I took the day off of work today, kinda hoping to go surfing. No such luck. My todo list is too big! We leave tomorrow morning for Seattle, for Brandon and Kristin’s wedding. I have a conference in San Diego that begins on Sunday. My original flight out of Seattle was for Saturday night, but I realized that I wouldn’t be able to spend much time at the reception, so I rescheduled for early Sunday morning. By the time we leave the house tomorrow morning, I gotta rake the leaves in the yard (blow ’em, actually, with my new leaf blower!), pick up drycleaning, pick up floormats for the car, get the wedding present (yeah, we waited this long), write my presentation for the conference, and more…I’ll stop boring you now. Writing a blog post isn’t on the todo list, so I’m outta here…

October is a big month for us. Besides all the birthdays, it’s our anniversary month. Today Amy and I have been married seven years. It seems like such a cliche’, but those years have gone by unbelievably fast. I’ll never forget our first kiss, in her apartment in Pusan, South Korea. When Amy’s roommate found out about us, she said she knew that we were going to get married. Of course we did, but not until 3+ years a few job changes and another continent later.

So this is my annual opportunity to say how much I love and appreciate Amy–as my best friend, partner in life and as a mom. As Truman would say, I love her *this much* (visualize my hands behind my back, because my arms can’t go any wider than all the way behind me).

Happy anniversary, Amy!

Yesterday was my birthday. And my mom’s birthday. And my uncle’s birthday. And my brother-in-law’s birthday. When I was younger, I kinda thought it was a drag to have to share my birthday with other people in my family. Now it’s sorta fun. 12 of us went to Red Lobster last night. It’d been a while since my last visit to the Lobster, so I didn’t have a well defined strategy for the all-you-can-eat shrimp deal. If you aren’t familiar with the deal, you get to choose two kinds of shrimp to start out with, plus a salad and a choice of potato or rice. I had a mashed potato, cesear salad for the shrimp I chose the fettucine alfredo shrimp and the breaded shrimp. Bad idea. I got so full of the pasta and potato stuff that I couldn’t eat any of the other kinds of shrimp! Ron had a better strategy. He got a baked potato and set it aside to take home later. Then he got the breaded shrimp and the shrimp scampi. He was able to get multiple refills on the different kinds of shrimp and saved the pasta kind for the very last–I’m not sure whether he even finished the pasta stuff. Anyway, I think I need a do-over.

gang

Just a first test post from Flickr

A new monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He notices, however, that they are copying copies, and not the original books. So, the new monk goes to the head monk to ask him about this. He points out that if there was an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies.

The head monk says “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.”

So, the head monk goes down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours later, nobody has seen him. So, one of the other monks goes downstairs to look for him. He hears sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old monk leaning over one of the original books crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“The word is celebrate” sobs the old monk.

A tough old cowboy once counseled his grandson that if he wanted to live a long life, the secret was to sprinkle a little gunpowder on his oatmeal every morning.

The grandson did this religiously and he lived to the age of 93.

When he died, he left 14 children, 28 grandchildren, 35 great grandchildren and a fifteen foot hole in the wall of the crematorium.

So we bought a Scion xB (I’m sure I’ll be calling it The Boxcar) today. I think it’ll be ready for us tomorrow. It’s black with an automatic transmission. Gets 31mpg around town and 35mpg on the highway. We just did the base model, but it’s still pretty loaded: A/C, AM/FM/CD that’s satellite and MP3 capable, six speakers, power mirrors, windows and locks, remote keyless entry, traction control (front wheel drive), ABS brakes, tinted windows, etc… They market the things at GenY people, so there are all these really silly accessories out there (cupholder backlighting, anyone?) which we passed on. I guess you could load the thing with stuff and make it upwards of $20k if you really tried, but like I said, most of it is pretty silly. The craziest thing about the car is the abundance of passenger seating in the rear. It is unreal. I can sit back there and still have 6″ of space between my knees and the back of the driver’s seat (with the seat all the way back). The tradeoff, of course, is trunk space. But we checked my sister’s Mazda mini-van and the xB has easily as much trunk depth, if not more. Height is another matter, since the van is so tall…

Anyway, it’s our first new car (as opposed to “new to us”) and we’re pretty pleased. Truman digs the dark windows…

We saw Hero this evening. Great movie! The photography was beautiful and the story featured some sweet martial arts action. As usual, some of the funnest stuff to watch is when the characters defy gravity and run on water, or stand on the sides of buildings. I love it. I remember in Korea, I had students who were quite certain that in parts of China, there lived accomplished martial artists who were capable of such feats–that it wasn’t purely creative license. Maybe that’s something Troy and Ruth could look into…

Also, I sent off my slacker manifesto this afternoon. Matt was kind enough to pass a critical eye over the final draft and I made some changes base on that input. The funny thing was, when we got back from the movie, I checked email and had a note from the ChangeThis folks. I had sent them my document, but it was blank! Not sure how that happened, but they asked the obvious question as to whether that was the slacker statement I was trying to make… 🙂 It wasn’t and I sent the right version… Now it’s time to wait and see whether they’ll publish it.

Last, just helpin’ out with Seraphim Proudleduck.

Because I’m fair, I offer the following…

My Slacker@Work entry has been scraped off the ChangeThis website and they’ve asked me to write the full manifesto. They’ve got a special Word template that is used to help them reformat the manifesto into their PDF layout. They made it clear that there are no guarantees that what I write will actually be published on the site and if it does get published, it’ll be placed in a “slushpile” section of the site which is devoted to submissions like mine, and not the commissioned stuff that you see on the front page. Regardless of all the caveats, I’m kinda stoked to get the chance to write the thing. I also recently finished a book called “Thinking Like Your Editor” which was super-helpful in getting me to understand how to write a book proposal. That knowledge will come in pretty handy when writing the manifesto too. In my understanding, a book proposal is simply a toned down business plan. You’ve got to sell the idea and identify the market and the competition. The ChangeThis manifesto will just focus on selling the idea, of course, but the advice in the book will go a long way toward helping me distill my swirling thoughts. Anyway, it’s good news. I’ll post the text of the manifesto here when I’m done writing it.

Okay, not very fair and balanced, but funny nonetheless. And for the record, if anyone finds a similar graphic for Kerry, I’d be happy to post that too.