sorrysosloppy

Not literally, but practically. Nothing is certain. The ground moves.

1. Jumping in the lake... from a moving motorboat.
2. Playing ball with lemons. It's a cunundrum.
3. Late-night frisbee at CSUH after our runs.
4. Herding the cats!
5. Dinner time dance!
6. Stopping at the street corners, then bolting on the command, "CROSS!" I think I could hear his little PFC working so hard.
7. The first time I let him off the leash -- freedom!
8. Running in the Hayward hills, and all our favorite mud puddles.
9. Timmy and Chachi walks around Richmond.
10. Timmy goes to work dream sequence.

I didn't think Timber would come back home with me last night. When I got home last night his food bowl was still full and he was laying legs sprawled backed against a wall. I carried him to the car and drove to the emergency vet. It was a tearful ride. The vet gave us some pain medication and a sling to help him stand, and suggested we see if he bounces back within a couple days. Timmy is slowing down fast. He doesn't seem to want to stand up anymore. Even food doesn't have its usual magical effect.

Rain fell in the middle of the night. It fell surprisingly hard on the roof for late April showers. It was tough getting out of Oakland and to Drupalcon here in SF. I want to immerse myself in the technical stuff, but it's clear I'm not a technical person. With Silvia in Montreal, and after last night's drama, the rain and all this talk about nodes and blocks and hooks, the poet in me is punching at my heart, shouting 'what the hell are you doing?'

Here I am in SF at Drupalcon. It took longer to get to Moscone Center than I anticipated, but I didn't miss anything. Had lunch with some nice folks from Vancouver. It's a beautiful day outside.

I think Paul's work (in what I would call philosophy of science) is fascinating, but the NSF doesn't get it. Beyond that, NSF's expectations for what our modest-sized program should do seem disproportionate to the resources provided. I don't think Paul helped himself, either. He wouldn't deign to fulfill the NSF's straightforward deliverable of a risk/safety/security/preparedness white paper, and he didn't follow up on the scenario planning and preparedness work NSF values (although budget was again part of the problem).

I was listening to Octopus Sock's RPM album on the way in. Good stuff. RPM's constraints seem to push some artists or songs onto a sparse stage with a bright spotlight in the center, where the something left unsaid still hangs in the empty spaces like a promise unfulfilled. An unadorned, beautiful young thing. The quality of that silence on Octopus Sock is intriguing and leaves me wanting to hear more.

On this and many other works with inexperienced or non-bass players playing bass that the bass lines divert from the root more often than "professional" recordings. This sometimes happens without the bass player even knowing it, I believe. I like that and wish I could teach myself to do that more often. Staying with the chord is so conventional and limiting.

As I was listening the garbage truck in front of me stopped in the right lane. I pulled around to pass quite gingerly. I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to hit a pedestrian that the garbage truck had stopped for in the first place. It was rainy and I couldn't see around the truck very well. I have been driving very conservatively lately, as if a child or deer will jump out in front of the car at any moment. There was no pedestrian today, and I imagined the contempt of the guy in the Camaro behind me for my pussyfooting. What would I say to him? "Yeah, well I'm a pussy that won't ever have to live with the guilt of killing a jaywalker." Huh. A pussy that never steps on it and lets the wind in his eyes, or strays from the bass note.

I just broke up with a girl with whom I've had an on-and-off relationship for the last 17 or so years. She's a femme fatale, the kind of girl you know will destroy you but you can't resist her. Call her Jane. I know I'm better off for being alone, but my heart still hurts. That's the best way I can think to describe it. So I have been really cranky and down this past week. Self-esteem at an all-time low. My wife thinks I'm depressed. Sometimes I start to believe it, too.

It made me wonder again: If I inherited my dad's penchant for dark-haired, dangerous women, why shouldn't I also have inherited his depression? As a kid I knew my dad to be a happy-go-lucky fellow, although you could elicit an angry and insensitive person if you, say, scratched the hood of his car. I think he still is that person, even though it's hard to tell through the stroke. I wonder what deep, dark sadness he carries inside. The pre-Prozac generation wasn't taught to embrace their depression and treat it with drugs, and he was never much of a talker anyway. Maybe that's another thing I inherited from my father: not owning my depression. Or maybe I just learned a different way to deal with it. In a weird way, I know my wretched weekends with Jane at least gave me something to look forward to: A slit of oblivion from whatever anxiety and sorrow the waking world gave me. And if you're convinced a wrecked girl is going to help you, it can be a strong placebo.

For the record, my independence day is Wednesday March 24, 2010.

when I stopped to look at this surreal sunset on the run home tonight.

I was curious if I could do this.

This guy is obviously very knowledgeable, but I have no idea what he's saying. (For example, drush? race condition?) It's probably my fault for not asking and/or caring. These guys are really developers, not users. I still can't figure out how to do version control. I still don't have a dev.site.com.