Happy Birthday Google!

Just a quick one.  I know I've been off the radar.  But we've missed some notable birthdays.

Happy 25th Birthday to Mario and Luigi of Super Mario Brothers!  So many many hours of my childhood I've given to those overly ambitious plumbers.

Happy Birthday Google I still remember teaching people how to use search engines and never finding what we were looking for and then came along and positioning on search lists way outstripped the AOL keyword nonsense.  THANK YOU GOOGLE and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

It's Gotta Be In Their Face

Recently, I've been doing some volunteer hours for my daughter's charter school.  I supervise lunch.  That means I keep all the kids from doing bodily harm to one another AND I attempt to teach them to quiet down and form orderly lines by class without holding their hands while they do it.  I'm having a varied level of success on both fronts.  In exchange for my efforts my daughter gets to attend all day kindergarten for free.  She loves this and this enables her to attend all the special classes like music, PE, Spanish, and art (theater is in the morning).  It also lets her stay for science and social studies as the morning is full with reading skills and math.

I'm very happy with our arrangement, even if it is absolutely exhausting.  Dealing with other people's children is always a challenge.  Not to mention going from bed rest and a prolonged recovery to walking for two hours and chasing kids, is a bit of a shock to my rapidly aging system.  Yet, today as I was patrolling the school yard and the cafeteria, I was struck by a bit of a realization.  It's very easy to tell the kids you are going to have issues with, without knowing their names, anything about them, or even talking to them.  They just have it in their faces.

My Dear Friends, Today Is My Eleventy-First Birthday!

Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday: I am eleventy-one today!...  I hope you are all enjoying yourselves as much as I am....  I shall not keep you long,... I have called you all together for a Purpose....  Indeed, for Three Purposes! First of all, to tell you that I am immensely fond of you all, and that eleventy-one years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits....  I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.... Secondly, to celebrate my birthday.... I should say: OUR birthday. For it is, of course, also the birthday of my heir and nephew, Frodo. He comes of age and into his inheritance today.... Together we score one hundred and forty-four. Your numbers were chosen to fit this remarkable total: One Gross, if I may use the expression.... 'One Gross, indeed! Vulgar expression.' It is also, if I may be allowed to refer to ancient history, the anniversary of my arrival by barrel at Esgaroth on the Long Lake; though the fact that it was my birthday slipped my memory on that occasion. I was only fifty-one then, and birthdays did not seem so important. The banquet was very splendid, however, though I had a bad cold at the time, I remember, and could only say 'thag you very buch'. I now repeat it more correctly: Thank you very much for coming to my little party.... Thirdly and finally, he said, I wish to make an ANNOUNCEMENT....  I regret to announce that – though, as I said, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to spend among you – this is the END. I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE!

Ok, it's not MY birthday, but it is the birthday of two very noteworthy heros.  And if you are good little geeks, enjoying Tolkien week this year (started Sunday ya all!), then you will most like have already reread or heard, or listened to, or thought of fondly, Bilbo's fairwell speech underneath the party tree all those years ago in the Shire of Middle Earth.  Or maybe you didn't and you forgot about all those holidays I told you were coming up.  Well it's not to late to start participating, and what's greater fun than Hobbit Day?  So, "Greetings you my friend, may I get you some tea?"  It's time for a feast and a celebration of the sort you seldom see.

Arr Me Mateys

First let me say sorry for the lack of posts this week.  It's been a busy week and we are expecting some very important company this weekend, so there may not be many posts next week either.  However, we are approaching some major geek holidays, and I do want to at least talk a little on each of those.  First, let me help you all prepare for the very important holiday coming this Sunday, International Talk Like a Pirate Day!!

This phenomenal holiday got started they way many want-to-be holidays do, not with noble aspirations, but with a few good friends joking about.  It "officially" began in 1995, but exploded onto the international scene (and out of the friend quirkiness) in 2002 when in one of those amazing moments, the holiday creators contacted Dave Barry (oh, like I need to tell you who that is?).  And then the world noticed, and that September 19th the interwebs, offices, pubs, and most other places exploded with the colorful intonations of "arr", "me", and "mateys".

Follow The White Rabbit

I believe that the foundations of wisdom are knowledge and understanding.  You can have all the knowledge in the world, but without a deeper understanding that ties those facts together you can't have wisdom.  If you have lots of understanding, but lack the knowledge of the underlying principles behind that understanding, you still lack wisdom.  A fool can have facts and figures, charts, tables, and all of the knowledge in the world, but without understanding, he remains a fool.  I hate to sound a fool.  Therefore when I talk I try to impart both knowledge and understanding so that wisdom may be shared.

Without the shared basic level of understanding and knowledge from which a topic is drawn, wisdom can never be attained, nor shared.  Therefore, frequent side tracking must occur in the discussion to bring in additional side points, examples, and related knowledge to fully understand a concept.  Additionally, my personal thought association, not so much a train as a terminal, leads to explanations that often require running through the brush and associated disorder along a rabbit trail.

Walls Walls Wall - An Answer For Bruce

When I shared about my new facination with the show Bones, Bruce commented that maybe the reason I fail to feel connected with my fellow humans was not because I was so weird. 
That I was really more connected than I thought, but the disconnect was in reality a construct of my own immaginings.  In more common terms, I am throwing up walls that prevent anyone from getting close to me and keep me from percieving the closeness that others try to give to me.

I'm no stranger to making walls.  Whether they are physical constructs on a property line or emotional barriers.  For a large part of my life I didn't leave my bed without full mental body armor, walls, centries, rampart cannons, and a moat.  I didn't let anyone close.  I didn't want anyone to know me, and I did not want to get hurt.  I was never "popular" and some of that stems from social awkwardness as a child and the fact that all the other kids knew each other outside of school, before I came on the scene. 

I Hate Deja vu

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!  It's never wrong, it's never consistent, and something usually happens.  It starts as something little, nothing that you'd ever notice, something you don't even remember really being in the dream or the daydream or seeing.  Like something in the corner of your eye way beyond the lens of your glasses and so far out that you can't really be sure you are seeing it, yet so unbelievably clear that there is no denying that when you see it again, this time with both eyes in full focus (or both ears - as many are auditory memories while the visual is merely a placeholder, like while in the car).

Bad stuff doesn't always happen, sometimes nothing really happens.  But sometimes it starts a wave of deja vu events, and sometimes it means something big is coming, something unplanned, something that unbalances me even more than those, "hey didn't this already happen?"  moments.

Binging

Moderation in all things.  That's what we are taught.  Heck it's what I try to teach my kids.  I'm a firm believer in moderation.  Moderation is the way of science.  More an more we find that if chemicals are present in a moderate amount they are less damaging then if there is a lot or a little.  We know that if we engage in alcohol, or pain killers, or even physical activities occasionally, or moderately, there may be some health benefits.  Yet, I'm not so moderate myself.  I tend to binge.

It's not just in one area of my life either.  It seems to be most things.  It's like everything in my life is on a rotation and when it's time for one activity to take is precedence I binge on that activity until I can't take anymore and then it swings out of rotation.  Some of the rotation is fast, some is slow, but for most things in my life they can be found on the unbalanced wheel of my binging habits.

Someday....

I love what if's and daydreaming.  I love making plans for "if we did this...." even if we have no intention of ever doing it.  One of the games my husband and I play is, "we could do this when we retire."  First off with three kids under 6 we aren't about to retire anytime soon, especially when the oldest wants be a doctor.  However that doesn't mean we can't share our thoughts.  Our thoughts may never meet the reality, we have so much we want that is important to us, but one of my husband's thoughts is to sell everything and live on the ocean.

I've never been sailing, so I can't say how I'd like doing that, but in some ways it's a lot more appealing than RV living, or even the really cool miniature house thing.  Living on a boat would allow us to travel, to see the world, to get away from it all, but to still get around.  Traveling the world is a big goal for my husband and myself, we already have friends scattered around the world, but it never seems to be our turn to head out.  Something always comes up.  Savings always get required for some crisis.  It just doesn't happen.  Yet, being on a boat makes it hard to see things that are further inland.  I mean sure in most of the world there are decent rail systems that are relatively inexpensive, but not in the US, and we love our children, what if they move too far inland?  What if we had one of these instead?

How Do I Love Google, Let Me Count The Ways

I got an unexpected surprise yesterday.  I'm already loving it.  You know sometimes its those little things that just really really make you want to keep pushing.  To get through whatever it is that is weighing you down.  And hey, I'm a girl that just loves a new toy!  Google brought me that when my primary email account was offered the new beta Priority Inbox.

While I love organization and everything having a space and being in it's space.  My entire existence is surrounded by unorganized chaos.  Honestly, if it wasn't for the electronic nature of email my inbox would probably look like a newsstand after a tornado.  I jumped at the chance to go to gmail years ago.  The idea of searching instead of the constant sorting, heaven!  Yet now I've got so many lists and things and fwd fwd fwds (thanks Dad) that stuff gets lost in the shuffle.  I use my primary email for everything, event he email from this blog is forwarded to it (I go sooooo tired of checking 6 email accounts daily, seriously much happier now).  I've overlooked stuff from my boss.  Missed seeing something that was time critical.  And after being offline for travel or when I was in the hospital.  The well wishes from facebook alone (which I will be the very first to admit got me through some very dark times), I'm drowning in electronic correspondence.

What Doesn't Kill You....

Yesterday, a helicopter carrying two biologists and a pilot crashed in a small town where I spent one summer interning.  Ok, I wasn't in that town, but I spent a lot of time there, calling where I was stationed a town is stretching reality a bit too much.  Sadly, it had been my honor to work with both of these biologists.  I hadn't really kept in touch since I left the agency, but I still counted them as friends and cherished having them as officemates (we shared an office for a few years), and for one of them as a classmate and teammate while we attended college together.

As tragic as this event is, I can still picture the banter in the office over this past week.  You know there were the smiles and the "lucky dog" remarks as this date crept closer and closer on the calendar.  Going up in the air and flying as low as possible over a hillside or a river to count something is one of the big perks of the best jobs.  Everyone knows the risks, but it's still one of the highlights.  Why is it that the most thrilling, the things we look forward to the most, are the ones that have the greatest potential for extremely bad consequences should something go wrong?