It isn't very often that your mother-in-law will appear on The Price Is Right. So I'm posting the video for posterity.

If you don't already have it, you'll need Quicktime to watch the video. Get it here.

Part of it has to do with living an hour away from all the people I used to hang out with, and part of it involves being cooped up in a residential neighborhood, but lately I've been very bored.

With a baby on the way, now is probably as good a time as ever to be bored. So I guess it's ok.

Totally changing subjects, DeAnja finally agrees with me that milk from these cows tastes better. It's a family operation. It's Hormone free. It's local. You feel better about supporting the little guy, and above all it tastes a whole lot better.

In other news, I need a dirtbike, and also, being without a truck, a single-axle trailor to carry such a dirtbike on. It will happen. Keep saying that.

But higher on the priority list I'm told, our house (and an adament DeAnja) needs a deck. Such a thing I can totally design and build on my own. Sure thing.

9:30 at night: "Let's go get some ice cream."

..and so it begins.

In other news, weiner dogs currently sneak around eating food off coffee tables when no one is looking, and also enjoy spending time in front yard, toying with fallen baby birds and giant insects.

We pay our bills. Most of the time.

In spite of the fact that both of us work full time, there isn't a pile of money in savings that gets bigger with each passing month. A house payment, one car payment, and we're lucky in that we both have health insurance. We're getting by, barely.

Yet apparently, I live in a very affluent society. And there are probably 3 billion people who would gladly trade places, and for good reasons. Well, there are pros and cons, and it depends on what you look at.


Knowing what little I do about design and packaging and paper printing and ink, it's disturbing how much energy and resources go simply into the things that we throw away. At least 1 garbage sack every two days, ..at least. All kinds of stuff.

Every day we're eating food that costs less than the packaging it comes in. It's all so wasteful, empty and arrogant.

There are probably 4 or 5 people working their hands to the bone in third world countries just to support my lifestyle, just to support me and my wife in our endeavor to break even at the end of every month, ...it's this big rolling cycle of extraction, deforestation, strip mining and gluttony and garbage cans and pollution that leaves everybody screwed. ..minus a few multinational corporations who are doing just fine, which by the way if I ever want to make money, I should heavily invest in.

Soon I'll have a daughter, and won't have time to give second thought to such things.

She'll grow up and be an glowing optimist, just like her dad.

I know I know, tech guru nerd internet junk is my thing. It's what I do. ..For fun and for a sub-standard living. But where else should I ask, where else can you download 27 Neil Young albums at one time, or watch all Itchy and Scratchy episodes ever created, or find out how every internal combustion engine known to man works by watching neat animations.

Of course it is very true that the internet, just like tv, is mostly junk. However at least with the internet you have options, and aren't part of a captive audience.

Speaking of tv, Frontline for the past few weeks has been the best thing on. The Age of AID's is one of the best documentary/journalism things I've ever seen. Soon, like all the other episodes, the whole thing will be online for viewing.

If all goes well and my wife doesn't give birth to an iguana, I fear that having children will ensure payback for all my childhood sins, as well as for all those of my wife.

If you are reading this and you know me, and you don't know that we are having a girl, well, you know now.

And this girl I'm sure, will emerge into the world and roll her eyes at us before she takes her first breath.

My mind wanders back to 11th grade Chemistry, on perhaps the one day I got bored enough to listen to Mr. Bane, as he wasn't simply getting us to memorize things for a test. Describing two otherwise ordinary and harmless substances that in isolation are perfectly stable, Bane went on to demonstrate how when mixed, they react violently into a firey death of sparks fumes and flames.

This is sometimes how I imagine the mixture of my genetics, with those of my dear wife.

See, from stories that I've been told, and from the memories she has chosen to share with me concerning her past deeds, my wife was at times was a difficult child. And some of the things I've heard about her as a kid aren't really "stories" - they are more like disturbing tales uttered to prospective parents around a campfire, with wolves howling in the background.

So that's her side.

And me, well, I was basically bald and fat until I was 4 - an infant boss hogg of sorts.

You could continue to read more here, and the idea would only repeat itself over and over again: I am the sort who expects the worst and is pleasantly surprised when things are simply ok; elated when things are good. Pessimism is a curse and sometimes a gift.

All we know is this: We will have a child and her hair will be red and she will be a dependant for the next 18, or if she's anything like me, 25 years.

I struggle with priorities. The big ones.

At work, I put everything, into my work. ..into design and web nerdiness ..and in many ways suffer for my craft, because I'm generally my own worst critic. It has to be good. It has to be good, or its nothing. etc..

The problem I face, well, is that money doesn't grow on trees. Great web work, great design work, doesn't necessarily sell itself. Giant buckets of money don't magically appear when you get good at your craft.

So you have to sell yourself, and be a business man. And compromise.

And compromise.


My wife will stay home with our baby. Anything less is unacceptable to me at this point, and I will do whatever it takes, short of cooking meth in our bathtub, to make that happen.

Dear internet journal blog thing whom I neglect and nobody reads anyway:

It has been many a night since we have last spaken.
Alot to catch up on. I'll keep it short.

DeAnja (my wife) is cooking fajitas tonight.
I will eat them, preferably in a chair.

I will go to sleep, wake up tommorow and drive to the new place of employment where I've been for the past 3 or 4 weeks. Things are good there. I have a great flexible schedule. I work on things there, things that are more meaningful and matter somewhat, ..things of less corporate'ness, less evil'ness.

Then I will come home, and hopefully the lady will cook me something again.

I'm glad we had this talk.

My brother Corey got married this past weekend down in Louisiana, and it was nice to go somewhere and just hang out for an extended weekend, even if I was hauling around all kinds of gear and heavily involved in trying to setup an imovie slideshow. I brought my Imac G5, and rented a projector from Online Technologies out of Maumelle. It wasn't cheap, but they were good to deal with and helped me out with my questions.

I think the slideshow I made was a bit too sad. I really didn't think about some of the people who would be at the wedding, and if I had to do it over again I'd probably have made something a bit more on the lighter side.

So now all my brothers are married, and we all answer to women who attempt to organize, prioritize, scrutinize, accessorize, monopolize, our time, activities, and attention. But I left one word out, stabilize. Because getting married keeps you out of trouble.

For the most part.