Um, happy soulmate-ship?

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But in case you haven't heard, my wife and I and my brother-in law and sister-in law are moving to the family farm and resettling there.

Yes, the kids are coming too.

We're building houses, but we'll all be living in the old farmhouse during construction.

Guess it's time for me to deal with that "sleepwalking in the nude" habit I have. Right, Keith?

Keith? You know I was just kidding, right Keith?

Hello?

Well, expect this blog to be pretty prolific in the coming months. What am I up to? Well, this Onion article is pretty relevant, especially about the alpacas...no joke.


Via The Onion:

WASHINGTON—A bipartisan committee found the plan was a "super-easy" way to rake in cash, and has already borrowed supplies from Sen. Chuck Hagel's brother-in-law.

Reference

[This is something Alyssa wrote for last Thanksgiving (she's 9). We've just gotten around to transcribing it, so enjoy! --Dave]

The Mystery Turkey

It was Thanksgiving day. Just as everyone sat down to the Thanksgiving table, the turkey became alive! Then the turkey opened the door and ran outside.

We chased after him, but he was too fast. So we didn’t catch him. We all went back inside and instead of turkey we had the dessert and side dishes.

That night I went to sleep. The next day I was on a mystery. I decided to investigate. I saw that the oven didn’t have an oven mitt on the handle. I thought maybe my dad put it in the drawer. I checked. It wasn’t there. I checked in all the other drawers. It wasn’t in any other.

I know that my stove usually is hot for 3 days. It wasn’t. It was as cold as ice. Clue number 2- I was starting to think that the turkey was never cooked. Then I found another clue…the day before the turkey was cooked, my mom cleaned the oven. Then the turkey was cooked but there was no grease? That was clue number 3. I had enough clues to tell that the turkey wasn’t cooked.

Then I had one more clue. My dad baked the turkey but he was on a vacation when we had our dinner. So then I put all the clues together and it all made sense.

Since my dad wasn’t here when the turkey ran away, then he forgot to cook the turkey. He didn’t admit it at Thanksgiving because he was not there. So now it all made sense and the mystery was solved.

By Alyssa

Did I lend any of you the graphic novel Stardust, by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess? It's oversized, so it would be hard to miss.
I just can't find it anywhere, and the last I remember about it is lending it to someone.

Rudolph’s Big Nose Problem!
By Drew

One snowy day at the North Pole, Santa went to feed Rudolph and the other reindeer. Then he noticed that Rudolph’s nose….was yellow!!!!!!!! With an X!!!! “Oh Dear”, said Santa. Then he told Mrs. Claus. Then they told the whole city and then the town. Then everybody was sad.

Next, they gave him water with red food coloring… but that didn’t work!

After that, they took him to a hockey game. But he had bad trouble getting his head on the seat because of his horns. So then Santa and Mrs. Claus led Rudolph to the nose bleed section!

Finally, “It worked!” said, Santa. The blood rushed to his nose but couldn’t get out.
Later, they told the city and town again. Now, the town and city were happy again. His nose was red again.

Here on his website: http://www.themancusofamily.com/joey/travel/java/index.htm.
He's just really an amazing photographer.

(thanks to Bill for the tip)

Apparently I do.



Oh, and Bill, congratulations on Seth's birth!

OK--some of you have heard this, but I feel compelled to tell the rest of you...

We bought slightly oversized sneakers for Drew (six years old now!) last spring, thinking that he'd grow into them. Now, the sneakers are practically worn out, and they still don't quite fit.

So, one day after playtime he told us that his feet hurt. He took off his shoes and socks and showed us toes that were rubbed raw. We were a bit shocked. It was definitely time to get him new sneakers, and ones that fit this time!

But that would be a few days away. The next day, Drew went on a field trip with his class at school. His teacher noticed that he was lagging behind the other children and asked him what was up.

"My feet hurt," Drew said. So his teacher took off a sneaker and a sock, and saw the raw toes. She felt so badly for him that she immediately got some band aids for his little toes. I felt terrible when I heard about this--I mean, what kind of parent am I to let this serious situation slide?

Until she told us the rest of the story.

Suddenly suspicious, she asked Drew to take off his sneakers. As she shook them, out came a small rock from each piece of footwear. She asked Drew the obvious question. His answer?

"Oh, don't take those out! Those are my lucky rocks!"

And that is the magic that is my son Drew.

I was showing the kids a couple of little movies on my computer--puppet shows from vacation, you know the stuff.

But then I ran across the werbung movie, the one with the little car going around the mountain lane? The one where the ghoul jumps up in front of the camera and screams?

Yeah, I showed that to Alyssa and Drew. I told them it was scary at the end, but Drew put his face close to the screen too quickly for me to stop him. Then the ghoul jumped up in his face. The look on his face was truly horrified. I think I scared a year's growth off him, and he doesn't have that much to spare.

Now he wants Mommy to sleep with him. Not Daddy. Daddy is in trouble with Mommy. As soon as Mommy stops laughing, that is. Then I'm in big, big trouble.

Oops.

And Happy Chanukah. I hope you have a stress-free and cheerful season. Or regardless, that the new year brings you new paths and quests to follow.

After all, things are happening--Aslan is on the move.

;-)

It's been an interesting year for me, the fall particularly so. As I look to the end of the week (and the end of the year), things changed in a number of ways. In fact, I've not posted to this weblog in over a month intentionally. I couldn't trust what I might write once my fingers got going on the keys.

At any rate, I guess what I'm saying is that you'll see more postings from me now, but I'm not sure what form they'll take. Not to sound trite, but I've spent a lot of time in the past few years trying to be the best this or that at work, and fulfilling various roles elsewhere (including how I write this blog). That's become a wearying dead end, especially at work. I was always very worried about boundaries, and edges, and how things looked, how people would react, you know the drill. I think now I'll just be the best me I can, and if things don't fit for me, maybe it's the situation that I need to change instead of form-fitting myself into every niche in my life. If I'm not making sense, don't worry. Things will become clearer gradually.

After all, 2006 is a brand new year for all of us.

No lie--I got my membership application catalog in the mail today.

Not that I wouldn't be proud to be black, but I'm Italian. And Dutch. Pale, pasty white all over, that's me.

Just a short weekend jaunt of twelve hundred miles or so. See you next week.

Hey, it gives my builder time to dynamite blast the rock on my land where the septic system is to be dug.

And you don't want to mess with a septic system for Dave....

Currently Listening to: Currently listening to:
"Cinecast #40: Top 5 Bleeding Hearts" by cinecast@cinecastshow.com

Well, actually last week it was 6.
I dont' seem to be able to sleep well at the rental no matter how long I sleep. I think it's a combination of too many carbs in thge diet and that road noise of living with I-283 in my back yard!

I slept better at Kevin's over the weekend, although I missed my family. Good visit, though. We should make it two days insteadof one sometime.

Most people who met him said that very same thing--what a cool cat.

So now he's gone.

He seemed to rally in past weeks, but I think he was just holding on to stay with us. He just fell apart this morning, to put a kind face on it. He struggled through the day, and I took him to the vet at eight tonight to put him to sleep.

The hard part today was when Drew broke down crying. He didn't want Dart to die. We told him that Dart wasn't coming back, but he said he thought things might change. He made Dart a little get well card and sent it with Dart and me to the vet.

Dart was in even worse shape than we thought. His circulation was so poor that they had to use a leg vein for the shot, and try three times to get the needle in properly. I skritched his head, and he purred right until he went to sleep. Forever.

I thought I would be OK, but I broke several times. But even the doctor teared up.

We've had three cats, but Dart seemed like he was more. He was different.

He was a cool cat.

I guess that's all I have to say.

I was going to take him to the vet to be put to sleep on Thursday. I even text chatted with Kevin about it Thursday just before I went home.

Then when I got home, the little guy was eating again. After sipping cat food gravy and tuna juice for a week, he's started to eat food again.

He's still rail thin. This is a cat who was 18 pounds, and now he's down to about 9. But he's actually beginning to resume normal activities.

Maybe it's just a calm period before he takes the Big Journey, I dunno. Or maybe he read the Celestine Prophecy and he's working on the 10th life/level. Or maybe he heard us talking about the final vet trip and decided that he wasn't that sick after all (insert Monty Python skit here--"I feel MUCH better now!").

But for as long as it lasts, it's good to have him back.

We still can't figure out the lump/mass on his neck. The biopsy said it was benign skeletal muscle. Maybe he got a bug bite on the neck that he was really allergic to? Maybe it's an extra mutant brain?

As usual, Dart is a mystery to us. I swear the dude surfs the Internet and stuff all day when we're gone ("darn non-opposable thumbs").

The poor cat is 15 years old now. This week was a crisis for him. He has a mass on the left side of his neck that has grown into his throat. He was having trouble breathing. The vet did a spectrum of tests and xrays, and got a sample of the mass for a biopsy. He thinks it's cancerous.

Dart isn't eating. He's pretty quiet, a bit lethargic. The real shame is that cat or not, 15 years old or not, Dart is the coolest cat I ever knew (and we've had 3). He really seems like a human trapped in a cat body.

The biopsy comes back within 7 to 10 days, so we'll know then. He's reacting well to antibiotics, but in a week I may be taking him in to the vet for a final visit if he goes more downhill. Poor guy.

An acre, wooded. We're really excited.

We chose a house to build on it too. A real nice plan.

Pretty cool. The next 10 months will be interesting between the rental by I-283 and the house in the middle of the woods being built.

I wanted to take my old microwave with me from the old house, but I didn't think that the new owners would appreciate the gaping hole from ripping it out above the range.

So I got the Consumer Reports guide and went to the store. I found such an awesome deal. I mean, it was thirty bucks less than the CR price, it was top rated, and man, it had gobs of room inside. It was huge! Really awesome.

So I took it home and unpacked it and set it on the counter. And I looked at it and I said "Holy cow, this thing is huge!"

But not in a good way.

It barely fit on the counter. It crowded out drying dishes. It was a nice deal, sure, but not if I have no room to wash the dishes. Besides, it seemed to take over the kitchen. Y'know, like politicians seem to take over your phone around election time.

So back I went to the store to get the other (and smaller) CR best buy. Much nicer, still plenty of room, and as an added bonus, I've magically eliminated my wife's sidelong glances and mumblings under her breath whenever she's near that side of the kitchen.

After all, it's the little things that count, right?

Due to superhuman effort, superincredible strategies, and supernatural incantations, I have turned huge piles filling my townhouse basement--so huge that you can't walk down there--into:

huger piles that reach to the ceiling.

But now you can walk around down there, in small structured paths. It's like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I know you are all very proud of me.

As I go through these items in the basement, know that all of your birthday presents in the next year will be unique and thoughtful (ahem).

;-)

I had a terrible, weird dream the other night.

Denise and I decided for some strange reason to look for a new house. To do that, we had to sell our house. So we put the house up for sale and got an offer right away.

But then, because the other people had to sell their own house, we kept showing our house to other people. Like, a zillion times and cleaning every time. And then somebody else bought our house because they could do it quicker, because they didn't have a house to sell.

And then, we had to find a rental, because we still hadn't found a new house to move to. So we found a townhouse that was nice and we got ready to move to it. And we threw out all kinds of stuff so we could fit into this little townhouse.

So then in the dream, we moved. And it took like, vanload after vanload, and moving van after moving van. And it took so long that we didn't have time to clean for the people moving in. So, like, we still had stuff to move just before the people bought the house, so we moved everything and cleaned like madmen all night to get everything ready for the new people. Or at least zombie-like madmen, because this all dragged on so long that everything was like that slow motion stuff in dreams.

And the worst was that we moved so much stuff that we filled the rental to the gills, and then we couldn't walk around in it anymore. It was like the movies, where the house is so full of popcorn or something that you can't go inside. But it was all our stuff from the house.

And then the people actually bought our house, and we went back to the little townhouse, because we still weren't sure where we would really move to. And as we sat down in this little townhouse exhausted, we heard all these cars and trucks zooming around, and we looked out back and noticed that the townhouse backed up to a superhighway with constant traffic. So we pretended the cars and trucks were ocean waves on the beach and tried to go to sleep.

UPDATE: Um--hey, guess what? IT WASN'T A DREAM.

I'm really up feces tributary without any visible means of propulsion, aren't I?

And people have been asking me what's up--the website hasn't been updated in a while.

Well, between selling the house, renting the temporary townhouse, looking for a lot or good house to build on/buy, trying to figure out where the best place for the kids is next year (same place they are now, really, if we can swing it), some extended family life changes, odd things going on at work, working with Tangelo, beginning to write TaskMaster, some heavy duty PHP/RB/PostgreSQL projects, budget time, and some awesome opportunities that I'll tell more about later (if they pan out), um.....

I've not had much time to add things to the website.

But, I hope at the end of this month, after we move into the townhouse and settle on selling our current home, that you'll see some interesting things here. I have a great backlog of things to put here and discuss. I may even set up a forum and/or a wiki for some more discussion about hot (as in controversial) topics.

(Man. Did I say this month? I meant May. Isn't April over yet? It's been two months worth of time this month already.)

Just wanted to say happy birthday to Kevin Corcoran today (because his birthday is today--it all syncs together, strangely enough). I was thinking the other day, for no particular reason, that Kevin is the only guy I know who solved the Rubik's Cube by grabbing a pencil and piece of paper and figuring it out in theory. I always thought it was pretty cool (the figuring, not the Rubik's Cube).

Also I just want to state for the record, that Kevin Corcoran has nothing to do with this new book I found on the Internet today:



He'd never be caught dead as the US president (or change his name to Tom, for that matter).