ceteris non paribus

A man with a racial background strikingly similar to my own was just, to the fading strains of a Quaker hymn, sworn in as the POTUS. ‘Tis a gift to be free, indeed.

Among other changes is our lives this September:
- Nathaniel is on “solid” food and seems to be a big fan.
- Sabriana is now officially a preschooler, and has been declared potty trained by the staff at school. (Yes, there’s still the occasional accident, but we drove all the way down to PA and back with nary an issue.)
- I’m starting a new job on Monday. Ack! (This means that eero.ethersmith.com and things hosted on it will be moving in the next few days, and my phone number will change back to my old -1927 one. Ding me if you’ve got questions about either.)

It’s been a good week for sky-related sightings. On Saturday, we had some balloons from Hudson Balloon Fest come right over our house.

The next day, a few ultralights we puttering in the area and did a 360-degree turn around us, I think because we were out on the porch waving like madpeople.

When I got home on Tuesday, after a cruddy day, I got to show Sabrina her first rainbow. Even better, I got a movie of her watching it.

And later that night I was taking the trash out and, while stargazing a bit, saw two satellites and two huge shooting stars.

Lots of neat stuff in the sky these days.

It’s System Administrator Appreciation Day!

It’s time for the yrealy reading of the Monkeybagel Document. Every word is true.

On a lighter note, it’s not uncommon to see comments like this about Obama:

also Barry you need to start dressing less like a 35-year-old midlevel IT supervisor

My first thought? “Hey, what are you talking about, he dresses just like me…. oh.” (I do not, however, have as cute a butt as he does. Vote for Obama! He’s got a cute butt! And can sink 3-pointers on the first try.)

Upromise EntOps’ corollary to Godwin’s Law: No meeting shall continue past the first mention of feaguing.

That is all.

“Mine are the ones without the cartoon characters on them, dear.” -Lindy, on seeing my momentary confusion at encountering S’s underwear in the laundry basket for the first time

Me, at 4AM: “So, other than the barf bowl and the snotsucker, anything else I should bring up from downstairs?”

We’re all sick. Looks to be just a head cold, but we’re all pretty hammered at the moment. Hope to be well again for back to work on Monday.

No, not the Shackleton voyage.

It just took me 8 hours to drive 32.4 miles. (In case that link doesn’t work, it’s from Kendall Square, Cambridge to Hudson, MA, via back roads.) In that time, Google claims that I could have driven down to DC to visit my brother.

Oddly enough, most of that delay wasn’t really weather related; the roads were mostly safe and I saw no accidents, just a few disabled cars. Heck, I only had to jump out of the car to push others (both rear wheel drive. Not for me, thanks, no matter how sexy the car is.) off of a slick patch twice. The the long waits were at intersections where people got frustrated and acted like assholes. It’s fascinating, in a sick sort of way, to watch gridlock form in front of your very eyes: Someone thinks that the green light in front of them means that they can barge into the intersection, even though there’s traffic on the other side that is going to force them to stop in the middle and get caught there when the light turns red. The person on the cross street, now unable to cross, edges forward just to show the first idiot how much they screwed up. Repeat this over a few lanes wide and a few light cycles and you’ve got an intersection full of cranky, annoyed people who aren’t going anywhere fast. Lots of fun.

I must say, if they had to evacuate Boston in a hurry, that would be a mess. There are a lot of choke points that pretty much instantly lock up in a big tangle.

I’m glad I had a GPS in the car; being able to bang a random left turn and know that I wouldn’t get completely lost let me feel like I was at least vaguely in control of my fate. (I’d much rather go slowly on back roads then just stop and go on a highway.)

I’m glad I had some spare diapers in the car. (No, I stopped to go to the bathroom. The diaper was to sponge off my dress shoes and slacks (”big boy clothes”, as Lindy calls them.) after pushing those cars and getting slush all over me.)

I’m glad I had recently updated the contents of our ipod.

I’m glad I had a charge on my blackberry. Catching up on blogs while sitting still for a while was a good way to pass time.

I’m glad I wasn’t in a hurry to get home. (once I realized I wasn’t getting home in time for Sabrina’s bath)

I’m glad I made it.

Good music to shovel to:

• Panic! At The Disco
• The Marginal Prophets
• DJ Format

(Though Lindy had done a great job of keeping up with the 8 inches or so we got, so I didn’t have much to do when I got home.)

I always forget to brush off the snow-covered car in the driveway _before_ I shovel the driveway.

Some folks at work are riding in the Pan Mass Challenge and are having a bake sale tomorrow to raise contributions for the worthy cause. Lindy offered (even though she was on the road nearly 4 hours today driving to downtown Boston…) to help walk through me making black and white brownies from Moosewood and we had a lot of fun. She’s always been the baker of the family (with bread being my only occasional foray into that world) so it was an educational experience for me to work with chocolate and more sugar than I usually see in one place. (Though I did slip and give a mini-lecture on creaming; I just can’t help myself, I guess.) The brownies look yummy, I got to relax and get some quality time with my wife, and all for a good cause. Yay!

If I ever put out a series of coffee table books, the first will be surreptitious photos taken of parents just after they’ve dropped their kids off at daycare.

I did the Corporate Challenge for the 6th time yesterday. Given that I’ve not jogged at all since the one last year, I’m content with my time of 37:10 for 3.5 miles. One of these years I’ll actually train for it and (hah) perhaps get closer to the sub-8’s I did as a teenager. I’m surprisingly unsore, but the the second day after is usually the killer.

Dammit. I’m sitting in a conference room with a person that I just introduced myself to. I can’t however, remember his name.

This happens to me a lot; I’ll be in the middle of a conversation with someone I just met and realize that their name never even hit my short-term memory. This is why I married Lindy; She remembers names of people we met in passing at a wedding three years ago.

Ooh, yay, someone just called him by name!

Half my life ago, give or take a few hours[1], I met the girl who would someday be my wife.

It was August of 1988, at the yearly week-long Young Friends summer retreat at Camp Onas. Lindy was 14 and at her first conference[0], I was 17 and had been attending for years at that point. It was a bright, sunny day and everyone was amped at seeing friends again for the first time in months[2]. Folks were straggling in over the course of the day, and the best place to be sure not to miss your friends was the dining/assembly hall. The four-square[3] court hadn’t been set up yet so I had gone out to hunt for the tape and balls. When I returned, I found a young woman I’d been crushing on for a while standing where the king square was to go and all thoughts of games fled. After an effusive greeting[4], I noticed the two girls (Lindy and Hannah) that she’d been talking to and introduced myself; “Hi, I’m Luke. Who are you?”[5] Not the most sophisticated of opening lines, but, hey, it worked. I was vaguely aware of her over the next few days[6], but it wasn’t until she randomly threw me on the ground during a smear-the-queer[7] game when I didn’t have the ball that I caught on that something was up[8]. The fact that she sat next to me through a Risk game as a spectator[9] (and my good luck charm) a few hours later confirmed it, and that evening found us smooching on the steps of one of the tent platforms. From a chance meeting, a great life together has come, and every day I thank my lucky stars that she was standing in the right place at the right time.

(There should be a picture of us 2 months later right here, but I can’t find the scanned file anywhere. I’ve got the original, still, but the fact that it’s missing worries me.)

[0] I think.

[1] Yes, I wrote a script to do the math and page me when it was time. I’m a geek, what of it?

[2] Typical attendance was 4 confs a year, and many kids (myself included) didn’t see much of the other YF’s between times.

[3] The three signature games of Young Friends of that era were Wink (”a combination of spin the bottle and professional wrestling”, where dislocations or broken bones were not uncommon), Russian Ratscrew (a version of slapjack where rings and long nails were expressly prohibited to avoid excessive injuries) and four-square (the typical game, but played with an element of seriousness that I’ve not seen anywhere else.) Yes, these were Quakers.

[4] It was tradition by that point for me to pick Heather up and spin her around as a hello. She later ended up dating a future housemate of mine for a while. Then again, lots of people ended up dating Jon…

[5] Smooth, huh? Actually for someone as shy as I was at that point, introducing myself to a girl was a notable event.

[6] Ben’s impression was “Kind of cute in a 14-year-old sort of way.”

[7] Yet another violent Quaker game. I always hated the name, but wikipedia says that it’s not as bad as I thought.

[8] “I take hints, yea, but only when applied with a sledgehammer.”

[9] The first of many sacrifices she’s made for me over the years. Risk is a boring game to play and I can’t imagine watching a session without going stark raving mad.

I tilled the garden last night, picking the warmest, most humid, day of the weekend to do it. It was easier this (the third) year, since the ground has been broken before and we did a good job of removing most of the leftover crud at the end of last season. (I’m using a mini-tiller, which works ok for the most part but tends to get grumpy after a few passes if I don’t stop and clean the long weeds off the tines. It was impossible to break the sod with it in the first place, but my neighbor took pity on me and let me borrow his big “till cement without complaining” jobbie and I’ve been fine after that.) Even though I resist doing it each year, I love the sense of completion when I’m done. It’s good, but not overly hard, exercise, and the patch of freshly-turned earth is a concrete reminder to myself that I really can check things off the todo list every once in a while.

I’m not a gardener, though, which is odd given my lineage; My mom had a garden every year I can remember when I was growing up, and my dad, with his bachelor’s in Plant and Soil Science brought me on many a tramp through a farmer’s field. (I wonder: Will Sabrina be able to recognize a redwing blackbird from a glance as it flies by a window? Will she care?) I feel a bit weird about not spending more time in the garden, but I just don’t have the time and, it pains me to admit, the attention span, to do a good job of it.

No, that’s not my butt, that’s my brother at around 18 months. Cute, huh?

From Wil Wheaton’s blog:

There isn’t enough time to do everything I want to do with my kids.
There isn’t enough time to take long walks with my wife.
There isn’t enough time to work on my yard.
There isn’t enough time to work on my house.
There isn’t enough time to get out and live life to the fullest.
There isn’t enough time to seek out and embrace inspiration.
There isn’t enough time to write great stories.
There isn’t enough time to play games.

There just isn’t enough time.

Ditto.

…except he writes much better stories.

When I was a kid, I toyed with the possibility of becoming an air traffic controller. (This was back before I was diagnosed with ADD, but it makes sense looking back. I would have been damn good at it.) That, and my interest in flight navigation and weather flying make me enjoy this video quite a bit:

A FAA Radar track sequence of a bank of FedEx aircraft getting into Memphis as thunderstorms pass over the airport.

I hit and killed a robin while driving home from work last night. The most surreal part was the complete lack of sensation around the impact; No sound, no thump, nothing. The largest thing I’ve ever killed. It’ll linger a bit, I think.

Among the things not to do when you’ve got a million things on your task list for both home and work, are short on sleep and need to have been in bed an hour ago:

Stumble on your college-era diary and spend a few hours skimming through angst, stress, love lost and stupid phrases like “Instead, I sit here in front of this damn box and blow my life away in silicon.”

Even worse if you detour into your old saved email from around that time. I was more selective in the mailboxes I read, though, so got to relive the more fun parts of my misspent youth, er, exploring the bounds of ethical computing.

On the plus side, I found a list of all 31 Young Friends cons I’d gone to over the course of a decade. It’s amazing how much a part of my life that was. Every four months, on average, I’d leave real life behind and go immerse myself in an intense but safe environment that helped keep me vaguely grounded and sane.

Dammit, why am I not in bed?

In the past two weeks I’ve had my computer die, our tivo crash and the door blow off our shed. Ugh.

(Luckily, Ben and I took backups of our tivos when we hacked them 6 years ago. If the restore works, I’ll be well and truly amazed.)