Sleeping

Today i slept nearly all day. I was awake for a couple hours this morning with Houston and Katrina, and then Karen let me go back to bed. I was awake to take the whole family besides me to The Children's Museum, and slept when i got home. And i've been awake since about 5:00pm, and will probably go to bed in half an hour or so -- maybe 9:15pm. See, i don't feel very good. I keep wondering, in my weird stupid feeling state, if maybe i'm faking it. Then i fall asleep again and think, probably i'm not faking anything. But i'm sure gonna go to work tomorrow, early in the morning, and then clean the kitchen really well when i get home. If Karen doesn't beat me to it. I dreamed that i was giving my mum a ride home on a bicycle, and part of the road was a really long stairway in three parts, with the last section being much steeper than the first two. She was really scared, but i remember being astonished by how good the brakes were on the bike, since it was completely manageable.

That picture up there is something Katrina asked me about a couple times today: "Daddy, remember when i got mud on my legs?" Weird. Also weird: i was driving home from the grocery store yesterday, an insect ran into the top of my open window as i was waiting at a red light, and plopped down into my lap. I looked closely at it, and was shocked to see that it was a water strider, a true bug, and i definitely did not expect to encounter one very far away from, you know, the water. Especially in the middle of a busy intersection. It was a -- heh -- displaced insect. That being funny, obviously, because they don't float (displace water) they stand on the surface tension of water with their fascinatingly structured legs. Nanotechnology in nature. I didn't pick the bug up because i didn't want to hurt its spindly legs, and i was, you know, driving, but it staggered across my lap, and a minute later, wound up for a jump, and launched itself directly into the side of the door. Poor bug. I hope he escaped back into a more watery world.

Beach!

I forgot a couple things i wanted to mention. On Sunday, at his Grandma's house, Houston rolled all the way down their driveway on a little aluminum scooter without falling over! He kept his balance! On a two-wheeler! Karen says he's done it before, but that's the first time i saw it. And that means he gets how to ride a bicycle, and that's awesome! You should read "awesome" with a monster truck ad voiceover type voice...

Hmm, maybe it was just that one thing. Well, we went to the beach today, and everyone got a little burned besides Zane. I took the kids to the store tonight to buy milk and so on, and impulse bought a hat for each of them. Houston was walking with me, wearing the hat enthusiastically, and a pretty lady was walking by and Houston looked at her and totally lifted his hat right off in an astonishingly elegant way!!! It was incredible. The lady looked at me grinning widely and i asked "Did he really just lift his hat to you?" and she was like "Sure did!" and i exclaimed "So polite!" Houston said "It's Singing in the Rain!" Awesome. You don't need to read that "awesome" so loud.

Katrina liked her hat too, but both kids were so giddy with the new possession that every stupid little thing they saw they asked me to get. I lectured them about the fact that we don't have a lot of money, and getting new hats is such a special treat, and we're not going to get anything else that is a treat. So please stop thinking that you can simply have whatever you want! Houston: "Can we get that baby juice???" I gazed at him incredulously, and he did his hide-his-face-in-his-arms thing that you can probably visualize if you know him. Imagine a slug's eye when you touch it.

Finally, Katrina sprawled face down in the checkout aisle floor and declared "My dead!" Oh, finally for real, Houston was clambering around in the little toy car thing they have on the front of shopping carts at Family Fare (on Leonard and Fuller -- totally my favorite store ever) and suddenly i heard a panicked voice: "Daddy! DADDY!!! HELP ME!!!" and he had somehow gotten himself upside down in the cart with his arms pinned awkwardly above his head and he couldn't move. Poor kid. Full size picture of Zane crying on the beach if you're interested.

Diversity and IRC

Yesterday i forgot to write about how weird it was to walk onto the street where the Jenison Memorial Day Parade (2007) was being held. I don't think of my life as bringing me into contact with a huge diversity of people. But when i saw the overwhelming homogeneity of the crowd, with their fashionable clothing and trendy hairdos, i felt really out of place. Even though i've got fashionable clothing and a trendy hairdo. Oh come on, you've seen one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, right? Have you seen how many people with dreadlocks there are? Yeah, short, weedy fuzzy dreads... okay, i admit that i'm too cheap to have fashionable clothes, and i'm still in the middle of the Bad Hair Year that short dreadlocks doom one to. But then as i look at where i work, i find that i'm among minorities (ethnically, at least) a great deal. And while at Meijer today, i heard Spanish being spoken more than English. And the conversations were just as boring as the ones in English were... but less swear words.

Oh -- several of the low-impulse-control kids at work who i don't know very well have said "He looks just like Jack Sparrow!" Um... yeah. I do think i look more like Johnny Depp than i used to -- hollowing cheeks as i age, sparsely whiskered cheeks -- but there's no way i'm that ridiculously good looking. Probably it's the bad hair and the fact that i really do act pretty weird. With the googly eyes and stuff.

Um... oh yeah, IRC. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it's a network invented, to text chat with others, even before hypertext (what "ht" in "html" stands for) took over the Internet. And like everything in the wild west frontier of the net, it's being used to transfer pirated materials. Aaarrrrrr. And i've been looking for Vernor Vinge's latest book for a long time, and i d/l'ed mIRC today and hooked up to #bookz on Undernet, and yaaaay, they have it! Not that i downloaded it at all... um... or put it on my palm pilot as soon as i could... nope. But i became very happy anyway. Say... i should put that book on hold at the library.

And seriously, if there's any sci-fi fans out there, you HAVE to read Vernor Vinge. I really wish i had never read any of his books, because i want to read them again for the first time. That's how good they are. If you like "hard" sci-fi. "Hard" means "scientifically plausible, as far as we know, or at least not patently ludicrous". I get the sense that my taste in books is like my taste in music, lots of people agree with me, but nobody i know, and nobody i'm likely to meet. Sigh.

Memorial Day!

That's candid. I usually think candid pictures are cuter. But Houston saw me taking that, and then he put on a smile which, you know what? is really super cute. I'm not so sure posed is worse.

So like i said, we went to the parade where the coolest thing was two marching bands, and a fairly elaborate float with a church band playing on it. Karen said in her post that parades seem to be less about community things like schools, with their floats and bands and stuff, and more about advertising. Insurance companies. Banks. Dentists. I guess churches are community groups, but they seemed to be advertising as much as everyone else. I guess fire trucks and police cars are important to the community, but they don't really need to advertise. Imagine: "Is your house on fire? Act now! Operators are standing by to accept your call!"

Then we moved bricks. We're going to have a non-poopy shady area in our back yard! The plan is, i believe, to make a little paved spot under one of our trees where dog poop will be easily picked up, and the picnic table can rest without sinking into the mole-excavated ground. I'm a little down on our back yard, to be honest. Our neighbor Kris has this antagonistic relationship with the guy who bought the house from her and let her stay on as a tenant, so she's eager to give away anything and everything that she can't take with her. Or pour plant killer all over it. The owner of the house, if i gather correctly, spoke sharply to Karen one time for snooping around in Kris's garden. So today i was moving bricks and stones, feeling a little worried that Mister Landowner would show up and i'd be caught up in this weird dynamic thing between Kris, who i really like, and this dude who's our neighbor too, and i don't want to have our relationship be all weird. Luckily, our brick moving project was done with the only people arriving at the house being Kris herself, and three girls, two or three of whom are Godsisters to our Hispanic-ish neighbors, and whose dad is Armenian, and whose grandmother is Farsi. The adults don't speak a lot of English. But if she's from Turkey and he's got a Greekesque background, that might explain the argument they seemed to have. Or maybe it's just family.

My Pants! Ginger!

My dreads are long enough to put in, um, eleven pigtails. Katrina: "my not like it." Houston: "it looks girly." Karen: "what's up with the hair?" Me: "My dreads are long enough to put in, um, eleven pigtails."

Besides that, yesterday i finished up a pair of pants i made out of a canvas dropcloth. See, canvas makes cool pants, and dropcloths are cheaper than going to the fabric store. Fabric stores are waaaay expensive. In the states, retail cloth stores should really be called boutiques. Oh yeah, so i bought the dropcloth, made the pants only a little bit ridiculously large, but they shrunk so much that i'm gonna have to take them to work and give them to one of the kids skinnier than me. D'oh! Plus, i made the crotch hilariously low. Problem is, out of a dropcloth which is 15 feet long, i don't think i'll have enough to make a second pair. Seriously, it shrinks that much.

Oh yeah -- but when i was making the pants, i realized how well i was doing, and wondered what had changed. See, the last time i ever made pants from scratch was before Karen and i got married. Maybe 15 years ago. And the zipper was goofy, i had to think REALLY CAREFULLY to decide how to make the waistband, the front pockets were strange... but this time i just thought for a minute, and started cutting. And the results look kind of perfect. Besides the low crotch and tight hip area. Karen says they look like sailor pants. Also, they took much less time to make. So again, what's up?

My conclusion is: i'm wiser. Sometime around when i turned 30, i just got kind of wiser. It's kind of awesome. I just scoured Wikipedia looking for references to cite, references about the myelinization of nerve cells, when it happens, and stuff. See, that myelin stuff sheaths brain cells, making thought WAAY more efficient, and the major restructuring times are late toddlerhood, adolescence, and then for girls, the final sheathing process occurs at around 25, while dudes gotta wait another five years. And i remember getting smarter (wiser) when i was about 30. I'm talking about, i believe, fluid vs. crystallized intelligence. My brain is crystallizing, while the brains of teenagers everywhere are becoming fluid. Eew.

Speaking of crystallized stuff, i made crystallized ginger today. If you want a mouth igniting sweet treat, make this stuff! The instructions i found online are astonishingly involved, and take at least a whole day. My recipe is: peel fresh ginger, slice very thinly. Cover with very VERY sugary water (i boiled sugar water for a while before even starting on the ginger, so it could get all syrupy) and boil for maybe 20 minutes, perhaps 30 or more if you skimped on the sugar. When the ginger is kind of cooked looking, take it out, and coat it with granulated sugar. Once it's cool and preferably a little bit dried out, you'll have the sinus clearing head bombs i was talking about. Mmm, it's so good.

Finally: Zane scratched my cornea today. I can't detect any blurry spots like i could that one time that one kid kicked a soccer ball at my face and scraped my cornea (it healed, but SLOW) but it hurt like a bad word. And finally, why does sleeping dog smell so much better than any other kind of dog? Besides maybe freshly shampooed dog.

McPost

Instead of ranting about the crazy price of gasoline (it was less than $3.00 a gallon a couple weeks ago, and now it's around $3.50) or the horrific violence which continues right under the noses of our most expensive military action ever and the whiny defensiveness way our president justifies our current strategy... no, i won't even mention those things once! Instead, i'll talk linguistics!

McDonalds has started a campaign to get the Oxford English Dictionary to change the definition of the word McJob. The obvious meaning is the one the Oxford English Dictionary cites: an unstimulating, low paying job with little chance for advancement, particularly due to the growth of the service sector. Hmm, i messed that up... but anyway, McDonalds thinks the definition is "out of date and insulting". I agree about the insulting part, but out of date? Huh?

Two things. First, and most ironically funny, is the fact that they completely misunderstand the OED. It's the best dictionary of any language ever -- the only one of its kind. And unlike the Académie française, which decides on what's Proper French, the OED just describes what's out there. So words like "bling", "jiggy" and, well, "McJob" get entries even though they're eloquent nonsense, because people speaking English use those words. And they have meaning! The OED isn't wrong, because McJob means what McJob means. So you know what, McDonalds? I'm sorry you're a joke. Sucks to be you. But, you know... thanks for having nifty play areas for my kids. And clean bathrooms.

Second, and this annoys me, McDonalds thinks it can change reality because they're a massive global powerhouse. The cheerful cynic in me rejoices when multinational corporations get pissed off. The Super Size Me movie? Loved it! I feel frustrated and powerless when i think that multinational corporations get so much more respect from our governments that individual people -- we people, the ones with brains and hearts, are the ones made in the image of God.
___more___

Katrina's turn!

Katrina took that picture. She took 41 other pictures, but that's the one where she somehow got Zane to smile a little bit. It's really cute, by the way, how Katrina can get along so well with Zane. I was holding Zane this afternoon when i heard Katrina coming down from her nap. I said "There's Katrina" loud enough for her to hear, and Zane looked around a lot until she came into view, and got this cute look of love on his face. And when she came close, he tried to pull her hair. I think he's borderline. Heh, just kidding.

A few months ago i bought generic unique-to-Meijer "Crocs". Wondering what the deal was, i decided to wear them to the exclusion of everything else. Well, that was almost exactly two months ago, and my verdict is: they're comfortable for a day. Very comfy, in fact. I had several mostly-standing days while wearing them, and my feet suffered not from the usual kinds of foot fatigue with which i'm familiar. HOWEVER, there's this really weird pain which started about a month into my grand experiment. The outside sides of my feet right ahead of the ball of my heel began to feel tingly and painful. Sort of constantly. It was really weird. So, a couple weeks ago i started wearing other shoes again, and just today bought another set of my favorite flip-flops ever. The first set i got in summer of 2005, which were all black. Last year's version are dark brown with tan foot straps with a leather strip, but identical outsole shape and size. This years version are again identical, but have fancier leather detail, and the center part of the bottom of the sole is kind of sticky. For what reason, i haven't the foggiest. But the stickiness will disappear.

Oh, and i don't know where my $8 Crocs are. Probably at work.
___more___

My turn!

So Karen's post last night was all about her scrapbooking adventure, which is weird since usually i'm the one with posts about specialized things, and Karen does the family post. Today i'll don the vestments of One Who Posts Pictures And Family Updates, and give it a whirl.

It's hard to be a baby when your sister loves you so much, and also likes to pose for pictures. But it must be fun to be a baby, since you're learning new skills all the time. Like, Zane is an established crawler now! He's crossed the blurry threshold from "well, he's kind of crawling" to "everybody agrees now -- he's crawling". Of course, he doesn't actually crawl like that, but the fact that he can get himself up on feet and hands is a good testament to how strong he is. Yeah, he's a strong baby.

Houston remains totally cute. He wheeled himself up, put his chin in his hands, and kind of looked introspective. I knew he would look really cute if i said in a warm voice, "Houston, are you okay?" so i did say that, and he did look really cute. Yes, you may all go "Awwww!"

And then, after the kids were in bed, but not asleep, and as Karen just arrived home, i did the clap-above-the-fly trick and mostly squashed a fly. It wandered around confused, so i took a picture of it. One time i clapped a fly at work, and its head was kind of knocked crooked, so when it walked, it did so in a hilariously diagonal way.

Not A Techie Post

Yesterday the kids and i helped our neighbor Kris put her stuff into a moving truck. She's kind of weird. One time we were talking about God and creation and how if you think about it long enough, it seems completely obvious that some Divine Other must exist. But the reality is so basic that it's easy for many people to walk around every day giving absolutely no thought to God or any spiritual depth to their world. It's like gravity, unless you think about it, you don't notice it. Then Kris, or weirdo hippie neighbor said "Right! Nobody walks around going 'OH! GRAVITY IS PULLING ME TO THE EARTH!!!'" and she staggered about looking dramatically skyward.

Or maybe we were talking about oppressive laws like taxes, and how the fact that we're taxed can be seen as dragging us down, but they're a reality. And necessary, at least for most forms of government. Funny and silly and weird, nonetheless.

I wish we'd spent more time hanging out with Kris. We really get along with her. Our next neighbors could be alcoholics like the guy across the street, or never around like our other next door neighbors, or even a friendly, but annoying teenage moocher like their kid. Who, furthermore, is too cool even to act like he knows us when he's hanging out with his friends. I make sure to point that out to him when he is with his friends and doesn't say hi to me. I wonder how much he hates that.

Techie post. Sorry.

My response to Travis (yo Trav!) and his snooty comment about Mac users being immune to malware is this snarky comment: "nobody smart enough to write a computer virus uses a Mac." So there. But the reality is simple market share. Malware wants to target as large a group of computers as possible, and Windows XP currently has 82.65% of the market share all absorbed. Wow. If you add all flavors of Windows which might work with a trojan or virus or whatever, Windows gets 90% of the market. So who's gonna write a virus for a Mac when a little less than four percent of systems would be vulnerable? I think the answer would be "nobody".

Also, lemme write for a second about my computer idea. I have about 30 gigs of music which i've ripped or downloaded to my computer. That represents some financial value because some of it's bought mp3s, but it's valuable more because of the time invested ripping or, uh, d/l'ing, and the fact that it's cool to have so much music which i like. So if it all got lost, that would be no big deal, it would just be a hassle. So i don't have my large-ish music collection backed up. But i'd like to, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. Like, i don't want my entire music library on two different hard drives -- too much wasted space.

So here's what somebody needs to make; some kind of application which acts like a kind of music file bin and organizer, a player, and maybe even a automatic file identifier and labeler. What the program would do is put your music in some kind of binary file system spread over all of your computer's hard drives, with some parity information also spread around which could be used to reconstruct the missing bits if one of your drives burns out. Of course, there's other solutions, like simply backing up your whole library on an external drive, or to DVD, or your iPod, or whatever. Plus, most people don't have five hard drives in their computer, so my aforementioned market share argument makes software like this of limited potential.

But you can do "virtual folders" in Windows Vista, which makes files look like they're one place, when really they're scattered around. And even in Windows XP, you can get partitions or network shares to work as though they're in one place when really they're not. So what i need to do is make ~10gig partitions, one for each of four hard drives, mount them in folders on the fifth hard drive, then write a batch file to update parity files for each partition every week or so. Automatically. Oh yeah, that's sounding pretty good.

Speaking of batch files, check out my little automatic digital picture mover. Unzip it, place it in your digital camera's flash card, edit the MovPix2.bat file using a text editor, i unreservedly recommend this one, and fill in all your file paths. When set up right, it makes a new folder with the date as its name, transfers your camera's pictures into there, deletes the pictures from the camera, and then opens the newly created folder for your perusal. It's totally self explanatory! For real! I use it every time i transfer pictures, and so does Karen. I think Tony (Bread) might too, i dunno.

Um, no title.

Two things: Houston said today as he was watching a snowboarding video that his Uncle Antony burned for him, and he was calling the snowboarders (Houston calls snowboards "skiboards" for some unknown reason) "talented". He then said "I used to think 'talented' meant 'teaching you to do bad things', but now i know what it means!" Later he explained that it means "good at stuff; clever". That kid is so smart. Talented, even!

I live in overwhelming thankfulness to God for making me talented. But my creativity goes in phases. And recently i'm more in a computer stuff kick than finding myself doing much writing. I think my poor weblog is suffering as a result. Soon it shall pass, because my computer is pretty much put together, it's stupidly fast, and i can only waste so much time on games and graphics and hardware tweaking. Did you know that if you're playing a 3D game, you can't use your second monitor unless you just want to look at a static image. It would be really nice to be able to surf the web on one monitor and play a fancy game on the other. If Windows Vista adds that capability, i'll possibly upgrade within the next five years.

Other thing: have you SEEN Karen's site recently? I mean, she is doing more writing than me, i feel like, but more than that, her photography is just stunning. I mean, she takes pictures like this, and it's great. Cute! But then she takes a picture like this, and i want to say "Okay, now you're just showing off." Look at the precise focus, the narrow depth of field!!! When i told her she's just showing off she said "Yeah, that one i manually focused." Good grief. So my little $30 Ebay special Sony with the wonky screen which takes quite good pictures for a point and shoot sits on my desk, dejected and nearly totally unused. I did take thirty seconds of video today... but it's just Houston and Katrina going "Lelelelelelelelelelelele" in the car.

Fathering is cool

Today Houston sent me a Monk-E-Mail which said something like "I like it that you listen to people". See, as soon as i got home, he asked sweetly if i wanted to go upstairs and clean his room with him. Well, having just got home, i wanted to talk to Karen, relax for a bit, check my email... but as i was about to go to the bathroom, i told Houston that when i got out, we could go upstairs and clean up. I think he was so happy that i remembered! That makes me glad. Because i really do make an effort to pay attention to what my kids say, even if -- may i be brutally honest here -- cleaning his room with him doesn't sound like fun. I know it'll just be me putting things away while he jumps on the bed. And that's exactly what happened.

And may i go on record as saying that McAfee Security Suite is an alarmist piece of garbage which absorbs massive amounts of CPU power and system memory. At least it's not actually malware. I installed it, by request, on a friend's 800MHz system, and it's bringing the system to its knees. Sigh. Just do what i do -- stay away from dodgy software. If you MUST use some kind of anti-virus software, use something free and good without a behemoth of software chewing up the performance of your computer.

JJ and Lauren's Wedding Pictures

Karen made a gallery of the pictures of JJ's wedding. It's now properly online, on our own server and so on. So please check it out now because it's awesome. Karen's aptitude for photography is astounding, and she's a dedicated student, learning about, i dunno, everything about photography. Do you know what an f-stop is? She does. How aperture changes depth of field? She knows that too. RESPEK!!!

P.S. I named the gallery "JJ and Lauren's First Wedding" as a silly whimsical joke... sorry... i didn't know it would put that in huge H1 text across the top.

stuff which is good, stuff which is bad

making it home safely: good
long drive: bad
good conversation with wife: good
missing an exit: bad
surprisingly awesome Mexican food: good
gas prices: bad
our children: good
not being able to say that our children are TOTALLY THE MOST AMAZING EVER because everything in this list is just "good" or "bad": bad
being with family, remembering depths of love, meeting new people, watching Karen shine in her talent for photography, clicky keyboard fast computer two monitors: all good

Happy Mother's Day!

That's not my mom. It's Antony jumping over lil' Katrina. And today was Mother's day! I like my mom. I wish everybody liked their mom as much as i like mine. She's great! I guess if there was one thing and only one thing i could say about my Mum that i appreciate, it might be that her love for us other family members is so great, her efforts to nurture and help her whole family go plainly beyond what's simply natural, and enter the realm of the divine! She's a Godly mum. Thanks, Mum!

And Karen; she's a mother too, and the appreciation i have for her knows no bounds. She's a consistent, creative and effortlessly skillful mother. She's loving and tender with our little ones. Part of the boundless love i have for my kids comes from the influence Karen's had on them, obviously the genetic stuff, but also the humor and curiosity that she's brought to them day by day. I think i like my family, and my family. Thank you God.

Here comes the bride and all that.

Hi! May 12th will go down in history as the DAY JJ GOT MARRIED!!! I speak for everyone here when i express again how totally happy we are for JJ and Lauren. Karen's got one of her awesome web photo albums up for your perusal... go check it out. And i understand that reading about people being happy seems so empty and, you know, boring compared to the real thing. Oh... and isn't that a good picture? Houston took it. If the focus had been on the couple, as i'm SURE Houston intended, it would be, well, really amazing. He's destined to be a good photographer, since he'll inherit his mother's aptitude, and will have the advantage of unlimited FREE experimentation.

So i'll describe our day. First we went over to help set up, and it was nice that we were one of the very first groups of people around to help. I guess that's good since we are the family and everything. So after a while of carrying water and stuff, wearing traditional Nigerian clothing, thanks to Karen's mom's friends who were missionaries in Nigeria for years, we assembled to take photographs! With digital photography, it seems like every event is endlessly documented by the people who really should be experiencing the event in the present. I don't think Karen and i fall into that trap -- if something cool happens, taking pictures of it totally adds to the experience. And me, i only held my camera still, taking video of as much of the wedding that would fit on my memory card.

Right... so they got married, in an ecumenical service, and it really was gorgeous. JJ said to Lauren "I was asleep for the first 26 years of my life, and then i met you!" Awww! I'm a little bit choked up right now even, just thinking about it!

Then we had cake and drinks. The cake was all organic (well... the eggs were free range eggs), rich, heavy, with a delightful sugar cream frosting. Mmmm, it was good. There was also a carrot dessert, which i ate lots of. Then Karen made a really awesome arrangement of pictures in a frame, which everybody adored at the place we went next: the restaurant to eat really delicious food. Karen took pictures of the food, but food almost always looks hideous in pictures. All glossy, slimy and moist looking. Yech.

Congratulations, JJ! Happy happy, joy joy!

JJ gets married tomorrow!

My brother Josh! He's getting married! With a license and EVERYTHING! Yaay yaay yay yeah! This is very cool, and not entirely expected, since he's enthusiastically anti-establishment and all. He told us one time that he'd never get legally married with Bush in the White House.

But whatever. He's my brother, and has been all his life. He's funny, smart, generous and incredibly loving. I'm so totally overjoyed for him. And really happy that we'll get to be part of the wedding tomorrow. Tonight some of JJ's friends from Texas joined us for dinner, and it's very interesting to see and hear from people who were in JJ's life back when he was heavily into the underground rave scene in Dallas, with the, um, "wild living" that went along with it. Here JJ's getting married, what a normal thing to do! And his friends, they've got Real Jobs. I guess that we get older and get more stable, but the question we discussed briefly is do we get more or less conservative as we age. I think i've become more progressive, but many people get less progressive. I guess we get more confident in our beliefs, whatever they are. More arrogant? Nah, couldn't be.

Safe!

We made it to Kentucky!

We decided this trip to drive in the daytime, letting us get more sleep that we usually get once we arrive. It's okay -- i'm not sure which i prefer.

Karen and i had a really good conversation about art. She thinks Chris Burden's performance art piece names "Shoot" isn't art. She maintains also, which makes me happy, that the back covers of Reader's Digest, paintings by C. F. Payne aren't exactly art. The guy is a fantastic draftsman, but his covers are simply very well produced cartoons. Also art is Mondrian's colorful "compositions". Not art is John Cage's 4'33", which is, of course, no deliberate sounds at all. Makes you wonder what the RIAA thinks of everybody having that almost all the time, and never once paying them any royalties. Yes, we are all pirates.

Also art, according to Karen, is Jackson Pollock's "action painting" but Warhol's assembly line silkscreens are not.

Me? I've got a much broader definition of art, brought on by, you know, my misguidedly spending four years as an art student... Art is when you've got someone who (this is important) claims to be an artist, an audience, and there's some kind of response, usually emotional. Or maybe, "art transcends". Or how about just... Art Is.