• Guess where DaddyBear is tonight:
  • About an hour north of here, I passed a Sikorsky plant, a Lockheed-Martin plant, and an assortment of tattoo parlors and pawn shops.
  • Red clay, red clay everywhere.
  • The peach and pecan crops appear to be fresh and plentiful.
• I got about twelve hours of pocket universes and biblical allegories today as Boo and I listened to the first four or five books in the Chronicles of Narnia series.
• Boo did awesome on the drive today.  Of course, once he was no longer strapped in and restricted by the hard shell of a pickup, he was a little twitchy, but that’s why they put pools in hotels.
• Tomorrow I will either indulge my historynerdness with a lecture series on Chinese history or just wallow in fun by listening to Monster Hunter International.
  • Boo will be riding with his mother, who has a Harry Potter audiobook for him.
• We appear to have threaded the needle when it comes to severe weather today.  When we stopped for breakfast, we saw a very slight break between two waves of storms, and thought we were in for it.  The sky got dark, but I rarely had to use the windshield wipers.  Hopefully that luck lasts through tomorrow, if not for the entire week.
• I’ve gotten to that part of the south where a lot of the place names would also beappropriate in Hawaii.
  • “Hwahatuahachie”  Huh?

• The liquor store and Chick-Fil-A are opening within 24 hours and 100 meters of each other.  I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
• Having a store that fills growlers with yummy, yummy beer within 10 minutes of the house is either really awesome or really dangerous.
  • Maybe both.
• Leftover spicy barbecue is awesome after you drink a 32 ounce growler of hefeweissen.
• Coincidentally, I’ve turned into a lightweight.  My personal best is 12 1 liter maß of German starkbier in one evening.  Now all it takes is one big hefeweissen to make me hungry, sleepy, and happy.
• I found a “Banana Bread“ale tonight, as well as a “Sticky Toffee Pudding” beer tonight.  They sound yummy.
• You never know how much your boss does to keep crap from flowing down on you until they go on vacation during a really bad week.
• The Roman Book went off to alpha readers today.   To celebrate, I’m going to take a break and sit on a beach and watch the world go by.  Posting may be even lighter than normal.

There have been a lot of controversies in the news lately, some real, some made-up, and some made out of smoke and mirrors.  Here are my thoughts on a few of them:

• It is none of my business who sleeps with whom, assuming they’re all consenting adults, or what sex/gender/whatever they decide/realize they are.  The only other thought I have on this is that it isn’t exactly brave to wait until your multi-million dollar TV show is over to do something controversial.  It would have been braver to do this while there were cameras in the living room.  It would have been really brave to do something like this in, say, 1976, when the spotlight of the world was squarely on you and society hadn’t become a heck of a lot more accepting of people who swing to different fences.
• Race ought to be a null value in society, but it isn’t.  Some can get past it, some can’t, and that’s on all sides of the argument.  To be honest, I don’t care what ethnic, racial, religious, or whatever pigeonhole someone wishes to slam themselves into.  Just be honest about who you are and how you got to where you are, and we’ll all get along a lot better.
• I write what I want, I read what I want, I watch what I want, and I play what I want.  If you can’t handle that, then leave. Feel free to take your ball and go home, because we’ll have at least as much fun without you.  It’s just that simple.  If you want to turn it into a fight over who gets what corner of the public space, just remember, most of the people on my side are highly trained assholes, and we enjoy our work.
• If your fiction can be easily described as gay cowboys eating pudding, then you’re missing the point of fiction.  I pick up a novel to be entertained.  If you can make me think while I read it, bravo, but I’m paying you to entertain me.  If I want to read something that will make me think, I’ll go back to non-fiction or a clearly-labeled book on religion, philosophy, or politics.  Now, bring on the exploding spaceships crewed by tall redheads who like medieval Japanese swordcraft.
• People who use words like ammosexual, tactard, fudd, nazi, threeper, teabagger, or whatever, are not serious and we waste our time in trying to engage with them.  That doesn’t mean that someone can’t use the term to describe a friend, because there isn’t a guy reading this that hasn’t been called every filthy, degrading term in the book by his buddies.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t the same with women.  I’m talking about the people who try to shut down debate by attaching an insulting term to their opponent, and both sides of the political spectrum do it.  If you do it to someone I admire, I’ll turn my back on you.  If you do it to my friends, then I will stand with them.  If you do it to me, don’t waste your energy. I’ve been insulted by the best, and there’s a good chance you won’t measure up to their standard.

• I am no longer allowed to use the phrase “Contingency plan includes reboot of all cluster nodes and holy water” at work.
• It’s never a good thing to stumble upon something really bad and have no idea how long it’s been like that.
• I think the biggest compliment I can give an author is to say that I got so absorbed in their work that it takes three requests from Irish Woman to get me to put the book down and go to sleep.  Michael Z. Williamson did that to me four times in the past week.
• My parenting style lately:  When I say “Boy, you better stand on your head and whistle Dixie”, I mean you better be into the fourth bar before you ask why.
• Girlie Bear has been watching a BBC television show that deals with midwives in rundown parts of post-war England, who bicycle around the slums, delivering babies and trumpeting the benefits of socialized medicine.  I think I’d rather have my gums scraped with a rusty coke can from the same time period.
• Since we can now decide what ethnicity we are, I respectfully ask that I be referred to a Barbarian-American.
  • Only I and people like me can use “barbarian.”  It’s our word.
  • The rest of you may refer to me as “green-eyed devil.”

• Girlie Bear begins one of her summer volunteer jobs this week, in which she will be assisting in the Louisville Zoo’s black-footed ferret program.  She likes to joke that she gets to work with her BFF all day.  Unfortunately, she is not allowed to give the fuzzy little varmints pat-pats, because they can’t be allowed to get used to attention from humans.  She, being a teenage girl, feels a little disappointment at that.
  • She describes baby ferrets, by the way, as ‘fuzzy little pink erasers’.
• Boo begins a week of “LEGO” camp at the zoo, which as far as I can tell, involves 3 hours a day of playing with LEGO’s, 3 hours of walking around the zoo, and an hour of doing something that keeps his counselors from jumping into the tiger exhibit.
• Irish Woman and I had another of our “Green goes with green, darn it!” disagreements this morning.  I guess this is why she buys all of Boo’s clothing, not me.
• Irish Woman is summoning dark magic.  She washed her car, parked it under a tree, and watered the lawn, the fruit trees, and the vegetable garden this weekend.  If it doesn’t rain tonight, then we need new dice.
• It’s a good feeling when you look around your home and say quietly “We need more book shelves.”
• Boo has reached that stage of summer life where vigorous nightly scrubs are necessary to remove the impression that he is spending his days in a coal mine.
  • For now, normal bar soap and a washcloth are working.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have to graduate up to Simple Green and a .50 chamber brush by the time school rolls back around.

• I worked from home today so that I could be handy to fetch Girlie Bear when she got back from camp.  As background noise, I queued up “Planet Earth”, which is one of my favorite natural documentary series.
  • There is one scene where the film shows tall, swirling columns rising from a lake in Africa.  What looks like smoke, Sir David Attenborough assured me, was really millions upon millions of flies mating.  That’s right, children, today I watched flies fornicate and found it interesting.
  • Another favorite was the cave ecosystem based on the constant rain of bat droppings from the ceiling, including millions of cockroaches, centipedes, crabs, and other creepy crawlies.  Yes, it was a tiny little world built on crap.
• Timmy, our mentally challenged outdoor cat, seems to have decided that dry cat food just isn’t for him.  We let him go for a few weeks, but after we saw him spitting out what kibble he would take, and noticed that he’s down several pound, we decided to try wet food with him.  Of course, that meant it was Mortal Kombat trying to keep Crash and Koshka out of it.
  • It’s like having a small herd of toddlers around here, I swear.
  • Yes, I checked his teeth and mouth, as did the vet when he went there two months ago.  Everything that should be there was there, and nothing that shouldn’t be.
  • He ate the whole can in one sitting.  Guess he was hungry.
• Girlie Bear returned from JROTC camp with rope burned hands, a sunburned neck, and horror stories of cleaning a female latrine.
• It is never a good idea to tell horror stories about cleaning a female latrine while trying to walk through the produce section of a grocery store.  I had to rather firmly ask her to drop the subject.
• Girlie Bear met a young woman at camp who is going to the university she wants to go to, who is in the ROTC program she wants to join, and is in the degree program she wants.  I hope she interrogated the young lady like she knew where the stolen atomic secrets were.

• I may not know much about a lot of things, but I know a lot of people who know more.
• How can one small boy get so much dirt on him?  How?  His shoes changed color today, for heaven’s sake!
• When your son comes home from day camp with a bruise on his shin that causes you to call in your spouse to see it, then just shrugs it off and says “I bumped into something”, you know he had an active day.
• I started to get angry this morning about something at work, then I reminded myself that in six months, nobody will remember, much less care, and suddenly I felt better.
• I hope the NRA plans on bringing in some good food vendors for lunch at next year’s NRAAM, because as you can see, there is diddly over squat to eat at the Kentucky Exposition Center, nothing within realistic walking distance, and you may have to pay to get back into the parking lot.
• Girlie Bear and Moonshine are going to have to spend some quality time together after she gets back from camp.  That dog has gone from “Where’s my girl?” to “She’s never coming back.” to “My life is a festering pool of gray, highlighted by the pain and weight of being”

• Problem – Seven year old boy is bored and it is hot out.
  • Solution – Turn on garden hose, give to seven year old, and tell him to stay in the back yard.
• Problem – Seven year old is now filthy with the mud he made playing with the hose and claims to be bored again.
  • Solution – Get old can of cheap shaving cream and show him how he can sculpt, paint, and draw with it.
• Problem – Seven year old boy is covered from head to toe in shaving cream.
  • Solution – Hose him off with the already unwound garden hose, then allow to air dry.
• Dear bike riders – When going down narrow country roads in a large group, it is incumbent upon you all to stay on your side of the double yellow line, especially in blind curves.
• Labrador retrievers are supposed to be water dogs.  Why do mine cry so much when being given a bath?
• For dinner tonight, Boo and I got sandwiches and headed over to a local park.  I didn’t feel like cooking, and he didn’t feel like eating my cooking, so it was a win-win.
• Boo was more interested in the M-60 tank on display than he was the UH-1 helicopter.  I wonder what that means for the future.
• After we ate and looked at the machinery, Boo played on the playground for a while.  Something struck me while I sat and watched.  You see, Louisville has its issues with race and class, but that wasn’t evident today.  The parking lot had Lexus and Mercedes, as well as Ford and Kia.  The people using the park had ancestors from all over the globe, and were of ages from a couple months old to at least their sixties.  The children played and chased each other, the adult men were playing cornhole and washers, and the women were all talking with one another.  Nobody seemed to shun anyone, nor did I see any anger or resentment.  Yeah, we have our issues, but if tonight was at all representative of how things stand, we’re not nearly as bad off as we sometimes believe.

• Project Management Quantum Theory – We have to go through the process in order to define the process, but the process must be in place before we do it.
• Project Management Calculus – As the length of time it takes to do a task approaches zero and the simplicity of it approaches infinity, the processes and paperwork needed to do it will also approach infinity.
• You know that old saw about not pissing off writers because they’ll work you into their novel and then kill you off?  I tried that the other night, and it was strangely satisfying.
• Girlie Bear didn’t understand why I made her do a lay-out of all the things she needed to take to JROTC camp.  That is, until I discovered that she planned on taking exactly two pairs of socks and three tee shirts, and explained her error to her.
  • She did, however, remember to pack her new bathing suit and oh-so fashionable tiger-striped shower shoes.
  • Did I mention that the last time she went to this camp, I went to Fort Knox and bought her extras of both and they were sitting in the bottom of one of her dresser drawers?
• Apparently the most important thing I could do to help her get ready was make a double batch of banana bread.
• Taking a blond-haired, blue-eyed seven year old boy with an outgoing personality to a JROTC parents meeting, where there were multiple teenage girls, sounded like a good idea at the time, but I’m pretty sure Boo came home with at least a few new friends.
• Show of hands – Who would like to see a series of restaurant reviews geared toward people coming to the 2016 NRAAM in Louisville?