I was right, I was wrong

SPOT ON: See the post headlined May 23: iTunes downloader ready. I was right; The new Dixie Chicks album is damn good. It's an exquisitely manicured middle finger standing tall against the crap they've had to endure over the last three years.

And it is, thankfully, more than that; it's a nice transition out of the hard-core country world into tunes that cross many lines. "Easy Silence" showcases the voice not of Natalie Maines the Texan, but that of Natalie Maines, the former Berklee student.

All that said, it's hard not to point out that the Chicks have been the top album download on iTunes all week while the president's approval rating struggles to stay above 30 percent. Take that, rednecks.

EATING MY WORDS: I wrote this in February 2002 after the Super Bowl. Musing about the commericals:

Cadillac has finally figured out that its customer base is, like, almost dead. The average age of a new Cadillac buyer is 69. The marketing folks catch a clue: Cadillac cues up the Zeppelin, finds a '59 Eldo, and voila, a star is born. Not crazy about the CTS; it's kind of a funny-looking car.

Well, maybe, I might have to amend that: Everybody else's CTS is funny-looking. The one that'll be in my driveway for the next 39 months looks pretty cool.

On the clock

I have 20 hours to complete two PowerPoint presentations for an upcoming conference. During that 20 hours, I must also have dinner, sleep, have breakfast and get children ready for school, and I'll lose one more hour to commuting.

How do you like my chances?

Flight 93 tapes out

First gut response while the CNN babe is reading her transcription of the Flight 93 tapes released today in Alexandria, Va.:

Am I to believe that, under moment of great stress and trauma, that these hijackers would be sending their final prayers to Allah ... in English?

UPDATE: The New York Times notes that the hijackers were indeed speaking Arabic. Which still leads me to wonder how a presumably non-Arabic speaking CNN reporter would know just minutes after the tapes were released what was being said. No tinfoil-hat stuff here, just saying ...

Sad and pathetic

A lot of heavy stuff here lately ... time for a chuckle in my most favorite way -- at my own expense.

Funny scene on the streets of suburban Tampa on Friday afternoon:

Guy in a black 2006 Rapidlyagingdudemobile, late 30s, sun shining off his receding hairline, windows down, 7-speaker Bose cranked up to the max, just absolutely rocking out ...

The song? "Behind these Hazel Eyes" by Kelly Clarkson.

Hi.

Simple rule

And one that would save me a lot of money: When you're not hungry, don't eat.

The latest

The Wife was telling me a story the other night about one of her dogs throwing up.

The Young Daughter observes this mess and says something along the lines of, "She must not have taken her medicine. When I take my medicine, I don't get sick."

The Wife was quite surprised by this. We had no idea that The Young Daughter had drawn the connection between her medications and her episodes of the past few months, which were usually punctuated by vomiting unconnected to any real nausea or upset stomach or carsickness or any other condition that usually generates vomiting.

Among the medicines she's taking is Thalidomide, the drug immortalized as one of the memories of the '60s in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." (Third verse: "Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide.") Baby boomers remember that the drug was originally the miracle cure for morning sickness, with the unfortunate side effect of horrendous birth defects. The drug was taken off the market in the United States until 1998, when it was approved for heavily controlled clincal trials. There are those, including one of the doctors that we are seeing, who believe it might be effective in treating neurofibromatosis.

I, of course, am in favor of most things that might help. Research seems to indicate that only serious side effects of this particular treatment are in utero. The Young Daughter's 5; that's not a high risk. But that doesn't make us any less apprehensive about it.

In two weeks, The Wife and The Young Daughter are traveling to Birmingham, Ala., to meet with the man who literally wrote the book -- actually, several books -- on NF1. Will he have some answers? We don't know. But we'll keep asking the questions.

------

I am reminded of a story from May 2002 (click here and scroll down to May 10, 2002), back when I had no understanding of the realities of this situation and wanted said understanding even less.

The link to the press release in that post was active until fairly recently. It's been awful quiet out of Dr. Parada's office lately. He said "five years." He has one year and one month left to restore my faith in the medical profession. The clock is ticking.

The clock is ticking, goddammit. Find a way to fix this. Now.

I stand and salute

From our wire services:

CHATTANOOGA, TENN. -- The only U.S. conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor in the Second World War has been buried at a national cemetery with a 21-gun salute, although he refused to carry a weapon while serving as an army medic.

Desmond Doss, 87, died March 23 in Piedmont, Ala., where he and his wife, Frances, had been living with family.

A horse-drawn hearse delivered the flag-covered coffin to the gravesite Monday in the Chattanooga National Cemetery. Military helicopters flew overhead in a tribute formation.

Doss was ridiculed for his beliefs but "remained true to his convictions even when it was not the most popular thing to do," said Patti Parks, a retired U.S. navy commander and director of the Medal of Honor Museum in Chattanooga.

Doss, who refused to carry a weapon during his wartime service in the Pacific, was the subject of a book, The Unlikeliest Hero, and a 2004 documentary, The Conscientious Objector.

Medal of Honor Society records show he was among 3,461 recipients of the highest U.S. military honor.

While under enemy fire on the island of Okinawa, Doss carried 75 wounded soldiers to the edge of a 120-metre cliff and lowered them to safety, according to his citation.

During a later attack, he was seriously wounded in the legs by a grenade. According to the citation, as he was being carried to safety, he saw a more critically injured man and crawled off his stretcher, directing the medics to help the other wounded man.

"He wanted to serve. He just didn't want to kill anybody," said a veteran who attended the service, Fred Headrick, 85. "Most all of them (Medal of Honor recipients) received their medal for killing someone. He received his by saving lives."

Now this dude's a hero. There's a way to be a patriot without killing other people in the process.

Why I hate technology

I'm so disgusted by this story. I would be just as disgusted if the guy wasn't a high-ranking federal official in an agency entrusted for securing the safety of the American people. If he is found guilty of the crimes for which he's charged, he's both sick and stupid, and I hate the fact that my wife and children share a planet with people like him.

The Wife and I have been batting around the idea of letting the Old Daughter have limited, heavily guarded, heavily filtered Internet access on the computer in her bedroom. The Wife has always been staunchly 100 percent opposed to it; I was 99 percent opposed to it, thinking that there might be an argument in favor of letting her have some freedom to do research, play her games, e-mail her friends, etc., without having to use the centrally located desktop in the living room.

The Old Daughter, of course, is 100 percent in favor of having Internet access in her room. We were almost ready to bend; I proposed that as long as she was fully open to random and unannounced searches of her browsing history, e-mail sent items, and the rest of her hard drive, I would consider it. The Wife reluctantly agreed to that proposal.

I've changed my mind. If I caught something in a history or a cache, it's too late. That toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube. I'm now back to being firmly opposed to letting children have Internet access in a non-common area of the house.

In my house, at least, I'm sure the problem wouldn't be outgoing material. And if an indecent proposal did make its way in, I'm sure it would be reported the second it hit the screen.

But we can't take the risk of letting the sick and the stupid into our house.

Another day, another airplane

Sitting in coach Sunday afternoon, on an airline where I don't carry Gold status. It's much more entertaining to people-watch in coach. In first, you see several variations of the same person, either the old white guy in a suit or the overdressed 50-ish woman self-consciously knocking back a bloody mary before takeoff.

From Seat 7D, I quietly look around from under the earbuds, only seeing, not hearing. It's much easier to make up stories about people when you can't actually hear what's going on ...

-- At the bulkhead, there are the young parents with the 5-month-old baby. They're trying desperately not to be Those Parents. They're both looking around just the slightest bit; whenever they make eye contact with someone, they give the apologetic "I'm sorry she's so loud" look. They're doing fine, though, in comparison to ...

-- ... The Militant Single Mom, three rows back and across the aisle. She sits in the middle as her kids (I'll call them Tyrone and LaKeisha) fight over the window and the aisle. Tyrone and LaKeisha are generating enough volume to get in under my Shure E300s. MSM, meanwhile, doesn't give a shit, and she just absolutely dares you to say something about it. Her big brown eyes are spitting fire; it might be directed at the kids, and it might be directed at you. Best not to find out. It's all she can do to get these kids back home. She's been taking crap from them for an entire week of "vacation," and she doesn't care at all that you're going to get two hours of it.

-- Taking a deep breath and running his fingers through what is left of his hair is the guy on the aisle across from MSM and her brood. He's wearing a white polo shirt with a logo of some small software company, as anonymous as the one for which I work. Clearly, he's carrying the entire weight of the world on his shoulders. It's written all over his face. I'm reading it line by line. He's been traveling too much and working too hard, his marriage is faltering, and he'd rather be getting an ice-water enema than making this particular trip. Two things are true about a business guy traveling on Sunday: 1/he's outbound, not inbound, and 2/he's leaving behind stuff he'd rather be doing and stuff that, in the scheme of things, is more important than whatever he's headed off to. Both, I can tell, are true of this guy. He's been sitting in his seat quietly enduring MSM to his right and the baby up front; he gets his laptop out of its briefcase and taps away idly on it. If I got out of my seat to go to the bathroom, I'm pretty sure I'd see a typical business traveler's work: a half-hearted game of solitaire.

-- The Young Lovers, he in a New York Giants jersey and gym shorts, she in a pink sweatshirt and flip-flops. Their spring break didn't go well. They probably won't be talking come May. Wonder who paid for this trip.

-- The old fellow next to me has a hospital bracelet on. He apparently broke his arm during his Florida business trip. He takes up way more of his middle seat than a guy his size normally would. He looks very fragile. I'm scared to bump him for fear he might shatter.

Turn off your electronic devices, turn off your brain, watch as everything that's really important to you disappears at 1,000 feet a minute. Sit back, relax and enjoy the flight as best as you can.

My life, brought to you by iTunes

A tremendously fun meme. Simple rules:

1/Get your iTunes library.
2/Set it to shuffle
3/Ask the questions below and hit Play (or next)
4/Whatever song comes up, go with it.

Q) How does the world see you?
A) The Road Goes on Forever / Robert Earl Keen
This is a song about a girl I knew back in Anytown. Several of them, actually. However, the story never ended as well for any of them.

Q) Will I have a happy life?
A) Drinkin' on the Job / The Rainmakers
Now there's an idea.

Q) What do my friends really think of me?
A) Manic Depression / Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
They could certainly be excused if that's what they thought.

Q) Do people secretly lust after me?
A) Free Bird / Lynyrd Skynyrd
Yeah ... probably not.

Q) How can I make myself happy?
A) A Million Miles Away / The Rainmakers
This song is a really really deep song about a guy who could be recovering from a traumatic experience, drug abuse, or homelessness. I always took it as that he was contemplating suicide, but that might be reading a little bit more into it. It does feature one of Bob Walkenhorst's very cool turns of phrase:

And the landscape in the dark,
it could have been New Zealand
New York, or New Mexico
So what else is new? Jim thought

Q) What should I do with my life?
A) More than a Feeling / Boston
Ah, a great song from the speakers of the Trans Am in the mid-'80s. Not much guidance there, though.

Q) Will I ever have children?
A) I Know My History / Van Zant
My history would suggest that I'd have a big family. By 21st-century standards, I do.

Q) What is some good advice for me?
A) The Three Fine Daughters of Farmer Brown / Eddie from Ohio
Hmm ... nah, that would probably cause trouble.

Q) How will I be remembered?
A) Creepin' In / Norah Jones
That's me, sneaking into places where I don't belong, over and over.

Q) What is my signature song?
A) Small Town Jericho / Sugarland
I always wanted to live in a small town. I never have. And I think it would be too late now. If you weren't born there, you'll never belong.

Q) What do I think my current theme song is?
A) Take Me Down / Kelly Willis
I don't believe the words you're saying
And I know the game you're playing
So it's only just for now
That I will let you take me down

Q) What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
A) Wide Open Spaces / Dixie Chicks
I lived in one place for 25 years. I haven't lived anywhere else for more than three. Might explain a lot about a lot.

Q) What song will play at my funeral?
A) The One That Got Away / The Rainmakers
The old man's lament.
Well I did this and I did that
And I guess I did OK
I did whatever I had to do
And I did it my own way
Whatever hand I drew
Whatever hand I played
From place to place
I come face to face
with the one that got away"

In a lot of ways, that's strangely appropriate. I've never felt I've made the most of the opportunities I've had.

Q) What type of men/women do I like?
A) If I Wanted To / Melissa Etheridge
Odd that she'd pop up in that spot.

Q) What is my day going to be like?
A) Snakedance / The Rainmakers
This is the lion's den ... And yeah, I knew that before I came in.

From largelypro.com (and please note: the fact that the blogger had a close association with a band that popped up repeatedly in the above list had no influence on the content).

A small request

If you are the praying type (and it's cool with me if you are, or not), I'd be grateful if you'd send a few our way.

May 23 ... iTunes downloader ready

This oughta be good.

Getting what I pay for

I'm going to blame my extended absence from this forum on Blogger's recent tendency to lag -- apparently for as long as a day or two -- before posts actually show up. Yep, that must be it.

Arrgh

Here we go, devolving back into monthly mode. I hate it when that happens.

Quick hits:

-- The Wife's Champion Dog had another litter of puppies. These dogs are apparently all the buzz in the world of dog-show people (at least, those who show her breed.) This is a very good buzz, and very good for The Wife and the Champion Dog. Five years ago, when she first got into all this, I wondered why the hell she was doing it. Now I understand. Very cool.

-- The Old Daughter recently won her school's spelling bee. Normally, this would not sound all that impressive -- hell, back in '82, I won my junior high's spelling bee -- but she did it 1/against a whole bunch of kids, way more than the 10 or so I beat and 2/she's in sixth grade, and given her July birthday was very likely the youngest kid in the competition. The win qualified her for an appearance in the county-wide spelling bee, against 45 other kids, most of whom were also in eighth grade. Her exit was far too early -- she got tripped up when the reader gave an obscure and kind of odd definition of the word "regency" -- but she'll be back.

-- I will be spending a good portion of my next two months in Montréal (I am there, in fact, as I write this), one of North America's most fabulous cities. Every time I'm here, I'm busy as hell and don't get much of a chance to see/enjoy much of anything. Plus, it's colder than crap. But one of these days, I'll share with you some of the wonders of this city.

Crawling back into my hole. I promise I'll try to come out before next month.

Coach of the Century

I love this story; stop me if you've heard it already.

I've found my new favorite basketball coach. His name is Jim Johnson, and he coaches high school hoops in a little town outside of Rochester, N.Y., called Greece. The school's name is Athena.

For their last home game, against a somewhat overmatched opponent, Johnson let student manager Jason McElwain dress and sit on the bench in uniform. I was a student manager; I would've probably given my right nut for the chance to do that.

With 4:30 to go and his team way up -- they eventually won, 79-43 -- Johnson put McElwain into the game. The fans go nuts, chanting "J-Mac! J-Mac!" It probably could have been interpreted as teasing. This was, after all, the 5-foot-6 student manager.

He gets the ball and throws up an air ball on his first shot. Then he missed a layup. So much for the nice ending; sit down and grab your clipboard, kid.

Not exactly.

Over the next four minutes, the kid hits 7 of 11 shots, including 6-of-10 from behind the 3-point line. The manager scored 20 points in four minutes, and set a school record for most 3-pointers in a game. I would have given both my nuts and a few of my toes to do something like that.

The manager scored 20 points in the only four minutes of high school ball he'll ever play.

Oh, by the way: The kid is autistic.

"I've had a lot of thrills in coaching and I've coached a lot of wonderful kids, but I've never experienced something like this ever in my life, you know other than my own personal family things," Johnson told WROC-TV. "My emotions, I couldn't stop crying."

I love this story. I hope this was the breakthrough moment for this kid; experts claim that high-functioning autistics can have experiences that actually help unshackle them from disease.

"This is the first moment Jason has ever succeeded and was proud of himself," Debbie McElwain, Jason's mother, told WROC. "I look at autism as the Berlin Wall; he cracked it."

For his sake, may that be the case -- and may he keep finding hammers to chip away at that wall.

Yep, definitely on a fast train headed way South

(somewhat continued from previous post)

Kids received money in the mail today for Valentine's Day from various relatives. Have no idea when the hell that tradition started; all I know is that it started about 25 years too late.

Anyway, each kid netted about $9 or so. We took them to Wal-Mart so each could buy $9 worth of toys.

The Old Daughter looked, and looked, and then found what she wanted:

Chips.

Yep, poker chips.

I got The Look again.

Instead of the bedtime story, The Boy and the Old Daughter opted for a few hands with me. Says The Boy, with an evil not-yet-7 smile: "Bluffing is fun. I like bluffing."

God help us all. God help me when The Wife delivers my well-deserved beating for my bad influence.

I suspect I'm going to Hell for this

Grandpa Mike was teaching the kids to play five-card draw. They were using K'Nex (think Tinkertoys of 2006) as chips. They were enjoying that, and then I came home. I said, "Let's learn a new game."

"Cool," said The Old Daughter, 11. "What's it called?"

"It's called Texas Hold 'Em." I dealt the pocket cards, explained terms and the betting, and set down the flop. The Wife rolled her eyes. The Boy, not quite 7, said, "Hey, this looks fun."

The Boy bluffed his way to win two consecutive hands, one of them after he stared down his sister, who folded to his pair of 4s. Grandpa Mike won a few hands, I held out until the river for a flush to win one, and then it was dinnertime.

Didn't think much more of it until a few days later, when we were driving to Lowe's or Home Depot or Chili's or somewhere suburban in the minivan. The Wife said, "It's awful quiet back there; wonder what's going on?"

The silence continues for a few seconds. Then, the Old Daughter's voice: "Now, here's the flop ... "

Yeah, I got The Look. You know, the look one's wife gives you after it becomes completely evident that you've corrupted the children in some fashion; the look I get when The Boy knows the words to "Bohemian Rhapsody." I'm pretty sure I deserved The Look. I'm not going to worry about it, at least not until my two older kids show up to the table in sunglasses.

Best of ...

Digging through the back issues, I found this from Aug. 29, 2002. No particular relevance to anything, other than a reminder that if you must wage war, there are plenty of things against which war should be waged. Here's one of them.

"There is never a shortage of bullshit"
Thus declared The Wife a couple of days ago. She noted that while we suffer deficits of many necessary things, there seems to be a perpetual bullshit surplus.

This is reality. Some people deal with it by meditating, or smoking weed, or lighting incense, or getting an occasional massage and spa treatment.

The Wife, right-leaning person that she is, has declared war.

"I am declaring war," she said, "on bullshit."

Now there's a war I can get behind.

This is a noble cause. Instead of obsessing and bitching and moaning and freaking out over things over which we have no control, now would be a good time to simply choose to not worry about them. Many things are just not going to get any better. That's OK, 'cause they're really pretty good. Let's say I take that excess energy freed up by ceasing to acknowledge bullshit and devote it to things that really matter, and who knows? Maybe I'll take less aspirin.

I know I won't be able to dodge the opponent every day, but it'll at least know I'm there.

The War on Bullshit is on. All are invited to join the effort.

We're still accepting volunteers.

You heard it here first

Steelers 24, Seahawks 20.

State of our Union: Fashion-challenged

So, Cindy Sheehan was arrested at the State of the Union shindig, and all I can think is, "Dear God, she wore a t-shirt to the Capitol?"

Karma bites man

We have a customer in a very average little town in northern Illinois. I think it's actually Illinois' second or third largest city, but let's just say it ain't Chicago. It reminds me of Anytown, only without the life that a major university brings (which, in Anytown, is the only life you'll find.) I absolutely love the people with whom I work there; to a person, they're the smartest and most fun group with whom I've had the privilege to associate. I've made some friendships there that transcend the job, and that's very cool.

But, other than those folks, the place has nothing which distinguishes it from any other very average town in the Midwest. Except this: from city limit to city limit, restaurant service is horrible. Upscale joint, local dive, national chain, doesn't matter. I've taken to calling the place the Land of the Eight Percent Tip.

And so it was that I found myself at a Steak 'n' Shake very late one night last week, and the shake I ordered never arrived. For me, it was just steak, no shake. So I dutifully put the 8 percent on the credit card slip, sighed and shook my head, and walked out the door. I got my keys out of my pocket, pointed them around the parking lot in one of my typical attempts to identify which rental car is mine, and then felt a chill of a high-20s evening.

That chill shook me a little bit; just enough to make me drop my keys.

In a storm drain.

I knew it was going to happen the millisecond they left my hand. And all I could do was calmly think, "Yep, they're gonna land in the drain." I could see them down there; about five feet down, just far enough to where getting them out was going to be a project.

After determining that the cover of the drain was indeed cemented down, and that I was indeed cold, and that it was indeed 12:30 a.m. and it was doubtful that anybody at Alamo Rent-A-Car was going to care at that hour (or perhaps at any other), I went back into the restaurant ... and pleaded my case with the kid to whom I had just granted 10 percent. I told him my tale of woe. He went to the back of the store and came back with a broom handle, a long hook-like rod and one of his friends.

We poked around in the drain for about 10 minutes, when the friend came up with an idea. In the absence of a flashlight (nobody had a flashlight!), the guy went back into the restaurant and came back with several paper placemats and a Bic lighter. He lit the paper on fire and dropped it in the drain. "Hope there's no gas in there," he said as he dropped it.

The idea was genius; not only did it warm us up, but it gave us sufficient light to coax the keys onto the hook with the broom handle. The waiter nudged, I hooked, and we brought the keys back to their rightful above-ground place.

I was, of course, grateful; so grateful that I gave the kid all the cash in my pocket, which meant that his 8 percent wound up being closer to 100. Being a kid -- and probably on some level aware that I had basically stiffed him -- he took the cash.

Good for him, I say. And from now on, I ... well, I'll probably still meet bad service with a bad tip. But I will add a new procedure to the travel system -- the keys stay in the pocket until I get to the car.

Fisher Price's My First Poker Blog

The casino in our city, Saturday night. Sat down at a $2 Texas Hold-'em table, started off with J-Kd, flop came up 2c-4s-9c, turn showed 6-c. I folded. It only got worse from there. But it's been a while since I had that much fun losing that much money.

The experience was diluted a bit by having a fight break out at the next table over, which was kind of distracting. The dealer at our table very much had a show-must-go-on attitude, which I guess he's trained to do, and kept slinging cards while he was yelling for security and we players were all watching for the inevitable firearm.

I take consolation in the fact that I never had good cards; I never folded too soon, basically. Had I played a little more pessimistically, the chips would have at least lasted longer, but I still doubt I'd be bragging about my winnings. I allowed myself to get rushed into a decision a few times, which seems to be the key difference between playing online and playing live (and with real money). I needed to give myself that extra second or two to think about what I was doing, and to get a read on the rest of the table.

But the fact that I've spent that many words analyzing what was possibly the weakest performance in the history of poker suggests that I'll probably be back.

-----

Overall, The Wife and I had a horrendously unsuccessful night at the casino. It was her first time in a casino, my fourth. The other three times (twice in Kansas City, once in Denmark) I came out a little bit ahead, mostly by playing blackjack. The Wife is apparently not Lady Luck. I'm not going to say how much we lost Satruday, lest people think we suddenly have a lot of disposable income and start calling us wanting loans. All I can say is thank God we have a big tax refund coming.

We spent most of the night giggling at our incompetence. We were flummoxed by the bingo game on the slot machines. We weren't sure why it was there, but we noticed that it seemed to change when we touched the screen, so we preceded every play on the slot machine with three taps on the bingo card.

In our state, gambling is only legal on "Native American land," which means the tribe buys up a few plots in the hotel district, plants its flag there and waits for it to start raining money. I consoled myself as we walked out, having drunkenly decided that I've made my reparations to the Indians for how my people treated them 150 years ago. We're even now.

-----

(To the overly sensitive, politically correct or Native American among us: That was a joke. Lighten up.)

-----

I'm not an early adopter; I'm just catching on to this poker thing. I'm playing at one of the few online sites compatible with Macs. I won my first few hands, then buzzed through my fake bankroll with alarming speed. Thankfully, refilling is as easy as clicking a button, and I'm now comfortably a few hundred fake dollars ahead.

Poker is a game that's well suited for my conflicting personality traits. I don't trust anybody and I tend to over-analyze situations, but I'm also one of the most optimistic people I know.

I do prefer to take my risks in environments I control (which is why I have no qualms with riding a motorcycle 140 mph but won't get on a rollercoaster). Ultimately, knowledge is control.

Thankfully, there are plenty of sources of knowledge out there. Cousin Otis has managed to make a career out of this, having extracted himself from the grind of mainstream journalism to become a globe-trotting poker blogger. That's so 2006; writing online about a game that incredible numbers of people are suddenly watching on television. Cards on TV? My parents played cards in the kitchen when I was a kid. My dad and mom and aunts and uncles would get together nearly every weekend to play canasta or some other equally uncool game. I can't imagine watching that on TV.

But I found myself on a Song flight recently with the little TV in the seat, watching ESPN during off hours. And there it was ... guys sitting around the table playing cards. After having successfully ignored the poker boom in the last two years, other than to occasionally marvel at the blogs, I found myself mesmerized. I found myself wondering why the hell So-and-So called with 5-2 offsuit. And then, I went online.

It'll be a long, long while before I'm comfortable using my kids' college money on a card game. But I now understand the appeal, and it probably won't be long before I'm seeking out a game.

Way, way too close to home

You probably heard about the school shooting in Central Florida on Friday. Kid takes gun to middle school, brandishes it, school clears out, cops chase kid into bathroom, corner kid. Kid points gun at cop, cop shoots kid. Kid is on life support as of this writing.

If we hadn't made the decision two years ago this month to uproot our lives and change my career, The Wife and I would have been among the frantic parents in the mob scene outside the school Friday morning. That was the middle school the Old Daughter would have attended.

-----

This spurred a discussion in the house this evening. The Wife was mortified that the SWAT team shot this poor kid, who just had a little pellet gun. "They didn't have to shoot to kill," she said. "They had him cornered in the bathroom, for Pete's said. Why didn't they just shoot him in the leg or something?"

I pointed out that it was a pellet gun made to look just like a 9mm Beretta, and that the cop did exactly the right thing. "A kid takes a gun to my kid's school," I said, "I want him taken out. I want the cops to drop him. I don't care if he's 15." If a SWAT team had been able to get to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold a little sooner, maybe that's 12 other families who would have been spared the unspeakable grief they've dealt with the last six years.

I'm probably closer to wrong, and she's probably closer to right. A kid dying is a tragedy, and I hope this kid holds on and gets treatment and becomes a productive member of society. But dammit, my first priority is my children's safety.

My kid was safely in her own middle school Friday, 100 miles to the southwest of the horror, and knows nothing of this incident. But we've already had to explain more to her this year than we've wanted to. An eighth-grader at her school committed suicide earlier this year. It was not that long ago that we were having to teach her how to tie her shoes; now we're having to show her some of the world's darkest corners.

I know that's the only way that she's going to grow up with the ability to understand and deal with such things. But it's not right, and it's not something for which I'm prepared as a parent.

I graduated from high school in 1986, which wasn't exactly the Little House on the Prairie era. In the approximately 2,160 days in which I attended public schools, I never once thought for a second that somebody might get shot there. We lost fellow students to car wrecks, childhood diseases and tornadoes, but not suicide.

I try not to believe the world is a worse or crazier place now than it has ever been. Days like today test that belief.

And then God said, "Let there be California"

I was headed home after our Southern California project got off to a rough start. The Co-Worker, who's managing the project, stayed behind another day. She suggested that I relieve my stress by taking the Pacific Coast Highway rather than the customary freeway route, U.S. 101 and I-405, back to Los Angeles International Airport. I asked if she was sure that it was faster. "Oh, yeah," she said. "And beautiful, too."

As I drove through Oxnard, apparently a military and agricultural outpost, I wasn't so sure. Looked like any other surface-street alternative route to me. At this point, it's just California 1 South, Oxnard Boulevard.

Then, my rented Chrysler Sebring convertible made a slight jog to the right, and the truth was revealed.

Oh. My. God.

I just don't have words. Thank God I was wearing sunglasses, because I was literally near tears as absolutely breathtaking scenery led to even more superlative sights. On the left, a mountain rising to the amazingly clear blue sky; in the middle, me and the Sebring; on the right, the Pacific crashing into the rocks stacked at the side of the road.

I see now why people overpay to live in Southern California. I appreciate why people build those houses in Malibu atop those cliffs, despite the very real possibility that they'll slide off into the ocean someday (and ultimately, I'm not so sure that would be a bad thing.) I wonder why anybody who is recruited to attend Pepperdine University, whose campus runs along the east side of the highway south of Malibu, would turn it down.

There are just no words. It was epiphany-level beautiful.

In a way, Los Angeles might be the true Anytown USA. It was disconcerting to be on a road for the first time and see so many familiar exits: Mulholland Drive, Wilshire Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard ("All I wanna do/is have some fun"). You want diversity? I looked to my right at one red light in Santa Monica, and saw an early-'70s Vega with the old blue California license plates, belching gray smoke from its exhaust pipe directly onto the shiny new Rolls waiting behind the Vega at the light. That's not a sight I'm going to see back in Suburbia; nor, likely, was it a sight I was going to see on the 405.

I live in one of America's versions of Paradise; it takes much more than a 69-degree day in January to impress me. I certainly came away impressed, and then some.

My next car

The first car I remember really wanting was a 1970 Dodge Challenger that was for sale on my walk to school when I was a 15-year-old, license-less, car-less high school sophomore. I, of course, had no access to the $1,500 that was going to be necessary to buy it. But, man, it looked sweet: 340 six-pack, big rectangular exhausts, all stock, well preserved.

Now Chrysler goes and shows me this. I would camp out at my local Dodge dealer if that came to fruition.

If only

I deal with buggy software a lot (and not just the stuff I install and support.) The latest buggy piece of software with which I'm dealing is a program that syncs my Blackberry to my Mac. Somehow, rather than syncing, it cleared my calendar.

The more I look at it, the more I like the way my new calendar looks.

Happy New Life

Just in time to get that all-important '05 tax deduction for our good friends C and L, little Teagan comes along at 8 pounds and 5 ounces Saturday afternoon. She's got three big brothers, which, over the course of the next 20 or so years, is either going to be the best thing that ever happened to her, or the worst. Welcome; it's going to be a fun ride.

After the fireworks, smoke

It's 1 hour and 11 minutes into the first day of the first year of the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. Suddenly, for reasons I don't quite understand, I feel a lot older than I did an hour and 11 minutes ago.

Year-end meme

Everybody's doing it, and I'm still feeling too lazy to come up with my own stuff. So:

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
Actually, I've only had three. I was lucky enough to get the one I really wanted rather young:
-- File clerk in a collection agency (the agency was owned by my uncle; my role basically was to be The Boss's Nephew. People were much nicer to me at that job than at any of my subsequent jobs. Go figure.)
-- Journalist
-- Software guy

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH REPEATEDLY
I'm not a big movie fan; I've probably seen fewer than 50 movies all the way through in my entire life. Short attention span, or something. Anyway:
-- Stripes ("Someday, one of these men might save your life." "Then again, we might not.")
-- The Lion King (I'm a sucker for triumphant-return stories, I guess)
-- Bull Durham ("Don't think, Meat. You'll hurt the ballclub.")
-- The Incredibles (or, really, any Pixar movie.)

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE LIVED
I spent the first 25 years of my life in my hometown, Anytown, USA. The places I've called home since then:
-- Cincinnati
-- Orlando
-- Dallas
-- Tampa

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH
This will be a struggle; I watch very little TV. Let's try:
-- Monday Night Football
-- M*A*S*H
-- Law and Order (the original, not SVU or CI or any of the other initialed ones)
-- Sheesh. I can't come up with a fourth.

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION
Exotic locales such as:
-- Houston
-- Washington, D.C.
-- St. Louis
-- Charleston, S.C.
I didn't get out much.

FOUR WEB SITES YOU VISIT DAILY
-- msnbc.com
-- nytimes.com
-- poynter.org/medianews
-- blogs.silconvalley.com/gmsv, the best tech news site out there.

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS
-- Ribeye steak, medium
-- Crab legs
-- Anything Mexican
-- A viciously hot stir-fry that The Wife makes, with beef, chicken or shrimp. Bad for the digestive system, good for the soul.

FOUR PLACES YOU'D RATHER BE
I'll limit this to places that I've never been:
-- Australia
-- Hawaii
-- Italy
-- Somewhere up in the mountains, say, Colorado or Wyoming

OK. I think I'm the last one to have done this, but if you haven't, well, you should.

iChristmas

Among the family's Christmas haul: a 12-inch iBook G4 (for The Wife; welcome to the Mac side!), an iPod Nano 4 GB (also for The Wife) and an iPod Shuffle (for the Old Daughter.)

Steve Jobs owes me a Christmas card.

Merry Christmas, from the archives

While I recharge the batteries and get ready for another Christmas Eve, I present to you this forum's first-ever Christmas post, from (unbelievably) four years ago, when life was a lot different. We never got a chance to do that "one last time" gathering; Grandma went on to her much-deserved rest in 2004, and the little house in Anytown is on the market, if not already sold. A reminder that while the holidays are wonderful, they sometimes make me wistful.

All the best to you and yours, and enjoy this blast from the not-so-recent past.

Christmas, Anytown style

Here's how it was: Christmas Eve, any year in the 1970s. Eight adult siblings (including my dad) and their spouses, probably 20 cousins (including me) ranging in age from 10 to just-born, a few ex-wives of the aforementioned siblings, and my grandparents, all packed into their house, which seated maybe six comfortably. Big, thick cloud of smoke hanging over the proceedings (apparently, back in the 1970s, secondhand smoke wasn't bad for kids). Somebody's dressed as Santa; one of my uncles, but I'm not sure who, and I certainly wasn't going to make my way through the crowd to figure it out. Not much food around, and certainly nothing I liked. We're supposed to start opening presents at 5:00, but it's 5:20, and one aunt-uncle-cousins bloc isn't here yet. They're always late. There's a Christmas tree in the corner, but you can hardly see it because it's covered with those shiny silver icicles. Small flashing lights on the tree inside, big flashing lights on the evergreen in the front yard, big flashbulb going off every once in a while on someone's Polaroid. If it's not snowing and it's above 20 degrees, a few of us will venture outside every once in a while to get away from the smoke and the noise. Back inside, the late arrivals have showed up. Wrapping paper is flying, cousins are hollering, and toys are piling up to the ceiling. If you have a cousin of the same gender and in the same basic age group, you got the same gift as he did. Conflict avoidance, of course. You can't play with anything, though; there's no room to play with anything. The family wasn't well-off, by any means; my dad and two of his brothers worked in the same factory, and they were on strike that winter. Or sitting out a temporary layoff. Didn't matter; none of the kids would have ever known the difference.

Here's what it became: Christmas Eve, sometime in the late 1980s. Same family, same gathering, although in the slightly larger house of the Uncle Who Made Good. Some of the cousins, such as myself, are in their late teens or early 20s. We're bringing girlfriends or boyfriends to the gathering, and we're not staying very long. We're getting gifts we really don't have a lot of use for, in complete honesty. And I can only stay until 6, because I have to go to work. There's more food around, but I've already been to one of the few places in Anytown that's open on Christmas Eve, probably the Waffle House. I leave, not particularly filled with Christmas spirit, but more relieved that I've made my appearance.

Here's how it is: Christmas Eve, 2001. The siblings are getting older; all the cousins are grown and many have kids of their own. Some are in Texas, some in Colorado, some in South Carolina, one in medical school. A few are still bumming around Anytown, doing the best they can with what they have. The Christmas gathering is a much smaller affair in a much bigger place, at the palatial estate of the Uncle Who Made Good. It'll probably be the only time my grandparents get out of their house all year. Phone rings a few times; it's the cousin from Texas or Colorado or South Carolina calling to wish the gathering a merry Christmas. The same aunt-uncle-cousins bloc, minus the cousins, will be late. Or they won't show up at all, which'll make Grandma sad, but probably nobody else will miss them. My own kids wouldn't have a clue how to conduct themselves in a large, loud group like the one I grew up with. It would just freak them out. We'll have our own gathering here in Texas; wrapping paper will fly, toys will pile to the ceiling; it'll have everything but the cloud of smoke.

Maybe soon we'll get that whole group together one last time. Maybe we'll do it at my grandparents' little house in Anytown. Until then, I'll count the memory as one of my best gifts of this or any year.

Cheap space-filler

A meme, via largelypro.com, basically just so I can say that I have a December post.

A is for Age: 37. The same age my Dad was when one second of inattention behind the wheel changed our lives forever.
B is for Booze: Macallan, 12 year. Disposable income is fun.
C is for Career: Software guy. Install it, teach it, document it. But I still think of myself as a journalist.
D is for Dad?s name: Same as mine, which explains how my credit report once showed a Sears account that "I" opened in 1978, when I was 10.
E is for Essential items to bring to a party: A four-pack of Grolsch swing-tops. Great conversation starters.
F is for Favorite song or music: I have a different favorite song every day, but one sticks in my head more than most. On June 1, 1986, the day I graduated from high school, I had the house to myself for a few minutes before I had to leave for the ceremony. I turned on the stereo and Boston's "Don't Look Back" was on. I closed my eyes and listened to it ... then, during the bridge, for reasons, I still can't understand, I jumped as high as I possibly could and let out a yell, because finally, my life was going to go forward. It's not even that band's best song, but whenever I hear it, I always remember that moment.
G is for Goof off thing to do: Not much time for that, but when I do, it usually involves idly surfing the Web.
H is for Hometown: Springfield, Mo., aka Anytown USA. Haven't been there since my grandmother's funeral in 2004.
I is for Instrument you play: For the last 25 years, it's been guitar. At times in my life, I have also publicly played violin, viola, cello and bass.
J is for Jam or Jelly you like: Welch's grape jelly. Accept no substitutes.
K is for Kids: Three, 11, 6 and 5, girl, boy, girl, respectively.
L is for Living arrangement: Plastic white suburbia, wife, her four dogs, the kids, and a cat who we can't persuade to leave.
M is for Mom?s name: Stephanie. Named for her father's political hero, Stephen Douglas. Explains a lot about her father.
N is for Name of best friend: Natalie. Thankfully, I'm also married to her.
Overnight Stay in a Hospital: Three days after getting smacked down with the flu last February in New Hampshire.
P is for Phobias: I'm afraid of water, and dogs, which explains why I have a house with a large swimming pool and four golden retrievers.
Q is for Quote you like: "Two elephants for a quarter is only a good deal if you need two elephants and you have a quarter."
R is for Relationship that lasted longest: The Wife and I began Year 16 in October.
S is for Siblings: A younger sister.
T is for Texas, ever been? Lived there for three years. Many things to love about that place. Many things to hate. It's a land of extremes.
U is for Unique trait: What makes me unique? Hell, I don't have a clue. I'm a pretty average guy.
V if for vegetable you love: Will eat just about any vegetable cold, or steamed. Once they lose their crunch, though, they lose me.
W is for Worst traits: Procrastination, and a tendency to shut down when I get frustrated.
X- is for X-rays you?ve had: I have a fuzzy memory of that hospital stay mentioned earlier involving X-rays, but I'm not sure. The source for this meme points out that this is a rather desperate attempt to come up with something for X. I agree.
Y is for Yummy food you make: I'm not much of a cook, but I can grill a steak as well as anybody and better than most.
Z is for Zodiac sign: Cancer.

It's just a number

It just occurred to me that people who went to high school with me are turning 40 this year.

And Madonna is 47.

Random stray thought

I find myself at 1:48 a.m. suddenly needing to know the Danish word for "fortuitous."

The new "normal"

The Young Daughter came home from the hospital Friday afternoon, none the worse for wear. After a few hours to get re-oriented, she was back up to full speed. She was in rare form at dinner, making up for lost time by applying a week's worth of torture on her big brother. (He's an easy target.) In short, all is well.

What they didn't come home with Friday afternoon was answers. These "episodes" she has are not common with her malady. We've rung up a doctor back in Texas, who originally diagnosed the Young Daughter back in 2001. This doctor is now in possession of all the records and is presenting the case to her colleagues next week. We expect to have an answer then, and we expect the answer to be low-dose chemotherapy to attack a couple of small lesions on her cerebellum. In the process, hopefully, it might zap a couple of optic gliomas, too.

This is not at all the worst-case scenario. Chemotherapy is no walk in the park, but I'm assured it's not near as bad as it used to be. The problem here is, though, as I write this, nobody's sure it's going to work. It might be a situation where we're "trying" chemo, the same way you'd "try taking a Motrin" if you had a headache.

But sometimes, all you can do is try. We're trying now to take this one step at a time. Right now, everybody's home. The Wife is two hours away at a dog show, her first time out of the Young Daughter's sight in a week. This is a good thing, for all involved. At 10:16 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 5, we're having a "normal" day. That's all that matters right now.

Hey you! The one with the black cloud over your head

I haven't been happy the last few days, and I'm perfectly justified. You don't like it? Screw you. My kid has been in the hospital all week tethered to some machine that's measuring her brain waves, testing for a condition nobody thinks she has. My wife is sleeping on a "bed" that a homeless person would turn down, with a blue light shining on her all night so they can film my daughter not having seizures. Neither of them signed up for that duty. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

So yeah. I've been a little testy.

Driving to work today, my grim countenance firmly installed, I find myself stopped at a light behind a little Toyota truck.

Its license plate: MO FAITH.

Deep breath. Awright. I'll give that a try.

Thanks for the message, whoever you are. And thanks for making me muster a smile.

When you learn that, can you teach me?

Direct quote:

"Well, if I want to do computer animation, which I do, I'm going to need to learn Flash. So I'm going to put the Adobe project on hold for a while and concetrate on Flash."

I did not hear this at the software company at which I work.

I heard it from the back seat of my car, from the Old Daughter. She's in sixth grade. She has a dual-processor Mac G4 (and is the only kid on the block who not only has a dual-processor G4, but knows she has a dual-processor G4 and thinks it's cool that she has a dual-processor G4.) She was teaching herself Illustrator and Photoshop, but apparently something else has grabbed her attention. It's nice to see some sign that she's actually 11.

That little woman fascinates me.

Pepto. Bismol.

It's early, early in the morning on Nov. 1, and somebody in my house is rushing to the commode after gorging on too much junk food.

Not the Old Daughter. Not The Boy. They have the advantage of having a parent around who tells them "no" to the second piece of candy.

Nope, the one chugging indigestion medicine in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 1 was me. Junk food is not a cure for anxiety and depression, but it sure as hell is a good treatment, at least right until it wakes you up in the middle of the night.

In our next episode, all my teeth fall out and I can't find them because my gut obscures my view of the ground. Stay tuned.

Today

She passed out at her party.

This would be reasonably acceptable behavior, of course, for a college sophomore who had one Red-Bull-and-Vodka too many while celebrating her birthday. However, it's much less so for somebody who's turning 5 at Gymboree.

The Young Daughter's having "episodes," as we call them. They look kind of like seizures, but we're pretty sure they're not. The usual progression: Young Daughter is playing at full speed, then she starts to look kind of out of it, then she goes all pale, then she wants to go to sleep right there, wherever "right there" is. Then, usually, she throws up.

Mercifully, that last part didn't happen Sunday. But the rest of it did, right up to falling asleep on her mom's shoulder while 20 screaming kids ran around jumping on things and throwing balls and dancing and stuff.

It's hard, really, to pin down what she does during these "episodes." The simplest way to put it would be that she's just not herself. Pretty much all of the behavior related to these incidents is 180 degrees out of character for her.

The hospital trip to diagnose these things was scheduled last week, before yesterday's occurrence. She'll stay until they can figure out what it is. So far, they've set aside five days. That's a long damn time, when you're 5 years old.

--------

This forum is almost exactly one year younger than the Young Daughter. The first post is dated Oct. 21, 2001, two days before her first birthday. It was at a "well-baby checkup" two days later that we found out that she might be somewhat less than well.

Up until the last few months, the impact of what I used to somewhat lightly call the dread disease was pretty minimal. She had some spots on her skin. She had to go to elongated doctor's appointments every few months. She had to undergo MRIs under general anesthesia. Turns out one of those, back in 2003, almost killed her. In the course of trying to track the neurofibromatosis, we discovered that she also has a condition known as malignant hyperthermia, where general anesthesia causes her to run fevers well into triple digits.

Even after that scare, we slipped back into something resembling a routine. In the back of my mind, though, ever since I learned how to spell neurofibromatosis, I thought that 2005 was going to be a rough ride. The disease flares up in tandem with hormonal activity -- it usually starts to get really bad around puberty, but you also start seeing effects around age 4.

My original fear was that she'd regress developmentally. That hasn't seemed to happen, at least not in the cognitive sense. She ALSO has a hormonal deficiency which has put her in the single-digiteth percentile on height and weight for her age. She's not a dwarf; she looks like a perfectly proportioned 3-year-old.

After the brain tumors (which sounds a whole lot more direct than "optic gliomas") were discovered, things changed a bit. We needed to do more tracking, because if those tumors -- which are otherwise benign -- start to grow in her head, there's a chance they'll get in the way of stuff that actually needs the room more. So, more MRIs. More eye exams.

Then, the "episodes." Rare at first, then more frequent, then noticeable to even the casual observer.

-------

Normalcy, now, is not an option. The Wife and the Young Daughter will spend the next several days in the hospital while people who spent lots and lots and lots of money on their educations rub their chins and squint a lot and say, in Doctor Voice, "Well, we don't know what's going on." The treatment could be chemotherapy; 18 months of hell punctuated by the occasional really bad day. The treatment could be surgery, where somebody opens the hood on my kid's head and rearranges some wires, which might or might not fix the problem. The treatment could be, "Well, these things are going to happen every once in a while; they're not causing any permanent damage and they're not really a sign of anything; you just have to keep a close eye, keep her comfortable and accept this as your new "normal."

All of those choices pretty much suck.

Meanwhile, the palms of my hands are scorched from the friction caused by my attempt to stop the world from turning for a few days. Everything's on hold right now. It's all on hold. The other two kids have to have Halloween tonight; you can't begin to guess the depths of my lack of enthusiasm for taking them around the neighborhood begging for candy while everyone asks "Where's your other one?" or, for those who know, "How's your other one?"

The Wife spent almost 40 minutes this morning rattling off the list of responsibilities for which I need to be responsible over the course of the coming week, while she sits in the incredibly uncomfortable accommodations offered by our local children's hospital. Her job is damn hard, much harder than mine, and requires greater organizational skill than I posess (and my organizational skills, frankly, are quite good.)

And oh, yeah, I need to figure out a way to hold down my job, too, to pretend to care that somebody's database is down or that the software is behaving funny or that they really wish their problem would move to the front of my line. I've been doing a pretty good job of feigning interest for the last month. One major project was completed last week, and another is starting to build steam. Several minor projects also are calling for my attention. For today, anyway, they're just hearing it ring, or hearing "please leave a message after the tone and I'll get back to you after I find out whether they're going to drill holes in my daughter's head."

For today, anyway. At some point, I pull my hands back and let it all start spinning again.

---------

I have no desire for anyone's sympathy. Neither does The Wife, nor the Young Daughter. Yeah, it's a crappy way to spend the day, in the hospital, but sympathy isn't going to help anything. Many are in far, far, far worse situations than we are.

I do care that you care. I appreciate the well wishes and the kind thoughts and all the people who are interrupting their lives to help us while ours are being interrupted. I appreciate it more than my facility with the language will allow me to express.

It's time now to spin the globe. Gotta jump back on.

Where the path leads next

The Young Daughter has taken a turn. It hasn't been a good turn. A bunch of doctors tell us what they think it is. Nobody is willing to commit. Nobody is willing to offer a course of treatment.

The Young Daughter goes into the hospital on Monday, length of stay undetermined. The mission: Find out what it is that is going on, and get some answers.

The disease is neurofibromatosis type 1, for those of you just joining us. The Wife is recording events and news here. Just send up some good wishes. Right now, those help more than anything.

Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

"I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die -- the dream of freedom and peace."

Others have gained more fame and fortune and notoriety during the struggle, but it all started that day in 1955, when that driver said, "I'm going to have you arrested," and she gently replied, "You may do that."

It had nothing to do with a seat on the bus, people. It had to do with teaching us how to be human beings, to treat each other with the respect all of us deserve -- and to stand up (or stay seated, in her case) for what is right.

The lesson hasn't been learned yet, but thanks to her, we're well on our way. Those of us born after 1964 will never know how much courage it took for her to say, "You may do that." We have Mrs. Parks to thank.

Baa

Last night in Tampa, 22,120 sheep flocked to the St. Pete Times Forum (why is the arena in Tampa named after the newspaper in St. Petersburg? Do you think the City of Dallas would have allowed the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to swoop in and do such a thing? But I digress) ... anyway, 22,120 sheep flocked to the big arena in downtown Tampa to welcome back the NHL and their Stanley Cup Champion Lightning.

This, of course, being the same NHL that decided NOT TO PLAY AT ALL LAST YEAR rather than figure out an equitable way to divide its multi-billions among its members.

And no fans of the Stanley Cup Champion Lightning are even the slightest bit angry about this? That it was Oct. 5, 2005, and they were hoisting a banner that read "2004 STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS"? Nobody thought it was the slightest bit ridiculous?

Sheep. Baa. This is why the professional sports moguls are the leading geniuses of the Western world. Nobody takes more money and gives back less. Wish I had thought of it first.

It must stop. Now.

She is just another one of more than 1,900 so far, just another dead soldier. She's the first woman from Palm Beach County to die in Iraq. She was 21. Born in 1984, the year I got my driver's license.

I should insert a political comment about how f---ing stupid war is in general and this war is specifically. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to send up a wish for peace for this woman and all those who believed in her, and leave it, because that's all I can do.

Random stray thought

If I'm going to work at home, I need a more comfortable chair.

Hey kid: Shut up

From a story in today's Cincinnati Enquirer exploring a phenomenon it calls "premature affluence":

What makes parents do it, experts say, are motives that range from sheer financial ability to "guilt giving" to make up for an absence of parental time or attention. And then there's simple convenience - a 16-year-old with his own car, for example, can haul younger siblings to soccer practice. Worse still, some parents give out of dread of what happens if they don't. "I've had parents tell me they're scared to come home from the store without a certain toy," said psychologist Buffone.

Scared? Scared?

A fellow parent once gave me his No. 1 Rule of Parenting, and we stick with it: "Never take shit from your kids."

Scared. Give me a break.

Thing is, if parents have already created this expectation in children old enough to cause that fear, they've already lost. It's too late to undo that.

And don't even get me started on the "guilt giving" thing.

Quick breather

Today, for the first time in several days, I didn't spend every waking moment thinking about, talking aobut, using, testing, and cursing at software. Here's what I did instead:

-- Slept like a baby on an Airbus A320, not worried for a second that the landing gear might go sideways ...
-- Went to a birthday party. The guest of honor was turning 5. About 30 of her friends were there to share the joy, including my three children. Talked football and airplanes with the guest of honor's dad, who is an Air Force pilot. On Nov. 11, he's leaving for Turkey for 15 months.
-- Hung out with the kids after coming home from the birthday party. We watched Shark Tale for the 23rd time. The animated Robert De Niro is pretty funny.
-- Played guitar and sang. Did neither very well, of course, but my audience of zero didn't care.
-- Monitored the Young Daughter after a CAT scan this afternoon. She had two seizure episodes earlier this week. Anxiously awaiting the results to determine what the next step is.
-- Standing watch at home tonight while The Wife takes a night off. God, she's earned it. She's been dealing with pretty much everything while I've been holding the hand of the software I'm installing. Everything, of course, ranging from dealing with normal life plus seizures plus bad news from the extended family.

It's been a long damn 168 hours for both of us. I plan to be unreachable for the next 12. Then it's time to get up and do it all again.

We can help

Their dog crapped in our yard. Usually, that's not a good way to get to know someone.

But my wife, of course, is a Dog Person. When the very apologetic woman with the black lab and the 7-year-old boy in tow stopped to apologize -- "I don't have a bag, I'm so sorry" -- The Wife assured her that it was OK, and that it certainly was not the first or last dog turd that would find a home in our yard.

I must point out that nobody gets out of our yard without getting to know The Wife. This is a woman who met one of her best friends in the checkout line at Kroger, and another in a random outing to the park three days after we moved to Florida the first time. When you and she cross paths, you will get to know her, and in minutes, you'll be giving her information you wouldn't just give any stranger. She's irresistable that way.

This stranger, with the kid and the dog, somehow let slip that she was visiting from New Orleans. Well, not "visiting," exactly. They got out of their East New Orleans neighborhood just before Hurricane Katrina dropped in with its 125-mph shredder.

She and 10 of her relatives are staying with relatives in our neighborhood. They don't know how long they'll be staying. They don't know if they have a home to go back to. They only know what they see on CNN, and what they see on CNN doesn't exactly make them optimistic.

The 10 range in age from 7 to 87. The black lab is one of four dogs who made the involuntary trip east on Interstate 10. They got out alive, but with only enough to get them through a few days. The "few days," of course, has turned into "indefinitely." And nothing is more indefinite than homelessness.

"Well, we'll help you," The Wife said. Understand, this was not, "oh, my gosh, you poor, poor people," or "oh my gosh, survivors in our midst!" or anything like that. Just a matter of fact: "Well, we'll help you."

And help she will. While I was in the air from Connecticut on the way home, she rallied a few of her friends in the neighborhood and made a plan.

The first thing, above all else, to take into consideration was the people's dignity. These are middle-class people, just like us, just like everyone around us, who are not used to taking handouts. They don't need a handout.

There are things they do need. Their hosts are going to see some pretty high utility bills with 10 extra people in the house. The dogs need food, and toys. The boys, ages 7 and 13, need something to stave off boredom -- and, more importantly, things to call their own, as they only carried with them what they could.

So: Her next step was to lead the coordination efforts, and to emphasize that this was not Goodwill. "I don't want them to wind up with a bunch of castoff stuff that these people will just have to move," she said. So she's serving as the neighborhood clearing house for material, making sure that each individual person's needs are filled -- from the 7-year-old's Hot Wheels to the matriarch's clip-on earrings.

Later that afternoon, she met the woman again in the park by the school. This time, the 87-year-old grandmother was with her, soaking up the sun in her wheelchair, looking little the worse for wear after two weeks of hell. The Wife shared her plans with the people, and quietly but firmly rebuffed their protestations. The old woman took my wife's hands. She looked her in the eye. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you, and bless you." She said a prayer.

"You're welcome," my wife said. But the old woman didn't let go.

"Bend down here, please," the old woman said. My wife leaned her 6-foot frame forward. The old woman made the sign of the Cross on my wife's forehead. She said a prayer in a foreign language; The Wife thinks it was Latin. The Wife, of course, is resolute. This is not sympathy she's providing; it's help. But it was hard for her to keep the tears in, and it was impossible for me as she related the story to me.

Later Friday evening, she held a meeting with the family to assess each person's specific needs.

Today, she's working with banks -- after hours -- to establish an account for them.

Tomorrow, after the logisitics get worked out, she and her two friends are going to canvass the neighborhood and get these people helped.

No sympathy. No pandering. Just help. It could be us next time.

This, folks, is what makes her The Best Woman in the World.

They're people, too

New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass is the latest Louisiana public official to lose it on TV. And the worst is yet to come for these people.

God help them. They have the most difficult jobs in America right now.

Hang on while I get the sand out of my hair

That would be appropriate, of course, only if Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff had hair. He was playing the "Uh, nobody saw this coming" defense in his presser this afternoon.

Mr. Chertoff, they saw it coming two years ago:

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/

And the National Weather Service put this in its normally dry, straight-to-the-point advisory on Sunday afternoon:

WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

Don't give me the "Nobody saw this coming" bullshit. Save it for the hearings.

Textbook example of failure

We're learning more lessons than a classroom full of first-graders. We still don't know the worst of the Gulf South tragedy, and already we're talking about "lessons learned." That learning comes too late for many, many people. But maybe we'll be better and smarter next time.

LESSON ONE: (blank), shelter and (blank)
Three basic human needs: food, shelter and clothing. We all learned that in first grade. One is not enough without the other two. If you're going to send all the people who can't get away to a large sports arena, make sure the damn thing is stocked with food and water. For good measure, park a couple of tankers outside to take over when the plumbing quits. In short: Do the same level of minimal planning that you'd do if you were planning to hold a football game or a boxing match or a Billy Graham Crusade, only over the course of several days.

LESSON TWO: Geography
You have a river flowing on one side. You have a lake on the other. You've built walls to keep a dry area between the two. A short drive away is an ocean; an ocean with waters that run 90-plus degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime, acting as fuel for tropical weather systems. Don't stand up there, Mr. FEMA, and tell me that "nobody thought about a hurricane and a flood at the same time." Hell, my wife and I thought about that Saturday night, and we're not exactly disaster planning experts. Maybe there'll be job openings for us at FEMA soon.

LESSON THREE: Sociology
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the mandatory evacuation order on Saturday, and offered up the Superdome as a "shelter of last resort." The Wife, upon hearing of this Saturday night: "The roof's gonna peel off that thing like a tuna can." My reply: "Yep, and there's gonna be several thousand cranky, unhappy, hungry people in there."

In general, who won't heed a mandatory evacuation order?

1/The stubborn
2/The stupid
3/The poor and/or infirm
4/People who have issues regarding respect for authority

(And hey, put your deck of race cards away. Notice NO REFERENCE to race in any of the above. Millions and millions of white people - some of whom to which I am related - fit all four of the criteria.)

In the midst of a natural disaster, you're dealing with about 75,000 people who fit at least one of the above four categories. Under the best of circumstances, that's not going to be an orderly group of people.

A group of 75,000 people in a small area who are not scared, bored, hungry, tired, dehydrated, and defending the lives of themselves and their children is going to be hard to manage. Throw in any one of those mitigating circumstances -- never mind all of them -- and you might as well light up a Lucky Strike on a drilling rig. The fact that somebody thought it would be OK to toss them into the Superdome with no food, water or security is simply the height (depth?) of idiocy.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being stubborn, stupid, poor or infirm. But those people needed a leader, or perhaps several leaders, and those leaders needed to be leading from the minute those people hit the Superdome's concourses. Authorities under no circumstances should have treated them like animals, but they should have understood with whom they were dealing and planned and acted accordingly.

LESSON FOUR: Division of power
City government is responsible for the cities. County government (or, in Louisiana, parish government) is responsible for the parishes. State government is responsible for the states. Federal government is NOT responsible for filling in gaps caused by the incompetence of the other three. We can't talk out of one side of our mouths about wanting less federal government and then talk out of the other side asking where they were in our time of need. When the time comes to go back and assess the failure in New Orleans, that assessment starts at City Hall, works its way to the parish government offices and then heads northwest to Baton Rouge, and stops there.

Should Washington have stepped in sooner to cover for that failure, which became obvious Monday afternoon? Perhaps. But that then calls into question the need for local and state governments at all. Should Washington have come through with the money to finish the levee project? Perhaps, but once it didn't, it was time for the state to step in and adjust its budget.

We've seen something awful. This is the worst disaster in American history since the Civil War. In terms of death toll, it's going to make September 11 look like a bad car accident. In terms of sustained human suffering, it's going to rival and perhaps eclipse the Great Depression. Nobody has addressed for even a second a question of what all these people holed up in the Astrodome and Alamodome and Reunion Arena and other assorted large sporting facilities around the South are going to do in two weeks.

It's time to find out if the United States has any social conscience at all. Pray for us.

Sad wordplay

New Orleans' airport code is MSY. All I can think when I see that is "misery."

A tip for the New Orleans Police Department

... and for law enforcement throughout the Gulf South:

See a looter, shoot on sight, shoot to kill.

This should be pretty simple.

Shoot to kill. Or, if you don't want that on your conscience, shoot to hurt, and let whatever's in the floodwaters do the rest.

Fuckwads.

Watch out, NOLA, and stay safe

Back on Thursday, I was leading system training a group of newsroom users up in Illinois. We were having a good time using the new editorial and page-building system to make fake pages, trying to wind "Katrina," "Waves" and "Sunshine State" into one headline. ... and don't it feel GOOD! (There, now the song is stuck in your head, too.)

Now, it doesn't seem so funny.

In 1998, I was a graphic artist at the Medium-Sized Newspaper in Florida. Hurricane Georges was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and as the only member of the Sunday night staff, I was assigned to assemble a graphic on what would happen to New Orleans if the Big One ever came across Lake Pontchartrain. The scenario I drew was basically really, really awful; levees breached, pumps overwhelmed, devastating damage and loss of life in one of America's great cities. I called the newsroom of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans to verify a couple of facts I had found in my research. "Hang on," the very nice young editor on the other end of the phone said, "we just lost power again." I apologized for taking her away from her work on what was certainly a very busy evening. "That's OK," she said. "We can't really do anything anyway. We're just waiting."

Georges veered off and took down a couple of Motel 6s in Mississippi. New Orleans was spared that time.

I found myself walking around in the French Quarter a year later, taking a break as I drove from Florida to Texas to take the job at the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper. I went down to where the river starts to meet the Gulf, and looked at the system of levees and dikes and pumps that I had drawn, sight unseen except for photographs. And I thought, Yeah, if that storm had hit, that would have been really bad. I can't say I fell in love with the city; even on a Saturday afternoon, the smell of debauchery hung in the air. And that's not a pretty smell. I ran into a lot of people from the fringes of society as I walked around and looked at the great architecture and the restaurants and the nightclub with the sign that read, "Come in and see if YOU can guess what gender they are!" But as a party town, I could certainly see the appeal.

I hope all the doomsayers are wrong on this one, but it doesn't look very good for the City of New Orleans. My thoughts are especially with all those people at the Times-Picayune building with their families and sleeping bags and snack foods, wondering what hell they're about to witness and then have to write about and photograph. I won't be calling this time, but if I was, I'd be sending prayers and best wishes.

Why bother?

I had a bad day at work today; the kind of bad day that makes you want to re-think your entire existence, your career, your way of life. Basically, I'm creating failure, and I'm surrounded by failure. Without going into specifics, I can guarantee we have no happy customers today, and no happy employees.

Bad days always end, however, and they often end at home. There I have three kids and wife who I love more than anything int he world and who, on most days, think I'm OK.

Bad days never really end, however, because at the end of a bad day, there's the wallowing and the what-if and the what-now, all the kinds of things you think at the end of a bad day.

We all talked about our days at the kitchen table. My entry: "My day was bad." The Young Daughter, 4, starts singing, "Bad day, bad day, go away, my day was BAD!" Flourish, big smile, mouth open wide enough to land a 757. That's her way of saying she cares.

I tucked the Young Daughter in tonight. I sighed deeply. The Young Daughter said, in reply, "What?" I said, "I had a long day."

She replied, "Yeah, I had a long day too in the hospital."

--------

Normally I'd mark that down as a perspective builder. But hers is one more situation about which I can do nothing. Meanwhile, I have a Vice President of Sales, an office fulll of co-workers and 12 customers who don't give a flying fuck that my kid has a tumor in her head, even if they knew, which they don't.

I have to deal with all that, too. The one and only thing I can do for the Young Daughter and the rest of the house is to generate income and maintain a vaild health insurance policy. Walking out in a huff is not going to be the answer, no matter what.

----

But I'm at my end. I just can't do anything to fix anything. Working harder isn't the answer; in 12 hours of work today, which started with a phone call to Europe at 5:30 a.m. my time, I accomplished about an hour's worth of actual accomplishment. This time last year, I was the new guy who didn't know what I was doing. This time this year, I have the word "Senior" in my title; I don't know a lot more about what I'm doing, but I'm expected to impart that knowledge to the three new people we just hired, boom-boom-boom, as well as manage the four projects I have to manage, as well as trying to write documentation.

Meanwhile, The Wife spent a good chunk of today on the phone with doctors. The Young Daughter has a team of specialists doing battle against the dread disease. They're all very good doctors, individually. Until today, they had been concentrating on their own little areas, in isolation. The Wife finally demanded today that ONE of them take charge of the situation. ONE of them has to know a little bit about everything. As I put it, "Somebody needs to be the project manager." I think she made some progress. She's taken charge of the situation the best way she knows how, which is to say, she has taken charge of the situation, grabbed the situation by the neck and is leading it in the right direction. She's not a neurologist. She's more important. She's a mom. My admiration for her keeps growing by the minute, even as I know she's nearing the end of her rope, too.

So what it comes down to is this: My problems mean really nothing. My bad day means really nothing. Which, at this very moment, just makes me ask the question above.

Barrier to the abyss

I'm back from Canada. I still have $50 Canadian in my pocket ($41 US, roughly) and a few more words in my French vocabulary. Montreal was wonderful; saw Andy Roddick get eliminated in the first round of a U.S. Open tuneup, heard lots of French, saw lots of fantastic architecture. I'll be back in mid-September. The chill of fall will likely already be in the air.

Returned Friday for an appointment with my daughter's pediatric neuro-oncologist. The fact that my daughter even has a pediatric neuro-oncologist is bad enough. We were making prepartions for the Young Daughter to begin chemotherapy to combat these tumors in her head. Made the appointment for the surgery, read the literature, began getting ourselves mentally prepared.

Then: Well, not yet. No growth in the tumor. No chemo yet.

This is good news. Sort of. The tumors are still there. She'll have to do it eventually, probably sooner rather than later. But not yet.

This is good. And bad. We wait.

Reward

After a really bad travel day, after which I said for the 10th time, "I'm never flying US Airways again," knowing full well that I will, I wound up here. It doesn't suck.

First day of school

The Old Daughter came home from her first day of middle school today. She announced that she was no longer going by her first name and wanted to go by her middle name.

Her first name is pretty cool. Her middle name is a family name, not one that most 11-year-old girls would want to carry.

Why? "I wanted a change."

Well, you don't change stuff on the first day of middle school, not when you're riding a bus for the first time and not when we might need to find you by the name we know. She was taken aback by that, and reacted accordingly, and somewhat emotionally. Well, that was not the way we wanted to start middle school.

We compromised: Academically, she must be known by her first name, or if she wants to use all three of her names, fine. Her friends can call her anything she wants.

I wonder if we handled that the right way. Thoughts?

A simple "thank you" would have sufficed

By all accounts, the crew of Air France 538 deserves to be lauded for its quick response after Tuesday's crash in Toronto -- which happened less than an hour before I took off for Detroit. The crew emptied an Airbus A340 in 90 seconds. An Airbus A340 is a big damn plane. Two aisles, 2-4-2 seating in the main cabin. A total of 309 people survived the crash, breakup of the plane and subsequent explosion.

As usual, however, you can't please everyone, even if you save his or her life. From msnbc.com:

Gwen Dunlop, a Toronto resident who was on the flight returning from vacation in France, said when the plane first touched down the passengers believed they had landed safely and clapped with relief.

"Only seconds later, it started really moving and obviously it wasn't OK," said Dunlop. "At some point the wing was off. The oxygen masks never came down; the plane was filling up with smoke."

"One of the hostesses said, 'You can calm down, it?s OK,' and yet the plane was on fire and smoke was pouring in," Dunlop told The AP. "I don't like to criticize, but the staff did not seem helpful or prepared."

Ungrateful bitch. Shut up and be happy you remember how "unprepared" they seemed.

Summer of bleah

Yeah, geez, I lost TWO WHOLE MONTHS there. I'd like to be able to blame some sort of computer crash or sunspots or something, but the bottom line is, well ... I just haven't felt very inspired to post.

Two whole months. During those months, I've eaten lunch on Chicago's Magnificient Mile, stepped out onto the rocks in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine, turned 37, and taken my family to Washington, D.C., on vacation.

I became the proud owner of a 1989 Honda Pacific Coast 800, putting me back in the saddle after a 10-year hiatus.

That was the cool stuff.

I also worked my ass off, slept very little, ate too much and walked through the time basically uninspired.

Alas, that wasn't the worst.

The Young Daughter's dread disease has begun to manifest itself in ways that are a lot less benign than the little spots on her skin.

She's 4. She's grown a half-inch in the last 18 months. She's begun to have mild seizures. She walked around last weekend with an ambulatory EEG device, a mass of wires glued to her head to try to discern what's going on in there.

As The Wife put it: "You know, it doesn't get any better from here. It only gets worse."

That's probably the case. In the best-case scenario, we listen to medical professionals tell us to "check back in 6 months" while they wait to see if anything changes. We buy medicine, we schedule doctor appointments -- four last month alone -- and we wait.

So, that was our summer. School starts Thursday. Life continues to move forward, and it'll move forward at the pace at which it always has. The Young Daughter doesn't cope. She just lives, with a smile on her face and a 100-decibel sentence at her lips.

Her favorite song is Travis Tritt's "It's a Great Day to Be Alive." She discovered the repeat button on her little CD player and sets it at night to play, over and over and over, all night.

There's a message in there.

Random stray thought

What amazes me is how 10 days pass in the time it used to take for one day.

The May installment

Since we've apparently gone monthly, it seems a little disappointing to think I'm burning the May installment on May 6. But: We've got a big trip coming up, nine days to wrap up the New Hampshire project. Then on to Illinois, with interludes in a little Central New York burg I'll call the Town of the Living Dead.

So, might as well get it over with now.

The Little Sister had a kid today. A girl. Don't know anything more yet, other than that she arrived sometime around 5 p.m. CDT via c-section. Everybody's healthy and happy, I'm told. This is a good thing. I haven't talked to the Little Sister near as much as I should have over the last, oh, 20 years or so. There's no animosity between us, certainly; neither one of us is big communicators, and her definition of reality is, shall we say, somewhat different from mine. That's OK; when we do talk, we usually find plenty of room to meet in the middle.

When it was announced that a little niece was on the way for me, I had trepidation. She and the baby's father aren't married; he, in fact, is nearly 12 years younger than she. On the surface, this sounds a little less than ideal. But by all accounts, he's a very good guy, and he's helped her keep her head on straight. I mused later that having a child might be the very thing to get her back on track and help her stabilize a bit after a rough decade. In my last several conversations with her, that theory seems to have been confirmed. This is a very good thing, and I hope the trend continues.

And no matter what, it's always a happy day when new life appears.

-----

New life has also blessed the family in canine form. Go here to see The Wife's Thousand-Dollar Puppies. One could have been yours, had you put your name on the list eight weeks ago. But you didn't, so you're out of luck. I've admitted before that I'm not exactly a dog person, and I continue to not be. These little guys, however, are cute as they can be, and pretty damn low-maintenance to boot.

-----

When I left the Medium-Sized Metropolitan newspaper last year to start The New Life, I left hoping that several people who were in similar ruts to mine would also take the plunge. Thankfully, they have. Lynniechan is on her way to becoming a full-time massage therapist, a job for which she would seem to be very well-suited. As a top-notch athlete (rowing), she has above-average knowledge of how the human body works. She likes people, as long as she can keep unwanted communication to a minimum. She, like many of us, hasn't updated much lately, but when she does update, it's obvious she's a lot happier now than she was this time last year. I know I'm a better person after I get a massage; she's contributing to make the world a better place by making lots of people into better people.

The Tiffster has joined the revolution, taking off her copy-editor green eyeshade and heading to the world of online journalism. After years of doing work at a level up here (think really high) and getting recognition at a level down here (think sewer), she's finally in a spot where she can call a lot of her own shots and have a chance to really shine. One of the things that online journalism has been short of in its infancy is, well, journalists. The Tiffster is one of the very best, and readers of her newspaper's site are in for a treat starting June 1.

RER blew everything up. He left a fairly cush (if extremely underpaid) job as a TV reporter to be ... a poker blogger. Three years ago, of course, there was no such thing as a poker blogger. Check the stuff out here. I don't know much about poker or poker blogging, but I know the man is racking up frequent-flyer miles at a faster rate than I am, and while I'm schlepping off to places like Central New York, New Hampshire and rural Washington State, he's going to Monaco, Paris, Copenhagen and London. A poker blogger. How cool is that?

------

We're planning an actual family vacation this year. We haven't had one of those since 2001, when we spent a week at a beach house in South Carolina. This year's destination: Washington, D.C. All three mini-humans are old enough to find something to appreciate. The Old Daughter, our history geek, will enjoy pretty much everything; The Boy is ready to wander the Air and Space Museum all day long; and the Young Daughter will have a great time at the National Zoo. Throw in some top-notch architecture for The Wife and my getting to watch it all, and it should be a great time. Love those Delta SkyMiles and Marriott points.

-----

There you have it. See you in June. Or, who knows, maybe before.

Uh, where am I ... ?

Dateline: Washington, D.C., a little after midnight.

I love baseball; I haven't followed it daily and religiously for a few years, but I still love the opportunity to sit and watch a ballgame. I had this opportunity Tuesday night. I celebrated the way I usually celebrate when I watch a game on TV: I feel asleep. Woke up in an oops-I-fell-asleep-watching-TV fog about 20 minutes ago.

The fog, of course, obscures whatever it is I was just going to type. So now I'm kind of winging it ...

I just noticed that I missed an entire month of posting, for the first time since we launched this forum back in October 2001. I guess I can't really be surprised. March 2005 was a busy month, too busy; the kind of month where the engine was running at redline but the car wasn't really going anywhere.

When I finally escaped the March madness (not to be confused with March Madness, in which three of my Final Four picks were eliminated before the round of eight), I emerged with a nice raise, a new Blackberry, five more pounds, and ... well, and an April calendar that is almost as packed.

The questions come up:

Is it worth it? Well, yeah. It's paying off financially, I'm learning a lot and I'm enjoying myself.
Well, I wasn't really asking about you. What about your family? I miss my family. They say they miss me. I try to maximize the time I have at home. One of the reasons that the travel schedule has become so frantic is that I'm taking those Businessman's Special flights, the flights that 1/allow you to leave at 5:55 a.m. to make a 10 a.m. meeting and/or 2/leave the job site at 9 p.m., which get you home at 2 a.m., but at least it's home and not another night in the hotel room. Some of my co-workers prefer a more relaxed travel schedule, where they have an extra night on either end of the trip and less rush to the airport. Not me, not now.
OK, come back and answer my first question: Is it worth it? Well, it beats the hell out of spending 9 hours a day behind a desk.
You haven't answered my question. Hey, you know what? You're starting to annoy me. Define "worth it." I'm still trying to.

Ugh, the fog. I hate falling asleep while watching TV.

So anyway, I have a BlackBerry. No more searching for wireless hotspots in airports. I could conceivably post directly from my airplane seat before they tell me to turn off all portable electronic devices. E-mail, AIM, phone and the web, all at my fingertips, all the time.

All. The. Time.

Overall, this is probably not a good thing.

Time to concede to the fog. Time to go to sleep for real. Day 103 of 2005 starts for me in a few hours.

Nothing left of me

Just had a long, long five days in southern New Hampshire. Talk about leaving it all on the field. I am just flat exhausted. So tired I can't sleep. I hate that feeling.

All I can do is write about it

I never intended for this to become a monthly publication. Really, I didn't. It's just ... well, anything I use to finish that sentence would simply be an excuse, and there is no room for excuses here.

I think a lot. That's what you do when you're on the road without anybody; you think. It's rare for all that thought to generate any end result, but I do it anyway because that's all I can do.

A roundup of the recent:

Denmark was fabulous. Cold, but fabulous. The thing that surprised me the most: How not different everything was. I had no trouble finding McDonald's, Burger King and 7-Eleven. People drive on the right. Coke and Pepsi and Marlboros are consumed in large quantities. Sure, some things were quite distinct from what we're used to in the U.S. Gas sells for about $6 a gallon. The sign on the beer cooler in the 7-Eleven translated to, "Don't even think about buying beer if you were born on or before March 8, 1990." More than 49 percent of Danes would have voted against George W. Bush.

But overall, I really expected to feel much more like a foreigner than I did. I'm not sure to what that should be attributed.

Going back to the Very Large Metropolitan Area was a little weird. I was at the same time homesick and so, so glad to be gone. I visited the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper while I was there; the bad mood created by October's layoffs still remains, like the smell of mildew in a car after the windows were left open during a rainstorm. I finally settled on, "It's very good to have lived here." I'm glad I was there; it's a good thing, however, that I'm not there now.

Now, I'm in a small town in southern New Hampshire, watching the World Champion Red Sox (as they are known here) taking on the Yankees on Opening Night. Last time we were here was in late February. We visited a restaurant in downtown Boston. On the bar TV: A replay of Game 5 of last year's World Series, as if it was on a continuous loop. Oh, yeah, the Patriots won the Super Bowl, too. But the Patriots could win the Super Bowl every year and still not inspire the passion that's generated by the World Champion Red Sox.

The Boy turned 6 last week. He has his first girlfriend, a charming and beautiful little girl named Amelia. He told The Wife, "You know, most of the boys in my class don't like love." He thought about it for a second. "But I think love is important." Spinning lines like that, he has to be very careful about peaking too soon.

The Wife's Champion Dog is pregnant. Anybody want a $1,000 puppy? (You think I'm kidding.)

David Wells just gave up a run-scoring balk. I think I actually heard somebody say,
"Gohddammit, ya fat bastahd!"