Harry's Ruminations

The New Mrs. Combs's summary found here Basically, it went off without a hitch, or so the bride saw. I got to see the labor unrest with the caterer, my family arriving 2 hours (!) too early and crowding the foyer of the church, my cousin the usher arrive after having spilt coffee all over his white shirt and gotten a new one. It was a great day, one I will cherish for many reasons: My bride looked at me and said, "I have hives all over my body and I threw up three times this morning," it was so her that I couldn't help but smile. Seeing Whitney freak out at my "Damn, you are so HOT" face getting to kiss her hand in a moment of inspiration Seeing my pal Jeremy again after 4 years. My best man's toast. Joe, you are AWESOME! The toast & roast. I was VERY dubious about that working, but Whitney's rambling, my extemporanous thoughts, Stu's sermon, Dad's anecdotes, Jamie's flippance, and Jeremy's summation were like the Epiloge to th...

Ah, life in the land of feast or famine... I bowed my head this morning and said, "Lord, if it be in Your will, please make the way straight for me this day" And it has been. * * *

http://www.typingtest.com/ 79 WPM...ugh...used to be over 100

Yes, yes, all the women of the world may now weep, I'm off the market. </End egotism> Doesn't suit me. I'm married to the most wonderful, spastic, loving, tender woman on the face of the earth, and I have been for going on two weeks!! I was off work from the 16th through the 26th and didn't miss it much, but then who does? Spent lots of money, had a great wedding, reception, and honeymoon. I'm not myself...I really can't tell who I am yet, but I'm def. not myself. More blogging later...just wanted to tell everyone (okay, all 3 of ya) that I'm still alive.

Curmudgeon: n. An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions. I'm getting there. Whitney and I ate our pizza and swilled our Pepsi before the morass of cable TV before us, and VH1 ran a spot promoting DAVE MATHEWS BAND: Storytellers, premiering tonight at 11pm Me: "Good LORD! 11pm? Who's going to be up on a weeknight watching THAT?!" Yup, how do you spell old fart? H-A-R-O-L-D. I'm a morning person. Yeah, that must be it. * * * On a brighter note (a phrase in common usage by the anti-old person at work, LR), I think I'm in love with Whitney's mattress. Since it found a home inside my Shaker-style cherry bed, I've wakened rested BEFORE my alarm on two successive mornings. No aches + pains. No sore muscles. Pillow tops rule!

I now have 72 channels, ranging from news, sports, human interest, travel, cooking, learning, and not-too-recent movies. It takes me 20 minutes to flip through them all, comprehend which channel I'm watching, and discern why I really don't want to watch that channel at that second. I just spent the last two hours trying to reaclimate myself to cable. I have a headache. I can feel my attention span shortening, my life wasting away, and a strange desire to buy airwick air freshener. Things have changed somewhat in the time I've been away from cable. News is now NEWS, DAMNIT! "News" is the presentation of current goings-on, possibly with human interest stories and some weird stuff to give flavor. NEWS, DAMNIT involves 3-4 blonde anchorpersons, a crawl going across the bottom of the screen, a rotating "FOX NEWS" banner in the lower corner, and snazzy graphics proclaiming the latest UPDATE regarding the president's digestion or Alan Greenspan's ...

My powerbook's been held hostage in Louisville for the past week, so no blogging from home, and (as we'll soon see) I can't blog from work. My apologies. This is, at once, the best and most chaotic time in my life. Work is sucking unbelievably, but my personal and spiritual life has been blessed. Maybe God is trying to tell me something. First, the facts: They fired 300 employees, then re-organized our department (no impact to me), and slipped in a not-so-subtle warning... Internet use is now STRICTLY monitored I walked in the next day and heard the unbelievable. My pal Joel Jirak, the guy who got me my job at Lexmark, the man who introduced me to Slashdot , Mozilla (later Firefox), my inspiration...had been fired. Porn? Nope. The only thing I could find out was 'excessive internet usage'. Shockwaves radiated throughout our department. Not only was Joel well-liked, but he was a keystone guy, a fellow of unwaivering Christianity, good humor, and who was su...

You enter in the morning whistling a happytune and by the end of the day you desperately don't want to work there anymore.

As reported over on Gabe's Blog , here's a snap of the new, extended wheelbase mini: * * * Had insomnia last night so I finally decided to watch Sin City This stylized movie version of Frank Miller's graphic novels by the same name stars nearly everyone in hollywood who's under 40 and who'll work for under $2 million: Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, Josh Hartnett, etc. Dark and surreal, the "plot" is actually 5-6 vignettes that occur in "Sin" (short for Basin) City, a land of angels, demons, murderers, and corruption, with the normal Film Noir inversion of sympathentic/antagonistic chracters--the "officials" are mostly evil, and the ex-cons and prositutes are the "good guys". The vignettes are uneven: Bruce Willis's Officer Hartigan, whose fatalistic, chivalric tale bookends the others, is interesting but pathetic, making him hard to root for but for his mission to save tasty Nancy from a fate worse than ...

link $94...Santa, I've been oh so good this year.

My family's napping, so here goes... I'm so HAPPY :D These past two days have been heaven...relaxing, fulfilling, and just neat. Drove Whitney & Joey down here in the MINI, and the first thing Joey said as we pulled into the garage is, "Harold, is that your BIKE? Why don't you every ride your BIKE?" ...good question... The saga of my lovelorn Cannondale: I bought it in the spring of 2002, when I was on a biking kick. I'd had a crappy Giant mountainbike when I was in college, and since I was out in cosmopolitan South Lexington, I thought...hmm...maybe a road bike of some sort. Then my father goes, "Son, I'll buy you whatever kinda bike you want". So, I jumped into the deep end and bought an all-aluminum Cannondale T800 touring bike: It's like a racing bike, but made more solidly in all respects, and it has 27 speeds (3 front cogs and 9 rears), like a mountain bike. Everything on it was top-notch and made to last. And I rode it for 6...

It's the day before Labor Day weekend, and it's all falling apart here... Okay, good stuff first: I got the yard mowed (after 4 inches of rain thanks to Katrina, it was a jungle), the trimming accomplished, and the car washed in the past couple of days, but I'm horribly behind on all things wedding. I just ordered cable. I'm tired of having fuzzy broadcast reception...just basic, no digital/TiVo/etc. Whitney and I are both newshounds, so maybe that will assuage our yen to be plugged-in. Plus, hey, Cartoon network :D New Orleans is...gone. Those who remained behind are enduring anarchy and violence closer to Mogadishu, Somalia, than anything America has seens since the Civil War. Civilization has collapsed there and people are doing anything to survive. It's a microcosm of what could happen anywhere in America if even a few basic services get disrupted and people are cut-off from food and water. I hope this isn't the start of a cascading failure, but it ...