Year: 2007

We had a wonderful Easter with two minor hiccups each reminding me that when I screw up I do it big. Other than those blemishes, we had a clean house, a pleasant visit from the grandparents, good treatment from Peter Cotton Tail, good food, happy children, relaxed times, a deep renewing nap, and no stress! Our Easter egg hunt was indoors thanks to the frigid temperatures outside and when the children declared that all eggs were discovered I was able to grin and announce that the five children had missed 17 eggs! (turns out they really missed 20+-) Our hunt consisted of plastic, candy filled eggs and 38 hardboiled colored eggs. In the end 2 hardboiled eggs were missing. The first turned out to be a joke by the children on me; they re-hid one! Of course, I was only looking where I knew eggs had been hidden. A game of hot and cold got Dad to the egg. The final hardboiled egg was searched for and searched for until finally it was discovered in the sink erator. Rather, Cathy remembered that when she was dumping out the egg dye that a forgotten egg when kerthulup straight into the in-sink-erator and was unrecoverable but still fun to try to find.

Student: Do I have to be perfect all the time?
Master: Hold true to your values, make them righteous, and perfection will follow.

I had one of those very strange moments. I bumped into an old friend and mentor this evening. I was overjoyed to see him and his wife. However, as an influx of blocked memories overwhelmed me and my mind reeled with conflicting thoughts on how to summarize my past 15 year while networking (he works where I would like to) and re-establishing a friendship, and all I could do is babble incoherently. You know. Your tongue swells up and your IQ drops 80 points. I parted company with my friends but decided not to let go of the awkwardness as I spoke nonsense to the cashier danced with other patrons as we tried to negotiate right of way, bumped into people entering the store as I tried to exit and froggered across the parking lot to my car where I realized I had forgotten to finishing my shopping.

As an extrovert who likes to entertain I think I have social skills down pretty well. I have always been an adult, although my permanent age is probably 24 or 18, and as such throughout my life I have found myself in social situations trying to keep the perfect rhythm of conversation, that balance of who leads who gets to be the subject of conversation and assuring that everyone gets a moment of self-importance. Often I review a conversation in my head thinking of the blunders and missed opportunities or lost points. Conversation is an art and it must be practiced. Locked away in my basement and having less and less adult contact, I feel my conversational skills slipping away. More and more I leave a conversation with almost a teenage awkwardness wondering why my head feels so fuzzy. Blast that brain cloud!

When I was in middle school or early high school I had an unusual bump on my leg. I ended up a at dermatologist freezing off a wart and asked about the bump. On inspection, the doctor explained that it looked like a foreign object in my leg. His suspicion was that a mosquito bit me and when it got swatted a piece of the insect remained in my leg and a cyst grew around it. This was frozen off and left a small scar which remains bright white when my legs tan. On occasion, like today, that spot on my leg makes me very aware that at one point it had an issue. There is no reason for the feeling and it is not hurtful but as if someone had a fingertip touching that spot on my leg with firm pressure. Of course, this is nothing compared to my wife’s weather toe and weather front detecting migraines. Now she has talent!

Black helicopters flying low and slow over west knoxville today. Google mapping today?

I highly recommend you take a moment and export your list of feeds from which ever feed reader you are using. I use SharpReader but it would appear an unexpected shutdown of windows may have trashed my reading list and I have no backup. That means all the locked posts that I have saved for future reference–gone. All the blogs, news, groups, et al–gone. If a reboot does not recover my list, it will be a nice purge. However, there are some that I had put up "just to try" that I may not be able to recover and they will be sorely missed. What a slap in the face! On the other hand, I bet my productivity goes up.

This is one of those days where I am stuck in a valley. To my east, I have a mountain of paperwork to climb. To my west, I have a mountain of client requests. I must climb both at the same time!

With the air conditioning broken, we have the pleasure of being reminded of the sounds our normally closed windows block. The birds singing the backyard often sound like they are in the house. The pitter patter of the light rain is relaxing and the smell of its cleansing relieving. There is beauty in sleeping with the windows open. We are fortunate that the air conditioning is broken right now.

I want to thank Katie and Jon for an awesome time last night!

My brain cloud is acting up.