Ryan and Debi & Toren

Author: rcragun

  • holiday activities

    I’ve been busy reading and reviewing books, but I thought I should do a quick recap of a few holiday activities.  On December 20th we went to a play with some friends who recently moved in across the street.  The play was “A Dickens’ Christmas Carol: A Traveling Travesty in Two Tumultuous Acts” by the…

  • It’s alive! It’s alive!

    I’ve had this for over a month and keep forgetting to post it.  It’s a short recording I made of Dariposa’s heartbeat during the last ultrasound.  It’s kind of hard to hear, but it really is a heartbeat, as heard through the ultrasound’s microphone: heartbeat

  • domestic partner benefits report

    Here’s another report I ended up putting together recently because I was interested in domestic partner benefits: Summary Report on Domestic Partner Benefits (DPBs) Ryan T. Cragun Assistant Professor of Sociology Definition domestic partners are non-blood relatives who share the same residence, intend to do so indefinitely, are not currently married to someone else, who…

  • healthcare wait times – US vs. Canada

    In my Introduction to Sociology class I was discussing the various approaches to health care: private pay/insurance companies vs. single-payer or universal pay (government sponsored). During that discussion one of my students raised an issue that is often raised in this debate. She had heard that because health care is free in Canada, wait times…

  • The True Meaning of Christmas…

    I should really be doing other work, but after reading the news this morning, it dawned on me that what I really wanted to do was write a short blog post about “The True Meaning of Christmas.”  (NOTE: For all the readers of my blog who are religious, this is your cue to stop reading…

  • OpenOffice Macro to fix UTF-8 and iso-8859-1 encoding issues (–, —, ”, “, Â)

    I’m not exactly sure why it is happening (probably cut and paste issues), but occasionally I get some encoding errors on my blog.  Quotes and dashes end up as: –, —, ”, “. You can see an example in this photo: According to this website, this is an issue of browsers not playing nice using…

  • Things I’ve Done…

    My sister-in-law posted this on her blog.  As I read through the list, I was surprised by the number of things I have done.  I don’t usually do these “pass-it-along” blog thingamajiggers, but I thought this might be fun.  Anyone done more than I have?  My percentage: 67% complete! 1. Started your own blog 2.…

  • Dariposa’s first pictures

    While Debi’s family was down here for Thanksgiving, they took to calling the baby “Dariposa” (nod to Shalynn for the name) which is a combination of the two names we have chosen: Darwin for a boy, Mariposa for a girl (though Debi is still insisting that she isn’t sold on the names).  So, until we…

  • completed puzzle – Debi’s pregnant!

    For those too impatient to put the puzzle together, here’s the puzzle in its entirety:

  • puzzle piece #35

    And now, for the final piece: