Month: May 2019

I found a snippet of an article from the New York Times sometime in the 1990’s:

As a physicist, I can attest this is true.

Another thing I found in my box of really old stuff (in a manila folder called Miscellaneous, if you can believe it) is this beautiful page from a copier, circa 1992.

That’s Dempsey in the shades on the left, and those are my lips and nostrils on the right. We’d taken a road trip from Rolla to Jefferson City one night (because that’s kind of stuff we did) and broke into the State Capitol building. I think it’s okay for me to admit that now, because surely the statute of limitations has expired. We wandered the marble hallways for a while and found a copier, and decided to put it to use. Hence the “Missouri tax dollars at work” note at the top.

Ahh, college.

I’m going through boxes of old stuff, cleaning house, and stumbled across a page I’d torn out of a magazine.

Luckily Linux isn’t quite that bad these days, but yeah, I do remember days of figuring out arcane hardware configurations and the like. (I’m looking at you, X11.)

Like Alex and Kyra before him, Zaque has decided to serve a mission for the church. After a few months of preparing (mostly waiting for the earliest time he could submit his paperwork), last night he received his mission call.

Unlike past years, missionaries now receive their calls via email. So it’s a little different to stand around Zaque’s computer as he opens the email, rather than sitting on the couch as he tears open an envelope.

He clicked the link in the email and started reading the letter aloud.

It started out just like all the others: “You are hereby called to serve as a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…”

And then came the second sentence, the one all prospective missionaries read with a little anxiety (mixed with excitement) in their voice: the one that tells them where they’ll be serving.

“You are assigned to labor in the Oklahoma Oklahoma City Mission.”

Yep, Zaque’s heading to Oklahoma on September 18 for two years. Laralee and I are so proud of him. He’s going to be an amazing missionary.

Laralee always impresses me with her dedication to eating well. She makes all sorts of concoctions that are amazingly healthy, or involve “superfoods”, or are elixirs of immortality, or whatever. Today I was impressed with the drink she created in the blender. Or, more accurately, I was impressed by how thick and purple it was.

I think it includes things like spinach, beets, and grass. Yes, grass. But such is the price of being healthy, I guess…

Today was Zaque’s last day of high school. He seemed pretty happy.

We still have to get through graduation next weekend, but for now he’s just thrilled not to have to worry about homework, quizzes, tests, and projects. Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how much he worried about those anyway…

Back in the late 90’s, we bought a desk. It was easily the largest desk I’ve ever seen, and since it was made of particle board (we were freshly out of college and married) it weighed hundreds and hundreds of pounds. But its sheer bulk made it practically indestructible– I’m pretty sure we could’ve weathered a tornado or a nuclear blast underneath it. When we had a moving company transport our stuff to this house, the workers (who were all massive Tongan guys who carry stuff for a living) confirmed it was the largest, heaviest, most awkward desk they’d ever encountered.

It takes up the entire front room of our house (admittedly, it’s a pretty small room to begin with) and over the years Laralee’s accumulated quite a few things. The desk has so many drawers and cubbies that it’s easy to stash just about anything in it.

Well, the time had come to retire The Desk. Not only do we need to downsize our things a bit in preparation for our fall move, but I’m pretty tired of having my desk in the basement. Now that I’m approaching retirement, I don’t want to have to trudge downstairs, all by myself, whenever I want to use my computer. I’d rather share the office with La.

So I emptied out The Desk. I ended up with stacks and stacks of books, papers, office supplies, sewing materials (!), and who knows what else. It took up most of the space in our dining room.

This is what The Desk looked like afterward:

Then came the adventure of disposing of it. We decided we couldn’t give it away to a friend, because it’s literally so huge that no one would have space for it (without emptying an entire room of their house). We couldn’t just set it out on the front curb with a big “FREE” sign on it, because it literally weighs five hundred pounds or more and no one would be able to move it (plus, we’d need to disassemble it to get it out the door, then reassemble it on the curb). So we dismantled it into about fifty pieces, loaded everything into the van, and took it all to the dumpster at my office. Several of the larger pieces were too big for the dumpster and had to be cracked in half with strategic karate kicks. Fortunately particle board cracks pretty easily with enough concentrated pressure.

With the office empty, we set up a smaller desk for Laralee and moved my desk (just a solid-core door with two filing cabinets) up from the basement. Even with these much smaller desks, the office is still pretty cramped.

But we’ve accomplished our two goals: no more big desk to move, and I won’t be stuck down in the basement this summer. Yay!

Laralee and Kyra are about to start a two-week “cleanse”, which is code for “food no normal human would eat”. The intention is to help both of them with the malaise they’ve been feeling. It means we have a ton of fruits and vegetables that Laralee bought, and she’ll be testing some new recipes for super-healthy food. It also means Zaque and I can look forward to cooking our own meals for the next couple of weeks (hello, mac and cheese!)

Today is Mother’s Day, which of course means none of our kids did anything special for their mother. Luckily our second daughter, Hannah, brought over some nice flowers, chocolate bars (Chocolove, of course), and balloons.

She’s very sweet, and Laralee definitely felt touched by the gesture.

Zaque will be graduating from high school in a few short weeks, and I realized we have to put together some graduation announcements. He and I went out to the yard, where the tree in our front lawn is in full blossom, to take some “nice” photos.

Of course, it’s Zaque. So the results went something like this:

But in the end I managed to catch him right when he looked presentable. Woo hoo!