Well, I decided to unleash a new blog upon the world. It’s called Slacker Manager and I’m looking forward to writing it. I’ve got it hosted on TypePad.com, which ought to provide quite a bit more reliable uptime than I’ve experienced with our pintglass.org hosts. This blog will be a little experiment for me…I want to try and force/fool myself into writing more about the slacker@work stuff. And also, I’m curious to learn more about the blog advertising model. I’ve got Google AdSense on the sidebar of the blog, and I’m curious as to how that’ll work out. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s yet another way to keep up with my doings, though I’ll be keeping the personal writing over here and the ‘professional’ writing over there.

Jared posted a few pics of their latest family addition, Levi! Go take a look. And bookmark Jared’s site…he’s got interesting interests that may interest you if you’re interested.

Well, it looks like my manifesto went live on the ChangeThis website. That’s kinda fun! Be sure to get linky with it and pass it around. Now that it’s up, I guess it’s probably time to write the book proposal… Sigh. I don’t like having to work for my millions.

Well, I voted. Oregon does all voting by mail. It’s actually really great, since you can vote at your convenience right at home. I think the ‘e-voting’ initiatives that other states are undertaking sound great and I’ll probably vote over the internet someday. But for now, this old fashioned way of voting seems awfully easy and secure. I make my votes, I put my ballot in a ‘secrecy envelope’ then I put that envelope in yet another envelope and walk it over to the ballot box down the street. Easy as pie.

I breezed through most of the ballot, but Measure 34 really had me stumped. Still does. I like the idea of setting aside 50% of the forests for non-logging uses, but I have a very hard time reconciling the killer combo of reduced income to the state and increased expenses to the state. The Pacific Greens urged a yes vote, but with a “strong caveat’ (which I never found). I went further and voted against it, but with a heavy heart–I actually hope it passes, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for it.

Last week was kind of a whirlwind. Starting Saturday (a week ago yesterday), we cruised up to Seattle and visited with Amy, then went to Brandon and Kristin’s wedding. The wedding was beautiful and traditional and the reception was going off! They had the reception in this big catering place and there was tons of food and drink. We brought Truman, but he started getting squirrelly, so we split early. I was able to finally meet JVE (and his lovely wife Kelly) in person, so that was pretty cool. Wish I could have spent more time chatting with them, though…

Got back last Wednesday night from my conference in San Diego. The conference was kind of dull, but I was able to hook up with three old friends from college, so that made it all worthwhile. 🙂 Then Lu and Joanie brought Trey into the world–wow, what a cutie! Been quite a week.

Tru’s ‘grammy’ comes into town this coming Wednesday, so that’ll be fun for all of us! I think Amy and I might even get a chance to take advantage of some free babysitting and have a little weekend getaway…we’ll see.

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