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Friday, September 14th
Friday was a busy day at work, catching up on all the things I’d put off to finish the A/C manual. It was a good sort of busy, though, and I finished the day ready for the weekend.

I came home, and had some chores I’d offered to do for T–. The biggest one was vacuuming the house. I started going to the chiropractor last week (did I mention that?) and he told me definitely not to do any vacuuming. But, yeah, what does he know? He’s just a doctor….

So an hour later, I was sitting on the couch unable to move because of the pain in my lower back. Ugh. It’s not really that bad, though, because I don’t really like to move. So I watched some TV with T– and waited for Mom and Dad to get home from work.

I’d offered to play some WoW with them, and Dad really wanted help getting his epic mount (a rather long-running quest), so I joined them around 5:30 and we spent a couple hours getting mostly done. The end of the quest requires another paladin, and D– had offered to help with that (which would make it easy-breezy), so we decided to call it a night at that point. Good thing, too. I had to go play host for T–‘s parents.

Oh! Before that, N– called to invite us out to dinner which was an extraordinarily tempting offer, but I already had the WoW commitments. I had a good time, though, so I can’t really regret missing out on the Jack Daniels Burger.

Anyway, when T–‘s parents got in, we all sat around and talked for a while, and then T– and her dad ran up to Wal-Mart to try to find him an OU shirt. They were gone for over an hour, but they brought back ice cream. We each had a big bowl, and then went straight to bed. Experts say that’s the best thing to do with ice cream….

Saturday, September 15th
Saturday morning John and I watched AB while T– and her mom went shopping. T– and her mom spent a lot of time shopping, Saturday. They only left us with AB for a couple hours, though. Around 11:00 they got back, and at the same time K– and N– showed up, along with D–, to head to Norman for the OU game. N– got us all tickets a couple weeks ago, through her work.

It was a blowout game. Everyone knew it would be. In fact, it was so foreordained that they didn’t even televise it, so it was a good thing we went. A good team is fun to watch, even when it’s mostly unopposed, so I think we all had a really good time. We’ve managed to go to one game a year for the last four or five. It’s been fun.

That did take most of the day, though. We left the house around 11:00, and the game started at 2:15, and we stayed for the whole thing, so we got back into OKC around 7:00. We stopped at Buffalo Wild Wings and picked up some dinner and took it back to the house, which happened to coincide with one of T– and Karla’s brief rest stops at the home for the day, so they got to eat. After that, they went back out to Kohl’s (it was nearly 9:00, but the shop didn’t close until 11:00) and took John with them. K– and N– went home, too, exhausted after the day at the game. It is just an exhausting experience.

D– hung around then, and we tried to watch the USC v. Nebraska game, but it got depressing pretty quickly and we had no choice but to turn it off. The commentators were just too infuriating. There are times I think USC could just stop charging tuition, and instead set up a kissing booth staffed by the football team, and fund their entire academic program off the donations of the national sports media. I hate those guys so much.

Argh.

Sunday, September 16th
Sunday morning we went to church and I got two or three pages written on “Royal Holiday” (which, incidentally, is very much on the verge of becoming Royal Holiday, if you catch my drift). During the sermon, McElroy was talking about some famous classic hymn that was written when a dude was inspired during a sermon and just scribbled down a poem, which became the song through an interesting and convoluted means.

Anyway, Karla looked over at me, frantically scribbling in my scribblebook, and raised an eyebrow. I quiet-laughed, as one does in such situations, but frankly, I’m writing a cheap rip-off of a third-rate Hepburn movie set in an overwraught and generic fantasy world, as an aside to a larger and still fairly cliche story. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s really the same thing.

After church, we went to Abuelo’s, and K– and N– and D– all joined us. It was a fantastic lunch (Abuelo’s always is). Then we split up, and the family went back to the house to help T– get ready for a purse party at 3:00. A few minutes before that was supposed to start, D– showed up to take me over to K–‘s place to watch the Cowboys game. Thank goodness for late afternoon kickoffs, know what I’m sayin’?

That was a really good game. N– went to the purse party, but she called on her way home around 5:00 and asked if we needed any snacks (which, natch, we did), so we finished the game in high style. As did the Cowboys. It’s looking like a good year!

Then I went home, and I really should have spent the evening working on homework for our marriage seminar (as should have T–), but we discussed with open, honest communication, and both, in harmonious consensus, agreed that we, as a family, ought to procrastinate. So we watched some Dead Zone and I played Heroes on T–‘s laptop, and it was a good night.

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Journal Entry

Okay, that’s another long week without updates. The sad fact is, I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t really do much on computers at home. I’ll play a video game if I’ve got hours to burn up, and I update our finances regularly, but I don’t really do a very good job of doing the daily sort of chores on my computer at home. I do that stuff in between work projects at work.

I don’t think I’m admitting anything particularly damning there. I have a pretty gappy sort of a job, where how busy I am, at any given time, is entirely dependent on breaks in the engineers’ meeting schedules. If I’ve done my work (and I’m a remarkably fast worker, when it’s just a bunch of work for me to do on my own), and everyone I’m supposed to be working with is in meetings, then I’m looking at free time, no matter how packed my schedule is.

Anyway, sometime in July I got into the (good) habit of posting regularly in evenings, following my daily walks (another short-lived good habit, but more on that later), and in the process I stopped doing my blog posts while I was at work. Probably a good thing, because a blog post is a little more dedicated personal time than, say, paying an electric bill, but if I did it daily the blog posts didn’t take that long.

(Oh, yeah, I’m stuck in a nothing-to-do-until-I hear-back-from-any-one-of-four-different-engineers gap right now, that’ll probably carry right through to the end of the day. So here I am.)

Anyway, I haven’t been writing much at home, and what I said about not doing chores on my home PC compounds depending how much of a chunk of home time I’ve got at once. Weekends, I barely do anything (not even the finances). Holiday weekends, less still. So you lost me for five days straight after my last blog post. Of couse, I can only blame laziness for the two days since that.

But here’s my roundup:

Thursday, August 30th
Work, as predicted, was awful. But I also predicted having a pretty good weekend following that, and that came through as well. In fact, in spite of the somber tone of my justifyin’ and excuse makin’ up above, I’ve had a really great time since last I posted.

Thursday night was the final preseason game for the Cowboys, and it was against the Vikings. I don’t think I explained last week why that was a big deal, but B– is a big Vikings fan, and the Vikings also picked up Adrian Peterson (amazing OU running back) to start for their team this season, so all of us were really looking forward to the game. We even convinced B– and E– to come watch it with us.

So, after work, T– and I packed up the baby, hit Wal-Mart for me to get some Cowboys gear (can you believe I didn’t have any? I got my first ever jersey) and then we headed over to K– and N–‘s place. B– and E– and D– all showed up a little while later, so we had quite the party going on. Vikings put in Adrian Peterson for the first play, he ran for, I dunno, six yards, and then they took him out for the rest of the game. Cowboys had their third string in from the start. That was kinda lame. But the group was fun, and we all had a good time.

T– took the baby home relatively early, as they were both pretty tired, and the B– and E– followed a little while after that. D– had agreed to drive me home, so we stayed through the end of the game. There was some talk of going to watch Transformers (mixed in with making fun of K– for having to work on Friday), but then D– and I left and just went driving. We talked about hitting a bar, but it was midnight on a Thursday. Everywhere was closed. We talked some, drove around for a couple hours testing out the new car, and then I finally got home around two in the morning. I crashed.

Friday, August 31st
Friday morning I mowed, after two weeks without it. It was quite the ordeal. I didn’t bother doing it the smart way, either. I just kept cramming the mower into too high grass, letting it die, and then backing up and starting it up again. Rinse and repeat, for over an hour. That was no fun.

I spent some of the afternoon playing video games, then some of the evening watching TV with T–. Most of that time I was on her laptop, because I decided to finally update the ID3 information on all our mp3s. We have a lot of music, and almost all of it has either no meta information, or completely wrong information. I never much cared about that, but it was really undermining a lot of the usefulness of her iPod, and I hated to see that opportunity wasted, so I decided to put in the hours to get everything up to date. I ended up working on that all weekend.

A little after 10:00 that night, Mom and Dad got in. At that point, I pretty much expected them to just crash, but we sat up talking until easily midnight, maybe later.

Saturday, September 1st
I was planning to wake up pretty late on Saturday, but didn’t really make it. I got up a little after 8:00. I blame the waffles.

Mom and T– went shopping, looking for ideas for new furnitures for Mom’s redecoration. Dad and I stayed home with AB, talked some, and I showed him the new version of Heroes of Might and Magic (well, new to us — it’s over two years old at this point, so antique). Then the girls got back, and D– showed up, and it was the men’s job to go buy groceries and liquor for lunch. S– called to say she was coming over early, so we waited for J– and took him along.

Wal-Mart gave us all the groceries we needed. We were standing in line, unloading a cart full of groceries (mostly soda), when D– noticed that the only meat in the basket was a bunch of chicken breasts. He insisted that it was wrong to say we were “having a barbecue” if we were only cooking chicken. He was horrified at that, so he talked Dad into grabbing a package of brats. Whatever.

Then the liquor store. Now, for some of us (mostly me), the idea of us having to “buy groceries and liquor for lunch” is completely normal, but in case it sounded weird to you, I should point out that we were trying out a recipe for Friday’s Jack Daniel’s dipping sauce. So, y’know, that was where that came in. I did end up having a Jack and Coke while I was grilling, but that’s no great sin. It was after noon, anyway.

The dipping sauce turned out great, as did all the food. B– and E– came for that, too, and K– and N–, and we had my parents and my sister’s whole family, so it was a full house. Everyone had a good time, though. Around 4:00 Mom and Dad had to leave.

After that D– and I headed over to K– and N–‘s to watch the season opener for OU football. T– said she was just too exhausted after the day’s work hosting the party, and I can’t really blame her. The rest of us went to get snowcones, though, on our way up to Edmond, and while we were waiting on the snowcones K– noticed a restaurant in the parking lot there called Ron’s Burgers and Chili, or something to that effect. He mentioned it, and D– and I mentioned that we’d both heard really good things about the place, but never been there. So K– checked the hours (it was after 6:00 by then, but we’d had a late lunch), and then we went to their place to watch the beginning of the game.

At 7:15 we paused the game (thank Heaven for TiVo), and went for chili burgers. N– went next door to Mr Sushi (or Sushisandesyo, as the Japanese would say), because she’s a girl. I tried some, and it was foul. Whatcha gonna do? The chili burgers were amazing, though. Best I’ve ever had. Yumm.

Anyway, then back to watch the absolute thrashing that was the rest of the game, and I could go on a rant about not going ahead and scoring one more touchdown at the end of the game to set a school record, but I won’t. Not here. Ask me about it anytime, though, if you want to hear me seethe.

After the game, it was late, so when D– dropped me off…well, naturally I stayed up catalogueing my mp3s. It was the only reasonable thing to do. I think I got through the M’s before sleep called me.

Sunday, September 2nd
D– joined us for church Sunday morning, which was a pleasant surprise. Afterward, we went to Jason’s Deli for lunch by an equally surprising consensus among the decision makers (read: girls). Then as we were closing that up, K– asked if I’d be willing to help him check out some grills at Lowe’s or Home Depot. He has a natural gas hookup right on his back porch that would be perfect for a grill (and he’s thought that since the day he moved in), but he hadn’t gotten one yet.

So a quick lunch stretched into an all afternoon commitment, but it was a fun one. We hit both places, and K– found the grill he wanted at Lowe’s, and then we had to make arrangements to get it moved (he borrowed a truck from a friend from OC), and then we decided to install it. Initially he had intended it to be more a research outing, intel gathering style of thing, but somewhere along the way he decided he wanted to do a Labor Day cookout on Monday, so that’s what we worked toward.

So, sometime around 5:00 we all ended up back at K– and N–‘s place, reading through the directions of the propane-to-natural-gas conversion kit and trying to figure out how to connect a 3/8″ hose to the 1/2″ pipe sticking out of the wall. Still, with surprisingly little difficulty we got his grill set up and attached and tested, and it worked great. We went to Falcone’s for some New York-style pizza, and then Johnny’s for some delicious-style gelato, and then to the dollar movie to watch Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard. D– was the only one watching it for the first time, but it was still a really good movie. T– stayed home with AB, but I promised to take her out to a movie tomorrow to make up for it.

Monday, September 3rd
On Monday, I slept late. When I woke up, T– and I ran to the grocery store for the week’s shopping, then K– came over to help me drag a two-month-old pile of branches out to the curb for Big Trash Day (which was Wednesday), and he took AB home so T– and I could go to the movie. We went to see Stardust, which was even more fun watching with her.

As soon as that ended we headed over to K– and N–‘s for the cookout dinner. D– showed up a little later. We had inch-thick steaks and grilled veggies, and grilled Bananas Callypso for dessert. It was all perfect. For his first try cooking on his new grill, it went as well as it possibly could have. After that, we hung around and talked for a while, then finally headed home and let the long weekend come to an end.

I spent an hour or two working on the mp3s, and mostly finished up that process before heading to bed.

Tuesday, September 4th
Work on Tuesday was pretty brutal. I spent most of the day chasing down info for the project of the engineer who I’d neglected during all the day-long meetings of the previous week. I also learned yesterday that I’ll be spending full-time on that same project next week (including overtime), because the deadline for the manual has been bumped up from “before the end of the year” to “close of business next Friday.” That is a significant change of pace.

Anyway, I went home from that exhausted. Tuesday night we started a two-month marriage seminar at church based on the book His Needs, Her Needs (which my Dad highly recommends). The class went pretty well, and I’m pretty optimistic about the rest. There are about eight couples, including K– and N–, several families from our small group, and T–‘s chiropractor and his wife.

On that note…she’s been trying to talk me into trying out the chiropractor for a while. I periodically wake up with just severe lower back pain, but I just kind of thought of it as one of those things that comes with having a back. I’ve never had a great deal of faith in the chiropractic practice, since I’ve never known anyone who seemed to get fixed by it. It didn’t seem to have any more long-term effect than, y’know, a massage. But T– insisted I was wrong about that, and I just happened to get some bad back pain in the last week, and, hey, my insurance covers most of it, so why not try?

So I made an appointment with them while we were chatting after class on Tuesday night.

After that, we went home, watched some TV, then went to bed. There were weird noises, and I just wasn’t comfortable for some reason, and, basically, I didn’t get any sleep all night. Pretty much the same thing for T–.

Wednesday, September 5th
So, when the alarm came on and I shut it off, I crawled right back into bed and told T– that I was staying home for the day. She had to do some work and had had trouble finding a babysitter, so I offered to watch AB while she went to work, and that somehow justified my skipping a full day. I dunno.

Anyway, I got up around 9:00 when she left, and I played with AB all morning. It was fun. She didn’t eat well when she was supposed to, but she was laughing and smiling and we crawled all over the living room, exploring. I put her down for a nap that she didn’t really take, and I went to try to take one which she prevented (by way of crying), and so I finally got up and took her out of her crib and tried to feed her again (and she still didn’t eat well), and basically I kept doing that until T– got home and took over.

After that, I tried to take a nap but couldn’t get to sleep, so I played some Overlord. Best use of an afternoon I’ve made in some time. At 4:25 I remembered my 4:45 chiropractic appointment, so I headed down to the clinic. He took XRays and did a preliminary adjustment, and asked a lot of questions that all had the same answer: “Well, it comes and goes, but sometimes my lower back really hurts.” He said it would take some time for the results to come back, and made an appointment for the same time next day to discuss my treatment.

I rushed home from there and picked up T– to meet K– and N– for dinner at Arby’s (we’ve seen a lot of them in the last seven days — it’s been nice). Dinner was okay, but not a patch on last week. We expected D–, but he never showed.

After that, K– and N– went home so K– could play with his new HD TiVo. We went back to the house, and probably watched some Dead Zone. If not that, then I played some Overlord. Or, in all likelihood, both. I got to bed early, though, and we set up a fan in the room for some white noise. It did the trick. I slept like the dead.

Thursday, September 6th
Hmm. I already told you about my big bombshell schedule change for work. That was the big news for yesterday. T– took AB to the doctor for some shots, and she said AB handled it like a little trooper. So that’s good news. After work, D– offered to bring us something for dinner, but he had to work out first so it was going to be late.

That worked out for me, anyway, because I had to visit the chiropractor and then run another errand before going home. Chiropractor said that I have two pinched nerves at the base of my spine, and rated my condition as serious transitioning toward severe, and it’s going to take twenty-four office visits to fix it. Ugh. He showed me some XRays, but for all I could tell, they could have been stock photos of a spine. Anyway, he did an adjustment, I agreed to pay a whole lot of money, and then I ran by Blockbuster before heading home.

D– showed up a little while later with boneless buffalo wings for all, and we ate and watched Simpsons and King of the Hill. After he left, T– and I watched a Dead Zone, and then realized with surprise that the night was already over. I played half an hour of Overlord, then headed to bed.

And now it’s today, and I’ve burned a significant portion of my afternoon, but I’ve still got an hour left until I get to go home. I’m going to see if I can find something useful to do. Everyone have a good weekend.

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Hmmm. I had a media-heavy weekend…..

Saturday, August 11th
As mentioned, I was up late Friday night reading Harry Potter. I woke up around 11:00 Saturday morning, only to be told we had to be at T–‘s brother’s place for lunch at noon. So I got cleaned up, and read another chapter of the book.

We went over to Matt’s place, and had brats and hotdogs. The kitten we gave them a couple months ago was running around, and he’s become a pretty fun little animal. The kids are all doing good, got to see Matt and Chris, had a good lunch and spent a lot of time talking. Then we checked out the old Jeep Matt is rebuilding, which is a pretty cool project. After that, John and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum.

I wasn’t really excited about that movie when I heard it was coming out (mostly because Supremacy was something of a snoozer), but for the last week or so I’ve been hearing a lot of people say how excited they were to see it, and getting really good reviews from people who had, so when John asked if I was interested, I said sure.

After leaving Matt’s, we had a little time before the movie so we stopped by a model car shop (John collects some of them), and while I followed him around the shop I saw an old Camaro, and for the first time in my life I got it. I was all, “Oh, Camaros used to be cool.” I’d never seen one before that that came close.

Anyway, the movie was awesome. Fantastic action flick. I recommend it highly, for anyone and everyone. Make sure to watch The Bourne Identity first. Supremacy is optional. If you’ve seen the first movie, you can pretty much assume everything that happens in the second movie, and save yourself two hours.

After the movie, we went back home and John made steaks. He just got his first gas grill (to my knowledge) when they bought the new house, and this is the second time he’s made us steaks on it. He keeps asking for my advice, but he already does a better job getting everything to the desired done-ness than I’ve ever managed, so good for him. The steaks, by the way, were excellent.

Then we went downstairs to watch some TV, and I was making an effort to be friendly and social, but the book was just lying right there. In easy reach. Looking at me.

So, y’know, during a commercial break or whatever I picked it up, and just sort of started flipping through the pages, and next thing you know, it’s one in the morning and I’m turning the last page.

So, basically, that’s my Saturday.

Sunday, August 12th
Sunday morning we had plans to go to Westlink for church — that’s the one in west Wichita where T– and I met (and D– and I for that matter, and Julie, Julie, and…well, half of the people reading this blog). It’s where I attended for the six years I lived in Kansas.

Anyway, of all my old friends, only Vicki nee Linnell still goes there. Everybody’s parents still go there, but that’s not quite the same thing. It was weird, though. T–‘s parents came with us, and we got stopped just inside the door by a greeter who recognized the Charbs even though they hadn’t been there for over a decade (T– and I have been back to visit more often than that). But, while we were caught in the entry, classes apparently let out, and it seemed like 3 out of 4 of the people walking past recognized one or all of us and came over to say hi. It was an outpouring of welcome and hospitality. It made my skin crawl.

But, yeah, everyone was really friendly and so excited to see all of us. We showed off the baby some, had an interesting service, and then Vicki and her husband Dan came to lunch with us at Chilis. After that, we went back to the house and pretty much started packing right away, because I had plans with D– in OKC Sunday evening. (Evening, I said, not afternoon — okay?)

The drive went pretty well. I came up with a story idea Suday morning and spent a couple hours developing it, then discussed it with T– on the drive home. That’s always a good time for talking, y’know? Anyway, I’m hoping to develop the idea into a short story within the next month, and that short story can serve as sufficient summary of the basic idea to hold it for me until I get time to develop it into a novel. Should be fun.

We got home around 5:30, unpacked the car, watched some Jim and had sandwiches, and then at 7:00 I headed to the mall to meet D– and K– and N–. I tried to invite B– and E–, but phones failed us and by the time I got through, I didn’t have sufficient time left to do all the necessary wheedling and convincing. Also, it wouldn’t’ve done any good. Poor B– is getting hammered with work stuff. That’s got to stop!

Anyway. Anyway. Back to the point. We went to see Stardust, which was awesome. It’s like Big Fish, if Big Fish were a happy movie. I loved it. Highly rewatchable. Very good story. I had a great time.

Then D– and I went for a walk around the neighborhood, and I ran my new story idea by him, and we ended up going to his apartment to try out a new bottle of chianti, and finish the conversation. I ended up getting home a little after eleven, and I was too tired to make my blog post. Sorry about that.

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Big news for today is that I’m posting blogs on MySpace and Facebook now. I actually created accounts on both of those sites in order to search for E–‘s blog, which ended up being on Blogger. So, in its way, a big waste of time.

I probably do have enough friends from days long gone, who could track me down through one of these blogging sites if they wanted, that it could be worthwhile. Y’know, in its way. Creepily, or whatever. I did a little bit of mini-stalking today, finding out who’s where, but nothing too serious. I found most of the names I was looking for, really, with the sad exception of Michael Stohr. Really wish I knew where he was now. I might even send him an email, if I found him.

Anyway, it’s one of those, “I just saw Heat” sort of things. I signed up for MySpace and FaceBook and, would you believe it, they’re full of people I knew in my distant past and lost contact with! Yeah, yeah, I won’t go on anymore.

I’m going to try to cross-post all my blogs. Maybe just this one, actually. We’ll see how much work that is, and if I can trick Python into doing it for me. Chances are good I’ll end up giving up on that, but it might be fun for a while.

Oh! Also, I did find E–‘s blog, which is entirely in French (for some strange reason), and I was
delighted to learn that I can tell what she’s saying almost all the time. I didn’t realize my French was still up to that level. So, yay. I read backward a couple weeks. I was going to give a couple examples of things that I couldn’t translate right away, but I worked them out later in context, and, as she’s pregnant, they both happen to be pretty embarassing things, which she’s probably only blogging about because, y’know, it’s in French and no one can understand it.

So I’ll keep that to myself. She’s a pretty good writer, though. I’m impressed.

After work, T– and I packed the car pretty quickly, stopped by S–‘s to grab a travel-crib for AB, then hit the road for glorious Wichita. Better trip than usual, because T– spent it reading Harry Potter to me. Book 7, that is. We got through three chapters, which was pretty good with her also taking care of the baby.

About 8:00 we got into Haysville and checked in with the in-laws. Then I had about half an hour to set up my computer at John’s desk, because I’d promised my parents I would help them out in WoW tonight. While the in-laws watched Psych, I ran my mom and dad through Hellfire Plateau, and got Dad some major upgrades. So that went well.

Just finished, and I’m writing up this post, then I’m going to head to bed. Have a good weekend, all.

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I feel like I’ve spent the whole day mowing, from sunup to sundown. In truth, it’s been a little less than that.

Back to work this morning, and really not as bad as I expected. I had clean, easy work to do today. I had a meeting last week with the engineer, in which we went over a two hundred page document page by page, and marked down every change that needed to be made. That was brutal, but once it was done, the actual change process is fairly simple. I spent the day today working on that.

I also had some time over lunch, and some free time in the afternoon that I spent working on KJW. I typed up B23 and B24 and B25, which I had written over the weekend, and I had to write a thousand words to finish up B25, which is about half. I got most of that done in the morning. Then over lunch I wrote out B26 and B27, and then as I was bragging to T– and K– about that at the end of the day (over GMail chat), I got so caught up in it that, instead of going home from work, I wrote B30 (which is the final section of the book).

Now, some of you are math whizzes out there (I’m looking at you, Toby), and you’ll have figured out that I skipped B28 and B29 in that paragraph. That’s okay. It amounts to twelve pages between them, and I already know what happens (the Council offers their allegiance to Jason if he’ll support the war, and then Myriam asks Jason to marry her — it’s complicated). Twelve pages, and I could probably do that in a day, if it’s a slow one. If not, it’s a small matter to finish it over two, and that still leaves me two more to type up the handful of vignette pages that I need to finish the story out (a smattering between N16 and N29 — N30 got cut).

So there you go. Most of my day centered around King Jason. That, and an air conditioner modification to our long range radars in high ambient and high corrosion environments. Not around a lawn mower at all.

But I got home from work, intending to do the laundry as a favor to T–, and found she’d already done it. So instead, I spent an hour playing with my computer as a favor to T–, and then headed to Edmond to mow my sister’s yard as a favor to my brother-in-law.

Now, let me take a moment to expound on mowing my sister’s yard. First, I hate mowing. I really, really hate mowing. Nobody enjoys it, but I hate it, to a very unreasonable degree.

But my little sister lives in Edmond which, for the most part, is filled with nazis. K– and N– insist this isn’t true, but they do such a good job taking care of their responsibilities without anyone asking, that they’d never have a chance to notice nazis anyway.

Should I capitalize that? Nah, I’m not going to bother. I’m generalizing far beyond the context of the proper noun anyway.

Okay, so, S– lives across the street from a particularly awful lawn nazi. Really, a complete asshole. I try to avoid language like that on my blog, just because I want my mom and dad to start reading it, but in this case it clearly applies. Also, there’s going to be a lot of it in this post.

So, I’ve already established a little bit about my likes and dislikes. Specifically, I hate mowing, but I hate nazis more. And S–‘s asshole neighbor is a nazi. They’re both true things about her, I don’t know which one causes which, but they’re definitely mutually reinforcing.

Anyway, so I get–

Oh! (Yes, I just interrupted myself. Deal with it.) I also really hate talking to people I don’t know. It makes me extraordinarily uncomfortable. Even people I know sometimes make me nervous (brothers-in-law for instance, even the ones I like…which, so far, is all of them, amazingly enough… huh, I just realized that).

Buh! Benadryl is making me dopey. Anyway, so I get to S–‘s house, and have to do this whole complicated rite to get the necessary doors unlocked and the dogs locked away in their run in the back yard. It’s like a puzzle game. I’m Link, out there opening the garage side door so that I can unhook the lock on the back yard gate, but I have to open the dog run gate before the side gate or else the dogs will escape, and then I’ll have to chase them down and once I’m carrying a dog under both arms I cannot work the latch on the back yard gate so I have to go through the house or garage, but that requires that I already opened one or both of those doors and left it open….

Seriously, Legend of Zelda stuff here.

Anyway, so I beat the first two levels of that, and then there I am with the lawn mower out on the driveway out front, and who’s standing out in their driveway across the street except that very asshole neighbor, chatting away with a bunch of friends. Now, as I understand it, she’s supposed to be the sort of nazi who leaves notes, not the sort who talks to you, but since I already think she’s an asshole, and I hate having to talk to strangers, I just assume she’s going to want to talk to me, so I get this big knot of hate going in my gut.

I force that from my mind, and yank the cord on the lawn mower. It goes guh-guh-guh, real loud, but doesn’t start. All six of the people on the neighbor’s driveway look at me, and I probably blushed (yeah, I’m that bad). It’s really no big deal, though, because you often have to prime a lawnmower, so I gave it another yank, and guh-guh-guh, but it doesn’t start. So I look all over for some sort of primer (that’s what mine has, a little vaccuum button sort of thing), but there’s none. I try again, three or four times, and every time I pull the cord all these strangers look at me and I’m all, “Gah!” in my head but (of course) say nothing out loud, and I’m just praying the stupid thing will start.

I go through that whole process two or three times, and each time I prod or poke some other bit sticking out of the side of the mower engine, until finally one lever ends up working. So the lawnmower pops to life, roaring real loud, and my adoring audience all look over again and I’m half expecting them to burst into applause, but they’re not actually as interested in me as I thought they were. Right after that, though, they all split up, leaving only the neighbor’s stupid-looking family standing out on the driveway.

So I start mowing…walk walk walk. Right, this is the part I hate under perfectly normal circumstances. And this time the neighbor is watching me, and I’m thinking to myself, “I’m pretty sure that one’s the asshole nazi one,” and she just watches me cutting back and forth, and it’s really getting to me.

Then, as I’m making a turn, she walks across the street, and smiles at me, and says, “It looks nice, huh?”

And I said, “What?” I had to yell over the motor (I think that last little bit I poked was the throttle, and I probably turned it all the way up, and I didn’t turn it back down — so it was loud). She said basically the same thing, and I shrugged and walked on around (which is my way of not talking to people), and when I got back she nodded, still smiling, and said the same thing.

So (see, I’m not good at being openly rude to people who don’t get it on the first try), I let the lawnmower die, and I sighed, and I said, “Huh?”

And she said, “It makes a big difference, huh?”

Now I was cutting the grass a lot shorter than it had grown, because J– keeps his mower set low, so there was a dramatic difference, but it really didn’t look that bad to start with. Anyway, I hated this lady before she said the first word, so I wasn’t about to agree with her. I shrugged. “It’s not that bad.” And she looked like she was going to argue, and I spent all day writing about people who talked over someone who looked like they were about to argue, and I guess that got to me because I said, “Y’know, I don’t live here. This is my sister’s house. I’m just mowing the lawn as a favor because she’s got this asshole neighbor who’s always bitching about her lawn.”

And she just stood there, her mouth open. I don’t really talk like that to strangers. (I sometimes use much dirtier words, but only for laugh factor, and only around friends.) And I could tell this lady was highly offended by what I was saying, and I was pretty sure no one had ever chastised her for all the hell she’d given my little sister, so I shook my head and said, “I can’t imagine living next to someone like that. I’d go insane. It must be real hell, huh?” Y’know, pretending I didn’t think she was the asshole neighbor (and kinda covering my ass in case I had the wrong chick). Then I jerked the cord, because I was ready to be openly rude again, and finished mowing the front yard.

So…apart from finishing two novels in one month, that’s about the coolest thing I’ve done this year.

*Contented sigh*

Now! Back to my list of things I hate! So, we start with mowing, and then move up to nazis, and talking to strangers is somewhere in there too (it’s no longer relevant to the story, so I’m not going to labor over its ranking). There’s a few other items in the list. Dogs, but that’s sort of a low-grade hate, so it goes near the bottom. Now, chasing around the yard after dogs I hate, that’s higher up, but still probably not as high as mowing. Stepping in dog poo, though, that’s right up there. Probably equal to nazi.

So, dogs, chasing dogs, mowing, nazis, and stepping in dog poo.

You know what’s worse than stepping in dog poo? Mowing dog poo. Wait, just in case that image isn’t completely clear in your head, I should expound upon it. Not just mowing over dog poo but, because you’ve got no choice but to follow the mower where it goes, stepping in the greasy puddle left behind.

So, anyway, that for about forty-five minutes, and then I came home and mowed my own yard (which, you’ll recall, is something that I hate) just for a not-awful medium in which to get some of the mess cleaned off my shoes.

Hmm…y’know, reading back over it, this blog post really needs some disclaimers at the top of it….

Anyway, mowing my yard took another forty-five, and it bled the last of the sunlight from the sky, and the last of my energy from me, so there’s no way I’m going for a walk tonight. I did technically finish earlier than usual, though, so I had time to do an extra long blog post. And I wasted it writing this filth. Can you believe it?

Okay, I’m going to go read Harry Potter now. I’m up to chapter eight. In book one! Can you believe it?

I’m starting to sound like the guy at the end of Hudson Hawk. I’ll go before I start tossing out worse expletives than I’ve used so far.

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Journal Entry

Just got home, at ten to eleven. Home safe, though, and it was a fun weekend in Little Rock. The older I get, the more I appreciate my relationship with my parents.

As I said earlier, morning came way too early today. We got to church on time, though, and I got a section of KJW done during the sermon. Then we had Friday’s for lunch, and got home just in time for AB to take a nap. We decided to let her sleep her fill, then feed her, and then get on the road. That should’ve put us out of town by 3:30, but she overslept and T– didn’t feel like waking her.

It was a funny scene in the Pogue house this afternoon, with S– and T– and Mom all three reading Harry Potter (and at pretty close to the same rate). Dad spent some time downstairs on the computer, playing WoW and such. I got started on another section of KJW (and got it finished on the drive home, when we stopped for dinner) so that leaves me just five left to write.

Between packing things up and long goodbyes, we finally got on the road at 4:15. I drove, T– read Harry Potter. We stopped at a Hardee’s for dinner, and spent some time there (as I said, I had time to write). Between that and the extra stops for the baby, it was a six and a half hour trip. That is stretching the limits of reason.

Still, as I said, we made it in safe, and the weekend was worth the cost of travel. I hope everyone else had a good one. I am not looking forward to work tomorrow. Then again, when am I ever?

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Journal Entry: Sunday, June 24th

Closer and closer….

My comment yesterday was, “hopefully I’ll get a couple more pages written.” All told, I got eleven pages done (T–‘s parents’ church is a kinda long-winded one). Most of it is mediocre stuff, but it gets me from where I am in the story, to where I want to be (where, hopefully, the quality will pick up as I write through the climax).

At this point, I know every single event that needs to happen between now and the end of the story. There may be a couple extra bits that present themselves for inclusion, but I’ve got, not just an outline, but the actual story in my head. I just need to write it down.

I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself, though.

Yesterday, after church, we had some amazing steaks. T– had agreed to give her mom some design advice for the relatively new house, so I knew we’d be sticking around for a while, so I took A–b– downstairs to watch some TV while we waited. We watched parts of Men in Black and that movie where Tim Allen and Kristie Brinkley go into hiding in an Amish community, and Hitch. I recommend the Will Smith ones, again.

That’s from past experience, though. Yesterday I didn’t really watch them. I fell asleep, with A–b– on my chest. I did a lot of napping this weekend. Apparently T–‘s parents both asked her at different times why I didn’t bring along a computer this time (I usually do, and then spend the whole weekend glued to it). Turns out leaving it at home didn’t make me any more social — I just ended up sleeping.

I did get a lot of good rest this weekend, though. Yay for that!

On the drive home, T– and I had an amazing conversation. One of the best conversations about us that we’ve had in years. I found it very encouraging.

When we got home, around eight, I dropped T– off to feed the baby, and ran up to Pizza Hut to pick up a couple P’zones, which were quite delicious. We watched some TV while we ate, and by the time the episode was over, it was already nine.

I’ve been telling myself for a week now that tonight I’m going to start going for a vigorous, exercisey walk every single night. I hadn’t followed through on it once. Then, during yesterday’s conversation, among a lot of other things, I told T– about that conviction in the hopes she could help hold me to it. So, last night, after eating way too much P’zone (it was really good), and only being in my home for an hour after a weekend away, I made myself spend the second hour home going for a walk, in spite of the excuses.

It was good, I’m glad I did. I think I did about a forty minute walk last night (my goal is closer to fifty, and probably at a significantly faster pace than I managed last night), and while I was walking, I put together all the pieces I was missing to finish Sleeping Kings. I discovered a couple extra scenes, a couple really strong plot twists that’ll make the impending battle a little less one-sided, I think. And I got some good exercise while I was at it.

Then I woke up this morning with incredibly sore legs. I’m going for a walk again tonight, anyway. It’s important enough to make time for. I get that.

Today’s been slow. Work is dull, and I’m only making progress at a snail’s pace. Around here, they just call that job security.

Hope everyone had a good weekend.

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Her Name is Lola

I have a new niece, to add to the already-impressive collection. She was born a couple weeks ago, but I just now got around to posting it. Here’s Shannon’s new daughter (I’ve rotated it 20 degrees clockwise, dropped out the background, cropped the picture and changed it to black and white just to save on bandwidth, because I believe in conservationism):

She sure is a cutie! I’ve spent a little bit of time around her in the last couple weeks. Mostly she just sleeps, but man, her big sister loves having a baby around all the time! Shannon’s doing well, and has had lots of visitors to help her out.

Also, on a completely unrelated note, here’s a picture of China’s Communist Chairman Mao (completely unaltered):