Hurry! Wait. Hurry! Wait.

When I send people on jobs, I tell them: often, people are paying you to have your skills on demand. This is the case here. I'm here for a long time, but unlike most of the folks here, I'm not constantly busy at all. So on the one hand, I feel bad for charging them for being here... but on the other hand, I understand that I'm a security feature.

They just asked me to hang until 10-11pmish. That's AOK by me! Heck, if I'm not home, I should be billing.

:-)

iChatting with an 8-year-old.

My son is IMing me, while I'm onsite in Florida.

Not only is it incredibly cute, it's an excercise in patience. Because once you see the little "the other person is typing" icon, you have to: 1) Wait for a good while, and 2) not interrupt. If I type to him while he's typing, it throws him off and he starts over go talk about the current comment. Begin cycle.

He's SO cute, my biggest guy.

Today looks like it could be a moderate lull day... but in saying that, I probably jinxed myself. Tomorrow gets crazy towards the evening. Hey! I'm halfway home! yay!

Long days, good days.

I miss my kids! I miss Maggie! Aaaah!

I was onsite at 7am this morning. I will probably be onsite until 10 or 11pm tonight. These are long days, but not bad ones.

People are working their butts off, here. One of the Creative Director's offered to baptize me in the Marriott fountain, because I'm a "show virgin."

I've got it easy. I only work sporadically... they just need me nearby in case something breaks. The artists and production folks are, like, non-stop. All day, all night.

Whoa.

gonna be 14-16 hours, today.

This is so cool. I've worked with these folks for a long time. But I've never gone on one of their shows before. It's amazing to watch these people in their element.

I started my day at 6:45am. It's 6:32pm. We're probably going to be here until 8, 9, or 10.

Coolness.

Uh. Oh.

Pardon the formatting of this post, if it doesn't look right. I'm posting to the blog via email.

I'm on the Delta flight to Orlando. It's 9:48am. I've only been travelling for 3 hours. Already, though, I miss my family SO much, it's kind of amazing.

I hate to fly. When I was taking off, I just prayed and thought of my wife and kids. There's turbulence right now on the plane, and, well... I'm just going to pray and think of my wife and kids.

I'm such a baby about flying.

One of the other people going to the show is also on this plane. Strangely, it's the only other person going to the show who works for my company.

Sideways shaking just scares the shit out of me. I'm going to watch an Episode of 24.

Tears of the girl.

I'm going away today... helping a client with a big show in Florida. It'll be the longest I've ever been away from my kids. It's funny: only five days, but it seems like forever. My daughter was crying last night... she misses me already.

Well, me too. I miss my family terribly and pre-emptively.

How lucky am I?

Speaking of pre-emptive... I feel kind of pre-emptively incompetent. Like I don't have any clue as to what the hell I'm going to do down there. Yikes! Should be interesting, at least. My mentor says something like "In every situation, figure out what you can learn." So I will. My boss told me that I should remember to act properly in spite of how anyone else might act. I wonder if this has elements of built-in drama, where people are EXPECTED to freak out... that'll be interesting to see.

Peace out, yo. Love ya.

C-c-c-c-c-c-cold.

So. I couldn't sleep last night. Too nervous about collections. I tried to wear myself down around 5pm yesterday by running five miles and doing weights. No go. So I got up at 3:30am and ran five miles and did weights. Again. Different muscle groups on the weights, though. I came home a little early because I needed rest, and...

...the FUCKING FURNACE DIED AGAIN.

So I'm sitting here, freezing. Waiting for the repair guys. It's been 8 hours. And counting.

The kids are all huddled in Jackson's room, with a small electric heater. Maggie hung out in front of the fireplace for a while, but went upstairs. I'm in here with two candles burning...

Oh well. It could be worse. It could be raining.

Artifacts.

I just found my Macworld Expo pass from 1998. I put down my title as "Technical Dog." Considering the name of my current company, that's pretty funny.

It's going to snow tonight. It might be a lot (In Westchester, NY terms, at least.) So we've stocked up on supplies, put out the lights and matches and candles, and have moved a good deal of firewood into the mud room. The power often goes out during the first "big" storm of the season, since everything that's going to break or collapse hasn't yet done so.

The puppy just came to my window, peeked in, and ran off. My home office is partially underground, so the big windows are at ground level. That was very cute.

Maggie and I were talking about adopting a fourth child, today. It's a daunting and ultimately beautiful possibliity, but one that I think I'm too afraid to undertake.

Top 100 list.

I'm making a list of the top 100 songs in my life, so far. I'm up to 52. I'm compiling this list by going through all 22,200 songs in my collection, to try and job my brain. It's pretty hilarious. I'm trying not to edit due to embarrassment. When I'm done, I'll edit them down to a 2 minute mix, and post a link here. Fun!

Starburst odyssey.

I decided to go crazy and buy a sandwhich, chips, coke, and starburst from the little cafe here in the building. The starburst are brutally stale. Strangely, I like them that way.

wtF?

I spent a large chunk of the day doing collections work. The crazy thing is, not a single person claimed they didn't owe us the money that is outstanding. They simply aren't paying. 100 days, 120 days, 140 days... it's just ridiculous. One company, a large ad agency, claimed they will only pay one invoice a month (this is news to us, and they didn't used to do this, either)... since we were billing weekly, that means that it will take 9 months to pay 2 months worth of invoices.

WTF, man...

Anyway. Tomorrow's a new day. Cheers.

Whenever I hurt myself...

...I think "Boy, my Dad would be glad about this."

Sad, but true. Every since he wrote me and wished me dead, that thought occurs to me almost every time I accidentally do something painful. In this case, I scraped my knuckle trying to unplug my youngest boy's nebulizer.

Bleah.

My ass hurts.

Seriously. I spent the day falling on my ass. Over and over and over and over.

I like snowboarding. I'm bad at it. My son is better than me... but he doesn't like it.

So, next week, we're spending some money that we don't have, by hiring a babysitter and taking the four oldest in my family back to the mountain. Three skiers and one snowboarder. I'll be taking a three-hour private lesson. I want to LEARN, baby!

First time snowboarder. Yeeehah!

I'm going snowboarding tomorrow!

My oldest boy and I are heading out early tomorrow morning. He's a skateboarder, and has been snowboarding once before. We're packed and ready. How ready? We made little layouts of ourselves on the floor with all our gear. At 5:30 am, all we have to do is wing on our stuff, hop in the car, and get movin'. A quick stop at the 24-hour deli, and we're ROCKING, baby!

I'm nervous about trying something new. But I'm excited. My son? He's RARING to go.

But that's his nature. My oldest boy is one of those generative personalities, who wants to engage the world and infuse it with his own amazing brand of energy.

Gay marriage, gay adoption.

Okay. I’m going to say this again. Whoever thinks gay marriage is a bad idea is wrong. There are lots of issues that have two valid sides… or at least two understandable ones… but this NOT one of them. Same with gay couples adopting children.

While the Supreme Court chooses not to hear (and thereby affirms the decision about) a case involving two men not being allowed to adopt a child, thousands of children go parentless and underloved. The timing on this is so sad. As children across Asia suddenly find themselves without homes or families, our highest court does nothing to allow potential adoptees, both home and abroad, to find a family.

What would Jesus do, indeed?

A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

That's James 1:8. And's it the truth. You can't be all crazy-ass scatterbrained and get shit done. You know? This is true in life, love, work, and marriage. Man. I rarely read the Letters of the new testament... I'm kind of a Matthew, Mark, and Luke kind of guy. But this sentence jumped out at me.

Anyway. Hi.

Paddle Tennis: This game is MINE.

Not that I’m any good at it… but holy smokes, is this game right up my alley. It’s a combination of tennis and ping pong. You play outdoors in freezing temperatures (temperature inappropriateness is weird trait of mine… I often wear t-shirts in 30 degree weather), you can play 6 or 8 sets in an outing, and it’s pretty fast-paced.

ROCK.

There was a potentially awkward moment when I had to decline going out for beers… and when they kept up (nicely, by the way), I told them that I don’t drink... ever. The awkward part was when I joked: “But the next time you're gonna shoot smack, I’m THERE.”

Damn nervous humor reflex! Fortunately, they rolled with it.

Wrestle, wrestle.

"When you are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with you. "

I'm trying to decide how I feel about this one. I could use some help, here.

Receivables panic. Blessed life.

I'm in a money panic. I've got four clients paying us VERY slowly. Slow enough that it's making me nervous.

My son asked me if I make more money than everyone because I own the company. I said: "the weird thing about owning a company is that you either make less money than everyone else in the company, or more money than everyone." He said: "Which do you do?" I said: "We're doing just fine." Which we are, I guess. But for the moment, it's the "less" option. Ah, holidays.

I have to remember how lucky I am to have these sorts of problems, you know?

Avoid the Prolific PL3507 Chipset like the plague.

That's all. Seriously. Back to parenting and politics and religion and stuff when I recover from this disaster. The attempts continue.

I wasn't looking for the left.

So, I flung my iBook off my desk. It was an accident. The hard drive got destroyed.

Opening up an iBook G4 is no small task. So I felt super-cool about taking the thing apart, putting the varios sets of screws into little baggies, diagramming where they came from... I was SO on it. I left the computer open-but-covered for two days, while I waited for my new hard drive to arrive. In the meantime, I worked off of the incredibly painful external drive, hooked up to an eMac at work. Thank goodness for backups.

So, today, I spend a whole bunch of time putting the iBook back together. Only 1 extra screw! (Yikes!)

The iBook seemed fine, but the cloning the data kept failing. Oh, lordy, I thought. I'm going to have to open this thing up again. But it turns out that the EXTERNAL DRIVE went bad. And, of course, I didn't back THAT up, since I was only using it for a day or two.

It's been four hours now, and I'm still trying to get data off the drive. Ugh.

My resolution for 2005.

My resolution for 2005 is to cut my response times. At work and at home.

Happy 2005, folks! ROCK.

Dear Spencer:

Sorry to delete your post. It was a bit too mean-spirited for me.

It seems that you don't understand the difference between "discipline" and "referring to something as 'evil.'" We discpline our kids, we rein them, we try to modify socially inapprorpriate behaviors, we punish them for wrongdoings. Etc., etc.

We even get pissed off sometimes.

What you're missing, Spencer, is the fact that I was not using hyperbole. My father is decent guy at heart, but he is mentally ill. He decides that people are evil, and are against him. And then he begins to act in "defense" against this perceived evil.

This is what separated him from his mother and brother for 15 years... when he decided they were evil. By evil, he means "do not deserve oxygen." That is a quote... and one of the significantly less obscene ones, at that.

Anyway: My point was this... watching my kids act the same way as I did, and my reacting to them rationally, has allowed me to view my own childhood in an evolving light.

These rational reactions very, very often include real discipline.

I have to say, Spencer... you jump to Big Conclusions based on a single blog entry. Feel free to email me your home address, and I'll send you some name-deleted copies of various police reports and letters from my Dad that illustrate the point.

On second thought, don't.

Please don't post here again. Thanks.