Pleading the Fifth

The fifth amendment in the McPherson bill of rights must be, "You don't have to help someone if you are an idiot." Otherwise people wouldn't plead ignorance so much. This morning I was having trouble installing an application. I asked Grace how she installed it and she said Mom did it for her so she had no idea. Since Mom is always busy, I figured it would be best not to bother her. After my typical prodding and banging and replacing random important sounding files routine, I discovered that I was lacking "Microsoft.NET 3.5" (I had something like 1.44 B.C.) I took all the files off Grace's computer and replaced all my important looking files with those ones. (That disclaimer in the WINDOWS file that says "IF YOU REPLACE ANY OF THESE FILES YOUR COMPUTER MAY CEASE TO FUNCTION" is obviously nonsense)

Anyway, no cigar. I went downstairs to ask for help. I asked Mom and she naturally asked Andrew, since Andrew is the "smart" computer guy. Anyway after he said that of course I couldn't simply replace some files! This was a Process!! It's not that simple! I therefore asked him how to replace a process. No use. He had apparently heard that dealing with processes was difficult but he couldn't actually give me any useful advice.

Yeah, I eventually figured everything out on my own. After downloading a Microsoft.NET 3.5 installer and finding out it was a "Bootstrapper" (It sounds illegal but it isn't.) I downloaded a different installer and got it to work. Phew. Very exhausting. Just one of many good reasons that I did not go into computer science.

Walk for Life!

Today was the Walk for Life. Woo hoo! And guess what? It wasn't cancelled for rain! In fact, it didn't begin raining until after the Walk for Life ended. It was overcast during the walk, but it only started raining when the last people to leave (us) slammed their car door and began to drive away. Neat, right? This year the McPhersons walked away with four door prizes, because there were a ton. I think most people thought it would be cancelled and didn't show up so the door prize to person ratio was all messed up. Anyway, Grace got two pocketknives, Emily got a watch battery, Connor got bread, and I got a box of make-up. Yes, make-up. I traded the entire box for one of Grace's pocketknives. She's a wheeler-dealer, that one. Now she has a knife AND a box of make-up. She made out like a bandit. Oh yeah, don't ask me what Emily is going to do with a watch battery since she doesn't even have a watch let alone a watch that is low on power.

Flu Shots

Just the other day, Grace had to go get a flu shot to keep from getting the French Flu when she goes to Paris. I guess all the frenchies are swine or something, who knows? Anyways she was absolutely terrified, and predictably she overreacted and said that she didn't want to go to Paris anymore because she hated learning French and getting shots.

How learning French was brought into it, I don't know, but by now Grace should be smart enough to realize that even if she wasn't going to France she'd be learning French.

But, being the theologically minded guy that I am, I thought to myself that Grace's hyperventilation is exactly what we sound like to God when we start speculating about heaven. You know when you start to ask how you could possibly enjoy heaven if we didn't have our unchristian friends and families with us or if we were in stasis? (reference to an UTC professor whose lecture Lexie had to endure since she takes humanities.)

I mean, the answer is "Just chill. Paris' going to be great and there is no use saying that you don't want to go just because it doesn't sound perfect. You'll love it, I assure you." Same goes for Heaven. Just think of self-sacrifice as a Heaven Shot.

Andrew's Hat

I was sitting at my laptop when I heard a ruckus down the hall. Grace and her friend had stolen Andrew's hat and were running around trying to keep it away from him. Now, as Andrew said multiple times while pleading with them to give it back, (he could have caught up with them and beat them up pretty easily, but he didn't because he was a gentleman.) there was no reason for them to steal it. It has no value at all, it is the most putrid thing I've ever seen, and it would take them a week to get the smell of their hands. Well after a lot of noise Grace and her friend finally managed to rip it. It doesn't look much like a hat anymore. It looks more like a cootie catcher now. As Andrew mourned his hat, his one friend, his precious family heirloom, Grace's friend said, "Well, it wasn't a very important hat."

Something Odd

Alright so something odd happened this morning. First Emily walked into the room and shouted "Breakfast Time!" This isn't odd because Emily is often sent up to wake everyone up for breakfast. Andrew is sent more often because he's always awake before everyone else and is readily available for parent exploitation, but I digress. She then followed it up by saying "There are doughnuts!" This isn't odd either because you never know when there will be doughnuts because you never know when Dad will buy them because you never know when they will be on sale. So it's like, whatever. Then Grace barged in and shouted "There are no doughnuts nor is it breakfasttime!" This one took me a while to sort out. I finally figured from all the shouting that Grace and Emily were doing that Emily wanted to play Pokemon with the boys and Grace wanted to make sure we could all sleep by yelling at Emily. Yes, the kids have played a weird self-designed board game about Pokemon obsessively for a couple days now. Dad has even outlawed it. Now that's odd.

Anyways, Emily ran off crying to Mom who shouted up the stairs that it WAS breakfasttime and there WERE doughnuts. And it was true. The end.

Luck of the Devil

When we were on the family reunion the powers that be decided that all the kids would make a movie. Heather wrote a script for it, which had such a lame premise that every boy in the cast quit. Heather quit right after that and told us to make our own movie. So it was down to Kaitlin, Anna, Grace, and Kathryn. They wrote a script for a murder mystery. It wasn't a murder mystery like Murder She Wrote or Hercule Poirot or anything. It was more like Nancy Drew or some little kid mystery book or something. The plot was really convoluted and stuff. Anyways, I played the dangerous psychopathic person who errantly believed he had murdered his sister because his aunt told him so.

By the way, parents, I know that if any of these girls actually discovered a dangerous psychopath had murdered his own sister, they wouldn't confront him about it. They would know to contact a reasonable adult.

Anyway, all the filming was done in the three hours before it was supposed to be shown to the parents. It was really rushed. In fact, they got home while we were still editing it. We needed to save it to a CD, which took 30 minutes but we needed to show the parents the movie. What did we do to keep them from taking their children home to bed since it was after 10:00?

Well, here's where the luck of the devil factors in. Grandad and Grandma had this brilliant idea to create a three-hour slideshow presentation chronicling Grandma's entire life through pictures. Some of those pictures could qualify as antiques. So while the entire family sat through a presentation that I had already seen twice, I was downstairs poking Andrew and trying to make him make the computer save faster. (Not really. That was a joke. I was just down there glaring at the computer screen as it saved sloooooooooooooooooowly.)

In the end it all worked out. I'm still waiting to see if I live happily ever after, though.

Plagueograph

Yeah, since Mrs. K. posted on disease in her family, I started thinking about whenever viruses hit our family. I could have left a comment, but it seemed to me to merit an entire blog post seeing as it has not much to do with the K's being sick. When McPhersons get sick, it typically does not spread to all of us. What happens is that one kid comes home with a sickness, say Andrew for example, and then the two kids on either side of him get sick, i.e. David and Duncan. Then one of the people on either side of them gets sick, i.e. Grace or Lexie. Then it stops. It just gets tired.
Common Cold Strain 1: How many more of these kids do I have to infect?
Common Cold Strain 2: Hah? You've only done half of them yet.
Common Cold Strain 1: What! You've got to be kidding me. Of all twenty-some strains of cold I had to get stuck with the Mormon family.
Alright, so we're not Mormon. But how are common colds supposed to know that? Anyways, after two links on the chain it exhausts itself and gives up the ghost. Victory once again for the McPherson family~!
Of course I have also mapped the three people who I notice getting sick a lot. These are the three people who typically start the ball rolling:
Heather-Goes to college, picks something up around finals week, infects everyone. Lexie and I have been going to college for a year now and so far we have not picked up anything. Heather typically picks up three diseases a semester (or more depending on how many tests she has coming.)
Grace-Goes to a friend's house, picks up some disease, comes back and infects everyone. In my opinion Grace should have less friends.
Andrew-Andrew gets sick, mopes around the house until I say "Andrew! Stop acting sick! Do your job!" And then I get sick. God has a "sick" sense of humor.

Simple Subtraction

This'll have to be my last post today lest I pass the 500 blogs a week limit. (I bet you didn't even know they had that limit.)

Anyways, I've found a use for subtraction: Calculating what time you ought to start your movies in order to end at a reasonable hour. For example: If you need to be done by 10:00 and your movie is 2 hours long, you should start no later than 8:00. I mention this because I have recently discovered that none of my siblings can do this.

Example 1: Heather recently tried to organize a watching of "Ever After" with the kids down to Grace (Bedtime=8:00). "Ever After" is 1 hr, 40 mins. What time should we start by?
Heather's Answer: 7:00.

Example 2: Alexie, Duncan, Andrew, David (Earliest bedtime: 9:00) all intended to watch a movie rental that needed to be returned as soon as possible. It was 100 mins (1 hr, 40 mins.) What time do we start by.
Alexie's and Andrew's Answer: Ignore Duncan and David trying to get it started at 7:00 so that David will be able to watch the whole thing. Send e-mails for thirty extra minutes, start at 7:30.

The reason I brought this up was because last night David helped with the Walk for Life. (fighting abortion.) David and Andrew had an one-hour movie for that night so I made sure to get David back before 8:00 so he could watch it. When we got back, we were immediately greeted by Andrew who said to David (exact quote): "David, because you went walking for life we can not watch our movie tonight." David was very upset. Now this strikes me as odd because Andrew: a) doesn't care whether anyone gets to bed on time. b) Always starts his movies way too late. c) Was wrong because they did manage to watch it all and end before 9:00.

The only thing that Andrew did by saying that was to make David feel bad for doing the Walk for Life, something which is one hundred times more important than watching a movie or doing computer projects.

Why is it that siblings are so unhelpful?

I bet we have all heard our parents complain about how hard it is to get children to work, right? I TOLD Duncan at least a BAZILLION times to clean that table and he still hasn't moved. Well, they have no idea how hard it is to motivate siblings.

For Example:
I recently told Luke and Connor that they could play on my computer all they wanted in exchange for helping me clean dinner. Andrew and David got pretty steamed that I was "manipulating my brothers." So what did they do? Well, Andrew just whined. He's harmless. David let Connor and Luke play on his computer all they wanted for free.

I bet you're thinking: Well that proves that he loves his brothers and doesn't want them to be taken advantage of, right? Listen, if someone truly wanted to be selfless, they wouldn't take away workers from their bosses for the sake of the workers, they would take the place of the workers for the sake of both the bosses and the workers. Think Jesus.


The reason I bring this up is because yesterday I asked my siblings a thousand times to help me find "Our Town." To her credit, Grace helped. In the end, I gave up on my siblings and had Dad drive me back and forth between the library TWICE. (The first time was a failure because no one would help me find a working library card. I had to go back to get a Photo ID to renew a library card.)

In the end, guess where it was hidden. You guessed it, on a bookshelf. On Lexie's bookshelf to be exact. This morning when she was gathering her books for school she found it and handed it to me. She said she thought I had already looked there. (I had but I had only done a cursory scan.) In short, if Lexie had just looked a little bit when I asked her to help me search, I could have saved mountains of time.

Remember parents, when you get tired of children doing nothing to help you, you just threaten corporal punishment. Siblings also threaten corporal punishment but it only motivates the siblings to move closer to parents. You think you have it hard, try being a sibling.