Brews you can use

I was just getting the urge to blog about various trivialities today, and things got all weird. Everyone I know (out to two degrees, so far) is OK and accounted for, with a few close calls. So far, at least, it’s turning out to be not as bad as it could have been.

The kids were probably feeding on some of the anxiety, and acting unruly. We took a walk to calm down a bit. There were thunderstorms approaching, causing air traffic to be re-routed over our neighborhood. The news choppers were constantly commuting to and from the scene of the disaster. Quite eerie.

Grace almost gets what’s going on. She’s just learning to ride a bike, and seems to have integrated this into her fears from a close call on the bike…. While walking home, she told me she didn’t want to ride her bike across a bridge, because it would break it and it would collapse. I tried to reassure her that very smart people design bridges to stay up, and it works most of the time. That appears to have worked — she suggested going over a “bridge that they haven’t built yet and we haven’t been over before” tomorrow.

What would I do without kids? The absurdities I can come up with pale in comparison.

I work pretty close to the bridge. I’m debating swinging by the area to see it for myself. It still doesn’t seem real…

What do I have to say? Apparently not much well-formed, possibly interesting, publishable, and “on my mind when I’m in the mood to blog” for the last month or so. This is not a rare condition. I have several friends who blog/LJ/(myspace/whatever, but I don’t do those) who post even less often than I do. This is not a ping — everyone should blog at their own pace — but I had some strange ideas about blogging improving my writing, being able to find something to write about a few times a week, and generally getting better at freezing thoughts into words. No luck.

Occasionally, I think of bowing out officially like my high school chum A.J. just did. It’s preferable to leaving a dead blog hanging out on the blogrolls of the vainly waiting (Hmmm, godot.blogspot.com? of course someone else has thought of that), but I don’t think that I’m done for good (which is for the best, because another high school friend linked to me recently and bowing out now would be poor timing ). A belated welcome to Laura’s friends!

Yesterday was good enough to write about. It was Grace’s birthday; she’s 4 now, which puts here in the range of “kid”, no qualifiers necessary. No “baby”, “toddler”, not even “preschooler” really. Just “kid”. I’m already kidding her about getting old

To celebrate, I blew off work (which is always a good start to the day), and we all took the bus down to the Minnesota Children’s Museum. We split into two groups so the kids could explore at their own pace. Grace and I hit the Bob the Builder exhibit, then the Earth World. Then my phone ran out of battery, and we took a whirlwind tour of the rest of the museum trying to find Jess and Arlo. That’s when I ran into another long-lost friend from high school, who was there with her daughter. We actually managed to chat and catch up a bit in between chasing after kids.

We found Jess and Arlo back at Bob the Builder, and traded kids for a while. Things got a bit blurry at that point (Arlo’s good at that), we probably switched kids a couple more times, and then finished the museum trip playing with elaborate golf ball contraptions. I had to be reminded that this was a children’s museum a few times…

To top it all off, we hit a nice candy store on the way back to the bus stop, and brought home a couple pounds

To envision how a 4-processor system running [SunOS] 4.1.x works, think of four kids and one bathroom. — John DiMarco

On too many occasions in the last week, I sat down really, really meaning to post, but just couldn’t get started writing. Much of the time, I thought about writing, but turned on the TV and a web browser and opted to spend the evening downloading rather than uploading. Need more input. Other times I had only a little trivia (trivium?) on my mind, nothing meriting a whole sentence, much less a post.

A few times, I thought I had a lot to write about, but nothing got put into words. I either got lost following a tangent while researching or re-reading links, or else it felt like my thoughts had spent so much time bouncing around in my head they would be bruised and bloodied beyond recognition, and rendered as an overlong incomprehensible ramble (with a few run-on sentences, naturally). This eventually led to a blogging death-spiral, where not posting leads to a build-up of topics on which to post, which leads to resource contention, starvation (priority inversion?), and no posts. Livelock.

I need to break out of this funk before it spreads further into my non-blog writing…

After playing around with nanoblogger for about a year of blogging, I’m ready for some gratuitous change. Brews you can use is now served by WordPress, a somewhat more complicated package than nanoblogger (not that it takes much — nanoblogger is an elegant little shell script), but with more features. The killer feature, of course, is a more user-friendly interface than vi in a shell window. I was personally OK with the vi interface (hell, I set EDITOR=ed when I’m in the right mood), but Jess wanted something nicer for her knitting blog.

I think I’ve got everything set up so that the already-indexed archives from the old blog will still work (no dangling googles), as will existing RSS/atom feeds. And I still don’t grok mod_rewrite….

There’s about a 40% chance that this meta-blogging activity (and the smoother interface — I can deal with erm… “interesting” UIs, I didn’t say I liked them…) will lead to more frequent updates. In other words, see you next year!