• Postponed

    Schools are training grounds for many things, both intended and not. Count immune systems under the not category. I suppose it’s a good thing the kids will have a robust immune system, but getting hit by the friendly fire gets old sometimes.

    The kids had the sniffles last week and Cheryl had them this weekend, so the surgery on her neck has been postponed.

    More updates to come.

  • Growing up

    Beth doesn’t look forward to school. She’s not afraid of the subjects or the work. She’s one of many of children who go to school afraid of the other kids.

    I was one of those kids. I’ve been thinking about my school days a lot lately, with all the messages I’ve received about a high school reunion coming up this year. The small minded, vengeful little prick in me would like to reply, “go fuck yourselves and your reunion.” But that wouldn’t be entirely fair. I’m sure a lot of those folks turned out to be decent people – many probably better than me.

    Beth and I talk about it sometimes after school – how one of the things we learn growing up, going to school, and being around others, is how to interact -how to get along. I want to believe people aren’t all bad, so I suggest some have a harder time than others learning and understanding how much our words can hurt. On the flip side, some of us are faced with an unfortunate choice. How do we respond? Do we fight back with our own harsh words or deeds? Do we try to give some benefit of doubt, not knowing if these bullies are motivated by their own pain? Do we try to find some middle ground, standing up for ourselves while avoiding the temptation to retaliate?

    Sometimes these talks don’t go very well. I feel it’s important never to lie, exagerate, or make promises I can’t keep with my kids. I’ve told her I didn’t have the answers when I was in school, that I never quite found the middle road. However, I tell her we’ll always try to be there for her, by backing her up in school, and lending an understanding ear at home. But I understand it doesn’t feel very reasurring now. I try to remind her that not everyone in her life has been a bully, and she’s bound to find it more true as time passes.

    Although I beleive those words are true, they feel a little empty leaving my mouth, and I can see they don’t always help much.

    Well, something happened this morning. Beth was going through her backpack, getting ready for school, and found a folded piece of paper she didn’t put there. She didn’t risk reading it. She handed to Cheryl instead. Cheryl glanced at it, then read it aloud:

    “Beth, don’t let others make you feel bad, you’re special just like you are.”

    She handed it back to a surprised, smiling Beth. There were three sets of initials signing the note.

    Beth left for school today with renewed enthusiasm.

    Never underestimate the power of your words.

  • A butterfly sneezes in China and my back hurts

    The Mac turned 25 this week. I’m one of the privileged few to have one all this time. I was twelve when my father came home from Ray’s Connecting Point with the first Mac. I didn’t buy my own Mac until my freshman year at UF – a sweet Mac Plus with a full MB of RAM, an external hard drive, and an ImageWriter II – a set up that only set me back a few grand of graduation money.

    Ah, but I digress. This post isn’t about computers. I only bring it because the media coverage set my mind in motion.

    Somewhere this week I heard the story about the first issue of MacWorld magazine, released at the same time the original Mac went on sale – without a date on it. Apple wasn’t clear on when the first machines would hit the shelves, so the the magazine was printed and stored for that eventual, magic day.

    My father has a thing about magazines. He keeps most of them – for years. It drove my mother crazy (no pun intended). To this day you can find boxed old copies of Byte, Scientific American, MacWorld, and various others stored at the house.

    It occurred to me that my father still has that first issue of MacWorld, in a box, in one of our old rooms.

    Beth has been begging me to get the telescope out, but clouds and homework got in the way. Friday night we finally got it out to look at Venus and a crescent moon. They were both stunning. I’d been thinking about dad’s old magazines, and I remembered some of them had breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Then I thought of another thing I inherited from my father – a tendency to keep old magazines.

    Before we moved to Florida, we used to visit my grandmother in Danvers (MA) at least once a week. Every fourth trip (give or take a trip or two) I’d thumb through the pages of my grandmother’s National Geographic. A little more than a year after we moved to Florida I got my first card from the National Geographic Society, announcing a gift subscription from my grandmother. My first issue was January 1981: the Mount St Helens explosion issue. It’s still at my parent’s house, along with every other issue I got before graduating from college. Cheryl and I moved to Orlando after graduating from UF in January of 1994. Every issue I received from then until my subscription expired in early 1999*, has been here at my house. They’ve been in a box in the garage, waiting for someone to take an interest.

    Criminal, I know.

    So the Mac turned 25, which led to a bit of Mac trivia being told in the media: the story about MacWorld Magazine. That reminded me of my father’s magazine collection, which reminded me of my own collection in the garage, which I thought Beth might find interesting (lots of space articles, including some cool 3-D images from the first Mars rover mission, not to mention the Hubble). That led to me hurting my back Friday night, which led to me spending a lot of time with my current favorite Mac, which led to the new theme of this blog. It may look completely uninspired, but I’ve been fiddling with it for two days.

    I asked Cheryl what she thought and she said, “I told you I didn’t like the last one and you used it anyway, so why do you bother asking?”

    Wheh!

    Hey… this one loads a random header image from a half dozen or so I set up from my library. Woo Hoo! The next project will be to use a little more compression. I didn’t realize until just now each one weighs in around 200k. (I suppose it’s not that big, with most folks using broadband, but it still seems wasteful.)

    *My subscription lapsed when my grandmother’s health started to fail and my interest started to wane – with a young child in the house and lots of things competing for my waking hours.