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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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!"

Dateline: Anytown, DK

I'm sitting in the international departure terminal in Newark, N.J. In a little more than two hours, I'll be leaving United States airspace for the first time in my life.

I'm going to Denmark, home of the company for which I work. I'll spend a week meeting my Danish co-workers on their home turf and learning more about our product from the people who actually assemble it. I'm repeating the phrase Jeg taler ikke dansk (I don't speak Danish), which in my southern U.S. accent comes out sounding more like "Yay taylor iggy dance." They tell me that's how I'm supposed to say it. The fact that I taylor iggy dance is OK; most of the Danish are conversant in English; many speak it better than you or I.

The Airbus A330 on which I'll spend the next eight hours is parked right outside the window by which I'm sitting. I'll land at 7:35 a.m. in Copenhagen, which will be 1:35 a.m. EST. Another 45-minute flight to the city in which I'll be staying, and I'll be a foreigner for the first time.

I have three books, four magazines, a digital camera, this machine, 900 songs in my iPod, a bottle of Dasani and a bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups. I have a passport, a boarding pass and 1,000 Danish kroner in my back pocket which I purchased for 202 American dollars. The femte kroner note features a picture of a fetching woman in a hat, the first time I've ever seen a picture of a woman on money. The woman's name is Karen Blixen. A quick Google reveals she wrote Out of Africa, among many, many other things during her 70-year life which ended in 1962. Imagine the Americans honoring artists on their money. We're stuck with #$#*(ing politicians.

It's going to be an interesting week. Check back for updates.

Time again to talk music

A long-overdue discovery and a rediscovery ...

The discovery: My heart is still seared from listening to Eddie from Ohio's Julie Murphy Wells sing "Oh My Brother." Oh my God, what a voice, what a delivery. I'm embarrassed to have not discovered this Virginia-based fusion of folk and bluegrass and soul -- i.e., music -- 10 years ago. They've been around since '91; I've known about them since '01, thanks to RER; yet I didn't give them a serious listen until a couple of weeks ago. They're more than worth your time. A good portion of their catalog is available on iTunes. I'm currently listening to their two live albums, Portable EFO Show and Three Rooms. I'm told they're way better live than in the studio. My next task: Hope my travel schedule and theirs converges at some point.

The rediscovery: Growing up in Springfield, Mo., I always kind of took the Ozark Mountain Daredevils for granted. A pretty good country-ish rock band, kind of like a hillbilly-flavored Eagles. I found a few of their songs on iTunes not long ago, and am reminded that my dad's former high school classmates were actually a helluva band. Recommended cuts: "If You Want to Get to Heaven," probably their best rock-'n'-roll song; "Jackie Blue," which had a run at Billboard's Top 5 in 1974 and was, I learned, remade by Smashing Pumpkins; and "Homemade Wine," off the best album you've never heard, Men from Earth. Some of the ex-Daredevils, including Michael "Supe" Granda and Ruell Chappell, are still hanging around Anytown making music. One, Steve Canaday, died in a plane crash in 1999 after a stint as Lee Roy Parnell's tour manager. These guys were probably the biggest stars to come out of Anytown before Brad Pitt. Worth a listen.

Your turn; tell me what you're listening to these days.

Once, it's a tragedy. Twice, it's a crime

A school district in Florida has suffered the deaths of two children in the last four months because of a bus driver's incompetence. That's two too many.

It's time to start holding some people criminally responsible.

Wait ... um ... hey ...

God, it just got a little crazy there for a while.

A co-worker's death. A business trip extended by the flu. The Young Daughter's dread disease rearing its ugly head. A little too much reality to digest all in one month.

A couple of weeks ago in New Hampshire, my new co-worker and I didn't feel very good. I plowed through the workshop we were conducting; she curled up in a fetal position in her hotel room for most of the trip. We somehow made our way back to the airport Thursday morning. She resumed the fetal position at the gate. I went to the bathroom to throw up.

When I came back, I decided I wasn't quite ready to fly just yet and went to tell the gate agent this, so she could put me on a later flight. Then I discovered I was using the gate agent's counter to hold myself up. I told her, "I think I need medical attention." Next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance.

I called The Wife. I didn't tell her much. She, of course, went into an utter panic. Early the next day, she found herself in New Hampshire, too, sitting beside me while I grumbled in my hospital bed about being hot, then cold, then hot. The Company was kind enough to fly her up there for me. It was a lifesaver.

I was kicked out of the hospital Saturday morning, with a diagnosis of flu and pneumonia. The Wife and I spent the next two days in a hotel room in Manchester, N.H., where I, well, slept from Saturday afternoon until the kickoff of the Super Bowl.

It was the next Friday before I felt like I was back at full strength. Basically, flu sucks. It's the first time I've had it in probably five years, and by far the worst that I've had it. Damn that shortage of flu shots. Next year, I'm getting in line.

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How about this lede: My kid has a brain tumor.

OK, it's a very small brain tumor. As yet, it's not threatening anything. It's something that bears watching, say her doctors, but nothing more than that at present.

Benign tumors are a symptom of neurofibromatosis, a mysterious genetic neurological disease. Of course, best we can tell, it's nowhere in our genetics; we're not comforted by the fact that 50 percent of the cases occur spontaneously, with no genetic basis.

The tumors don't cause any serious medical problems, unless they get too close to a vital organ, or the brain. That's why this bears watching.

Right now, everything's fine. She's 100 percent fully active and healthy. We check it again in a couple of months. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center are working on a cure. We root for them like we've never rooted for anybody in our lives.

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I shook off the flu just in time for my brutal travel schedule to resume. This gave me the opportunity to visit California for the first time. Not just California, mind you: San Francisco, California, which is my new favorite city, based on only four hours there. My God, what a beautiful place. Water, mountains, the Golden Gate, great restaurants every-friggin'-where you turn. I can certainly see the appeal, and why people are willing to pay five times what they'd pay to live anywhere else.

The co-worker who was in Montreal urged me to eat dinner at a delightful downtown restaurant called The Crustacean, which, as you might suspect, serves seafood. It's seafood with a Vietnamese twist, however, I had a whole dungeness crab simmered in a three-wine sauce with black pepper and scallions, with garlic rice on the side. It was fabulous, and worth almost every bit of the per-diem-plus that I paid for it.

I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, just to say I did. Dipped down into historic Sausalito, and racked my brain trying to think of that sticks-in-your-head-like-glue song, "Sausalito Summer Nights." (Answer: The one-hit wonder Diesel, in 1982.) We drove to Frisco in the Rambler/The radiator running dry ...

Next week: New Hampshire, again, reluctantly. I get home Friday with enough time to do laundry and sleep before boarding a plane for my first-ever venture off United States soil.

I'm headed to the home office in Denmark for some training. I'll spend a few days with a customer in Copenhagen, and a few days at the company's Scandinavian headquarters in a little North Sea town called Aalborg.

Then, back to New Hampshire. Then Minnesota, then Dallas for a big trade show. It'll be my first time back in the Very Large Metropolitan Area for something other than an airport layover since leaving in 2002.

All the time on the road is good; it means The Company is prospering, which means The Family and I are prospering.

But it also means an awful lot of stuff is whizzing by at 542 mph. I'm moving, as Seger once sang, eight miles a minute for months at a time.

I'm going to go take a minute I have now to go hug some people I love. You go do the same, and be thankful you can.

Sharon, 1966-2005

She didn't make it. Dammit.

Melanoma. Fought it like hell for two years before finally turning away Sunday.

Dammit. 38 years old. Two children, one born the same day as our son, one born in late 2002. Two little girls.

Madison, Hannah, Brian, peace to y'all. I don't know what would bring that peace; something much stronger than all of us. Peace to y'all.

Goodbye, LZ

In 1989, I was pretty much at a life crossroads. I had just been promoted to a full-time job in the career of my choice. I was 21-going-on-16, and in the process of attempting to piss it all away. Drinking too much, driving too fast, spending money I didn't have, hanging out with people who had no vision of their own futures.

I became aware of the uncomfortable position in which I had put myself by the time 1989 became 1990. I began turning the corner, and had a lot of help from friends and family and career mentors in making that turn.

One of those mentors was the then-new editor of the Anytown Daily Bugle. He was a relatively young guy himself, and he had made a few bad choices during the early years of his career. He shared the consequences of those choices with me, and showed me how focusing on work could help pull me out of my personal downward spiral. He had no reason to do this; it's not typical for a top editor to pay any attention at all to a young sports copy editor, unless there was a screwup in print.

But he did, and I responded by working at about 114 percent of my talent level. Some of the best work I ever did came during that 1990-92 era, and the learning I did during that time laid the foundation for the job I have today. I have a file in which I've kept every complimentary letter or memo I've ever received relating to my work. I have a sheaf of them with the initials "LZ" at the end. He made sure that every good move I made was noticed, and through my boss, that every bad move I made was corrected.

He promoted me into my first management position in late 1991. I was going to be assisting our young sports editor in running the department. Then, in a surprise move, the sports ediitor left to take a job in Florida. Suddenly, for a month, I ran the show.

I'm not sure I did it very well, but I kept things afloat and kept us from embarrassing ourselves in print. The editor hired another man who became one of my mentors as sports editor, and I settled in as his assistant in January 1992.

At the end of December 1991, we all received an extra payroll envelope with our Christmas bonuses, which by then had dwindled to $30 per employee. Imagine my surprise when I opened my envelope to see an extra "0" after the "$30."

In it, a handwritten note: "A little something extra. Great work this month. Looking forward to the future. -LZ"

I'm not sure what happened in the summer of '92 between him and the publisher, but he quit. The publisher was, um, moved to a corporate damage control position shortly thereafter. A new editor took over; I learned a lot from him, too.

But I'll never ever forget the lessons I learned from Lou Ziegler, especially those relating to how to treat the people who work for you. Praise publicly and frequently; criticize privately and only when necessary, but every time it's necessary. I took those lessons to bigger jobs and bigger places, but the techniques and the results were the same.

Lou died Saturday at 56. He was running the newsroom in Fargo, N.D.; despite his declining health, he was still teaching and helping people until shortly before his death.

Peace, man, and thanks for helping me save my career.

Hey Julio, another drink, por favor

Did the Leader of the Free World just say we need more Hispanics here to "do jobs Americans won't do?" Twice?

Jobs Americans WON'T DO? We're too good for work all of a sudden?

And worse, a room full of journalists didn't call him on that remark?

"Jobs Americans won't do." As I recall, from 1789 to 1863, we called that slavery.

Screw us.

A comprehensive update

It's 7:31 a.m. in central Minnesota. The temperature outside is 18 below zero, and it's not expected to get much warmer. The sun is poking its head up over the eastern horizon; it appears as if it's trying to decide whether it really wants to come up or not.

My first start-to-finish project with my new company is scheduled to launch on Monday. So far, everything's on track and in order. I've been lucky enough to have been working with very skilled people on the customer side. If everything goes as planned -- and there's no reason to think that it won't -- a small newspaper in central Minnesota will be using a computer system that I installed, starting Monday.

This for me has been the culmination of a wild, wild year. Eleven months ago, I was sitting on the other side of the computers, doing the same thing I had been doing for all of my adult life and a good chunk of my late adolescence. I was bored to tears, tired of the constant second-guessing that goes on at every level of a newsroom, and frustrated with the thought that, because I had devoted my entire life and what little formal education I had to the pursuit of journalism, I wasn't qualified to do anything else.

Then this thing fell into my lap. I was given the opportunity to use what I knew about how a newsroom works in conjunction with what was arguably my best natural skill -- manipulating the technology -- to help design, sell and install that technology in other newsrooms. It gave me a chance to make good on one of my frequent grumbles: "When I design my own computer system, it sure as hell isn't going to work like this one ... "

Well, OK, I'm not exactly designing it, but I'm getting a chance to contribute. My newsroom experience has gained me much respect inside the company and with customers. People don't second-guess every decision I make. I don't second-guess every decision I make. In short, career-wise, it so far appears that I've made a perfect landing.

I pointed out last year, when I was deciding whether to do this, that it's a volatile industry. And it still is. We're hiring a bunch of people right now. A lot of those people might be let go if business takes a turn. I might be let go if business takes a turn. Our company is one of the smaller players in the industry; the chance of being bought out is very real, at least in the medium term. A lot of uncertainties are attached to this gig.

But one thing is certain: So far, it works for me. Right now, I'll take that.

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The new career has meant a new lifestyle for the family. After nearly a decade and a half of working at night, on weekends, working a non-set, uncertain schedule, having to drop everything and come to work to cover a major news event, I'm now leading the normal life of a 9-to-5er.

Well, almost. I'm also on the road most weekdays and a few weekends. If we have to work for a client on Monday, we have to travel on Sunday night. So it's not perfect.

But it's better than the previous arrangement. My weekends have largely been free to spend with the family; to let The Wife pursue her pursuits without worrying that she's going to get a call at 2 p.m. Saturday saying I have to go to work because a terrorist was found in the Middle East. We're able to have weekends with the kids and explore the wonder that is Florida. I have friends in our neighborhood, friends outside of work. We spend weekend nights with them, drinking, talking, basically just doing what humans are supposed to do in their time off: relaxing.

I'm home for dinner most nights. We have what's called "Circle Time" at dinner, which The Wife devised as a way to give the kids a forum to report on the events of their days. The Old Daughter lists hers off methodically. The Boy breathlessly speaks of the latest book he's read or the five or six people he played with at recess. The Young Daughter stretches out her time by reporting what she's done, then repeating it. I usually say, "I helped people with their computers." What I'm doing is not nearly as important as what they're doing.

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The travel is rough sometimes. I enjoy being out and seeing new things and meeting new people. I don't like being away from the family for extended periods. But the perks are good.

The Wife and I used those perks -- a bundle of Delta SkyMiles and Marriott Rewards points -- to spend her 34th birthday in beautiful downtown Manhattan. The Wife has always wanted to see a Broadway show. So last Saturday, we went to a Broadway show.

It was weird to think that it was almost as easy for us to go to a Broadway show on Broadway as it would have been to go to a Broadway show in St. Petersburg. We left Friday night, went to the show Saturday and came home Sunday. Spent $400 on food, transportation, show tickets and stuff.

We ate lunch Saturday at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. We ate lunch Sunday at an Italian joint in Little Italy. Both would rank near the top in our experience of those restaurant genres, although neither was ranked high enough in the eyes of travel-guide writers to merit a mention. That's part of what makes New York fun: The ability to discover great stuff just by looking for it.

We saw Wonderful Town at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on West 45th Street. Brooke Shields played the lead. She's actually far more talented than her career credits would suggest. Live theatre seems to be her niche, and she has a much-underused gift for physical comedy. The music was good without being cheesy. The seats were comfortable. The company was great. It couldn't have been a better evening.


This is not the kind of thing we'd be able to do if I wasn't doing what I was doing. It doesn't take all of the sting about being away from home, but it helps a little bit.

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Life's not perfect. It never is. But mine right now is basically a sequence of perfect moments. That's about as close as you can hope to get in this less-than-perfect world. I didn't just change careers on Feb. 4, 2004. I changed everything, and I dragged four people along with me for the ride.

Risky? Yeah. But so far, worth it. The lesson: You're never bound to something that sucks unless you choose to be bound to something that sucks. It takes more than a finger-snap and a decision, but really, in the broad sense, not that much more.

New York, New York

Trip report to come. Let's just say that it was everything we expected and then some. Nothing about that city is overrated.

Welcome to the new life

It's 7:45 a.m. I'm awake before everybody else, which is the new "normal" in our house. After years of being a night person, I've learned to enjoy a good sunrise.

It's Jan. 2. Tomorrow, I'll be on an airplane for the first of two times this week. I'll be heading to New Hampshire for work until Wednesday, then on Friday, The Wife and I are leaving to celebrate her birthday in New York. We've never been to New York. (I'm listening to suggestions, by the way; we're only going to be there for the weekend, so we're going to be trying to pack a lot into a very short time.) This is also the new "normal" in our house, a house from which 12 months ago we were lamenting the fact that we didn't leave very often.

Roughly this time last year, I urged my readers -- which is to say, I urged myself -- to break free of whatever was binding them to stuff that sucked and to head out in search of something good. In a triumph that ranks as one of the biggest triumphs in my entire existence, I have done so. I hear tales from elsewhere of others doing so, too: Otis, Lynniechan, Janel (aka West Virginia Mountain Mama), countless other people I know.

It can perhaps be attributed to some form of mid-life crisis. But the best way to deal with a crisis is to face it head-on and take action. I'm proud of everybody I know who has done so in the past year. That includes myself.

Happy 2005, y'all. May it be a year of doing whatever the hell you want to do.

Peeking from behind the barrier

See, I wasn't going to go an entire month without posting something. I just need to gather my thoughts a bit. It's been a wild month; travel, parties, gifts galore, excitement and bliss and wonder. Basically, all the reasons one would wake up every morning.

So today, the day after Christmas, I'm surrounded by the debris from the Mini-Humans' barrage of Christmas joy. Dora the Explorer is praising my youngest from the TV screen. The oldest just emerged from her room, wearing a new outfit. The Boy is trying to decide which of his new pirate ships should pillage the castle.

Had a good conversation with my little sister last night. She's going to give me a niece in May. It's the first time I've spoken to her since the news broke. Life has been kind of a struggle for her the last several years, to say the least. Much of the drama has been self-created, but that hasn't made it any easier. Anyway, for the first time in, like, ever, she has a reason now to believe in the future. I couldn't be happier for her.

No work Friday, no work yesterday, no work today, no work tomorrow. No thinking about configuration issues or search requests or integration with existing systems. See how I'm not thinking about it?

This is what contentment feels like. I feel the overall inspiration coming back. I'm starting to feel like Me again. This is a good thing.

Good stuff all around

Good suggestion from utexas.edu, which has resulted in dark text on a light-ish background. This isn't the final design -- in fact, it's still mostly the generic template you'll see on 24,695 other sites. But at least it's an easier-to-read generic rendition.

Good news from the Carolinas. Always glad to hear things are going well for Otis and his group.

Good company for Thanksgiving dinner -- The Wife and the Mini-Humans. We have no family nearby, and their visits to us are reserved for Christmas. We were invited to a friend's dinner, and The Wife (who doesn't give up traditions easily) was strongly considering it. She presented the idea to the children; the younger two were all fired up about hanging out with their friends, but the Old Daughter vetoed it. "Thanksgiving is for family," she said. "That's our tradition. We should stick to it." So noted. It's comforting that a kid who has seen so much change in her life can find something to use as an anchor. Further evidence that when it comes to her, I really have nothing to worry about.

Good story in one of the Edge of America's rags today, worth a look. Brian Griese is a son of privilege. Thankfully, he knows it, and chooses to use the gifts he has received for the good of others. Few causes are more noble than his cause.

Good to be able to paint the outside of your house in late November. Bad to have to paint the outside of your house in late November. But good to be able to do it.

Good to watch The Wife lounging on the couch watching her favorite movie, Gone With the Wind. A well-deserved reward for a great Thanksgiving dinner, and for making my life generally, well, good.

Good to hear good reports from Anytown about Thanksgiving. My grandfather got out of the house and went to the celebration, which probably wasn't easy for him. Today marked the first time since 1937 that he wasn't celebrating my grandmother's birthday with her. The aunts and uncles and a few cousins got together, and, I'm told, a reasonably good time was had by all.

Awful lot of goodness around. Be thankful for all of it.

Silent cry, invisible tear

Looks like bad weather today in my hometown, not unlike a November 24 from 17 years ago. Today's a little bit of a rough day. Not that every day since that day hasn't been in its own little way, but when those numbers all come together, a "1," a "1," a "2," a "4," for some reason, it's just a little bit rougher.

I miss my father. Yeah, I know, he's still here. But the brutal truth is, he's not. And I think that sucks.

It's OK for me to think that. And I'll be fine, in a while, for a while.

I just needed a few minutes alone with November 24 to tell it what I really think of it.

Yasser Arafat, 1929-not soon enough

Proving once again there is no justice in the world, gallstones got him before the Israelis did. The fact that his name is on the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin and to Shimon Peres.

Speak ill of this dead bastard all you want.

Nothing matters and what if it did?

Click, Drag and Delete have been pretty busy tonight. I keep trying to write something coherent, but bullshit comes out instead. My tolerance for bullshit is pretty low, and getting lower all the time.

I've been trying to make sense of the post-election babble. What are people really trying to say? Because 51 percent of us were too stupid to vote for W, the country's going straight to hell in a handbasket? Funny thing; most of the people who seem to be the most blue about Kerry's loss have access to computers and a good command of the written word, and jobs that give them a platform to share their feelings. Most of the people who stand around with my wife waiting to pick up their kids from school couldn't be more pleased with the election results. I know of nobody among the rapidly widening circle of friends we're gaining here on the Western Edge who voted for Kerry. If they did, they're doing a good job verbally faking their happiness over the result of the election.

What does that actually prove? Well, really, nothing. My suburb might or might not be typical. I would lean toward "not." A majority of my neighbors are officers in the Air Force, who work at the nearby base that houses Central Command. Some of them are headed to Iraq soon. Some of them have had to send people who report to them over there. All of them have strong feelings about the war, for and against. All of them voted for Bush.

It seems very possible that we're outgrowing our little democracy. What "unites" us? Really, nothing.

It took the deaths of 3,000 people who decided to not skip work one Tuesday in 2001 to get us to unite for a common cause, and that lasted, what, about two months? Then we were back to bitching and squabbling and back-biting. And that's not the fault of the left; if we must resort to schoolyard discourse (and apparently we must), the right started the whole "we're perfect and you're stupid" thing. They started it ...

An aside that doesn't really fit in anywhere else in this rant: Stop trying to convince me George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging functional illiterate. He's not the most articulate person who's ever stood in front of the Great Seal. But last time I checked, they weren't just handing out degrees from Yale, even to people whose dads went there. I dropped out of a not-very-prestigious state university. I'm not going to pretend I'm smarter than somebody who found a way to make it through Yale.

God knows there's hypocrisy to spare in both red and blue hues. Bill Clinton was a womanizer who got a hummer from a chubby babe right there in the Oval Office. His successor sat in that same Oval Office and sent people off to die for ... well, for ... well, to defend us against ... uh, dammit, we had to bomb somebody! Michael Moore is a lying sack of shit. So is Ken Lay and the rest of his Enron cronies. I'm not sure any of Moore's lies have cost anybody their retirement savings.

Bottom line: We're facing a pretty serious hero shortage on both sides. Why? Because the good people are too damn smart to get involved. Colin Powell knows better. You know somebody's gunning for Barack Obama, the latest political Flavor of the Month,; not to attack his political ideas, all of which are sound, but to find out which of his college girlfriends he cheated on or how many speeding tickets he has or some other indiscretion with an actual relevance value of zero. We're going to be stuck with Hillary Clinton in 2008, not because she's the best or the brightest, but because she has good "name recognition."

The pool of statesmen and stateswomen is pretty thin these days. Good leaders are out there, but they're too busy leading to get caught up in the smoke-and-mirrors act that is the United States political system. The truly intelligent and visionary people don't want to play the game -- or they get drummed out of the game. (See index entries "McCain, John, too much integrity for own good," and "Dean, Howard, too visionary and passionate to be taken seriously").

Besides, we don't really want a leader as our president. We want somebody who looks good on TV and who can quip one-liners. We don't want a human; we want an image. Is Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of California because he has an advanced degree in international economics? No. Did you know he has an advanced degree in international economics? Probably not. Lots of people have degrees in international economics. None of them was the Terminator. You likely won't see any of them as the governor of California.

So, now that I've declared the Repbulic extinct, what do I care about? I care that I'm not paying more than my fair share of the tax burden. I care that the things for which I am paying those taxes are of the highest quality, and are being built and maintained by people who are themselves being paid a living wage. I care that my children are safe, and I know that's primarily the responsibility of my wife and me. I'm less worried about international terrorists than I am about the registered sex offender who lives eight houses away from us. I care that the person who's being paid to watch him while he's on probation is doing her job. (We checked. She is.) I care mostly about stuff that's happening within about a 12-mile radius of wherever I am at the moment.

The most important vote I cast last Tuesday wasn't for president; it was for sheriff and the county commission.

I'm not choosing to be isolated; I'm choosing to mind my own house, and to take as much control as possible of what I can see. I'm participating in the process, but only to the extent where it affects me. I don't care what they do in Boston. I don't care what they do in Wyoming. I'm not sure anybody else in my immediate line of sight does, either. My hot-button issue is not abortion, or gay marriage, or "moral values," whatever the fuck that means. My issue is taxes. Bush sees it my way on taxes. Therefore, I voted for Bush. It's up to the people I send to Congress to keep him honest. (My vote for Senate went to the Democratic candidate, who lost to her slimebag opponent by about 132 votes ... Oops, there we go with the schoolyard stuff again. My bad. But he is a slimebag.) Bush wouldn't have been able to send all those people off to die if Congress hadn't let him. Kerry wasn't going to do anything about it anytime soon. All things being basically equal -- and they were -- the Republicans keep my taxes low, I'm voting Republican. As soon as the Democrats find some way to make it personally beneficial for me to vote for them, I'll vote for them.

So much for "united" states, huh? That's pretty much what I'm suspecting.

A logical criticism for what I have just written would go as follows: "You wrote god-knows-how-many-hundred-words and I still don't know what you believe." If that's the case, you weren't paying attention, and I'll sum it up in a few sentences.

I believe in the power of the individual, and I believe in the power of integrity and vision. Few of the choices with which I was presented last Tuesday showed me any of that. I support integrity and vision, no matter what party provides it. Does that explain anything?

(I'm not sure that this was any lower on the bullshit scale than any of the stuff that fell victim to Click, Drag and Delete, but I needed something to show for the last hour of typing. If I lose my balance while standing on this fence, it's really going to hurt my nuts. Click "Publish Post" and go on to the next thing, I guess.)