“So, Karel, what’s been going on in your life lately?”

• Saturday was a nice big goof-off day, culminating in the premiere of InuYasha on Cartoon Network. Not too shabby, really, but I like most of the stuff from the creator of Ranma 1/2. I couldn’t tell you what Sunday was like, I don’t remember. It must not have been terribly interesting.
  
• Yesterday was a day of guests. Ben and John came over early in the afternoon for hours and hours of Diablo II gaming as well as a short Doom Legacy fragfest. Nothing like nostalgic gaming, right down to the “why won’t Doom effing network properly?” Brought back memories, I tell ya. A few hours after they left, the Bourgos came over. We convinced Amy (Michael needed none) to play Age of Empires instead of Diablo, since I’d already had more than my fill over the weekend. A great time was had by all. For the record, Amy and Michael won thanks to her early wonder completion and a flotilla of Michael’s Viking longboats to protect said wonder. My Korean turtle ships didn’t stand a chance, so I spent the 400 year countdown beating the living crap out of my Japanese neighbors. Yes, I’m a big wuss.
  
• The kids start school again tomorrow, so Wendi’s got them out shopping and doing other preparatory activities.
  
• Zero crashed. Hard. As I was getting ready to type up a really big Thoughts entry. (I’ve been shamefully neglecting that category since about, oh, this time last year.) Turns out that the loud whining noise coming from her tower is the sound of a hard drive on its last bearings. As I type this, data is being transferred to another computer in anticipation of replacing the hard drives in Zero and starting over again. Wheee. I wasn’t planning to do another Linux From Scratch build quite so soon, but life is often that way… unplanned situations that don’t bear waiting.
  
• On a related note, the “Current Music” feature will be missing until Zero is fully operational and trustworthy once more. Turns out that if XMMS isn’t running on Zero, the “Current Music” code stalls and prevents the loading of the rest of this site. Eep! I’ll see about coming up with some sort of better way of showing off my music collection.
  

• The two “Kagato” episodes of TMTT are posted. Huge thanks to Mari and Kylanath for suggestions and some proofreading!
  
• Benjamin stopped by the office yesterday. We had a nice long chat about some of my future plans, and how he can be involved in them if things all work out for the best. He’s supposed to stop by the house tonight for some Diablo II gaming… muahahaha!
  
• Wendi’s very proud of the fact that she’s finally “on top of” the housekeeping. The secret, it turns out, is to spend an hour every day doing it. It then becomes incredibly simple to maintain. A happy Wendi is a good thing, even better than a neat-looking house.
  
• The head-cold lingers, much like the die-hard fans after the lights have come up at the concert venue. I’m okay, but I’m not as okay as I’d like. Such is life.
  
• Once I’m done with TMTT, I have a half-formed plan to do another music video. This time I’m bucking for Journeyman status as I create a video with an actual story. At the moment I’m torn between using Genesis or Midnight Oil as the backing music.
  

So we’re drifting slowly down I-5 on our way to check out some dishwashers, okay? Traffic is bad, the sun is baking everything and everyone. (Come to think on it, that might explain this episode.) The wife and I are up front, the kids are on the back-back bench seat. The A/C is cranked.

We approach the Portland temple. Mormon, that is. “Hey, kids, it’s the temple.” No sooner are the words out of my mouth than we pull up alongside a massive tractor-trailer rig. “Oooo, it’s so big and white!” Giggles from the back seat. Silly grin from the driver. “I didn’t know it was so huge, it fills the entire view all the way up to the sky!” Laughter fills the mini-van.

Traffic shifts, and now we’re alongside the tractor instead of the trailer. “Hey, wow, now it’s PURPLE!” More delight. “I wonder what you call a purple temple. The Purple Tabernacle?”

Attempts to say “purple tabernacle” three times fast fail. To be honest, attempts to say it once fail often, and attempts to say it twice simply cause more laughter. As the laughter dies down and Alex sips water to deal with his hiccups, I jot down two words on my Kyocera so I’ll remember to write up a journal entry…

This is how I keep my family amused. The family that laughs together, stays together.

At 10:30am, 15 August 1992 our son Alexander Frederick Kerezman came into the world.

Ten years later, Alex (a.k.a. “the Spud”) is a healthy, smart little computer gamer and budding golf enthusiast with a clever wit and good manners. Well, sometimes “wit” and “manners” clash just a little, but nobody’s perfect. If we can get him to relax a bit more and learn to truly enjoy life, I think he’ll grow up to be one heck of a neat person.

Happy Birthday, son. I love you.

I like my job, yes, but that’s not the reason I want to stay at work for the next few days. You see, Portland’s experiencing something of a one-week heatwave, and I want no part of it. I absolutely wilt in 90+ temperatures. Our house becomes a kind of sauna, or perhaps the term is ‘blast furnace.’ From mid-afternoon all the way until well past midnight, our abode is unbearable.

My office, on the other hand, is tiny but it has air conditioning. Mmmm. I love being cool and comfy. Too bad I don’t have a stockpile of food or a nice place to sleep.

Oh well. I should just suck it up and be miserable with the rest of my family. It wouldn’t be fair to them anyway, now would it?

I did something Saturday afternoon that most people aren’t aware that I’ve ever done.

I trimmed back both the rhododendron bush next to our front door and the big leafy shrub that’s been taking over the bend in our walkway for the last three years. The rhodie is in pretty sad shape, limbs and leaves all over the place. I cut it back pretty drastically, but at least we can see out the window now and get to our front door. Yes, it was that bad. Over the last few years I’ve done very light trimming to keep the rhodie out of the doorway, but this is the first time I’ve made a serious effort to rehabilitate the little shrub.

As for the other bush, whose name I do not know but probably should, we’ve been letting it grow unchecked since we moved in. It used to be no taller than I am, and was neatly contained in its bed on the inside of the walkway curve. Over time it’s grown upward and outward to the point where you almost have to walk in the grass to get around it. While I did make pretty good progress on that plant, I expect to make a few more passes at it with the pruning shears over the next few weekends.

For grins and chuckles I also got the neighbor’s grape vines the hell out of our tree and off our house, did a tiny bit of trimming on the other, better-grown rhodie at the corner of the house, and removed what looks like some ivy vines that wanted to climb up the drainpipe.

You didn’t know that I sometimes get a kick out of pruning shrubbery? See what happens when you assume you know everything you need to know about a person?