.: bistan.net :.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have blogged nearly every day this week.  And some days (including today), I have blogged multiple times.  I still have lots of things to post, including Mackenzie’s 3K graduation from last month.  I think I’ll go have a cookie now.

If it’s not obvious, I’m clearly avoiding school-work by blogging.  (I have two more projects to turn in before Tuesday.  One is 75% done and I haven’t started the other.) I’m also considering promoting this blog more to my friends, etc. via facebook and twitter, so I need to populate it with lots of content.

Next week, I’ll be blogging live from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Camden, New Jersey.  Stay tuned . . .

I have a new blog reader, which just *might* bring my readership up to a total of 3.  She sat down the other night and read this site from top to bottom. She gives me plenty of feedback on my posts, though you wont see any of it in the Comments section.

To protect her identity, I won’t disclose her name, but we can refer to her “wife” for short.

Here we go again. I blog about how I resolve to blog more. Then I make about 3 blog posts. Then you don’t hear from me for a few weeks. Then I make an excuse about why I haven’t been blogging and then I resolve to blog more.

I guess that means this is the excuse post. Let’s see . . . I’m swamped at work, swamped with class, and swamped in my personal life.

Work: I won’t bore you with the work stuff.  I doubt you care about Windows 7 imaging and Drupal modules anyway.

School: It was stupid to commit to doing this masters degree in the first place. My first masters degree didn’t get me anywhere, yet I sign up for another one. My classes this semester are Object Oriented Programming II and Advanced Graphic Design. “Advanced Graphic Design” is what Mercer calls a video game programming class when they want employers to pay for it.  Since my language of choice for the program is C#, I’m developing a game in XNA Game Studio 3.1.  I have a project in OOP2 due next week on secure code and wikis and a project in the game class due the following week on 2D game programming.  My game is pretty sweet and when I compile it, I’ll publish it here and you can download and play it too!

Running: My heel is still freaking killing me.  I can barely walk when I get out of bed in the mornings. I only ran 7 miles this week, but I need to knock out at least 5 tomorrow to exceed 70 miles for the month.

Personal life: We signed Tristan up for T-ball.  That should be interesting. I’m not particularly looking to spend 3 nights a week at a ballpark, but we want to get him involved in something.  Kimberlie is now up to 60 – 70 hour weeks so I have the kids by myself in the evenings for a while.  She works with two other Occupational Therapists.  One is in Africa for a month and the other just went out of maternity leave.  And then on Monday, as if we didn’t have enough going on, her mother died.  After this week, we are both certainly looking forward to a new week.

My calendar says its December but clearly the year hasn’t gone by that fast.  It must be a Y2K but or something.  It’s unimaginable that Y2K was a decade ago. Paranoia was everywhere and my field was at the top of our game.  Fun stuff.

I’ve been annoyed with blogging and micro-blogging lately.  Sometimes I want to say more than a tweet or Facebook status will allow, yet it’s not enough for a WordPress post.  There really needs to be a solid convergence between the two soon.

My goal for December is to update this blog at least once a day.  Ha!

Oh my blog, how I’ve neglected thee — but I’ll update soon, just wait — you’ll see!

Tomorrow will be a difficult day.

Last Labor Day weekend, while I was running the Labor Day Road Race, a coworker/friend was on a trip to Birmingham.  Her son Joshua, one of Tristan’s friends, became ill and was taken to a local emergency room.  To make a long story short, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  It’s difficult for me because he is Tristan’s age. 

I’ve wrote about Joshua before here and here.  You can also read more about him here.

On Friday, he died at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital.  I visited them Wednesday and he wasn’t doing very well.  I have to say that the PICU is one of the most horrible places that I’ve ever been.  Each room has huge glass windows into the hall, so everywhere you look, you see children suffering.  I hope I never have a reason to go there again.

Joshua’s mother is the only person that I work with who has a child the same age as Tristan, so for the last four years we have chatted about the crazy things that our little boys have done.

Every night for the better part of a year, Tristan has asked God to “help Joshua feel better” as part of his nightly prayers.  Friday night, I talked to him and told him he didn’t have to say that anymore because Joshua was in heaven.  When my mother died last year, Tristan didn’t fully understand everything that was happening, but going through that experience helped him understand the end of life on earth.  So when I told him about Joshua, he grieved for the first time.  That was difficult for both me and Kimberlie.

Tomorrow, I will go somewhere that I’ve never been to before and somewhere that I hope I never have to go to again — to a child’s funeral.

So I looked at the calendar yesterday . . . and it’s August? 2009?  Where does the time go?

Instead of apologizing for not posting in the last week or so, I’ll just tell you what I’m up to now:

Tuesday we are headed to Six Flags.  We only go when we have free tickets because it sort of sucks.  We scored two free tickets off of mycokerewards.com and bought a $15 ticket for Tristan off of a twitter special.  Mackenzie has been taught that being two at Six Flags and WDW saves Daddy lots of money and I think she’s OK with that.

Thursday my boy starts kindergarten.  25 years ago, that was ME starting kindergarten, but the blur between then and now called life happened so here we are.  He’s going to the same elementary school that I went to and believe it or not, there are a lot of teachers still there . . . including my 1st and 3rd grade teacher and the principal!

Work is hell. School starting back is enough, but over then summer there has been over $1,000,000 worth of construction in our building and the technology that comes with that isn’t just going to happen by itself.  On top of that we are suppose to have a new website (first time in 5 years) by September and our web developer conveniently quit in June.  That leaves me working literally 7 days a week, sometimes around the clock.  This weekend was spent getting familiar with Drupal, our chosen (but not my me) CMS.

My half-marathon training plan is on.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’ve been sick pretty much all week, but I don’t have a choice except to keep going.  I went 120 hours without drinking coke, which was a major feat for me!

Also, classes start back for me in a few weeks for that stupid graduate program I put myself into.  This semester I dropped everything but one class so that I can deal with all of the above.  I’ll be taking a class that deals with artificial intelligence in game programming (fuzzy logic, probability, and a few other things I could spell out here to make myself sound smarter).

So obviously, I’m still working on “getting all of my ducks in a row”.  (That’s Rachel’s phrase.)  And when I do . . . this blog will be BACK!

When we found out we were going to Las Vegas, I thought I was going to hate it.  I loved it!

When we found out we were going to Baltimore, I thought I was going to hate it.  I loved it!

When we found out we were going to Boulder, I thought I was going to hate it.  But, I loved it, too!

So naturally, when Kimberlie’s class was scheduled for New Orleans, I knew I would hate it.  My vision of this place was people who eat weird food, drunks wondering between bars checking out strippers and ignorant people that don’t pay attention to hurricane evacuation warnings.

Of course, I LOVE IT HERE!

Yesterday on the way, I added two new states to the list of state that I’ve been to: Mississippi and Louisiana.  Today, after checking out the local mall (which is fabulous — better than any Atlanta mall), I took the kids and drove down to the French Quarter to take a steamboat ride up and down the Mississippi River.  The French Quarter was awesome . . . tons of history, interesting people, and beautiful architecture.  Parts of it remind me of Savannah but also reminds me of Nassau.  We didn’t have much time because we had to pick Kimberlie up not long after our boat returned, but I can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

After picking Kimberlie up, we went back to the mall so that the kids could get stuff from the Disney store and make an overpriced bear at the Build-A-Bear factory.  Then we hit Acme Oyster House.  I got the New Orleans sampler: jambalaya, red beans & rice, sausage, mojo potatos and gumbo.  I hadn’t tried any of it before and I’m usually funny about trying new things but all of it was delicious.  These people really know how to eat here!  Before I ordered, I asked the waiter to describe each item.  This would be the equivalent of him going to Georgia and asking what barbebue and bruswick stew is.  He even brought me some free oysters since I had never tasted them either.  They were great as well!

Tomorrow we hit up Storyland, which is a giant playground, and then chill for a while until Kimberlie gets out of class. Then its back to the French Quarter for some more culture!

Monday we plan to tour a cemetery before heading back to boring Macon.  My Day Two post may have to wait until I return home because I’m too frugal to pay this hotel another $13.00 for another day of internet.  I guess I can’t complain since I got the (really nice) hotel for $60 a night.

The past few weeks have been so busy!

We enjoyed our trip to Colorado. While we were gone, temperatures in Macon reached 102 but in Boulder the high was only 75 on the same day. Boulder is the healthiest city in the country and bike and pedestrian trails were everywhere! If only Macon could do something similar.

We travelled to Rocky Mountain National Park — perhaps the most beautiful place that I’ve ever been to. We drove up Trail Ridge Road, which is the highest paved road in the country — 12,000 feet above sea-level. At that altitude — even in June — there was six feet of snow remaining on the ground. The wind was blowing 40 mph and the high temperature for that day and location was 48 — much better than the 102 that Macon was experiencing! Of course, none of us had ever seen six feet of snow, so we stopped for a while to play around in it. As usual I had sandals on and couldn’t really feel my toes after a few seconds but it was a blast!

We also visited Columbine High School and Jon Benet Ramsey’s final home. Morbid? Perhaps, but I won’t digress into the “American history or pop-culture” argument that I had with a co-worker.

When I returned to work the following week, we basically were given a blank check to purchase whatever technology we wanted. You just have to love that end-of-the-year spending! The kids had a week of vacation bible school and then two weeks of swimming lessons. Mackenzie celebrated her third birthday. And I neglected to blog about any of it. I’ll add some photos over the next few days of Colorado, swimming, the birthday, etc.

I’ve also had two freelance web projects in the past few weeks, one of which I’m wrapping up today. After doing web stuff all day for pay, blogging hasn’t really appealed to me.

I’ve also come up with an ingenious hustle. I’ve been making about $100 bucks a month for doing pretty much nothing! This isn’t a work-at-home pyramid scheme, but more of a “Jonathan is outsmarting the system” scheme. Nothing illegal of course, but it certainly falls into the “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” category. I may blog more details soon, but I think that if too many people get in on it than there is less reward for me (not that anyone is reading this blog anymore anyway).

Tomorrow we head out again . . . this time to New Orleans, Louisiana. Kimberlie has NDT training at a hospital there and I plan to tag along and explore the city with the kids. That should be interesting considering that New Orleans is not exactly the most kid-friendly place around. I’m sure I’ll have some blogging time while I’m there.

When you see this many posts on my blog, that means I’m procrastinating.  I have a huge project due tonight at midnight and I’m avoiding doing it.  Its a database design project.  The design is done, but the report that I have to submit is not.  I would rather watch paint dry.