Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

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Wow! A little bit of costume!

So last night I’m taking Minnie Mouse’s picture with a nice person giving out candy and suddenly I have the urge to take a picture for Cathy and BusyMom. Supergirl and the Slut Friends came running up as I was taking Minnie Mouse’s picture. The buxom superhero was having trouble slowing down because her secret weapon, bulbus breasts, obviously kept her off balance. Her identity is kept secret by the glaring cleavage protruding from her plasticized costume; not a mortal man can possibly make eye contact with her!

Suddenly a battle of good versus evil rages within me. My finger is on the shutter button of the camera. It is ready to fire. I merely need to raise the lense a few inches and push the button. Supergirl and the Slut Friends are moving like coke fiends at an 80s party hosted by a Columbian drug lord. They move almost in a blur in their mission to pillage as much chocolate and sugar as possible to fuel their teen metabolisms. The decent people of this nice, upper-middle class neighborhood laugh and talk with their friends in lawn chairs on their porches surrounded by professionally landscaped yards. How will they judge me if I take the picture! I visualize the light merriment of the neighborhood changing to anger as clouds billow over, the houses take sharp angled Tim Burtonesque shapes as thunder roars and beers are dropped for pitchforks and torches, and the adults chant "pervert! pedophile!" I might get away with taking the picture; afterall, I am showing my horns.

Supergirl is first to reach the candy bucket at the porch. As she leans forward to grab some treats right in front of me I am sudden aware that it is colder outside than I originally assessed. Happy doesn’t appropriately describe the jolly superteen. "Perky" would be far more apropos. Snap the picture! As a parent, I am thinking a plasticized, hard shell of a costume probably was not her best choice. Perhaps something more form fitting. And a bra. Or two.

In the end I could not bring myself to take the picture. I would not want to give the FBI anything that could be construed as child porn. Of course, as we approach the next house, one woman and five or six beer guzzling men are guffawing and talking about Supergirl’s boobs.

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What is stress?

Stress is when the pressure builds up so much that you cannot stop shaking, it is hard to focus because your field of vision is reduced, you cannot concentrate enough to read a single sentence and comprehend it, short term memory vanishes, and ambivalence takes hold. Then the dominoes fall.

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Today’s Programming Hell

Today I am whimpering and crying while trying to resolve this lovely error message: "GPL Ghostscript 8.54: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1" Right now I think that either ImageMagick is not creating the eps or ps files in a way that Ghostscript likes or that I am missing some fonts. Possibly, I need to add some steps to building the eps file with ImageMagick. Of course it could be something mundanely stupid like not having the path set.

Update! A clue! A clue! Found while trying eps2eps

Error: /invalid font in findfont
Operand stack:
Times-Roman Font Times-Roman 976412 Times-Roman –nostringval– Times-Roman NimbusRomNo9L-Regu Courier NimbusMonL-Regu
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– 2 %stopped_push –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– false 1 %stopped_push 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop –nostringval– 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop .runexec2 –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– 2 %stopped_push –nostringval– –nostringval– 1 4 %oparray_pop 2 4 %oparray_pop –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– false 1 %stopped_push 5 5 %oparray_pop –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– 1 -1 1 –nostringval– %for_neg_int_continue
Dictionary stack:
–dict:1122/1686(ro)(G)– –dict:0/20(G)– –dict:88/200(L)– –dict:88/200(L)– –dict:17/17(ro)(G)– –dict:1122/1686(ro)(G)–
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
Current file position is 5709
GPL Ghostscript 8.54: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

Joy.

Update: I bet this is going to help: wget http://mirror3.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
See also. That worked!

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Special Moments and Rituals – Evan Shaving

Evan and I share a ritual most mornings. I use an electric shaver and when I turn it on Evan comes running. It is his job to sit on my left hip and hold the container for the shaver. He plays with the paperwork that I’ve never thrown away and uses the cleaning brush to mimic the motions I am making on my face. He smiles being with Daddy and seems to like the feel of the cleaning brush over his cheeks. His dimple shows big while spending a few quality moments with Dad and I love it!

It is my goal to establish a psuedo-daily ritual with each of the children. With the older children, it might be reading a chapter aloud from a book or cooking a meal together.

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Halloween Redux

Today, Amy will go to school dressed like Minnie Mouse. We did it last Wednesday and walked into the school to see most people not in costume. Fortunately, Amy had an extra shirt in the car. Two or three children remained in costume, one with hair dyed orange, as the teachers explained the date had changed and we must have missed the memo. Amy was having an overtired tantrum and part of me just wanted to take her home. I also didn’t want her to feel bad being one of the only children (at first I thought ‘the only’) in costume but I really do not think 4 year old minds think things like that until adults put such thoughts of self-doubt and insecurity into their minds. I think she would have proudly shown off her costume despite the other children. That’s the correct, confident response we should maintain all our lives. I hope I can instill such confidence. I don’t see it in Sarah.