Wow! A month passes really quickly these days. If time can slow down, perhaps it can also speed up?

Want to go to college for free without leaving your home? Take some courses here

I don't just want TakeTV, I need it.

I say: w00t!

I've been using Pidgin, since before it got it's new name. If you have more than one IM account, especially with more than one service, this is the best idea since they started preslicing bread. I wish there was a version for my Mac.

On September 26, 1983, Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Army quite possibly (and single-handedly) saved the world.

It's been years and I still choke on my eggnog every Christmas when I watch this:

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito."- African Proverb

Do you know a geek? Need to buy him/her something for Christmas? Shop here.

... and here is a good reason why. Wacky stuff from Japan:

You know, if they started the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric off with a classic Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny short it would do wonders for their flagging ratings.

They're killing chupacabras like flies down in Cuero, Texas these days. "The Man" tried to explain them away as hairless coyotes but we know better. It's part of a conspiracy by the fur industry to get us to look the other way. And Hollywood wants us to believe that these misunderstood creatures are blood thirsty killers.

All profits from the sales of these t-shirts will go to preservation efforts for the Chupacabras or to finance the college education of my kids, which ever seems more important when you fork over your hard earned cash.

Okay, there's this website called guru.com where you can freelance out your skills and talents and make some extra money. I suppose you could even make a living from it if you are persistent. The joke amongst us freelancers is that the people who submit requests for work usually want the job done for little money. I understand that. That's fair, everyone wants to get their money's worth. Personally, I avoid bidding on projects where the pay is really low or that I think is going to get out of control and suck a bunch of uncompensated time out of me. You can spot them easily. Other times, if it is simple and straightforward, I'll bend my own pricing rules and do a quickie illustration at a below-market rate. The key word here being "quick." Get in and out, like a duck mating, and be done with it.

Then there are project requests like this little gem:

Title: Hidden coloring pages
Project ID: 351099

Category: Illustration / Cartooning / Painting / Sculpting
Description:
Hi,
I need for my pre-school website 100 coloring pages with a cute animal hidden on each coloring page (kids will have to find it), black and white, 2480 X 3508 pixels, gif format, no text on drawings. This is for kids, so i don't need a lot of details. All shapes must be closed. You will have 2 weeks to complete the project. As it is some simple drawings, i am looking for a 70$ budget for the 100 drawings. It could be for a long relationship because i always need a lot of drawings. Please send a sample of previous work.

Let's just analyze this a little further, shall we. You would have 2 weeks to complete 100 simple drawings. Okay, simple is good. So, we're talking what, 15 to 20 minutes to draw, then 10 minutes to scan them into the Mac and clean it up. 30 minutes, tops, per drawing. Let's see here, 30 minutes times 100 drawings... that makes for 50 hours of work, so we're looking at a good full work week here. So, $70 for a week of work, um that's $0.70 per drawing, or basically $1.50 per hour. Am I missing anything here? Is my math off?

Come on! Puh-leez! I realize that this person is probably a poorly paid public school teacher financing this out of her* own pocket, but really, $1.50 an hour for a wage? Perhaps, my fellow struggling artists in Ghana would bewilling to do the job. The average hourly wage there is about $0.15.. Problem is, an artist in Ghana making that much money probably doesn't have a computer and a scanner.

I could go on, but I won't. You get the picture. What I want to know is: will she be surprised when no one bids on her project?

* sadly, we can assume the teacher is a female and we would be correct. Few male role models still exist in the lower grades.

4pm. Something happened where somebody said that somebody got on a Dart bus and said something about a bomb, so naturally pandemonium ensues.

Just in time for rush hour. We're going to do our part by running out into the street screaming like little girls.

You see this? Exactly one full month between posts rambling incoherent rants. How in the world does one month go by without doing anything in this strategically important area of my life? Well, it's all about the moral compromises we make in life. You see, along life's meandering path I met a girl. This was, uh, in late 1985. Now, marrying this girl in 1987 was most decidedly NOT a moral compromise. On the contrary, it's been one of the best things I've ever done. When I die, just put this on my headstone: "He married well." That's it, no name, no dates. Anyway, the moral compromise began in the subtle form of a ridiculously meager paystub that I would bring home twice a month after I married. Mind you, this ridiculously meager paystub was not a problem up until this point. After marriage it was a problem. Yep, we were poor. Not out-on-the-street poor, just baloney-sammiches poor. We ate a lot of them. When I reached a breaking point one day, my wife did something brilliant: she showed me how to fry the baloney, melt cheese on it and then make a sammich out of it. Pure genius! That alone probably saved my life because five and a half years of college had already ruined my appetite for instant ramen noodles.

Well, as always, I digress. On to the point...

So, almost from the get-go, we became occupied with the problem of how to make these meager paychecks much larger. I decided to gamble and go to grad school and get an MBA. I had read somewhere that foolish corporations all over America were hiring people with these freshly printed degrees by the truckload and at laughably high salaries. These were people with absolutely zero business experience, just schoolin' and nothing else. I decided that I needed to get on that gravy train ASAP. Almost two years later I doubled my salary by agreeing to surrender most of my waking hours to a large bank holding company in Dallas.

Now, here's the interesting part: despite our doubling our income (actually it tripled because Debbie had started teaching full-time, but we were saving her salary for a down payment on a house) we still managed to spend that and more every month. Instead of doing the prudent thing and elevating our lifestyle modestly from baloney to, say, hamburger, we started accumulating things, stuff. I can't tell you what it all was exactly, but we must have spent all that dough on something.

Fast forward today, the salaries are even bigger, and it's all about spending a boatload of money every month. Honestly: it's not a family or a household... it's more like a company! There's even a daily "burn rate" because we're incapable of passing a 24-hour period without spending some amount on something. It's mindblowing, because you suddenly realize one day that you are just like everyone else. I didn't register for this rat race, but somehow I got signed up anyway. This may seem obvious to you, but somehow I thought we'd be different. Not like living-in-a-yurt-and-naming-our-kids-sunflower-and-moonbeam-while-eating-nuts-and-berries different, but just different in a normal way. I guess I thought things would get less complicated over time but instead the opposite happened. Now, everyone in the house is overcommitted and too busy to do the things we want to do because there's so much that we have to do.

So, to sum up... Moral Compromise #1: allowing myself to get addicted to the things that cost money, so that making money becomes a very important means to reaching this end.

But... I think I can fix it. And by that I mean I have no idea how to fix it.

You know what I miss? I miss sitting/standing for hours while absorbed in a really complicated drawing. You know...the way your brain kind of gets in the zone and starts buzzing and you are oblivious to all activity around you except for your subject and you lose all sense of time passing and you can't hear your wife yelling at you until she throws something small and heavy at your head to snap you out of it such as a D battery from the flashlight in the laundry room and she tells you to fix something for dinner which is only fair because she's been doing load after load of laundry all afternoon so you reach for the box of spaghetti but as you pull it out of the pantry you think to yourself hmmm, this might be a great addition to the still life drawing so instead of starting a pot to boil you put the box of spaghetti down next to the peach and the grapes and begin drawing again? Yeah: THAT. I'm gonna try to carve some time off tonight and do that. Maybe I can get the boys to get down on that too. Probably not. They missed most of Heroes last night so they'll be spending sdome quality time with the Tivo tonight. Perhaps if they sit still it might be an opportunity to sketch them? [mind begins to hum]

I got some more gesso this past weekend so I can start painting again.

Is it just me or does there seem to be an extraordinary number of people born in September? I Googled this and found out that August ranks the highest for births in the United States... a little over 9 percent, followed by July, THEN September. I guess it is my family/crowd. This surprises me because my wife, who delivered in March, August, and November, so she should know, says that one should plan on NOT being pregnant during the Summer, especially the hottest, most humid part because sweat rolling down your preggo belly is most unpleasant. I don't know why I'm typing this. I'm going to stop now.

In case you didn't know today is Computer Programmer's Day because it is the 256th day of the year.

Okay. Yeah.

Well, let's explore this a little bit for those of y'all who don't know a bit from a byte (or don't care). 256 is not an especially special number, even if you are counting in binary... (cue Julie Andrews!):

Let's start at the very beginning ( a very good place to start)
When you count like people, you begin 1, 2, 3
When you count like PeeCee, you begin 1, 10, 11
1, 10, 11   1, 10, 11
The first three binary numbers just happen to be 1, 10, 11
1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111
Let's see if I can make it easy

Think of a light bulb. A light bulb is either on, or it is off. Light, or no light. For shorthand's sake 1 is on and off is 1. We need a shorthand way to represent them because we just placed an order for 20,000,000 of them to make a processor. So, because the bulbs can only be on or off, we have to use a Base-2 number system. Humans use Base-10 and it is second nature to us, when we get to 9 and want to go higher we can't because we're using Base-10 and we've already used up 10 symbols to represent real numbers (zero through nine). So, we have a problem: what do we do/use to represent ten? Well, turns out, what we do is start over with 0, but in order to not confuse the ten with the original zero we add a one to the front and so we come up with the combination of "10"

Pretty simple, huh?

So, in Base-2 we only have two symbols to use to represent numbers: 0 and 1. So, when we count to two, we're in the same pickle that we get into when we want to represent 10 in Base-10. We count 0 (zero), 1 (one), and now for two we simply do not have a symbol to represent 2 so we have to start over with 0, but in order to not confuse the two with the original zero we add a one to the front and so we come up with the combination of "10"

Pretty simple, huh?

Meh, not really, it makes my head spin too.

So anyway, back to 256. Turns out representing larger numbers in binary take a lot of 1's and 0's and by large I mean bigger than 16. For example, my favorite number is 42. 42 in binary is 101010. See? It take a whopping 6 characters to represent a number that can be represented with only two characters in Base-10. Don't feel smug, the mathematicians in the Aldebaran system have 64 fingers and can easily represent 42 with a single character that looks a little like the symbol Prince used to use for his name but I digress. So, it becomes convenient to speak of these large numbers in binary in terms of powers of 2. You know, like how 10 to the 2nd power is 100 (because it means the same thing as 10 times 10)? We computer geeks quickly find it useful to talk of numbers on computers on terns of "2 to the something-power" such as 2 to the 2nd power (or two times two) or 2 to the 8th power (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2).

2 to the 8th power by the way is 256.

So why is computer programmer's day celebrated on the 2^8 day of the year? Why not the 2^4 day?

Beats me

Um, yeah, well... nevermind.

Apple keeps churning out "must have" gizmos faster than I can make money for them. I'm still waiting on the release of Leopard to purchase my new iMac. I am also waiting on the availability of the wireless keyboard option too. It's like waiting for Christmas and I can't stand it!

Meanwhile, I am using the brand new Wacom tablet with my old-school G3 iBook and it is slower than honey in January.

And now, Apple introduces these new iPods and slashes the price of the iPhone. While I don't actually need any of these, they did cause me to take my eye off of the iMac for just a sec. I actually started a thought process that began with downgrading from my planned purchase of the 24 inch iMac to the 20 inch so I could then invest in the iPod Touch. Luckily, I'm saved because I cannot buy the iMac until it ships with Leopard. This will allow time for logic to prevail over any impulses.

Meanwhile, I am working through some exercises with the tablet and my iBook, creating 3-point perspective technical illustrations in Adobe Fireworks and PhotoShop. Maybe I'll post some of them here if they turn out okay. These illustrations initially look like CAD drawings but you use Photoshop to color them. If I am sucessful, then perhaps in a few years I hope to be able to create something like this. Intimidating? You betcha! And it gets more so when you start obtaining a little skill in drawing stuff in perspective on the computer and you have an inkling of the enormous amount of time that has to be invested into creating drawings like these.

Anyway, back to Apple products and my current lackage of discretionary funds: it looks like I need to get busy and scare up some more freelance work.

We cleaned out the closet under the stairs today. You know... the place where we'd keep Harry Potter if he lived with us. There was a tremendous amount of junk in there. A lot of old coats and jackets that brought back [now] pleasant memories of toddlers and adolescents. We found long lost mates to gloves and mittens, Lego bricks, tons of craft stuff, and the Pack flag for Cub Scout Pack 336 which I was convinced was not in my posession when they were looking for it two years ago. For me personally, I regained three treasured items: a black Lotus Software cap, an Astroboy Gameboy cartridge, and a pair of olive green wool gloves which I had to go without all last winter. Debbie found her karate uniform and pads, and the boys were able to restock with a dozen or so stray tennis balls.

Anyway, it all capped off a glorious weekend of slacking about, which, I think we were all craving after the first two weeks of school. It's just a shame that I have to ruin it all by paying the bills tonight.

Let's see, you have your traditional fare such as coffee and soft drinks. Then there are the cross-hybrids like Monster Energy and Boo Koo, then the creative twists like the Full Throttle Slurpee at 7-Eleven, then it all comes full circle with Diet Pepsi Max muscling in on Mountain Dew turf. Yup, caffeine seems to be the new drug of choice for modern Americans and I must confess that I'm not only on this bandwagon, I'm up front cracking the whip on the team of horses driving this thing. One of these days, I know, I'm gonna have to pull that bandwagon up and park it in from of the Betty Ford clinic for 6 to 12 weeks of detox. If I'm lucky maybe me and Lohan can be roomies. Until then, my caffeine-induced mania has produced two more paintings for your amusement.

As always, slightly larger, albeit unprofessionally phtographed pics are on the portfolio page. Check 'em.

Seriously, these things are starting to pile up around the house. Thinking about giving them away as Christmas gifts this year so you family members and friends better watch out!

I got up this morning and started working on this little guy:

He looks like he could go on a sign outside a catfish joint, or on a box of frozen fillets at Kroger's. It made me wonder where all the illustrators went. I mean, I know where they went... over the years they all got jobs elsewhere. Some became line men for the phone company, others went to work in grocery stores, some actually became (gasp!) businessmen!

Allow me to back up for a second. You see, up until the personal computer (and Adobe Photoshop in particular) became synonymous with the Art Department at any major newspaper or company, everybody employed a few artists to get "art stuff" done when it was needed. As you might imagine, newspapers employed a small army of artists to create ads, and draw cartoons and illustrations to go along with stories. Likewise, a company like, say, Bank of America would employ a few artists to create story boards and graphs for presentations by one executive to another. They might have an internal advertising department to take care of the more repetitive and mundane chores that a contracted Ad agency would not. Deparment stores would employ lots of illustrators to do catalogs, circulars, and in-store displays. They all still do a little of this today, but PowerPoint and Photoshop has drastically reduced the need for in-house illustrators. One artist today with computer skills can be as productive as ten or twenty artists in the earlier part of last century.

It reminds me a little of Bunny Watson's Research Department in Desk Set where writers and different employees of the company, but mostly the writers, could call in and quickly get answers to any questions they might have. At one point someone called in to see what kind of car the King of the Watusis drove. Today we have Google for this and the modern version of Bunny and her girls are lawyers, secretaries, or advertising execs.

Same sadly goes for illustrators. I just hope that more than a few of them are still drawing on the side.

I have to admit: this is embarrassing and not something I am proud of. As a parent, I took a stand a few years ago that one gaming platform was sufficient for our household. That was back when we upgraded our N64 to the Nintendo Gamecube. For those of you uninitiated, Nintendo is the exclusive vendor of all video games featuring the Mario Brothers, the pink, bubble-headed Kirby, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and of course all things Pokemon. All good, fun, rated E, games for the whole family: from kids under 8 to kids over 40. And I held the line there pretty well. For several years, in fact.

Except for Game Boys, we had some of those. They don't count.

Every now and then a new game would come out exclusively for Sony's Playstation 2 and one of the boys would beg for it, but I was strong and I had a backbone. That is, until I found this little gem. So I caved. Yes, it was selfish, but at least I could say that it was "my" PS2 and "my" game and not something I bought for the kids. Using this thin veil of an excuse, I was able to stay out of trouble with La Señora Dominguez (who definitely thinks I buy too much crap stuff for our kids). Katamari Damacy, by the way, is probably the weirdest trip you can take yourself on without having to ingest drugs. So, the cat was out of the bag and we began buying titles for the PS2. My firstborn was getting older and discovered that he preferred shooting people and blowing up stuff in his video games and the PS2 had more titles for older gamers. He began developing an interest in WWII by playing games like the Medal of Honor series and in history in general with games like Civilization and Age of Empires. All really cool games, I have to admit. Somewhat violent, but still tame even by Doom standards. Every now and then they'd talk about this up-and-comer called the Xbox. The good thing was that all the games coming out for this platform seemed to be for older teens and adults. In fact, it seemed that almost all of the Xbox games that weren't sports games were rated "M" (we have yet to purchase or play a rated M game in this house). So we could ignore the Xbox. Fine. Gamecube and the PS2. I could live with that. Two platforms... I slipped a little , but surely I can hold this line.

Then the Wii came out.

Now, I gotta say, it just isn't fair. The Wii shouldn't count. We had to get one, of course... they're just too much fun! Every house in America (no, the WORLD) should possess one of these. If you don't have a Wii yet stop reading this right now and go get one. A few months ago, my Mom and Dad, my kids, and I were all playing the Wii... together! We don't even do that with board games anymore. Fun, fun, fun.

Okay, so we moved the Gamecube upstairs with the PS2, and the Wii stayed downstairs connected to the big TV. I could now come home and get beat by my 8 year old in baseball, bowling, boxing, and tennis after work everyday.

This brings us to last week. The two older boys had been hoarding money for more than 6-months and they came to me and announced that they wanted an Xbox 360. I said No, of course. We have a Gamecube, a PS2, and a Wii... what possible game would they want to play on it that was not available on these other platforms? This was stupid. I was expecting (and prepared) for them to ask for Halo. That game is rated M and I don't care how much fun it is... I have set the rated-M rule in in concrete.

They showed me this game.

You know... it just isn't fair. They fought dirty on this one... a smartly executed flanking maneuver right around my defenses. They know how much I love the Harvest Moon series for the Gameboy and Viva Piñata is a cross-pollinated hybrid of Harvest Moon and Pokemon, and somewhat twisted like Katamari Damacy. They knew I couldn't resist. Viva Piñata, y'all. I gotta go play on our Xbox now.

Any advertising person or firm that uses the song "What I Like About You" should be fired immediately by their client. I mean, seriously, this song has been prostituted out for years to peddle dozens of products and frankly the song is tired, old, and ineffective. No one likes it anymore. I'd rather listen to fingernails scratch a chalkboard!

If I were Esurance, I would ask Foote, Cone & Belding for my money back. Their commercials are kind of dumb to begin with but combining this music with their spy-girl cartoons to sell car insurance just reeks of lazy creativity.

Finished up three paintings this weekend: Texas Weather III, IV, and V. I've been working on them off and on for about a month. Here are the thumbnails.

I posted larger pics on the portfolio page. Check 'em.

Next up: overdue portraits of my sons, a "fall" painting for my wife, and more paintings of kitchen appliances for me!

New article in Infoworld yesterday about the soaring sales of Apple computers. You know, back in 1994 when I bought my first Mac, there was no one, I mean I was alone (except for the several hundred thousand Mac users on AOL). Later, when I upgraded to an iBook I'd get approached in public when using it. People saw it as a real curiosity, something special and different. If I saw another Mac person in public, our mutual posession of an Apple product almost demanded that a conversation be started.

Now, everybody and their cat has a MacBook or an iMac... they're so common that I don't even take a second glance. So, as Apple's PC market share begins it's drive up to 20% I'm feeling a little gloomy that it's all not much of a club anymore.

I've been pretty busy this Summer doing OTHER THINGS. Exactly what these OTHER THINGS are is on a "need to know" basis and right now you don't need to know. Except for maybe one project where I had to make 30 different cartoons of President Bush. Some are humorous and some not so. They will support an upcoming calendar of humorous quotes but Dub-ya. Other than that, I don't know much about the project. Here's a couple:

Now that this is done (and when I get paid) I can get me one of these to replace my aging iBook. My iBook is 4 years old yet I was able to confidently (albeit slowly) scan, touch up, and color the Geo. Bush drawings in Photoshop 7. The only thing I really missed other than CPU speed, was the lackage of a graphics tablet to do the coloring. My old tablet was one of the victims of the burglary back in 2005. I'm hoping that this project and another web development gig I did last month will pay for all of this. Then, I can (hopefully) be more efficient and do some more art gigs to build up the new minivan fund.

But anyway, since there's a pause in the work for now, I'll get back to doing some daily pages stuff and finish up some paintings.

Okay, I was entering the men's room at work yesterday and all of a sudden this thought hit me like a load of rocks. Do you realize that public restrooms are the last bastion of gender segregation in our society? Didn't Brown v. Board of Education declare that separate is NOT equal? I wonder, then, why we still have separate men's and women's restrooms? We should have just one big single bathroom for everyone. I know (from talking to women and not by peeking) that many women's restrooms have a little couch thing... a piece of furniture that you can lie down and take a rest. I can tell you from firsthand experience that no men's room has such a thing. This alone invalidates any 'separate but equal' argument (as if you didn't need B v. BOE to do that).

I'm not mocking Brown v. Board of Education, I'm just saying.

My attorney agrees that the situation is "an infringement on my constitutional rights. It's outrageous, egregious, preposterous, deplorable, unfathomable, and improbable." But he refuses to represent me anymore.

So, what I'm asking I guess if for some lawyer somewhere to take this cause up so that separate public restrooms for men and women can be rightly declared unconstitutional. However, I must recuse myself from being a plaintiff because I'm unwilling to undergo the humiliation really busy. Any takers?

Everyone's favorite gamer-girl and co-host of the wildly popular X-Play on the G4 Channel has a daily video blog. Check it because, erm... it's an important new source of tech news? No wait, because we need another quickly digestible source of internet-based news? No, that's not it either. Oh, poop! Watch it because she's a little slice of cutie pie. There. I said it. Go.

Like you, I have a collection of websites that I visit regularly. This collection has been somewhat etched in stone for several years now: doggdot.us, woot.com, macrumors.com, gizmodo.com, and treehugger.com. So it should be with some fanfare and a little recognition to announce I've added another one Drawn! to my daily list of must-digest websites. Take a look.

By the way, I've noticed that a lot of blogs include a picture with each article. I'm going to start doing that too, either one of my own or something I copied.

I used to be kind of embarassed about my hobbies (art, computers, solving math problems). I mean, I figured if you were over 30 and a large part of your leisure time wasn't spent golfing, fishing, or hunting then there was something seriously wrong with you. After all, this is what men do, right? They do these ball/bait/gun activities with other men and everyone feels good about it, right? Well, except some of the wives, I suppose, but that's another story.

I played golf in High School and I liked it. But the thing is, even back in those days, being on the golf course all morning or afternoon, all I could think about was the time I was wasting and all the other things that I a) should be doing and b) would rather be doing. So I gave that up pretty quickly.

I used to fish a bit when I was a kid and I liked it a lot. I even ate the fish I caught, which most kids I knew would not do. Except the fish that came out of the James River. We weren't allowed to eat those. Something about "kepone." Anyway, I'll probably take it up again some day. I can't do it now becuase I can always think of 20 things that have to be done before I could even think about going fishing.

The hobbies that I actually do like to spend time on, drawing, painting, computers, math, woodworking... can all be done around the house. I always thought that it is a little strange that a guy would spend 40 to 60 hours a week away from his wife and kids, just so he can spend all day Saturday away from his wife and kids playing golf or hunting. I mean, I'm like, "Dude! Why did you bother to get married and have kids in the first place?" To which the response would usually be something like "Dude! I don't know." Seriously though, if you don't enjoy being around your wife and kids, get some stinking therapy or something!

So, I started meeting and hearing about people in my area who have all these unusual and geeky hobbies. There are some painters and illustrators, sure, but there's guys who raise birds, go to the Dallas Summer Musicals, cook, restore furniture, write books, do community theater, and collect antiques. It can be hard to get people to talk about it, so you sometimes have to confess your own geeky hobbies first.

It just goes to show you: the next time you think you're weird or a geek for collecting tropical fish or reading Japanese comic books, you have to remember that you are surrounded by other people just as geeky as you are, if not more... you just don't know it. You also have to figure that there's a lot of golfers and hunters out there who would really rather be doing something else if you pinned them down about it. They just can't overcome the intertia of external expectations.

Still, if I didn't have to work... I think I'd probably fish and play some golf. After all, you can't paint all the time, can you?

When I was younger I never ate a vegetable, except for tater tots. Later on, as my palete matured, I began to experiment with starter vegetables like tomatoes and iceberg lettuce (liberally saturated with Ranch dressing of course). These days, I'll regularly hit the harder stuff like broccoli, corn on the cob, green beans, peas, and asparagus, but because my generation didn't grow up starving in a Great Depression or anything like that, I never learned to eat the nastier crack-cocaine vegetables like beets, turnips and rutabagas.

Now you have to understand something important: up until this Spring, vegetables were something that one purchased as the local grocery store. Fresh, frozen, or in cans... it doesn't matter... you get these things at the grocery store.

So why in the world did I plant tomatoes, yellow squash, cucumbers, jalapenos, strawberries, and cantaloupes in my backyard? I'm telling ya, there's some kind of "old man" gene that kicks in during middle age and every chromosome in your body starts screaming out "PLAY WITH DIRT! START COMPOSTING! PLANT SOMETHING NOW!!!!" So that's what I did. Now, it didn't help things that we got, like, a record-setting foot and a half of rain in June so raising vegetables in the back yard became a totally effortless endeavor. Despite this, I quickly came to erroneously believe that I have some natural talent as a farmer and that my life thusfar has been wasted toiling in the field of software development when I should have rightly been toiling in the field of, well... the fields.

Anyway, resistance to the gene is futile, so don't bother, but I do have a theory about it and here goes: I think that as my kids grow up, I unconsciously realize that I'm on the downhill side of raising them and they don't require quite as much attention as they did when they were under, say eight. So I'm filling the void by re-raising children through vegetables. I know it sounds crazy, but if psychologists say that a woman subconsciously has sex every time she puts a shoe on, then why can't a man raise a child every time he plants a pepper?

I'm at peace with this gene and I already have plans to double my garden next year. It's the gene that makes me want to keep kids off my lawn that has me worried. I wonder when that one will kick in?

The rasceta are the wrinkles crease marks on the bottom of your wrist. I've been studying it off and on pretty much for my entire life. This probably qualifies me as an expert in the subject of rasceta in particluar and permanent skin creases in general. I have not published any scientific papers mind you, but I could if I wanted to. To sound like I know what I'm talking about I wouldn't say to someone 'Oh, yes, I study rasceta which are the crease marks on the bottom of your wrist.' No. I would say something more scientific-sounding like 'Oh, yes, I study rasceta which are the transverse wrinkling on the anterior surface of the wrist.'

1. Taser shotgun!
2. And this to keep those stray dogs off the lawn.

OMG! I was so ROFL at this commercial! Scary thing was: I didn't need the subtitles to understand it.

This page was beginning to take a long time to load so I put the older stuff, including The History of Toast on Page Three. Check it.