The archives for the first quarter of 2005 come to 459KB in text! That is SO much typing that I have been doing over the last three months. I can’t believe how much that there is. Of course, I don’t actually sit around reading SGL every day either. I just write it. I leave the whole reading thing up to all of you. And thanks for that, by the way. According to the most recent count, the total size of the SGL dailies is just shy of .5 Million words in length. Yeah, and if you think that your eyes are soar from reading this, imagine how my fingers must feel. I think that I might have tendenitis or something similar to it in my right thumb that I can only imagine comes from all of this typing everyday. Someday, I think that it would be cool to produce SGL in a traditional printed format and have it bound and sitting on my bookshelves. It would already be more than a single volume, I would think. My children will probably think that this is the dumbest thing ever but my grandkids will probably find it one of the most fascinating things ever. Imagine if you had the opportunity to look back over the entire life of one of your relatives. See them through their own eyes. Watch world events unravel in their everyday lives. Some day my descendants will only know this year as one of the years of the Iraqi War. And yet it is barely in my thoughts and I hardly know that we are engaged or have been engaged there. We have been in armed conflict for close to eighty percent of my entire life and I barely even am conscious of it. And since I have been over a year without any form of television or regular radio, I am impacted by distant world events very little. I only wish that I had started blogging like this many years ago instead of waiting until I was so old because my childhood and my teenage years and those turmoil filled years of 1997-2001 have been lost. All of the really exciting “what’s going to happen” years. The college uncertainties the first professional jobs. Moving from work to career. Living in Pittsburgh, Alexandria and Annapolis. All of that, I think, would be so much more fascinating to be able to look back on. But, I am sure that there is equally interesting or, perhaps, uninteresting stuff going on now and it just doesn’t seem that way because I am here now writing this. Maybe this will end up being the really interesting time because of trying to run my business and get it really doing something. Maybe that will be the big adventure that the grandkids will want to read about. Maybe it will be me raising their parents, if I ever even get around to having kids. Maybe this document will serve, not only to shed light on the early years of the twenty first century, but also to make my grandchildren understand how much more like them I actually am instead of just being an old man trying to remember his lost youth. So, just in case this document survives, intact, through the many, many years necessary for my kids, grandkids or further decendants to be reading it, here is a big “Hello!” from 2005. I will go out on a limb and say that times are good, life is going well and things are probably not really all that different now than they are then. I don’t think that you are living on Mars or that aliens are about to make contact with the planet or that computers might actually become sentient and take over the earth. I am sure that the hindsight of these times will render our fears and assumptions to be as foolish as those held by my grandparent’s generation. I am sure that I will feel that you, you being the future generations, are lazy and liberal and taking the world to “hell in a handbasket” but the reality is you are probably much more on top of things than I was at that age. My parent’s generation (the baby boomers) felt that my generation was lazy and their parent’s generation felt the same thing about them. But the reality is that the world is becoming more conservative, less lazy, more cooperative and social. People seem to be getting nicer to each other, not meaner. Crime is going down, not up. The media might actually lose its death grip on us and a whole new world could be about to open up. Over the last one hundred years, electronic long distance communications have come into existance and are now blossoming and redefining everything. The world is already so small and accessible. I can’t even imagine how create it will be in your day. I have good expectations for you. Things won’t be perfect and you will have to deal with all sorts of new problems that we never envisioned. But you will overcome them and excel beyond our wildest dreams. I am just happy that now, at just 29 years old, I am able to have been keeping this record of my life for the past five years and hope that it will be useful to you. At least something to remember me by when I have left this place – someway to feel connected to me.
Enough being sappy for today. I don’t even have kids yet but I figure that I might as well be preparing because if you wait until you have them then there is no way to have time to do and say all of the things that I would like to do and say. So I will get as many out of the way now as I can.
This morning I had to get up super early and wake up Jeremy and get him out the door to head out to Canandaigua to take his A+ exam. He is taking it out at FLCC.
The testing environment out at FLCC is really nice. If you take a test there, call first because the information desk doesn’t know what is going on and you might have problems getting to the testing room. It is a small testing site with only two stations and they can’t do tests all day long, only at certain times. But the environment is very casual and easy going. Nice for taking stressful tests.
After the test we got lunch at Burger King in Canandaigua. That was about 9:30. The funniest thing happened while we were getting breakfast… Some little kid, maybe five years old, went into the playground area with his parents not paying very close attention to him. As he was entering the playground area, he was picking his nose. Apparently he wasn’t able to get what he was looking for up there to his satisfaction so he went up to the window that was right behind Jeremy’s head (so facing us but on the other side of the glass) and wiped his nose down the glass leaving a big streak of you know what on the glass. Eww. But, apparently, he still was happy with the results. So he tried wiping his nose first on his righ sleeve and then on his left. Still no good. Then he went for some cushioned roller thing in the playground area. He stuck his nose on it and turned it around with his hands. But that wasn’t doing the trick either. Then it was back to another window, this time without the benefit of Jeremy’s head blocking him from the sight of most of the people in the restaurant, and he tried wiping it off on the glass again. We were dying, it was so funny. Really, really gross, but funny too.
I dropped Jeremy off as I headed down to Castile to help out with Min’s classes for the afternoon. I arrived at the school at about 11:30 and was able to help out with all of the afternoon classes and managed to do some technical stuff while I was there too. We didn’t hang around late tonight. We actually managed to get out of the school by about 4:00. We had to stay a little late to do a couple of things with the computers to get them ready for next week and to discuss some details of a Web Site Design class that I am going to be teaching starting to two weeks from today.
We met dad at the Hole in the Wall in Perry around 5:00 and had the Friday fish fry. Imagine that, me getting a fish fry on a Friday. What are the chances of that?
After dinner we went over to my grandmother’s house in Leicester and visited until around 10:30. We did managed to avoid getting embroiled in a game of Skimbo. So things went well.