I’m feeling up and down right now, and that’s the problem. I’m up four hours before I’m supposed to wake up for work (it’s a little past 2am here as I write this), and I’ve yet to get a whiff of sleep. I’m up because I’m down, for reasons I can explain and others I can’t.
The last few weeks have been tough. The last few months have been tough, but for different reasons.
Cheryl…
Some people hate bagpipes. I love ’em. The European settlers of what is now Dunedin were from Scotland, and their influence survives today.
The high school had a pipe band. They made Friday night an event – even if you weren’t interested in football. If their music didn’t get your heart beating faster, marching on and off the field, you didn’t have one to begin with. A friend of mine…
There are good reasons and bad, reasons that are easy to understand and others that are harder to appretiate. When you put them together you get someone who’s found it hard to find joy in anything. You get me.
Saturday night was an exception. Two days later I’m back in the emotional valley, but the memory of our evening out still has the power to make a smile.
We’d done a little research…
Cheryl and I rarely go out alone. We have all the usual excuses: kids, work, and the like. But we also have another thing: an unexplainable attraction to misfortune.
I won’t bore you with an unabridged list, but here are some of my favorites:
During a summer break from UF, not long after we started dating, we planned a trip to the northeast. A few days before we were supposed to leave I came…
If you’re one of the one or two folks who’ve been coming around for a while, this picture may look a little familiar…
I used an edited version of the above picture as part of the theme for an early version of our web site.
Cheryl loved this photo (below)… for about 1.23 seconds. Then she smacked me for closing my eyes. I wonder if I could Photoshop me some open ones?
It was a nice…
I hadn’t thought about it before, but a card that came in the mail today struck me as odd.
“Congratulations!” it said.
I’ve said it to other people on their anniversary – many times. But today, at this moment, it seems off… somehow not quite appropriate. It makes wedding anniversaries sound like some kind of endurance award, doesn’t it? You don’t congratulate someone on their…
I was going to hold off on this post for another week, but I really need to write something happy today.
The following is a letter I wrote to a good friend a number of years ago (blame the 2001 me for the writing).
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It was the beginning of my second year at UF and it was a terrible semester. I was unsure of my future plans and I was lonely. After my first year (in the dorms), a group of my…
As you could guess, this is another one of my father’s test scans. It’s another reason I’m eager to get over there and do more. I have few pictures of my grandparents, and I haven’t seen the ones my father has in ages (it’s a chore to haul out the projector, and I’ve never been satisfied with the simpler “hold it up to a light and squint” method of slide viewing).
This is another…
When we were four
Originally uploaded by jkauffman
Once again my father has upstaged me in our computer arms race. It seems that every time I buy a computer he buys a better one. To be fair, our replacement cycles are similarly modest, he earns more money, and his computing needs are more robust… but come on dad! Give a nerd a break.
Well this time he didn’t get another computer – he…
Did you know there are rodents that will eat the wiring in your car? Eat may not be the right word. Chew may be closer to the truth. In either case, I’m a victim of such a creature. And I’m not alone. Dozens of folks at my office have suffered the same fate – some more than once.
I got off lucky though. I only spent a little over $200 fixing my car. I wasn’t even having any symptoms…