RIP Dan Fogleberg

I'm going to miss this man. I truly enjoyed his album The Innocent Age, especially sharing it with my mother. Run for the Roses was one of the most unique pop songs I've ever heard.

Why am I here?

No, I don't mean in this life. I mean, why am I writing this blog?

While there are a lot of semi-understood reasons muddled together in my head, there are three big and clear reasons. First, memory. I've alluded to the fact that my children -- no, I've stated it outright, several times -- live several hundred miles away from me. I'm putting down some of what matters to me so that they will have a record of some things that are important to me. For that matter, I want to have a record to look back on. Second, sorting it out. Doing this helps me to clarify what I'm thinking. Third, polishing my writing. I've always had a way with technical writing. This isn't a brag, it's simply the truth. I took a couple of creative writing class back in my college days, from Doris Betts and Lee Smith, and I believe that in two semesters, I produced one half-way passable story. I don't have any bad novels stored away in a trunk, and I'm not interested in taking that path right now, anyway. No, what I want to do is become a decent essayist. So, here I am.

Impressions from a Thanksgiving on the Road

Up at 4:15 am ... a quick shower, got dressed, out to the kitchen ... Lisa nursing our pathetic coffee maker through brewing another pot ... that first cup of coffee ... the drive from Greensboro to Charlotte, since airfare is so much cheaper there ... why was the daily parking deck closed? ... the ticket kiosk told me that my flight had no seats available and to check with the ticket attendant, who found plenty of seats available, including the aisle seat on the exit row ... MasterCard is missing an opportunity, because being able to stretch your legs out on a domestic US flight is truly priceless ... Valor's Choice by Tanya Huff is a really enjoyable piece of MilSF, what makes a great travel read ... the flight attendant's name tag reads "OH MISS" :) ... it was actually easy walking through O'Hare airport, and the bus to Hertz was waiting outside the door ... I think the Ford Fusion lives up to its advertising, and hey, who doesn't like a talking GPS unit? That it give accurate directions is even better ... I've never seen less traffic driving from Chicago to northwest Indiana ... I told my ex-wife and the kids that I'd arrive "around lunch time" and I've arrived at their home town and it's not even 11:00 am yet ... "Oh, Eddie's here, you're early, we're still cleaning" ... amazingly, no one did get angry over my arrival time (I did mention my ex-wife, didn't I?), and the time with my kids was even more priceless than leg room on the plane ... the Green Bay Packers beat the Detroit Lions to go to 10-1 on the season, it'd be really fine if everyone played their game with the joy Brett Favre is showing this year ... late evening phone call home, to hear Lisa's voice, to know that she's coping with the arrival of her in-laws -- yep, my Mom and Dad got to Greensboro about the time I got settled in for my Indiana visit; Dad's got a craft show at the Coliseum, and they're staying at the apartment ... that sweet voice that makes my days did it again, and just like I expected, her Thanksgiving dinner for Mom and Dad went off without a hitch, and everybody's full and safe ... the soundtrack for the day, on repeat: My Thanksgiving, by Don Henley.

Requiem for a Jack Russell Terrier

When I got home from work yesterday, Lisa was in the kitchen cooking dinner. And crying. I hugged her and asked her what's wrong. She told me, "Mom had to put Tasha down." I thought, "Ah s...". Fill in the blank, if you must.

My mother-in-law Meki is a strong woman. Once though, she definitely wasn't. That was when Harry, her husband and love of her life, died. This was five years before I even met Lisa online through ABDK, 1995 I believe. The two things that really let Meki get back on her feet were the several months that Lisa moved in with her, and the year-old JRT her son Rusty brought her one day. Tasha.

I never knew the dog Lisa described to me, the short-legged little bundle of energy that could jump up onto the kitchen table and couldn't be held back from licking your face because she was so glad to see you. The one that would have held off a bear that threatened her people.

The dog I knew had a hard time jumping up onto an ottoman to sleep by your feet, was half blind from a cataract in her left eye, and was too often incontinent when her mistress left to go to work. The dog I knew was often scooped up from the floor by that same mistress, called very silly names, and kissed and kissed.

The dog I knew was the same one Lisa told me had been neglected, had been left chained up in a trailer park as a puppy, left for much larger dogs to terrify, and still trembled at every hand that reached down to pet her. Except for Meki's.

The dog I knew barked when she was hungry or thirsty, pranced across the hard wood floor to stand by the door when she needed to go out, and thrived on attention even as she trembled. There are some reactions time does not erase.

The dog I knew helped heal a woman I love and admire, and helped shape my wife into the woman she is today.

The dog I knew had a stroke that left her unable to move her hind legs, and according to the vet, in agony that there was a 50-to-1 chance would never end. So, Meki did the hard and compassionate thing, and held Tasha as she went to sleep for the last time.

I grew up on a farm, and I put down more than one badly injured animal. It was a fact of the life. I've not had to say good bye to a companion that was part of making me whole after the most devastating loss I can imagine. Meki did.

For now, please excuse me. In my mind, I hear claws clacking across a hard wood floor and Tasha's bark, telling me she has to go. I've got a door to open. Godspeed, little one.

Today's postseason musing

When will the Yankees win it all with A-Rod? Probably around the time that Curt Schilling folds in the playoffs...

Missed Birthdays

Andy turned 17 on September 6th, and Gigi turned 19 on October 5th. I have no excuse for missing them, since I wrote about both David and Mom on their birthdays. Let me simply say, guys, happy belated.

Lisa's birthday was last Saturday, October 13th, and I'm going to be a gentleman and not give my wife's age. I will say that Bianca's is just as much the most romantic restaurant in Greensboro now as it was when I proposed to her there on October 13th, 2003.

Summer memories

Yesterday, Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum recalled his father's love of the Philadelphia Phillies and how that translated into his own love of baseball. Similarly, my father introduced me to baseball. He was a fan of the Yankees teams of the 1950s and early 60s, Mantle and Maris and Yogi Berra. I started playing baseball because it was a way to spend time with my dad. He worked swing shift at a paper mill and farmed full-time. Any time I could spend with him was necessary and precious. Thus, I became an outfielder on a Little League team...actually, in rural North Carolina, it was a Dixie Youth League team.

So began my passion for baseball. Ironically, my dad is not a baseball fan today. There was no one thing that drove him away from the game; no, he gave his time, his interest, indeed his life to his farm, his family, and his church. And since he retired at 72, woodworking has replaced farming.

I had a stretch in my life when I put aside baseball for the sake of a relationship. That relationship ended, not well, and baseball came back. It's stayed with me through other relationships, an old friend. And, like old friends should, it has its niche in my life. Not first, not last, but just right.

I treasure the game of baseball, and just as deeply, I despise the business of baseball. Its place in the entertainment industry seems to have dislodged its place in sport. In that, it is like much that is American. The ideals are there, but the practice hides them.

Give me what happens between the foul lines, please, and leave the rest outside the stadium.

Favorites

I've lurked or participated in Usenet genre- or author-oriented newsgroups for several years now, and when threads are on topic, two of the most frequent topics are "What are you reading now?" and "What are your favorite books?" I'll generally leave aside the "reading now" subject here, but I think I'm going, for my own enjoyment, to address the "favorite books" idea.

What makes a book a favorite, rather than just a good read? The things I look for in a book: interesting characters -- extra points if I like them -- who make believable and meaningful moral choices, suspense, the "sense of wonder" that thrills the SF wonk in me, humor (optional but desired), and writing that doesn't yank me out of the story. The extra something that puts a book over the top and merits consideration as one of my favorites is re-readability. Yeah, pretty much unquantifiable. That's why it's art, not science.

So, if I had to rebuild my personal library, these are where I'd start:

1. Watership Down, by Richard Adams This is, and I say this with no hesitation at all, my very favorite book. I love the parallel civilization that the rabbits of Sandleford Warren are part of, their folklore, their psychics, their storytellers and leaders. These characters drive the story they are part of, not the other way around. The language of the book is often quite beautiful, and the England of the novel feels timeless. This story has been part of me since I read it in the 10th grade.


2. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card This is one of the most celebrated SF novels, ever. It succeeds as a military adventure, a thriller -- I know several people, very well read and savvy, who simply didn't see the ending coming -- a dysfunctional family saga, and a tale of transcendence. Card asks the very pertinent question of how far a person, a group, or a species can, should, indeed must go when their very survival is threatened by someone or something with which no communication appears to be possible. And how one deals with the aftermath. I first read Ender's Game when I lived in Nashville, TN. My then wife and I moved there from Greensboro for my first programming job out of school. I didn't know at the time that Card lived in Greensboro, so imagine my surprise when I read references to Lake Brandt Road (the neighborhood my mother-in-law lived in was just off Lake Brandt Road), Greensboro, and Guilford County Schools! This novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, which meant that both SF fans and writers thought it was worthy.


3. Watchers, by Dean Koontz This was my first Koontz, and it remains the best. Einstein, the golden retriever with the genetically enhanced intelligence, is one the most memorable, honorable, and enjoyable characters ever created; the Outsider, genetic mashup intended to be a horrifying solder, is an equally memorable character, but so very tragic. The main human characters, Travis and Nora, are people I'd love to have for friends. The themes of being open to wonder and happiness, of knowing that life also has moments of abject horror that must be endured to reach the sweetness, of reaching out to others and accepting responsibility resonate strongly in my life. This book was quite original and utterly unlike anything I had read up to that time. My daughter, my first child, was born a couple of months after I read it, and the new creations that are these events are closely linked in my mind and spirit.


4. On Basilisk Station, by David Weber This is the first volume featuring Honor Harrington, a 41st century space military series based on Horatio Hornblower. It's purely a guilty pleasure.


5. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee Novels do not get any more Southern than this. Nor do they have much more to say about what is right and noble in how to treat other people. Atticus Finch is my hero.


6. The Ninja, by Eric van Lustbader This erotic thriller is a revenge tale. It's deeply concerned with the Orient/Occident divide within protagonist Nicholas Linnear, whose father was English and mother was Chinese/Japanese, and it's simply compulsively readable.


7. Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman This is the funniest treatment of the Apocalypse, ever. Have a nice Doomsday!


8. The Plays of William Shakespeare, any edition Is there anything about the human condition not covered here?


9. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien There aren't many works that are recognized as singlehandedly creating a new commercial genre. Because of LOTR, we have so many fantasy novels in bookstores. This is the first book that I remember hating to finish. I want the experience of crossing the plains of Mordor with Frodo and Sam for the first time again, and I can't have it.


10. Harry Potter, all 7 volumes, by J.K. Rowling The commercial publishing phenomenon of pretty much the last millennium, this is exuberant storytelling with characters who grow, who love, who fight, who die, who triumph. I don't care if the prose was sometimes clunky. I don't care if there were logic holes in the story. I care that Harry and company made choices that, in their universe, mattered. I had more pure fun with these books than almost any others I've ever read.


11. The Holy Bible I'm not the most observant or devout Christian, but it's the tradition I was raised in, I do believe, and this book is the foundation of my faith. It's also filled with beautiful poetry and meaningful moral instruction. Even if you don't accept the divinity of Christ, tell me that his story of sacrifice for others isn't relevant.

It's late, but here it is

I read a lot of SF. And, sometimes, SF writers' blogs (Card, Varley). The best of the bunch, at blogging, is John Scalzi, whose Old Man's War is the best military SF novel in recent memory. Scalzi is an unusually active blogger; he has a couple of journals over at AOL, where he was a staff writer once upon a time.

On By The Way..., he has regular Weekend Assignments; a couple of weeks ago, he asked his readers this.

This isn't original; I saw it 20 years ago in California. Still, it's my favorite of all time.

An Everyday Miracle

I woke up today snuggling with an everyday miracle.
Her hair is dark, and soft. It tickled my nose.
Her eyes are a very dark brown. I willingly lose myself in them.
Her smile rivals the sun in the light it gives.
Her laughter creates a space for joy.
Her childhood had great ugliness in it, but she grew up giving and loving.
Her heart went, not unclaimed, but ungiven, before me. I don't deserve it.
She gives it to me anyway.
I love you, Lisa.

New obsessions

The Allman Brothers Live From Fillmore East and Alfred Bester's science fiction from the 1950s: The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.

I can't say that I've listened to Duane Allman's playing before now. Sure, I've heard it; now, I'm listening, and I'm hearing genius wrapped up in passion. It's fire, like you don't find very much in popular music these days.

Alfred Bester's writing is also incendiary. Lots of writers play with typography now. Bester did it first, and I haven't seen where, 50 years later, anyone has caught up to him. As for his characters and his stories, well, I'm simply blown away. This is the guy whose SF should be part of the American literary canon. Forget Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. Alfred Bester is a titan; these others are dwarves.

Unix Shell, and other flavors of, Scripting

Okay, everybody that remembers using MS-DOS raise your hands. Not really that many of us, are there? And who uses a command line interface these days? Well, I do.

That's the thing about being a maintenance programmer who loves being a generalist, I get into a wide range of things. One of them being support for an application that displays invoices, and other reports, downloaded from one of those big iron dinosaurs, a mainframe, to an Oracle database on a Unix server. These reports are stored in such a way that the customers select them, on a web page, by the customer number, report type, and date; then, they're converted to PDF format for the customer to look at, treasure, save locally, print, or ignore. I just implemented a new report feed, which meant a new download file and a new load into Oracle. And that meant an adventure in Unix shell scripting. I guess, to be precise, I should say AIX shell scripting, using the Korn shell, not the C shell, Bourne shell, or even the Bourne Again shell.

Honestly, I love scripting languages. That was what was so much fun when I started web development. Microsoft's coding model at the time was ASP, where the HTML, Javascript for client-side processing, and VBScript for server-side processing were all stored together in the same ASP file, just waiting for a user request to come in, data to be grabbed off of a database, the whole thing turned into HTML for the browser to interpret, and we're off to the races with a dynamic web page. The cool thing, for the geek in me, was the immediate response, where I could quickly find out what syntax errors and logic bugs I had subtly embedded in my code. Then, I could spend hours diagnosing and fixing! Nerd nirvana...

Unix shell scripting, that's where I was. If you ever thought DOS commands were cryptic, you ain't seen nothing yet. Isn't it perfectly obvious that find . -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \; will delete all files in the current directory that were modified, which includes created, over 30 days ago? No? It wasn't to me, either. And I haven't even touched grep or sed. Google is my friend. Sometimes, though, Dogpile is even better.

Stardust

Lisa and I saw Stardust last weekend. I already knew that Neil Gaiman is a superb fantasist, having read American Gods, Coraline, and Good Omens ("Have a nice Doomsday"). I now know that he is a skilled movie producer as well. Stardust is a wonderful fairy tale, with thrills, laughs -- who knew, even after Meet the Parents, that Robert De Niro is such a fine comedic actor? -- magic, and frights It doesn't go as far into the dark side as the copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales my dad had when he was a boy, but it couldn't and keep the PG-13 rating, now could it? There were visuals we'd never seen before -- Michelle Pfeiffer is quite a treat :) -- but I guess there was nothing earthshattering. Well, that's alright, I went to the theater to be entertained, which I was, quite thoroughly, not to have my intellectual world turned inside out. And there's nothing wrong with an afternoon's entertainment.

Seen on the streets of Greensboro today...

A bumper sticker: Republicans for Voldemort.

Happy Birthday, Mom...

...Lisa and I are traveling to visit her and Dad. Hope she likes the small gifts we have for her, just tokens, really, to reflect the love and respect we have for her. Good food tonight, too; we're taking them to one of their favorite seafood restaurants. I'm looking forward a good meal on the shore of Lake Waccamaw, conversing with people we want to be with and looking out over a lake that may be sunny and calm, or stormy and rough. Either way, the scenery is grand.

Hall of Fame

I couldn't be happier about a couple of this year's inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame. While a stutter may not be the most debilitating condition in the world, Mel Tillis had to overcome his. He made it first as a songwriter (Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town), then as a performer. His song I remember best is Sawmill, which is pretty much forgotten today.

I'm really over the moon about Vince Gill. His triple-threat talent is undeniable, as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, and his music was a great comfort to me after my first marriage fell apart. He says that he performs for the joy of music, and I tend to believe him. His CDs Next Best Thing and These Days (a four disc set, no less) are his very best, and they've come out after his radio popularity declined. He's known as a great guy, and I'll keep supporting his career for as long as I can.

Backwards compatibility

I've been a programmer for 20+ years. My current job is application maintenance, spanning at least three generations of web development philosophy and technology, for several divisions of a multinational corporation headquartered in Europe. I have users in the US, Canada, Sweden, France, Brazil, and Australia. And my co-workers in the cubicles right around me still ask me questions about mainframe development, which I haven't done at all in three or four years.

I know, both from all the third party software I've installed over the years and from applications I've written and/or maintained, that achieving backwards compatibility is a damned difficult proposition. After all, if programs were physical machines, we'd be talking about millions of moving parts in your PC. That said, it's a real pain in the butt when, say, an Oracle database gets upgraded, and you miss the memo informing you of the need to upgrade your Oracle client. I mean, okay, the production database is version 10, my client is version 9.2, and the test database is version 8; why can't I simply connect to test database to see if the Canadian test data loaded successfully?! After all, my tnsnames.ora file is correct, the DBA told me so. Or, at least it was before I tried to upgrade my Oracle client...

Let's compare it to the version on the test application server. Yep, they're the same. And my desktop tools still won't connect to the test database. Wait, there's another Oracle configuration file, sqlnet.ora; could that be the problem?

It is! Happy happy, joy joy!! Now, SQL*Plus can connect, so I have a command line tool; why won't PL/SQL Developer?

300

Tom Glavine won his 300th victory last night. That's much better news for Major League Baseball than Barry Bonds tying Hank Aaron's career home run record, but does anyone else wish that the Braves had responded positively to Glavine's overtures to return last winter?

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I begin to see point the folks at Fire Joe Morgan are making. During ESPN's coverage of the Mets and Cubs last night, Mets second baseman Luis Castillo was struggling to catch a foul pop up in the winds at Wrigley Field. Joe Morgan remarked that it was because Castillo had spent all of his career in the American League. If Morgan had bothered to look at his employer's own website, he could easily have seen that, yes, Luis Castillo was with the Minnesota Twins for the last season-and-a-half, but he spent the 10 previous seasons with the Florida Marlins.

The first day alone

Yesterday was the first day in a month that Lisa and I were home alone. She swore that once during the day she saw David crossing the hall from his bedroom to the bathroom. We just got that used to their presence.

There's a difference about their summer visit this year, compared to the three previous years. This time, having them here immediately fell into the normal rhythm of our lives, not an alteration to it. I think that's a change in me, not in everyone else. And, I think I like it.

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We saw The Bourne Ultimatum yesterday. It's a very good action flick, with a lot of ideas. Matt Damon pulls off Ludlum's character perfectly. He'd make a great Jack Reacher, if any of Lee Child's series is ever filmed. Well, except he's too short.

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Now playing: Lee Roy Parnell - All That Matters Anymore
via FoxyTunes

A trip to the airport

We were up by 5:30 this morning for a quick breakfast, a last sweep around the apartment for the boys' things (only some socks, deodorant, and hot pepper jelly were unpacked), hugs from Lisa, and out the door for an hour-and-a-half drive for their flight back to their mom's. The soundtrack for that part of the trip was Lynyrd Skynyrd's All-Time Greatest Hits. David is learning to play guitar -- he has both the talent and the passion for it -- and he loves Freebird.

Traffic was light on the interstate, right into Charlotte, and there was no line at the airline check-in counter. The clerk asked me how old the boys were, and as I told her 16 and 14, I automatically asked if there was any way I could go back to the gate with them. I was astonished and delighted when she said sure, she just needed to see my picture id!

The line through security must've taken 20 minutes, and the boarding passes didn't tell us which gate their flight left from. The departure board did, and we were off to gate A5. When we got to the gate, the flight was already boarding. There was just enough time for one more hug each, and then Andy and David were out of sight down the jetway.

I stayed glued to that window, even through a conversation with a couple of ladies on their way to Memphis. I watched the jetway being moved away from the plane, the plane being pushed back to the taxiway, and then the plane taxiing away. Ten minutes later, I watched it take off. As it did, I swore I wasn't moving as long as it was in sight. And I didn't.

The soundtrack for the ride home was Montgomery Gentry's Some People Change. It was much, much lonelier this time.

David turns 14 today

Woke up this morning knowing that it would be a day devoted to my younger son. His brother Andy and I wrapped his presents, and then David woke up on his own just before I was going to call him. Surprise, surprise, that a boy would get himself out of bed on his birthday...

Took 'em to Steak and Shake, which they love and I'm not opposed to, saw the Simpsons Movie -- I liked it way more than I expected to -- stopped at the Fresh Market bakery to pick up a cake from Ganache, then came home to make chili for supper.

Lisa will be home soon, and we'll kick this celebration into high gear. Just in time to shut it down and go to bed early, since the boys are flying back to their mom in the morning.

Happy birthday, Son.

As This Summer Ends...

As this summer ends, I hope that I'm doing right by my children. They live with their mother 700 miles away from my North Carolina home. Gigi and boyfriend Chris have come and gone; now, Andy and David are a couple of days from leaving. This last month they've been here has rocked, but I'm sad that the gig is going back to being part-time Dad again.

If you guys -- Gigi, Andy, David -- ever read this, know that Lisa and I love you, that we're delighted at your accomplishments and potential, and that we're here for you, whatever your problems or joys.