Providence Spring Festival

I took yesterday off to go with the family to Isaac’s school’s 2nd Annual Spring Festival. This year it was …

Continue reading →

Happy Birthday Dirge….um…What?!

Yesterday we celebrated the start of the 5th year in the life of our adorable little girl.

In the traditional manner, we lit five candles on a (cup)cake and sang the traditional “Happy Birthday” song. But not too far into the song you can hear Isaac say “We’re gonna do two Happy Birthday songs!”

At first, I was anticipating the Fuqua version of the Happy Birthday song: a stirring rendition sung to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner”! That has long been my favorite version, despite its length.

The Box family tradition however is the “Happy Birthday Dirge”, sung to the first part of the tune, “The Volga Boatmen“, and which (in our family) begins like so:

Misery and despair, people dying everywhere….Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday.

(There are actually many variations on this song, but that’s neither here nor there…)

After the conclusion of our song last night, Isaac broke out with his version of the Dirge:

In marriage and despair, people dying everywhere, Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday.

And there was silence….

(I captioned Isaac’s quotes, but you have to enable ‘CC’ to see it.)

I should also note that Charisse’s attempts at blowing out the candles were very entertaining as well, but it will be a long while before we get over Isaac’s version of the Happy Birthday Dirge.

I bet you’re glad to have me on your team

At baseball practice the other night…

Isaac to his new coach:

I bet you’re glad to have me on your team!

Of course, the coach told me he also said to him

My dad says I’m going to be the best player on the team!

I’m very glad he has such high confidence, but I never once told him that!

Time-Lapse Earth

This has to be one of the coolest videos I’ve seen in a while. It’s a time lapse video of photos taken from the International Space Station, shot at 1fps. (Best viewed in full-screen, as the embedded version simply doesn’t do it justice…)

The author says “[t]he yellow/greenish line that you see over the earth is Airglow.” For the full details, including the locations shown, see the description under the video on the original vimeo page.
(Thanks to @timdan for sharing!)