It’s weird having a three

It’s weird having a three year old child. She says the funniest things. The other night as supper she looks at me and says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I don’t know where she comes up with stuff. Actually, I realized later that that particular phrase is often repeated on PB&J Otter, but still.

The dog, on the other hand, never says anything intelligible. Just barks. Although there are times when I would give cash money to find out what’s going through his brain. He looks at me sometimes like he passionately wants to speak but can’t. Then he usually pees or does something equally endearing.

My good friend Bill and his wife visited last weekend. Bill was the best man in my wedding. His brother and his wife just lost a baby, about as far along as Jen and I were. My heart is broken for them, but I hope that I can somehow help. It’s been over a year and a half for us, and the sting is still there. It’s mostly not so bad, but there are times when it’s worse. This week, for example, I was asked on two occasions about my second child and had to tell people that he was stillborn. Invariably, people feel embarrassed and awkward at having asked, and they fall all over themselves to apologize, and they genuinely try to be helpful.

But it still stings. And I guess it always will.

I’ve heard it said many

I’ve heard it said many times that potty training is an almost instant thing when the child decides that it’s time. I’ve actually been reminding my wife of that for several months. Friday evening, Grace’s potty training switch flipped. She’s a big girl now.

The teachers are now officially gone at Etown. Now the summer begins and our work becomes absolutely insane. I get so annoyed at people who assume I have the summer off just because I work at a school. I guess they think the computer fairies are rebuilding servers, re-imaging labs, upgrading classroom computers, and installing new network hardware.

My dog must think I’m

My dog must think I’m an idiot. I went downstairs after a thunderstorm last night to see if we had taken in any water (we didn’t). In the basement is our house mascot, a stuffed and mounted fox.

Now, I’m not a hunter. I have no ethical or moral issues with hunting, I just don’t have the heart for it. My dad got the fox many years ago. He was going to get rid of it in 1994 at a garage sale, but I took it home because it seemed kind of campy. From being stored in his basement and several of my basements through the years, he has earned the name Dusty.

So Dusty now dwells in my basement, which drives my dog Jack crazy. My basement is split into two halves, a partially finished section and a completely unfinished section. Dusty stays in the unfinished half, which is where I check for water (since there’s no seal or anything over there). Whenever we go into the basement, Jack goes nuts and scratches at the door that divides the two halves of the basement, just dying to get at Dusty.

Sometimes I have a little fun and pretend to make Dusty growl at Jack, which flips him out completely. Usually, I just try to calm him down and take him back upstairs.

This is why he thinks I’m an idiot. I can only imagine what’s going through the dog’s head. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you know there’s a freaking fox living in the basement!? Why won’t you let me get him? I can take him! Why are you holding me back? It’s a fox, don’t you understand??”

My allergies are killing me.

My allergies are killing me. I haven’t regularly taken allergy medicine since about two weeks after I went on the Atkins Diet (in May, 2000). But this week I’m just getting hammered and taking my Actifed knock-off four times a day. If I don’t, my head fills up and I can’t even think straight.

Today was the last day for students at my school. Monday will see the last of the teachers leave for the summer, and then we can really get busy. We’re migrating to Windows2000 servers over the summer, so we have our work cut out for us.

I just looked over at my Far Side desk calendar (my Mom gets me one every Christmas) and noticed that I haven’t flipped it since May 9. Odd. I would think that I would have noticed before now.

REALbasic 4.5 is out of alpha and now in beta. I’ve been lurking on the developer releases mailing list and it’s shaping up to be a pretty cool release. To all those who say REALbasic is for sissies: shut up.

This evening I heard strange

This evening I heard strange sounds coming from the hallway. I left the computer room to find Gracie carrying the squirt bottle that we use when Jack’s barker gets out of control. She was spraying random spots on the walls of the hallway. I don’t know why, exactly. I’m not sure what she was trying to accomplish.

Just installed Silk on Mac OS X 10.1.5. Very cool. Very smooth. Nice job by Unsanity on this one.

Installed Apple Remote Desktop last week. Works just like I expected — it’s pretty much Network Assistant 5.0. The only really interesting feature is that you can observe/control a machine in a window or in full screen, in color or black and white. Strangely, my informal tests lead me to believe that color screen sharing is faster. The other nice thing, aside from the fact that it’s a native OS X application, is that it’s as modal as Network Assistant 4.0 and below. I can start a long file copy and still continue to use my computer. Couldn’t ever do that before.

Jen is feeling much better now. She still gets tired more quickly than she used to, and I expect that to continue for a few weeks or so, but she’s much healthier overall.

I realized something frightening today

I realized something frightening today as I was talking to my friend and co-worker, Mike. Everything that comes out of my mouth has made it through the filter. Everything I say has made the cut, so to speak. I told Mike, “You ought to hear the stuff that I keep to myself if you think I say stupid things. This is stuff that the filter doesn’t catch.”

Mike replied, “I’ve turned off filtering because it used too many CPU cycles.”

I always thought we were just getting raw sockets from Mike. Now I know.

Well, Gracie is three years

Well, Gracie is three years old as of Saturday. I can’t believe it. She’s so big now. I can’t remember when it happened, but all of a sudden she went from being a baby to being a little kid. And the stuff she says and comes up with these days. I can’t believe how fast time is going with her around.

Her new swing set was a big hit, which is good because it’s too big to return and it was quite an investment. My father-in-law and I put landscape timbers around it and filled the area with playground mulch so she can have a soft landing when she inevitably falls off of the swing, slide, or deck.

We weren’t sure how her party was going to go. On her first birthday and her second birthday, it rained, so I wound up grilling in the rain while everybody crowded into our slightly-too-small-for-that-sort-of-thing home. This year, we made it. It rained just before the party, but it stopped as everyone was arriving. Fortunately, we have enough mature trees that the backyard didn’t even get wet while it rained.

Got a new fridge for

Got a new fridge for the office at Lowe’s last night. Everybody seems pretty happy with it. That’s good. It was time for a new fridge anyway.

From one of my favorite sites, Crazy Apple Rumors Site: Fatal Flaw In New iBooks. “I put it down on my desk and immediately noticed something was wrong,” Gregory said. “The hinge mechanism should be away from me, on the other side of the laptop. Instead, I opened it up and the lid was facing me. It’s useless to me like this. I can’t believe they let this ship.” For some reason, the stupid, absurd stuff they write just makes me laugh out loud. I guess because they sound so much like all the real whiners in the Mac community.