Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

I dare you to find another photograph featuring a Zentraedi Officer’s Pod, a cast-iron “rubber” duck, and a black LEGO minifig.

Context will arrive in the form of Thursday’s Quacked Panes comic.

I swear to you, my intentions did not include ending up making only one post per month.

Say! I looked at the lava dome of a volcano a couple of weeks ago! See? I even took Explorer Duck along with! Excitement! Explorer Duck has since gone back home to her owner back in Pennsylvania, as my house was her final stop in the worldwide tour.

My daughter turns 18 on Monday. I guess I may have to stop calling them my “kids” now, though they’ll always be my “rugrats,” which admittedly makes no sense to anyone but myself. So be it; I’m a known weirdo anyway.

So far, the new webserver is working beautifully. It’s faster, it’s running a much newer Linux OS than the old one, and most importantly it costs $40 less per month. I should’ve done this years ago.

The job is… crazy. We just added three new clients and two new Kaseya management add-ons, so I’m never bored. Then again, I’m also never going to get caught up. Sigh.

My personal life is largely drama-free, and I count that as a very good thing. I get plenty enough excitement from my job and the day-to-day challenges of life without adding interpersonal conflicts, you know?

Once I get my head a bit more above water, maybe I’ll start looking at ways to spruce things up around here. For now… I’m just hanging in there as best I can.

I ignore this journal for weeks on end, and then I decide to post an epic. Go figure, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

My birthday celebration was stretched over several days…

• On Friday, Lil’ took me on a trip to the Beaverton Powell’s store; I came home with several books and the yin/yang devil ducky.
• On Saturday, Kylanath and Erica gave me cards and ducks (two more from the pastel Bath & Body Works line) and a sweater. Also? We ate… this delightful confection that Kylanath put together for me (and that Erica had way too much fun beheading, hmm…):

• Later on Saturday, I bought a new pair of shoes. They’d better last a long while; Doc Martens charges a pretty penny. Still, they’re incredibly comfortable and they’ve got to be more durable than the “cheap” ($50+) shoes I’ve been buying at Fred Meyer lately…
• On Sunday, well, that day mostly consisted of vegging out and doing laundry and playing games. Nothing to complain about, really.
• On the day itself? I got up early, went to work, and received the traditional signed-by-the-office-staff birthday card. Oh, and The Roomie foraged some grub so I didn’t end up just making a sandwich for dinner tonight (on account of being too brain-fried to put any kind of effort into food preparations).

All in all? My entry into “being 38″ didn’t go too badly, no, not too badly at all…

While Kylanath and I were out and about yesterday we picked up a set of shelves for her (“What do you get the girl who loves books?”) and a set of shelves for me. Thankfully Ikea now offers $20 65-pound-capable handcarts for those of us who take the MAX to and fro.

Tonight I assembled my set of shelves…

…and filled them full within five minutes of assembly. The new one’s on the left. Sadly, the ducks on the right are just for show: I have another box of books to unpack. Eventually I won’t have any books remaining in boxes, they’ll all be shelved! I figure that’ll be about five minutes before I found out I’m moving again, but hey, whatever.

So, on the heels of my somewhat-down little posting yesterday, I offer what I consider to be one of the most beautiful skies I’ve seen in a long time:

Most folks, I suppose, prefer a pristine blue, or maybe mostly-blue with an occasional white puffy cloud. Me? I want a lot of different shapes and shades of clouds as far as the eye can see. No, I’m no more fond of the solid mass of flat gray than most people, but this? This is lovely. Truly.

Cheered me up, this morning, it did.