A Curious Instrument

I am happy to note that Lisa and I have been married for 25 years this coming Tuesday!  We will be off somewhere and sleeping in and having the sort of fun we tend to have, which is probably terribly low-key compared to most... I also calculated something else and it has been fifteen years since "The Great Writing Year", where I penned many of my short stories, the awesome novella Rachel and Her Knight in Shining Armor , and wrote the first complete draft of a book from The Navigiary Series .  That was 1998, while I was bobbing about on the waters off the US Gulf Coast and the west coast of Africa as a seismic navigator. To celebrate the 15th anniversary of my big writing push, I am giving everyone  A Free Copy of "The Joys of Autism and Christian Ethos" , which is a collection of many of these stories that is available from my Amazon store .  The book will only be free for a few days, so don't hesitate to get it right now! Of course, I welcome your kind rev...

It was almost a week ago when some spare hard drives, disturbed by my shuffling about in preparation for our upcoming move, dropped from a cabinet onto the open-faced motherboard that served as my web and gopher server for the past year.  The debris dislodged the sound card and jarred the hard drive enough to gouge the surface and totally ruin the drive.  I typically have a none-too-recent backup of the drive, but I have had to shuffle around the backup drives to put my daughter Shayna back into service, so the backup drive had been recently formatted and EVERYTHING is now lost!! Fortunately, I had been slowly moving most of my core documents to cloud servers, so all of what I would consider to be the really important stuff has weathered this storm.  The server itself is back in service and there is a web and gopher server running, but they are both quite empty for now.  Both the old podcasts are totally gone, which is a bit sad, but it would probably be just as we...

I don't even like to talk about how many sleeping bags I have. For years, in my camping and hiking adventures, pathetic though they may seem, I have always struggled with the problem of sleeping bags.  I am too tall apparently, and only relatively short people are supposed to do such things.  Of course, I am an anomaly in a lot of ways from other camper/hikers (besides all the other anomalies I have generally with humans), as I prefer my equipment ultra-cheap and relatively light, in that order.  If I pay more than $50 for a piece of equipment, I must really, really think it is going to save the world or some such. Over time, I have collected an assortment of bags, each with features I had hoped that I would like, hoping one day to stumble upon that "holy grail" of fit, comfort, and utility.  Lightning hasn't struck yet, but even so far as yesterday, I keep trying. Of course, when it comes to sleeping bags, cheap and light rarely come togeth...