Personal Thoughts – A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Eleven

A decade and a bit ago Monday, I became a dad.

He’s getting big now and isn’t crazy about having his picture taken, so here’s a picture of his birthday haul, with a small cameo by the almost-tween with the aquamarine hair.

Happy birthday, son. From dad. And Eleven. And Eleven. Happy Eleven.

Yes, I am reusing this picture from my Veteran’s Day joke.

Been busy

So I still own my old house in Baltimore from back when I lived there, and we had a management company looking after the place, but they flaked out during the pandemic, and… Well now we know I guess.

That crack in the back wall was not there before.

Yeah, so you open the back gate and I guess there’s a portal to a sylvan otherworld now?

I think I saw this happen in an episode of Doctor Who?

There’s a whole Christmas tree back here somehow?

Having excavated my way to the porch, I discovered someone had allowed a desk to return to nature. Not clear how it decomposed faster than the Christmas tree.

I ran out of lawn bags and also blood glucose, but I did manage to render the back yard passable and knocked the bush down below the level of the fence.

Then Leah came back the next day and actually finished it.

The biggest part of the walkway blockage was a vine full of purple berries.

I look like I went Lady Macbeth on The Grimace.

I’ve had that shirt roughly the same amount of time I’ve had the house. They’ve held up about equally well.

Oddities

I have about a hundred words left to write in the final chapter of the Winnie-the-Pooh story, but for dramatic purposes it will have to wait for shipping.

Instead…

An Nvidia graphics card ca 2006 with its cooling system removed — So here’s a weird thing that happened. Was going to get rid of the computer I bought about 15 years ago when I got my first Real Proper Grown-Up Job, and I was stripping it for parts. When I pulled out the video card, the heat sink just fell away and the cooling fan *crumbled* at my touch.

A burn — I whacked my arm on a halogen bulb and burned it. Hurt like hell for a few hours, but stopped quickly. When it healed, my freckles had migrated. Like, the new skin that healed over the burn was freckle-less, but the edge of the burn is now marked with a visible line of extra-dense freckles, as though the freckles on the injured skin had *moved*.

Internet Of Painful Things

It’s nice to know that there is a fine chance that my death will be automatically captured for posterity and uploaded to the cloud for all time by my doorbell.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged…

So, a little more than twenty years ago, there was this woman I went to school with. We ran in some of the same circles. She was a computer science minor, and I think she was maybe on the newspaper with the girlfriend of one of my buddies and we were in honors together. I was a junior. I can’t remember now if she was a junior or a senior, and I lost touch with her like fifteen years ago.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that she started this rumor around the computer science department that I was seeing this sophomore girl. We didn’t actually know each other especially well at the time; we’d met at the department picnic the previous spring, and I’d invited her to go wander around downtown on Halloween, which was supposed to be a big group thing but everyone else had cancelled. But this preexisting rumor going around took off a lot of the pressure that historically made it very difficult for me to get up the nerve to ask a cute girl out on a date, so I asked her out on the first Friday in December. I took her to a Jane Austin movie at the Rotunda and then the Papermoon Diner on 29th street, and it was only later, at dinner, that she told me that it also happened to be her birthday. That was twenty years ago yesterday.

Mansfield Park Collage — Happy birthday, Leah

To quote entirely the wrong Regency-era romance novelist, Reader, I married her.

Fly Me To the Moon

A Conversation with Evelyn at Bedtime

Daddy?

Remember when we went to space?

I’d never went to space before.

I saw two stars. I didn’t cry.

I didn’t cry when the monster came. The monster was scary. I didn’t like the monster. Why did the monster come?

The monster breathed fire. I didn’t want the monster to breathe fire on me. I didn’t want the monster to breathe fire on you either.

We told the monster to go away, but the monster didn’t go away. The monster was scary.

When we go to space again, will the monster come? The monster shouldn’t come. Can we go on an Evelyn Family Trip? I want an Evelyn Backpack to go to space.

I want to go to space tomorrow. Can we go to space tomorrow? I WANT TO GO TO SPACE TOMORROW.

Okay.

Ten Years Earlier…

A version of this post first appeared September 17, 2008.

Me: Well here’s a serious question: If you could change one thing about me, what would it be?
Leah: [laughs]
Me: Just one
Leah: Two things.
Me: [fake sulk]
Leah: I really wish you’d lose some weight. We both should. Because I worry about you, and I know you haven’t been watching what you eat so much.
Me: Yeah. I know.
(a pause, while I wait for her to ask the reciprocal question. She doesn’t)
Me: I ask, because I’ve been thinking
Leah: Oh?
Me: Yeah. And I guess, maybe there’s one thing I might change about you.
Leah: Um.
Me: Your last name. [produces a ring] Will you marry me?