The Twilight Report

A month or so ago I told my mum (that is Australian for mother, Happy Australia Day) that I thought the project that I was working on might just be impossible, and that I should have told my manager and team leader up front about my estimate of the tractability of the assignment. Suffice it to say I got a really big test case not produce errors today for the first time ever. So I was on the phone with my mum and I told her "It's only going to be a month late. I think that is pretty good for something which is impossible huh?" The whole situation sort of reminds me of the Stan Bush song "Never Surrender" although my favorite of his is still Dare!

Anyway, it occurs to me that my entries of late have been very work centric and more than a little jargon filled. Sorry about that folks. The good news is that I'm having my Australia Day party on Saturday which will be 100% fun and after that I am off to Australia, so I am sure in future entries you will be able to hear what a fun folks are having in the Hudson Valley; hopefully to the point that you wonder if we get anything done ever. Beacon is, after all, the Party Capital of the Universe. I spill over the brim with irony.

So anyway, after talking to mum on the phone about the unmentionable, I got to work baking myself a meat pie to celebrate Australia Day. Yay Australia Day! Hooray, it's Australia Day. Meat pies are very Australian. Anyway, actually it is sort of a dry run for the party on Saturday. I thought it would be good to make sure that I knew how to make it before I started making them en mass. When I extracted a slice it sort of fell apart, but it tasted super good. I attribute this to the indestructibility of the recipe, because I think I did just about everything wrong.

Brad says that he likes meat, and that he likes pies, and that he is looking forward to having the combination of those two good things. Joanna on the other hand will not be missing out, although we are missing her. We miss you Joanna!

Oh I had a discussion with my father last night where I explained, once again, that I am not interested in being an academic. I don't understand why I have to explain this to him every time that I talk to him. It's like fish. He probably still doesn't remember that I don't like fish. I wish he would listen to me.

Somebody tried to hack my web page today. Actually I would say that it was more of a probe that an out right hack. He was trying to insert java script into one of my comment thingies on my web site. Oops sorry, that was computer jargon wasn't it. Ok. Never mind. Suffice it to say Simon Belmont repelled the intruders with his trusty whip. It is a good thing he is a tough mother. I realize that doesn't make any more sense than the jargon, unless you are Tyler. Oh well.

Yesterday we went up to visit my mother's friend and mentor, Clare, at her rustic cabin home which looks over Bear Lake. Last July I took a photograph which now is on the welcome page of my web site up there. For "Christmas" dinner, we had fish. Although I am not a fan of fish and I did not have seconds, it did taste pretty good. We also drank lots of Australian wine; that probably helped.

( The Sublime )

In short, our range of topics was both wide and deep, and intellectually stimulating.

Then we drove back to Salt Lake City where we attended the annual Christmas Eve party for Don's (my step father) family. Gosh... where to begin. ( The Ridiculous )

Streetlight outside my New York home. I might never have seen it?

Those of you, who know me best, may not know that I am in fact from the planet Shashars, where I was the emperor of an empire that I ruled with an Iron Fist^TM. I am actually here on Earth as part of the Emperor Exchange Program. It's a service of the Galactic Dictators of the Universe, an elite club that only the biggest and most ruthless belong. It is very very invitation-only, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'm here on Earth for vacation, to get away from it all, as it were, as an anonymous computer programmer working at The Company (real name removed to protect Corporate America).

I've been telling people this story in various forms for decades now. Not bad considering I am only approaching my third decade on this planet. In the first grade I had nearly my entire class convinced that they were also from Shashars. I even had a Queen to rule by my side (back then, I was the King instead of the Emperor - at some point I decided Empire sounded better than Kingdom).

Back then I was living in New Haven Connecticut, where my folks were employed as post docs at Yale. Later my dad would move to Chicago and my mum and I were off to Los Alamos. I was just now in my kitchen trying to think of what I wanted to snack on (finally decided on a tall glass of Chocolate Milk) and I wondered out of nowhere, how my life would have been different had I stayed in New Haven.

This is a bit embarrassing or maybe just funny... but I was theoretically engaged to a girl back then. I really wish I could remember what prompted me to do it, but I remember whispering into my Queen's ear "Do you want to marry me?" She answered in the affirmative. Now here is the embarrassing part: it has been so long and my memories of the first grade are so corrupted that I don't actually remember this girl's name. I don't know a girl I was sort of engaged to once.

If I had stayed in New Haven, might we have been friends growing up, like some of my friends in New Mexico? Would we now be old friends who occasionally sent e-mails back and forth at odd intervals? It is just so hard to say. It is hard to imagine how entirely different my life would be now, except just to know that it would have been completely different. When I think of life changing events, I usually think of two: one was moving to America with my parents (when we moved to New Haven in 1980), the other was when I put a free quotations database onto the Internet in 1995, which eventually led to a job offer at The Company and lead me to where I now live in New York State. Now that I think about it though, Moving to New Mexico from New Haven may not have been as dramatic as leaving one country to live in another one, but probably at least as causal to my effect.