Going on a week-long trip to Minneapolis. Ten degrees cooler + a much lower dewpoint + old friends = good times. Backson.

We've just started watching a new show, courtesy of our renewed membership with Netflix, that is proving both entertaining and educational. The characters are interesting, the situations in which they find themselves are eye-opening, and we're learning a lot of new vocabulary. Even the title implies an educational experience. And you thought this was going to be about politics.

So, we're sitting around Saturday morning, one kid is watching TV (yes, we know) while the other is playing happily with the big, vinyl-covered foam blocks we keep telling you are the most awesome toy ever.

Gazing in admiration at them, we decide that maybe we should buy another set, as these are five years old and constant, almost daily play has started to wear them out just a smidge. It would be nice to have some back up pieces, since we anticipate at least three to five more years of play with them.

So I go to my trusty old link, and there they are at Constructive Playthings, now for $140. Not bad, but we have a gift certificate to Amazon, so, on a whim, I decide to check and see if I can get them through Amazon. Not sure what to search for (the manufacturer is unclear) I go with their title/description on the Constructive Playthings web site, "Soft Play Forms."

Sure enough, they are listed at Amazon, though only from a third-party individual, and for a $100 premium... but I was much more interested in the second item Amazon suggested for the search: Soft Play Forms.

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Mark just sent me to an article about how investors at Apple's latest quarterly earnings report were nervous about Steve Jobs' health. They reportedly asked him to name a successor. Which is just silly. I went back and looked at the list of likely successors. I noted that my favorite (and Job's favorite, if the article is to be believed), Scott Forstall, Senior vice president, iPhone software, may be watching his star fall, given all the reports of bug-ridden iPhone 2.0 software. Which only serves to illustrate that picking a successor now means having to pick a different successor down the road, if Jobs happens to live a little longer, and/or the Anointed One screws up. So give it a rest, and let's not kill Steve before his time is up.

I usually dip salad in the dressing, rather than tossing it, for fear of crappiness I can't undo. This was validated by today's tzatziki.