Take us out to the ball game

Nick and I are taking some of our guy friends to a baseball game this weekend, and it looks like we couldn't have chosen a better time to do it. We were out to the ballpark the first weekend of last season, too:



Last year it was 60F/15C and very windy. This year, I think we're in for some amazing weather.

I'm taking a few days off for spring break, so we'll pick up again on Tuesday. Happy Easter and Passover!

First flower planting of the season

Maria and one of her friends decided that they wanted to start a new flower garden outside our house. There's not much they can plant yet - still a risk of frosts and freezes for a few more weeks - but they were able to plant some pansies:





Maria says she wants to take pictures of them every week throughout the season so we can see how they grow. We'll see if we remember to do that....

Vegetables: How many Spergers are out there?

Via the marvelous James Fallows, the US Census publishes a fascinating spreadsheet of frequently occurring names in US households. The top ten contains a few usual suspects and perhaps a few surprises:

1. Smith
2. Johnson
3. Williams
4. Brown
5. Jones
6. Miller
7. Davis
8. Garcia
9. Rodriguez
10. Wilson

I wouldn't have thought of Davis or Wilson. Garcia and Rodriguez - I might have guessed Martinez (11) or Hernandez (15) would place higher, but I'll admit that I don't know Hispanic ethnography/geneaology well enough to make an informed prediction. There are six Hispanic surnames in the top 25, and not for nothing does salsa outsell ketchup in the US.

(Important note: This is not a political statement on my part, especially not about legal or illegal immigration.)

Anyway, here on Sperger.com we have one interest only, and that's the promotion and greater glory of Spergers everywhere. Here are the top ranking surnames that contain "sperger" in them, and then of course, Sperger itself. The numbers in parentheses after each name indicate how many US households claim the given name as their surname:

33,955. Gindlesperger (633 households)
44,529. Hopfensperger (455)
47,435. Leibensperger (421)
50,652. Raffensperger (388)
62,682. Kochensperger (299)
71,893. Hunsperger (253)
74,957. Adelsperger (240)

And so on, until:

123,977. Sperger (129 households)

Some extended family names in the Sperger tribe that occur much more frequently:

34. King (438,000 households)
157. Hunt (152,000)
5,160. Gammon (6,238)
19,188. Convery (1,300)
25,956. Marnell (889)
49,538. Seydel (399)

One conclusion from all this is obvious: Those who marry into the Sperger family clearly become part of something more unique than where they started. Those of us who are Spergers by birth knew this already. Even so, it's nice to have hard data.

If you are fortunate enough to be part of a Sperger household, and you use Facebook, I invite you to join the group The Very Extended Sperger Family. Share in the tradition of excellence.

Also: Gindlesperger? Gindlesperger? That's the most popular Sperger-related name in the US?!? Baffling. Even more baffling is that it turns out they have an association to keep track of their US genealogy. I guess when you have 633 households contributing, you can afford to get fancy.

Well, we have an international music contest named for us. Take that, Gindlespergers.

The many faces of a Maria monster

We were over at Chelsea's preschool this past weekend for a little bit while she did some pictures of Nick, so the kids and I were kicking around the school and the playground while Chelsea worked on other stuff. Maria was having a little bit of a hard day, but we eventually coaxed some smiles and silly faces out of her:







Nick and Anna did what they do best... entertaining themselves and each other on the playground:









They even got me in on the fun:



Notice we're all wearing cold-weather gear... that won't last for long this week. We have a big rain storm moving through, and then it's supposed to get progressively warmer this week. By Saturday, we may have temperatures above 80F/27C. (If you prefer Kelvin: 300K. Doesn't that sound really hot?) Anyway, it's going to be time for shorts and sandals around here. Time to build up the freckle inventory again!

Time to camp again

With the sudden rush of warm weather we've had in Philly these last two weeks, our thoughts are naturally turning to summertime. I've been saying for the last two years that I want to do more camping - in 2007 we got out four times, but in 2008 and 2009 we only went once each year. I'm determined this year.









On my way home from work these days, I can see the trees and the ground just starting to take on the green fuzz of spring. Won't be long now.

My neighbor, The Mayor

Yesterday I mentioned that my neighbor and I were planning to till our gardens. What I hadn't mentioned was that we were planning to do it Friday after work. But when I got home from work last night, I saw the he had gone ahead and rented the tiller, done his... and done mine.

Great neighbor!

We jokingly call him The Mayor, because he's so well tuned in to the goings-on of the neighborhood. I almost wish I could vote for him in something - it's the least I can do to say thanks. (Well, that and a case of beer.)

Wayback Machine: Garden time again

Sometime this week or next, my neighbor and I will be tilling our gardens to start getting them ready for the growing season. We're going to make our garden a bit bigger this year, to accommodate a few more types of vegetables, and also to see if we can grow some herbs, like basil and rosemary, for use in the kitchen.

Here's a look back at the start of our efforts last year... note that just over the weekend, the grass started turning that iridescent green you see in the pictures. We love springtime!







And here's a quick look at the bounty our garden was yielding by July:



Make your reservations now for a salad dinner at our place this summer.

American Girl Fashion Show

A few weeks ago, Maria and Anna appeared in the American Girl Fashion Show, an event held every year to benefit local kids' charities. Here are a few pictures of our girls in costume at rehearsals:







Maria has been doing this show for several years, and she's now so tall that she has probably outgrown the show. We think this will be her last year. Anna is in her second year, and has a few more years ahead of her as long as she's still interested.

A few more Washington pics

All right, I worked out our technical problems with the digital camera, and I was able to retrieve the rest of our photos.

There were some sharp restrictions on photography in the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit, but they had a replica warrior at the exit who was available for group pictures:



I also snapped a flash-free picture of one of the figures in the exhibit... fortunately they were very well lit:



This is another iconic figure... a C-3PO costume from the original Star Wars trilogy, on display at the American History Museum:



Here we are out for a walk on the soggy National Mall:



There's nothing soggy about Philadelphia this weekend, so to all of you on the East Coast, enjoy the fabulous weekend! We certainly earned it this winter.

How quickly it passes...

Just a few weeks ago, my driveway looked like this:





With more than a week of above-average temperatures, it's all gone now. The last of our February snow mountains disappeared last week, and now, the snow is basically gone everywhere.

We still have some stacked up against the side of our parking garage at work, where they dumped all of the snow they cleared out of the garage. I think that snow is going to be with us until July.

Weekend in DC

I had a conference in Washington last week, and Chelsea came down at the tail end of the conference so we could spend a little kid-free time together in the nation's capital. I'm having a little bit of trouble getting all of our pictures off the camera, so these updates may take a couple days to finish out.

Friday evening we went to the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at the National Geographic Museum, and it was amazing. The story: In the 1970s some farmers in rural China accidentally discovered an underground warren full of terra cotta statues. These statues comprised an army - some 7,000 in all, of which only 1,000 have been excavated so far. They were made to guard the tomb of the first Qin emperor, around 200 BC.

In the traveling exhibit now in DC, they have maybe a dozen of the life-size statues, which not only include warriors, but also horses, strongmen, musicians, and acrobats. It's as if the entire court of the emperor was rendered in terra cotta. Finding the statues has been a huge boon for the field of archaeology. The statues are so detailed that they have provided valuable clues on how materials were created and used in that time, data that are not otherwise available because organic materials have decayed over the centuries.

Until I can upload my pictures, you can see an amazing gallery of images here.

Saturday we met up with our college friend Bethany and toured the Smithsonian museums. Here are the ladies at the entrance to the freshly-renovated American history museum:



One of the highlights in the museum for us was Julia Child's kitchen, which has been relocated in its entirety from the Childs' former home in Massachusetts:





It's not nearly as big a room as you would imagine, though I think it is probably about 50% larger than our kitchen at home.

We also went to the National Museum of the American Indian, which was fascinating, though we only had about an hour to spend there before closing:



We took Amtrak back from DC that evening, so it was a pretty brief visit - less than 48 hours in town for Chelsea, and slightly longer for me because of the conference.

I'll work on recovering more of the photos in the next few days.

Girls' room update: Painting right along

We're well under way with the wall paint in the girls' room, and I wanted to share a quick preview. Most of the walls are going to be a light blue, shown here:



One wall is getting an accent color - a deep red:



So when we're all done in here, it will be blue walls, red accent wall, gold ceiling. Fancy!

The music man

Nick is our resident musician - so far in his young career he has played viola, piano, and trumpet, the last of which he took up when he started middle school last year. He's also teaching himself how to play guitar right now.

We attended Nick's winter concert several weeks back:





He plays in the 7th grade concert band, and he's also playing in the all-volunteer jazz band.

Bowl the cabin fever away

Last month, when Anna had chicken pox, she was home from school for a week. By the end of that week, she was feeling much better, but she was going stir crazy from being cooped up in the house. And honestly, the rest of us were right behind her on the road to Crazyland - not because of Anna, but because of February.

So the kids and I went out for a couple hours of bowling.









We had some snacks and enjoyed some friendly competition. It was a nice break for all involved - probably even a nice break for Chelsea and Mary, who stayed home in relative quiet.





This last snapshot is the kind of picture where I would normally correct Anna's red eyes, but they are so appropriate for the picture that I'm going to leave them as is:



Program note: I'll be traveling the rest of this week to a conference, and so I probably won't get many chances to post here. Back next week!

Colonial Day

Maria had Colonial Day at school recently. The kids dressed up in colonial clothes (made by Chelsea!) and ran a "market" in which they promoted their trades. Maria was a furniture maker:





The kids also did some colonial-style dancing:







Dancing and fashion - what more could Maria ask in a school assignment?

If there's ice, you might as well skate on it

Also over the Christmas holidays, we got out for an afternoon of ice skating with some friends of ours. Your intrepid reporter used to like ice skating as a kid, but now can't find a comfortable pair of skates to wear. So I spent the session on the sidelines, taking pictures:





Fortunately, the kids don't have any trouble with skates or ice:





Chelsea likes skating, too... here she is with our friend Nicole:



I can't seem to find Maria in these pictures, so I am guessing that she was at Nutcracker that afternoon. Christmastime is like that with her.

Happy weekend!

Catching up: Cousin Night

We had our annual Cousin Night over the Christmas holidays, and it's taken me this long to hunt down all of the pictures. (Sorry to keep you waiting, Kate!)





With the cousins all getting bigger and older, the event is changing all the time. This year, my cousin John cooked a "fourthmeal" of chicken fajitas around midnight, making this either a very late dinner or a very early breakfast:







We played some Rock Band, too, which is becoming a new tradition:



We also played some Double Double This This:









This crew is now staying up later and waking up later than in the olden days. That suits us fine - sitting around eating and playing cards at 1:00 in the morning makes the older cousins feel like we're back in college again.

Sanding, priming, painting

When we last left our intrepid renovators, the girls' room looked like this:



While it was nice to be rid of the plaster cracks, No self-respecting young princess would tolerate living in such squalor for long. Clearly, we needed to do some more work. The first order of business was to sand down all of the spackle work, which created a lovely quarter inch of white dust all over everything, including me:







The vacuum and mop made quick work of the dust:



This is the kind of shine we're hoping to achieve permanently after refinishing the floor... not just after the room has been mopped:



Next, we needed to swap out the existing light fixture for something temporary while we work on the ceiling:



We also needed to cover up the floor so that we don't make extra work for ourselves on the refinishing step later... we're going to be doing a lot of painting:



It was time to start priming. Since we're making big color changes all around, and since we had done so much spackling, we went ahead and primed every surface:





After a solid coat of primer, we got ready to paint the ceiling. Now, this is not going to be any ordinary ceiling. Our girls deserve the best! As part of their Asian theme, we agreed to make the ceiling metallic gold. Yes, metallic gold.

That meant the job had a few complications. For one thing, we decided we would need to bring the ceiling paint down onto the walls a few inches, so we could do a border around the room and avoid having a difficult line to maintain between the walls and the ceiling. So you'll see in these pictures that we laid out a line about 5" (13cm) down from the wall/ceiling boundary.

We also needed to mask all of the walls, in addition to the floor, because we don't want the wall surfaces to be dotted with flecks of metallic gold from the ceiling paint cycle.



First round of the gold ceiling looked pretty cool:



After the second round, you could start to see how it was going to look when finished:



Maria came in at this point for an inspection:



Her room now has bling. She approves.

We probably have to do one more coat on the ceiling, and then it's on to the walls.

Tomorrow: Cabin fever and bowling.

In fairness to the girls...

...I was reminded last night that Nick and I occasionally do some strange things to our own hair. You may know that Nick has been wearing a "faux-hawk" for the past several months. It looks like this:



Well, the other day I needed to take a shower in the middle of the day after sanding the walls in the girls' room:



And Maria had the bright idea to make my hair look like Nick's:





So the boys have had their own hair adventures, too.

Tomorrow: A closer look at that sanding job, and everything that has followed.

Update on Anna

Gentle readers, a quick note to let you know that Anna is doing great - completely done with her chicken pox and back to school this morning. We're still waiting to see if Nick and Maria come down the magic spots....

Girl hair

I have to admit I'm baffled. Maria has been going to great lengths recently to curl her hair. Here she is, first thing in the morning, with empty orange juice cans attached to her head. She slept like this!



Last night - I don't have a picture of this, alas - she went to sleep with tight curls of hair attached to her head with maybe two hundred bobby pins. Help! I'm just a simple caveman. I don't understand.