Brain Spill

I'm playing Tamil songs on the computer and busting my moves. 

Sempi: Appa why does this song keep saying 'poop'.

Me: Haha. It's not saying 'Poop', it's saying 'poo'. I guess that's not any better. In Tamil 'Poo' means flower. They're singing about a flower.

Sempi: 'Poo' means flower? 

Me: Yeah. But to be fair we had that word a long time before English. English stole it from us. 

Sempi: How do you steal words? 

Me: Ok. I was just kidding. Tamil people heard the sound 'poo' and decided it's such a beautiful sound, we'll use it to mean flower. English people heard the same sound and figured it's a fitting word for excrement.

Sempi: What's excrement? 

Me: Sigh...

Early Wednesday morning. I'm entertaining both Sempi and Vian. I start to play some music (Tamil songs) and decided to dance. Sempi reaches for his ear muffs and Vian starts to bounce to the music. 

I have the sudden realization that both the kids are doomed to be dorks if they're learning dance moves from me. Naturally, I start dancing harder. 

Sempi: Appa, I'm making hot dogs. Do you want one? 

Me: Yes! How much is it? Eight dollars or Fifty Three dollars?

Sempi: Appa, you can't make up numbers. It is eight dollars.

ps: He can count up to ten. It gets fuzzy after that.

I'm a bit of a classical string instruments nerd. I can't pay any instrument but I listen to classical music a lot.

Sempi and I like to name our trucks. Sempi goes for the classics like Mary Anne and Mike Mulligan. I usually go for Jacquline Du Pre, Yoyo Ma and Stradivarius. 

Me: So Yoyo Ma is driving the Stradivarius (the dump truck) and Jacquline Du Pre is digging the dirt with Guarneri (the excavator).

Sempi: Appa, Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne are driving up the hill and coming to the construction site.

Me: Paganini (the steam roller) is flattening the road. Perlman and Heifetz are pouring the concrete. 

Sempi starts struggling with the names at this point.

Sempi: What should we name our back hoe. 

Me: How about Beethoven? 

Sempi: Ok, we'll call it Beethoven Backhoei. But we'll use Backhoei for short. What do you think? 

Me: Nice try buddy, we're calling our backhoe, Beethoven.

My hope is that by the time he starts taking Cello lessons, he's already used to the names of big wigs.

For some unknown reason, I looked up GWBasic today and downloaded an emulator. GWBasic was the first programming language that I learned. I have fond memories of that language. I love the fact that I could switch to a graphics mode and start drawing circles and squares. 

After about 30 minutes of fumbling around, my muscle memory kicked in and I started to write a simple program to draw some shapes on the screen. I asked Sempi to sit with me and help me with the drawing. He wanted me to draw a truck, so I decided to give it a shot. 

He lost interest midway when I started looking up various commands in the programming manual, but I stuck with it. 

Here's the creation in all it's glory. 

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun.