Mandaris Moore

Today, I'm thinking about doing my push up challenge again. The push up challenge has been something that I've done many times over the last three years to start off a work out routine and I've always liked the quick results it gives me.

We took the girls to see the Disney on Ice show today and it was equally enjoyable to see the show and to have the girls watch it. They both were on the edge of their seats as they watched the Toy Story 3 characters run around and try to save the day. I wonder when my children will understand some of the bigger plot lines from the movie, because it's kind of deep.

Also, the prices for things at those things are crazy. I understand that as parents, we all want to give our children the best but don't think the best things in life are $12 stale pop corn and 15 dollar iceess that come in mugs with buzz lightyears face. What kind of leasson are we teaching out children when we spend 20 dollars on something that has a value sooo much less than that?

On the job front

Still no calls, and it looks like I'm going to have a harsh road ahead. I feel that this is partially my fault for trusting that I'd have something at the end of all this. I worked hard, but in the end it leads to nothing because I'm worried about what will happen next week. I know a lot of people worry like I do, but it doesn't make it better.

Not in the slightest...

Today was another great day for dancing. I went to the lindy hop lesson again and I think I did pretty good on most of the drills except for the lindy circle and I rediscovered that I have a small issue where I pull a follow out of their anchor step. It's weird to be reminded that there is a little "and" before you start dancing. I met a couple good people during the dance and it was great meeting people who dance for the sheer enjoyment of it versus trying to meet people.

I think I've matured quite a bit because I didn't get stuck in my own head and compare myself against every other dancer including what I imagined what I was able to do during my "glory days". I just took it as a chance to have fun and work on my basic¹.

The eyes have it

My daughter has a bug bite on her eye and it's swollen up pretty bad. Today, after I picked her up, she told me about how all the kids were asking about it. I don't know exactly how she felt, so I tried to let her know that she'll be alright and that the other kids just wanted to make sure that she was alright. Luckily, the eye is getting better.

Today, I stayed home with my oldest. She had woken up with a very pink and very swollen right eye. We didn't know if it was pink eye or something else so we had her stay home and then we took her to the doctor later in the morning. It was pretty nice spending time with her during the day because although the eye looked pretty bad, it didn't really hurt her too much.

She seemed to really enjoy the day that we had together and I even thought about taking her to work tomorrow if her eye doesn't get better. I think it would be nice for her to see where daddy works.

Playing Hooky

Despite the fact that I'm not in the office, work still comes in. Normally, this isn't a problem because I would connect to all of my necessary machines remotely ad do the work without having to deal with lag. Things have changed because I've since given away those machines to the guy I'm training to replace me. File transfers are horrible and the performance of the machine is terribly slow when I'm attempting to make a video, run a test or just check my email.

Star Wars

For the last week or so, I've been trying to get the girls to sit down and watch Star Wars with me. Apparently, they do not have the patience to learn about a galaxy far, far away... They ask to watch it, but 30 minutes into it they fall asleep or go off and play.

This morning, I woke up to vomit.

After a very long night filled with little ones who don't like sleeping in their own beds by themselves coming to invade mommy and daddy's bed, I was awakened to a desperate plea for water.

I ran to get the water, she took two sips and then promptly threw up...

... in the bed

... on the way to bathroom

... not in the bathroom

... but on the way out

Luckily, my wife was able to take care of her during the day. So that I could go to work and train my replacement some more.

Oh, the horrors

For the last year, I've been busy at work attempting to get an automated tool to work as it was designed. In fact, at one point I was attempting to automate the automated tool so that everyone could benefit by not running it. Personally, I thought this was a pointless endevour.

What is the point of automating an automated tool? Especially when that first tool is being modified and changed on an almost daily basis.

Well, I managed to get the system somewhat working but I found myself having to do a significant amount of working trying to fix other issues and it kind of died.

But the problems still persist. I welcome automation, but I have to question the logic when were are stacking issues upon issues like this.

Improvements in writing

I've been doing this 250 word thing for almost 3 weeks now and I haven't done any editing on entries that I make. The original goal of this project was to get my thoughts out of my head and have something to look at as an achievement. I'm currently debating on whether I should read them because the process might make me too self conscience to write more.

Today was a great day.

Truly great.

The family went to funderland and had a wonderful time going on the little rides. It's at these times that I really realize that time isn't going to stand still. Already, some of the rides are too small for my oldest and I worry that the simple things in life won't be enough to entertain them. That doesn't mean they'll want to go bungie jumping next year, but it could certainly make things different if they would rather sit at home and play video games then spend some time at the park.

Recently, my oldest has been wanting to play the game Cooties and it's been fun interacting with her. I think I've mentioned that I have trouble sometimes interacting with her and I want to spend as many chances as I can to let my children know who I am.

Dance Shape

My wife and I have made up after a couple days of quite rioting and we've both decided that I needed more ways of reducing stress. So, I'll be going dancing on a more regular basis ¹. The thing about this is that I'm starting over. When I'm on the floor it feels like I've never danced before. All I can remember is how to keep my hands in the right spot (so I don't get slapped) and how to keep rhythm.

Every dance, I'm winded and I feel muscles that haven't been used in years burn with awakening. It hurts me physically, but my pride is swelling.

I think one of the benefits of doing this project and making myself write on the computer is that I don't have as much anxiety about writing on a computer. The thoughts and words are appearing to me as fast as they would when I write on paper. In addition, thanks to applications like Byword that allow me to ignore all the spelling mistakes until I'm ready to correct them (if I choose to). My current work flow is to open up a new document and then just start writing until I meet the word requirements and finish my last thought. From there, I give the document a title, created date and tags then save it in a folder structure called "Chronicles" which then separates the entries by year and month. I'll probably set up some kind of folder action to just sort the files after saving, but -for now- I'm focused on the actual writing versus the tools and tech surrounding it.

Today, I spent some one on one time with my oldest daughter to just play around and have fun. I had asked her if she'd rather make cookies with me which is something that we've been doing more and more of but she seemed to really like the idea of just the two of us using our imagination¹. I did my best to keep up with all the ideas that she made up but I think my favorite one was the following.

Sarah Milkins She's a Princess Scientist horse who succeed when everyone said it was impossible².
She's 4-5 years old.
Goes to school a lot, even when she gets fussy...
Doesn't get fat when she gets older³.
There are only a few of them... But there is a lot of others and tons of information about them.

It was just so exciting to see her talk about this idea and we both went to the rest of the family to share. It was one of those great moments when a parent can just sit back and enjoy the their little one's creation.

After that, we sat in front of the computer and giggled making little movies in PhotoBooth... This was a wonderful evening.

I'm trying to think of all the positive things that are happening in my life. Sometimes I lose track of those things that I should be grateful for so I want to list them here:

• My wife.
  There are no perfect people in this world, but when push comes to shove I feel that she has m back.
• My children.
  It's a kind of pride and warm feeling to see them grow from little meatballs into little girls. I'm not looking forward to have them leave one day.
• My job. It's been able to support our house hold at a standard of living that's becoming harder and harder to maintain in this economy.

The economic rock on which we stand

Speaking of economy, I've been thinking about how even though we are in a recession, there seems to be more and more ads on things. Once again, I'm not a communist, but it seems crazy that our society has no problems having all these messages about buying things when most Americans are having problems balancing thier budgets.

Caeer builder recently had a survey stating that 42 percent of their respondents were living paycheck to paycheck. I think it is more of a personal thing rather than the amount of money that people make. From a very young age we are taught to keep up with "the Jones'" and the other thing that we are taught about money is the single semester of econ¹ in high school. Personally, I think that it's a little late because by then all your classmates have already been bombarded by barbie, GI Joe and Disney and I doubt many of them have an idea of what it is costing to live like they live.