Category: Personal News

Paula just found out that our friend Lisa is return­ing to Stan­ford to pur­sue her Ph.D. next year.

Lisa grad­u­at­ed a few years ago and we’ve sore­ly missed her. It’s going to be great to have her back on the Farm again. Paula was almost in tears (with joy) when she called to let me know.

Paula has just informed me that we have com­plete­ly paid for Dana, and she can no longer be repos­sessed by the hos­pi­tal.

She’s entire­ly our prob­lem now.

Inci­den­tal­ly, she got mad at me the oth­er day and began wav­ing “bye-bye” at me to get me to go away. That was pret­ty cute.

At the end of Col­lege Win­ter Retreat I was told by a stu­dent prepar­ing to dri­ve back to Ari­zona that I sound like Ron Luce… “only smarter.”

I had nev­er heard of Mr. Luce pri­or to this state­ment and don’t know what to think about it. Ques­tions loom in my mind:

1. Do I phys­i­cal­ly sound like Ron Luce or did the per­son mean that we have sim­i­lar speak­ing styles?
2. Is Mr. Luce gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be “all heat and no light” or is he a lumi­nous genius whom I have some­how man­aged to sur­pass?

If any­one knows us both and has a frame­work for com­par­i­son, could you please com­ment? I’m intrigued.

Some All of our Christ­mas pic­tures of Dana are up (the ones from my Dad’s cam­era). We’ll upload some more pic­tures lat­er today from our own cam­era.

Dana real­ly seemed to enjoy her first Christ­mas. She did­n’t under­stand any­thing, of course, but she does actu­al­ly enjoy play­ing with her gifts quite a bit.

I per­son­al­ly thought it was sil­ly to buy her toys on the the­o­ry that she’d be just as hap­py with the box­es and wrap­ping paper. Turns out I was very much mis­tak­en, and I’m quite glad to be. Watch­ing her play is FUN.

It’s Christ­mas Eve and I’m off to bed, so have a mer­ry Christ­mas. The well-known words of Isaac Watts express my sen­ti­ments best:

Joy to the world! the Lord is come:
let earth receive her King;
let every heart pre­pare him room,
and heav­en and nature sing,
and heav­en and nature sing,
and heav­en, and heav­en and nature sing.

Joy to the world! the Sav­ior reigns;
let us our songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
repeat the sound­ing joy,
repeat the sound­ing joy,
repeat, repeat the sound­ing joy.

No more let sins and sor­rows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his bless­ings flow
far as the curse is found,
far as the curse is found,
far as, far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
and makes the nations prove
the glo­ries of his right­eous­ness,
and won­ders of his love,
and won­ders of his love,
and won­ders, won­ders of his love.

Now I’m off to have visions of sug­arplums dance in my head.

Hear ye, hear ye: today is Glen & Paula’s 8th wed­ding anniver­sary.

That will be all. Move along.

Paula, Dana and I just returned from our Christ­mas pil­grim­mage to Louisiana. And we’re all exhaust­ed.

It was a nice vis­it, and Dana behaved like an angel on all the flights, but it’s nice to be back in our own home with our own wire­less interenet con­nec­tion and our own weath­er and our own time­zone.

Oh, and our own beds. Dana has already become reac­quaint­ed with hers and Paula and I will soon ambush ours.

Thanks­giv­ing was quite won­der­ful.

My broth­er Greg vis­it­ed (and we played through Halo 2 on co-op–he had the same reac­tion I did to the abrupt end­ing), we had a ton of stu­dents over for Turkey Day itself, my friend Antho­ny got XBox live and we gamed togeth­er, and I bought a 200 gig hard dri­ve for under $50. Got­ta love those Fry’s “day after Thanks­giv­ing” spe­cials…

Any­way, giv­en my new abun­dance of disk space I decid­ed to install Lin­ux. I did it once in col­lege and enjoyed play­ing with it. I expect­ed much the same expe­ri­ence (name­ly a few days of fight­ing with arcane and need­less­ly obscure con­fig­u­ra­tion files), and I have to say I’m blown away by how far it’s come. I down­loaded the Fedo­ra Core 3 dis­tri­b­u­tion and set­up was a snap. Fedo­ra auto-detect­ed every­thing (includ­ing my sound card and net­work con­fig­u­ra­tion) and installed a very nice graph­i­cal inter­face called Gnome.

And to top it off, it kept all my exist­ing infor­ma­tion intact so that my com­put­er will now boot either Win­dows XP or Lin­ux at my whim.

How cool is that?

This morn­ing around 9:50 I glanced at my cal­en­dar and real­ized that I had a rather impor­tant meet­ing at 10:00. In Sacra­men­to. 125 miles away.

As my stom­ach sank into my socks I began mak­ing those pathet­ic, des­per­ate sounds I am prone to make in such situ­ta­tions, “Urgh. Ack. Jeez. No. Must be a mis­take. Shoot. AARGH!”

That may seem mild, but I assure you that if I was pos­sessed of a more flex­i­ble vocab­u­lary I would have employed every unwhole­some utter­ance at the stereo­typ­i­cal sailor’s dis­pos­al. As it is I prob­a­bly pushed the bound­aries for some­one in my line of work–at least inter­nal­ly.

Any­way, I was out the door in a flash and arrived just in time for lunch.

As it turned out I only missed the infor­ma­tion­al part of the meet­ing and was able to be present for the deci­sion-mak­ing dis­cus­sions.

Which is for­tu­nate, because the world needs more unin­formed peo­ple mak­ing impor­tant deci­sions… 🙂