Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I am not even going to mention how long it has been since I posted. I would like to say I was too busy, but since I have the Internet at work that's really not much of an excuse. Honestly - it is just pure laziness. Couple that with the fact that I prefer reading to writing and add in my basic hermitness and that equals crappy blogger. :)

Anyway - let's see what has been happening in the world of the Smith's in Georgia. The heat finally broke. I think we were in October before our heat index went down under 100. It has been a very pleasant upper 70's to mid 80's the last week or two with a nip in the mornings that is nice. Maybe sometime in December I will need to turn my heater on. I don't miss driving in the snow but I have to admit that it certainly doesn't feel like it's almost Christmas. It makes it a little harder to get into the spirit of things you know?

Otherwise - life moves on. Josh had stomach surgery a week before Halloween. He was complaining about a stomach and I just kind of brushed it off. I mean - it was just a stomach ache right? But he kept complaining and said it was getting worse and he started crying. Then I realized he didn't have school the next day so he wasn't trying to get out of anything and I felt bas because he looked like he was really hurting so I took him in to Winn. (The on-post hospital, it has a urgent care in the ER) They said his stomach felt full so they did an x-ray, then they did a cat scan. Several hours later the doctor came in and said there might be something but it was probably nothing but just in case they were transferring us to the Bacchus Children's Hospital at Memorial in Savannah since they don't really deal with kids. I said, um ok. So we rode in an ambulance to Savannah at 4:30 in the morning. When we got there the doctor looked at the cat scan and said his intestine was kinked and we need to do surgery. Now. I said sure and 20 minutes later he was in the ER. I guess all the stuff they did when he was a baby left some scar tissue that grew and stretched as he did until it finally kinked that intestine. *sigh* But after 4 days they said go home, and we did, and now he is fine. Except that the scar he had from before is just a little longer and a little crooked because it swerves around his bellybutton. I told him his old scar was the "cut here" line.

Curtis finally got his braces off last week and I finally made my last payment to the orthodontist! Hooray! Now he better floss those suckers religiously!

I went to Oktoberfest in Savannah. It was awesome. They had all these little booths everywhere (which is really why I go to any festival) and I found two awesome artists. One is photographer and the other a painter. Loved them. Aaron found a life size model of Marylin Monroe and loved her too. A little too much according to some photographic evidence I have. :)

Haven't been to the beach in a while and I miss that, but I did get to drive out to South Carolina to see my sister last week! Yay for family moving close! Well...closer. Within driving distance. Ok easy day trip driving distance. For anyone but my father who probably thinks 10000 miles is day trip driving distance. Anyway - you get the picture. And I get to go back in a couple days for Thanksgiving! Yay for turkey (and Adrian's stuffed mushrooms)!

Now if I could only get all the details of our FRG Christmas party settled to everyone's satisfaction that would be great!

Family Update!

It hasn't been a really exciting couple of months. The boys are doing well in school. Josh makes friends as easy as breathing so he is always over at someones house or has someone over at ours. I wish Curtis had it as easy but he doesn't seem to have anyone he hangs out with. I know a lot of it is because there are a million kids Josh's age around here but just not many Curtis' age. I'm not sure what to do about that. He seems fine and says he is but still. He is doing well in classes but missed to cutoff day to try out for football so he wasn't able to do that. I want to sign him up for Tai Kwan Do or something. We will see.

Josh is playing football on post and is playing pretty well. Aaron is coaching and has decided football is a lot harder to coach than baaseball. Especially dealing with the parents. But I told him you just have to realize that that there will always be unhappy parents, just do what you do. As soon as I get his pictures back I will post some.

Aaron is just doing the Army thing. Which turns out to be a lot more standing around and boring breifings that I thought it would be. They all feel that there is a serious lack of training going on. They still dont have their weapons yet and that is worrisome. They deploy in March and they really need their own weapons to train and qualify with before they go. He goes home next week for 11 days so that will be good for him. Also, he will be in Fort Hood in November for 2 weeks to meet the Brigade they are deploying with. That will be a good thing I hope.

And I'm just plugging along. I am working, which is a good thing. My bosses like me and its an interesting place to be. I work at a Nissan dealership as a receptionist. And I sit on my butt all day so I have gained back 20 pounds. I am very dissapointed about that! I need to do something but it is so hard to get up at 5 in the morning to excercise and I just dont have time at night between football, and laundry and dinner etc. I know these are just excuses but still. *sigh*

Georgia is...Georgia. Hot, muggy, and green. We have in the hundreds with out heat index every day for the last couple of months. 95 is hot at home but its almost unbearable here when the heat index goes up to 111 because of the humidity. Blech. But the wildlife is interesting. Daily you see something running around by the house - armadillos, turkeys, foxes, snakes, raccoons,turtles, vultures, and more squirrels than a disney movie. It's all right here - but I would give a lot right now to see my mountains and fish the UM.

Love to all my family out there!

I don't Care How It's Made

Have you ever been scrolling the channels on T.V. and you get sucked into a show you really don't care about but find strangely compelling so you end up watching the whole thing anyway? Like the show How It's Made. I really don't care how they make chain link or wodden barrels, and yet here I am wasting an hour my life finding out how. In spite of myself, there are a couple of episodes that really were interesting. You quietly say to yourself - huh, how about that? Sometimes it happens with less informative shows like Say Yess to the Dress (now that really IS a waste of 30 minutes)but mostly with shows from the Discovery Networks. Not to be confused with other shows on Discovery that me and my family love like Deadliest Catch and Mythbusters.

Anyway, I am a big fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. Im an escapist-type reader. With some horror and the occasional biography and history thrown in. But I found myself looking at a book the other day that I have walked past several times, mostly because I liked the sound of the title. Cryptonomicon just sounds cool. But its a complicated book dealing with a lot of math. (Crypography is actually a lot of wierd math and probablities and things I really dont understand.) Math has never been my strong point and is not a subject I look for in the topic of my reading material. But I picked it up anyway, and in the bonus materials there is an article the author (Neal Stephenson) wrote for the magazine Wired in 1999. He talks about...well, wires. The original cables that were laid down for morse code - and later used for telephone wire and the evolution of cables for internet and phone and how and where they have to be placed and made to hold all the data, the poltical power struggle of who owns the cables and how precarious the internet (and long distance telephone calls) really are. And of course - how they are made, from then to now.

In spite of myself, it was really fascinating. Things I had never thought of, and if anyone had asked I would have said I really didn't care. It's something we all take for granted, that this whole world wide web is something that is "out there in the ether" and can't be stopped. But destroying one major connection point (like in Alexandria) could be devastaing to any number of countries. Huh, how about that? The best part of it was the author though. He wrote it humor - knowing his audience is a bunch of techno nerds who are way smarter than I am. Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

According to legend,in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying “Mr. Watson,come here.I want you.”Compared with Morse’s “What hath God wrought!’’this is disappointingly banal— as if Neil Armstrong,setting foot on the moon,had uttered the words:“Buzz,could you toss me that rock hammer?’’It’s as though during the 32 years following Morse’s message,people had become inured to the amazing powers of wire.

About one of the early men who tried to solve the problem of seding information along a wire.

In the Victorian era was an age of superlatives and largerthan-life characters,and as far as that goes,Dr.Wildman Whitehouse fit right in:what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists,Burton to explorers,Robert E.Lee to generals,Dr.Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.He achieved a level of pure accomplishment in this field that the Alfonse D’Amatos of our time can only dream of.The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer.

About where one line was being installed outside of Hong Kong:

It’s a hot day,and kids are swimming on the public beach,prudently staying within the line of red buoys marking the antishark net.Handley remarks,offhandedly, that five people have been eaten so far this year.A bulletin board,in English and Chinese,offers advice:“If schooling fish start to congregate in large numbers, please leave the water."

Now there were a lot of fun and interesting things in this article that I would normally never have read. Now I think I need to read the book. Cryptography could be just as fascinating.

Lillith - Blenders - and Time

Ok, so this post is mostly just trying to organize some thoughts that have been floating around my head. I have read several good books lately and like all the good ones they make you think about them for a while. And as I thought about them I start thinking to myself - well what if?? And you reorganise some ideas in your head and those ideas shoot off into tangents. Then they decide to go onto several different hikes and these ones head down the scenic byways while some other ones go straight up and yet others lag behind to chill in the shade. This generally just leads to a crazy mess in my head because they all end up getting hot and tires and losing their hiking buddy and no one can make sense of anything when they all get home.

You know?

So anyway - I have been thinking about mythical creatures. Vampires, angels, and everything in between. Yes I am a Twilight fan. I think because she made them new. I know a lot of people hated them for that very reason but personally I liked it. So there. Another series I read was called the Mortal Instruments trilogy. The good guys carry the blood of angels and are the "police" of the "downworlders". Which are the vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches, warlocks, etc. All of which carry the blood of demons. This was a great trilogy and I recommend it. What was interesting in all my readings of various books involving the mythical and night creatures was how many references to Lilith there were. Even in C.S. Lewis' books he mentions her as Adams first wife.

Now this is the first I have heard about it. So I looked it up and there is oodles of mythology about her. Apparently she was not as submissive and meek as Eve. Also it seems she was very strong and somewhat powerful (power of the angels its hinted). God deemed her unsuitable and cast her out of the garden. Now her children from Adam were also powerful, but cursed because of their parentage. Mostly its only vampires who are associated as children of Lilith, but in other stories all magical creatures and faries are descended from her. Hmmm. Now that time in Eden and the immediate aftermath would make an interesting story yes? And with vague biblical references (and really what other kind are there?) to her, a nod from C.S. Lewis, is there any kernel of truth to a story of Adams other wife??? Hmmmm.

Of course, I am not sure that I buy that reason for Lilith for being unsuitable. Or at least that being the only reason. I just don't picture Eve as being meek and submissive. She had to have a lot of courage and strength and, well, gumption to do all she had to in her life. If you think about all of those "night children" including the faeiries, maybe especially the faeiries, they all have a touch of capriciousness and cruelty. Some more than others. This is attributed to Lillith which seems like a much likelier reason for her being unsuitable for Adam. Humanity needed less power and more compassion? I know I would prefer Eve for a mother.

Another fun topic for me lately has been time. The Hourglass Door started a very fun new story for me about what time is and does. Eric was a fun story that had a section where they travelled in time that is forming a story in my head greatly influenced by my husband. Time I decided is NOT like a river. Thats too linear. Time is whirlpool, every eddy touches the other circling endlessly around. A rock thrown in one eddy will not disrupt the whirlpool but will cause ripples radiating out the edge of that eddy and into the adjacent ones causing unknown problems in both the past and future from that moment! Chaos! Sounds fun! I mentioned this to my mother and she told me it sounded more like a blender. Swirling around, faster at the bottom, and if you push the wrong button everything shoots out the top into squared space making a complete mess of things. I like that too. I think that needs to be a conversation in my story.

Anway this is way too long but I needed to get it out of my head. :)

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