A Small Confession

Greetings,

I am typing this blog using Windows Live Writer on the wife’s new HP Mini Netbook. So far I am impressed with this little thing (the small amount of time that I have been able to wrestle it from her hands that is). We have not even begun to explore all the things it came with (including the add-on GPS software) so I am sure this is not the last you have heard about our new purchase. After unwrapping the netbook, I snapped a pic of the wife turning it on for the first time.



Now to the confession part. I have mentioned that 2 of my new year’s resolutions this year were to drink no carbonated beverages and to purchase no music. I think I have slipped (albeit slightly) on each of theses. First the beverage. One of my daughter’s favorite things is root beer floats. I got her hooked on these things a while back and whenever we buy vanilla ice cream she begs me to head over an aisle or two and get some cheap (Big K) root beer. It was a few weeks ago when I was dishing out ice cream for the family and a root beer float for the daughter. Even though I am careful to put the root beer in the glass first and drop the ice cream in carefully, this time the foam was rising too fast. It was only out of instinct that I quickly dipped my head down and sucked up the near over flowing foam. Technically, the beverage was no longer carbonated but my mind will not forgive me. As for purchasing music, I did buy 2 tracks from Praise Hymn. I have been asked to sing a special in our church in April so I needed to buy the accompaniment track along with a demonstration performance track. I think it totaled $2.58 but (again technically) this is a direct violation of my resolution.

My third resolution I have yet to mention to you. I did not know if I was going to keep it or not and did not want to appear as if I had broken it. But since I am confessing, why not? I decided to grow my hair and not cut it at all for 2010. I did this a few years back (my profile pic here on xanga is from that period). 3 months into this and I am itching to shave the head down again to the 1/2” length I had last fall. I withstood the temptation on Sunday afternoon when it was at its strongest thus far but I don’t know how much more I have in me. I will keep you posted.

I am getting used to this slightly smaller keyboard so I think I might have to make it my default blog-from computer (with the wife’s permission of course).

Jon

Now, That’s A Salad

Greetings,

I have mentioned that I am working from home on days that I don’t have super important meetings or on days when the weather is bad (rain and connectivity do not mix). One of the many benefits of being here is lunch with the wife. She definitely eats better here than I do at the office, and I don’t mean just nutrition-wise. Take a look at yesterday’s lunch…



Now, that’s a salad! This had the normal base (lettuce) but also (in no particular order) raisons, apples, walnuts, sunflower seeds, chicken and feta cheese all topped with some raspberry vinaigrette to top it all off. I think she is trying to duplicate a salad that she likes at Panera Bread. Whatever the reason, I like it a lot more than eating leftovers in my cube all alone. I wonder what’s for lunch today?

Jon

To Be Continued

Greetings and welcome to today’s random thought.

First of all, I think I am a little tired of my first sentence (see above). I mean, with a few exceptions I have started all 400+ blogs with this greeting but it is a pain to have to ensure that I have the text word word for word so this will be the last time I worry about it (in my own anal-retentive way). You might see it at the beginning still, I just won’t be worrying about it as much and I know that you care about such things.

The wife and son went on a school field trip on Friday to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. She had planned on driving (due to our distrust of the safety of 15 passenger vans) but there was another mother (who shared our thoughts about those vans) and so they hitched a ride with them. These two ladies (the wife and the driver) did not know each other well but 5 hours or so in a van together gives a couple time to get to know each other (as a side note, our first date involved a drive to Ft Wayne and back giving us 3 hours to know each other). As a result, they are now (in some weird fashion that the male brain cannot quite grasp) great friends. One bad thing about the wife having someone to talk to for such a great length of time is that she feels the need to share highlights of the conversation with me (and by highlights I mean to replay the entire conversation). Over the 13 years of our marriage (our 13th anniversary is tomorrow), I have tried various techniques to avoid hearing these kind of details…

• Pay close attention (in case there is a quiz): I admit that I only tried this during the first few months of our marriage when all males give it their best to be the man they pretended to be before they said, “Yes” to the marriage proposal. This grew old quickly as any married man can testify to.
• Pay close attention, but only for the highlights (since I learned there never was a quiz): This gives me the highlights in case (for brownie points) I needed to recall a piece of information about a particular friend of hers in case we should ever meet.
• Nod but pay no attention: Once I realized that there were no quizzes and that brownie points weren’t all that they were cracked up to be, I decided that the basic reason for her telling me this information was not that I would be more informed but that she had some basic need to decompress after a long conversation. I thought that maybe (again, here we are talking about a male trying to figure out what a female needs or is intending) she just needed to get it out of her system. This technique worked pretty well but you still need to fake interest by repeating an occasional phrase to ask a question whose nature would indicate that you were paying attention.
• Fake a distraction: I will often claim that I have a need to leave the room (to go to the bathroom to take care of an errand that I forgot until just now, etc) and then return to the room (sometimes 30 minutes later) only to have her click some magic “un-pause” button that allows here to pick up right where she left off. This ability is incredible to me. I lose my train of thought in the middle of a conversation and she can pick up a conversation that has been on hiatus for 30 minutes.
• Look for a way to stop the conversation: I have tried this this lately (hey, I hit 10 years of marriage a few years back). I even have gotten so bold to ask if there was any particular words or phrase (including swearing) that I could say that would stop the conversation. When that was only met with “a look” I become bolder and asked what physical action I could take (get in the car and drive away, walk out of the room while slamming a door, etc) and this was met with “another look” that made the first look look quite tame in comparison.
• Threw up my hands in numb despair and go back to earlier techniques: On the eve of my 13th anniversary, I am now back (almost) to where I have started.

Anyway, I love my wife and all her quirks. My best decision in my life was still 13+ years ago when I decided to ask her to marry me. Happy Anniversary Dear!

Thanks for reading my random thoughts.

Jon

Gotta Get Outta This Funk

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I worked every day but one from home this week. I tend to log in very early (6 am) and check to see if there are any emails from the EMEA (Europe Middle East Africa) region that I could quickly reply to while it is still during their workday. This only takes a few minutes usually but can take up to 30 depending on the email subject. Since the wife has been driving the kids to school, there is little need for me to shower or get dresses so after breakfast and sitting back down in front of the computer I tend not to think about anything other than work for a while. Then I realize that it is getting to be lunchtime and I am still wearing the same clothing that I slept in, that I have not brushed my hair, and that I have not brushed my teeth. I try to take care of this during my lunch hour but one day I did not get to the shower part until after 5 pm. I think if I am going to make this work from home thing work I am going to need to be more disciplined about getting ready like I would for a normal work day (though I would stick with more comfortable clothing). Even now at the time that I started this blog entry (3 pm) I have yet to shave or shower (though I did manage to brush my teeth).

The wife had a women’s thing to go to at 2 today so the kids and I killed time by having an afternoon snack of chocolate ice cream and playing Uno. The daughter won both games that we played (much to the son’s dismay). The wife arrived home around 4 but she has a date tonight with one of her oldest girlfriends to see the movie, “Remember Me”. This looks like a true chick flick so I am glad that I am not invited. This means though that the kids and I will be alone again tonight. Since it is a weekend, the kids usually head to the son’s room around 8, pull out the trundle bed and put a movie on his laptop to fall asleep to. This will probably leave me with a lot of alone time depending on how soon the wife returns to me.

Since this is the last season of Lost, the wife and I decided (ok, I decide and she agreed) that we would rewatch the first 5 seasons to get back up to speed. The son decided he would like to watch with us and although he watched through his fingers at times and we had to pause every 5 minutes or so to explain why this or that scene was important, he only made it 10 shows before it got the best of him. He was losing sleep and seeing things in the dark of his room at night. The wife and I plodded on and burned through the first season (which has the best cliff hanger of any show I have ever seen, I still remember where I was and what my reaction to it was the first time I saw it). The son then decided that he wanted to play catch up and that he could handle it now. He is about 7 shows behind us and we make sure we are close when he is watching as he has a ton of questions and we aren’t there to pause the show and explain. This is borderline too much for him (from a concerned parent’s point of view) but the show does get better (i.e. less scary, more of a mystery) as the seasons wear on. We just need to get him through the first season.

Well I had better spend some time with the wife while she is here.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Working From Home

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Since we have high speed internet now (at times), I have been working from home for the last 4 workdays. I have not worked from home in over a year but I have slipped right back into "work from home" mode. This involves putting off a shower until lunch (or in the case of last Friday, until dinner), wearing sweats all day long (even after the shower), not shaving, drinking too much French press coffee and in general being an overall slug. It is strange how quickly the wife fell back into the "check email / facebook every hour" routine too. Now that the kids each have computers, they too have been spending a bit of time online too (the daughter looks at pictures of puppies and the son looks up weather).

One think that both the kids and I are doing a lot is popping balloons. The son and I like tower defense type games and the one we are hooked now is Bloons 2. It is a typical TD game only with monkeys popping balloons. Be ye forewarned, this game is severely addicting. Bloons 1 was fun but easy, Bloons 2 has 3 levels and I have defeated the first 2 and am close to defeating the 3^rd. Bloons 3 and Bloons 4 are out there waiting when I need them.

I spent an hour today at work listening to a seminar about how blogging could be used at our company. I admit I actually salivated a little when I thought about being paid to blog internally. Now the hard part will be deciding which ideas to keep internally for my company and which ones to share here. I will share this photo (that I also posted at work about someone stealing my seat when I returned from getting some tea.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Do What Your Mother Says

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

So it has been a while since I have blogged. I was reminded of this today by my mother. We were at my grandmother's house celebrating her birthday (mmm, ice cream cake) and she reminded me of this (more of a reprimand actually). So, Mom, this one's for you.

We actually have high speed internet (relatively speaking) at the house and although it worked pretty good from Tuesday around 7 PM to early Friday evening, the honeymoon quickly was over and internet was down until sometime early Sunday morning and it has been hit and miss for most of today. This is about how it should be now that I think about it. If I were to script what would cause me the most pain, it would not have been to have the site survey done and then have been told that internet was not an option, rather, it is truly more painful to have a wonderful 3 day experience (to get my hopes up) then dash those hopes with a frustrating 48 hour period of sporadic connectivity. Yes, this is truly the most painful way (and thus it is so). I have no idea why the connection is so bad. I don't think it is due to it being the weekend (more users online maybe) or perhaps it is the weather interfering with my line of site connection. This shoots a hole in my plans to work from home on a more regular basis (unless of course I check the weather forecast first). It is early and I do have a (30) day period where I can cancel the whole thing but I have a feeling it will be just good enough for home use that I cannot cancel in good conscious.

Working from home Thursday and Friday was weird. I have not worked from home in a little over a year. I got back into the groove on Friday though when around 3:00 I realized I had not brushed my teeth or even gotten dressed yet. I actually only showered after the internet connection died around 6:00 (maybe internet at home is not that great of an idea). I did discover that my headset interfered with the wireless router that I am borrowing from my mom. Fortunately my really old regular phone (900 Mhz) does not interfere.

Thursday night we went out for dinner. I decided this right after the wife asked (demanded) that we consider the idea of a family night out. We ended up at Chili's (our default) where the son and I accidently ordered ribs. You see we wanted a burger that was new to the menu. It was called the Shiner Brock BBQ burger and sounded good to us (as we usually share a plate). However, we did notice that they had a $10 menu that included both a ½ appetizer and an entrée and we THOUGHT the burger that we wanted was one of the choices. However, all I saw was Shiner Brock and neglected to see that it was actually a ½ rack of ribs and not the burger. It was only after our plate was in front of us that we discovered our mistake. Now you have to now my son and I to know that we really dislike getting our hands dirty so the thought of picking up the bbq smeared rack with our bare hands is just short of torture but we pressed on and the son is now a huge fan of ribs (and I admit that it was quite tasty). We did have to fight over the sole wet nap that was included on the plate (actually I surrendered it when I saw his face).

Well it is time now to see if I have lost my internet between the time of starting this blog and the time I am trying to post it.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon