Monthly Archives: March 2006

El Trio Grande

This morning I was quite anxious when I woke up (yeah, I know, “…be anxious for nothing…”). I had to check my email to see if we had more bugs reported in my code. There were a few minor ones, which was relieving, because I don’t do well with big ones. But great tension was from having to sing with two gals from church in a trio. That would be me playing guitar and singing in harmony with two women with great voices. Plus, I had the high part! We dropped the key four whole steps so that I could handle the part, but it was still a stretch for me.

All feedback was that it sounded great. I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t recorded, but it went really, really well. My dad said this evening that we could sing that song every week for a year and he’d be OK (not because he likes repetition, but that it was an indication that he enjoyed it). We sang the song, “In Christ Alone,” which I’ve not heard with the arrangement that we did. I’m hoping that the two gals involved will agree to record it here. I’ll have to figure out any licensing issues because I don’t want to charge for Pordcast readers/listeners to hear the song (that would be stinkerific), but I’m also not going to pay $300.00 out of pocket to host an MP3 🙂 I’ll keep you posted.

At the Airport

Overheard walking through the ‘port:
“I took, like, a sleeping pill. It totally freaked me out. It was, like, a Xanax.”

What the heck? Xanax should mellow people out! Maybe she shouldn’t have mixed the Xanax with methamphetamine [note: Microsoft Word doesn’t offer synonyms for methamphetamine].

So this morning as I was waiting for my Grande Soy Latte at Starbucks (which I don’t prefer, but given I consumed Folgers all week, this was a step in the right direction in my caffeinated world) I noticed that the young lady in front of me was wearing a Victoria’s Secret sweatshirt. It was not lingerie it was a sweatshirt. Weird. Weirder still was the fact that her pants had a large hole in their right buttock [20% of the total right buttock area in my general estimation]. There was some sort of fabric underneath the pants that made sure that the public was not exposed to skin, but there was an awkwardness to this for me because I didn’t know if she was wearing a long striped shirt that extended way beyond what I have seen in shirt design, or if I was being exposed to the stripy colorfulness of her undergarment. I didn’t want to be exposed to either of the options, but it was clear that this hole was a fashion. The third alternative is that there was a colorful, stripy, and stupid piece of cloth sewn into the pants, but that defeats the purpose of the hole and I did not see any thread that indicated sewing lines. And I know sewing lines in pants like I know molecular biology [which I don’t].

OK, so here’s where it gets weirder: I saw another woman walking through the airport moments later that had incredibly tight pants on that left nothing to question about her lower body structure. I imagine those pants cut off the blood circulation to parts of her body and took a large amount of time to squeeze into. Maybe they have started to make “pants horns”, much like shoe horns, only larger and more stunning in their dimensions.

Even weirder was that Soledad O’Brien is on CNN this morning talking about a coyote. The woman sitting across the airport waiting area from me was smiling a large smile as she watched the news about the coyote. It is kind of scary because I don’t want for her to enjoy coyote news. I guess I’m generally an anti-coyote news sort of guy, which is something I didn’t know about myself. Coyote news feels rather stupid in the grand scheme of things because coyotes, wily or not, just don’t seem to be a really important part of urban ecology. Sure, that could change, but I doubt it.

I have had 4-6 hours of sleep the last couple nights and I’m getting burned out on the whole ‘low on sleep thing.’ To further the issue last night I woke up several times with my brain in a near panic due to not wanting to miss my alarm. The same alarm that woke me up the other days that I was on this trip that kept my sleep to a minimum. For some reason not showing up to the office on time didn’t concern me, but missing a flight to get home where I would be alone was apparently important. Apparently I need to find a sleeping pill that is not, like, Xanax.

Meeting of the Minds: IETF

Last night I got to meet some of the gentlement who are working on DKIM, an anti-phishing technology (in laymans terms, its more than that to the geeks, whom I’ll let explore via Google or some other search engine). I got to meet (in alphabetical order by last name) Eric Allman, Dave Crocker, Dennis Dayman, Jim Fenton, and others whose names frankly have escaped me at present due to absolute exhaustion. However, it was quite an honor. They were all need guys but I was warned to leave my politics at the door by my client who kindly suggested that self injury was far kinder to my body than bringing up politics in this group 😀

We had some Texas barbecue and had some fun. I ended up spending more time with my client’s kids because I wanted to know how they were doing. I used to work as an employee for the client and have known the kids for about 5 years, which is a smaller and smaller fraction of my life, but a pretty large fraction of his kids’ lives.

I’m tired now because I got 5 hours of sleep, 6 hours the night before and 4 the night before that. I’m ready for some rest, next month is looking good for that.

The Brokefast of Champions

Yeah, so this morning I made some assumptions about how things were going to go down, but they didn’t. So instead this was my breakfast. Yum.
Breakfast
Pretzels are good for you for breakfast because their sodium content is enough to draw out the water from your body. Wait, that’s not good for you at all! Ahh! I should have gone with the bacon, cheese, fat breakfast burrito instead with a side-order of oil-saturated re-constituted potato (bi-)products.

Funny Sunday School Moment

So, this morning I concluded my two week ‘series’ on sexual perversion in Sunday School. The first class was heterosexual perversion, the second class was homosexual perversion. Frankly, that could be a rather awkward class to teach anywhere, let alone in a class with quite a few post-retiree attendees. After teaching for a bit the oldest man in the class (who has to be in his late 80’s) piped up and asked, “How does bestiality tie in with all of this [perversion]?”

Me: Dear in the headlights! Didn’t see that coming.

Yeah, you know you go to a church that is full of grace when you can address these issues without coming across like ‘GodHatesFags.com’ and the oldest guy asks about perversion with animals so that he can attempt to fathom where the culture has gone since he was a teenager back in the earlier part of the 20th century 🙂 He also asked where the term ‘gay’ came from to mean anything but happy since when he was a bit younger that is what the term meant. Fortunately I had learned the answer to that some time ago. Still, its weird being 28 and fielding questions on such intense [or at least heated] topics. I don’t know that the MP3’s will be made available online or not in the near future, but they’re going to have to be edited 🙂

Klingon War Ships

I don’t know why I typed that title in, it just seemed like the wrong thing to do. However, it is there, and I can’t help but to leave it. The snow is falling here and it is predicted that we may have lots of snow here before too long, which will be a real problem because I need to fly out early in the morning to arrive in Grapevine, Texas. Strangely enough if you swap the V and P in Grapevine you get grave pine. I don’t know why that matters, but in the theme of random tidbits, I guess I’ll just have to move on past that goofy observation. Maybe I can call in some Klingon war ships to clear out the snow or simply transport me from CO to TX. Of course knowing the Klingons I’d probably die in the process due to them just enjoying the general idea of inflicting pain.

[If I knew some whitty Klingon phrase, I’d put it here.]

Home? Where’s That?

Since Jessica and the girls left with my mother-in-law to go see Jess’ grandpa who is going to be with the Lord soon I’ve been alone. Well, only sort of. I’ve spent very little time at home the last 24 hours because I don’t deal well with being alone. However, our church body rocks because I’ve had to turn people down for lunch and fellowship after church. People knowing that I’m flying solo have gone out of their way to make sure I don’t get too lonely. It pretty much makes me feel like I’m not a total loser 🙂 However, Monday I leave to go to Texas for a couple days to work with one of my clients. As much as this is hard for me to be away from my bride and beautiful girls, it is a good thing, I’m excited to be able to go meet some fantastic folks that I hope to blog about in the upcoming days.

Tech Gangsters: IBM

Flickr Photo
You know things are getting pretty rough in the tech world when IBM employees start tagging utility boxes.

I’ve also uploaded some other pictures to the site (click the image above to see my Flickr photos.)

Prayer Request

One of the elders at our church, Hal, has just been diagnosed with acute leukemia. The doctors are predicting that if it goes untreated he may have aproximately one month to live. What is somewhat warming is the fact that Hal has spent so much time teaching others at the church about how God uses trials and suffering for our growth. I keep thinking, “Lord, I haven’t gotten to learn from Hal all that he knows so that I can pass it on.” Except that the doctors haven’t given him a treatment plan yet, so it could all turn around and be a non-issue if the cancer goes into remission.

Thanks everyone.

Randy (and the rest of the Petermans)

Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Star

A few annymous females that I lived with while growing up used to use a word for ‘urinating’ that was fun: Tinkle. What is weird is that in the English language we have such a large body of vocabulary dedicated to bodily functions in general. I recall hearing as I grew up about a contest they had at my dad’s place of employment that encouraged the employees to come up with other names for ‘cow pies’ and by cow pies I mean manure, cow poop, dung, cow crap, meadow muffins, cow frisbees, boot muck also known as fecal matter of bovine origin.

Another blog I once read had a listing of names for boy and girl private parts as well. What was funny was reading that many people used the same word to describe the front or back side of male or female parts depending on the family. Can you imagine getting married to someone only to discover that their ‘pom-pom’ was a completely different ‘pom-pom’ than your’s [don’t think about that too much]? And that is why I wanted to ask this question: if you are a parent, what sort of vocabulary do you have for dirty business in your house? We have stuck with as much of the scientific words so as to make it less of a shock when people use them in polite company or educational environments and they don’t snicker like a candy bar.