There is a mystery in our house that up until now I have not been able to solve. The lights in some rooms keep coming on by themselves. Mind you, it never happens when I am in a room. It is only evident when I leave a room and go into another room and that room's lights are on. I must turn off lights a dozen or so times over the course of a normal day. I have asked my family about this (mostly the kids) but they SWEAR that it is not them turning (or leaving) on the lights. They SEEM to be honest so IF I take them at their word then we have to research other plausible explanations.
You might recall that my house also suffers from FSD (flat surface disease). You may recall that I blogged about this a while back. FSD is where all the flat surfaces in the house gather stuff over time (the only cure for FSD is to blog about it – worked like a charm last time). Because of my house's tendency for disease, it is not unthinkable that it also suffers from SORLOD (Spontaneous Other Room Lights On Disease). SORLOD mainly effects the bathrooms of my house. This may be a normal symptom or perhaps is it specific to this case. Who knows how long this has been going on as I have only recently began to gather data. This could have been happening the entire year or so we have lived here. It is hard to say. I think the previous owners of this house read this blog so maybe they can chime in on the history.
There are sister diseases that have spawned.
- IRSPETNOILTID (Irresponsible Radio Still Playing Even Though No One Is Listening To It Disease): This usually effects the kid's rooms and only in the mornings after they have woke up from sleeping with the radio on all night.
- DSFTCPRIHTCIFAPD (Desperate Search For The Cell Phone Resulting In Having To Call It From Another Phone Disease): Some disease names are self explanatory. This is the MAIN reason we keep a land line I think and don't switch to a cell phone only lifestyle. The phone
- WAMKD (Where Are My Keys Disease): Thankfully this only affects the wife as I put my keys in the exact same place every time I come home. This has occasionally occurred to my keys but only after the wife has borrowed my car so this disease is evidently communicable.
- HM/HWOOSD (Hey Mom/Honey We're Out Of Spoons Disease): For some reason, we have always (dating back to our early years of marriage) constantly run low on spoons. We buy more spoons but to no avail. Throwing spoons at this seems only to worsen the situation. This disease is not specific to this house for us so we might have brought it with us.
- ???: I am sure there are more afflictions that this house suffers from but this is a good beginning to the list.
On the work front, we have a new team member whose name also is Jon (without an H even). I wasted no time claiming my veto rights to any nicknames given to us so as to avoid confusion in team conference calls. We have a few Chris' on the team too so this should be fun. I remember being in a 40 man bowling league once where there were no less than six of us with the same name and 5 of us spelled it with no H. Forget winning the league, we were all vying for top Jon/John.
On the neck front, we are making progress. Sleeping is still restless as any position is not comfortable for more than an hour or so. Having to reach above my head to dislodge Oreo from my pillow does not help when attempting to find a new position. Throwing the dog at the wife seems to have no effect as he just migrates back, stealthily within the hour. The wife has this neat little thing that you can throw in the microwave for 2 minutes and then put around your neck. This really helps but I fear I am growing addicted to it. Fortunately we have 2 of them so there is no fighting (other than for first microwave rights).
On the "no new music" front (one of my New Year's resolutions) I am doing good and at the time of this blog writing I am enjoying some 80s/90s Steve Camp music. My pastor mentioned a song (Living in Laodicea) to me last Sunday night so this renewed my interest in Camp's music. It is typical Christian 80s music in quality and subject matter but I still like it nonetheless. I am seeking out the sheet music for the Laodicea song to see if I can sing it as a special during a future church service (assuming I can find a keyboard player to help me out).
On the "no soda" front (another resolution) all is well. No temptations to speak of really. I am surviving on hot tea, hot coffee, iced tea, water and milk. This might be too easy and this makes me a little uncomfortable as resolutions should have some degree of difficulty to them.
Another resolution that I almost made was not to check out any books from the library until I had read the books we have in the house. I did not think of this until a few weeks into the year and I have not broken it yet and were it not for my anal-retentiveness in such matters (resolutions need to be made at or around new year's day) then I would claim it as a 4th resolution. I finished a few books that I had started (Couplehood by Paul Reiser, SeinLanguage by Jerry Seinfeld and History of the Millennium (So Far) by Dave Barry) and have moved on to Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. The son just finished Treasure Island at school so I think we might have him read this other book by Stevenson over the summer. I have a collection of short stories by Tolstoy (short being a relative term given Tolstoy's typical lengths for novels) and I want to re-read Watership Down as well. We probably have 30 or so books that I have not read just sitting on the book shelf in the living room. Why waste the gas to head to the library?
On the kid's laptops front, we had to abandon Ubuntu. The daughter's 6 year old laptop kept losing the screen. You could tell the OS was running based on sounds and such but only hard rebooting seemed to help. We have switched back to XP Home for now. The son's laptop's sound card did not play well with Ubuntu as it could not get very loud at all. I researched a bit but could not find a bug thread about this issue. Given the other non working hardware (both wired and wireless network cards) I thought it might also be a hardware problem but after installing Fedora (another flavor of linux) all is well again and he seems happy enough.
The work counter tells me that I am pushing 1,300 words now so I think I will wrap this blog up.
Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.
Jon
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