Friday June 30th, 2000

Today is a day for much reflection.

One year ago today, I was blessed with the rarest of opportunities. First, perhaps a little background: I met Faith the summer I turned sixteen. We had a mutual friend who happened to stop by my house one afternoon with Faith in tow. I don’t remember the circumstances of why they stopped by, but I do remember one thing: Faith. The moment she walked into my sight, I knew instantly that this was the girl I would marry. I know it sounds corny, but it really is true. Faith and I dated a couple of times and, as luck would have it, we decided that we really didn’t like each other all that much! We did stay in contact, though. So much so that we became the very best of friends. It seems that we were always there for each other.

After high school, I moved to Seattle for a girl I was seeing at the time. Needless to say that didn’t work out, so some months later I moved back to St. Louis only to find Faith engaged and about to move to Texas! This was it! I just couldn’t let her do it! We had been through way too much together and she meant everthing to me. I proposed to her in February of ‘89 and we were married four months later. As time passed, our marriage slowly began to disintegrate with the immaturity of our youth. Six years after we married, we were divorced.

Two and a half years ago, we were sitting on some railroad ties at Logan’s school during a cub scout meeting. All the boys were playing on the playground as we sat and watched. Naturally, we sat together (this may seem odd for most divorced couples, but for us it was like instinct- we always stayed together) and this time I just couldn’t help but wonder if she still had those feelings for me. After spending nearly a week trying to convince myself to talk to her about it (”She’s going to think I’m crazy!” , “She will probably laugh and tell me how ridiculous I am”…) I called her and we spent several hours on the phone. We had both been feeling the same thing and after many hard lessons, the time was right to try to put our family back together under one roof. And that is just what we did. We found a house that we all liked and after much haggling, we closed on our present house on July 30th, 1999. This was not the hilight of that day. You see, it was on this day, one year ago, that Faith and I were re-married.

Charlie, thank you so very much for performing our ceremony! This past year has been the happiest of our lives!

We went out to dinner with Stephan and Christine tonight. There is a little place out here in the county called “Big Chief Dakota’s”. Excellent food! I had the opportunity to try calamari. It was rather good! I may have to have it again! The conversation we had was quite amusing. That was the fastest three hourssince, umm… since… well, since lunch with Charlie and Matt!

So many things have passed this last year. Time shared remodelling the house: the bathroom renovation (the floor looks amazing! -thanks to Faith), the new siding on the house, the baseball game I actually enjoyed- all made better because of the people in my life I am blessed to share these things with.

Thursday June 29th, 2000

Very busy day today. Started off building some sort of space vehicles out of legos with Logan. Then I met with Charlie and Matt for lunch. What a great two hours! I was able to catch up on all sorts of things they have been doing! (I may expand on this later…) The final migration at work went extremely well. We actually finished the upgrade a couple of hours early. So naturally I came home and spent those extra hours surfing for newton stuff. Very tired and my downloads are complete, so its off to bed.

Wednesday June 28th, 2000

Stopped on my lunch hour @ Barnes & Noble to pick up the next five books in The Magic Treehouse series for Logan. Also stopped by The Book House (a real used bookstore) and found a hardback copy of The Turing Option by Harry Harrison. I haven’t read it before, but it looks promising.

Bad sounds coming from my car on the way home from downtown. All the way home I kept thinking about how full the garage was, and that I wouldn’t have a place to work on said car. Wouldn’t you know it? I pull up our street and there is my loving wife cleaning out the garage! I tell ya, this gal is the greatest!

Barbecued dinner tonight. Polish sausage on my new grill! They turned out excellent! We ate out on the back porch which was a nice change.

Tuesday June 27th, 2000

I get to keep my office for another week. The V.P. has decreed that we make room for a new director in our building. That room is my office. OK. I guess I feel better being ousted by a Director than by a new Manager. Still, it makes me feel a bit petty.

Logan has been on a reading spree!!! Three books in three days! I hope it continues. He has read the first three books in The Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osborne. ‘There’s hope for that boy, yet’ ::Grin::
–>I stand corrected. Four books.

Eleven more days until Paradise! That’s right, for the first time, our family is taking a real vacation! The sun, the beach, the Space Center!!. We are very excited and can’t wait to get there!

Monday June 26th, 2000

It rained hard again last night. My initial inspection of the leak in the roof seems to indicate that the patch was a success! Woohoo! (sure beats putting on a whole new roof!) Faith has adopted a momcat and her five babies. This, she tells me, is a temporary thing. Thay are awfully cute. This brings the count of animals to: seven cats, one dog and one ten pound guinea pig. Of course the momcat and her babies will get adopted out once they are old enough. We are only fostering them for a few weeks. (Did I just say we? )

Sunday June 25th, 2000

The sun came out long enough for me to _finally_ get my grass cut! Of course the back half of the yard was still semi-submerged from yesterday’s rain. I was also able to get up on the roof (not one of my favorite activities, by the way!) and repair the leak discovered yesterday morning. All in all, if I had to get a leak, this was probably the best place to get it. Right around one of the vents, the roofing cement had worn/cracked away and the flashing from the vent had peeled up. So, a bit (okay a lot- I’m paranoid OK?) of roofing cement and hammer the flashing back down and everything is as good as new! (I hope) More storms are due tonight, so time will tell…

Saturday June 24th, 2000

Woke up a bit early this morning. Spent some time pondering all the home projects we’ve been working on and the obvious lack of progress lately. As I was thinking to myself “I wonder what will come along to motivate me again..”, I glanced towards the ceiling, and lo! my answer had come to me! Divine revelation? perhaps. A small wet spot on my ceiling informed me that my brief respite was over. To action! I grab my clothes, awaken Faith (hmmm… perhaps a double entendre’ ?) and go to get my shoes off the landing. ::screeching halt:: Argghh! One of the cats had decided that my left shoe was a wonderful repository for what ailed it. (yuck!) So, after finding my boots and examining the leak in the roof (last night’s rain was probably the hardest all year) I was able to prepare myself for the repair. Of course, at this point, it started raining again, not hard enough to cause more of a leak, but enough to keep me off the roof. I guess the repair will wait until tomorrow.

Faith and I had a rare opportunity to spend the evening out by ourselves. Of course we felt really strange not having Logan with us, but he was spending good quality time with his grandparents. Not having been out in at least a millenia, we were rather short on ideas of what to do. We ended up going to The Funny Bone at Westport. I haven’t laughed that hard in many years! We really had a good time. Afterwards, we stopped at Denny’s for breakfast (it was about 12:00am by this time)

Friday June 23rd, 2000

Friday June 23rd, 2000

Well, I have had a brief stay of being sentenced to a cube. The guy who is supposed to get my office is on vacation today so I get to wait until monday to change office for cube.

Thursday June 22nd, 2000

Another glorious day away from work. Replaced the nic in Logan’s machine with a new Linksys 10/100 card. Nice little card for fifteen bucks! No more sneakernet! Also configured Samba on my BSD box with minimum hassle. I’m thinking of naming the bsd box ‘Wintermute’ after a character in a William Gibson novel. Around three the phone rang. The animal clinic called and asked Faith to work tonight. Oh well, I guess I can take care of few things around the house while she is gone. My resume on Monster.com has produced a few interesting bites. One in Denver, one in Detroit and one that is mostly (90%) travel. Oh well.

Well, I posted my little note about lpkg to the newton mailing list and someone immediately snatched it off of my website and posted it on their own. This is good for the newton community as his website has been serving the community much longer than I have, but he then sent an e-mail of his own telling everyone on the list that he also had the file available on his site. No nod in my direction for going through the trouble of re-packaging the code for general use. Hrmph.

Wednesday June 21st, 2000

Day two: I decided to take a couple of days off of work and spend some good quality time with my computers at home. The network is up and running. Logan’s machine is having a difficult time handling packets. I suspect a faulty nic. this morning I went to all the hot spots in town: Gateway electronics (finally picked up a Dauphin mini-keyboard, $10.00), Electronics exchange, and then headed down to A-Z South to do a bit of poking around there. Surprise! They’re not there anymore! No notes on the door regarding their whereabouts or anything!! Bummer. Not that there was a great selection of anything there, but it seems that with the success of Ebay that there are fewer and fewer places around town to rifle through old, used equipment. Once home, I grabbed the lpkg package from Debian and began to extract the package for use on my BSD machine. LPKG is a very small and simple command line tool for transferring packages to my Apple Newton. Started to play around with the idea of turning my old compaq laptop into a wearable type thing. Hmmm.. I’ll keep you posted as to how far that really gets.