Studio711.com – Ben Martens

When Jay came through town, he said we needed to go to Home Depot to buy some hardware to make a game he’d just learned called bimini ring. The basic idea is that you have a ring connected to a string. You swing it forward and attempt to get it to hook onto a hook sticking out of the wall. Simple, but complicated!

The game started in England hundreds of years ago and over there it’s called “Ringing the Bull” because they used a bull nose ring. When the English settled the Caribbean, they brought that game with them and it really caught on. Bimini is a town in the Bahamas and I guess that’s where it got it’s new name.

It’s not a wildly exciting game, but as with most games like this, it’s a fun way to pass time with friends. Once you get the hang of it, you can get it to stick on the hook fairly regularly. The official scoring rules require a ringer to get any points, but an easier way to play includes giving points if you just touch the hook on the wall with the ring. And since this game is from the Caribbean, I’ve added my own suggested rule of playing with rum in your hand. You can check online to find the measurements for setting up your own game.

This game is super cheap and can be played just about anywhere. I think we’ll be adding it to our regular set of games which also includes bocce ball, Kan Jam, hillbilly horseshoes, and of course, corn hole.

In the past you’ve had to shell out hundreds of dollars to get the Microsoft Office suite, or maybe you got it for a little less with your new computer. Then you’re stuck with that version no matter what versions arrive later. And what if you have five computers in your house? Well either you break the law or you buy a bunch of copies. It’s a big cost.

With Office 2013, Microsoft is launching a new way to buy Office. You can now buy a subscription for one year for just $100. That subscription works on up to 5 devices! Mac, PC, handheld devices, etc are all included. You can easily manage which computers/devices are included in the subscription and change them as you go. And each of those computers gets a full version of office that would cost $400 for each computer if you bought the actual full copy of Office. Additionally, it comes with 25GB of extra storage on SkyDrive and some Skype minutes.

If you have a bunch of computers in your house and you like to keep them all up to date, check out this new subscription service.

Note: I realize that some of you are anti-vaccine. This post is being written because I find it amazing that we can have an epidemic like this, not necessarily to try to change your mind about vaccines.

Visits to the OBGYN are usually full of facts about things that have never crossed my mind before. On one of our first trips, we were asked if we had been vaccinated recently for whooping cough. I’d never even heard of it. Maybe I’m the only one, but I’ll explain a bit anyway.

The scientific name for whooping cough is pertussis. It’s a bacterial disease that causes severe coughing fits. In serious cases, it can result in death. A research paper from 2012 says that it affects 48.5 million people and kills 295,000 every year. It spreads through droplets produced while coughing, talking and sneezing. Young children are most susceptible to the disease and run the greatest risk of death if contracted.

It turns out that I had received a whooping cough vaccine at a few points in my life, though not recently. It’s commonly distributed as part of your tetnus shot, or TDaP which stands for Tetnus, Diphtheria and Pertussis. That’s usually given every 10 years but the pertussis vaccine is only good for three years.

Little did I know that I’ve been walking through a whooping cough war zone for the past year. The Department of Health for Washington has a good website with lots of information about the outbreak. This report shows that last year the levels were 15 times greater than the baseline and eight times greater than what they would call an epidemic! Thankfully the numbers are starting to decline through education and vaccination.

The docs recommend that we get the vaccine ourselves and also ask anyone who is planning to have close contact with our child to do the same. I got mine done last week (insurance covered the cost) and Tyla will get it at a specific upcoming point in her pregnancy. Even if you’re not around babies a lot, it’s worth considering getting vaccinated to help control the spread of this disease.

It looks like the Post Office is going to cut Saturday delivery to save money. It’s a novel idea: cut costs to balance your budget. No wonder it’s causing so much confusion in D.C. But regardless of the politics or whether it’s even legal for them to do this, I think the Post Office is missing some big opportunities.

What is the biggest asset of the USPS? They employ a workforce that touches almost every household in the country 6 out of every 7 days. How many dotcoms have we watched fail because their service couldn’t handle the costs of a workforce like that? Maybe they really have to cut Saturday delivery to save money, but what else could they be doing to make more money instead of just delivering mail?

Imagine if you could pay a USPS worker to knock on the door of your elderly relative every day and report back to you if nobody answers the door. Or what if you could pay a USPS worker to clean any packages or fliers off your doorstep when you’re on vacation?

It seems that the volume of mail is going to keep declining. Are they just going to keep cutting days of service? Or will they make use of their army of employees to broaden their horizons and change their business model?

In the post about my beard, I mentioned that part of the reason for doing this was that when I was a kid, I saw some pictures of Dad with a beard and thought it was hilarious. It seemed like a fun thing to do for my son too. Mom has embarked on a project to scan in thousands of slide photos and she stumbled across the photos of Dad’s beard. I think it looks pretty good! The shirt in the second photo maybe not so much.

Tyla commented that Mom looks about as thrilled with Dad’s beard as Tyla is with mine. I had to explain that for as long as I can remember (and apparently longer), Mom’s eyes are magically closed in almost every picture! There may be some supernatural forces at work.

But seriously, thanks to Mom for digging up these photos and for spending countless hours in front of the scanner salvaging these slides. It will be an amazing historical record of our family for decades to come.