I seem to have gone into a bit of a hiatus with this weblog, but it wasn’t intentional.  I’ve been supporting our economy both online and locally.  I’m starting to think that our recent economic uptick has been solely due to my activity outfitting my new house and getting ready for Christmas.  I know I’ve bought way too much stuff.  I hit the trifecta today with deliveries from Airborne, UPS, and FedEx all in the same day.  My emperical economic study has also shown that Amazon.com is shipping a copy of the AOL (if I hear the word optimized again my head will rotate) 9.0 CD in every single shipment.  I threw out three of them today alone.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of waking up at 3:00am and not being able to get back to sleep.  You know that tomorrow is going to suck because you’ll fall asleep again just before the alarm goes off and you’ll stumble around like a zombie for a while.  Whenever this happens my brain just starts going when I wake up and I can’t stop it long enough to get back to sleep.

The only interesting part of it all is that these are usually the only times I remember much from my dreams.  This morning I was just settling into some REM sleep when the alarm went off, so I have a few memories.  I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t remember them, because they’re often weird and sometimes frightening.  In no particular order (since they’re all jumbled together in my head anyway):

• There were angry pit bulls.  I had to shoot some of them, but I remember feeling bad about it (and angry at the people who had let them loose, forcing me to kill the dogs).
• Unfortunately, getting rid of the pit bulls didn’t lead to safety, because there were small velociraptors (!) stalking me from a corn field.  I found myself shooting at fleeting images as they ran through the corn.
• Interestingly enough I was at the edge of the field and as soon as I realized that I got in my truck and drove away.  Unfortunately, there were trucks and graders spreading fresh dirt on the road and I couldn’t get much traction.  And for some reason I couldn’t find the button that engages 4WD (or I couldn’t get to it).  It was one of those frustrating things similar to when you’re trying to run but just can’t seem to move.
• Next I found myself in a house with what seemed like way too much furniture and too many TVs (they were stacked on other TVs).  There were also at least six clocks, all of which were stopped or flashing.
• A couple of women came in carrying a new dining table and I had to help them before they fell over.  I realized that I was married (!) to one of them and the other was her mother.  At the same time I saw that the problem of too much furniture was just that it was all jammed into one room of this large, older house.
• Somehow I was in college again and there was some kind of exhibition going on and I was trying to get in.  I could see a couple of my friends through the doors, but they wouldn’t let me in.  They said something that implied they were allowing people in on certain days based on their housing status or something.  But what they really meant was that men were not allowed on this day.

I’m not sure what any of it means, as it was all so weird and disconnected.  I suppose it’s better that I don’t usually remember any of this crap.

If nothing else this move of work location has forced me to improve my wardrobe.  At the old location we didn’t have many customers or other visitors around, so we tended to be a bit rough at the edges (why dress up if you’re working on code or taking conference calls?).  In particular, I have a liking for loud shirts that are not meant to be tucked in.  Correlated with this is my extreme dislike for tucking in my shirt.  I hate it because it feels so constricting (not to mention the difficulty in concealed carry with a tucked-in shirt when I’m not at work¹). 

The new location has a lot of customers around because they come here for classes.  We have been told to adhere to a “business casual” dress code (which also means no blue jeans).  I’ve spent over $300 in the past few weeks buying new clothes.  On the positive side, though, is that I’ve discovered that I can now buy shirts and pants at Kohls.  Their sale prices certainly beat those at Casual Male.

¹  I looked at those “Pager Pal” holsters at the gun show this weekend.  The guy at the table let me try one on (along with a dummy Glock).  The problem is that while I’ve lost quite a bit of weight, I’m still not shaped right to carry with the Pager Pal.  It created a noticeable bulge in the front of my pants that I was able to identify as a gun.  I’m not sure if the Kimber would have done the same thing, but I didn’t want to take the chance.  Concealed means concealed…

Just as soon as I got settled into my new house my company moved us to a different location.  We’ve left our nice secluded office complex in the country to one on the outskirts of Dallas (in the Farmer’s Branch/Carrollton area).  This means that I now have to negotiate some truly annoying traffic.  It took me an hour and 15 minutes on Friday (it was raining then) and an hour this morning to get to work.  My home office is looking better and better all the time (or front-mounted rocket launchers to deal with the most obnoxious drivers).  I think the thing that bugs me the most is that the two main routes to get out of Keller are overloaded (1709 just plain sucks and 114 is under destruction right now with traffic rerouted to the service road).  If 114 were fully operational it might be better, but that appears to still be several months away.  Anyhow, it means dealing with a lot of stop lights until I can get onto 635 (which is surprisingly good once you get past the 114/121 merge).  The stop lights bring out my ire at people who wait for the other car to get fully moving before starting when the light turns green.  This causes gaps in the flow and also causes a ripple effect down the line, usually causing those of us at the back of the line to get trapped by the light when it turns red again (because their ripple moves too slowly).  It is possible to get more cars through if people would move together (i.e. start moving as the car in front is moving, rather than waiting for the car in front to open up a gap).  Of course this would mean paying attention to traffic and we wouldn’t want to interrupt anyone’s cell phone conversation or interfere with putting on makeup…

It appears that my fears of being stuck with extra candy were unfounded.  I was mobbed by a variety of ghouls and other creatures, leaving me with one Tootsie roll (which by the way is some kind of vanilla variety that I hadn’t seen before; overall it wasn’t too bad…).

The best ones were the little kids, although some of the youngest ones seemed kind of overwhelmed by the whole thing.  On the other hand, I was a little put off by a couple of the older ones.  I think a rule of thumb for trick-or-treating should be that if you’re taller than the average adult then you probably shouldn’t be trick-or treating.

There’s something lurking in my kitchen.  It’s infesting the lower part of the pantry.  It taunts me like the heart under the floorboard in Poe’s story.

This is a dangerous time of year for a recovering carb junky.  Last year I avoided the problem by going out on Halloween so I didn’t have to deal with trick-or-treaters or candy.  But now that I have the house I thought it best to have candy on hand so I can appease any little heathens that might come by.  I can only hope that there will be enough of them to get rid of all the candy, or I’m going to be in trouble.  This year Halloween is on a Friday, so I won’t be able to take the leftovers into work the next day. 

Anyway, as of Saturday morning I’d lost 94 pounds on the Atkins plan, so I’m going to do my best to stay away from the candy.  However, the Whoppers may yet be my undoing.

This week has been crazy.  I had to finish a big design document and prepare some sizings so that the project manager could put together a detailed project plan.  I’d been having trouble concentrating on it last week with all the house details.  But my writing has always been like that.  I will read background material and throw out a few ideas for a while and then it all kind of just spills out into a document in the last few days.  This process hit me around 3:30am Monday.  I tried to fight it and get some sleep, but to no avail.  So I finally gave up and wrote some notes before going into the office.  This process repeated itself on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, which allowed me to finish the document (except for some minor changes) by the end of the day Wednesday (it’s amazing how much you can get done when you get into the office at 6:15am when no one’s around to bug you).  Even so, I still woke up around 4:45am on Thursday with a few last minute changes and additions buzzing around in my head.  Now that the document is out of the way (the main part anyway, there will be reviews and revisions in the next couple of weeks), I can sleep again (or at least I did this morning).

I actually planned for this sort of situation when I picked the date for the move.  I knew I’d be in the throws of last-minute document preparation this week, so I scheduled the move for next week.  Now I have to get busy painting the house.  I’m going to go over there this afternoon and do the prep work and try to get some painting done before it gets too late.  I’ll also be over there all day tomorrow, painting and waiting for a delivery.

I got back early this afternoon, but I’ve been trying to catch up on email and get a feel for what’s going on in the world (and trolling my way through the blog roll; up to the Friday Lileks now—wonder what brand of tiny evil cigar he favors as I’m partial to Macanudo Minatures myself).

Centered around my grandfather’s services, the weekend turned into something of a family reunion, with people coming in who I’d never met before, including my great uncle (my grandfather’s younger brother).  I think my grandfather would have been pleased by it.

I also learned some more about the family, including the revelation that I have several more cousins than I originally knew about.  I asked one of my aunts, who is researching the family tree about it when I saw that the obituary listed 27 grandchildren when I was only aware of 20.  It turns out that one of my uncles (who is something of the “prodigal son”, he’s currently in Kuwait working for an oil company) had a family while he was living in Mexico (which accounts for some, but not all of the additional 7).

My aunt is talking about having another family reunion to try to bring all these people together again, since it’s been quite a while since there’s been one for my grandfather’s side of the family (the one I went to in June was for my grandmother’s family and their descendants).  I hope this comes through, since I’ve got a lot to learn, having been pretty much separated from them since I was about 7.

My grandfather passed away this morning.  The funeral will be Saturday in Rosenberg (about 30 miles southwest of Houston).

Most people refer to their grandparents by family name because they grew up with a set of grandparents for each of their parents.  In my case my father was so much older than my mother (he was 58, she was 22 when I was born), that I never had a chance to meet my grandparents on my father’s side.  So for me, Grandpa always meant one person.  Most of my memories of him are from when I was young.  Until I was seven we lived in Houston, which let us see my grandparents on a regular basis.  Unfortunately we moved 300 miles away and I rarely saw them after that. The same goes for all of my cousins and other relatives (and there are quite a few, my mother is the youngest of eight children, and I have 18 first cousins).

He wasn’t a terribly demonstrative man.  I think that was just a trait of his generation.  But you always knew he cared and that you were welcome at my grandparent’s house.  It was just something that came across somehow.

I’ll be driving down there tomorrow and coming back on Sunday.

My mother and one of my aunts sat with my grandfather last night and there were several rough spots.  It was very sad when we had to leave.  After we left, my aunt called to tell us that he’d improved later in the morning.  He has always been a very robust man, and even in his current state he’s got some of that fight left.  They’ll probably move him out of the hospital in Houston soon and send him back to Richmond so he will be closer to the family (most of whom are in Rosenberg).  But at this point, it’s only a matter of time and they’re just going to try to keep him comfortable.

Maybe later, when I’m not so tired (I’ve been on the road most of the day), I may have more to say about my (unfavorable) thoughts on the doctors who have been involved with my grandfather’s care.