Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • So, we were trying to

    So, we were trying to go to sleep last night, my wife and I. We were talking, as we normally do, when Jen let loose one of her famously mispronounced words (she doesn’t think they are… maybe she speaks her own dialect?). JenWords come in two varieties: the emphasis-on-the-wrong-syllable and the mixed-up-first-sound. I don’t even remember what it was last night that go me started… but it made me laugh. Now, I love JenWords. They keep me on my toes, and I think maybe she does it to make sure I’m paying attention, because to miss a JenWord is to miss something beautiful and original.

    I must also say that most of these happened while Jen was pregnant, and therefore must be attributed to hormones or something. Otherwise, it’s just an endearing quirk that I hope never goes away. Here are some of my favorites of both types:

    emphasis-on-the-wrong-syllable: (phonetically)

    • cement: SEE-mint, so it sounds like semen with a t.
    • drixoral: dricks-or-ALL, you know, the allergy medicine.
    • mercury: I don’t even know how to do this one, just be sure it’s funny.
    • syllable: sill-AAAAA-bull – makes me giggle every time.

    mixed-up-first-sound:

    The wonderful thing about these is that 1) they’re hilarious, and 2) you never know when she’ll do it. The emphasis words are pretty regular, but these are gems!

    • french onion: fred onchion – we went through this phase where chopped up potatos + some mix + 400 degree oven = yummy when we first got married. fred onchion potatos was Jen’s suggestion one day. We still bring up good ole Fred whenever we need a laugh.
    • great outdoors: bud ortdoseman – Sunday morning shortly after moving to Virginia, she asked if SportsCenter was coming on after that bud ortdoseman show… she meant The Great Outdoors… really, it was funny at the time. Now, Bud and Fred are friends.
    • Buddhist Monks: Moodist Bunks – This one was recent, so she can’t use pregnancy as an excuse… eating dinner at my mom’s. I don’t know why we were talking about Buddhism, but there you have it.\
      There are others, and I’ll add them if I remember them, but you get the idea.

  • I want to be able

    I want to be able to change colors! I mean, other than jaundice, or my slowly expanding grey spot…

    “Kevin must have eaten cabbage today because his skin is a nice shade of blue.” Yeah… exactly.

  • So, it’s time to redesign

    So, it’s time to redesign because I’m tired of the white, and well, I kind of half-assed it this morning while I was waiting for an e-mail. Trust me, it won’t stay like this for long.

    It must be a slow news day, cuz I have nothing to talk about…

  • There are tons of beautiful

    There are tons of beautiful colors that fall outside of the web-safe palette. I can’t wait for the day when I can use them all. I found a great orange today that I’d love to use, but alas, we must remain members of the Web-Safe Army and only use the approved colors!! Let’s all march to the tune of 216 colors of happiness and long for the days of many colors, when it will be safe to come up with fabulous designs that use colors that no one’s discovered, lying under hats in the closet to the left of the old shoes we never wear and should probably give to charity. Yes, I’m talking about THOSE colors!! Aahhhh, what a nice dream, maybe some day.

  • I love Sunday afternoons. It’s

    I love Sunday afternoons. It’s this time, after church and lunch, and everyone’s come home and changed clothes that I feel like I have nothing to do and nowhere to be and I love it. Jen and Max are asleep; I keep listening for them, trying to decipher creaks and sounds from the baby monitor as the signs of waking. The TV is on, providing background noise to my surfing and goofing off. The laptop is on the dining room table, and I’m not working. All is quiet, and peaceful. I’m a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a friend – and right now I’m all alone doing nothing, all of those things that I am in the background to me being me to myself, doing nothing but sitting and taking a break. This is the best time…

  • I’ve realized that there are

    I’ve realized that there are two types of people in the world – target=_new people and who don’t mind if someone else comes in and talks for awhile. Unfortunately, I’m a target=_new person…

  • So, where was I yesterday?

    So, where was I yesterday? I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art with my wife, son, mother-in-law and mother. Other than taking the looooooooooooooooo-oooong way there through downtown DC (all to avoid congestion on the beltway. reminder to self: never trust mom with a map), it was a great trip. Max was an angel the whole time. We saw some great art.

    If you haven’t been, and live in the area, I totally suggest it. It’s not as impressive as the old Getty or the LACMA, which are full of the paintings you see on postcards and calendars. It still has a very nice collection of Matisse, Picasso drawings (which I enjoyed more than the paintings), and some great abstracts by some of my favorite artists like Paul Klee and Kandinsky.

    It really got me in the mood to paint again. There’s something wonderful about seeing real paint on canvas. The texture of paint is so gorgeous. It’s never carried over in prints or even in reproductions. And it’s funny, it’s those details that make a work great. Looking at some Matisse in books or postcards makes it look hurried and childish. On closer inspection, the care taken in the brush strokes to bring out the knee and calf of a dancer, or a painter in a grove of olive trees make the painting beautiful and complex. I loved it. I need more…

    We also ate at the museum restaurant, which, in most cases is a baaa-aaad idea. But, this museum has Gertrude’s (which I hear is closing… so sad). The food was AMAZING and the place was packed. I had the salmon alla bella and almost died of seafood happiness. It was the best I’ve ever had – and I’m an expert on restaurant salmon. Everyone else got crab cakes, and they were a little too full of old bay spice for me, but they were still very good.

    My mother-in-law is headed back to Tucson today. It makes me sad. Yeah, really. I dig my in-laws. They’re fun, funny and caring. They’ve accepted me and my family and are always great to be around. I really wish they were closer or could visit more often. It also makes me feel guilty for dragging their daughter and grandson across the country. When we’re independantly wealthy, we’ll make it up to you Connie, I promise.

  • So, what am I doing?

    So, what am I doing? I think next week, I’ll start posting a bunch of the cool AOLserver stuff I’ve done on my own, like the adp-tag db call, the calendar and my instructions on how to install AOLserver and Postgres in Linux. How does that sound? It’ll be nice to have some content up here other than my ramblings and Max’s pics (which are cool and need to be updated).

    I’m also thinking of building a search engine into AOLserver. There used to be this cool text indexing stuff built right in back in 2.1 when Illustra was still the primary db (and which I still have running somewhere on my O2). I’d love to see it come back. Why, you ask? Because I’ve been doing Search stuff for two years and think I can do it. So there.

    What has to go into a search engine? Here’s what I’ve got so far:

    • Indexing: There has to be a way to get content, and it has to be fast. Also, it has to be able to index parsed content from ADP’s, which means lots of http gets, or ns_adp_parses (which would be cool but cumbersome).
    • Searching: I have to find some way to search other than tacking SQL wildcards on either side of the query. It just doesn’t produce good results. That means cool meta searching stuff which I know nothing about.
    • Results: I’ve used lots of API’s, and I don’t really like any of them. This isn’t a knock against the people who wrote them, it’s just the way it is. They’re usually written by people who do all backend stuff and don’t take the pains of UI development into consideration. I do some of both, so hopefully I can do it the way I wanna do it.
      Ok, I think that’s it… Wow, what a geeky post.

  • Here’s a tip: Never wear

    Here’s a tip: Never wear a white t-shirt the same day you bring spaghetti for lunch.

  • I wanted to write this

    I wanted to write this before I lost the feeling. Six Feet Under is going to be a great show. Last night’s episode was so beautiful and painful. The last scene where Brenda takes David and Nate on the bus was the most cathartic thing I’ve ever seen on TV. The look on David’s face as he finally let go, finally opened the door and felt real grief was amazing. In a second he went from stuffy and cold to real and grieving. I couldn’t stop crying (yes, I can admit it, I cried). It was one of the only times television has made me do that, and I loved it.

    In two hours of screen time, I love this show. I love the characters. I love the pacing of the show. Think about it. In TWO HOURS, I’ve become emotionally invested enough in the characters to CRY! Jen cried last week (sorry sweetie) and I came close. How amazing is that? It honestly doesn’t get better than this. I know people will disagree, but this show is better than the first two episodes of The Sopranos by far. I can’t wait to see where it goes…