Man, girls are loud. Last night it was proven to me all over again.
My oldest daughter Sarah will be 11 years old in two days. We decided to celebrate her birthday party on Friday night becuase the nasty crazy schedule of a family of seven on the weekens doesn’t reall allow for a party any other time than Friday, March 30, 2007. For anyone. So, thankfully that will the be the last party for us. Ever.
Ok, all kidding aside, it was actually a good party. There were our four girls and four girls invited by my daughter to spend the night. Two of those girls didn’t actually spend the night becuase of things they had going on the next morning, but they didn’t actually go home until almost mignight, so in my estimation they spent the night.
Sarah had these really cool games that she planned for the girls, like hiding little pieces of paper with challenges written on them. The challenges were then placed into a balloon that you selected, then you had to pop to get the challenge out. Once you had your challenge out, you had to perform it in front of the group. That went pretty well… especially doing three laps around the backyard carrying an egg on a spoon.
There was also a game that she calls ‘Telephone’. It may be more familiar to you as ‘Pass it on’, where kids sit in a circle and one kid whispers a message to the next kid, and so on, until the last kid has to say the message out loud. It kind shows the way that things can get lost in translation among kids, though I’d say that this could happen to any group of any people. 
After the games came presents, then cupcakes. But these were no ordinary cupcakes, no no. These were brownie cupcakes. The kind that only my six year old daughter, Adriannah, could think up. In fact, she had made a brownie cake last year that was wildly acclaimed and, at Sarah’s request, se turned them into cupcakes. Mmmm, yummy.
Then it was movie time and bed time. Well, bed time for me and movie time for the girls. My wife stayed up with them because I literally could not keep my eyes open. But that was ok, because the girls kept me from getting the great night’s sleep that I’d hoped for. But hey, birthdays only come around once a year right? And since this was the past party for us ever, well, it seems only right that we let them stay up until midnight.
I am totally and thoroughly enthralled by a new Comcast commercial that is out. It shows a man named Roger on the phone talking with a tattoo shop. He states that he is talking on his new Comcast Digital Voice line. It appears as though he is trying to change something when a voice on the other end of the phone replies…
“I’m sorry Roger, you tiger now.”
Roger replies with “You’re sorry?” as the camera pans backward and shows Roger, with black tattooed Cincinnati Bengal tiger stripes all over his body, standing in the middle of Cincinnati Bengal room. It was almost as if Roger regretted becoming a tattooed tiger and wanted to undo what he had done.
Unlike software, life has no undo
This actually got me thinking about something. How many times in your life have you done something without thinking about the consequences at all? I mean, it could be a small thing or a big thing, but at some point the thought of what happens next never enters the mindscape. Have you ever done that? I have. Usually with a bad outcome. Which may have been predicted if I had thought that far in advance.
It brings up that notion in you where you begin to think to yourself “I wish I could go back in time and do it differently”. But the sad reality is there is no undo button. There is no rewind. And all too often the decisions we make without thinking result in permanent effects that could very well haunt you for the rest of your natural life.
So why do we do that? It just seems funny to me when people do something and when all hell breaks lose as a result of their action, the only thing they can muster up as a response is “I never thought this would happen”. Perhaps that should be shortened to “I never thought.” Why do we not think? I believe there are a few reasons for not thinking, but the most common reasons, as I see them, are A) we really care more about what is about to happen now that what may happen later; B) we truly do not have the wisdom to look beyond now; c) we think that there is a possibility that what we know will certainly happen later may, by some slim chance, not happen. Whatever the reasoning for stupidity and lack of discernment, I can say, without a doubt, there is never a rationale or justification that covers the consequence. Ever.
Now that seems like something to ponder…
I am so mad at my couch
My couch is nasty. It is ugly, dirty, outdated, mismatched with the living room and falling apart. And it is comfortable enough to make a person want to fall asleep on it.
My wife love to stay up late and watch TV. It is her time, when there are no kids, no husband, no noise and no distractions to move her out of her peaceful place. Unfortunately, when she stays up late watching TV, she invariable falls asleep on the couch. Now if there is no husband or child next to her, messing with her, she will not wake up. Which usually means I wake up to find myself alone in bed. I usually end up giving her a kiss on her still sleeping head while she dreams peacefully on the couch as I leave for work in the morning. Man, I hate my couce. 
Lat night we were putting the couch cover back on the couch. Yes, we cover it because it is so nasty that it needs a cover. And as we were doing that I began to see how badly we need a new couch. My wife has been telling me this for years, but for years I have been sleeping alone because of that stupid thing and have refused to get a new one. But I might just break down soon and get a new couch. And when I do, you’d better believe that it will be a good looking, well fitting part of the living room that is so darn uncomfortable that no one would ever consider using it for more than minute.
Maybe then I can actually have a good night’s sleep with my wife…
Man, I pretty much totally called the American Idol breakdown last night. I feel so big headed right now. 
I knew Chris Sligh was gone. I thought Haley Scarnato would be in the bottom three. I thought Phil Stacey would be in the bottom three. I told you that Sanjaya is untouchable. It all worked out the way I thought it would.
Maybe I can become a professional psychic now?
Anyway, what do you think about the new theme? I think it is moving in a direction I like. Just wait until I add the collapsable side boxes. Now that will be cool. And so far everything is done with pure CSS. No tables, no javascripts (yet), nothing but compliant markup and valid CSS. Man, I feel like big headed geek now.
Anyway, I am not feeling all that great at the moment. I think I have a savage chest infection. I also have a boatload of code to write at the moment, so I need to get busy. I will post more tomorrow. As usual.
Ok, it is time for my usual day after recap of what I though happened on American Idol the night before. This one may be a little different than most… I’ll explain later.
American Idol
Sanjaya Malakar is untouchable. I am not sure how he does it, but he is. So even though I am of the opinion that he should be voted off every week, I will probably be writing about him the day after the finale. That said, I will not bash him anymore. There are a few reasons for this, but the one that is most important to this section is that he is just totally untouchable. He’s not going anywhere no matter the quality of his singing.
Chris Sligh, on the other hand, is touchable, and it is my opinion that he is gone tonight. He did not do ‘Every little thing she does is magic’ any justice last night, and I think it will reflect on him. If not him, the on Haley Scarnato, although I think the boys are voting for her just to see what she’ll wear next week.
Jordin Sparks slipped to my number three with her performance last night. It was rocky and off key in my opinion. And Lakisha Jones did a lot better, so she moves up to my number two. My number one, along with every other hearing person in the world, is Melinda Doolittle. She once again set herself apart from the crowd yesterday. I know she is going to win it. And it won’t be for any other reason than she can sing. Phil Stacey did an excellent copy of ‘Every breath you take’. Unfortunately it was exactly that… a copy. Had he added any originality to that song it might have been better.
Blake Lewis and Chris Richardson both did pretty well last night. I thought Blake showed a side of himself that he hasn’t shown yet, and it was pretty good. Gina Glocksen also did fairly well. At least well enough to stay for another week.
So let’s see, that’s everybody right? Melinda, Lakisha, Jordin, Haley, Gina, Phil, Blake, Chris R and Chris S… yep, got all of them. At least the ones that should be there.
Watching what comes out of your mouth
Ephesians 4:29 reads “Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.” I have struggled greatly with this over the last few weeks (maybe months) and have noticed my wife and kids struggling with it as well. There is a lot of teaching about the power of the tongue and speech in the Word, and this is not nearly long enough to accommodate that teaching. But I will say that I am taking a new approach to the words that come out of my mouth. And I will be sharing that with my family very soon.
I started too last night with putting a moratorium on bashing Sanjaya Malakar on American Idol. And let me tell you, he did not make it easy for us last night. But we persevered and made do. When the Bible study is done with this topic, maybe the kids will see why I asked them to quiet their bashing down as well.
Anyhow, if no one has told you yet, have a great day today. I hope that you are blessed in all that you do today and I pray that you might be a light to someone in the world today.
If there wasn’t one, there should be one. I swear there is one, and it is today. In Concord.
The Bay Area Idiot Driver’s (BAID) conference must have been called to action this morning. There were more stupid accidents today than there has been in a long while. I am usually not affected by the traffic as my commute is in the reverse direction from everyone else. But for some reason, even I had my fair share today.
For those familiar with the East Bay Area, I drive a stretch of the I680 corridor between Fremont and Concord. Almost everyone in the Bay Area drives from wherever they live to the Fremont (or south to San Jose) area, so that makes the southbound commute a nightmare and the northbound commute a dream. Usually.
This morning there were three accidents that I was fortunate enough to miss. One in Fremont after I got out of the area and two in San Ramon at the same spot. In fact, the one on San Ramon was a three car injury crash at Sycamore Valley Road which was exacerbated by the two car crash 100 feet ahead involving a Cadillac Escalade and a CalTrans truck. Oh well, at least the road ahead was nice after that.
So what do you all think of the new theme? I think I like it, though I want to change the core of it to make it a little cleaner. We’ll see. I have a lot to do today, so I may not mess with this until next week. Til then… hasta la pasta.
So I spent a little while building a new theme for this blog. I like it. It can be a little better (the CSS really needs to be optimized… so do some of the graphics). But for the most part, I think it came out OK.
Yes, it is based on my last theme, Cabernet Gold. This one is called Green Sunday. It just sounded right.
Anyway, enjoy.
As much as I like it, I think that I am going to be redesigning a theme for my blog. I am still fond of this theme, but I think it is time for a change. I was thinking something along the lines of a Sage Green and Light Tan color scheme. Or perhaps blue and red (or orange). I am not sure yet, but I do know that things will be changing around here.
I might also throw a downloaded theme out temporarily, just to mix it up a bit. We’ll see. But for now, just expect some changes in the near future.
OK, so try to put off the fact that I was seriously spouting off yesterday in my post. It was truly out of frustration. With that, lets look back at a really weird week.
Thursday
My son fell face first out of the back door… from his high chair. Now before you report me to Child Protective Services, please understand that this was not so much a matter of negligence as it was the spirited nature of an almost two year old wanting to get up and run out of his high chair. My wife was outside with the other kids while my son was finishing lunch. One of my daughters thought it would be nice if my son could see what was happening outside, so she moved my son from near the kitchen table to near the wide open back door. It was a nice gesture. Not exactly the most well thought out gesture, but nice.
Anyhow, as my son was sitting in his bar stool height seat, strapped into his high chair, he decided enough was enough and he lurched himself forward. Out the door. On to the concrete in the back yard.
Boys are supposed to get banged up, right?
Yesterday
My daughter fell out of a window… Again, before you call CPS, remember that we have a full house, and that sometimes the kids do things faster than we can react. In a house of more than one child, things happen in 1 second intervals, and if you are not right on the scene of something about to happen, well, 2 seconds later when it does happen you find yourself 1 second too late.
Anyway, my youngest daughter, Alaynah, decided she would stand on her bookcase and open her own window, which until yesterday, I had no idea she could do. I also had no idea that she could thrust herself hard enough and high enough to get herself out of the window, through her scree and onto her face in the bushes below.
Honestly, this is the first of our children to make it out a window. AJ was not the first the fall out of a high chair (Rebekah, our second daughter did that when she was 15 months old and broke her arm in the process), but needless to say, one calamity in a week is usually enough. Two, well, I guess it should be expected in a household of our size.
The Akismet spam fighting plugin for Wordpress
Does this thing work like a dream or what? I am so happy that I decided to install it. I have not seen an ounce of span since I did. Not on this blog or on my daughter Sarah’s blog. I have to tip my hat to the developers of the Akismet application. It works like all good things should.
An acronym, my kingdom for an acronym
I have been putting together a framework/library for PHP in the last few months that I am hoping to be able to open to the community for immediate out of the box use. It is lightweight, fast, object-oriented and clean. The one thing that I cannot say about it is it is named. I cannot for the life of me come up with a name for this thing. I wanted to use acronym to describe the library, but I just cannot. No matter what I come up with, it stinks. The best I have come up with so far is SOOPA (Simple Object Oriented PHP Application) Library, OPAL (Open PHP Application Library) and, now that I think about it, this is it. That is the best. And that is not very good.
Anyway, as you can see, it has been a heck of a week. I am sure things will get much busier starting tomorrow as our weeks have a tendency to start off very fast paced. But, like I said before, what would you expect from a household of our size?
Have you ever been so broke that you couldn’t afford to pay attention? So broke that opening the refrigerator depresses you whenever you look inside of it? So broke that when the kids have a glass of milk you intentionally give them a little less than normal because you know that when the milk is gone, it is gone and will stay that way for a while? Yep, we are that broke.
This is not something new. I come from a long line of broke folks that have been used to be broke. In fact, it is almost at the point where my family line could say “we have been here before, what’s new?”. But I was thinking today, as I sat depressed at the fact that I have not done enough to out-earn our spending, that I really need to put a stop to this. I need to earn more. Well, at least that is one potential solution.
I am of the mind that there are two and only two reasons for someone not having any money. Either you don’t earn enough or you don’t use what you have wisely. Either way, at the end of the day, you will be broke. But I am also of the mind that broke is more a state of mind than a financial position. I mean, not earning enough can be rectified with a number of different solutions, from getting a new job to increasing your knowledge to make yourself more marketable to going into business for yourself to God knows what else. But not using what you have wisely, well that goes straight to your character.
God gives each one of us a measure of responsibility and observes us to see how we steward that responsibility. If we show that we can be accountable in the little things then we are tasked with being responsible for increasingly greater things. This is where I think people get crossed up the most. I think people have a tendency to get frustrated with their position and, not knowing that they are to be responsible in a responsible way, see their position not changing and decide to drive themselves deeper into the position.
That is where I am right now
I think I am at that place of frustration right now. I am so totally and completely fed up with having nothing that everything in my being makes me want to get up, get out and earn. That is a dangerous place for someone that spends a lot of time at work as it is now. But to me it makes sense.
Today, after selling some stuff on eBay, I had to ship them. I looked for boxes to ship four different items in and found nothing. Knowing that I didn’t have enough money to go to the store and buy four boxes really put me in a funk. Later on finding out that we are on our last half gallon of milk put me into a deeper funk. Or that my wife used the last of my cash for groceries and I will need gas before my next payday, also put me into a funk.
Keep in mind that I am not spilling this because I want sympothy or pity. I am well aware that I have caused this will my inability to earn a proportionate amount to cover the lifestyle of my family (or I spend wildly, which I don’t think I do and would be for another post at some other time anyway ). I am merely speaking out of frustration.
I want so bad to have the lifestyle that God envisioned for my family. A lifestyle of provision without lack. A lifestyle of carefree reliance upon Him. And I know that sounds storybook-ish, and that everybody goes through something at some point. But I have already gone through this. And for some reason it seems like I want to put myself through it all over again. There is no way that a guy that earns what I earn should ever not have any money in savings, no money in checking, no money on his credit cards at the same time as having nothing to show for it. That is what frustrates me the most. The provision God has provided should be enough. And it isn’t. And it isn’t because of Him.
It will get better
It always gets better. God never brings to something without the desire to bring you through it. I am a firm believer in that. Of course, I also believe that God will let you simmer in ignorance until the time you acknowledge him with your character and lifestyle. So I supposed there is some acknowledgments that needs to take place. God knows I need it. I really don’t want to be in this depression any longer
An elderly lady heard a knock at her door and, being the kind soul that she was, she opened it to see who it was. A young man was standing on her porch with a vacuum cleaner in his hands.
“Ma’am” said the young man, in a polite fashion, “I was wondering if I could have a minute of your time to show you the latest in home cleaning technology. This piece of equipment you see in my hands is the most powerful, most flexible vacuum cleaner in the world and I would love to get one in your hands this afternoon.”
The elderly lady, as nice as she could be, told the young man “I would love to. But I don’t have any money” and she proceeded to close the door.
The young man, persistent as all salesmen should be, wedged his foot in the door before it closed. He opened the door back up and threw a bucket of horse manure on the woman’s carpet. “Ma’am”, he said, “I am so confident that you will see the power of this vacuum and want one so bad that I will make this deal with you… If this vacuum doesn’t pick up every last bit of that manure, I will eat whatever is left over.”
Chuckling, the nice lady told the young man “I hope you brought a big appetite with that vacuum. They cut off my electricity this morning.”
Persistence and confidence are good. Arrogance stinks like horse manure.