The Aerie
Well this is annoying!
I'm trying to post an entry from my web phone, but they vanish everytime I hit Send.
One more time, I guess!
My youngest son has discovered the camera on the log chute. He is riding repeatedly on his all-day wristband (a Xmas gift from his Aunt Laura) just to gain five minutes of fame on the photo monitors.
I'm sad that I can't ride with him, but I'm trying to hold the cost of this trip to under $20. An all-day band for me would cost $25. We did have one bit of luck, though: I had just bought 10 ride points for $7.50, when a woman who was leaving offered me a bedraggled ticket.
Her $50 ride card still had 9 points on it. At first I thought, "Now why did I go buy the 10 points?" But then I realized that if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been there to get her ticket. Can't complain about 2-for-1 points!
Half the time he isn't even interested in the rides: he's hanging around the arcades, begging me or scrouinging for tokens. Nevermind that he has his own and the kids game computers at home. The kid lives for video games.
We're at Camp Snoopy for his monthly Dad Day, where I spend 1-on-1 time with each of the kids. His all-day wristband was burning a hole in his pocket. Even though his siblings declined to join him
(his sister intends to get every minute coming to her), and he'd have to ride alone most of the time, he wanted to go.
Okay, so I'll try posting this one more time.
My Aunt Marian died Sunday.
Now, this isn't the great ripping tragedy of my dad's death (sudden brain tumor, age 67), Steve's death (slow, vicious cancer, age 42), or Theresa's aunt's death (slow, vicious cancer, age 55?), or even my brother's near-death immersion in a swamp back in November.
Aunt Marian was 78, and was very sad after Uncle John died ten years ago. So she was ready to go and had said so.
Nonetheless, along with last summer's suicide of my youngest child's teacher, this will make five funerals in a year for our family.
The funeral will be Wednesday, the anniversary of my father's funeral.
Uncle John and Aunt Marian were where we used to go for Fourth of July in my family. I don't even remember what, if anything, my family did on the 4th in New Jersey. But when I was 12 we came to Minnesota for a visit and when I was 13 we moved back here to Minnesota, my mother's native state. Both years, and thereafter, we went to Uncle John's for the 4th.
Those were the last times that I saw my cousins by Uncle John on a regular basis. He and Aunt Marian had seven boys, which made their home an intensely rowdy place. We'd show up for barbeque and all the cousins would be swarming around, his seven, Aunt Mary's five, and our three.
Later we would treck across Falcon Heights to the State Fairgrounds, and watch the fireworks from across the U of M croplands (an odd thing in itself -- several acres of corn and soybeans planted in the middle of a city next to the U's "farm campus").
Uncle John was funny and friendly, stern with his own boys but kind to the rest of us. Aunt Marian was friendly but dour, a rail-thin South Dakota farm-girl whose capacity for pleasure always seemed limited.
With her passing the house (at a well-known Twin Cities intersection) may be left two her boys, Teddy and Bobby, labelled by one rakish cousin of mine as "The Dream Team." Suffice to say that if they worked together they might have a brain between them, but it's unlikely that they will work together.
We'll see where this goes...
Okay, nearly done. I've got style (well, my blog has style), which I achieved by, frankly, stealing the stylesheet from The Usual Suspects and then modifying it and adding the banner image. I think it looks a little crowded at the moment, but I'll nudge those margins out later.
Now, if I want to get anything else accomplished today aside from noodling with my weblog, I'd better get to it! Writing group tonight!
Okay, well, I've got my old entries pulled in under the Archives, as well as the old entries for my spouse's website.
Next I get to play with appearance and color, hopefully in order to get this new website to debut on New Year's day...
I didn't do anything fancy -- with almost 300 entries I didn't try to preserve image links or even clean up tags and stuff. Maybe I'll do those one-at-a-time over the next few weeks. Maybe I won't get to them. Who knows.
But it's nice to get this much done today, at least. Now I have to make myself go do something else...
To the gym!
In a one-of-a-kind event, I actually used duct tape... on a duct!
Well, the computers were a big success.
The kids woke in the morning to discover they each had their own computer on their desks. Small, slow by modern standards, and not loaded with space, these computers are intended as work computers, not as game computers.
So of course the first thing they did was load their most complicated games on them.
Ah well, they'll learn. That's the point. "These are yours to manage and maintain. You can ask me for help, but these are your responsibility." I told them. We'll see if it sinks in!
Greetings!
Well, after four years of operation (yes, that's right, four) I have decided to implement an actual web logging software.
Fortunately I stumbled across Movable Type over at The Usual Suspects and fell immediately in love with it... due in no small factor to the ability to hit up Scott Brown with questions if I hit a snag.
But I hit no snags, and now I've got MT up and running. Here's my first web entry as proof!
Meanwhile, it is as you might notice, Xmas Eve. I should be upstairs helping Santa get ready, but Santa has fallen asleep in my armchair after hosting the in-laws, so I'm taking this time to get my own Xmas present working.
Well, here goes the first test! Cross your fingers!
I realize that this isn't very politically correct, but...
I like Christmas shopping.
I know, I know, how materialistic!. How shallow! I... I'm just a pawn
of the merchandising machine. I'm part of the decline of the Western
world.
But I enjoy it.
When I have time. When I have a little bit of money (I've never had a
lot, but I have had none, and I like a little better than none). I
enjoy the process. Maybe it keys into some instinctive hunter-gatherer
instinct. Maybe I just like thinking about the people I care about.
And that's how I do it. I'm ridiculously inefficient. I basically take
one person and put them in my mind, and then I walk around and look at
things. I just walk around, thinking about someone, and looking at
stuff, trying to find something that "fits."
Now, I have to admit, I frequently find myself browsing bookstores
using this method, but that's just a cop-out, I just like bookstores.
But it works anywhere. I browse around, I look at stuff, I hold it up
to the person in my head, I see if it looks right for them.
That's what I was doing today. I was supposed to be doing a lot of
other things. I was supposed to be working on the corporate Christmas
card. I was supposed to be writing up a proposal. I was supposed to be
working on my book. But I needed a break. I've spent the last three
weeks working like an idiot. Even yesterday was idiotic, when it
shouldn't have been, it just turned out that way.
So despite the inclement weather
TITLE:the first significant winter storm in three years
TITLE:I trucked off to the bookstores, looking for something for a
friend of mine.
She's particularly challenging to buy for -- she lives an alternate
lifestyle. Bi. Married. Experimenting with foursomes with her husband
and another couple. The closest thing that Barnes and Noble had that I
thought might suit her was a book by Susie Bright, and I figured she
probably already had it. So I went to the Amazon Bookstore (not to be
confused with Amazon.com, they won that court case), and didn't see
much there that wasn't at B&N. Somewhat disappointing.
I even stopped by "Sex World," not really expecting to find anything
suitable, and I was right.
So what was I looking for? I don't know: "Couples Dating Couples"?
"Dating for Four?" Hard to say. Amazon.com revealed a few
possibilities: [1]Redefining Our Relationships, [2]Open Marriage, but
I didn't just want to pull something out of the Amazon.com, hat. I
wanted to see the book, look it over... hold it up to her picture in
my head and say "Does this fit?"
So I spent a couple hours trying to find the perfect gift for this
challenging friend. Not quite satisfied yet, but if I want the gift to
arrive on time I'd better find something soon...
And after her, I've got the rest of my list -- my birthmother, my
wife, my kids, my family...
My wife, she wants to do less. She wants us to make things for each
other, write stories, poems, sketches, etc. Less materialistic. More
touchy-feely.
But I like shopping for Christmas presents. I like finding the "right"
things. And I enjoy it, when I can.
Hopefully I'll have a chance this year.
[3]Last
Well this is cool. Of course, I'll get less writing done.
I discovered (that is to say, I was told by my spouse) that I was taking my son to his Lego League tournament this weekend. His friends joined in, so that I have now taken THREE boys to the Lego League tournament.
I brought my laptop expecting to at least get some writing done. But much to my surprise the school has a full wireless network going. Public IP addresses, no encryption, no passwords, and oddly enough for a school, no content filtering. About as wide open as a school can be.
Sheesh.
So I get to be on the Internet, which in some senses is fun, but onthe other hand offers me tons of distractions from the writing I anticipated doing.
I'm also kept quite busy following the team to their presentations and tournaments. In addition to building a robot that can accomplish various tasks in a theme (this year it's a robotic Mars lander, last year I think it was environmental cleanup), they have to present a report on the topic (the proposed NASA Mars lander), and a techical presentation on how they built and run their robot. Basically that means that I get about 30 minutes of writing between scurrying off to take snapshots of the action.
It's really kind of amazing to me, that kids are growing up programming Lego robots to explore Mars. I remember how amazing my first 110-baud teletype seemed back in 1975. It was incredible! And now they have programmable robot cars...
Of course, I was lucky because when I got into computers they WERE so simple. I could sit down with Lunar Lander and within seconds start rewriting the program. Nowadays you have to learn so much more before you can create something that says "Hello world." You need to know how to open up windows on the desktop, choose color and font, etc. Back then it was just 'PRINT "HELLO, WORLD"' We didn't even need the Shift key!
Anyway lunch break is nearly over and I should get back to writing...