Thanksgiving was good.

The hockey game was tied.

I am tired.

I haven’t posted in a while, so I figured that I would, just so you’d know that I was alive.

Feh, I have a recap to write for USCHO. I’m going to nap first.

Listening to the Barenaked Ladies’ “The Old Apartment” reminded me that I didn’t say anything about the trip up to Detroit on Friday.

We were about 45 minutes ahead of schedule [mainly due to leaving early and making better time with a detour around Louisville--Mom and Dad, they put a spur around the south side of the city so you don't have to make the 65-71 transition anymore!], and so I looked at the guys and said, “Okay, I have a request. Can we go by my old house?”

I hadn’t been to Beavercreek since we moved in early June of 1991. Doug had been back for his 10-year high school reunion, and he tried to impress upon me how different everything was. No such luck. I was freaking out about how different everything was the entire time–just ask Mike or George.

The old house looks just about like I remembered it. There was even a lamp in the same spot in the living room window where we always had one, and it looked like I could just pull in, walk up the stairs to the porch, get the key from under the rock, and walk on in to the house, where Buttons would surely be waiting, yapping happily at me.

But no. I’m 24, not 12. “Broke into the old apartment / Tore the phone out of the wall / Only memories, fading memories / Blending into dull tableaux / I want them back / I want them back”

The funniest thing was driving by my best friend’s house, realizing that yep, that was his Jeep in the driveway, and stifling the urge to knock on the door at 4:30 a.m.

Now that I know how short the drive is, I’ll have to make it some weekend when I have time. [Please, laugh with me now.]

“I know we don’t live here anymore / We bought an old house on the Danforth / She loves me and her body keeps me warm / I’m happy here / But this is where we used to live”

Yeah. Beavercreek is much the same as I remembered it, at least in the old parts of town. The further north you go out towards Wright-Patt, though, the newer it becomes. It’s really scary. I need to go back and take photos during the day, just so Mom and Dad can see.

I got mentioned in this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback. You gotta scroll to the bottom, but it’s there. Heh.

And why does every female I talk to for any length of time end up telling me some deep, dark secret at some point? Is the “Pastor In Training” light always on over my head? Do I give off some sort of vibe? It’s weird.

The last week has absolutely, positively sucked at work. I’ve been trying to get about three customer organizations to agree to a schedule that we can work to over here in manufacturing. At the same time, I’ve been trying to build a schedule that we can manage the entire bloody project from. Right now, it’s about 650 line items, and by the time I finish building it up today [and it will be today, because I'm out tomorrow--yeah, hockey trip!], it’ll probably be pushing 800 or so. It’s been a royal pain in my ass, frankly, since I’m getting to deal with a variety of competing interests.

My boss just came in and said, “This is the kind of thing that I’ve been wanting for the last two years. Thanks for getting this done.” Before he came in and said anything, I was about ready to blow my top.

Proof positive that a few heartfelt words at the right time can make all the difference.

The cool thing about working on it today is that I should be able to do it without sitting through a single telecon. That’s almost enough to make me want to pay someone for the privilege … but not that much.

Man, after yesterday, I kinda just want to sit here like a bump on a log yesterday. We underwent a much needed scheduling exercise that saw me in teleconference meetings for … oh, five hours of the day. My poor boss, he was in even more of them.

I’m pretty close to suggesting that we go over the schedules in detail with the customer once a month. They get our detailed schedules every week and a thumbnail, top-level view most every day, but frankly, I’m not sure that they’re looking at it. I know that some of the guys are, but I don’t think that they all are, and that really bothers me, seeing that the schedules are, well, my job. I really only do them for the customer, as we could manage this project without the Nth level of detail that we go to in these schedules, so to have my liaison work harxly considered doesn’t exactly leave me primed to get out of bed every morning, you know?

All right, that’s enough complaining for my morning. Time to get my ass in gear and get to work.

No easy way to put this: Mom has breast cancer, and has surgery scheduled for the 2nd of December.

I’d waited on saying anything until knowing [or at least strongly presuming] that Doug had talked with Mom and Dad. I certainly didn’t want him to learn this by reading my site.

Yes, I knew that this was a possibility, and yes, I didn’t say anything about it on purpose. And frankly, I probably won’t say much about it, really, but I do feel that my friends should know, and heck, IJSM is a better medium at distributing such information than many other media I could use for the task.

Your thoughts, concerns, and prayers will be appreciated by Mom, Dad, Doug, and me. If you just want to leave a little note, I think that would be cool. An email to Mom and Dad would probably also be cool, too.

As a family, we’ll soldier on. It’s what we do.

I’ve just been keeping quiet, really. Work is a never-ending battle between keeping my butt from getting singed and struggling to get the ammunition up to the right people. Right now, we’re caught in a crossfire at work, and I’m working to make sure that we have the best ammunition until all sides decide to sign yet another peace treaty.

I’m getting tired of doing this every couple of months. It’s pretty non-productive, and the problem is not in our house. But, that’s all I’m going to say about it.

I did, however, wish to post so that none of you would think that I had perished or something. I’m working on getting gfmorris.com running, and rather than going to an SGA meeting tonight, I’m probably going to put the templates together tonight. The site as a whole isn’t ready for use right away, as I’ve got to fold in the IM.o and Perp.net archives into it as well. Such a pain, but eventually worth it.

Okay, so I get everything settled in my head yesterday, finally begin to relax last night, get into bed at a decent hour …

… and wake up with a freaking sinus headache.

Damn this weather, damn it to hell, because the temperature oscillations are what cause this. What’s really bad is that the only stuff I have for this at home is stuff that makes me drowsy when I take it, so I’m not going to make it to work at 7:00 a.m. like I would if I got moving now and got on the road in an hour.

Nuts!

[Nuts! is my new perjorative, in an ever-ongoing effort to limit my FCC-disapproved vocabulary. Just say it with me: "NUTS!" Doesn't that feel gutturral?]

I know that my Wondergeeks readership might not have seen this, but I’m dropping grad school.

Y’all get me back now. What’s this? Weeknights, save for hockey trips, are free?

Peyton Hall? Hit by a tornado?

Reading this 36 hours later still gives me the shakes. Peyton was home for two years.

This … this … ugh.

Can I get an official WTF about the weather?

Remember this entry? It was 45F in the house on Thursday morning, and about 36F outside.

It’s 79F outside now, and the low last night was about 62F.

WTF?

Pick a season and stick there!

Of course, all the bugs have come out of hibernation, and will all get to die later this week, so maybe that’s not all bad.

Seeing as I was overwhelmed with people willing to donate time to a design of GFMorris.com, I decided to take a shot at it myself. Sitting at home yesterday, I mulled a variety of things that I could do with the site. I eventually decided to pull up Photoshop and see what I could come up with.

The end result is here. Mind you, at the time of this writing, I’ve not done anything really interesting, and all the text up there is filler, but hey … it’s something. I’ve been using Georgia as a font on IJSM for a while, and I like the way it looks, so I’ll keep it here. But I’ve been wanting something else for a new site, and when I was playing with font stuff yesterday, Tahoma was the default … and I like it, so it stays.

I have to run off to church now, but when I get back, I have SGA stuff to send out to Anthony and then I will get somewhere further with the layout. The biggest problem is going to be consolidating archives from ijsm.org/masters/, imperfectmirror.org, and perpendicularity.net into one archive for GFMorris.com. [That, and there are a couple mis-filed entries in the ijsm.org/bachelors/ archives, too.] While this is daunting–I don’t really want to go a-digging through 1500 or so entries–the end result is a better delineation of Web sites, and that’s worth it, I guess.

Man, I’ve got a sinus headache that no amount of medication seems to be able to knock out today. Woke up around 4:00 with it, and couldn’t remember where I had my good drugs. [In the laptop bag, of course--isn't that where you'd stick them?] Around 7:00, it got so bad that I had to find the good stuff, and finally I did.

Of course, these are the “drowsy” kind–or, as Denis Leary said of NyQuil, “Don’t make any f—ing plans.” Would be nice, sleeping ’til noon, except the headache is still here! Grrrrr…

Anyhow, Todd’s out of town for the weekend, so I’m going to go feed the dogs, wander around in the house, check the mail, and probably get something to eat. My weekend “off”, and I spend it doing really mundane things. Figures.

Subject: A beer survey? Finally, something really important!

And if your question is whether I’m going to fill this out, the answer is a hearty, “Hell yeah!”

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to remember why I’m at work on a Friday morning … hasn’t happened for about a month …

Last night, after class, I went over to the University Center and killed time. Anthony was working the front desk, so I pulled up a piece of counter to lean on and just talked to him for a while.

At one point, Anthony said, “What have you got out there in the Outhouse for heat?” Me: “You’re under the impersonation that I need a heater out there?” Anthony: “Well, what happens when it’s like 30?” Me: “I don’t much care.”

Wow, it’s 36F outside, and it can’t be much more than 45F in here. It was hell getting out of bed this morning, because I just slept in a white T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants … oh man. It’s cold in here, and that’s saying a lot for me.

Gotta break out the warm-weather sleeping gear. I don’t need no stinking space heater.

Does Crayola make a color called “absolutely incredulous”? If not, they need to get on that–pronto.

What the GOP did last night was absolutely unprecedented. This has not happened in the history of the American polity.

Class is going to be fun tonight.

The GOP now has the ball. They can choose to:

1) Run for a touchdown.
2) Kneel and run out the clock.
3) Fumble.

Remember: the Democrats had the ball from 1992-94, and look where that got them–a 60-plus-seat spanking and a populist firebrand as Speaker of the House.

When I turned in my ballot, I was voter 611 at my precinct. That’s typically a customer service number, so I’m happy to oblige.

I never, ever thought that I’d vote for a Libertarian candidate. I appreciate their candor and their ideology, but something about the whole thing strikes me as odd. Mind you, I hope they can foster a movement to force the GOP to reform themselves, but that’s irrelevant. However, I could not bring myself to vote for Bob Riley or Don Siegelman. Siegelman has been someone whose politics I’ve detested for a good two years now, and Riley did nothing in his campaigning to make me want to vote for him. Frankly, I would have loved the opportunity to vote for Steve Windom, because he at least knows he’s a hack. Riley won’t admit to it.

Then there was my state senate spot, where Jeff Enfinger has long been a pain in my ass. This is the first time that I’ve lived in his district, though, having always been in Tom Butler’s district. I know and like Tom, and I was kinda disappointed that I couldn’t help him push towards re-election. But I also know and like Greg Bacon, the Libertarian candidate for #7 Senate. Greg is a UAH and an ASMS grad, and I figure, hey–he gets elected, I can call him up at 4:00 a.m. if I’m pissed. Besides, I’m his representative in SGA.

Other than that, I voted for the person if I’d heard of them before and didn’t associate their name with evil nastiness. I’m reasonably poltically connected, so I know who most of the bastards are around here.

The fun votes were on Constitutional amendments. Make any new Constitution have to come before the voters? Yeah. Make unincorporated Madison County be zoned? Bet your ass. Sure, the ‘necks won’t like it, but it ought to be done. Madison County needs to stop being ‘neckville.

Glad I voted. I earned the right to bitch around here for four more years. You don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t bitch …

So, I’ve been thinking about consolidating the sites. Unsurprising, seeing as I got an impetus to do so. [Which reminds me: Heather, in linklists, what do you want listed for you?]

Anyhow, let me take this moment to announce that I’m going to be really lazy [shocker, I know] and, rather than do my own site design, give you, my readers, the opportunity to come up with your own design for my site.

Yep, I’ll let you make my choices for me. Scary, I know.

What do I want? Well, the only thing that I know that I want involved is a much larger version of this picture:

If you want to be involved, I’m going to be willing to listen. All I’m looking for is a general idea to run with: what an entry page would look like, or maybe the main page. You can take whatever elements out of that photo which suit your fancy and expand upon them.

If’n you’re interested [and if so, I worry about you], I can get you the original 2048×1536 photo that Amy took back in the day. If’n you are, well, leave me a comment, eh?

Of course, if none of you respond, well, I’ll be forced to do it my own self. Heh.

Okay, okay, so having a boatload of sites is fun, but it’s not productive.

I’m going to let IJSM continue to be the wacky-ass Weblog that it is, and maybe I’ll even start updating it daily again.

The rest of my sites are going to get glommed on in some shape or form into gfmorris.com. I’m going to take the month of November to do this, only because setting a deadline will make sure that it gets done. Also, I’m thinking about playing around with Quarto for this site, just because it’s got so much darn potential. That’s not something I can do in a night of caffeine-induced coding.

I’ll keep the ImperfectMirror.org domain name, though, because I bloody well like it. I still keep thinking that I should force myself into a daily devotional, and maybe I can make that be it. That, and the site design is too beautiful to throw away!

I now return you to your regular surfing.

Well, there’s not a heater out here in the Outhouse, and until it gets cold enough that it bothers me–which means that I’d have to bring Minnesota’s weather back here, likely–so it was good and chilly last night.

This means that I slept unbelievably well. It also means that I woke up about 15 minutes ago.

Ooooooh, 13 hours of sleep. Yay.

Back home.

No trips the next two weekends, thank God.

It may have been a 12-1 pasting on Friday, but it was a close 4-2 game last night. I have so much pride for our guys coming back and playing hard, it’s hard to put it into words. I’m not as much into the “home cooking” theory as Mike is, but … if our guys play like that the rest of the year, look out.

UAH is the best 0-6 team in the country.

And for now, I shall nap.

Well, we’re here at the Mariucci Arena on the UMinn campus. And look who’s here with me!

Yep. John Wilson’s media, don’tchaknow?

We’re having fun, and we hope you are, too. I mean, hey, I’m at a hockey game, I’ve got my boys with me, we’re in Minnesooooooooota, it’s cold outside, and John’s here.

What more do I need?