Harry's Ruminations

I understand this is meaningless to anyone besides me, but I just wanted to jot it down. She said, "I don't know who it is, but it's not you.  It used to be, and I think it's sad that it's not anymore." And you know what, she's right.  I agree with her .  Long about July 2011, I took a left turn and lost myself a bit.  Not quite sure what to do with that.

It was pouring outside, and my daughter was trying to convince me how much she hated a children's museum 4 hours' drive away. " Cosi?  You mean the museum in Columbus?"  I said between bites of Subway sandwich.  Oooh, with mayonnaise.  My youngest is allergic to eggs, so mayo was a delicacy. "YEAH," she exploded.  I was thankful we were the only customers; Maria's like a combination of my passion and her mom's expressiveness.  In comparison, a nitromethane Funny Car mouses about. "I mean, really, I hate the place.  There was this time..." Oh, here come the hands gesticulating... "...when mommy was behind the door in the dark room with the lasers and I couldn't get to her and..." and then, my daughter, time stopped, and Daddy looked at you.  I mean, really looked.  Hack writers would say "drank you in." There's a moment in Forrest Gump  when Jenny shows Forrest his son for the first time, tells him that ...

Caution: This is an entry about things that go boom.  It's NSFW (well, at my work, anyway) So, for my bi-weekly time to myself, I choose to go to  The Gun Warehouse  (a.k.a "Bud's Gun Shop") in Lexington and try out some techniques I saw here: Bud's was busy (as typical of any Saturday), but I got on the range about 11:30am.  If you've never been in a busy gun shop, it's truly an experience:  Excitement, fear, bravado from customers and staunch professionalism from the staff.  Can't recommend the place enough. First I did the two-in-the hole drill at 3 yards, and results weren't encouraging. [Excuses] I was wearing my glasses today after having pinkeye this past week.  I'm also trying to shift from using my right eye primarily (which I've used to shoot all my life) to going to my left eye, which is my dominant eye. I'm also trying to learn the isosceles stance,[/Excuses] Anyway, I was basically unable to hit two in one ...

Here in Kentucky, we root for hopeless causes:  Most incarnations of UK Football, the Broncos in Superbowl XVIII, and winter. Winter?  you ask.   Indeed! Usually, Winter is a neutered season.  It's like a buffer between our long, dry falls and our all-too-short wet Springtime.  Summer's the top-dog.  Summer's on the beach, kicking sand in the face of nerdy Winter, breaking his glasses and shooting tequila like a Carrie Underwood song (underage, natch).   A "hard" winter here is one big  snow of 3" and an average daytime high under 40.  "You know, I had to scrape my windows this morning!" we exclaim in disbelief. Okay, well, it seems clear that Winter's had it, gotten some 'Roids, hit the gym, and come packing a Glock 10mm.  He's back, and he's bad .  At this point, I'm beginning to think he's homicidal. As I sit here at 6:45am, my birch tree in the back yard genuflects onto  my back deck, weighed down by a crapton of ...

There's been much discussion lately on the web about the dismal # of women choosing Computer Science.  I thought I'd go straight to the source and ask, you know, a woman, who did not choose CS. My wife. Her theory on gender imbalance in CS.  (I had to transcribe as quickly as I could, and I'm not sure I quite caught the spirit of it all) It's stupid.  You don't make anything tangible .  When I think of Computer Science, I think of greasy gamer nerds who want show off for their greasy gamer nerd friends.    Why would I want to choose that, particularly when I know that when I go into it I'm going to be harangued by perverts who do nothing but sit on their butt all day?  Which makes your butt huge.    (Caveat: This is not what she thinks about the people I work with.  This is her general view on what a female surveying the field would see as a Freshman in college.)

Random stuff that'd annoy my twitter stream to death: The animation in He-Man and She-Ra is laughably bad.  Not "it's anime and they only shot one cel but panned across it for 2 seconds" bad, but "we reused the same sequence of he-man rolling 25 times in 5 episodes" bad. Natural Gas heat furnaces are amazing.  My house is a toasty 70 degrees. It's painful to start my Camry every morning.  That glowing "low oil pressure light" (while normal) goes out much more slowly in zero degree weather, and there's this groan  it makes about 5 seconds after startup that I interpret as the car saying, "Really?  Again?" Useless related factoid I remember from my childhood absorbing everything about aviation:  When pilots started flying in Alaskan winters, they preferred radial engines (no water cooling system to freeze) and they were careful to drain the sump oil from the engine on shutdown into a container, then heat-up the container the n...

I imagine this convo someday: "You really believe there's some magic guy up in the sky who created the Universe?  Do you also believe in Santa Claus?" The respondent will be one of my children: I've never believed in Santa Claus.  I would like to tell you about a real guy named Jesus and what He did for me.... Yep, we're those people.  Santa Claus doesn't give our children presents, we give each other presents to celebrate the greatest unearned present ever, salvation.   Our kids are the all-too-honest little antichrists who send your little Timmy or Terry home crying from Kindergarten, "MOM!  Maria said Santa Claus isn't real ." I'm not going to lie, it's awkward.  You get around other families any month south of September and hoo boy, you get The Glare , usually from the mom who's put a load of items on layaway for Santa to bring.  "Why in the world would you deprive your kids the joy of Santa?"  Some come out and...