Well received

Darby says her project was well received by her teacher and class. We won't know until a little later, but she may be invited to participate in the school-wide science fair.

Late nighter

You don't even want to know how late I was up working on Darby's project. I just couldn't have her up past midnight, and she was done writing out her content, so I put her to bed and finished putting together her presentation and typing/editing her report. I am pretty darn tired.

T-I-R-E-D.

First accident

I know what you're thinking, I already reported on my somewhat recent first accident. But it took me nearly 14 years to have that accident.

My little brother, it only took him a month. One month after he got his driver's license and already he's has his first car accident. Dad is going to be... rather upset.



UPDATE
Hmmmm, dad took it much better than expected. But he ain't happy.

The damage is minor, so I'm sure that helped. But still, there was an exchange of info and he hit her from behind, so I don't see how their insurance doesn't go up...

I loathe science projects

'nuff said.

I was hoping we'd mostly finish Darby's project tonight. But it ain't happenin'. We'll be very lucky to get it done at a resonable hour tomorrow at the rate it's going.

Choir bells

The girls started choir practice today for Christmas mass. I was hesitant to let Shelby join, but I guess we'll at least see how she does behavior-wise after a couple weeks.

Another thousand miles

The way back was more grueling than the way out there, but we made it, however late/early.

While it was good that we went, the fact that we did won't help me dig out of the hole I was already in before we left. There's much to be done. For example, Darby's final science project is due in a few days, and we'll be working on it the next several nights. And I already know there's a big pile at work.

I haven't even started to think about Christmas. I know that I need to, but I'm not going to have time for at least a week, if not two. And then it will be imperative. It's like I've got yet another thousand miles in front of me, but only my two bare feet to get me through it, making that last grueling thousand miles seem like a joyride.


(speaking of Christmas, it occurs to me that the company party is in 13 days... then it will be just a couple weeks to Christmas... bleh)

So long, sis

After some last minute family visiting today, I took my sister to the airport for her flight back to NYC. I've since gotten the call that she's home safe. The family here in Tucson is very thankful that she was able to join us, even for so short a time. We're hoping for a similar reunion in the Summer.

Tonight the girls and I took it easy, and spent the whole evening with grandma. We watched a movie together while the laundry was going. I've since packed up everything for our departure tomorrow. Oh, how I look so very much forward to the 16-hour drive, away from these darned 75-degree days. Get me the heck out of this beautiful place, back to work, and school, and science projects...

Thankful for so much

What an incredible Thanksgiving. One for the record books. One to be, well, thankful for.

We started with breakfast at a cousins, followed by final dinner preparations leading into a best-in-recent-memory family Thanksgiving dinner. Grandma was there, of course, as well as her daughter (my aunt) and all four of her daughters, not to mention all three of her daughter's grandchildren. Then there was my sister, my children, and I, representing grandma's younger son's portion of the family. Unfortunately there was no representation from grandma's oldest son's family, but we hope to see at least her son (my uncle) on Friday.

Once everyone had gone, Shawna and I spent a couple hours with grandma. We also used the opportunity to get some of grandma's family history recollections on video tape.

We rounded out the day attending what I could only call a Thanksgiving party (lots of people, music, food, alcohol), where we met up with more long-time family friends. Of course we couldn't turn down more turkey as more than a couple hours had passed since our Thanksgiving dinner.

All-in-all it was a very memorable Thanksgiving day for everyone involved. I don't remember the last time my sister and I were together on this holiday (probably when I was a teenager). This was the first Thanksgiving in Arizona for my sister, and it had been years since I spent Thanksgiving here. And short of having all three of her children present (not likely because of my father's work schedule), it will be a difficult Thanksgiving to beat for grandma. Hopefully it won't be quite so long until we're all together like this again.

Most of all we are thankful that grandma is still with us (she's 76), and for each Thanksgiving that she continues to be with us.



(P.S. We're also thankful for the best Shelby picture ever [Shelby with her mouth strapped shut])

Pictured again

One of the primary tasks of the day was holiday photo taking. Though the girls and I had recently taken care of that ourselves, we're talking pictures of the more historic variety here, similar to the effort made this past summer. We had photos taken of the kids and I, my sister, and our grandmother together. While we were there, we had photos taken of my sister and her nieces, as well as photos of my sister and I together. It had probably been a couple decades since the sis and I sat for professional photos together. Here's the preview.

We met with an aunt and cousin after photos for a late lunch, which worked out well because we had plans for a late dinner with old friends. In between lunch and dinner we dropped grandma off and Shawna prepared her contribution to tomorrows Thanksgiving meal in the form of pumpkin cannoli.


Our dinner with long-time close family friends was fantastic as always (the kids and I make it a point to do it whenever we're out this way). It had probably been almost twenty years since Shawna had seen these close family friends of ours, so there was much catching up to do.

Overdue reunions

Fourteen and a half years ago my little brother was 1-year old, I had just graduated high school, and my sister last saw her grandmother. In fact, it was at my high school graduation in Philadelphia, which my grandmother from Arizona attended, that my sister last saw our grandmother. She's been busy since then, but has been no less concerned about grandma's health, so she agreed to join me here in Tucson for the holiday. I picked her up at the airport today, and the long overdue reunion with grandma went quite splendidly. The five of us (the kids and I, sis, and grandma) went to dinner to catch up on old times. Starting tomorrow we re-introduce Shawna to the rest of the family in the lead-up to Thursday festivities. Hopefully the next all-out reunion won't be so long in the making.

Tucson in the Fall

When we left Oklahoma it was under 40 degrees and the high that day was supposed to be like 44. Today in Tucson it got up to 78, and it was awesome. We LOVE Tucson in the Fall.



As a reward to the children for their mostly good behavior during our 16+ hour journey, after lunch today I took them to the best park in town (Reid Park), and let them enjoy themselves for a couple hours. What made it particularly swell was the fact that all of the Tucsonian children were still in school (my daughters are in the fortunate position to go to a school that takes the entire week of Thanksgiving off), so it was almost like we had the park to ourselves. There were a few below-school-age children along with their parents, but I don't recall seeing any older kids. We left right about when school was letting out locally, knowing it would probably get a lot more busy. It really is a very nice park. Several playgrounds, an awesome duck pond with a waterfall system, and a rose garden. There are ball fields and a performing arts center, but we didn't get to make use of those.

In between checking out playgrounds, the girls and I took-in the extensive rose garden. There's a gazebo in the center with some benches, where we sat a good long while and took in the peacefulness on such a nice, quiet day, with the aroma of roses filling the air. I know it sounds lame for a guy to describe it, so if it helps, Darby said it was one of the most peaceful places she had ever been to. I also used the opportune background to take cute pics of the girls.



The rest of the day was pretty much reserved for family visiting.

1000 miles in a day

We got up bright and early this morning -- okay maybe dull and early -- with the intention of traversing one-third of a continent. By midnight. We got on our way reasonably on time and kept it pretty much to business. Two meal/gas stops, four gas only stops. No major diversions (but one close call). Sixteen and a half hours later we pulled into our destination, at 11:30pm local time (12:30am Oklahoma time), just in time.

Hello Tucson, it's good to be back. Yes. Yes, I know we were just here (nearly fours months ago). But it's Thanksgiving-ish, and much of our family is here, so I don't think anyone will mind. I think it'll all go over quite nicely.

Unfortunately part of the reason we're here isn't so cheery. Grandma (Great-Grandma to the girls) is having non-trivial health issues. And we're worried. A number of us family types are actually rather worried.

I was fortunate to have gotten to know my Great-Grandmother pretty well. She lived until I was 13, and I had gotten to visit with her in Ventura, California many a time as a youth.

It occurred to me, when pondering my children's Great-Grandmother's health, that they had not spent nearly as much time with her as what would have been preferable. It also occurred to me that it was my fault. And so the only thing to do was to try to right the wrong in the best way available. We'd try to get in as many visits as possible for at least as long as her health is a question mark. We'll go out at Thanksgiving. We'll go out in the summer. We'll go out the next Thanksgiving... until we're sure many more years are ahead for her.

So here we are. It's Thanksgiving and we are here. In Tucson. The kids will have all week to spend with their Great-Grandmother, and it pleases me that I have provided for them this opportunity, however overdue it actually is.

Food that pays you to eat it

Darby found a Chilean Peso (yes, a coin) in her egg roll tonight. I'm told she freaked out. Her mother called the restaurant about it, though I'm sure not much will come of it.

So just how much is that "CLP" worth? At the moment, 0.001895 US dollars. 526.75 more of those and she'll have a whole dollar. Anybody hungry for egg rolls?

Nosedive

So Shelby got another tally today (for a total of 8). AND a swat by the principal. AND she's been told by the principal that each subsequent tally this week will result in an additional swat. AND she still didn't have all of her classwork finished. AND her mom scolded her in a way I've never seen before.

It's been a really bad week for Shelby. Really bad.

Aftertaste

When I picked up Shelby from school, she had no homework, which was briefly pleasing. But she had three more tallies (7 for the week), and when I inspected her desk, I found four crumpled, incomplete classwork papers. So we brought those home and she got to spend all night doing work again. I told her I will be inspecting her desk daily, and that if she doesn't want to spend the rest of the school year doing school work at night as well as during the day, she had better focus harder on getting the work done during the day.

Grim anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of the beginning of several unfortunate events. The home life took a sizeable downturn at this point last year and has at best reached a flatline since then. While I am pleased that the trendline is not still downward, at this stage the possibility for a downslide is equal that of any upside potential. I'm basically just trying to remain very still, as to not interrupt the delicate equilibrium that has been reached.

The best flu shot ever

As if that's a way to describe a flu shot. But that's how it went down. That shot-giving lady was a real pro. Had I not been watching her stick me, I might not have realized she had done it. I was expecting something quite different considering how badly Shelby freaked just a few weeks ago.

The icing

As if Shelby's behavior yesterday wasn't enough... Today she got her mid-2nd quarter progress report, and it's ugly. The ugliest she's ever had. She has no As, 2 solid Bs, 3 barely Bs (80s), a C, and a D. There's also an S- in there. Considering she had straight Bs on her first quarter report card, it's like she's turned her attention span off completely in just a few weeks.

Darby has all As and Bs on hers, which is not unexpected.

More of slacker Shelby

I thought we had a good streak going, but once again Shelby was just covering up the problem (she's gotten really good at that). She "forgot" her assignment pad over the weekend, so she had a "normal" weekend, homework wise and discipline wise. Turns out she had an adverse note from her teacher in the assignment pad, along with 18 pages of incomplete classwork to catch up with (which she had crumpled up and shoved into her desk). So tonight we had all that work, plus her regularly assigned homework. It took her about four hours to get it all done. I'd like to say poor kid, but it's all of her own doing. And she didn't help herself with her behavior today. She got herself four tallies with which to sugar coat the day.

Yep, she's grounded, if you're wondering.

Final experimentation

It wasn't nearly as nice today as it was Friday (or Saturday for that matter), but we did get the remainder of our experimental trials in. Now we need to crunch the numbers and work on the presentation. Trouble is the rough draft is due in a few days.

Early thanks

This evening was the annual church Thanksgiving Dinner. It amazes me the turnout to this thing each year. We had almost thirty people at our family table alone. They did do a better job of food dispersal this year. In previous years you had to wait in a buffet-style line which took forever. By the time the last person got their food the first person had finished their food and was in line for seconds. This year each table had it's own food delivered to it to be passed around the table.

Holiday pictured

The girls and I got our holiday pictures taken this afternoon. We get them back in ten days (they've really shortened the wait, used to be ~21 days). Here's a barely viewable preview.

More experimentation

I left work early today so that I could pick-up Darby from school, as well as the the device my father made for Darby a couple weeks ago. We're running out of time to get her science project experiment run, and we've missed a couple of good weather days already due to transport vehicle unavailability (the one drawback to making such a device has become transporting it in something other than a pickup truck).

We got a couple trials in (a trial being 5 measured hits), but ran out of sunlight, so we'll have to try again this weekend.

Cinematic passing

I was informed today that my favorite filmaker (as recently noted) is getting out of the business. It's a crying shame, and we should have a funeral to morn this day.


Okay, so I've proven my idiocy once again. I'm not a frequenter of The Onion, so I am not familiar with the fact that it's a parody news site. As for the above "news", please forget I mentioned it. I would be happy if I didn't feel so stupid.

Swashbuckling Shelby

I got to see Shelby bout at fencing tonight for the first time in quite awhile. There was several months there where Darby's softball practices and games made it impossible for me to see Shelby fence. I've been to several of Shelby's practices in the last few weeks, but tonight was the first time they whipped out the scoring equipment. I got a number of decent pictures, but what I didn't get was video of her flailing the sword around as her arm got tired. It was pretty funny looking, and one of the parents said it looked like she was "swashbuckling".

Just burn it

I went to an information security symposium today, and the keynote speaker was a digital forensics expert, the director of the Defense Cyber Crime Institute.

Let me just say this... WOW. If you've ever done anything (really) wrong, and you were stupid enough to store something about it on electronic media, unless you do a couple things, you are really screwed. These guys can get just about any piece of data off of just about any sort of destroyed media. They showed us examples of someone having krinkled and then cut a floppy disk into multiple pieces, and even though they didn't find all the pieces in the trash they were able recover enough incriminating data from the fragments to put the guy away for life. There were many other extremely impressive examples.

Basically, AFTER using a quality multi-pass secure deletion program like BCWipe to erase your media, you should just burn it or melt it down, or otherwise make it no longer remotely distinguishable as former electronic media. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure they're going to be able to get it, in which case, as I mentioned, you're screwed.

First to worst

It's official. The Eagles are in a world of hurt, and have fallen to last place in their division after an appearance in the Superbowl less than a year ago. Is it all TO's fault? Probably not. But that whole bit of drama certainly hasn't helped to keep the focus. Of course, some rushing would help, too. At this point, I'll just be glad to see a playoff appearance. But their division is a tough one, so much has to turn around. I'm... non-optimistic.

As heard on ESPN about the Eagles... "where have all the good times gone?"


Update, 7 Nov
As alluded by Leo in the comments, T.O. is officially outie. In my best AOL-guy-sign-off-voice: Good-bye.


Update, 8 Nov
I wouldn't have thought it would happen, but the man has apologized big time. Not that I think it will help. It's not unappreciated or anything, but I'm pretty sure he only did it because his agent said something like, "dude, you are so screwed... no team is ever going to sign you for more than a year at a time because of this." Or something to that affect. If the Eagles don't reverse their decision, I really think he has seriously harmed own his ability to get a future high-dollar multi-year contract. At least not without some big time stipulations that allow the team to dump him easily for similar behavior.

Little chickens

Took the girls to see Chicken Little. It was quite humorous. I could go on a little about how this first non-Pixar computer-animated Disney film wasn't quite a crisp visually as the Pixar films, but who would really care or notice? It was entertaining, and still rather nice to look at, so I won't get all wrapped up in those semantics. The girls loved it, and I'm sure we'll own it four to six months from now when it's released to DVD.

Cheap gas?

After dinner with the kids, before Darby headed off to a sleepover birthday party, I got me some "cheap gas". $1.99/gallon, a level it hasn't been in many months. Yet a year ago I would have gasped at the thought of considering $2-ish gas cheap. My how things have changed.

One of the great mysteries: Solved

If you're like me, and most people aren't, you fulfilled your DVD-buying obligation for the week by picking up... no, NOT Episode III... the Special Edition of Office Space. It's actually called the "Special Edition with Flair", but I'll touch on that in a moment.

What caught my eye as I was going through the packaging was the coupon for $5 off a red Swingline stapler. So I'm thinking, hey cool, I could use that. I was assuming that even the best possible manual stapler in the world would be like, what, ten bucks? So then five bucks off gives me a five dollar stapler, right?

Um, no.

The bloody thing, as novel as it is, has an in excess of $30 MSRP. Can you belief THAT? Not even electric for thirty bucks. Well, no red stapler for me. I mean, how many sheets of paper do I have to put together before I reap my return on investment? I did one of those Cosmo Kramer reality-realizing full-body-convulsions when I saw that price.

But now I know. Now I know why the heck, in the movie, Milton is so darned determined to keep his red swingline stapler. Because he paid so dang much for the thing! One of the great mysteries in the universe has been solved!


So I did watch the movie (for the [insert large number]th time) and all the deleted scenes. I have to say that one of my big disappointments with this "special edition" DVD was that it wasn't an uncut edition with all the deleted scenes put back in or something. I was also disappointed that the "with Flair" tagline in the DVD title didn't ring true. I really expected to open the box and find a silly pin in there or something. But no. They didn't even try. Only the new special features served as flair. Bummer. Shoot, even my Episode III (yes, okay, I bought it, too) DVD came with a silly medallion thingy that I would consider flair-like. So why couldn't Office Space of all movies?

I'm glad I picked up the movie that was long on my wishlist, but I think the studio missed a supreme opportunity to make this "special edition" truly special to true fans.

Newsflash: I'm stark raving mad

Today's (screencap) quote of the day hints at my true nature:

"Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad."
    -Norm Papernick

I VERY OFTEN laugh without cause. Yet I have NOT found the true meaning of happiness.

It begins

It's opening night, and people are excited. Hopefully, this will mean the beginning of a great future for Oklahoma City.


Update
The score made for a fairy tale... beginning.

It may not last for as long as we'd like (since it's technically not planned permanent), but I like the way this looks.


More Articles
ESPN.Com: Everything's A-OK for Hornets on Opening Night
Sacramento Bee: Oklahoma City ready for its moment in sun
New York Times: Welcome to Oklahoma. Please Stay Awhile.
The Oklahoman: It's a cheken-and-egg argument
ESPN.Com: Odds OK for Hornets to beeline back to New Orleans