How to be a REAL villain....

This came from an old email. I have no idea who wrote it. If you know who did, please drop me a line and tell me so I can attribute it properly. -- Thanks

World domination is everyone's dream. It's not a bad
job really. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks
and you can set your own hours. However, every Evil
Villain I've read about in books or seen in movies
invariably gets overthrown and destroyed in the end.
I've noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian
lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists or alien
invaders, they always seem to make the same basic
mistakes every single time. Therefore, I follow these
guidelines while conquering the world:

1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear
Plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl
through.

3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be
killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten
cell of my dungeon.

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

5. The artifact which is the source of my power will
not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River
of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be
in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object
which is my one weakness.

6. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before
killing them.

7. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look,
before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this
is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on
second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."

8. After I kidnap the hot girlfriend of the hero, we
will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony,
not a lavish spectacle in three weeks' time during
which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

9. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless
absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not
be a large red button labeled "Danger: Do Not Push".
The big red button marked "Do Not Push" will instead
trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to
disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not
clearly be labeled as such.

10. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner
sanctum -- a small hotel well outside my borders will
work just as well.

11. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I
will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the
form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to
show they pose no threat.

12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old
child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot
will be corrected before implementation.

13. All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least
have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them,
not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The
announcement of their deaths, as well as any
accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after
the aforementioned disposal.

14. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last
cigarette, or any other form of last request.

15. I will never employ any device with a digital
countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely
unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter
reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into
operation.

16. I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill
you, there's just one thing I want to know."

17. When I employ people as advisors, I will
occasionally listen to their advice.

18. I will not have a son. Although his laughably
under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail,
it would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point
in time.

19. I will not have a daughter. She would be as
beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero's
rugged countenance and she'd betray her own father.

20. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will
not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied,
it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a
more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

21. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create
original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed
to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi
storm troopers, Roman foot soldiers, or savage Mongol
hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my
troops to have a more positive mind-set.

22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of
unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field
bigger than my head.

23. I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and
train my troops in their use. That way -- even if the
heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or
render the standard-issue energy weapons useless -- my
troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages
armed with spears and rocks.

24. I will maintain a realistic assessment of my
strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some
of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter
the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!"
(After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

25. No matter how well it would perform, I will never
construct any sort of machinery which is completely
indestructible except for one small and virtually
inaccessible vulnerable spot.

26. No matter how attractive certain members of the
rebellion are, there is probably someone just as
attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore,
I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to
my bed chamber.

27. I will never build only one of anything important.
All important systems will have redundant control
panels and power supplies. For the same reason I will
always carry at least two fully loaded weapons at all
times.

28. My pet monster will be kept in a secure cage from
which it cannot escape and into which I could not
accidentally stumble.

29. I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so
throw my enemies into confusion.

30. All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent
bards, and cowardly thieves in the land will be
preemptively put to death. My foes will surely give up
and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic
relief.

31. All naive, busty tavern wenches in my realm will be
replaced with surly, world-weary waitresses who will
provide no unexpected reinforcement and/or romantic
subplot for the hero or his sidekick.

32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who
brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really
am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

33. I will never employ the use of a major weapon that
takes time to charge up before firing and utterly
destroying the rebel base. Instead I will use weapons
that can do the same thing with a single push of a
button.

34. I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.

35. I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made
you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a
disaffected member of Generation X.

36. I will not imprison members of the same party in
the same cell block, let alone the same cell. If they
are important prisoners, I will keep the only key to
the cell door on my person instead of handing out
copies to every bottom-rung guard in the prison.

37. If my trusted lieutenant tells me my Legions of
Terror are losing a battle, I will believe him. After
all, he's my trusted lieutenant.

38. If an enemy I have just killed has a younger
sibling or offspring anywhere, I will find them and
have them killed immediately, instead of waiting for
them to grow up harboring feelings of vengeance towards
me in my old age.

39. If I absolutely must ride into battle, I will
certainly not ride at the forefront of my Legions of
Terror, nor will I seek out my opposite number among
his army.

40. I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I
have an unstoppable super-weapon, I will use it as
early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in
reserve.

41. Once my power is secure, I will destroy all those
pesky time-travel devices.

42. When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also
get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly
cute little animal capable of untying ropes and
filching keys happens to follow him around.

43. I will maintain a healthy amount of skepticism when
I capture the hot rebel and she claims she is attracted
to my power and good looks and will gladly betray her
companions if I just let him in on my plans.

44. I will only employ bounty hunters who work for
money. Those who work for the pleasure of the hunt tend
to do dumb things like even the odds to give the other
guy a sporting chance.

45. I will make sure I have a clear understanding of
who is responsible for what in my organization. For
example, if my general screws up I will not draw my
weapon, point it at him, say "And here is the price for
failure," then suddenly turn and kill some random
underling.

46. If an advisor says to me "My liege, he is but one
man. What can one man possibly do?", I will reply
"This." and shoot the advisor.

47. If I learn that a callow youth has begun a quest to
destroy me, I will slay him while he is still a callow
youth instead of waiting for him to mature.

48. I will treat any beast which I control through
magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if
the control is ever broken, it will not immediately
come after me for revenge.

49. If I learn the whereabouts of the one artifact
which can destroy me, I will not send all my troops out
to seize it. Instead I will send them out to seize
something else and quietly put a Want-Ad in the local
paper.
50. My main computers will have their own special
operating system that will be completely incompatible
with standard IBM and Macintosh Powerbooks.

51. If one of my dungeon guards begins expressing
concern over the conditions in the hot friend of the
hero's cell, I will immediately transfer him to a less
people-oriented position.

52. I will hire a team of board-certified architects
and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any
secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not
know about.

53. If the hot friends of the hero that I capture says
"I'll never marry you! Never, do you hear me,
NEVER!!!", I will say "Oh well" and kill her.

54. I will not strike a bargain with a demonic being
then attempt to double-cross it simply because I feel
like being contrary.

55. The deformed mutants and odd-ball psychotics will
have their place in my Legions of Terror. However
before I send them out on important covert missions
that require tact and subtlety, I will first see if
there is anyone else equally qualified who would
attract less attention.

56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic
marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized
target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

57. Before employing any captured artifacts or
machinery, I will carefully read the owner's manual.

58. If it becomes necessary to escape, I will never
stop to pose dramatically and toss off a one-liner.

59. I will never build a sentient computer smarter than
I am.

60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked
to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he
breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be
used. Note: this also applies to passwords.

61. If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything
on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have
a response that satisfies them.

62. I will design fortress hallways with no alcoves or
protruding structural supports which intruders could
use for cover in a fire fight.

63. Bulk trash will be disposed of in incinerators, not
compactors. And they will be kept hot, with none of
that nonsense about flames going through accessible
tunnels at predictable intervals.

64. I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured
of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive
habits which could prove to be a disadvantage.

65. If I must have computer systems with publicly
available terminals, the maps they display of my
complex will have a room clearly marked as the Main
Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber.
The actual main control room will be marked as Sewage
Overflow Containment.

66. My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint
scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of
buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then
subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence
will trigger the alarm system.

67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my
guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance
camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.

68. I will spare someone who saved my life sometime in
the past. This is only reasonable as it encourages
others to do so. However, the offer is good one time
only. If they want me to spare them again, they'd
better save my life again.

69. All midwives will be banned from the realm. All
babies will be delivered at state-approved hospitals.
Orphans will be placed in foster-homes, not abandoned
in the woods to be raised by creatures of the wild.

70. When my guards split up to search for intruders,
they will always travel in groups of at least two. They
will be trained so that if one of them disappears
mysteriously while on patrol, the other will
immediately initiate an alert and call for backup,
instead of quizzically peering around a corner.

71. If I decide to test a lieutenant's loyalty and see
if he/she should be made a trusted lieutenant, I will
have a crack squad of marksmen standing by in case the
answer is no.

72. If all the heroes are standing together around a
strange device and begin to taunt me, I will pull out a
conventional weapon instead of using my unstoppable
super-weapon on them.

73. I will not agree to let the heroes go free if they
win a rigged contest, even though my advisors assure me
it is impossible for them to win.

74. When I create a multimedia presentation of my plan
designed so that my five-year-old advisor can easily
understand the details, I will not label the disk
"Project Overlord" and leave it lying on top of my
desk.

75. I will instruct my Legions of Terror to attack the
hero en masse, instead of standing around waiting while
members break off and attack one or two at a time.

76. If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up
after him and struggle with him in an attempt to push
him over the edge. I will also not engage him at the
edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a
river of molten lava is not even worth considering.)

77. If I have a fit of temporary insanity and decide to
give the hero the chance to reject a job as my trusted
lieutenant, I will retain enough sanity to wait until
my current trusted lieutenant is out of earshot before
making the offer.

78. I will not tell my Legions of Terror "And he must
be taken alive!" The command will be "And try to take
him alive if it is reasonably practical."

79. If my doomsday device happens to come with a
reverse switch, as soon as it has been employed it will
be melted down and made into limited-edition
commemorative coins.

80. If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I
will send out my best troops instead of wasting time
with progressively stronger ones as he gets closer and
closer to my fortress.

81. If I am fighting with the hero atop a moving
platform, have disarmed him, and am about to finish him
off and he glances behind me and drops flat, I too will
drop flat instead of quizzically turning around to find
out what he saw.

82. I will not shoot at any of my enemies if they are
standing in front of the crucial support beam to a
heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.

83. If I'm eating dinner with the hero, put poison in
his goblet, then have to leave the table for any
reason, I will order new drinks for both of us instead
of trying to decide whether or not to switch with him.

84. I will not have captives of one sex guarded by
members of the opposite sex.

85. I will not use any plan in which the final step is
horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 Stones of
Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion
at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be
more along the lines of "Push the button."

86. I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to
code and properly grounded.

87. My vats of hazardous chemicals will be covered when
not in use. Also, I will not construct walkways above
them.

88. If a group of henchmen fail miserably at a task, I
will not berate them for incompetence then send the
same group out to try the task again.

89. After I capture the hero's super-weapon, I will
not immediately disband my legions and relax my guard
because I believe whoever holds the weapon is
unstoppable. After all, the hero held the weapon and I
took it from him.

90. I will not design my Main Control Room so that
every workstation is facing away from the door.

91. I will not ignore the messenger that stumbles in
exhausted and obviously agitated until my personal
grooming or current entertainment is finished. It might
actually be important.

92. If I ever talk to the hero on the phone, I will not
taunt him. Instead I will say that his dogged
perseverance has given me new insight on the futility
of my evil ways and that if he leaves me alone for a
few months of quiet contemplation I will likely return
to the path of righteousness. (Heroes are incredibly
gullible in this regard.)

93. If I decide to hold a double execution of the hero
and an underling who failed or betrayed me, I will see
to it that the hero is scheduled to go first.

94. When arresting prisoners, my guards will not allow
them to stop and grab a useless trinket of purely
sentimental value.

95. My dungeon will have its own qualified medical
staff complete with bodyguards. That way if a prisoner
becomes sick and his cell-mate tells the guard its an
emergency, the guard will fetch a trauma team instead
of opening up the cell for a look.

96. My door mechanisms will be designed so that
blasting the control panel on the outside seals the
door and blasting the control panel on the inside opens
the door, not vice versa.

97. My dungeon cells will not be furnished with objects
that contain reflective surfaces or anything that can
be unraveled.

98. If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I
will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they
are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However
if circumstance have forced them together against their
will and they spend all their time bickering and
criticizing each other except during the intermittent
occasions when they are saving each others' lives at
which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will
immediately order their execution.

99. Any data file of crucial importance will be padded
to 1.45Mb in size.

100. Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in
a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with
free unlimited Internet access.

...

I'm having a hard time thinking today. I don't know what to write. I drift in and out of my usual boards as a wisp of lurking mist. I hit reply, but when I try to actually put something down the white box defeats me.

I am a bit beaten up by life today, I think. This morning I had to take my son to court. Hopefully it doesn't do anything but sit there, but if things go as far south as they did we should have some options. But I still feel sick.

Afterwards we went to his doctor's appointment, and they got to wrangle about responsibility and taking it for your actions. That was more than a little intense.

I got home, and just had to go lay down. I just couldn't deal anymore. I still can't. I'm up because it's expected of me and that's it. I wonder if this is what my doctor keeps talking about.

Cool Retro Link...

Did you have a LiteBrite when you were a kid? We had one and my mom hated it because of those )&@$% pegs that were always everywhere. It was just so cool, though!

Well, you can let your kids have the fun, but without the plastic vacuum-fodder. Check out the Online LiteBrite!

Geeky Poetry Slam.....
I've had several good geeky poems sent to me recently, and I've decided to share them with you. Both of them are attributed to anonymous authors (if you know otherwise I'd be glad to properly attribute them - just drop me a line).

Abort, Retry, Ignore
Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

Was this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.
Carefully, I weighed my options.
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly, I must now adopt one:
Choose Abort, Retry, Ignore.

With my fingers pale and trembling,
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee
Finally I pressed a key --
But on the screen what did I see?
Again: "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

I tried to catch the chips off-guard --
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
Luck was just not in the cards.
I saw what I had seen before.
Now I typed in desperation
Trying random combinations
Still there came the incantation:
Choose: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw an awful sight:
A bold and blinding flash of light --
A lightning bolt had cut the night and shook me to my very core. I
saw the screen collapse and die "Oh no -- my database", I cried I
thought I heard a voice reply, "You'll see your data Nevermore."

To this day I do not know
The place to which lost data goes
I bet it goes to heaven where the angels have it stored.
But as for productivity, well
I fear that it goes straight to hell
And that's the tale I have to tell
Your choice: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

Anon



Waka Waka Poem

First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):

<> ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * <> ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , system halted

In English, this reads:

waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash
bang splat equal at dollar under-score
percent splat waka waka tilda number four
ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash
vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma crash

How much wood could a Trogdor burninate, if a Trogdor burninated wood?

I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that doesn't come off as snivelling or geeky, so I'm erring on the geeky side today.

The build process at work has gone fins up, so I'm without a testing environment I can trust. Things look pretty good, though. I'll be glad when I can believe that sentance, though.

She's Doing Well

I want to thank those who've wished Gramma well. She had open heart surgery a week ago, and they let her wake up yesterday. She's doing really well. We'll just keep praying it keeps up.

Connection Strings of the Heart.....

My boss and I have been chasing Heisenbugs and other sorts of geeky code foolishness all day. We were getting a bit punchy this afternoon, and we had this great idea that we needed to get Dr. Phil or someone in there who really understood "connections" to figure out this connection string bug. Of course, then it went down hill from there with suggestions about similar topics for Oprah, and an appearance on Jerry Springer for our error-trapping object and the IIS server.

We're tired, and we're geeks. This is as good as it gets, I'm afraid.

She did finally figure it out, and Dr. Phil wasn't necessary after all.

Serenity Prayer for Gramma....

"God, grant me the senility
To forget the people
I never liked anyway,
The good fortune
To run into the ones I do,
And the eyesight to tell the difference. "

Good luck with the surgery, and may you be well soon. There are people out there who still need your sure hand with a shotgun full of rock-salt and your chocolate chip cookies afterward. ;)

A REAL First Lady....

I just don't know what to do with this election.

Maybe what we need for a President is a 65 year old woman who spent a large part of her formative years raising a large brood of kids and running a bar or truck stop.

I want an old battleaxe who can wear heels and fit in like a lady but still peels paint with her language at 50 feet when she feels the need. No drunkards, idiots, or assholes of any gender need apply to her cabinet, and sychophants and hangers-on had better learn a useful skill. She can frog-march an unruly Senator out the door when necessary, and march right back in and put the meeting back on track. She respects expert opinion but has no qualms about calling bullshit on either educated or bureaucratic bloviating.

On the world front, the UN and the rest of those guys had better watch their P's and Q's as her oldest son is in the Army and if they think she's going to put up with their hijinks to put him in harm's way, well, they've got another think coming. "Diplomacy" just got a whole new set of nuances when she names her best friend Francis from down at the DMV as Secretary of State - she's been telling people exactly how to do things they don't want to do in the most blunt way possible for twenty years and only one has ever tried to take a swing at her. And let's just say there's going to be a new skill required of the translators because her level of "rhetoric" is not part of their standard vocabulary.

Domestically, it is a whole new ballgame for all concerned. Her ability to manage the bottom line of her business gives her a unique perspective on the economic front. Her real life experiences dealing with the vagrancies of the social programs her office now oversees will be a wake-up call for the stuffed shirts who've never gone without that had been setting policy.

The "First Gentleman" will be a large guy with a penchant for fishing and worn buffalo-check flannel for when he's not performing his official duties of looking mild yet menacingly supportive behind his wife at social functions. Those traditional "big projects" expected of the President's spouse will be easing load limits to improve interstate commerce, coming up with clear and consistent guidelines for re-introducing corporal punishment in schools, and environmental causes that improve fishing conditions. He will be into saving the whales because any guy who can hook one of those things has his respect and he wants to make sure the next generation gets their chance. His contribution to The China Room will be crocheted covers for all the teapots (done by his Mamma) and a set of diner-grade white stonewear for less formal settings.

The Vice President will be a former jr. high. Vice Principal from the Deep South. Time as a Marine non-com would also be helpful. His abilities in dealing discipline to a never-ending stream of pimpled and attitude-clad youth will hold him in good stead as he leads Congress to a productive session. Or maybe it's just that boat oar with the holes drilled through it he ceremoniously hangs on the wall behind his chair as he is seated at the opening of every working day. He will spend most of his term supporting that amendment to the Department of Education code that the First Gentleman is stumping for him, and stopping all that running in the hallways by the Senate chamber.

I'm only partially joking.

Green Eggs and Politics....

One of my favorite forums is getting soaked with political rhetoric, but I refuse to join in. Why? Because the only thing it seems to do is consume bandwidth with bloat and rhetoric. The ones who started out Republicans are still Republicans, and the Democrats are all still Democrats. Hot air and bad feelings abound on both sides, and there's no point to it, IMHO.

I will not ever Poli-post
I will not even when they're toast
I will not read them when they're mean
I will not read them Nader-green
  I will not post these Poli-threads
  I do not like them, they are dead ends

I will not use my quiet vox
I will not put them in the stocks
I will not look over here or there
I will not post them anywhere
  I will not post these Poli-threads
  I do not like them, they are dead ends

Cosmic gaming coincidence...

goat-rodeo:
Describes a condition of extreme chaos. Have you ever seen a rodeo? Replace the cows with goats. Goats are way faster, smarter and in many cases meaner than cows.

Used:
as an adjective: "This project has been a real goat-rodeo."
or
a noun: "What kind of goat-rodeo are you running here?"

"Goat Rodeo" is my houseape-friendly version of several words that mean the situation is messed up (fubar, Charlie Foxtrot, etc). I use it enough than one day when my son was messing with my cell phone he changed the display name to that.

My original Xbox I bought when they first came out named itself "rodeo". I didn't think anything of this, until I bought my second one and we did our first system link. It's name is "goat". Irony is everywhere.....

PS238

Aaron Williams (of Nodwick fame) has been working on a new comic book for the last year or so but they've never been available online before now. For all of us who know our kids are really special, this comic is definately for us. Think X-men as 1st graders. Some really funny stuff.

At any rate, if you want a taste of the book, you can go to their website and read some specially created background materials. Just look under "School Notes". I think the permission slip says it all...

Real Pie in the Sky...

People are all up in various sorts of arms about the president's plan and all it's finer points. The costs will be truly astronomical, the technologies new and dangerous, and the goal unimaginably distant to the average person. Whatever. Go on and on all you want gang, 'cause we're way ahead of you.

Just as the exploration of the world in the 15th and 16th centuries was started by governments trying to get an edge over each other, so has our conquest of space. But fairly early on those early explorations by governments were eclipsed by the merchants who took on the risks to go to those far off lands. They took to the blazed but unbeaten trails and led the settlers and farmers off into new lands to see what could be made of them. Space travel is shaping up the same way. I truly believe the age of commercial space exploration is just around the corner.

What, you say? Space travel with no political or military axe to grind, no nationalistic visions, and no government or collegiate bureaucracy?! Yep. Just people, willing to spend the time and money and expertise to strap themselves to a not so absurdly expensive machine and see what they can do up there. That's one of the things I love about this country. While others are standing around dithering, someone here will just get up and shuffle off and DO IT!

It can't be done. Nope. Only governments can afford to do it. Not so. There are literally hundreds of companies the world over reaching for the void. Several American companies like XCOR and Scaled Composites, LLC are already testing their craft. XCOR’s White Knight has successfully launched and landed, as has Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne. Using private money, these companies are building systems that can develop into completely private commercial ventures into space.

This isn’t just playboys wasting money on really compensatory model rockets. If you think this isn’t serious, you’re wrong. And the FAA agrees with me. After extensive review in a truly labyrinthine process, XCOR was informed back in November that their application for a launch license was sufficiently complete. You can read it in the article but what it means is that they have done their part to prove that this is a feasible program. By the rules of the AST (Administer of Commercial Space Transportation), XCOR is going to get a license to launch within 180 days, or the FAA has to explain why to the powers that be.

Sub orbital flight doesn’t count! Well, I’d ask Alan Shepard about that. His fifteen minutes aboard Freedom 7 were key to the launches that followed. In the case of the two I’ve mentioned, the craft and its launch system have been built, and they’ve been tested in atmosphere. In fact, SpaceShipOne just broke the sound barrier here back in December.

The stakes are fairly high. If they can manage to launch and land, they will win the X Prize. To win they have to design, build, and fly a craft that can achieve sub orbital flight with a crew of three, return to Earth safely and launch the same craft again within two weeks. The 10 million dollar prize is nice, but not the end of the road.

These men and women are convinced that sub orbital flight is in fact commercially viable at the present time. I find it kind of ironic. The same lines that used to be traced on maps to chart the paths of intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy cities can now be used to move people and goods from one side of the world to the other with another order of magnitude increase in speed. Just as the Pony Express revolutionized the mail system in the Old West, these little rockets are a first step. This is just the beginning, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here.

There are those of us who want to see space not only explored but also lived in. With the crushing disappointments in our national space efforts over the last thirty years, we've stopped waiting on the government or Congress or Oingo-Boingo the Great God of the Congo or whatever is keeping them from getting it together and doing this thing. We are going into space, and we're going to do it ourselves.

So. What flavor pie do you want us to bring back for you?

Never ever think you have got it made....

.....because that is the precise moment when you get completely kicked in the teeth. Looooooooooooooonnnnnnng story.

I've got to get back into working on PostNuke. This thing has more damned opinions on how a website should be run than my pushy Aunt (who I am much smarter than to name here! Sheeesh!). I'm about this close to just writing a frickin' custom module that does exactly what I tell it to rather than this.

A Not Unexpected Guest....

Had our first visit today from the in-home family counselor my younger son's regular counsellor recommended to his case manager as part of his treatment plan. Definately interesting. I can see her being very successful in this line of work. She didn't take any crap, but she still managed to work him around to negotiating some rule changes for the good of both sides without causing a huge fuss. I'm going to be taking lots and lots of notes on these. It reminded me so strongly of having my Gramma over for coffee when she left I went into the bathroom and cried.

She's a lady in her late sixties, and I don't think my kids quite knew what to do with her. We sat around the dining table and sort of got to know each other and hashed out a few smaller issues. I noticed she had four small black dots on her neck and it took me a few minutes but I realized why I recognized them - they were markers for radiation treatment. I asked her if we needed to do any working around her treatment schedule by way of prying, and she looked at me for a second until I gestured to my throat. Her face cleared and she said no, and then she explained that it was metastisized breast cancer but it has been in remission for two years.

I don't have a lot of hope, but I hope she'll help me through the loss of it this time. One of the things she hammered on like a nail on an 80-pound anvil was I could do everything in the world, but if he continued to make those bad choices then I was just going to have to let him face the consequences and hopefully be able to help him turn that to the good. I don't buy into that. At least not yet. He isn't in horrible trouble yet, and he's so much better over the last couple weeks that the treatment seems almost too much.

I have to follow through, though, for his sake. I can't do another year like the last one, and I don't think he can either. We have to nail this down and make sure it's handled for the forseeable future. Time is so short to get him ready to go out into the world and we've got way too much to do without having to struggle through this stuff again.

I've had this running through my head all day and I can't get rid of it. Does anyone know what it belongs to?

Help me if you can I'm going
Back to the House at Pooh Corner by One
You'd be surprised, there's so much to be done
Count all the bees in the hive
Chase all the clouds in the sky
Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh

Pondering-time....

This is the time of year when the tarnished tinsel caught forlornly on the bush outside the window from taking out the tree seems to bring out the urge to take a look at things. To evaluate them. To ponder.

I read the story of the Nativity, and the part that always gets me isn't the "Behold! I bring you tidings of great joy..." part. It's after all that has been said and done and all the various flocks of adoring visitors and what have you have shown up and raised their ruckus and things have quieted down and the baby's asleep and it says, "And Mary pondered these things in her heart." The girl had a lot to think about. Things that have happened. Things that were going to happen. And in the first quiet moments that's what she did. I think we all do that. We get through all the rush of year's ending and at the first chance we get we sit down on the curb in our soul and take a look around a bit.

I've only started the process for this year, so I only have some vague impressions. There are people I wish I'd known better that are gone now. There are people I wish I didn't know. Things I wish I'd done and things I wish I hadn't done. Parts of me aren't all I wish they were. There are moments of happiness that shine out.

I have to be careful. It can all too easily turn into a litany of should-haves and could-haves and would-have-if-onlies that can tie me right into a self-recriminating knot. On the other hand, I don't want to gloss it over so hard I don't get anything real. It's a fine line.

For better or for worse, it's 2004. Can't escape that. I guess most of all today I have that line from an old TV show called "Hill Street Blues" running through my head. When Sargent Esterhaus used to send them all out on their beats at the start of every show, he'd always say the same thing.

"Let's all be careful out there."

And God Bless us, every one...

Last night was the traditional gymkhana. Nothing was calm, but it was pretty bright. Actually, that might be because I think the kids were trying to signal the mothership out in space with the amount of lights they inflicted on that poor little tree. The boys finally started snoring at 3:30 or so. I did actually get everything done and sat down with a cup of tea around 6am or so. The kids showed up at 8am precisely, and entirely too chipper about the whole thing. I got the fire started with our Yule-log from last year, and the semi-controlled frenzy ensued.

Barney is a dinosaur from our refridgerator... The velociraptor-sized bird the boys picked out is in the oven, and will be for the rest of the day. The girls chose asparagus for the veggie so that's all trimmed and ready. I'm making picture slideshow CDs for all the grandmas and picking tinsel out of my hair yet again (I am NEVER buying that stuff again).

The consoles have been rearranged and the kids are running around with several of their friends who came over to compare loot. Lord love her, but my Mom got each of the kids their own digital camera. I'm going to have to get a MUCH bigger hard drive. I never thought I'd ever pine for the days of those loud popping-noise Fisher Price things. The boys are running a head-to-head comparison between Project Gotham 2 and Tokyo Extreme Racing 3 on the big TV by switching between controllers and flipping the inputs back and forth really fast. My living room looks like a power sub-station now with all the cables and blinking lights. The girls are closeted in their bathroom with two of their little buddies tangling their hair and applying substances and giggling (which in the case of one of their friends is so high-pitched it could bend metal).

It is a Happy Holiday.

Nothing says "Hollidays"...

....like a glowing deer with an extension cord in his backside. ;)

This year it seems like there's been an invasion of lighted deer all over the place. Who comes up with these things?

We saw a bunch of them tonight while out getting our tree. I decided that if I ever have a rock band, I'm going to call them "Electric Venison".

HeisenBugs....

This is an abridgement of a bunch of material I found on WardsWiki. I'm adding links to these pages in our testing definitions, both as a light-hearted joke but also as a more precise nomenclature for identifying problems that arise.

Bohr Bug
It's broke, but I know how to fix it.
A BohrBug is just your average, straight-forward bug. Simple like the Bohr model of the atom: A small sphere. You push it, it moves. BohrBugs are reproducible, and hence are easily fixed once discovered. Testers pray for these.

Heisen Bug
A HeisenBug is a bug whose presence is affected by act of observing it.
This is a bug who appears and disappears for what appears to be no reason. Sometimes called "intermittent". They play peekaboo through the lines of code. These are most annoying when coupled with the Programmer Proximity Detector (see below) where not only does the tester affect the bug by hunting it, but once they think they've found it and try to show the programmer, the programmer is faced with a program that seems to function perfectly (unlike the tester).

This has been known to make grown testers cry.

Mandel Bug
A bug that has a single simple cause, but which causes the system to exhibit wildly chaotic and unpredictable behaviour.
In multi-tier applications, particularly web applications this is pretty much a given. Something breaks, and since the whole thing is a house of cards you can get errors in what appears to be competely unrelated code.

Schroedin Bug
A defect that exists neither working nor not working until you look at it, and suddenly it collapses into a state, usually 'that could never have worked'.
This occurs frequently while editing other people's code. Since code is often a reflection of the mental workings of the programmer, you are often faced with code that looks like it could have been scrawled on butcher paper with crayons
for all you know. While working with the code you are likely to introduce values and variables that cause other parts of the code that seem to work fine to cease working because they have related return or attibute data that you were unaware of. Or they were just idiots.

Programmer Proximity Detector
This isn't strictly a bug. It more behaves like a feature that is apparently spontaneously evolving in programs. It allows the program to act differently in the presence of its author.

Typically this involves a user who claims that the program has a bug, but after calling the programmer over to the test facility (usually across the compound, requiring exiting the building and crossing a windswept parking lot in the rain, or taking an elevator 26 stories down to the subbasement), the bug does not manifest - the program works perfectly. The user often serves as the proximity detector. Because the user is carefully showing the programmer how he (is supposed to) use the program, the user may use the program more slowly (thus hiding race condition bugs) or exactly the way the programmer told him to use the program (thus hiding bugs due to slightly different inputs or orders of operations).

They're back....

The gang is back from Snow Camp. They had way too much fun in the snow and now we are cleaning up the damp bags of clothes and they are ALL hitting the shower. The hope is for a quiet and early evening as they have school tomorrow.

As for me, I had a night to myself. I met a friend I had known online for a long time and we went to see Master and Commander (way cool flick - Gamerdad's going to have my review of it). It was nice to get out and talk to someone who speaks the entire English language, who uses consonants in all the words that are supposed to have them, and who thinks "hella" is someplace in Greece. He was a good conversationalist and had some great stories to share. That and it was so good to be able to put a face with a screen name. We're looking at trying to do ROTK next weekend or the weekend after.

It's always a challenge to pick the baggage up again when it's been off. Just as you start to decompress it gets dumped on you again, and you stagger under the load. I have been careful this time to plan ahead for that and to be mindful of the phenomenon so that I don't get frustrated and angry about it.

It's the WHAT of December!?

Okay, who decided to compress the space/time continuum or something and cut at least two weeks out of the month of December this year?!

I'm not ready. Well, I'm never ready, but this year I'm really, really not ready. I wonder how people do this.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer geek....

Wil Wheaton, child-star turned geek and author, has inked a deal with O'Reilly Publishing to carry his currently published book Dancing Barefoot, his in-progress Just a Geek, and a third book not yet announced. They are so amped about Dancing Barefoot they are preparing a printing that will be available before Christmas (see their site here to order).

Last year I found his blog, and was delighted to follow his doings as a grown-up, family man, and nascent geek trying to figure out what to do with his life.

w00t for you, Wil!

Adventuring Home
When did we turn even our dreams inside?

We all look back with a certain nostalgia at the summer afternoons of our childhood, biking off into the woods or off to the park with our buddies to play until Mom's call drifted across the way to bring us home for dinner. In today's protective times, we can't do that. Our children are not allowed even a tiny fraction of the freedoms we enjoyed. Families are fragmented, with extended families spread all across the continent and parents working and divorcing. In ever-larger numbers, our children are caged tightly by limits, but floating in a sea of uncertainties and ever-growing responsibility with fewer and fewer guides to show them the way as they grow.

It shows up in many areas, but perhaps nowhere so telling as our literature. Our stories are no longer about going off to find adventure in the great beyond and the next great discovery, but finding out how to fix our problems and somehow come to a place that feels like they belong.

Disney's film "Treasure Planet" is a great example of what I'm talking about, particularly because it straddles both sorts of stories. It's original text by Robert Louis Stephenson is a coming-of-age story with a young man going out in the world to make his fortune and forge his own path. He's just trying to grow up by the lights of the time. The new version is a troubled young man who goes off trying to find a solution to his problems so he can find a path for his life and a way to get home.

The main character, Jim, could have been filmed at my house. Both my sons (but particularly my younger) have that awkward set to their limbs and those questioning eyes that seem to personify a young man trying to figure out how to be a grown man in this day and age. I have seen that eyes-closed look of bliss and heard that yell of triumph as they land some insane thing on a skateboard, and that bright-eyed grin covered in dirty grease coming out from under the hood of a car. I also see those sullen, shadowed eyes and hang-dog shoulders when they've done wrong and know it or when they're forced to do something. Particularly when the younger has decided for whatever reason that he's not good enough and gives up.

This isn't the only film, though. Look back at the recent history of family cinema. "Holes", "Secondhand Lions", "Finding Nemo", and even "Lilo and Stitch" are all stories of young men (or young blue aliens) trying to find ways to straighten things out and fit in. Even the X-men and other comics contain a strong subtext of trying to fit in, and youth-oriented books are the same. Mr. Potter is only a broom-length in front of Artemis Fowl and Lemony Snicket.

The kids feel the lack, too. We saw Treasure Planet in the theater. As we were walking back out the car, my eldest turned to me and said, "Well Mom, I guess all you need now is a couple old cyborgs with boats." We laughed, but the truth of it really has stuck with me in the year or more since then. The fashion of sending boys off to learn a trade has been replaced with macrameing them to the couch in the house alone or placing them behind a counter in a paper hat. Then they turn 18 and they are supposed to magically know what to do with themselves and like it.

What do we tell them? How do we help them find their way? So many of us are still trying to find a way home ourselves. I don't know. All I know is I'm running out of time.

Thanksgiving Notes....

We've finished eating and in the tryptophan-induced holliday stupor the kids are quietly arguing about a game and I'm writing rather than deal with the mess. On the table, the bird is tattered strips hanging off bones and the bowls and serving utensils have got one good snack-worth left in each. It's going to take me an hour or so to get things back into shape around here, but all in all it didn't turn out too badly. I seem to have gauged the scale of festivities that fit us this year fairly well.

I've been asked several times on several forums what I'm grateful for, and this has turned out to be the best list I have come up with so far:

I'm grateful that we're all here, and I'm grateful for those who were here and had to go, but left us these ephemeral notes to remember them by.

I am grateful for my children, and for the fact that I have managed to keep us all together and taken care of for one more year.

I am grateful for my friends, both meat and electron, who have been a rock for me in these times.

I'm grateful for my best friend's truly bitchy cat, who keeps reminding me what really bad behavior looks like and helps me keep perspective (and also helps me keep in contact with the friend - I'm the only person she'll let take care of her but him).

You have a great Thanksgiving and see you in the Holiday Rush! ;)

Livin' La Vida Dorka....

I'm trying to bury myself in geek-dom for a bit here. I look at my life and the things going on in it and I just can't deal with this tonight.

Less than a month 'til Return of the King - even Newsweek is getting on the bandwagon. They ran a huge lovely spread. Heard a bunch of cyber-vapor about the battle at Pellenor but nothing I'm willing to quote.

Berkley Breathed has taken up his pen again to give us Opus, a Sunday-only cartoon starring everyone's favorite flightless waterfowl. The Seattle Times is going to have it - check their online comics pages to see it Sunday (I hope!).

Tomorrow X-2 hits DVD. Guess what's going to be playing in my house tomorrow night? I knew that you could. ;)

Mint Flavored Sneakers in full effect tonight...

I'm going to keep this short. For some reason nothing I say seems to be taken correctly today. I might as well be speaking Sanskrit or something. I'm going to cut my losses and just do some work and then hit the hay, I think.

Do you ever have days like that, where nothing you do or say seems to be understood or make sense to anyone else?

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

My brain is running in tiny little pattering circles like a mouse in a Mason jar. This is the two-edged sword of being kept awake even beyond my very high threshold of no-sleep.

bookZilla's leg is doing very well - thanks everyone for asking. The surgery went fabulously, and the doctor thinks there won't be any problems at all now. She has her very cool black moon boot and she's ready for school tomorrow.

I, on the other hand, am a wreck. Kind of funny how that all works out.

From the book of MsZilla....

I am seriously considering changing my screen-name to "Job". The book-in-the-Bible Job. I'm feeling a bit beleagered.

My house sounds like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dirty Laundry - I've got the washer and dryer going in one ear, and Crimson Skies going in the other. Three of the kids are home from school today and so I'm working from home.

bookZilla fell last night and broke her leg. Did it right, too - we were at the ER until almost five this morning. She has to have surgery tomorrow morning so they have her tranked to the gills and I basically have a very surly, needy piece of furniture that has to be re-arranged frequently. grrlZilla has what is either the Sympathy Flu, or the real thing. skateZilla is at home due to his problems at school. ZillaJr had his 16th birthday yesterday in the midst of all this, and his first drama production has Opening Night tonight. He'll be home any second. And I'm here trying to work with my internet connection going up and down like a basketball at a Sonics game.

Arrgggh! I won't change it, actually. I consider it from time to time, but people probably won't read it correctly, and then I'll have to explain it, and well, it gets ugly from there..... ;P

Educational day all around

The pagan horde and I have had an educational day today. First thing was a trip down to the good theater in town to see "The Matrix: Revolutions". It was just me and the guys, with me sitting between them with two coats I could throw over them if I felt the need. I didn't have to, not once. Well, I probably should have in the S&M bar, just because I had to explain what the heck that place was on the way out the car. That was embarassing, but not in the way you think. They had kind of figured it out, but they were kind of wigged out that I knew what it was. Ah, youth.

BTW, the film was actually quite good. And more importantly, it seriously improved the second film. You can see my spoiler-free version of my review on movZilla (and on Slate's Fray later tonight). I decided to post it on the Fray so we can discuss it. That's one thing that I miss with this blog is the interactions. I get response here, but not the conversational give-and-take I get there. Once they start answering there, then we get into the heavy spoilers.

Once I got that done, ZillaJr had to go to rehearsal for his drama production, and then I took the girls to see Brother Bear. I didn't go in with them - I was dealing with skateZilla. They loved it, though. Gave it two thumbs WAY WAY up. Except for the part with the bear riding the mammoth. They really didn't think that could ever have happened. Had great conversation on way home about real bears (like the fact that male bears eat cubs rather than take them on long trips).

Once got everyone home, it was chore time. When they were done, we drove over to Schlockbuster to return our videos and looked up in the sky and had a serious, "Oh WOW!" moment when I saw it. The eclipse! I had read it's time online but the guy had stated that we probably wouldn't be able to see it. Well, he was dead dead wrong. Gorgeous view. We drove home in a flash and sat out in the parking lot of our complex and drank hot chocolate and watched it and had a great talk about what was going on and why it looked like it did.

Now in for chili. It was skateZilla's turn tonight, and he cooked one of my favorite kid-friendly recipes. Simple, easy, and they love it. We call it "can chili", because it was created when a friend of mine who is a Mormon had to move out of state and left me her entire year's supply thing. Looks like this:

Can Chili
1 lb. ground beef
1 cup diced onion
2 cups frozen corn (or a can of nibblets corn)
1 large can or two small cans of commercial chili (Stagg is best)
2 cans diced, peeled tomatoes (stewed also works if you slice them up when adding them)
4 small or two large cans of various beans (two dark red beans and two pintos is good mix)

Brown ground beef and onions with your favorite spices (we use really offensive amounts of garlic, pepper, parsley, celery seed, and a touch of seasoned salt). Add chili and stir. Add rest of canned ingredients and stir. Add frozen corn and stir. Heat on medium until just simmering. Taste and if bland add some chili powder to taste.

Serve in large bowls with grated cheese and onions on top and bagel chips or cornbread on the side (or skateZilla adds what seems like a cup of frickin' Tobasco).

Once everyone had their bowl, we watched what we picked up at the video store, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I've been impressed. These films have really stood the test of time. The transfers on the DVD's are amazing - they must have found an unviewed print or the transfer company sacrificed something very large to someone at exactly the right phase of the moon to get twenty-year-old film this clean.

Let's see. Today we've covered several sorts of solipsistic philosophy, a little naturalism, lunar and solar astronomy, home ec and now cinematic history. We've had a full day. Time to relax with a little aeronautics and ballistics (Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge). The boys have been bragging again and it's time to peel some bark off them. My work is never done, I guess.

I was having lunch with the gang at work, and the movie “Anna and the King” came up in the conversation. This one gal has a fairly huge thing for Chow Yun Fat (one of the few things we agree on that way), and made a comment that she would give a lot to have someone look at her like that. I just nodded, flabbergasted that she had gotten this far in her life and she never had. She has been married twice, once for twelve years. She has a child. I can’t imagine having never having stood there, looking at a man looking back at you with his heart in his eyes. I can’t imagine never having known deep in your soul someone felt like that about you just once in your whole life.

I watched the movie again tonight, and I was watching Jodie Foster’s character struggle with the consequences of her own feelings about being held by a man other than her dead husband, and I realized I am in sort of the same boat. In many ways, my ex is dead. The person I knew and loved is gone, buried somewhere back along the years we were together. I don’t know when he died. I wish I did know. When that person died, the other parts of him were left to try and make sense out of the life they are left with. A lot of what happened was because the parts of him that were left were stuck trying to live that life, which in many ways was foreign to them. No wonder things fell apart.

There was a time, glacial ages ago it feels sometimes, when he looked at me that way and I looked back at him, serene in the knowledge that we belonged together. I was never happier but when we were together, even just sitting on the couch watching TV or something.

Even after the divorce, there were times I would see it again. When he dropped off or picked up the children he would look at me and I see the tracks the feelings had left behind in his eyes. Like somewhere down the line, he felt that the same thing happened to me – that the woman he loved and wed and lived with died too – and he was looking for her in the tattered remains of me.

I never did figure out how to deal with that. We always just found some trite way to end the conversation and escape. I will always be grateful to her for this insight, I guess. I never had to lack for it. Before I even realized what it was, I had it. And through whatever agency brought the twists and turns of our life about, I lost it. I had been afraid that something horrible was going on in my life because I didn’t have that any more. She seems to have gotten on just fine without it, and she is almost twice my age. If she can make it for that long without it, I can certainly find a way to finish out my life without it.

Even after this last year and it’s revelations, something in me still answers that searching. It would have been so easy to fall right back into that dance. He has said my name in a way that no one else has ever said it. He has held my hand and walked with me in a way that no other ever will. Will I listen for that sound and feel for that hand for the rest of my life? Even if I do ever find someone else, he will say those things and do those things his own way. And as wonderful as those ways may be, it won’t be the same. I wonder if I will ever not miss it?

Zen and the Art of Spellchecking...

Jim Lileks has this note on the bottom of his blog tonight here.

(Note: spellcheck wanted to replace “Tholian” with “Taliban.” I hit the LEARN button for Tholian, which means that some day I will spellcheck a column while tired and submit an essay that castigates the Kabul bombing and the Tholian remnants who claimed responsibility.)

Anyone who writes fiction has similar problems. I wrote a piece of Tolkien fan-fiction with my daughters and I just couldn't stand those damned red squigglies anymore and I have a whole legion of Elven names and words in my spellchecking dictionary that I'm just waiting to have show up. Have "melior" show up as an alternative for "mellon" for example.

What words have you added to your spell-check that you are afraid are going to bite you in the arse one day?

Ode to Aging by the Pagan Horde....

The girls and several of their friends wrote me a song for my birthday, and performed it for me with their youth group tonight and they said I could share it with you:

Sung to the tune of 'You're Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile' from the musical 'Annie'

No sanity, big calamity
The biggest number yet,
But, Mother, you're never fully dressed
without a life......

You're turning older yet
We've got to remember
Mommy, you're never fully dressed
without a life....

Who cares what you look like
You're still a geek to us
All your grays and lumpy bumps,
And those wrinkles by your eyes
are all part of you

No sanity, big calamity
You've got to remember
That you're turning older yet
The biggest number yet,
Oh yes you're never fully dressed
without a life......

You're never fully dressed
Though you may wear your best
You're never fully dressed
with...out....a.....life!!!

I'll leave you to imagine the big finish...

Letter of Intent (ironic joke)

To: A Certain Corporation
Attn: Legal Department
From: Azathoth, Nyarlathotep and Hastur, Elder Attorneys.

Sirs:

Our agents among the mortal herd have brought to Our attention your recent product entitled Visual Studio .NET 2003. Therefore, We now give you statutory notice of intent of proceedings to be taken against your company by the Many-Angled Ones.

With this suit We will show that Visual Studio, and to a lesser extent all of your range of products, infringe upon the recognised "look-and-feel" of the Elder Gods, for the following reasons:

o Visual Studio is a crawling abomination from the darkest pits of Hell;

o No one can be in it's presence for too long without being driven into gibbering insanity;

o A cult who worship it exist in secret amongst the mortal herd;

o Those who associate with it for too long develop common physical characteristics, to wit: pale, clammy skin, bulging eyes, generally unkempt physical appearance, tendency towards nocturnal living, change in diet to that which normal men do not eat (in your case tacos, burgers and Jolt Cola; in Ours, human flesh, Fungi of Yuggoth and the blood of Alien Gods);

o Mysterious tomes that purport to explain this phenomenon are reputed to exist; they are bound in an unnatural substance and only available at a terrible cost to the user.

o Visual Studio seeks to utterly dominate the development environment, and force all who dwell there to live in eternal damnation.

As you can see, Our case is very strong, especially when you consider that most judges prefer not to have chittering things with tentacles for faces scoop out their brains and eat them.

We hope that you will consider these points carefully and settle out of court, since it is not Our intention to have your senior partners spend the rest of their mercifully short lives under heavy sedation in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. After all, it was the Lords of the Outer Planes who gave humanity lawyers in the first place.

Respectfully yours,



pp. J. Arthur Hastur, LL.B., B.C.L, B.D


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My compiler isn't cooperating again. Can you tell? ;)

Walking on Broken Glass

It's hard for me to take a stand on the Rush Limbaugh/drug thing. For one thing, it's hard for me to stand in general. (pause for collective groan at bad joke)

I live with a chronic pain condition. For me, all it takes is a movement or even just to wait a minute and I get small jabbed reminders of just what he's been talking about. Larger efforts bring even more pain. On a good day, I feel like I've run 10 miles and worked out for four hours the day before. On a bad day, well, let's just say it gets worse.

I can understand the urge to get relief no matter what. I've been lucky, if you can call it that, that my physicians don't believe that those drugs are appropriate or helpful for my condition. As a result, I don't get them prescribed to me and so I don't have to fight them off when the prescription runs out. I fight mine with a series of folk remedies, OTC anti-inflammatories, symptom relief techniques and just plain sucking it up. I get through; some days are easier than others.

And there are days when I fall down. One of the most effective pain relievers I have access to easily is alcahol, and there are times when it is very very hard to stay away from it. Again, luckily, the kids are all graduates of the local D.A.R.E. program and if I even walk down that aisle in the store I get them channelling Nancy Reagan's preaching in four-part harmony. If you don't think that's a deterrent, you haven't met the Pagan Horde.

This life is the only one I get, and the coin it is measured in is time. My children are only this age for a short time. I have things that I want to get accomplished in my life, and duties as a mother that can't be shirked. I made a choice long ago that I wouldn't just lay down and hand over any part of my time, my life to this. If this gets any, it is going to have to take it. I get up each morning, and I go to work and chase kids and do what is necessary. That means that sometimes I have to do things that hurt. That means I pay the price the next days or weeks in increased pain and debility. I consider it an investment, in my kids and their lives and in mine. It hurts me to tie my own shoes and, yes, it hurts me like crap to rollerblade. But I do both anyways.

I think both sides need to take a knee for a second. Those who are trying to excuse Rush need to realize that there are quite a few people in this country who are fighting these conditions who don't resort to illegal use of prescription medication to combat it. He made his choice just like everyone else and he needs to face the consequences of that act. And those who just blithely strode into the room and started spouting how his pain couldn't be THAT bad and cut-and-pasted that article about playing golf obviously have no idea what price he probably paid the next day for doing that, or why he would do it. To truly understand, you would need to walk a day with someone whose shoes are full of broken glass, and there's no end to the road in sight.

Stop-and-Go Walden Pond

Each morning, I get the children out the door and trudge out to my car. Seatbelt, ignition, hook hands-free to cell phone. The hands return to the steering wheel by habit, almost without my thinking about it. Turn, look twice, and then do my little back-and-fill tango because someone with a really compensatorially large pickup moved in and their parking space is right behind mine. I wait at our entrance for the upstream traffic light to make a gap for me, and then I join the flow of steel creeping down my street.

Cars and trucks and everything of all shapes and sizes creeping along their daily pilgrimage to wherever. The lady next to me has a very nice Jag, I notice. She's on the phone. The guy in front of me is in a Lexus that looks like a shuttle on the old Star Trek and has a license plate surround that says something about the Microsoft Exchange team being feared, so I know where he's probably headed. He's in the wrong lane for that exit, so that will be fun later on. The other lane is moving faster (of course) so by the time I look back the Jag has been replaced by a beat up white pickup with a bed mounded wth filled leaf-bags.

The crawl stops. My eyes stray out of their usual straight forward to rear-view mirror and back flicker. The fields off to my left are being harvested, and the pumpkins that have been hidden by the vines are being herded by workers into bright orange groups at the edges of the field before being picked up and carted off to their final destinations. The wild apple tree on the right has started dropping fruit, so there is a section of street where the bike lane and the whole curb is covered in green apples in various states of smashed. A bicyclist goes up on the sidewalk to avoid them. I wonder if anyone thinks about that - someone probably threw an apple core out the window here, or a truck lost one twenty years ago, and now there is a tree here. That still feels strange to me. Back home, fruit is a product of careful gardening and hard work. Here, it's a weed. The kids walking by on their way to the mall keep this one's fruit pretty well picked, but they don't ever touch the ones that have fallen. The ruby eyes in front of me blink dim or wink out, and we move forward a few feet.

We get to the freeway, and the kindness of a little electric blue rice-rocket with a hatchback full of black speakers on the right lets the Lexus get into the right place. With a quick wave he powers off to his life. In my mind I see mauve halls and bright orange styrofoam coffee cups and have a little reminiscent moment. Some of my favorite ideas have been scrawled on the back of unbleached brown napkins from those breakrooms. I smile a bit to myself. This happens almost every morning; not necessarily caused by this Lexus but there are quite a few of it's brethren running around with those tags dangling by the mirror to remind me. It's been almost five years, and I still think back.

The freeway isn't much better than the arterial, but the construction makes it a bit more interesting. We pass by lines of those blinking yellow lights mounted on plastic barrels I call road aliens. The kids and I once had a great conversation where we speculated how they were trying to get home and they all needed to work together to signal the mothership. We had a taxonomy worked out, and everything. You have your barrell-bellied road aliens, and your spindly-legged road aliens, and your stone-toed road aliens (those are the ones mounted directly on concrete barriers). At the end we decided they needed to get more of them in one place to do it. Looks like they haven't managed it yet, but they try around here. A lot.

I finally get to my exit, and we dive back into another flock of aliens. There is usually a hawk that sits on top of a power pole and glares at us on our way, but he must be off on other pursuits today. It's most definately fall, and the gray lowering brows over the hills make me want to go home and curl up with a comforter and a good book. A tandem bike passes me in the bike-lane. Matching rain-gear, too. Maybe I'm too independent - I don't understand why you would pay $2,000 dollars for the priveledge of not being able to ride the bike by yourself. Of course, they probably have separate bikes, too. But I still wonder.

Up the hill, and then down on the other side. The clouds mask the views of Bellevue and downtown Seattle today. I turn into the parking lot, and reverse my getting in the car ritual. Double check - wallet, phone, keys... Grab laptop case, lock doors and trudge up the stairs to the office.

Coming Home...

He came home today. In a lot of ways for me it feels like introducing a new pet into the household. You watch them like a hawk, watching to make sure they don't hurt themselves or get into any kerfubbles with the current residents. I worked from home the rest of the day while he was on the phone calling everyone in our area code, I think. The rest of the kids got home an hour or so later, and so far things have gone calmly this evening.

The worrying has already begun again. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach. The listening to the slightest sound and having to classify it as benign or "what the heck is going on now?". I can feel it falling down around my shoulders like a musty old wool greatcoat scented with stress and faux Old Spice. Actually the Old Spice is wafting out of the bathroom. One of the girls squirted ZillaJr's shaving cream all through the laundry basket; I don't know why and I've decided this is a battle I'm not going to pick today. I did the laundry that was in there to try to kill it but we still get drifts of it wafting through the house every time someone opens the bathroom door. Besides, the constant beeping of the phone keys and Caller ID as he tried to returned his calls was driving me straight up the wall and the washer and dryer helped mask that.

He's trying to deal. He didn't like being cooped up, but things were easier there, and he's way too smart not to have noticed that pretty quick. As good as it feels to be out, there's also a lot of things that he didn't have to deal with for a while that he has to think about now. He has the rest of the week home from school to stretch those real-life muscles again. He said it feels like he's had to go to work. In some ways, that's exactly right. His work is growing up. I just wish it was easier.

We had the meetings and what have you and came home with a stack of prescriptions and phone numbers and appointment cards. I guess that "outpatient" means that instead of having everything in one place you have to go all over heck all the time. There are so many it feels like I've taken a second job. Maybe I should; at this rate, even just the out-of-pocket costs are going to be interesting to deal with. Mental health insurance parity, anyone? If this is what it takes, I'll do it. I don't care what it is as long as we end up with a reasonable outcome for him, and for all of them.

I know there is nothing certain in this whole teenager thing, even without this to complicate it. I used to be certain that somehow we would find a way through this, but I'm not anymore. I've seen now what the path will be if it keeps going the way it's gone this last year. The odds I'm fighting just keep getting worse. I wanted to scream at some poor lady from church yesterday. I know she was trying to comfort me, but she has a talent for saying precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. That whole "the Lord wouldn't give you a task without giving you the way to accomplish it" platitude just hurts when you feel like you've failed this badly.

The Longest Miles...

My younger son is in the hospital, so things are a little messed up around here. Things are going to be fine, but we are going to have an interesting few weeks getting things straightened back out.

The hardest part is every time I go to visit him, I have to leave. And the longest miles I have ever gone are when I have to drive away from there without him.

The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project

And just when you thought I might have moved on to meaty topics to the exclusion of all else, we have The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project! Yep. They Turing Tested a Twinkie. Make sure not to miss their results in Haiku!

My Life As A Mom-friend...

Twenty years ago, young women of my age would send their husbands off to work in the morning, get the kids settled playing in the yard or bundle them up and bring them along in a sort of game of house swap. They would all show up at one house or another to “have coffee” while the hordes of the neighborhood played in the yard. I watched my mother and her friends around the kitchen table enviously so many times, wondering what they had to say to each other that took all that time. With so many young women having careers and waiting to have families the very nature of these interactions has changed. Now, many young women can’t look around her neighborhood and find a group of like situated people to interact with. Instead of the kitchen table, the office and the closest coffee shop are the new venue. The standard office kaffee-klatch will have single people, married people, divorced people, single parents, different genders, you name it. New ways have to be come up with to deal with those different circumstances and the restrictions it can cause.

In response to the new situation, people actually have begun to develop their own new words for the various kinds of situations as a sort of shorthand to explaining all those various circumstances. I was once told I am a “Mom-friend”. With a subtle cynical air, I asked what that meant. She helpfully explained that this means a friend with kids that you can only see when they manage to dump the kids on a spouse or babysitter or whatever. Used in a sentence in place of the term “girlfriend”. She doesn’t seem to make any separation between single parents and married parents. I nodded wisely and let the subject drop, quailing a bit inside.

Later on, I got mad. How dare she pigeonhole me like that? It made me want to throw up. A little delicate probing at another time brought out the rest of the story. This one gal has a whole new hierarchy based on how much time the people can spend with her and what they can do together. Mom-friends rate lower than single-friends, since the Mom-friends can’t just drop everything on 20 minutes notice and come over and watch movies at her house at midnight on a weeknight if they want. Male-friends are guys she sees in social settings but for whatever reason aren’t suitable to become boy-friends. There is a sub-set called Dad-friends, but I don’t know what that is all about, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to. Everyone she knows is categorized and pigeonholed and her interactions with them are run accordingly.

Since then, I have seen the term a couple of times on newsgroups and message boards. It still makes me a little sick inside. One of the side effects of the Internet has been an explosion of writing, from all walks of life. Until recently, only people who could convince a publisher their words were worth money could get their work on paper and in front of the public. Now, everyone with a keyboard and a dream can spout their prose on the world. Our society has changed in so many other ways as well, and in many cases the Oxford just doesn’t seem to have the right words. Everyone chipping in can make for some interesting discovery, but it also means that with no editorial resources, some interesting usages are getting out there in front of people, and from sheer repetition can become part of our language.

As cold and mercenary as this person’s approach to life seems to me, there is an uneasy germ of truth in it. I am a friend, and I am a Mom, and I truly can’t just drop everything and go play whenever I want. If she wants to categorize people to manage her investment of time, then so be it. I have other friends, who are happy to see me when we can get together, and understand when I can’t. But I don’t like the term, I just don’t. I have a term for her, too. Former-friend.

If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all....

Been in the Pit of Despair this last week or so, and things are just not looking up yet. It's always interesting looking at life from the belly of the Beast. I mean, I'm just enough into this that I'm starting to get the full view of just how deep the rabbit hole can go, but I'm no where near the spot where I can start climbing out. Sort of like waiting for Christmas when you were a kid except there's no good thing waiting at the end.

I'm not going to snivel on for the length of the Bible about this. I could I suppose, but who the heck wants to read that. Heck, I don't even want to read it.

A couple of high-points:

Saw Pirates of the Carribean, finally. Incredibly cool flick. Will be doing a full review here soon. You'll see it on movZilla if GamerDad doesn't need it.

Finally got the clearance to updated our spec/requirements/testing procedures at work. That's the good news. Bad part - I get to do it ON TOP OF my current workload, which is vaguely psychotic already. Gonna be an interesting month.

At any rate, I hope to develop a more normal schedule of things here soon. Already learned about promising things, though, so I won't. If you're really bored, there is a new review of "The Core" on movZilla, and a link to our new venue Gamerdad (which is also joining our Links Bank here today).

On this day of remembrance...

That day has come around again. As it will every year now until those of us who watched it in stunned horror are old or gone and only those who have seen the pictures remain. It will join the parade of Time/Life books that our grandchildren will see on our bookshelves and use to build forts and we will explain to them every year why we are a little sad on that day and get a little peeved when they are properly solemn for a second and then ask us if they can use the Elvis one instead, then. I did this to my Gramma on D-Day once. She lost two brothers on those beaches. To me they were just black-and-white pictures in the photo album. Like so many other things, I understand it a little better now.

And that is how life is supposed to be, I think. We rebuild ourselves. This big sharp thing is driven up through of the fabric of our lives and after a period of shock we blaze new trails around it. Then at some point down the line the edges are softened by the winds that blow through our lives and the grass grows up over it and flowers start to bloom on it, and it starts to feel like it was always there. We pass it on our way, and remember for a moment, but then we have to go on. How many of us noticed beyond a few newsflashes when D-Day rolled around this year? Unless you were in the business of marking the day, most of us just had a few sad introspective thoughts on our drive home and left it at that. I'm just as guilty as everyone else - my Veterans Day poppy which lives on my rear-view mirror got a few more looks that day and the kids and I had a talk while we were driving somewhere and that was about it. My aunt has those pictures now.

My uncle who worked in the Pentagon (and thankfully wasn't there that day) died in a car crash two months ago. I guess it's all a matter of perspective. I can't tell you if I would have mourned more if we had lost him that day or not. I am glad just from the standpoint that his family had the intervening time with him that they would have lost. I only talked to him about it once. He downplayed it, saying that it was hard to loose all those friends.

Maybe that is part of the sharpness of this. These people would have all died at some point. We all have to face that. But one day all of them just go off to work or travel, minding their own business and then it happens. Suddenly their families get a phone call and are told they have lost the time between that indefinate and hopefully far off day and this one. That is what I mourn. That is what makes me angry. Collectively, how much love and friendship and every good thing did those families loose? It isn't the buildings and the dust blowing through Manhattan; it is the intangible stuff that matters and is the hardest to track. We can look and try to count how many kid's birthdays are shadowed by a missing parent, how many graduation days. But we'll never know it all; we can't count bedtime stories and kisses on the cheek on the way out the door and a finger pointing out a more correct answer on a homework sheet.

James Lileks captured it well:

Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she'll have to insist that she's okay. It's hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it's hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn't remember daddy at all anymore. And she's the one who has his eyes.

Two years in; the rest of our lives to go.

What my learned colleague of the opposition is TRYING to say...

I somehow got roped into an online debate. The topic is about whether the US government should pay reparations for slavery. The online part adds some interesting twists to things. In a case like this, it is most odd not to know the skincolor of your opponents or team mates. I've never even met my team mates. I know nothing about them but what they've chosen to post on a discussion board, and they know nothing about me.

It goes the way these things always go. Must dust is being thrown up in all directions about things that you would think have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with this, but are cast in the most urgent relevency. Soapboxes are in a state of high polish, and there is much holystoning going on down in the ranks of rhetoric.

I had forgotten just how much maddening joy this is. The rush of adrenaline as you listen to their measured phrases and try to shore up your own arguments while poking holes in theirs. You spend days shaking inside and praying you aren't shaking outside, too. I'm tied up in knots - I can't eat, I can't sleep, but I haven't had this much fun in years.

It's cool to see the people I usually chat with in this sort of light. We usually talk about non-esentials or politics. Someone may go off and go all formal on one topic or another, but we usually don't get exposed to the true depths of the brains hitting those other keyboard keys to the extent we are now. It is awe-inspiring and terrifying. There is some amazing power just floating around those Fray-boards, and I don't think most of us ever saw it.

Fighting Fair

Like to argue? Want some help with someone else's "ideas"? A friend pointed out this link to me. It is titled A List Of Fallacious Arguments, and it gives an exhaustive list of how people use bad technique to support their arguements. Since I'm in a debate on one of my favorite forums next week, this will come in majorly handy!

It isn't the beginning of childhood that is the problem, it's the middle.

It seems that all my friends have decided it is time to have children of their own. This is interesting to me, because I had mine quite some time ago and so I see them starting out now and I just shake my head. Those days were wonderful, and I wouldn't trade them for anything, but it was not easy. There's millions of words out there of advice about what to do with babies, but let me add a few. I know you're tired. I know you have no idea what you are doing and they seem so fragile, but believe me, that fades. Far quicker than you want it to.

• This too shall pass. Or, to put it another way, "The darkest hour is only 60 minutes long." This first year is literally that, only a year. It feels like eternity right now, but it does end. And when it is gone, it really is gone forever. Just hang in there.


• Get a good picture of you and the baby while it is sleeping and blow it up really big. Hang it someplace where you can see it when you are trying to get them to sleep. If you have other children, catch them too, and do the same thing. Sometimes, just the evidence that they do in fact sleep at some point, and they are absolutely adorable when they do it really can help you get through it. (plus the photos are good grandma-fodder later)


• Everyone has all sorts of advice, but at 3 am, it doesn't mean a bloody thing. You know your child better than anyone. When we were trying to deal with my daughters and the boys, my doctor suggested writing down a list of things to do that soothe each child and stick it to the wall by their beds. That way, when that child got upset at night we could just start at the top of the list each time and work down. Each kid is an individual, so they need their own list. Sometimes having it written out makes it easier to know what do at that unholy cow-milking hour of the morning when you can't see straight and they are wailing like a banshee.


• You have the same 24 hours per day you had before the baby, you just have more to do in that time. I know it sounds silly, but you are not in some sort of odd timewarp. Prioritization, writing down EVERYTHING, and a liberal dose of help from others (paid or otherwise) will get you through this.


• Lighten up on yourself, and on your expectations. Due to the aforementioned 24-hours-in-a-day thing, some stuff you used to get done simply isn't going to. Things aren't going to be perfect. There is no amount of wishful thinking or effort on your part that are going to make it so. Be careful what you promise to other people - you don't know the shape of the hat anymore and you can hang yourself. Do the best you can and let the rest go.


• Newborns hit your life like an atomic weapon and you would have to be some sort of automaton if you didn't feel a bit put out about the entire thing. Your feelings of frustration (or, say it softly, anger) are real. THIS DOES NOT MAKE YOU A BAD PARENT, A BAD SPOUSE, OR A BAD PERSON. No one likes to talk about it, but we all have the urge to play hand-baby from time to time. The difference is all in what you do, not what you feel. Just put your head down until it passes, give yourself a stern shake and a mental hug (or get a real one from your spouse), and then go in and deal with whatever was just spattered all over the floor.


• SHARE THIS WITH YOUR SPOUSE! You are both lost, exhausted, and scared. Hormones and fatigue poisons are all over, and you are both on edge. You need each other. The only real strength you are going to be able to find in all of this is in each other. At some point in the evening, put the baby close to hand but not in someone's arms, let the others watch a show or run around playing with their toys, and take a few minutes to sit on the couch, hold hands, and just be together.

When they get older, information gets thinner on the ground. Friends and relatives stop gushing about their favorite trick for getting Jr. to burp on command and they start changing the subject. Or, you just get commiserating headshakes or vague you-should-have-done-X advice. I do have a few notes to impart. This is about the future. I'm not talking about tomorrow, or the next item on the list, but what you would see if you could lift your eyes up from in front of your feet and see a bit farther out. I mean when they are older. Like when you have a fourth-grader who comes home shouting the words to the latest gansta-rap song his friend let him listen to.

Sometimes when I am hip deep in the morass of my daily life I remember with nostalgia the simpler time when a diaper wipe and a mop could fix things, and their main goal in life was to graduate to a smaller size of Legos. No matter what they tell you, each age has its own challenges. They are just different, not necessarily easier.

• They do tend to be less physically messy as they age, unless you have a budding mad scientist in the house like I have. Now it is far less about accidents and more about premeditated actions. Spilled grape juice has nothing on skateboard bearing lubricant.


• Things are just as hectic now as they were then. You no longer have to feed them every two hours or change their diapers. You have to drive them all over heck and deal with their schedule and their friends and school and everthing else. Starbucks is your friend, still.


• Skinned knees and other concrete problems are a thing of the past. There comes a point were you are dealing with the specters of driver's licenses and school dances for the boys, and boyfriends and bras for the girls. And "because I said so" no longer works as well.


• Privacy is not a joke. You are used to knowing EVERYTHING about your kids, and now all of a sudden they don't want you to even know if they have eaten yet today. Understand that they need some distance. Just know when it is time for you to become nosy.


• You are their parent, not their friend. You have to do things to help them learn and grow in this life and they aren't all fun and games. You can show you love them just as much by telling them no as telling them yes. They may not take it that way now, but that doesn't make it any less true.

The good news is, they do grow up. And even if you feel you aren't good enough and don't deserve it, they are often generous enough to love you anyways. Yes, there were plenty of those "Someday we'll all look back on this, laugh nervously, and change the subject" sort of moments, but all in all, some of the most precious memories I have are of that time. And if you think poopy diapers are bad, wait until you have to deal with the mess that comes with broken hearts. If could figure out how to make a wipe for that, I would be a trillionaire.

School Daze, School Nights

School is starting again. After running laps between two schools, I got all the paperwork done. I have done my time in the back-to-school-sale trenches and paid really offensive amounts of money for random-seeming stuff and pants with specific names on them. I get my days back to myself, for work or whatever is is necessary. But more importantly to me, we have "school nights".

People who aren't in my situation may not realize just how precious a gift this is. The days have to belong to my boss or whatever errands and chores need to be done. Evenings and mornings are the children's, to do with as they see fit - part of my job as a mom. But once they are properly settled into bed every weeknight, the next couple of hours are MINE.

It is the only time of the day that is truly my own. I decide what goes on. I do chores and what have you, but not due to necessity but because I choose to get them done now as a present to myself an easier to do list tomorrow. If I want to spend the entire night with the Master Chief blowing things up or vegging in front of a DVD that the kids hate, I can. If I want to invest it in getting some work done in peace and quiet, I can TS in and do that. I can actually hear myself think if I want to, or I can choose to crank something obnoxious on my headphones so I don't have to. I get my life back to myself for as long as I can stay awake.

My friends and family are forever after me to "take care of myself". I have tried to explain it to some people, but the only person I know who gets it has sleeping habits as bad or worse than mine. My life is overbooked to the Nth degree. There is no way it all is going to get done, and something has to give. I won't drop the ball at work or take it out of what I owe the children. If I am going to have any time at all, it has to come out of the tattered shards of my day that aren't promised to others and at this point, sleep-time is all that isn't.

This time is an investment in the parts of me that being a mom and an employee and a friend and every other label I wear do not cover. This part doesn't need much because there really isn't much at this point. But it needs care and feeding just as much as the bloody laundry needs to get done or the kids need dinner. It is the part that will be left when the kids grow up, and when I retire. If I ignore it for all these years, when I need it to step up to the plate and take over for those peeled off labels it isn't going to be able to.