#blessed

my girl

my boy

my bride

i came home to a cool and dry home. i had supper waiting for me in the fridge. i kissed my beautiful children as they slept. i kissed my beautiful, steadfast, do-it-all bride good night. i poured chilled white wine into a glass. i rubbed my cat's nose. i thanked the good Lord for the life He has given me and asked that i may make of it a pleasing offering to Him. despite upheavals and uncertainties, i know i am blessed with wealth beyond measure.

kooky

mama's modified no-bake cookies. (the last one. mine, all mine.)

the babies made no-bake cookies yesterday, so i complimented them at breakfast for how good they were.

the boy looked a little concerned. "how many did you eat?"

i held up two fingers and reiterated, "two."

he hopped off his seat and ran to the refrigerator just to make sure daddy left some for them. something sad and sweet about that, isn't there?

also, he and his sister watched some real, live hockey today.

watching hockey camp.

-30-

once it began leaking then quickly became official, it didn't take long for word of charley west's demise to spread on the twitters.

hot off the press

reading the reaction from former colleagues and alum from my paper is like sitting in on your own funeral.

me? i'm still in shock. not even sure i should be writing this in such an accessible forum. (with its worldwide following of six whole people — for whom i am grateful, i shall note.)

aside from the shock and the anxiety, really, was the regret that comes from leaving with a whimper, not a bang. like a good mob hit, we never saw it coming.

but when all is said and done, i'm heartbroken. our race is run.

sudden lawn care

back in business.

first time mowing the lawn in more than a month. steady and ill-timed rain, plus a vacation and mower problems led to the delay. kudos and thanks to pile hardware for having this guy ready about 10 days faster than they'd promised.

blast from the past

Meet the new boss. pic.twitter.com/GLUDxwR

— some asian guy (@grumpnet) December 21, 2011

wired

huggy boy. photo by baby.

the boy's emotional wiring must be getting stringed together.

last month, i think just a few days before the disney trip, kris told me he began crying at the end of "monsters inc."

this is a movie he's been watching for at least two years, but for the first time, he actually got wrapped up in the relationship between boo and sully when he had to say goodbye near the end.

"it's a whole new perspective," kris told me the next morning.

then, 10 days after we get back, sends me a text describing the following scene:

.... during what was supposed to be naptime, I hear (him) sobbing in his room and I find him, inconsolable, looking out his window. Why so sad, you ask? Death. I just had to, out of the blue, try to explain death to our 5-year-old. I'm done in and it's 2:38. 

No idea. i ask why he's crying and he turns and says he's thinking about how much he's going to miss kitty when she gets old and 'goes away' and where exactly is she going to go and what happens and is he going to get old and go somewhere, too? Not even kidding. I was stunned. 

I think we should board up his windows. Sitting and staring out the window while thinking is becoming a pastime. God. He's so me. 

this was something that didn't bother me until i was at least 8 or 10. i'm not sure if it's good he's this sensitive or introspective at this age or not, but it's a development i sure wasn't expecting for a while.

when i spoke with her about it the next day, she said he went on about how he didn't ever want to leave our home and that he'd miss us all.

we've got a sensitive temperament on our hands. Lord guide us through this.

gray in the cloud

talking to the phone

i'm going to say that until, oh, about five years ago, there wasn't much that could get past me by way of technology. if it wasn't clear to me, the software designers made their work intuitive enough that if i sat and played along with it long enough, i could figure it out, even if it that way turned out to be inelegant and "the long way around."

(chances were that i'd watch someone employ a shortcut and i'd either repeat what i saw or i'd ask. over time, i would eventually become fluent, or at least functionally literate in its use.)

i had little to fear from tech. it was a miraculous, challenging friend.

well, now things are getting interesting.

i began hearing about something called "the cloud" maybe two or three years ago. it may have started appearing as a featured option on my old macbook after a round of software updates. and it may have been asking me if i wanted to join it. as a suspicious digital user from the get-go, i refused and left it alone.

i found myself having to become acquainted with it thanks to a computer system change at work in which all our production processing would be handled off-site, "in the cloud."

i've since come to learn, in my rudimentary understanding, that all our programs now work from a giant bank of servers that not only provide a platform for our software to run but also (probably more importantly?) offer unlimited storage for our files.

anyway, i'm still wrapping my brain around the concept and now, with a couple of new computers in the house — aka smartphones and a laptop — that are now native to cloud-based computing, i'm having to learn something new.

"Cloud computing" by Sam Johnston - Created by Sam Johnston using OmniGroup's OmniGraffle and Inkscape (includes Computer.svg by Sasa Stefanovic) This vector image was created with Inkscape.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

some aspects are easy to understand. streaming video, for instance. when we got our first flatscreen television two years ago, we were delighted to learn that the amazon prime service we backed into offered more than just free shipping, but hallelujah, on-demand video through this new tv. this was almost as good as having cable.

not only was kris now able to more easily watch the hulu shows she'd been watching on our aging laptop, but we had an additional source of child-friendly content for our children to watch. (if we'd just go ahead and get the netflix, we'd have the holy trinity of streaming video providers.)

now, though, in an effort to not lard our new-ish computers with files that eat memory — mostly pictures from our phone cameras — i've stepped into the land of cloud-based storage. and here's where things have gotten buggy.

within about a year of getting our first smartphones, i found i was running out of space on my phone for pictures. so, after learning about it from my buddy jake via some work-related use, i downloaded the dropbox app, which gave about 2 gb of free storage.

long story short, i can understand how dropbox pulls photos off my phone and onto its servers. i know where it went and i can be assured enough i have those copies that i can delete the images from my phone's memory to pick up some space.

things would be hunky dory if everything else were that simple.

this spring, i linked our old phones to apple's icloud in advance of our switch to our new phones so as to facilitate the copying of contacts and calendars to our new devices. that was simple enough.

the confusing new iphoto.

i did, however, also buy a data plan thinking it would help alleviate the memory crunch of all those photos we brought over from our backed-up phones.

but it turns out, no, the data plan doesn't do that. and it seems that the icloud storage has nothing to do with the "photostream" that all our phones feed in to.

in addition, saving phone pics into the "icloud photo sharing" album so that i can archive them onto my macbook isn't providing much confidence because of an apparent delay between posting them and actually having them appear on the laptop's photo app.

while i have the security of the dropbox as backup to whatever i've shot, this icloud system bugs me a) for the aforementioned lag/uncertainty that i'm saving anything and 2) the sharing between devices is not working as advertised.

(no. 2 is not a dealbreaker; it's a feature that i stumbled into when i updated the mac's operating system and, unexpectedly, the photo program that comes with it. now i just want it to work.)

my research is indicating that apple's cloud sharing for photos is notoriously slow. i've not seen yet where it's being deemed unreliable.

the p.s. to this confused rant is the confusion with mac's new iphoto program. rather than being able to view photos by way of either albums created by date upon import ("events") or a straight-up compilation of every photo imported into the system, it now offers not one, but two cloud-based compilations, photos saved from the iphone, photos imported into the system (now called "moments"), and the "events" from the previous version of iphoto. (images are no longer imported as "events," apparently.)

just putting this part into words may be helping me sort out what the hell i'm looking at when i see all those options, but for now, i'm still trying to untangle this unfamiliar mess of a program.