The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera web browser

What is it with parents having naked baby pictures of their children? Mine were found yesterday. Let the embarrassment begin, eh? I'm sure I'll get my revenge when I take pictures of my (future) children naked and have them as ready ammunition, should they be necessary. My parents always say that their revenge will occur when I have my children. Well, believe-you-me, I have some revenge of my own for my children....

I'm told that I so loved trucks and machines when I was a child that my first word was bulldozer.

My trip to Richmond, VA yesterday was to visit my mom. I don't get to see her much, which I regret. And when I do see her, she always wants to reminisce. She talks about days when I was much younger and I smiled and giggled. Yesterday, she pulled out baby pictures. She recalled days when I watched the construction of our house, fixated by the machines and the complexity of a building project. And she searched my face, looking for signs of that person she remembered me being. He's been gone for years, but he's slowly--s l o w l y--coming back. Ironically, I mentioned how I didn't see my resemblance in the pictures--maybe it's the joy that looked so foreign. Didn't it all seem so much simpler then?

Sometimes I sit at red lights and I tell them when to turn green. I'll count down, usually from three, and the beat after one is when the light is supposed to turn green. Now, I say supposed to because it rarely works. One would figure that after all this time (for I've been doing this for years) I would know that it isn't going to work. Some people just never learn.

Speaking of driving, my step-mother says I drive like a grandmother. That just makes me think of the Taco Bell (I think it was TB...) commercial from a while back where an old woman and man are sitting in their car, the woman driving. The man begs her to slow down because she's driving like a bat out of Hades. The camera then moves outside the car where we can see the car is barely moving--typical stereotype of senior citizens. Is it so hideously wrong to try to drive the speed limit these days?

I was sitting in traffic last night on my way back from Richmond, VA in the Mixing Bowl (nickname given to the area where I-95 meets I-495 south of Washington, DC because of the heavy construction and traffic the area is known for) and a thought occurred to me: wouldn't it be fun to brighten the evening of all these people stuck in traffic? You know the whole da-da-da-da-da.... da da thing, right? One person goes da-da-da-da-da and another person replies da da. It can be done anywhere--beat on your chest, knock on a door, or... honk your horn. So, I get this mental picture of the parking lot that is I-95 (Do you know where the largest parking lot in the world is? Disney World's Magic Kingdom. Do you know where the second largest parking lot in the world is? I-495.) filled with people honking their horns with the whole call-response thing going on. There would be news reports showing people smiling and laughing while sitting in traffic, honking their horns, giggling, waiting for the response. Oh, it would have been sweet.

Of course, I didn't have the courage to get it going. Figures.

When I was a kid, my parents always told me that thunder and lightning was God bowling--the thunder was the ball rolling down the lane and the lightning was when God got a strike (God always got a strike, of course). I was afraid of thunder and lightning then, but that fear disappeared when we moved away from the tornadoes in Illinois. I quite like watching the storms now, actually. On our porch is a nice swing. If the rain isn't coming in over the railing, it's a nice place to sit, read, and watch / listen to the storm. Albuquerque, NM has some wonderful storms during monsoon season, for those interested. I visited family out there several summers ago and was treated to daily storms.

If you're wondering where all this came from, the cover of American Gods has lightning on it.

This would be a first. I'm in Richmond, VA at a Tower Books, typing on a i-opener Internet computer. I've just read a bit of Neil Gaiman's American Gods before purchasing it. I'm disappointed in the amount of vulgarity in the book, but I guess that's something that shouldn't surprise me about Gaiman's writing.

While reading, I noticed that the song That's Amore came on in the store (what's with that--I'm trying to read and they have Dean Martin playing). Normally that wouldn't be a huge thing itself, but the fact that I'm wearing my I sing in my car t-shirt just made the moment... momentous.

Make the robot dance. (via Megan @ Scatterbrain)

Microsoft drops Smart tags