Just got back from a weekend with the family down in Wichita. The occasion was my brother-in-law being on furlough from Iraq, and it was very good to see him. I was sad to leave, because we won't see him again before he ships back to "the suck." He's a mortarman, too, so he's really IN the suck when he's over there. Two weeks out and a couple days back.

Let me just say that, at least from his point of view, none of what we've heard about what's actually going on over there is really very accurate. It's not as bad as a lot of folks seem to think, but it's also pretty hopeless as far as the goal of a stable democratic Iraq is concerned.

Anyway - we played the game Eat Poop You Cat while we were down there. One of my sisters and my brother were there with their respective spouses, and I with Jill. So the six of us sat down and played the "paper telephone" version. Until very late in the morning. The ladies were hitting the wine coolers pretty hard, and it was pretty damned funny. Of course, looking over the papers, it wasn't nearly as funny in the morning. But still. I made Jill cry Diet Dr. Pepper, so you know it was a good time.

Some of the gems we ended up with:

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick --> Jesus getting Beaten
A Lone Bird Cries on the Prairie --> Army Ants Terrorizing a Chicken
I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie --> Certainly, I Will Purchase That Fine Donkey, Little Person


If you haven't played this game with your friends over a few drinks, you really should.

Also, I really hope my brother-in-law stays safe. He's a good man, and I have a lot of respect for him - which is surprising considering how young he is.

After dinner tonight, the family sat down to a rousing game of Apples to Apples, Jr.

Apples to Apples is a great game in just about any context. The regular version can be used in the cleanest family game-day, and can be seriously raunchy in the hands of a group of half-drunk buddies on game night.

For those who don't know the game, it consists basically of two stacks of cards. The larger stack is a stack of nouns which gets passed out to the players evenly in hands of five. These cards are red. The smaller stack is a stack of adjectives, which are held in common in the center of the table. These cards are green.

The players take turns being the "judge," and what the judge does is turn over a green card adjective and announce it. The other players ponder the nouns in their hands, and place the one that they think fits the best, would be funniest, etc in an anonymous pile in the center. The judge, not knowing whose is whose, then takes the anonymous pile and selects a "winner." First player to n cards wins, where n is usually 5, but can be anything. The judge then deals out cards to bring everyone's hands to five (the judge does not play on his own adjective).

We have taken to a funny little variant at the end of the game. Everyone keeps their green cards, and lays them out one-by-one. These adjectives describe the person. This can get VERY funny. It can also be pretty uncomfortable if they're too true, but that's usually pretty funny in its own way.

Tonight, I discovered that I am Strange, Exciting, Wild, and Good. Good at being a perv, apparently.

So... a friend and I are writing a web application. Well, he's doing the coding, and I'm doing the design. We're using Ruby on Rails, which has some really sweet data-handling stuff in it. I'm used to using Dreamweaver for version control, checking stuff out, etc. He likes Subversion for that, and it's a really powerful tool for version control.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver doesn't handle svn. But there IS a company selling a plugin for it. I installed the demo, and it worked pretty well after I got through the nightmarish setup.

So eventually the demo runs out, and it wants me to purchase the license. Blah, blah, sure. Coincindentally, my buddy rewrites a huge chunk of the layout code and whatnot, so we figure I should just blow away my local copy of the site, and re-download it.

I went ahead and purchased the svn plugin for Dreamweaver. Then the damned thing stopped working.

I started dicking around with Dreamweaver and got freakin' WebDAV to work, which Dreamweaver has fullly integrated support for. DAMMIT. I think I just wasted $60.

Fucking open-source. Sometimes I hate it with a passion.

At least I got some work done outside this weekend, though I didn't realize that topping the apple trees would make my back feel like a rhino ran over me. Ugh.

Current Mood: aggravated

Guess what I'm doing tomorrow?

No, I'm not writing new chapters for my next book.

No, I'm not doing (much) development on the web app my friend and I have been writing.

No, I'm not doing super-secret G-man work.

I'm going to be planting potatoes. On St. Patrick's day. Yes, indeedy. I may have moved to Jackson County, Kansas three years ago, but I do believe I have finally arrived.

I also need to clean out the strawberry beds of stray branches from the old elm tree, get the tractor tire fixed, burn off the back field, top the apple trees, and prepare the kids' garden for next weekend.

As much work as that might sound like, I'm really looking forward to getting into the dirt. Smelling it, feeling it, and working it. It's not sexual, so stop looking at me like that. It is, however, quite sensual. I am convinced that if I were independently wealthy, I would not travel the world. I would not buy big fancy toys. I would become a Hobbit of the Baggins variety. I would be a gentleman farmer, and I would write my silly little stories, and I would be immeasurably happy.

Dirt is good.

Livejournal, eh?

We'll see if this experiment can last.

I'm really quite bored at the moment, which is likely what led me to create this method of humiliation in the first place.

It's good to be humiliated periodically, though. It's good for you. That's what I'm told, anyway, and the voices have never been wrong. Well, except for that time with old Mrs. Hammersfeldt. They were very wrong then. She was not, in all actuality, a hot coed disguised as a sextegenarian math teacher.

I still have nightmares about THAT particular cartesian plain.

Current Mood: blah