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

Lights Out

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

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 beard front, I still have the caterpillar on my face. I have not had that many comments though I do get the initial uncomfortable look from people. I think this means that they have no idea what to say or perhaps they can't tell if I am doing this as a joke or a serious fashion statement. My grandmother did appreciate the tribute to Apollo (the Olympic short track speed skater). That is as close I have gotten to a compliment thus far. I am leading song service in church tomorrow morning so I might get a little more exposure and comments at that time.

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 4^th 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