• Yet again, I have failed the “enough caffeine to be alert on the way home from work” versus “Too much caffeine to fall asleep once I get home” balancing act.
• Never underestimate the ability of other people to make a series of very simple things incalculably complicated.
• Note to self – Next time you come home at 11 PM from work and the screen doors are locked, preventing you from coming in that way, call your wife and deal with waking her up to let you in.  The alternative is to have to announce yourself in a strong, clear manner as you walk up the basement steps after scaring hell out of your wife, who sleeps next to a gun safe, when you come in the basement door and the dogs start barking at you.
• Irish Woman and Boo picked the first two or three ripe blueberries off of our bushes today.  It’s taken 15 years and several generations of bushes to do it, but we’re finally growing blueberries.  Now if I can just get those verdammte grape vines to do something other than tear up a picket fence, I’ll be in business.
• Today was cool enough to shut off the air conditioner and open up the house.  I took a look at my electricity bill the other day, and I wholeheartedly support this current trend in weather.

• If you want to know what it’s like to listen to howler monkeys hoot at each other from one tree to the next, watch kindergarten boys yell to each other from their parents’ cars during morning carpool.
• When the only thing keeping me from walking away from your business is the $100 deposit I put on something with you, you have a problem.
• Dear Kentucky and Indiana drivers – If you do not know how to drive or your rusted out shitbox cannot handle the trip across the Ohio River, don’t attempt to drive across the bridge.  Having break downs and accidents on the only bridge for 20 miles tends to cut into everyone else’s day.
• Goosing my wife and laughing when she squeaked loudly, while in the produce area of SuperDuperMegaMart, was the most romantic thing I’ve done all week.
• Telling me to “use my words” when I just used a rather complex grammatical construct to tell you something is counterproductive.
• In related news, cussing under my breath in several Slavic and Germanic languages after being told to “use my words” is also counterproductive.
• When things are so hectic that you have to share an on-line calendar, hold project planning meetings, and are considering making a Gannt Chart, all for your family activities over a weekend, it’s time to scale things back a tad.
• Ahhh, the sweet sounds of a home at the end of the day.  The gentle sound of the children sleeping, the snoring of the dogs, the thuds and bangs as Irish Woman re-arranges something in the bedroom, the sound of water running in the kitchen after I turn on the….. wait, water running?

“There they are, arrayed on the face of the stone.  All that is left of their eager faces, their dreams, their inviolable souls.  They are dead now.  They were singularly trusting.  They asked no collateral on the prompt surrender of their lives, they demanded no social privileges, no distinctions, no seats of power or influence as they walked steadily into the valley.  They demanded nothing.  What about us, the beneficiaries of such profligate bounty?  Will we be so callous as to scheme and despoil for these things again – and mock their death, their slow, immeasurable agony? — Sam Damon, in his memorial speech at the end of World War II,  in Once an Eagle, by Anton Myrer

• I finally gave in and just bought the junk food Girlie Bear wanted to take for her camping trip this weekend.  It’s only two nights, so scurvy probably won’t set in.
• I don’t know what was funnier, Girlie Bear’s face when I said I thought I might volunteer to chaperone said trip, or her face when I told her that I couldn’t go.
• I am going to find the person who wrote the documentation for the new software I am using at work and beat them with a manhole cover.  “To use this feature, please reference section 5 of the release notes”  “To use this feature, please refer to section 7 of the user’s guide.”  “To use this feature, please refer to the on-line help.”  “Error 404, File Not Found”
• It finally happened.  I caught a young man checking out Girlie Bear when we stopped to get a burger for dinner tonight. I was quite civilized about the whole thing, but if he dies from an aneurism tonight, it may be my fault.

• It is rarely a good sign when the replacement part has more issues than the original.
• Being a grown up means that you take a pass on a gun-related class that sounds really interesting so that you can attend graduation parties.
• I wrote a scene last night, then asked people who knew more then me about the scenario.  Now I’m going back and rewriting the scene.
• It’s a sad testament to my life when putting tick and flea repellent on the cat was the most exciting thing I did all day.
  • I’m proud to say that I didn’t bleed at all, but it was a near run thing.
• I love living in the future.  Tonight, I used laundry machines with more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft to wash our clothes, picked out a television program that was cancelled before I was born from a selection of thousands of choices, and watched it on a television that had more surface area than a coffee table.  Now, all I need is a rocket pack and a robot maid who folds the laundry.

• During his latest installment of “Hardcore History“, Dan Carlin apologizes for using the term “Middle East”, because apparently it harkens back to a colonial time.  I can see where he comes from, and I support this effort to rid people and places of the stain of colonialism.  From now on, I pledge to forever call the country I live in by its proper, pre-colonial name: South Vinland.
• I am no longer allowed to use the term “I’m your huckleberry.” when telling someone I will be their point of contact for planned work.
• Dear paint company – saying “Strip it off and start over” is not an acceptable solution to the problem of your non-oil-based deck stain not being dry after 96 hours.  “We apologize and here are gift certificates to the hardware store to rent and/orpurchase a method to strip the deck and redo your porch” is the correct answer.
  • It’s amazing how quickly “We need to redo this right now” becomes “Screw it, we’ll do it in the fall” when the temperature approaches 90.
  • When I finally do my coat of arms, the motto will probably be “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth re-doing”.
• It is exceedingly difficult to diagnose a server problem when someone on another ssh shell accidentally finds reboot in their command history and executes it.
  • For you non-geeks out there, imagine you’re elbows deep in a toilet, trying to diagnose an issue, and somebody keeps flushing it.
• Someday I need to read the Aeneid in the original Vulcan.
• Boo lost another tooth tonight.  If he keeps this up, all our vacation pictures this summer are going to look like he did 15 rounds with Leon Spinks.
• There is a demonstrable relationship to the amount of banana pudding I eat after dinner and how early I need to go to bed.

• If soaking hot-from-the-oven banana bread in bourbon is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
  • By the way, hot bourbon fumes up the nose isn’t the most pleasant sensation I’ve ever experienced.
• Girlie Bear got her yearly inoculation against alcohol and stupidity this weekend when she joined her JROTC group and a few hundred other teenagers in cleaning up Churchill Downs after the Kentucky Derby.  Apparently it was as disgusting as I hoped.
• A fried egg and chicken gravy breakfast burrito is low carb, isn’t it?
  • Don’t judge me.  I was hungry, hung over, and in a hurry.
• Irish Woman began thinking up new variations on the phrase “more than one way to skin a cat” this weekend after Crash walked across her freshly painted porch floor.
• There are days when I walk around the office thinking “I can’t believe they pay me to do this!”.  Today was not one of those days.
• Words I never thought I’d hear from my wife:  Let’s get up early and watch the meteor shower.
• Doing research for the Romans book this evening.  The Romans were quite creative people, especially when it came to torture and execution.  Thank goodness they didn’t have access to electricity and explosives.

• Boo had his second ice skating lesson tonight.  No major falls, and the addition of a spiked bicycle helmet seems to have helped him get over being afraid of getting a concussion.
• If you ever want to get in touch with the Russian speaking contingent of Louisville, just visit the ice rink on a Monday evening.
• If you ever want a demonstration of Newtonian physics, watch a small group of 6 and 7 year old boys try to skate close to each other.
• Of course Irish Woman dropped Girlie Bear off at the YMCA close to the skating rink.  Why wouldn’t she?  In totally unrelated news, it takes approximately 20 minutes to drive from the YMCA close to our home to the one close to the ice rink.
• If you translate “Irish Woman” into Gaelic, it comes out as “Kwisatz Haderach“.  I did not know that.
• Irish Woman wants to paint the deck of the side porch a shade of brown to better hide dirt and such.  She officially shot down my proposal to do the whole thing in flat dark earth.

• Boo had his first ice skating lesson today.
• He also had his first ass over teakettle, land like a sack of potatoes, clonk your head on the ice, fall today.
• I comforted him by passing on wisdom from my youth:  The only people who haven’t fallen on ice skates are people who have never put on ice skates.
• Next week, I will remember to bring his cycling/skating helmet.
• I also need to teach him to not try to break his fall with his shoulder and cranium.
• I got to witness Irish Woman going into total uber-mother beast mode when she saw him fall.  I was able to keep her from stomping out onto the ice to retrieve him.  She doesn’t know how to walk on ice and I can’t pick both of them up.
• To the nice lady who tried to comfort Irish Woman when she was close to tears, thank you.  However, bringing up emergency rooms and concussions was probably a little counterproductive.
• To his credit, he finished the lesson and wants to go back next week.
• Who’s got two thumbs and will be digging up his back yard this weekend to try to figure out where the maple tree is getting into the drain pipe again?  This guy!
• To the slimy piece of iguana crap at work who decided that my leftover steak, potatoes, onions, and peppers needed to be in your belly and not mine, I hope that the cholesterol is the final straw that breaks your coronary camel’s back.  May the fleas of a thousand Bolivian marmosets infest your sister’s armpits.  I hope your mother chokes on the rancid pickled herring that she has to eat because you skipped out with her Social Security.  In other words, I hope you enjoyed it, jerk.

• It must have been a long, difficult winter in Kentucky.  The zoo was packed with pregnant women and newborn babies.
• If you’re under 50 years old, riding a mobility scooter, and puffing on an e-cigarette, you give up the right to tell other people that they’re making life hard for you.
• When the puma is watching every move your little girl makes outside his cage, it’s not because he thinks she’s cute.
• Penelope the Porcupine with the prehensile tail was feeling particularly pensive this past PM.
• Juvenile vampire bats are kind of cute.  Juvenile meerkats are adorable.  Baby naked mole rats?  Not so much.
• Apparently “I just want a piece of pizza” means “I want a piece of pizza, a piece of fruit, some of mom’s chips, part of mom’s burger, a packet of fruit snacks, half a liter of orange juice, and Dad, can we stop for ice cream?”
• There were roving packs of sorority girls at the zoo today.  Apparently it was “Remind DaddyBear why he didn’t go directly to college” day at the Louisville Zoo.
• Further investigation confirmed that the red mark on Girlie Bear’s neck was, in fact, a bee sting, as she calmly explained to me when I asked what young man had volunteered to star in the next Cold Steel video as a target.
• Grilled scallops, shrimp, and tuna are a wonderful way to end the day.  They also do an excellent job of getting your cat to tell you that she still loves you.