I have a way of remembering to do things that might be idiosyncratic, or it may be completely normal.  So I thought I would reach out to the dozen or so people who read this little blog to see if you do the same thing.  So here’s the scenario:

Let’s say I want to remember to take a CD to the office with me tomorrow morning.  I will pick out some very specific action that I know I will take tomorrow—like picking up my keys off the bedside table—and I’ll visualize myself doing that while thinking to myself “don’t forget that CD.”  I only need to spend a minute or two concentrating very hard on picturing myself picking up the keys while thinking “don’t forget that CD.”  Then in the morning, when I’m picking up my keys, the thought “don’t forget that CD” will magically appear in my head.

I believe this is technically a form of self-hypnosis, or something like it.  It works most of the time, but only recently did I start to wonder if other people use this little trick.  When the thought comes popping into your head, it feels very much like deja vu.  In fact, I think I figured it out when I was curious about the feeling of deja vu when I was little (this was before I learned there was even a term for it).  I reasoned that surely I didn’t have some buried “memory” of a future event, so I tried to induce deja vu like this.  Eventually, I got it to work.

So does anyone else do this?  If not, you should try it, it really works.

I don’t know about you guys, but I thought tonight’s Lost was excellent.

In the interest of those of you who haven’t seen it yet or are waiting for DVDs... that is all.

CharlotteGigs.net is a mostly worthless spam machine that masquerades as a local job board.  I signed up for their site when I was looking for a job, and now I can’t seem to get their junk mail to stop coming.  I have clicked the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of their spam several times.  I continue to get this message upon doing so:

Your request to update your email options has been received and is being processed. Please note that it may take up to 10 days for the changes to take effect as there may be email messages already in progress.

Protip:  If you have to show a message like this to your users, you are doing something wrong.  Come on guys, ten days??  What are you doing, writing the request on a notarized letter and mailing it to Nigeria?

It’s time again for some new pictures and videos of Emma.  I added two new albums to the photos page.  First, Emma’s second first-birthday party.  That’s right, Emma got to celebrate her first birthday twice—once with family and then again with friends.  And second, we have a set of photos from our recent trip to Myrtle Beach, which we took in the last week before I started my new job.

Beyond that, I have four new videos for you.  Here is a video from a month and a half ago, showing Emma climbing the stairs.  We happened to catch her descending the stairs properly for the first time while we were recording this video.  Nowadays she can go all the way down the stairs with no problem.

Next, we have a series of scenes in which Stephanie and I try to get Emma to play the drums in Guitar Hero.  We had some success, but I think Stephanie and me end up playing the drums more than Emma does!

Now we get to the afore-mentioned beach trip.  Nothing particularly special about this video, it’s just Emma wandering around on the beach for fifty-nine seconds.  Enjoy!

And to finish this off, we have another demonstration of Emma’s musical inclinations.  We never taught her to dance, but we found that whenever fast music would come on during TV shows or video games, Emma would start dancing.  So I tried to capture it on video, and I was mostly successful.