RIP Paul Newman

From Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Butch Cassidy to the Piston Cup winning Hudson in Cars, there's hardly been a finer American actor. That he both gave so much to charity through the many Newman's Own products and stayed true to his marriage -- I believe his quote was, "Why should I go out for a hamburger when I have steak at home?" -- shows a true wealth of spirit that enriches the world, all the more for being so rare.

It fits me well

This is my PDA. Why, you may be wondering, am I bothering to write about a gadget? Well, because it's just about part of me.

It wasn't the most powerful Palm PDA on the market when it was brand new, not by a long shot. It was leaps and bounds beyond my previous PDAs. My first one was a Palm Vx, which had 8 megabytes of memory, a green and black display, no expansion slot, and no communications capability. It reached the point, rather quickly, that the the battery would not recharge. A PDA that won't hold a charge is pretty much useless.

This lead me to buy my second PDA, a Palm m130. It also had 8 megabytes of memory and no communications capability, but it did have a color display and an expansion slot. It had a nicely curved profile that fit my hand very comfortably. I bought an SD card with a whopping 32 megabytes of storage. It was completely and thoroughly adequate as a personal information manager, you know, calendar, contacts, tasks. It's real shortcoming was that it had no provision to act as an MP3 player.

Lisa answered this for me a couple of years ago, when she got me the Palm Tungsten E2 in the picture. It came with 32 megabytes of memory, Bluetooth for short range communications, RealPlayer MP3 player software, a 128 megabyte SD card (I soon replaced this with a 1 gigabyte card), and Palm's ebook software. Actually, I had installed different ebook software on my first Palm, from Mobipocket, and I have a nice library built it.

Take a good look at the PDA. There are places where the shiny finish has nearly worn off. It's been used, a lot. It's my alarm clock, my calculator, my calendar, my address book, my photo album, and my portable library. It has almost every novel from Peter F. Hamilton (grand scale space opera) and Kim Harrison (urban fantasy set in Cincinnati), plus a lot of Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Cory Doctorow and David Weber and Eric Flint, with room to spare.

It's my secondary portable music player since I got my 30 gigabyte Creative Zen W for both music and movies. Obviously I can't be as expansive with the PDA as I am with the Creative Zen player, so I've limited the music to my very favorites albums: Kind of Blue, Back in Black, Red Headed Stranger, Dark Side of the Moon, Hotel California, Nickel Creek, The Road and the Radio.

I also have a short playlist of favorite songs on the PDA:

1. Bob Dylan is rightly regarded as one of our best songwriters, but in my opinion, he blows chunks as a singer. Jimi Hendrix of course pioneered a lot of rock guitar. The intersection of the two? Hendrix's rendition of All Along the Watchtower, which I think is the best performance of a Dylan song. Ever.
2. The 1960s changed almost everything about America. For a decade that was so much about love and freedom, it ended with in a great deal of despair. That's why Bridge Over Troubled Water was, and is, such an important song. It's about hope, and about a promise to be there when a friend is bottoming out, even if the relationship isn't what it once was. Paul Simon's lyrics and melody are just about perfect, and Art Garfunkel's vocals are stunningly beautiful.
3. I love the melody of Until the Night by Billy Joel, and I like the story that tells the woman you love that coming home to her is the reason you can make it through the day.
4. The Change by Garth Brooks is, in a sense, the flip side to Bridge Over Troubled Water. The latter song is an act of compassion, of simply responding to a spirit in need. The former song is an act of defiance, of reaching out to another to dare the world to crush your integrity and sense of compassion. It's one of the few country power ballads I know of.
5. When You Come Back Down by Nickel Creek is what I hope I have given my children.
6. Anything But Mine has Kenny Chesney's sure sense of melody going for it, along with some nicely rockish guitar. It also has Kenny's patented nostalgia vibe, this time starring a horndog college boy trying to score with his summer romance before the beach vacation is over.
7. Vince Gill and Diana Krall are two of my favorite singers. Their duet Faint of Heart from Gill's 4 CD set These Days sounds right up Krall's alley, like an old jazz standard. It definitely doesn't sound like a Vince Gill composition a la When I Call Your Name, but it is, and despite the low key, relaxed presentation, it smoulders.
8. Martina McBride is one of the best female vocalists there is, easily on par with a Barbara Streisand or a Billie Holiday. She was for the longest time a song interpreter, but she became a first rate songwriter with Anyway.
9. The Eagles released their first album of completely original material in 29 years last October, and Long Road Out of Eden was the title cut. It's a passionate condemnation of the current state of American politics, with an angry Don Henley vocal and a fiery Joe Walsh guitar solo. Rock music doesn't get much better than this.
10. Sugarland, Little Big Town, and Jake Owen were on a CMT-sponsored tour together earlier this year, and they resurrected a 1980s pop gem, Life in a Northern Town. This is the kind of joyful melody that exuberant harmonies were meant for.

By the way, the picture on the mousepad is entitled Haulin' Ass.

DotNot, Part 1

In the first fourteen years of my career in Information Technology, I worked for a half-dozen companies, but I basically did three jobs. I started out a Cobol and JCL programmer on IBM mainframes. In this job, I learned not only a programming style, but a programming philosophy. We'll come back to this.

There are two traditional career paths for a mainframe programmer, at least if he desires to continue in Information Technology. One path is technical support, which involves building and maintaining a company's IT infrastructure. The other path is called systems analysis; this path consists mainly of serving as a liaison to the business users and translating their needs and requirements into technical specifications that can be used to build applications, which drive today's businesses.

This career path scenario simplifies, indeed largely ignores, several current realities of Information Systems/Information Technology, such as sufficiently flexible PC software that savvy business people can use to create very sophisticated applications, outsourcing, and the rise of the independent corporate IT subsidiary that has replaced many internal IT departments. My work environment is largely a mix of the last two, "competitive sourcing" and the IT subsidiary. There are opportunities because of this that I wouldn't otherwise have. I work on applications across several platforms, including mainframe, Unix, Windows client-server, and the Web; these applications span multiple companies in North America and Europe.

As I faced this branch, I determined that I get much more enjoyment and satisfaction from writing software than from detailing the functionality that someone else should write. Or put another way, I'm a bit of a geek who enjoys cutting code. I would have actually been very happy long term to continue mainframe application development in Cobol. It's not a cool language by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a darn satisfying workhorse of a language, and I'm good at it. But, it was pretty much a given ten or fifteen years ago that programmers didn't stay programmers. You were expected to become either more technical or more business. Otherwise, well, there must have been something wrong with you.

Since I knew I wanted to remain on the more technical side, I began to look for opportunities in technical support. As it happened, there was a very attractive opening as systems programmer supporting mainframe database management software at my then employer. I posted for the position, and I felt very positive about my chances to get the job. I had very good relationships with the people in tech support, including the hiring manager, and I knew I could do the job. It may have even worked out that way, if I'd already had experience supporting mainframe database management software. I didn't get the job, and that was a blessing in disguise. Mainframe technical support turned out to be mostly installing and configuring software packages, lots of troubleshooting performance issues, and tons of after hours and weekend trouble calls. There was basically no software development in that line of work.

Shortly after this, my company ran into business troubles and began a long cycle of downsizing and layoffs. I made it through the first round of layoffs and decided it was time to change jobs. What did I end up with? My second IT job, the one I hadn't wanted, systems analysis. Turns out I'm not too shabby at this, either, but I still wanted be the guy writing the programs.

During most of the next four years, I did get to do a little programming, but more and more, I was writing program specifications and test plans for other programmers, and then testing their programs. I do like the design side of applications, but not as my full time gig. And I definitely didn't care for the on-call and planned overtime parts of that job, the parts that made it feel as if I worked two-and-a-half full time jobs, while getting paid for one.

I moved to a new company again, and I ended up in the third of my three discrete IT jobs. For a little over two years, I was a DBA, a database analyst. This job was actually a move away from programming, even more so than systems analysis. I didn't install database software, but I used it extensively. My job was to design the data structures that programmers needed to hold the business information their applications had to have to do the business work, to maintain the integrity of the data (for example, if there's a credit card account, there has to be a cardholder), and to ensure that the applications got acceptable performance from their databases. A poorly designed or implemented database can kill computer performance; how long do you want to wait on your online banking, or to buy a concert ticket? Yep, that's what I thought.

Now, there are dozens of database managers on the market. I worked primarily with DB2, IBM's mainframe relational database manager. Truthfully, for my purposes here, it doesn't matter which topography of database comes into play, be it relational, hierarchical, or network. What matters is that I was in an infrastructure support position, I was professionally challenged, and I strongly considered staying in that career path. In the end, I didn't like where the office politics were taking me, and I decided to change jobs again. I very happily got back into application development, programming again. This time, though, I stayed at the same company, and I have now been there for a bit over 10 years.

I haven't gotten around to explaining the title of this post, nor have I touched on programming philosophy, yet. I'll get to those in Part 2.

RIP Richard Wright

Pink Floyd's keyboard player passed away last week. He was the group's George Harrison to Roger Waters and David Gilmour's Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison contributed Something to the Beatles' cannon; Rick Wright was the songwriter of Us and Them. What a song - melodic as can be, with a killer sax solo, and just as depressing as anything else in Pink Floyd's oeuvre.

Golden

Fifty years ago today, on Sunday, September 14, 1958, my dad worked the graveyard shift at Riegelwood Paper Company, went to church with my mom and her family, and after the service, Dad and Mom got married. There was a small reception at the church, but they skipped it to go to Myrtle Beach, where they stayed overnight. They returned home on Monday, because Dad had to go back to work.

Yesterday, we had a family gathering to celebrate Dad and Mom's golden anniversary. I got the planning going for this nearly a year ago, and after several iterations, we settled on simplicity. After all, my dad and mom are very private people who intensely despise any hint of limelight.

Friday night, Lisa and I picked up two of our three kids at the Raleigh-Durham airport. Andy, having just started his first semester at Purdue, elected to stay in West Lafayette. Gigi and David's flight from Chicago was scheduled to arrive at 10:08, and we planned to drive on to Mom and Dad's in Whiteville, two-and-a-half hours away, rather than drive an hour back to Greensboro. We wanted to let the kids spend as much time with Mom and Dad as possible, since they had to fly back today.

Well, Hurricane Ike intervened, and that 10:08 flight arrived at midnight. They didn't have any checked luggage, so we were out of the airport in very good order. We wanted a bite to eat and had seen a sign on I-40 for a Wendy's, but we got lost for a short while looking for that restaurant. Happily, once we got back to the interstate, we found another Wendy's at the next exit. So, a quick trip to the drive thru window, four sandwiches, four cups of water, an order of fries, and a frosty later, and we were back on the road.

We got to Dad and Mom's at 3:00 am yesterday morning.

Yesterday evening at 5:00, almost 20 of us met at Dale's Seafood at Lake Waccamaw -- unfortunately, the view was the parking lot rather than the lake, because they don't reserve the lake side -- and between us, my brother Ken and I treated our extended family to a nice seafood dinner. Then, we all went back to Mom and Dad's. Lisa, the kids, and I left the restaurant first, because we needed to put the punch together. I forgot the code to the alarm system, and I was sure the security company would call, I'd fail the challenge, and the party would be spoiled when everyone came downtown to stand my bail. Mom and Dad came to the rescue, by driving up and giving us the code.

We had our punch, a really nice cake that my sister-in-law Susan bought, and for the next couple of hours, Mom and Dad were the center of eating, conversation, and hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures (gotta love digital cameras). We had a few gifts for them, a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse gift certificate and tickets to a Le Grande Cirque performance. I would have done more for them, but in the same way that they dislike being the center of attention, they didn't want much in the way of gifts. It was a celebration for them, so I honored their request.

This morning, we had to leave earlier than I wanted to, but Gigi and David had a flight from Raleigh to Chicago scheduled to leave at 12:30 pm. We were on the road just before 8:45, and we were pulling into RDU just after 11:00. The departure board at the United ticketing area showed that their flight was on schedule. After we got the boarding passes and got Gigi and David to security, we checked the departure board again before settling down to wait until their flight was in the air. Their flight was now DELAYED. The Midwest was experiencing very heavy rains; this evening, several Chicago expressways are closed due to flooding. The flight didn't leave until about 2:45, and once they got to Chicago, the flooding interfered with their drive home. In fact, they didn't get home until almost 9:00 pm our time. My poor kids had a hectic travel weekend, but it was in a good cause.

Now, it's time for a short, maudlin note:

Mom and Dad,

Congratulations on 50 years together. You inspire and challenge me to be as constant and attentive in my marriage as you are in yours, and I hope that I have been half as successful a parent as you have.

Your loving son,
Eddie

Happy Birthday, Andy!

My oldest son turns 18 today. When I called him, he sounded happy. He seems to be enjoying college so far. The only downside to his day, from my point of view, is that UPS didn't get my present to him yet, even though I paid extra to get it there yesterday. He's been out both times they tried to deliver it. Frak!

I can identify with this

Today's imitation Shakespeare

Blazer jumped up on the bed, meowing for his breakfast, well before Lisa and I were ready to get up this morning. I told him, "I will rise up and smite thee righteously if ye do not stop, cat."

Sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards

I generally do not post about politics here, but this was just too bloody disgusting. Sure, the cliches are true -- "Truth will out" and "The truth will set you free" -- but no one is entitled, for any reason whatsoever, to the "truth" about someone's cheating spouse. Elizabeth Edwards, regardless of her incurable cancer, deserves the respect of her privacy. It's her marriage, and it's her children to protect.

I do understand her position, because I've been in her shoes, and I held the truth close to the vest until I was ready to deal with the repercussions of telling other people. Yes, I kept quiet, even with close friends and family.

I hope that the Brad Crone mentioned in the CNN article never has to deal with a cheating spouse.

I admire the grace Elizabeth Edwards has shown in dealing with this very public outing of a very private pain and betrayal, and I wish her the very best going forward in dealing with her husband, who I consider the biggest buried turd in the litter box of American politics.

A belated birthday present

Lisa ordered this t-shirt for me well before my birthday, but it didn't get here until today:

Olympics Redux

Yesterday, I commented on the relationship I see between the Olympic games and politics. This commentary was composed while watching the IOC president's speech during the US network broadcast of the Beijing closing ceremonies, and after further reflection, what I said really says more about how politics seizes on the Olympics than the other way around.

I admire the athletes, deeply, and marvel at what they can do. They are the epitome of talent honed by hard work and dedication. Only the barest portion of them can take home medals, but every national team member at the games is one the absolute best at what they do, in the world.

As far as I know, every nation takes fierce pride in their competitors. There are some few Olympians, such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, that capture the attention of the world at large. They are, unfortunately, the exceptions.

The Olympics, like Christmas, are unifying in the abstract, and for the short term. Only the true believer holds on to the positive effect of either for longer than a few weeks. There is less division in this than I gave credence to in my off the cuff post last night, but there is far less unity than the media or the denizens of the Olympic movement would have us believe.

Thoughts on the Summer Olympics

Lisa and I are watching the closing ceremonies. Color me impressed. I am far less impressed by NBC's coverage. On the evening news tonight, there was a story on America's "unsung heroes" of these games, those who won gold medals in other sports.

ABC was the network that broadcast the Olympics when I was younger, and they showed us far more sports than NBC does. They spent less time personalizing the athletes and more time showing us just why they represented their countries in competition. Because of that, ABC wouldn't have had to have a special report on their newscast before the closing ceremonies.

Lisa was terribly bored in the hour before the closing ceremonies started. NBC showed highlights from the gold medal round of men's indoor volleyball, between Brazil and the USA. I played just enough volleyball when I was in college to have a real appreciation for the sport. The Brazilians showed flashes of brilliance, as befits a team that had won a couple of world championships, but it was the Americans' turn to pull out the victory. Surprisingly, the announcers were not jingoistic; they respected the flow of the game and the spectacular skills of both teams.

The Olympics are hailed as a unifying force, as something that is above politics. I'm not sure that this is really how most of the world sees them. For a couple of weeks every four years, people do stop and pay attention to the games, but they do not live them the way many people do professional sports. Of course Olympic athletes, coaches, and organizers live them, but as far as I can tell, the Olympics divide people as much as pull them together. As for the games being above politics, did you know that the "tradition" of the Olympic flame, as well as the huge opening and closing ceremonies, originated with the 1936 Olympics? The ones held in Berlin? When Adolph Hitler was the leader of the German state? Remember 1972, when the Black September terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes? Remember 1980, when the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Remember 1984, when the Soviets retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles games?

I'd love to see the Olympic games be both unifying and apolitical. This is too simplistic to ever work, I know, but I think it would be a fantastic thing if the Olympics were permanently held in Greece, and if only amateurs could compete in the games. This might reduce the influence of politics in the games. If nothing else, the debate would be interesting.

Sometimes I'm evil, evil I tell you

We live in an apartment, and like many an apartment complex, there are lots of young kids here. Now, there are a couple of provisions in the standard lease here that sometimes seem to get overlooked. First, we're supposed to keep the noise down. Second, no one is supposed to play out in the parking lots.

One of our neighbors has a couple of kids, and they spend a great deal of time out in the parking lot. The little boy in the family is probably four or five, and he screams a great deal. Since the weather has been nice and comfortable for the last week, we've had the windows open and fans running, rather than the AC going. Consequently, we have heard the neighbor's son quite a bit.

He screamed much louder than usual about ten minutes ago. I walked out to the parking lot and asked the mom, "Is anyone hurt?" She shook her head no, with a rather surprised look on her face. I said, "I heard the screaming, and I was concerned." Then, I simply walked back inside.

I haven't heard any screams from the parking lot since.

The Phantom Tollbooth

This is a book that I've wanted to read for several years, ever since a fellow I quite liked on alt.books.dean-koontz talked it up. However, I couldn't find it in the local bookstores and just never thought to order it online. Happily, I found it last weekend. At Wal-Mart, of all places.

This book is compared very favorably to Alice In Wonderland, and I think this is an apt comparison. Both books have have story lines full of absurdities and are filled with puns and wordplay. They are both also very much of their times. Alice reflects Victorian England, and Tollbooth is an artifact of 1960s America. It's been too long since I read Alice to comment on it in any detail, but I can say that Tollbooth made me smile, made me laugh, and made me think.

This book is as much a reflection on the importance of knowledge and its acquisition as it is a delight to read. It speaks to a need for looking at the world with fresh wonder and not getting bogged down in the inconsequential, of Wisdom requiring Rhyme and Reason.

This quote sums up what this gem of a book means to me: And remember, also, that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.

It's real!

I weigh 249 pounds this morning. I've now lost 30 pounds since the beginning of June, and it feels, well, liberating. My left knee, the one I dislocated in 2003, doesn't ache all the time now. I can bend over and tie my shoes without feeling out of breath. I can bend over.

I want to publicly acknowledge that this would not have happened without my wife Lisa. She started on SparkPeople a week or two before I did, and I joined her more to keep from sabotaging her than to benefit myself. I know how bad for me restaurant burgers, pizza, and other fatty and salt-laden foods are, but I love the flavors and the emotional "comfort" of these foods. You know, a sop to "poor poor pitiful me" through two separations and divorces, job changes, overwhelming debt, and loneliness. I'm following her lead, and while I sometimes want the things I used to eat (and even eat them occasionally), I'm finding now that it's becoming easy to choose the better things. Of course, Lisa has filled the voids that "poor poor pitiful" Eddie was teetering on the edge of, and that makes it even easier to make good choices.

A great birthday present

I posted a review of Little Brother a couple of months ago, after I read the free ebook version. I ended the post by recommending people go out and buy a copy of the book for themselves, as well as one to give to a teen important to them. I've sort of done part of this, as I passed the ebook on to my daughter to read. When I turned 48 earlier this month, I asked my wife for a hardcover copy of the book, which I just finished reading this evening, enjoyed just as much the second time around, and still fervently believe should win all the SF awards available next year.

Yes, I had Lisa put her money where my mouth is.

A college career begins

Andy moved into his...well, it's not a dorm...apartment at Purdue today. His mom called me about an hour ago to let me know that he's there and settled. Barely.

See, he's got a George Foreman grill, a bunch of junk food -- I'm sure he'll manage to survive on Pop Tarts and Cheerwine for a few days -- a bath mat, no plates or silverware or coffee maker, his internet access turned on and his laptop, and no roommates until the middle of the week. He told everyone who tried to help him out with the things that you need to establish a household, even a temporary one like your first college room, no thanks, that his roommates are bringing everything. Andy's never been on his own before, so he's in for interesting times.

He has mandatory events for freshman orientation, and I believe his mom told me that he is being fed for free all week. He's not happy about having to wear an armband that identifies him as a freshman, but I hope he realizes that everyone is going to know he's a newbie. He might as well accept the help that comes with the official recognition. After all, once classes start, it's going to be sink or swim.

Good luck, son. I expect great things of you.

250?!

I weighed on two scales this morning, and they both agreed. I now weigh 250 lbs! It's been a week-and-a-half, roughly, since I last weighed myself, and I weighed 261 then. I certainly haven't stretched myself exercising in the last week, and I went to a party last weekend where there was exactly nothing I could consider really healthy to eat, but I still dug in like there was no tomorrow!

I don't understand how I could have lost 11 pounds in 10 days, but I also don't believe the scales are lying to me. So, to celebrate, Lisa and I went to the NC Zoo today and spent a good 90 minutes just walking, faster than usual, uphill and down. I do believe I'm proud of us.

Ponder this

If you can do lunch, can lunch be done to you?

And now a word from Winston Churchill

My wife calls me "Lemonade Man", from the saying "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." I am, and have always been, basically an optimist. I am now entering a new stage on the SparkDiet, which is LifeStyle Change.

Winston Churchill is one of history's genuinely great men and master motivators, and I'm using one of his quotes as a motivational touchstone, as a reminder to myself of who I am at heart. I believe this is going to work, for weight loss, for better health, and for improving my life.

I now weigh 261 pounds. The journey continues.

I didn't expect this

My Jeopardy appearance, ten months after the taping and seven months after the broadcast, still comes up in conversation from time-to-time. Most recently, a co-worker told me that she talked about it with someone she visits at Hospice, who seemed to attend to the conversation a bit more than usual. Is it possible that something I did largely as a lark was of some comfort to someone who's dying?

My favorite Babbles from the first year

I meant to do this yesterday, but real life intruded. These are my favorite Babble On entries from the first year of the blog: 3) the funniest, especially since it's at my own expense - What not to say at dinner, 2) the best family entry - Blues, and 1) the best written (this one is also the saddest) - Requiem for a Jack Russell Terrier.

David turns 15 today

Unlike this day last year when he and Andy were here, David is at home in Indiana today. I know that his mom's partner Ellen is taking him and one of his friends to the Guitar Center, and I know that David takes a lot of pleasure in trying out various guitars and amps there, even though he's not impressed with either the salespeople or the care they take with the stock guitars. I'll call him later today so Lisa and I can wish him the happiest of birthdays, and I'll ask him to play a little bit for us on his Fender Telecaster, whose purchase we contributed to back in the spring.

I think after that I may go purchase Stargate Continuum. It will be good to see Richard Dean Anderson in the role of Jack O'Neill again.

Babble On now a toddler

And to celebrate, we're giv...no, no prizes. Let's see...I'm publishing my tell-all...no, I'm neither that feckless nor salacious. Maybe...wisdom of the ages...the world probably isn't ready.

Ah, screw it. Here's to me for keeping this up for a year. I've enjoyed it, and I hope that anyone else who's read it has as well.

The Trading Deadline

Ivan Rodriguez to the Yankees? Ken Griffey Jr to the White Sox? Manny Ramirez to the Dodgers?! No front line pitchers moved? The world seems to have turned upside down.

Saddest to me is that the Braves have surrendered hope of making the postseason. It's understandable, since their starting pitching has been ravaged by injuries all year, starting with John Smoltz's season-ending shoulder surgery. Now, with Tim Hudson out for the rest of the season with elbow ligament damage and Chipper going on the DL with nagging leg injuries, and considering the two big leads they blew to the Phillies last weekend, it simply made economic sense to trade Mark Teixeira. The Braves couldn't have afforded him as a free agent this winter, not with Scott Boras as his agent.

As Dodger fans used to say, just wait till next year!

Ashton Shepherd: Sounds So Good

Ashton Shepherd is a 21 year old wife and mother from Alabama who released her debut country CD last March. I saw a lot of positive online commentary concerning her CD, with frequent comparisons to giants of the genre like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams. I've been resisting buying it, because it seems more and more that such hype is empty, and spending my money based on it is only a waste.

While we were on vacation last week, we hit the Wally World in my folks' hometown, and I saw the CD there for under $10. I decided the price was low enough and threw it in the shopping cart.

I am very glad I did. The production on the CD is clean and has much more of a traditional country sound that most current Nashville "product". And, where the typical new female vocalist in country is a willowy blond with a quavery high pitched voice who has had moderate success in some other area of show business and has "always wanted to sing country", Shepherd really has been singing country music as long as she can remember. Writing it too.

She has a very twangy voice, singing in a lower register, with an assurance and emotional maturity that belongs to a much older soul. I think mid-1990s Patty Loveless is a very apt comparison. And, by the way, Ashton Shepherd is a willowy brunette :)

To my ears, Sounds So Good is the finest country debut of the last decade. If I were to use a single word to describe the CD, I think it would be...astonishing.

265

That's my weigh-in for today, and I was actually astonished to have lost another pound. All three of my kids were here last week, we went to visit my parents, which meant all the family came to visit, and you know grandparents like to feed the family well. Then, we took the kids to Myrtle Beach for a couple of days, the Bay Watch resort had a very nice breakfast buffet in one of their restaurants, and dinners out at Fuddruckers and the Original Benjamin's Calabash Seafood with their 170 item buffet aren't really conducive to weight loss.

What was conducive to weight loss were the trips David and I took to the fitness center and the pool at home, and the three hours we all spent playing in the rather rough Myrtle Beach surf last Wednesday (think of it as full contact water aerobics). I did think that we were well protected with the 30 and 50 SPF sun screen we all used, but we didn't take the need to reapply it into account. All five of us got burned, but we are well on the road to the recovery. Or at least we will be, once the itching is past.

RIP Randy Pausch

The world is a sadder place today, as the man behind The Last Lecture has passed away from pancreatic cancer. He had more to say about living well than almost anyone else I've heard, and I feel richer for having experienced them. I believe it's time to install my copy of Alice and start playing. Randy would think that a worthy legacy.

Aunt Mildred

Aunt Mildred is my dad's older sister. She's 86 and has been widowed for 10 years or so now. Sadly, no one misses her husband. No one. They were married almost 50 years, and he moved her around the South, never staying in one place more than a couple of years. Luckily for us, he moved her back to a spot on Dad's farm, where they set up a mobile home not long before he passed away. When he was ready to move on that time, Aunt Mildred told him he could go, but she was home.

During the last 10 years, my sons have usually stayed with Aunt Mildred when we visit Dad and Mom, and I've visited her a lot. We've gotten close, and the best discovery of all is that we're kindred spirits in many ways. I'll have more to say about her soon, and I need to find a picture or two. She deserves for people to know about her, if not to know her for themselves.

Goodbye Gigi, Hello Georgia...Maybe

I think my daughter has outgrown her childhood nickname. Or, at least I did. We're vacationing at Myrtle Beach, and we just got back from a late walk on the beach. Lisa took a bunch of pictures, David spent a lot of time dancing in the waves, and Gigi told me that she was itchy. I asked her, "Where is scratchy?" She said, "I don't know, but I want to find him."