Punderings

TBD blogging about my first week off. Pretty crazy, actually, other than being sick and spending a nice day reading a book (the whole thing!) and taking a nap, I didn’t do much more than if I’d been at work.

This was the 50th anniversary of the Cutchogue Firemen’s Bar-B-Q, and I’m glad I attended.  The chicken was excellent – even better than usual, I think.  Corn was sweet and tender – the first truly excellent ear I’d had all summer.  Sides were good, company was just fine, and the desserts were big servings of ice cream again (they’d had frozen yogurt for a while) and the usual delicious peaches.

This is a sort of family pilgrimage: when the videographer came around making the documentary of their 50 years of history, my grandmother mentioned that she’d been to 49 of the 50 years – I think he was a little impressed.  The great thing – besides the food and company – is that they’ve avoided rain nearly every year.  This year was a touch overcast, but still warm and dry, the rain holding off until well after the event.

It’s hard to explain, but it was an important trip for me.  It’s something I’ve done over 80% of the years in my life, so it’s nice to be able to get down there.  Next year I’ll get Roxanne and Amy to come too – this year they had a friend’s birthday party at exactly the same time (which was fun too they claim!).

Yes, I am back-dating this post commemorating the beginning of my second sabbatical from Lotus!  To answer the number one FAQ, I plan to spend my 4 weeks off simply doing all those things around the house I’ve always wanted to do, but never have time for.  Well, maybe not all of them… we’re planning several weekends away, and I’ll probably take one crazy day for myself and just drive somewhere I think is interesting.

Actually, the first week looks pretty darn full already, and that’s not even including some of the tasks in my sabbatical planning spreadsheet!  Even spare time isn’t spare enough.

We knew you well.  You’re still there, of course, out in your eccentric orbit and fellow plutonian objects, but the official astronomers no longer call you “Planet X” anymore.

I think the definition makes sense.  It just doesn’t seem to have been argued very eloquently, and it certainly wasn’t communicated to the unwashed masses as well as it could have been.  Think of it as an excuse to get astronomy back on the front page!  Get kids excited about looking up at the sky!  Think of some way to present it (and present the endless meetings they probably had) that’s exciting, instead of vaguely confusing to the average reader.

For those of you under 40, do you ever wish you were a boomer, and had been alive and old enough on that day in 1957?  That was magic.

Good weekend, and I’m about to have my second Lotus sabbatical, so I’m actually, really, honest-to-goodness, finally, really mean it this time, start blogging again.  No, really.  I definitely mean it this time.

Heck, I’ll even leave this post as ‘Uncategorized’, hinting (mostly to myself) that someday this will be a site of rich content from Shane, and that I don’t need to count such a simple and pointless post in my future categories.  Not that most blogs aren’t personal, and sometimes seem pointless to the outside observer: that’s a key point to the idea of a blog.  You write, people might read.

Anyway, I wanted to mention that I’ve added a new auto-spam word to my comment system: “m y  s p a c e”.  Any comments with those characters in them will be silently and efficently dev/null’d.  The rest of the few spams that get through my spamsystem are either infrequent enough or amusing enough that I’ll moderate them away now and then.  But some luzer M-S type came and went through the whole darn site and spammed, so that’s not worth my time.  Plus, the whole M-S image of the net is so far away from my world that I just don’t need it.  Useful service for some, perhaps, but it still feels like it’s too frequently mis- or poorly-used to be valuable on the larger scale.

Normally I don’t blog on politics, although I have my favored political blog sources I keep up on sometimes.  But these two snippets were just too darn funny to not link to (at least out of context, re: the recent terrorisim alert level scare tactics and being – or not being – terrorized):

Kung Fu Monkey: “Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

Must be my old WW2 history reading catching up to me, but those were almost priceless comparisons of good leadership (in public appearances) of old versus the (expletives deleted) leadership of now.