Jessica turns 28 today. In a week her mom will be 29 and a week after that her sister will be *cough – I feel old* 16.
I could probably write a long description of the wonders that are my daily life with Jessica, but then I wouldn’t be getting work done and a beautiful ode to my beautiful bride would lead to homelessness. So let me just say that I love her dearly and am looking forward to the next 28 years with her 🙂
I just had one of my friends’ sons ask me if I’d ever heard of a Robo-Raptor. Heck no. Of course not. No way. I’m 28. That is like asking me if I wear womens clothing with regularity (that too is supposed to be a rhetorically implied negative). I haven’t looked at the latest toys for (mostly) boys in years. And I sure don’t know what their names are. I think this officially puts me over the threshold of ‘twenty-something’ to ‘curmudgeonly-old-guy’. I’m OK with nose piercings, tattoos, iPods and various technological changes, but can we PLEASE have the OLD Legos back? You know the ones that were not kits of 30 special parts to make the dino-crapto-saurus? Let imagination and creativity be the focus not lifelike plastic replicas of things that may or may not have looked like modern artistic interpretations?
I remember when we used to walk barefoot through the snow because we liked it that way and it put hair on your chest (or in the case of women it was preparation for childbirth). OK, that’s a lie. I don’t remember that. I do however remember creativity was encouraged by teachers instead of test taking skills and television had scary Skeletor and not pansy claymation construction workers with talking tractors. Kids need a little fear in their lives. Now the closest thing to Skeletor they have is Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton.
This is an interesting blog post: Why You, Too, Should Cancel Cable. I don’t think that television is the embodiment of evil, but I do think that human beings (in all countries who have access to television) need to be a bit more discerning about what television they watch. I mean, think about it: you are giving them your time, and paying cable/satellite for it. I like Alton Brown, and that’s probably the most loyal I am to television, I record every episode of Good Eats. I watch it on my time and still don’t finish every episode because I’ve got important things to do. Like raise a family of amazingly well behaved and well adjusted women who will fight against the imballance of feminism and male dominant worldviews to seek out truth, love and better cheeses. But seriously, how much TV do you actually watch?
Thanks to Mr. Robinson for exposing me to this blog post.
My Grandfather-in-Law, Hiram Roach, the voice after whom the assistant coach character in the Movie Waterboy was modeled after has gone to be with Jesus. He died last night while everyone was sleeping. In our household we’re not sad. No, its not because were calous, but instead because we rejoice that his suffering is ended and he has gone to be with his savior, Jesus. It is hard to be sad when someone is not suffering any more and they are with God. Sure, he’ll be missed and his wife is probably broken hearted (we’ve been praying for her emotional well being), his children are sad, but in the eternal scheme of things he’s just beat us to the finish line temporarily 🙂
Update: I’m a remiss for not clarifying that Hiram died of cancer, but he’s been fighting various forms for about 5 years (to my recollection) so its good that its over.
…you need to put the word Compelling away. Just remove it from your vocabulary. Don’t write the word into another script, ad, or anti-Linux document. I’m compelled to reject anything you have to tell me after you use the word ‘compelling.’ No one else uses this word in real-life conversations. Other words I recommend you avoid include ‘masticate’, ‘super-duper’, ‘okey-dokey’ and ‘germane.’
However, if you use ‘plick’, ‘slick’, or ‘sick’ to describe your products I may listen more. Between bouts of laughter.
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.
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 shouldnt have mixed the Xanax with methamphetamine [note: Microsoft Word doesnt offer synonyms for methamphetamine].
So this morning as I was waiting for my Grande Soy Latte at Starbucks (which I dont 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 Victorias 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 dont].
OK, so heres 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 OBrien 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 dont want for her to enjoy coyote news. I guess Im generally an anti-coyote news sort of guy, which is something I didnt know about myself. Coyote news feels rather stupid in the grand scheme of things because coyotes, wily or not, just dont 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 Im 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 didnt 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂