Ultranormal

Category: family

  • I’ve created an account of

    I’ve created an account of our Risk game on Sunday… probably only interesting to the fam. You’re welcome to look at it though, if only to get a glimpse of my amazing photographic talents.

  • My favorite non-uncle uncle is

    My favorite non-uncle uncle is retiring from his column @ Salon.com. This saddens me, as it was always well written, funny, and provided some more insight into a man I only knew through the radio. As I said before, he’s the kind of man I want as an uncle. He sounds like a guy you could call with problems you can’t talk to your parents about. He sounds like a guy you’d want to have dinner with, or have along on a campout. I’ll miss his column.

    In happy news, I played Risk for the first time in many many years on Sunday night with the fam (well, Dad, H and S… Jen and Mom bowed out to discuss fabric). I documented the carnage with the digital camera, and will post a report later today (unless things get busy).

  • oh boy

    So, day one of my two-day sanity check:

    • Woke up a little after normal time so I could watch Max so Jen could do church stuff.
    • Watched Max all morning, played and tickled and laughed.
    • Put Max down for a nap.
    • Ate leftovers for lunch (from the FAB-U-LOUS roast from Sunday – want the recipe?
    • Mowed the lawn.
    • Ate dinner
    • Went to World Market for Ginger Beer, then to Lowe’s for black spray paint and paint for the bricks outside.
    • Watching Big Brother, wondering if tomorrow will be the whirlwind that today was. Wow! What a vacation!!

  • Unknown Origins

    My mom’s into genealogy (I know I spelled that wrong – don’t care – you’ll see why later). Through contacts in the family, and lots of research, she’s traced our ancestors back to the 1600s on her side, and to the 1700s on my dad’s.

    I hate to shock anyone who knows me, but I’m a blue blood! On mom’s side, there are three family lines that show up in America in the 1600s, from Great Britain (Wales, Scotland, etc)!! On my dad’s side, they’re here in the 1700s, from Switzerland. So, that means I should be much snobbier than I am. I mean, come on!! I’m a WASP with some raging neutrality thrown in. It’s funny that four hundred years of people living and dying has culminated in me. How scary is that?

  • Saturday: Ha-cha-cha

    Yeah, baby, it’s Saturday! We’re taking it easy, watching bad made-for-TV movies and eating fast food. I did get something done: I went to Burlington Coat Factory and found some sweeeet Hawaiian shirts on sale. Yum-may.

    I’m taking a couple days off next week to recharge. After the past few weeks of edge-of-the-seat sitting and the eventual conclusion of the layoffs, it’s time to regroup.

    I have all of these ideas, and as of right now, I don’t have the energy to do it all. I need a break. We’re going to work on the house, clean up, play around… have fun. Yeah, it’s time to have some fun. So, if next week is slow, it’s because I’m either out doing something or working. You all remember what that was like, right?

  • I don’t want to do this

    I don’t want to do this… I don’t want my blog to become one of those “I hate my job” daily tirades, but this week, I do. I’m tired of feeling overworked and under siege by project managers. How many project managers does ONE project need? Now, instead of dealing with one person who asks me questions and makes me do stuff, I deal with 5 or 6, which greatly increases my pissed-off quotient (by a magnitude of 5 or 6), and makes my job that much harder. Stupid stupid stupid.

    On TOP of that, I have to deal with impending doom, and the possibility that one of my best friends at work might get carried away by it. That pisses me off. So, to sum up, this week has pissed me off. I feel like I’m on the edge of some emotional breakdown, and will just kick the next person who walks by squarely in the nuts.

    On a happy notes, during one of my mental health breaks this week, I came up with this, which I think is really cool, and I’d do it, but I know how much people hate pop-up windows. But, I love how it’s aligned, and the TV shows up over the menu on the right, and the logo is behind the text. Yeah, it’s cool. I rule, now go away before I kill your testicles with my boot.

  • I used to fancy myself an artist

    I used to fancy myself an artist. I considered becoming a medical illustrator, and held this dream that I could become a fantastically popular (if not talented) comic book artist. I took an advanced figure drawing class my freshman year of college, and got an A. I thought that’s what I really wanted to do. I was sure of it.

    What I’ve realized in my 8 years since that year is that I’m not ever going to be a medical illustrator, or a comic book artist in any other arena than my imagination. I still doodle all over my legal pad during meetings, and every once in a while I come up with something worth looking at again. I drew this fat kid in sledding clothes dreaming of snow during a meeting one day. It’s still magnet-attached to my filing cabinet at work.

    Dreams die. The dreams of children and teenagers die slow deaths in the journey to adulthood. I don’t want to be an artist now, not really.

    I write code. I write code all day long. I write stuff that does fabulous things like return search results in readable formats. I’ve written calendars, message boards, file libraries, databases full of useful information and lots of other widgets and tools. I never dreamed of being a code-writer when I was a child. I wanted to be a mad scientist at one point, and I guess this is close. I love taking things and turning them into products that no one could have imagined them turning into when they were conceived (like Tcl – did you know you can do amazingly Mad things with Tcl? Bet you didn’t).

    It’s my dream to build cool stuff. I dream of building the perfect tool. Someone told me of an april fool’s joke they pulled. They worked in an office of lawyers. They were the computer support guy. All the lawyers bitched and moaned about the tools they had. So, on 4/1, this guy put a big red button on everyone’s screen that said “Your Job”. That’s what I want to build… the big red Your Job button. It’ll be in Tcl… just you wait.

  • This one’s for the grandparents:

    This one’s for the grandparents: Something else to list in the con column of being allergic to hair-bearing animals – Max LOVES dogs. The kid isn’t even two, and he’s in love with them. I took him outside for a romp (I swear that’s what he does. He doesn’t walk, he romps) after dinner. In the space between our collection of townhouses and the next, there’s a large grassy hill that Max likes to play in. He’ll roll down it, or drop small rocks through the holes in the storm drain to listen to them hit the bottom. Once he hears the clink of the pebble on the bottom, he looks up with a smile on his face and waves his cute reverse “bye-bye” wave.

    Oh, wait, we were talking about the dogs. Dog , a black lab, was in his fenced backyard in the next section of townhomes. Max saw him and went toddling over to take a peek. He would stare through the slats of the fence trying to get a better look. When the dog would bark, he’d jump back and giggle like he’d just made a new friend. When the owner came and took the dog inside, Max looked around the fence for the dog, kept waving his poor little bye-bye wave, and looking up at me, asking me to bring the dog back to play. When I couldn’t, he got, well, pissed.

    After he calmed down and we were back to romping up and down the sidewalk came dog number 2, a pretty golden retriever that belongs to the couple one townhouse down from us. Max intercepted them on the way back from their walk and circled that poor dog mercilessly until Max got close enough for the dog to lick Max’s fingers. Max was in toddler heaven. He had way too much fun playing with, petting and just looking at that dog. It makes me feel bad that the kid probably won’t get one… so there.

  • Went to the doctor this

    Went to the doctor this morning. Sinus infection is gone, but I’m still fat. Yup, it’s official. I got a chart and everything. It’s time to get less fat. Why? Because I made a startling realization the other day: You don’t see a lot of fat old guys. No, really, they all die before they get old. I don’t want to do that, so I’m going to lose weight. It sucks, but it’s got to be done. So, look out for “how less fat is Kevin than he was when he started” updates periodically (for the two people who read this thing).

  • Kevin is disgruntled today. Why?

    Kevin is disgruntled today. Why? No good reason. Thursdays are just good days to be disgruntled on. I want good Chinese food and bad reality tv. I want competent people working with me, and projects that mean something. I want people to RTFM and stop using me as a first option when it comes to questions. You will learn much more and appreciate it more if you find it yourself, no really. I mean it. No kidding.

    I’m apparently not the only person suffering from dreams.