Not to too my own horn, but when no one else will toot it, I guess it's left up to me. I was graced with the Haiku of the Week honors at Rockwood this week for my contribution. Anyone else up to the challenge of submitting your own Haiku for Brian's weekly exhibition?

Hey, I gotta take it where I can get it, right?

So the clouds parted just long enough for the wife and I to see the moon as it neared totality tonight. It was a tough call, though. I either wanted it to be clear so we could see a majority of the eclipse, or if it was going to be cloudy, I wanted it to rain. Instead, I got a little of neither. Only a little sprinkle of rain and just a few minutes of a cloudbreak right around the moon. Sure did have a nice color to it, though.

And all that while the Sox were eclipsing the Cards. What a glorious night!

Some days, I can go through the full 24 hours without a blatant reminder that I am, in fact, a geek. Today was not one of those days.


Which File Extension are You?

I ran across this on another blog site that I regularly read, but have been behind on with the 'rents in town last week. Now that I'm getting caught up, my geekness catches up with me as well.

Oh well. At least I have my PowerBook to keep me company.

So far, no one has submitted the correct answer to the Pun query from the last post. Out of thousands of mail messages, (did I say messages? I meant characters, and then only about 30) none have been able to crack the code. That means that my joke was either way too obscure, way too oblivious, or you people just aren't trying! So to keep you in the spirit of the game, I'm going to start e-mailing each and only one of you daily until someone sends me the correct answer. That should be fun, right?

Besides, this is Halloween week, and I'm getting into the evil spirit of things...

So I put a joke in the last couple of posts. Did you catch it? Yes, I'm asking both of you who read this blog (besides me). If you think you "got it" drop me a line at eriqnATearthlingDOTnet and tell me what it was. Glorious prizes to those who e-mail and have the correct answer. Winners will be posted in a future blog post.


*Winners will not actually get anything. Period.

Poor Yankees. They're not going to win the World Series. They're not even going to the World Series. And this after going up on the Sox 3-0, virtually assuring themselves another trip to the Show.

Bwahahahahahahaha!

I love the Sox, but I hate the Yanks even more, so my baseball fever is in high gear, because I'll actually care about watching the Series this year. What a treat. And the possibility of an all-Wild Card Series? How awesome is that?

We'll just have to see what Clemens can do against the Cards tomorrow. He'd better have a better start than overpaid Kevin Brown did tonight.

I'm giddy. So sue me.

Just to prove that life is secure and safe, my current employer released all but two of the current contract staff in my team. Fortunately, I was one of the two. Unfortunately, I get to pick up the "slack" of the other team members along with survivor #2.

I've never had any desire to play on any reality show contests. My life over the past two years has been enough competition for me. I got "voted off" my last gig, but I've managed to pass the first three rounds of eliminations here. The best part is that none of the contestants know the rules or what may or may not have them on the ballot to get voted off, or when the ballot may be cast.

So I wait for the end of the week to arrive to see what new fate awaits for my fellow castaway. With so many evicted, I have no idea what new challenges await us, including when the final ballot will be cast that will send us both packing.

Weird things happen in 3's, right? Such it is with Denton today.

1. I get home from work and find my copy of the North Texan, the alumni magazine from UNT (in Denton). G. Harvey is on the cover. My folks collect his work. He is a grad of the University of North Texas State Normal College University (or whatever it was called when he graduated in '56).

2. Denton Ryan and Southlake Carroll meet in high school football this Thursday night in a game that will be broadcast on ESPN2. I learn this on the radio as I'm driving home from work.

3. In tonight's episode of Lost, the first name read from the victim's list in the memorial service is from, you guessed it, Denton. It was really cool to hear "Denton, Texas" read in an Aussie accent.

How freakin bizarre.

My wife developed this theory about Denton a few years ago. It seems that key people in Denton are related to others in uncanny ways, kinda like the whole six degrees of separation thing. Our friend Sandra, who lives and works in Denton, knows just about everyone we've ever run across who has any connection to Denton. When we moved back to Denton, the morning after we spent the first night in the new house, we bumped into a college friend at the Grandy's near the mall where we were having breakfast. Not to mention the number of big-name musicians who have made Denton a stop on their journey to stardom.

And how can we forget that good old Denton is the "Home o' happiness"...

So I'm still kinda reeling from something my mother pointed out to me earlier this year: I'm now the age my step-father was when he married Mom. Yow. Even just typing that gave me the willies.

Anyway, as I've been surrounded by more and more people who are having kids (apparently a lot of our friends are younger than we are), this thought has been rattling around in my brain periodically, and not doing any good in the process. Essentially, when my step-dad was my age, he married someone who had a 16-year-old kid. He also had a 14-, 9-, and 6-year old of his own. I can't imaging having even one kid right now, of any age, much less three of my own and two that I inherited.

And if I'm anything like the typical male my age (no, we're not going there), I'm just stupefied at the thought of what I'd do with kids. I'm certainly not anywhere near qualified to be a parent (thank goodness that we can't have kids), and I can't imaging that with what I've been through in my life that any other adult is qualified, either. Yikes. Adults going around having kids and raising them.

So I've decided to form a new support group for those of us who were raised by these horribly-unqualified people: ACOA - Adult Children of Adults. We'll have weekly meetings where we'll sit around and be amazed, bemused, befuddled, and shocked by the things our parents (our *adult* parents, mind you) did while raising us and compare that to the things we're dealing with now at that age. We'll laugh and cry and hug each other and offer reassurances that we're all OK despite the fact that adults brought us into this world and were responsible for us for 1-18 years, or some such number in there. As Adult Children of Adults, we can learn coping mechanisms for the traumas we endure daily. We can remind each other of the good things that have happened to us, and that just because our parents were adults doesn't mean we have to be adults, too. We can choose to fight against our genetic predisposition to be adults like our parents, or just rely on the strength of our fellow members to help us get through those trying times when we think that, even for a moment, we may have traces of adultness in our daily routines.

I should be able to get non-profit status for this organization as well. So not only can I get counselling and guidance for moving through this trying period in my life, but it could be a great tax break, too.

Today, I was witness to the miracle of life first hand. This is not something new to me, per se, but this morning's events were particularly meaningful.

A couple of months ago, we moved the contents of our smaller fish tank into my mid-sized tank and relocated it upstairs near the entertainment center. After letting it settle for a week, I acquired some additional tenants - some more colored neons for our one remaining colored neon, some more black neons for our one remaining black neon, a couple of shrimp (they've been much more interesting than I thought they would be), and a few guppies.

I got the guppies specifically because I wanted another live birth species. We had some success a few years ago with mollies, so I wanted to give it a go again, and see what would happen.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a small motion in one corner of the tank where we have a large number of plants. Sure enough, it was a small guppy fry. Upon further investigation, we found two fry in the tank.

Now I've already blogged about the arrival of the new fry before, and we still have two of those little guys swimming around, but the last couple of days, mamma guppy has been getting really bloated again, and I just knew she was ready to drop some frogs, so to speak. Last night, I watched as she was hovering around the plants in the tank, not moving much, even to eat. And she looked like she had swallowed a basketball. So I knew it was close to birthing time. I watched her off and on for a little over an hour, and when the auto-timer shut off the light, I gave up for the night.

This morning, I was rewarded. Mamma looked a little smaller, but she was still hanging around the plants. I looked really carefully for several minutes, hoping to see if there were any new occupants to the tank. The last newborns were still swimming around, and I saw two of them (I think I had seen three at one point, but not all at the same time) getting adventurous and moving out beyond the cover of the plants into more open water. One of them is beginning to get a little color in the tail, so I think that one's female. But I kept watching to see if anyone else was swimming around. And then I saw it. A little, tiny fry, moving cautiously in and out of the 'branches' of the plant. He was smaller than the other two, but still big enough that I could make out his eyes and fins. He was poking around the plants, looking for some food particles that were small enough to eat. I sat and gazed at this amazing feat for several minutes, never taking my eyes off the little fry, so that I had a clear view when mamma swam right up and ate him.

Ah, yes, the miracle of life. How did this species ever survive if it's constantly eating its young?

I checked again this afternoon, and mamma is fully deflated, so there's no more coming. I've been looking around, and I haven't seen any more new little guys, but there's a lot of places to hide, and hopefully one or more found a good hiding spot to keep away from mamma. But it was kinda creepy. After she munched down on junior, she went methodically through the plants in the area, checking in all the nooks and crannies looking for little baby fish. Even feeding the tank didn't detract her from her mission to devour what she just birthed. If we're blessed, though, she missed a few, and the tank will begin growing new stock on its own, without me needing to go to Petsmart to find new renters.

Life is a constant stream of challenges and cheers. That's my excuse for not posting in a while. :) That and I was out of town over the weekend.

Seriously, though, how can you not be excited about the accomplishments of SpaceShipOne earlier today? Granted, I'm a nut about anything space-related, but I've been fortunate to be able to watch the past two launches of SpaceShipOne as they happened (not in person, mind you). I've gone back and watched the launch video several times, just because I'm enthralled by watching the sky change color from blue to black as the ship hurtles upward. Wow.

I also saw a note in the news this evening about a local company that will take you on a ride in a commercial "vomit comet" from Love Field in Dallas. Watching the passengers go from full G to zero G was just cool. Not that I'd ever do that, mind you. Forget that they're charging $2900/person/trip. If I really wanted, I could come up with that dough. Nope, it's my horrible fear of heights and falling that will keep me off that ride forever.

Which is why, even though it would be the coolest thing in the world for me, I'll never be a space traveler, even when it becomes an affordable venture. Basically, you'd have to knock me out before you could get me on such a vehicle, and then you'd have to wake me up slowly so I wouldn't completely freak in the free-fall environment. Sure, I'd probably love it once I got used to it, but *shudder* that would probably take some time. Then you'd have to do the same to get me back to earth. *shudder*

On an administrative note, I'll probably be posting more sporadically for a bit. Life is interesting, and someday soon I can share more information about it. But, for now, I have to keep my trap shut. :)