a label.

[From 2002. Reposting all of this stuff makes it feel like I am actually doing some work on this blog!]

Procrastination. Doing tomorrow what you could possibly do today. I am a master of it. Just look at the number of articles that I have written for this site. It was meant to be one a month, but in reality it is one whenever it happens. I start off, as I do with so many things, with a strong desire and a promise to myself that I will work hard and get it done...

...And then I don't do that much.

Anything that does get done, gets done in a rushed hour or two when it is absolutely necessary, or when I have gotten so disgusted at myself that I just have to do it. Usually, my efforts at alleviating procrastination are just a way of procrastinating on something else.

This article is a perfect example. I have a ton of other things to do at the moment, but I just don't want to do them. So I busy myself with writing a pointless article that no one will ever read. I justify this to myself thusly: "Well, at least I am writing. At least I am doing something. I am flexing the old writing muscle, which is exactly what I need to do in order to get that other writing task completed. That's what I am doing, I'm warming up!"

When I have finally finished this task I know that I will feel a sense of satisfaction. I have actually achieved something. The fact that that something has nothing to do with what I originally intended to do is of no real importance. I am on a high. I can now sit back and look at my accomplishment and think, "Wow, I have done something". But after a while, the high disappears and I sink again into the depths of procrastinatic depression.

The fact is, dear reader, I am a sick, sick man. I am writing this article, really, as a confession. I am sick of my procrastination and I want it to stop. The tempting thing to say here is that I will get around to doing that, but this type of black comedy is just so many tears from a clown. So let me just get it out in the open.

"Hi, My name is David, and I am a procrastinator".

There, that's the first step. That is meant to be the biggest step and it wasn't too hard. Everything else is meant to be easy, once I have made that admission. Isn't it?

Now I am supposed to tell my story, which is sort of what I have been doing so far, isn't it? Oh well, here it goes. I went to school for a long time. Then I went to university after that. I chose to study physics because (and I kid you not), the line for physics was shorter than the line for biology, which I what I originally intended to study.

After I finished my bachelor's degree, I enrolled in a master's and then a PhD. While a postgraduate student, I met my wife to be. I proposed to her after a year of going out. It took another 5 years to get married, however, because I kept on putting the wedding preparation off.

Now I am a lecturer at the same university that I studied at. I kept meaning to find other employment, but you know how it is...

...And that brings me up to today. So you can see from this that I have spent my entire life procrastinating. I have even had the same best friend for the past 20+ years. I keep meaning to go out and find new friends, but I never quite get around to it.

Now I am meant to make apologies to all of the people I have wronged by my procrastination. Damn these 12 steps! Now I will have to go out and talk to them because some of them haven't gotten around to getting email accounts yet (or even computers, in some cases).

I guess I will just have to put this step off until I can get around to it…and there it is again. One of these days someone is going to have to come up with a program with fewer steps in order to stop procrastination.

Now that it is time to finish the article, I suppose I should write something witty, just to give the article that sense of closure, but truth to tell... I don't really have the time right now. After all, I have a lot of other stuff to do (which all has to be done urgently), and it's such a nice day outside, and... well... you know how it is...

I'll just finish this tomorrow.

[This one was, I think, my first piece for Ed's site. It was done in 2001.]

When our daughter was born, it was inevitable that we would receive gifts for the baby. These ranged from the practical to the playful and all were greatly appreciated. One of my friends, knowing how I loved to read and would also read to my daughter (in fact I started reading The Hobbit to the baby when she was two hours old) gave her some books, one of which was an ABC book. I know that this isn't strange at all, but when I looked at the front cover of the book I saw that in addition to an illustrator there was also an author!

Now, I can appreciate the skill that goes into the visual design of a children's book and live in awe of the skill that illustrators have. Likewise, the ability to write entertaining poetry and prose for the little ones is a wonderful gift to have. I just didn't understand how a book about the letters of the alphabet could have an author. I opened the book and found that, rather than just a collection of letters, this book actually had little stories associated with the letter (hence the author) and the pictures illustrated the story as well as the letter.

This particular book had an animal and plant theme with native flora and fauna beginning with each letter. I found the book totally fascinating and quite satisfying, up to a point.

Now, you're probably thinking that I am a little mad, or have led a very sheltered life in order to get interested in a simple ABC book. This is probably true, but what I did next is even stranger and serves to confirm whatever impression you undoubtedly have formed.

You see, as I was reading through the book (and brushing up on my native plants and animals) I came, invariably to X. Now, there aren't too many surprises in an ABC book; B follows A, G leads H, and Z always finishes last. So, while the book lacked any real suspense or drama, it did have some tragedy. At X, the author had used "X-Mas Beetle" as the animal.

Now I realize that this isn't as appalling as say seeing Bambi's mother dying (a tragedy that still brings me to tears), but as a reasonably well-read person, I was deeply offended. How dare they take a perfectly good alphabet and a great premise and wreck it with "Xmas"! No one actually says the X in Xmas (well, not that I know of anyway), so why would you use that to teach a child his or her ABC's?

This discovery doesn't sound too strange, I agree, but I'm getting to that part. After being disappointed by this betrayal (which I liken to reading a really good novel and then finding out, after 600 pages, that it was all a dream in the first place) I decided to have a look at other ABC books to see how they handled X.

You may be asking yourself "Why would a fully grown and obviously intelligent man go to a book store and look at ABC books (shelved by author, of course)"? The answer is simple; I want value for my X. I realize that I didn't pay for this particular book, but if I did want to buy one (to teach my daughter about the joys of X, maybe) then I would want to make sure that all of the letters are set firmly into there correct places and that all was right with the world in general. After all, once you start messing about with the alphabet, the next step is spelling, and then grammar, and then what? You end up buying "Lite" products, and you can't spell potato anymore.

Anyway, it was off to the local bookstore for some research into X. Fortunately, there was quite a collection to examine; it seems that everyone who's anyone turns his or her hand to these things. Now I wish to point out, before I present the results of my findings, that I am not here to comment on the illustrators of these tomes, who by and large do a very nice job. It may seem outrageous to spend $30+ dollars on an alphabet book, but when you compare the illustrations in these to the $1.95 bargain basket books, you can see that you aren't paying for the writing (at least, I hope you're not). Anyway, back to the results. It seems that, for perhaps obvious reasons, xylophone was a very popular X choice. This is fine if the book is a general "things that begin with certain letters" type book, but it does tend to limit the themed volumes to books about musical instruments. There were occasional X-Rays, both in the general type books and in science or medicine themed ones, and even the occasional X-mas reared its head (I still can't justify this one), but that was it, and I think I know why.

Take a break for a second and try to think of as many words as you can that begin with X (ignoring X-mas, X-ray, and xylophone, because I've already used them; and no, X-Files doesn't count, either). Write them down. Now count how many you have.

Is the total 0?

Here we have an excellent example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can't think of X words because all we have been taught from our ABC books is xylophone, which in turn leads us to only teach that to our children, which results in them not knowing any X words. The disturbing thing is that no one cares! As the English language evolved, there were probably lots and lots of X words invented. These words, however, died over the generations because all anyone was ever taught about X was that you use it to spell "xylophone". This is why it's got such a high value in Scrabble. The supply is restricted and the value of the letter increases. I don't know about the rest of you, but I am not going to let this happen. I am going to reclaim our heritage.

Right now I am in the process of writing some themed ABC books that will, I hope, inspire a resurgence in the letter X. I am so dedicated to this project that my wife and I plan to name our first son Xavier.

Imagine a world where X not only marks the spot or indicates a wrong answer, but where it is loved and cherished as much as A, B and even W. Let's take it out of the hands of mathematicians and physicists, who have abused it for so long, and give it back to the poets. I strongly urge you to support this cause and buy the following products: The Greek Mythology Alphabet, where you can read about Argonauts, Minotaurs and Xerxes; The KKK Alphabet, where you will see Bigots, Shotguns, and Xenophobes, (but not Malcolm X); and finally the Insect Classification Alphabet, where you will find Arachnid, Chaetopod, and Xylophage.

They will be available in all the more enlightened bookstores, just as soon as I get an illustrator, a publisher and a distributor. I am happy to put my X next to any offer.

[I wrote this one in 2001.]

I have been a university lecturer for many years now, and while I haven't heard every excuse known to man, his dog (or a combination of both), I have heard a lot of them... several times over - sometimes even from the same person.

The following article is a guide to the most common excuses used by students, as well as a bit of a primer on how to construct better ones. It should be noted that the excuses used in this article are real and have been used on me in the past, and will probably be used in the future. Only the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.

Creative Writing

There is an ancient Chinese fable that goes like this:

A man goes to the wisest monk in the land and asks him the secret to a happy life. The monk thinks about this and says:

"Grandfather dies; father dies; son dies"

The man is shocked at this statement and says to the monk:

"I came here to ask about happiness, but all you talk about is death. Why??"

To which the monk replies:

"This is the natural order of things. Only by following the natural order of things can you have true happiness."
I tell you this story because, over the centuries, this parable has been corrupted. It now goes like this:

A student walks into a bar (which is a hell of a lot more likely to happen than visiting a monk on a mountain top) and asks the bartender the secret of academic happiness. The bartender replies:

"Grandfathers die, grandmothers die, father dies, mother dies, and as many other members of your family die, as required, for the duration of your academic career, because you spend too much time in here, rather than studying. Now, how many beers was that?"
Without doubt, dead grandmothers are the most common excuse that lecturers are presented with at exam time. I think the record in our department is five dead grandmothers in one year (for the same person, that is).

Now, before you start thinking that with stepparents, ex-husbands, adopted parents and so on, five grandmothers may be a possibility - and they all have to die sometime - the timing is eerily suspicious.

If the excuses used at exam time were incorporated into mortality statistics, I am sure they would find that the biggest cause of death amongst women aged 60 and over is having a grandchild in tertiary study. If you plotted the death rates throughout the year for the same group, there would be definite spikes around university exam times. I am sure undertakers pay particular attention to this and order more wood and shovels when it comes to the end of semester. I know this sounds cynical, but every semester, (at exam time) Granny stands a much higher chance of biting the dust.

"Ah!" you say, being the intelligent person that you are, "what about the grandfathers". True! For every grandmother, there is usually a grandfather, but strangely, dead grandfathers rarely come up as excuses at university. For many years I was quite confused about this, until I read that women live, on average, a few years longer than men.

Then it hit me: grandfathers die during high school, grandmothers die during university. QED.

What to say when Granny didn't die.

Not all excuses are about dead grandmothers. Sometimes students seem to suffer from either an over abundance of creativity, or a distinct lack of it. Whatever the cause, they leave their grandparents alone (maybe they have played all the death cards they have) and they usually start attacking technology.

Technology excuses are among my favourites, since I am a technical person and like asking questions (in other words, I enjoy torturing the students). From my point of view, technology excuses have two main themes - cars and computers.
Quote:

There is an urban legend about a couple of students who missed an exam (because they were drunk) and claimed it was because they were traveling in the same car, which had a flat tire.

The lecturer agreed to give them a supplementary exam, but each student was put in a different room and could not communicate with the other.

The exam consisted one question: "Which tire?"
While this may just be allegorical, some excuses have come close.

I know, for a fact, that service station managers and the motor clubs of most states will give people written proof that they worked on or attended a call out to fix a particular car. I always make a point of asking for this, along with proof that the car is registered to them, or to someone in the family. I also ask for an affidavit stating that they were indeed driving it at the time in question. This is usually enough to send people running in fright, but occasionally we get the handyman who fixed his own car. When I get one of these characters, I have a simple policy: no grease under the fingernails, no excuse.

The "cyber-dog ate my homework" is the other technology excuse that I quite like. Now, this might work with humanities lecturers, but if you want to use this against a computing lecturer, you had better be well armed.

One semester in particular, I received one of these from a particularly stubborn student. Before this, my policy was simply to tell the student "Bad luck". They were computing students after all and this was a good lesson for them to always keep a backup of their work. This particular student, however, wouldn't budge.

Did he have any written documentation for the assignment? Uhhh... No.

Notes, scribble, jottings, rude drawings, anything? Ummm... No.

Any printouts of his code? Uhhh... No.

Any backups on disk anywhere? Ummm... No.

So the only proof that his assignment was even attempted was on his hard drive at home and he couldn't retrieve it? Yes... Yes!

Solution: bring the whole computer in and I will get the file, even if I have to read it bit by bit.

Result: I never saw the student again.

Excuses' Greatest Secrets - Revealed!

I suppose that it's now time to give you my guide for making up excuses (that is, after all, the only reason I can think of for reading this crap so far).

There really are only two principles to keep in mind:

First of all, apply the K.I.S.S. principle, which states that if you have no real talent, make sure you wear lots of makeup. But seriously folks... real excuses are very simple. They don't involve horrendously long epics of adventure and subsequent disaster. In fact, the longer and more convoluted your story becomes, the more opportunities there are to poke holes in it. Thus, the believability of an excuse is inversely proportional to its complexity.

Secondly, real excuses are usually quite unbelievable:
Quote:

For example, a friend of mine asked for (and received) special consideration for his exams after he broke a bone in his right hand during a sword fight (which is exactly what he put on his application form).
This actually happened. I was there. I saw it. Real excuses are like that. The human imagination, while quite capable of creating amazing fantasies like "Alice in Wonderland" or "The Lord of the Rings", is totally unable to match the utter bizarreness of reality.

Last Words

I will leave this rant with what has become my favourite excuse of all. This person must have actually been reading ancient Chinese parables (not just the crib notes), and decided that doing without doing was the way to go. You will notice that it follows my guidelines for a good excuse: it is short and has no loopholes to explore, and it is totally unbelievable. I feel that it deserves proper attention from excuse connoisseurs.

The excuse, verbatim, was:

"I was going to hand the assignment in, but I didn't".

I think that says it all.

[More stuff I wrote in 2002.]

Throughout history, there have been many great conflicts: David versus Goliath, Muhammad Ali versus Smokin' Joe Frazier, Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant.

All of these conflicts pale into insignificance when compared to the age old struggle between two diametrically opposite forces. I'm not talking about good versus evil here. Such notions are trivial by comparison.

I'm talking brother versus brother.

Ever since Kane and Able, brothers have been fiercely competitive. My brother and I are no exception. While we had all the love our parents had to give and as many advantages as each other, the inherent drive to compete has always landed us in interesting situations.

Picture this... my brother and I are playing with our collection of Lego blocks. My brother challenges me to a demolition derby, of sorts. He proposes that we build cars out of Lego, go into the hallway (which has nice wooden floors) and see which car stands up better in a series of head on collisions. The last car left rolling wins. Needless to say, the challenge was accepted.

We each take some Lego and go off to construct our Monster Machines. My car was a masterpiece of Lego engineering. Not only did it have a spacious interior that could seat four Lego men in comfort, it also had a hinged boot so that the Lego men could store their belongings (we had a lot of space Lego and the Lego spacemen had to have somewhere to put their helmets and air tanks). With a great deal of pride, and a sense of victory, I proceeded to the joust in the hallway.

My brother took his sweet time getting to our meeting. The repeated knocking (and kicking) at his door was met with a calm, "Almost there". That should have been my first warning - his calm acceptance of my badgering.

Finally, however, he emerged with a box containing his Lego creation. I walked to my end of the hallway with nervous glances at the box. I was right to be worried.

From the box he brought forth the mother of all demolition vehicles. Essentially it was a brick made out of Lego blocks, with a set of wheels stuck to the bottom. It was about double the size of my little car and the only concession to a car-like appearance was a token window attached to the front surface.

If my Lego men could see out of their little painted eyes, then their little painted pants may have become a little more painted. They were on their way to the slaughter and nothing could be done about it. The gauntlet had been thrown down and I had accepted the challenge.

The aftermath looked like Lego Hell… all of those blocks strewn over the hallway; the decapitated heads, still smiling; the horrible, horrible pearls of laughter…

Flash forward...

Picture this... I am playing with my little green and brown army set. The little brown army was taking quite a pounding from the cannons of the little green army. You see, this army set came with a pair of little cannons (why American Civil War style cannons were included in a WW2 army set, I don't know) which accepted tiny little plastic cannon balls as ammunition; exactly the type of thing that would be banned for safety reasons by almost every government in the world these days.

We had quickly lost the little balls, but had found that matchsticks could be loaded into the front of the cannon and shot with much more effect! I loved to set up the little army men and then use the cannons to fire matchsticks (unlit Mum, honest) at them until there wasn't a man left standing.

On this particular occasion, I was struck with a burst of inspiration. I set up both the brown and green armies in the hallway and invited my brother in for a little war play. One cannon and a box of matches each (all of which had been previously "deactivated"). The gauntlet had again been thrown.

We began firing and watched as the front ranks on both sides fell, but my rear guard was standing up to the barrage with a lot more ability than my brother's. In short order, his brown army lay strewn across the battlefield while the majority of my green army stood proudly in plastic victory.

Only when the brown army's helicopter "flew" across no-mans land in a suicide attack was it revealed that the green army had a technological advantage - plasticine.

I had painstakingly and methodically stuck a large portion of my soldiers to the floor, sacrificing a few small souls for the sake of the deception. The price they paid will never be forgotten.

Flash forward...

Picture this... I am sitting watching television while my brother is in the garage working on his bike. He has just finished greasing a bearing and walks into the house with his middle finger extended and covered in thick brown grease.

I see him standing in the doorway as such and ask him what he has been doing, to which he replies, "I was just checking the dog for worms".

It was such an improbable story, yet for a fraction of a second, I believed it... and he knew it. In that briefest of moments, with something as simple as a finger covered in grease, he had scored a decisive victory.

In the past (almost) thirty years, my brother and I have had many such encounters. Sometimes he wins, sometimes I do. We will never stop and we don't keep score.

The competition between my brother and I has increased our creativity and inventiveness, developed our skills and has taught us to have a sense of humour. Without it, we would have been much less. I feel for people unlucky enough to not have a brother, in the same way I was jealous of my sister for having two brothers while I only had one.

The word brotherhood is often used to describe a positive and supporting relationship between people, countries or cultures. The stories I have told here, strange as it may seem, are also manifestations of that theme. Men understand this contradiction instinctively.

To put it simply, my brother is my favourite foe.

[This is something I wrote in 2002 for my friend Ed's website. I thought I would repost it here so that no one can read it here either.]

I have come to the conclusion that the whole world has gone mad.

Maybe it is because I'm getting old (I'm about to turn 29, for God's sake) but things just ain't the way they used to be. People are suing companies because the coffee is too hot, children are being expelled from schools for sharing sweets with other children (the principal said that sharing the sweets was like sharing drugs, which is just not tolerated!). My students aren't students anymore, they're customers.

The final shred of proof that led to my conclusion came the other day during one of my lectures:

I was teaching my students about number systems (such as binary, decimal and hexadecimal) in a first year introductory computing class. I asked the class a question about why we use a decimal (base 10) system.

The simple, obvious and probably correct answer is that we have ten fingers. At this point I made a joke that this is also the reason why men are better at mathematics than women. You see, if they take their shoes and socks off, men and women can count up to 20, but men, if they're naked, can count up to 21. (Pause for laughter).

I have been using that joke for a lot of semesters and it usually gets a good reception. It is, in my honest opinion, a quite tame, if childish joke that could not possibly offend anyone.

This semester, however, was different.

I started by telling the joke, as usual, but even before I had reached the punch line, I noticed that one of my female students had become visibly agitated. As I delivered the coup-de-grace and was pausing for the laughter, this student spoke up and protested at my assertion that men were better at mathematics than women.

The rest of the class, who heard the punch line over her protest, did laugh as expected, but the protestor refused to be silent. On her feet now, she demanded that I retract the statement or she would sue me.

I explained, patiently, that it was a joke. I tried to explain the joke to her (which is hard to do without being obvious about what should be obvious), but she was not satisfied. I had, in her opinion, made a blatantly sexist remark that would result in severe and immediate legal action.

Now, if I were living in America, I would probably have been more concerned by her threat (let's face it, if I was in America, I wouldn't have kept this job for long, with the level of crap I go on with - I'm a law suit waiting to happen). Fortunately, I live in Australia and that sort of thing just doesn't happen here - yet.

The way the world is evolving, there will be no haven left for exploring the pleasures of making even a simple joke.

Jokers will be confined to small, dank clubs where they will congregate in the darkness, wearing long overcoats and laughing at the one about the Pope and the duck - but in a subdued fashion, looking over their shoulder suspiciously in case someone had heard them snicker.

News items will abound about the rise in the number of random acts of comedy on the street. Drive-by jokings will become popular in some of the poorer neighbourhoods and people will sell dirty gags in alleyways.

The jokers of this world will be a hunted subspecies and the lawyers will be the New Gods.

I have always used comedy to great effect in my lectures and it has proved to be very popular. However, you usually get one or two squeaky wheels that cause a problem, just like the wailing banshee mentioned above (I'm just kidding, don't sue me!).

A few years ago I was told to stop making jokes in class, because (and I am not making this up) ONE (yes, only one) student had complained that I was too funny in class.

Let me repeat that:

I was told to stop being funny in class, because I was too funny.

I didn't take this lying down. I told my students about it and they launched a "Save Dave" campaign where they bombarded the head of department with emails saying how much they enjoyed the lectures and especially the jokes.

The head of department told me that he didn't have an issue with it, although I later found out that a spy was sent into the lectures to see if I was, indeed, too funny (and since I was allowed to continue teaching, I was apparently not. I'm not sure whether to be offended?)

As far as I am concerned, there are few, if any, situations where jokes are entirely inappropriate. Sure, some jokes may be rude or crude, but even those in the worst taste and at the worst time, are as valid a form of expression as poetry, painting or song.

Jokes can be dark and revealing about a subject (e.g. What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing she hasn't already been told twice), they can be scathingly critical (e.g. What do you call a Muslim with a beard? Terrorist) and they can be sadly amusing (e.g. Spike Milligan's official last words - "See, I told you I was sick").

In my lectures I use jokes to illustrate ideas. Ideas that, when remembered, are associated with a smile rather than just with the pain of understanding.

To get back to the situation that prompted this rant. In the end, nothing happened. The woman in question, being the annoying troublemaker that she is (I'm just joking, please don't sue me!), never showed up to my class again. The rest of the class didn't seem to care, but at least now have an amusing anecdote, and I continue to do what I have always done in the best way that I know how.

I think the best comment on the political correctness of jokes (and the joke of political correctness) comes from an after dinner speech I heard at a conference banquet.

The speaker, a well-known scientist, started by telling us that he usually opened his talks with a little joke. Unfortunately, he was now obliged to be politically correct and couldn't make jokes about people of other races or nationalities in case it caused offence. He did, however, believe that it was O.K. to make jokes about long dead civilizations.

So he told us a joke about an ancient Aztec priest, named Father Murphy, who...

This weekend saw my mother's 65th birthday and the corresponding surprise party. My sister organised it and since my mother likes seafood, she organised a party at a seafood restaurant. An expensive seafood restaurant. My wife, kids and I are vegetarians. Hilarity ensues.
It turned out to be a very nice lunch in many ways. My mother got a big surprise and we got to see the kids behave themselves at a restaurant. In the end my wife and I had a garden salad (I specifically said to the waitress "No dairy, no egg, and no dead things". Some restaurants have a weird idea of vegetarian) which cost us a stupid amount of money and then we had some chips for main, as did the kids (with the obligatory sauce). My middle daughter ate the chips with her fork(s) since she was so thrilled to have two forks and two knives. I don't think she has ever eaten chips with a fork before, but it was nice to see her take an experience with both hands and go with it.
To give you a idea of the quality of the seafood at this place, after the appetizer and entree, almost nobody ordered seafood for main (including my mother). Going to a seafood restaurant and ordering lamb is a good indictment of the bill of fare at Lugarno Seafood. It seems that developing a reputation means you can jack up your prices and serve ordinary food.
In the end it was a nice party for my mother. My sister learned that expensive isn't always good. My kids wore pretty dresses and didn't tear the joint up and what is better, they stayed at grandma and grandpa's house over the weekend.