Eeek!

A mouse. Mice.

They scurry to and fro, and make merriment. Dust lover. Waste dweller.

One little bastard has just run in and out of my basement office in plain view.

I search the beams and boards in my basement ceiling, searching for their routes...where are they making their ingress and egress to my kitchen? Are these cobwebs 83 years old, or 83 minutes old?

I plug every crack and crevice with steel wool...I don't intend to give them any free shortcuts as they ramble throughout my home, the world of humans, a place where they are most unwelcome indeed. Do they eat the poisonous biscuits when two little girls (and two messy adults) scatter crumbs everywhere?

Sophie and I just finished reading, as our bedtime story of late, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH." Do I feel remorse when I see the half-eaten Tomcat brand bait block? No.

Lo, I am become Death, the destroyer of mouse worlds.

Nearing Solstice

Hi.

Not much happening here these days, except for the constant frenzy of activity involved with working at a mail order place during the holiday season and the usual zillion tasks surrounding the upbringing of two children.

I'm only a few short days away from the winter solstice...then things should really get ugly. Just as the seasonal climate shift lags behind the apogee and perigee (i.e., the hottest months of summer happen well after the summer solstice), so does my typical seasonal pattern of depression. I've been seeing a pretty good therapist (who is also helping me with job related issues, as in considering possibilities other than my current somewhat dissatisfying position), so I'm optimistic that this year will be less traumatic than others have been.

Usually by February/March I am more than slightly off-kilter.

I am debating taking the RHCE exam in early January. I can't decide whether I prefer the thrill ride of system administration or the caffeinated buzz of programming. We're also planning a midwinter sojourn to Isla Mujeres (see previous post), and so I'm trying to decide how much grief I want to receive from my employer...as in, do I really think I deserve two weeks off in January?

RHCE is expensive, but it's pretty well-respected as certifications go, and part of me really craves some credentials.

Since I have been reading about the link between sleep deprivation and obesity (check), diabetes (not yet), etc. etc. (we'll see!), I think I'm going to go up and get into my bed and drift away into the sweet dreamscape.

Ta ta for now.

Faith Hope and Love

Which reminds me of a Meatloaf classic: "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"

Maybe one and a half on a bad day. Can you guess which one I'm missing?

I stumbled across my wife's blog about Catholicism today. My first reaction was "Oh wow, she's really into this stuff" followed by "Where's she getting all this extra time to run TWO blogs?" Then I noticed she hadn't posted anything on the Catholic blog between March and a few days ago.

I have a standard remark about my wife's conversion to Catholicism. "I spend all my adolescent years trying to get away from Catholic women, and what happens? My wife converts."

But seriously folks...

Something she wrote here made me think about responding on her blog, but since it would clash with the curtains over there I thought I'd just write it on my own blog.

She writes:
I am, however, offended deeply at the notion that God gave me depression to teach me these lessons. I can’t bear to hear people say that God gave a child cancer for the purpose of building character or correcting a fault. The verse is “God turns all things to good,” not “God does all things for good.” This may seem like a minor adjustment to the notion of how God works in the world, but it is a crucial one.

For me, the best thing about abandoning my faith in the supernatural is being set free from questions like these. Because I no longer worry about why God lets one baby die from malaria and another live, or how that might be turned to good, or that maybe S/He could have chosen a kinder lesson for the moral improvement of the parents or whatever. Things happen and I don't have to try to make sense of a supreme being who lets bad things happen to good people, or good things happen to bad people, or lets anything happen, really.

I'm not trying to dispute anything my wife describes in her post. In fact, I could really relate to her description of giving things over to God via accepting them into her heart, or however she eloquently phrased it. I feel the same kind of peace when I accept reality for what it is instead of trying either to push it away from me or to consider myself as separate from it in the first place. I think we work through a lot of things in similar ways, but I don't see any "God" in any of it, and she does.

No, the thing that struck me was just a profound sense of relief. These theodicean sort of questions really used to bug me. I can't really claim to be totally free, but thank God I'm free from this!

The worst thing about deciding I'm done with faith is the gulf it creates between me and the missus, and the difficulty it poses in raising our kids. But hey, if James Carville and Darth Matalin can get over their differences, what's a little religious disagreement between friends?

Oh, how it slays me

This has been in the back of my mind ever since I saw it a few years ago:
Watch me

Eggmaster Simpson

Had a hard time deciding between the Rock and Roll Tshirt or the Linux Penguin Tshirt.

Long Live Rock!

Where the hell am I?

Uh, mostly in the World of Warcraft, although tonight I plan to take an extended trip to the world of Harry Potter.

DD1 and I are going to a midnight release "event" at a nearby Barnes & Noble. I'm not sure what the "event" part will be other than standing in line wringing our hands with the other hundreds of HP fans. I may wear a sign around my neck saying "Spoilers will be physically assaulted" and a very gruff, mean expression on my face.

The upside of going to the midnight release is that I will have my copy of the book before my wife has hers. Yes, you read it right; we buy two copies of the book and give one away after we've read it in parallel. Wrestling each other for a single copy would be extremely undignified, especially in front of our children.

I'm having a good summer. In spite of all the food I'm eating, my body shape seems to be plateau-ing at small-weather-balloon level. This week I tried lifting weights; I was so sore a few days later that I have not yet returned to them. Maybe tonight or tomorrow since the soreness has left me more or less.

Wifey asked me (in a roundabout way, i.e. by suggesting it in her blog) that I should tell the story of my correspondence with Daniel Pinkwater. And I will do that. Some other time.

Ta ta for now.

Will the real Eggmaster please stand up?

In September, 1987, a young man from mid-Michigan took occupancy of a dorm room in Ann Arbor. Dissatisfied with his given, Christian name, he turned over the potato-shaped construction paper name tag that had been taped to the outside of the door of his cell and (perhaps not knowing the implications for his future ability to have, uh, "meaningful interactions" with "members" of the "opposite sex") wrote the word "Eggmaster."

Shortly thereafter, his roommate (not to be one-upped in nerdliness) flipped his name tag and wrote "Warp," which didn't stick and--by the consensus of his fellow subterranean dorm-dwellers--was changed to "Psycho." That turned out to be the keeper, although I always liked "Warp."

Flash forward to the year 2007. The Eggmaster googles himself and finds, to his horror (or, at least, his extreme irritation), that in the twenty years since he took the fateful step of becoming the Master of all Eggs great hordes of pretenders to the title have sprung up.

I'd like to know if any of these other so-called 'eggmasters' can date their nicknames prior to September, 1987. It's not like I can forbid anyone from using this nickname, but I had hoped when I chose it that the name would be random enough to be somewhat unique...that I was blazing a trail into uncharted realms of dorkdom.