Light Side

I know I promised a long time ago more about our homeschooling. If Spaces plays nice, maybe I'll put some more here from time to time. I've pretty much given up trying to use Livejournal as any sort of personal blog. I always liked Spaces' format better, but it's been very un-Mac-friendly for the last couple of years, but now mostly better.

Anyway, besides my main Twitter account aeroG, I've started several others - yeah, I really LOVE Twitter! One is for homeschooling links, info, resources: Homeschooling .

BTW, in case you're one of those folks who don't "get" homeschooling, let me just say this:

Homeschooling 101

LESSON ONE: Most people homeschool because education is VERY important to them, not less important!

There, I think I needed to get that off my chest :)

I've written a few times about our kids' antics, but something I NEVER thought I'd do on a blog is write about a cat, at least a housecat. It's one of those cliches of the internet, right up there with recounting what you had for breakfast or griping in all caps about your parents! Indeed, I was safe until about a year and a half ago, when we adopted a cat left behind by some neighbors who moved.

The problem is, cats are so semi-brilliant and then semi-insane that they just end up doing something amusing sooner or later. Anyway, I'll probably write a whole blog post about our feline another time. Today I'm just going to recount a couple of interesting incidents around here, starting with her.

The last few weeks we've been having a lot of work done around our house, actually literally around the house. That would be, of course, siding, painting, doors, etc. Sweetie is an outside/kitchen/garage cat, so of course she wasn't too happy when some guy showed up one day and started taking apart the door of our garage, where she usually sleeps.

After that was replaced, things quieted down again for a couple weeks. We've had so much rain this summer that it took a long time to get started on the rest of the work. Finally the siding folks came and once again Sweetie thought we'd been invaded. It was actually kind of interesting to see how she's taken "ownership" of our home, after wondering for quite a while if we were going to kick her out, I guess (yes ... the lingering guilt of busting up all those garbage bags for a late night snack).

For over a week there was banging and sawing and a general invasion, she seemed to think. Presuming one can pull the veil back on cat psychology is a slippery intellectual slope, I suppose, but I can't help wondering if Sweetie thought we were all stupid, not noticing a thing all week! Our kids were like that on occasion when they were real little, just old enough to start having an idea what was going on (but misunderstanding most of it).

Anyway, eventually they left, nearly finished with the job and apparently busy starting the next. I've noticed that with contractors before, how they'll get 95% done and move on to the next project, and then send just part of the crew to finish up the last bit. That's one reason you should definitely NOT pay contractors the last chunk of what's owed until the job's completely done, because otherwise it might be a looonnggg time till they get back to you and finish!

After nearly a week, I'm sure our cat was finally starting to relax when yes ... THEY'RE BACK!!! As I suspected, she was none too happy, even growling at them a bit. It's comforting to think a cat would try to defend your home, though I wonder if any cat has actually been a successful "guard cat"! Anyway, Sweetie is amusing to watch at times, and since I have sort of a love/hate mindset about cats (love the playfulness/hate the "royal" attitude), I guess I don't worry too much that she'll be over-stressed by it all, seeing how much sleep she manages to get every afternoon.

Obviously, on the dog/cat question I (and Susan) fall squarely on the dog side. Cats have their good, though fickle, qualities, but there are times when you really need the constant loyalty of a dog (e.g. if you need a friend in D.C., as they say). Of course, there are countless stories of dogs saving people's lives, so many I've gotten tired of printing them out for the kids to read, but this one was maybe unique: Dog Performs "Heimlich" on Choking Owner. "I literally have pawprint-shaped bruises on my chest", said Debbie Parkhurst, who credited Toby, her golden retriever, with probably saving her life.

While I've written before about the curious variety of animals that have invaded our yard, I never did mention what came of our air conditioner problems last spring. Back from vacation, our repairman finally got to take a look at the big A/C box out back (the condenser). I was not too happy with the thought of possibly having to replace it, but soon had good news - it turns out the controls had been shorted out by a garter snake! He was about 18" I guess, coiled up several times in a circle around a large capacitor.

Now I wish I had a photo of the snake, but our repairman just tossed it right away. I'd noticed garter snakes (pretty much harmless) under the concrete pad for the a/c, but guess it moved closer toward the nice warm electronics, just like bugs that get too close to a light. Well, now I know there are both real computer bugs and air conditioner snakes!

I wrote last year about searching for my old teachers and mentioned how the school I'd spent longer at than any other, Will Rogers Elementary, was about to be torn down.

Well, today the Houstonist is reporting that a Costco wholesale will be built on part of that tract. Actually, it'll be on the part where the HISD Administration Building (enviously known as "the Taj" - it was quite nice, though terribly space inefficient, inside) stood. That's it in the top photo of the Houstonist post (cute pun). The Administration Building's very open, multi-level interior bore absolutely no resemblance to its fort-like exterior.

The 24-acre HISD tract, sold for $38 million, was supposed to get some sort of "special" development, since it was billed as the biggest tract of land available for development inside Houston's Loop, but a retail/apartment? complex anchored by Costco seems to be a considerable step down, especially since it's right across Richmond Ave. from Greenway Plaza, one of the most elaborate office/multi-use developments in the country.

While I watched them build Greenway Plaza (after tearing down several friends' houses) throughout my childhood, the last parts of its master plan (not to mention the aircraft landing strip that was depicted, in their elaborate model, to be atop a building on the south side of US 59) fell victim to the downturn of the 1980s. Since these tracts eventually got converted to retail, cinema, a Mercedes dealership, etc., I guess it shouldn't be surprising that'll be the fate of the HISD tract as well.

At least the church I grew up in (and where Susan and I had our wedding reception), Central Presbyterian, is still there, across Cummins from the HISD tract. I got a surprise recently when I discovered that one of my AeroGo subscribers goes to another Presbyterian church that meets there, Pathways, though he says Central Pres. is still there as well.

I haven't been on (Windows) Live Spaces much lately, because it won't work in my Opera browser, which I've switched to on the Mac, and which right now is far better than Safari for most stuff.

Today I took a look and it appears that Microsoft is finally starting to make some changes again. What's better, these changes seem to be visually clean and neat and WORK right the first time! Microsoft, I know you've got it in you to do well on the web (but NOT necessarily to be the 800 pound gorilla of the internet), if you'll just set a course and stick to it, and DO THE LITTLE THINGS RIGHT.

I.E., don't bother chasing someone/everyone else who's doing well on the web. That competitive strategy doesn't work on the internet!

Of course, the problem is, there seems to hardly be anyone left on Live Spaces anymore, even worse than Xanga. My stats for this blog are pitiful, but very unlike my Xanga blog, Spaces doesn't seem to pull any hits in from outside its own community, despite sending out pings.

On the other hand, I just read something about MS investing a lot in server farms, so maybe Live is going to finally happen in some form, even if they've been beaten - bad - in search.

Light Side is starting to look like a nice, clean design again, which makes me want to work on it. Spaces is a work in progress, but probably worth Microsoft's continued investment.

Well, I didn't expect the title above to end with an "s", but this afternoon daughter #2, nearly 12, surprised me with a little book she'd made about our family, with drawings and descriptions of each of us and then a drawing of all of us at the end. This goes along with another drawing I've been intending to put here, the one below where we're all in a line.

That long drawing was started a couple of weeks ago in church, but she only got through our fourth son before the sermon was over, so I asked her to finish it, which she thankfully did today. I assure you this drawing is not to scale - some of our kids are still shorter than me! Also, daughter #3 and her next older brother, who have been frequent characters in this blog, were somehow put out of order.

Actually, today's sort of an anniversary for Light Side, as it was two years ago on Father's Day when I finally got going with blogging, starting here with my personal blog. To this was soon added several more (see at right), as well as just recently a LiveJournal blog (aeropreneur) which I've been experimenting with using as a sort of personal journal, a different sort of personal blog from Light Side.

I've been trying a couple of Mac browsers as a replacement for Safari, which works great for a few days but then gets increasingly bloated from memory leaks. Since Safari doesn't have a way to readily save all the open links/windows, you can't just easily quit and restart.

Anyway, I was surprised to discover that in both the browsers I tried, Camino 1.0.4 and Opera 9.2, Windows Live Spaces are automatically redirected to Mobile Spaces, a much simpler rendering of my blog. I guess there's only certain browsers that Spaces even accepts for the normal version.

As a result of Spaces' "rejecting" them, these browsers are completely unacceptable as a way to maintain Light Side. So I guess I'll be using Safari at least to run this blog.

I also tried the User Agent feature under the Debug menu (which you must activate to see in Safari). I was hoping that maybe by using the Windows MSIE 6.0 user agent, that I could fool Spaces into letting me do at least simple things, particularly working with categories, the module for which, as I've noted, don't even show up in Safari.

It worked as far as seeing the Categories module (and display by category) goes, but I wasn't able to add a category. I've been wanting to add one for entrepreneurship, thinking Light Side might be a good place to write more about my experiences and things I've learned in this area, but since I couldn't add a category, an earlier post was simply put under the "About Me" category where I guess I'll be putting any more for the time being.

There's still a lot of things I like about Spaces, but in case Microsoft isn't paying attention, most of their competitors are adding features and capabilities at an ever-accelerating pace. Xanga has really improved a lot in the past year, FaceBook has just announced a major upgrade, MySpace has been buying other companies, and even WordPress is up to v. 2.2 now. Spaces is clearly falling farther and farther behind.

By the way, if you're looking for a good Mac browser, you should definitely check out Opera. Someone wrote that they thought Opera 9.2 was the best Mac browser out there, and I'm pretty impressed myself. Besides automatically saving your current session, it has a lot of nice new features you might not realize you want/need such as fast-forward, "speed-dial" and a trash tab where you can recover accidentally-closed tabs. Of course, it's completely free now, so that's quite a deal. I'll write more about it later in my blog All Things.

Well, I finally got around to taking a picture of a few of the things daughters #1, 2 and 3 gave Susan last Sunday for Mother's day. I think she had a good day.

Actually, there once was a giant cookie under the MotherCard ... Regarding the other two, daughter #3, our 6.5 year-old who made the bracelet at the bottom, is really into beads, and I think it's rubbed off on her older sister, who made the middle item.

Despite this photo, I can tell you that the vast majority of her gifts involved chocolate!

Well, my oldest daughter's done with a couple of her classes. After school she told me about her psychology final, and I told her I couldn't help wondering if it was actually an experiment. She did say that she was confused about it, because at the beginning of the semester the prof said there'd be four tests, but then they'd already had four and all of a sudden there was going to be a final.

There was something odd about the test that she only started noticing after several pages of questions. It wasn't weird, but somewhat curious, so who knows. I'm by nature a rather suspicious person (though I must not look like it, since salespeople always think I'm an easy target), so perhaps it was nothing.

In any case, I've read about a lot of odd/humorous experiments that psychologists and their like have pulled on people over the years. Certainly, one of the funniest was simply the old show Candid Camera. It was really popular when I was little, because it was so funny to see all the different reactions people would have. I guess in a way it was one of the earliest attempts at "reality" (yeah, sure) TV.

You don't see much physics on TV, but there was one episode I remember where there was a large, heavy suitcase in a receptionist area, and a secretary would ask men to carry it down the hall for her, into one of the offices. It was so funny because they would, with difficulty, pick it up, and just about the time they started feeling proud of themselves for getting it down the hall, they would try to turn into the office and the suitcase would not budge. At all.

It would only go straight, because the Hollywood folks had gone down to one of the local aerospace companies, I believe it was, and gotten a sizable gyroscope. That thing was spinning inside the suitcase, and was not about to turn (unless you pushed down at one of the ends, I guess).

Experiment design is really something of an art, especially in psychology where it is so easy to inadvertantly influence the test subject. Nevertheless, some interesting experiments have been quite simple. There were several, some done at UT I believe, where a man would do various things in different forms of dress and they would measure what percentage of people copied him. Some examples were looking up at a high building and crossing the street when the light was red. They found out that if he wore a suit, several times as many people would follow his lead (this was several decades ago, maybe it would be different today, but who knows).

A lot of times, in order to get the real answer they're after, psychologists will run one test, to get everyone focussed on it, but then ask something else of the test subjects that is the real test. One of my favorites was a focus group for some kind of portable electronic device. The subjects were asked their opinions of various colors and whatnot, and in the end were told to take their choice of the device off the table at the rear, as their reward for attending.

Interestingly, I don't remember which colors they were, but while the subjects voiced a resounding preference for a certain more flashy color - I guess as supposedly the "right" answer - they actually took many more of the other color home with them!

Well, that's about it for now, but of course there are psych tests and then are pSyCh tEsTs ... If you want a pretty funny account (not suitable for younger ages) of the good cop/bad cop routine that astronaut candidates used to go through (and that they're probably polishing up again considering recent events), read chapter one of Mike Mullane's Riding Rockets. It's scary and hilarious.

Mullane writes, "The [first] doctor rose from behind a desk and introduced himself, shaking hands with a very weak, moist grip. I hadn't been in the room for fifteen seconds and already I was in a panic." Hmm ... yes, the joy of psychology. Well, I don't think I can help you with that, but if you're asked if you've ever had amnesia, apparently the right answer is, "I don't remember."

And I'd likely agree with Pete Conrad on one test; in fact, I suspect all blank sheets of paper are upside down. That explains why they're so hard to write on!

Today my oldest daughter got out of class early, and once home she began playing the piano. Usually when she's happy she'll start with the piano and later move to her guitar. When's she's not happy, she goes right to her room and cranks up the amp, and her little sister (see last post) will scurry out, actually none too upset to have a perfect excuse not to take her nap, or go to bed.

I wasn't surprised she was happy, since she's nearly done with her first year of college and is busy planning a trip for the summer. We're not used to having her away too much, but hopefully it will be a good experience for her. She's one of those people who need to have a definite summer break, something that always seemed like too much of a luxury to Susan and me when we were in college, either working or going to summer school.

I always enjoy listening to her play the piano (and guitar has gotten a lot better lately as well), but every time she plays the Pachelbel Canon I can't help thinking how amazing that is. It brings back a lot of memories. Way back when, besides designing her wedding dress (of course), Susan didn't have a whole lot of particulars in mind, but did request that Pachelbel be played at our wedding. While the Canon in D has become quite common at weddings now, in 1984 it wasn't, at least in Texas so far as I could tell.

Of course, whenever I hear that song I inevitably think of Susan and our wedding, and it amazes me now, twenty-two years later, to see our daughter playing it! It's like a living echo of the past, as songs are in general, which is perhaps why music tends to bring back so many memories.

The Canon in D is simple but not particularly easy. Both Susan's mother, who taught piano for years, and Susan, who took piano for years (did she have any choice?), tried to teach our daughter at one point, but it's only been in the last few year's that she's really taken a serious interest in piano, basically teaching herself. While she hits all the notes, this song brings out more than many any deficiencies in timing, dynamics and so on, but even with the imperfections, I still love hearing her play it.

Anyway, I went back to work, attacking (with little result) a stack of papers in the center of my desk (I know I'm having a particularly good day when I can also knock out some of the stuff around the edge). After a while I took a break, read a few blogs, only to find someone listened to Pachelbel to study for her finals! Well, it sure beats Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. That song also brings back strong memories, of a very different sort.

After finishing the posts on Microsoft and Yahoo, I just had a little time but wanted to take a short nap before having to pick up my son at a certain well-known dining establishment. Anyway, there was my daughter playing her guitar, practicing very quietly. I've long told her that the first mark of a good musician is the ability to practice quietly, and I think she knows what I'm talking about now.

This test particularly applies to guitarists and drummers. We had a professional drummer that lived across the street from us when I was a teen, and I was amazed how he could fill his living room with pro musicians, play all day, and never have any problems with our neighbors.

Anyway, tonight all this prompted me to start putting into iTunes some CDs Susan bought me a couple of years ago. Actually, it's two down, six to go. This 8-CD set, Guitar & Piano Masterpieces, won't win any awards for the greatest performance (though they are fine), but what I really like about it is the song selection, even if some are repeated on both instruments. A reviewer is right, though, that the guitar CDs have somewhat better sound than the piano discs.

I've been wondering for some time if there's any truth to the claim that baroque music will make you smarter. There's a Schlotzky's nearby that plays it all the time, and when I'm there, I can't help noticing it makes me feel smarter. Well, once the songs (some from that era) are all in my computer it should be much easier to run what might, at least, be a fairly enjoyable experiment. Maybe it will make my Mac smarter, too ...

I started out writing here about the revived Microsoft-Yahoo talks and MS' need to change their culture and strategy, but decided to move the post to my blog All Things. Maybe Microsoft is finally starting to accept that they really don't get the internet. I hope they realize it's not just the technology/business, they don't get the culture of the net, either.

BBC reported a really telling quote by analyst Matt Rosoff, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don't want to work for Microsoft."

Microsoft needs to stop making enemies and work harder at making some friends! After 27 years as a Microsoft customer, I still feel like a second-class citizen just because I don't use Windows and IE (actually, I was using IE until they pulled the plug on the Mac version).

My six and half year old daughter came in, and so I tested her reading as I've been prone to do for the last couple of years. I highlighted Microsoft on the screen and asked her to say it ... "mick-ros-oft?" I wouldn't have expected her to know it, but then I highlighted the other name and she says "Ya-hoo", right away ... I suspect MS needs them much more than the other way around.

Tonight was one of those times when, after I dropped the kids off at their various activities, I could definitely feel I was getting a break. Having a big family is nice in a lot of ways, but with a lot of kids there aren't too many times when you're not "on" as a parent, and so you really do appreciate the breaks you get.

For the past seven years or so, a wonderful friend from our church, Pat, would babysit the kids every week for us. When she started, our oldest was just 11 or so, and so it was about the only time Susan and I truly got a break. Now we've got several who can babysit, and none really that small, so we get to go out a lot more. Still, I can tell the difference since she stopped babysitting last fall, as they prepared to move out of state.

Tonight Susan and I took advantage of the short break we had to go out to eat, unquestionably our main indulgence, since neither of us much likes to cook. Our oldest daughter actually got the rare chance to have the house to herself for a while. It's amazing how different it seems when no one else is around, how quiet, how relaxing, how things stay put up when you put them up ...

Anyway, Susan and I went to Chipotle, and then got some shaved ice for dessert. At Chipotle, we always share a burrito, which actually makes it cheaper than most fast-food restaurants. I've read two or three times on somebody's blog about how they ate a whole burrito from Chipotle and couldn't hardly move afterward, so a half really is about enough, especially if dessert follows.

Early in the week I'd told Susan we'd go to her favorite shaved ice place, Juice Box over in Chinatown, and even though it slipped my mind, somehow amazingly she remembered. I must say that shaved ice has come a long way since the 80s, when it was red beans, green beans, or grass jelly for the topping. I kind of got to where I liked the red beans, but never the same as she does (or our daughter, who's much more adventurous about trying out different foods than I am)

Nowadays, there's all kinds of much more agreeable toppings, but we always end up getting strawberries, which is fine with me. Since we shared that, too, our whole bill for dinner and dessert was less than $15 - well worth it since she's happy and I feel a lot better after a pretty stressful week.

Today's my birthday, and I wanted to write about some of the stuff I've been thinking lately. Being one of those people Peter Drucker describes as gaining insights from talking or writing about what they're thinking, maybe this will help me better understand it. I guess it's also as good a time as any to reflect, because this past month has been just one of those times ... There seems to be just one thing after another to contend with. Some problems are just small or silly, while others start out seeming big, but perhaps turn out not to be so bad.

Since the problems in my last post, for example, our a/c has gone out, which didn't really surprise me because the compressor bearing hadn't sounded too happy. However, when I called our repairman, I got a recording saying they were on vacation. So we were going to be (mostly) without a/c for two weeks, since I didn't want to trust what may be a major repair to someone I didn't know. It hasn't turned out so bad after all, though, because of a couple of cool spells. Yesterday we had a nice front, which has made today's weather just about perfect, and it's supposed to get cooler for the next few days, so hopefully it won't get too hot before we can get our a/c repaired.

I'm one of those people who hate interruptions, and so really hate it when things break. There's a part of me which fantasizes that somehow, one day, I'll get all my ducks in a row and will be able to merrily go along, working without interruption, with everything running like clockwork. Times like this past month point out the quite obvious fact that, actually, the longer I go, the more papers keep stacking up in my office, the more things don't get done, and therefore just how essential it is that I develop a more strategic approach to dealing with this reality!

In my uber-organized fantasy mindset, I'm thinking that if I can just get all the trivial, mundane stuff - fixing the car, filing tax returns, returning phone calls, etc. - out of the way, that somehow I'll be free to do creative stuff. Michael Eisner, Disney's former CEO, actually wrote something like this in his autobiography, that you have to learn to keep your desk cleaned off in order to be able to do creative work. In practice, though, it seems that most creative persons are typically swamped with work, a tangled morass of creative projects and mundane tasks, and the real trick is to be able to somehow keep projects moving forward despite the endless mundane disruptions.

Taking this line of thought a bit further, lately I've been reflecting on how the longer I go in life, the more I realize the "big things" in life actually mirror the seemingly mundane stuff. This was probably understood a century or two ago, but nowadays when folks start out as entrepreneurs or in some other ambitious endeavor, it's natural, given the influence of TV and other media, to somehow think the experience is going to be different or transcendent from other parts of life.

Really, though, I've found that one of the basic entrepreneurial skills is to be able to break out of this mode of thinking. Rather than pushing hard for a limited time, expecting to suddenly pop out above the clouds, real-world entrepreneurial persistence is about slugging it out from day to day, scoring little victories while containing the damage from defeats.

Startup Journal, the (free) entrepreneur's section of the Wall Street Journal, had an interesting article recently about Blogger co-founder Evan Williams, who is encountering some of this his next time around. Having taken VC money, he's gotten a lot of pressure to go-go-go, when his entrepreneurial instincts are telling him he needs to hunt around for the right opportunity before pushing ahead. Apparently he's cut a deal to buy the VCs out, but considering that his new venture reportedly hasn't burned much of their cash anyway, I suspect he's right and they're wrong (why doesn't being frugal ever factor into anyone's credibility these days?!!).

Even though I'm very much an optimist at a strategic level, I've noticed that people like me have a tendency to be overly pessimistic at the day-to-day tactical level. As someone observed, you always end up accomplishing less than you expect in the short run, but more than you expect in the long run. In other words, it's important to avoid being overly swayed by the daily ups and downs and frustrating setbacks, which I suspect scuttles many entrepreneurial attempts.

One example that helped me a lot is a description I saw on TV some years back of how renowned Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev approached his work. One of his assistants recalled that usually, his day would start with bad news - a tank had failed a test, a part was delayed, whatever. He would get everyone involved together in a meeting, and they would hash it out, often late into the night. And then the process would start all over again the next day.

I'm sure it would have been horrendously frustrating, if he had allowed it to be. Nevertheless, as many have remarked, until his death in early 1966, the Soviets were always ahead in the space race. He accomplished an awful lot with very limited resources, by just grinding it out on a day-by-day basis.

Over the years, I've seen my thinking about entrepreneurship crystallize into several simple analogies that often help me to better understand what's going on. One is that an entrepreneurial venture is analogous to a farm. Another is that it's analogous to the stages of a rocket. Perhaps I will write about various analogies some other time, but this past month a new analogy has crystallized in my mind: entrepreneurship is like a grueling tennis match, hard fought over every point.

I'm not a big fan, but if you've ever watched much tennis on TV, you know what I mean. The players give their all for each point. Sometimes they win a game, sometimes they lose and have to start all over. Sometimes they lose a hard-fought set and still fight back to win the match. It's grueling. They make the most of each point, game, and set but, like a boxer, it's also key that they be constantly ready to come back for the next round. If you see a tennis player starting to fade, you can usually figure it's over for them.

The longer I go, the more I realize that as an entrepreneur, you really need to move past the mindset of trying to generate a breakthrough, and instead just execute as well as possible every day. In many ways, entrepreneurship is the art of the possible. The more innovative you're trying to be, the more you'll be operating with limited resources and heightened uncertainty. A lot of times, you won't really know quite what you can accomplish on any particular day. As the tagline says, you can be busy making all sorts of plans, but find yourself doing something quite different! I've learned that for me, anyway, I have to be receptive and alert to the opportunities for getting things done as they present themselves, rather than trying too hard to stick to the script.

This "art of the possible" applies in a big-picture sense as well. The entrepreneur strikes out in some new direction, blazing a trail to what they alone may see to be possible. At the same time, there must be discipline and honesty to recognize and work within one's limits, and to change course when needed. The paradox is that, when you get good at this, on both the small-scale and the grand-scale, you'll end up in fact generating some breakthroughs, though perhaps without realizing it, since they happen gradually.

In my mind, the biggest challenge for us, anyway, is to keep being aggressive about taking care of ourselves, to prepare ourselves for the next round, in the face of so many other worthy things all demanding more out of us. It's been a quarter century since Susan and I started college, and there really hasn't been much of a break all this time. A lot of good things have happened, a lot of breakthroughs have been accomplished that other people don't see yet, but it helps to have an easy way to visualize how I need to make sure I'm up for the next point, every day.

This morning Susan and I both had early appointments. She had to be way over on the north side of Houston for a class, but when coming to say goodbye about 7:15, she had that look that tells me "uh-oh", something's wrong. It turns out the dishwasher had flooded the kitchen. While there's some things I don't like, one of the really good things is that our kitchen and dining room are configured so that when there's a flood in the kitchen or from the washing machine, it drains out without damaging the carpet. I've heard of other people having thousands of dollars of damage from flooding by their appliances, which isn't such an unlikely occurrence. We've experienced it several times.

Anyway, Susan turned on the dishwasher this morning, and after a while a bunch of water started pouring out. Usually we run it on a timer in the middle of the night, which makes morning showers nicer, but for some reason our son didn't set it last night, which was really fortunate because it might have poured a lot of gallons of hot water out by morning.

I didn't have time to mess with it much, because I had to be at the dentist at 8. I got my first crown, which is pretty good I guess for nearly 44, at least considering that some of our kids already have one. Actually, the permanent one's supposed to be ready in a couple of weeks, on my birthday, though I'm not sure I want to spend it going to the dentist! Well, at least one of our kids was impressed that I had a "crown", which when I was little referred to your whole head, not just one tooth.

Stuck in the dentist chair for about an hour and a half, I really didn't know much about how crowns worked, so I tried to figure out what he was doing as he seemed to drill forever. Wondering what I was going to do about our dishwasher, after a while I recalled that there was a float that acted as a cutoff valve. When I got home, I checked it, and sure enough it was stuck. My son and I cleaned out that and the vent, which will also cause it to flood the kitchen, though not so dramatically.

All seems to be working again, thankfully, so hopefully that's all it is. I think I'll wait another night before running the timer while we're asleep, though. It's funny how with appliances they often seem so aggravating when they break, but then it turns out to be some very simple little thing. When we do have to call a repairman, if I'm home I try to watch everything he's doing since about half the time it's something so simple you could easily do it yourself. Sometimes they're done in five or ten minutes, and you realize why it is they can make so much money.

I guess in a way, as awkward as this morning looked like it would be, it actually worked out pretty well. I could have easily spent a while messing with the dishwasher, but instead the solution for the dishwasher repair came to me while I was busy getting repaired myself! Besides that, I didn't really feel like eating most of the day, so I decided just to fast instead, something I try to do once every quarter anyway.

I've always liked electrical and mechanical work, but really don't like messing with plumbing repairs. After a while, though, you learn how to do most of the basic stuff, because after the first few times, you just don't call out a plumber for every little thing. Actually, to psych myself up, I like to remind myself how plumbing is a lot like a rocket engine (which is loaded with tubes, fittings and those oh-so-naughty valves and seals). Of course, I had an even better way today. After having someone drill in your mouth for an hour or so, even a potential plumbing repair looks pretty appealing!

I decided to go ahead and put LightSide on my Technorati Profile, and it asked me to write a post including that link, which was good because I had a few little things I wanted to write about.

Our eight year old, for one, continues his curiosity about medical stuff. It seems ridiculous the number of drug ads you see on television these days, but whenever there's one where they show the digestive system or some other body organ (thank God they can't show how all these drugs work!), he's glued to the screen.

He's always reading the encyclopedia now, which is neat. I love seeing kids with an active curiosity and desire to learn about a subject that fascinates them. A few months ago, Susan and I went to Borders and bought him a physiology book. We spent about half an hour sorting through a couple dozen books trying to find something that, obviously, wasn't too hard, but at the same wasn't really a "kid's" book. We ended up getting him Barron's Essential Atlas of Physiology, which isn't really for the average 8 year old, but hey, I say, strike while the iron is hot.

By his age, I'd read about all the aerospace books in my elementary school and church library, and was pretty much starved for new material for years. Like the folks eating shoe leather or tulip bulbs in wartime, I ended up trying to read a math dictionary in the school library. Talk about BORING! I had to give up, some books are just not meant to be chewed or digested ...

Anyway, the physiology book was a small investment in our son which could pay off big if he ever does become a "brain and eye doctor", as he says. Even if he doesn't, I want him to be able to pursue whatever it is that God has put on his heart. He seems to be pretty interested in all the organs and even in the chemistry, so who knows how far he'll go if he has the chance.

Of course, I have to brace myself for a lot of "odd" questions. This morning, at breakfast no less, he just suddenly asks me, "Dad, when people die, why don't they take their brain out so everybody can look at it?" I wonder if that's how the Egyptians used to think ... ANYWAY, I think what he really meant was why don't they have more brains on exhibit, sprinkled around like moon rocks, I guess.

Actually, we did get to see some brains recently, at the Health Museum in Houston's Museum District, where there is a special Brain: Explore the World Inside Your Head exhibit going on through May 6th. It's fascinating (and scary) to see how small a great white shark's brain is. I wouldn't count on trying to psych that predator out.

Also, on the topic of animals, I've been waiting for a chance to mention some hilarious photos from a Tokyo zoo. Apparently the zoo higher-ups decided they needed a drill to practice dealing with an animal escape. So they had a zookeeper dress up in an orangutan suit for the "mock" escape. Their Japanese interpretation of monkey suit is a riot, kind of like manga meets monkey, or something.

Well, there was this slight problem. It seems no one bothered to tell the kids that it was just a drill! So they see this giant monkey running around loose - scary enough - who begins fighting zookeepers who then proceed to shoot it with a gun (a tranquilizer)! I guess it was a little much for the kids. It reminds me of when we went to EPCOT/DW when our oldest was just a baby. We were eating breakfast one morning in the hotel, and all of a sudden Chip n Dale walk in. Sitting down, they seemed huge. It was a bit much for her, at her age.

BTW, the captions Spiegel Online put with the photos are hilarious.

People (especially salesmen) talk about "Christmas in July", but I guess today I'm more in the mood for "Thanksgiving in March", or rather the spirit of it. We actually do have a turkey in the freezer ... I don't know when we'll get around to cooking it, but since it's one of my favorites, we don't just eat one once a year like a lot of folks.

Of course, today is St. Patrick's day, which is kind of cool for folks like me who are part Irish, though unlike in Boston, no one really celebrates it here. Some day I want to read a good history of Ireland and St. Patrick in particular. I've noticed a lot of books on Ireland at B&N; I guess it makes sense that there'd be a lot of books about a culture known for its literature. Today was also a friend of my daughter's birthday; she turned 13, no less. It's nice having a holiday birthday - in our family we've got two on Valentine's Day!

So while the holiday docket is full, I still find myself these past couple of days being very grateful for a lot of the things in my life, especially Susan. We've been married a long time now, but it keeps getting better. I know that's a cliche a lot of times, but I think it's true for folks who put the effort into the relationship.

I guess it's typical for there to be a lot of things, both trivial and important, to work out in the first decade or so of a marriage, but if you can get past that with both partners still actively "engaged" in making the marriage work, investing the large amount of time and energy it takes, then it likely will get better. I'm amazed, though, how often folks seem to think they don't need to make this investment, the idea that they can kind of put their marriage on the "back burner" because they're too busy with kids, career, or whatever.

I think Susan and I had an advantage over a lot of folks, in that we were always grateful for our relationship and treated it like it was something very special. Besides that, as Christians we knew it was going to be a fight to have a good relationship, that there were all kinds of forces, seen and unseen, threatening it. The folks who are all infatuated thinking they're the first to ever fall in love are sitting ducks, sadly.

Before we started college, some were saying it would never last. We didn't agree with that assessment, but we weren't complacent. It was miserable being apart, and eventually I made a lot of changes so we could be together. Later, she made a lot of changes to accommodate me and my goals. Sadly, students are taught career planning as being all about "me, myself and I", when in the real world it's all about work-life balance and building a team.

After many years of reflection on this, I realized that a lot of work-life balance really boils down to being willing to slow down. In the aerospace business you just don't rush through stuff, it's too important, and French food isn't served in a minute like McDonald's. In the same way, we have to be willing to slow down at times in order to get the important things right in our life, even though all the signposts in our frenzied society are telling us just the opposite.

There was a girl I knew just slightly in college, who I was told by a friend went on to the top medical research school in their combined MD/PhD program. I'm sure just one of those would have been pretty tough, med school itself is a sleepless marathon, so both seemed to really be pushing it. Eventually, I heard that she backed down to "just" one, it was too much. Even she had to learn to slow down, which I'm sure was good for her, though I wonder if she felt like a "failure"!

You have to slow down a lot when you have kids, and after a while watching the same folks pass you by over and over again, you realize you're not doing so bad after all (and wonder if they know what they're doing at all). Consistency is really the name of the game, and consistency can help you to see what's really valuable. A while back Susan mentioned to me how she thought it was neat that we had such a long history together.

That was nice because I had started thinking the same thing. It's one thing to be able to complete each other's sentences, but it's really cool when you discover your partner has made the same realization you had. There have even been a few times where Susan has voiced some unusual observation that I had myself concluded, but didn't know how I'd ever convey it to her. It's as if even in our thoughts we are companions on some long, out of the way journey, which is pretty special.

Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday, not mainly because of the food, but because I can see how important it is, especially us Americans, to give thanks for God's blessings, and because I love William Bradford's account of the pilgrims (Of Plymouth Plantation). Nevertheless, after our daughter Audrey died at birth, the day after Thanksgiving, I actually wondered if maybe it would ruin the holiday for me, that I'd need to celebrate it another time. Next year is a leap year, so it will still be a few more years before Thanksgiving lands on her birthday.

"Counting our blessings" may seem like some quaint practice, but it's actually good defense, both spiritually and mentally. I've read a number of successful business people discuss how they viewed gratefulness as a key that opened up a lot of blessing. Even Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, made learning the value of a dollar one of the first chapters in his autobiography (Made in America). I guess the idea was that if someone would waste a dollar, then they'd just as easily waste a whole bunch of dollars. If you're not grateful for what you already have, then no amount will really make you satisfied.

I thank God for Susan, I thank God for our family. It's been a long haul, an awful lot of work, a lot of stress at times, but my view has always been that you only go through life once, so you might as well go for it. We have, and we are, and the "we" makes it a lot more fun.