atomicthoughts.com

Man did I sweat tonight. More than I have in years and years, and all for 20 minutes on an excercise bike. It felt good though. Sweating makes me feel like I accomplished something.

Honest to god, the easiest way to a native is to watch them on a street corner in the summer. They stand in the shade of the light post.

I’m actually working out now. It’s been 6 times in a row or so, that makes a routine. It’s the first time in my life I’ve done this on a regular basis. In high school I rode my bike and played tennis on a daily basis, but that certainly wasn’t the same.

At the gym we do a little cardio, do a little weight lifting. But they aren’t weights, they’re machines. And not even machines with cables and pins and actual weights, but machines with …. well, I have no idea what’s in there. But I’m pretty sure it’s not weight. Just resistance and bytes.

These are machines you log into. They’re machines with a website. It’s a geeks dream come true! So far I’ve burned 60 gummy bears of calories and lifted 15,932 pounds. This and many other mostly worthless details are available at my fingertips.

I’ve been taking Monday off every week this summer, to make up for a really grueling semester. It’s amazing how much taking the day entirely off resembles working it and sitting in meetings all day.

I miss paying your bill at the register. It used to be only the finer restaurants would bring your bill and take your money, but now it’s everywhere, even Denny’s. I liked the opportunity to tell someone else how much the service sucked. It was a good check and balance that has largely disappeared.

The lesson for today: Don’t throw glass. You would think a grown man would have figured that out by now. You would be wrong.

atomicthoughts.com is a weird domain name evidently. But it is memorable, I hope. It won’t be a place to discuss nuclear proliferation or the finer points of the SALT II treaty. No, it’s atomic as in “small”, “singular”, “self contained”.

One of the coolest concepts I learned of in IT is transactional integrity. (Coolest IT phrase: data granularity). Transactional integrity isn’t necessarily very exciting, but it seemed like a big leap from PC maintenance or low level coding to enterprise level stuff. But anyway, I dig transactional integrity. But if it’s an atomic transaction, there’s no need for it.

And that’s what most of my thoughts are, single brief entities. I often have brief thoughts, barely more than a sentence worth of theory, that feel compelled to be recorded. At least that’s the theory.

Happy Father’s Day to Nick, to Dave, and to my grandfather. These are all men who are pretty good to damn good fathers, and who I look up to.

I’ve spent the last 2 Mother’s days, since my mother passed away suddenly, in mourning. Also celebrating the day for my wife, the best mother I know. It’s been a strange juxtaposition, but one I’m walking alright. It’ll get better with time, I’m sure.

Father’s day has never been a day of mourning, nor one of celebration. My dad left very early in our lives, too young and age to reflect on not having a father for father’s day. By the time I started thinking about such larger life issues, I realized him leaving was easily the best thing for my family, and found no reason to have issue with not having a father.

Of course, I really did have a father. Or a father figure anyway, someone to look up to and watch and learn how to be a man. He was a very quiet man in the heat of the moment, but seemed wise when he finally spoke up to calm everyone down. He certainly wasn’t big into discipline, spanking or scolding me only once that I can remember.

One of my strongest memories is him doing the bills every month, using some weird mechanical counter/calculator thing. At the time was the most wonderful futuristic device I had seen; now it’s a quaint relic. But I bet he still uses it. It wasn’t the paying the bills that stuck with me, it was their delivery. They used to live close to downtown, and he and I would walk around to deliver the bills by hand, paying the gas company, the phone, the electricity, even the mechanic. Except I don’t think we really paid the mechanic as much as just paid a visit and had something to drink.

As we walked around town, me all of 4 or 5, my grandpa seemed like the tallest and strongest man around. And easily the most popular. Everywhere we went, people waved and said hi. Certainly because of him, and a little bit because that was the kind of time when you said hi to passers by.

I don’t really remember every having any big “talks” with my grandpa. Certainly never the father-son kinds of talks you think of when you think of such things. He never even taught me to tie a tie, I’m not entirely sure he ever knew himself. I still chuckle remembering the day I really needed a tie tied, and he was at work. So I went up to his closet and there were a dozen ties, already tied. Some of them had been that way for longer than I had been around, easily.

What he did teach me was just how to be, how to act, and how to be a good person. He was the epitome of a role model, someone to learn from just by watching. So thank you, grandpa, for teaching me to be the man and father I am today.

Yesterday I turned 31. As part of an extended birthday weekend, on Friday I went to Friday’s Front Row (The TGIFriday’s in Bank One Ballpark) with my family and Earl, and Earl and I hung around for a very dull loss by the Diamondbacks. The next day I attended a memorial service, had an extremely tasty burrito for lunch, drove back from Phoenix, got some wonderful gifts, had some tasty cake, had some dinner, and watched a little movie. It was a pretty nice day overall, if a little introspective.

I still miss my mom, truth be told. I miss her calling to sing me happy birthday. She was always the first one of the day. The memorial service was the first one I’d attended since my mom’s, so that didn’t help. And it was for someone’s father. Although stastically they’re probably always someone’s mother or father.

Birthday’s are often a time when one takes stake in there life and reflects on the past and future, which in general I find myself doing a lot more as I get older. I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard.

Last year at this time compared to this year at this time are like night and day, owing almost entirely to the house. At 30, I never dreamed of owning a house. Maybe in 10 years at an outside shot, I thought. I tore up, spit out, shreaded, crapped on, and spindled my credit history throughout my 20′s. While I knew you could still get car loans at shitty rates with bad credit, and a credit card (maybe secured) with bad credit, but a house? No way.

At the urging of my good friend and financial guru SpoonDave I pulled up my credit report to being the arduous process of cleaing it up. But … it wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t that arduous. And I was only a few points away from qualifying for an FHA loan. Around the same time, a house almost fell into our lap. A friend of my mother in law was moving, and wanted to sell his house to a family that he knew. He wanted to do it without a realtor, and he wanted to do it for what was probably less than market value.

ba da bing ba da boom, we had a house. Moved in in September. Holy cow. It’s hard to explain the differences between pre-house and post-house. In many many ways it made little to no difference. But mentally, it seems huge. I’m an adult now, all growed up. I come home to our house. I work on our yard. It’s really quiet incredible.

But back to introspection, this is about my year not the house. Other than the house, things are mostly normal. My son has changed from the crying pooping lump of a 4 month old to a wonderful laughing 16month old. My daughter continues to amaze me with her language skills. So I guess we haven’t screwed them up yet.

Everything else is pretty much the same. And that’s a good thing.

13 years ago, when I was a freshmen in college, about a third of one of my molars just broke off and fell out. No warning, no pain, it was just gone. Not having any insurance, and mostly since it didn’t hurt, I ignored it.

3 months ago another third of the tooth fell off. Also no pain, no warning. But this time I had insurance, and thought this was a good time to stop putting off going to the dentist, which I had been doing for about the last 3 years.

So in I went, although it took 2 months to get the actual appointment. I had steeled myself to my biggest fear, the recrimination of the staff as I fessed up to my absymal oral hygiene. Although my mom had been great about getting us to the dentist on a very regular basis, the day to day emphasis on toothly things just wasn’t there. For 30 1/2 years of my life, I brushed my teeth an average of once a month, and that’s being extremely generous.

As I approached my appointment, I kept thinking about an episode of Northern Exposure. Chris came from a family that died before 40, and that was the lifespan he was looking at. Then something happened and he realized he would live a lot longer, but his teeth might not accompany him. In fact, that’s exactly what I thought would be the case. I thought I’d be completely in dentures in short order.

So I went, and I was … shocked. There was the obvious problem, which needed a root canal and a crown. There’s a pretty bad cavity on the left that needs a filling. I had mild to medium periodontal (gum) disease. And that was it. Not only was that it, but my other teeth looked “exceptionally good”. Not only that, but my overall health was so good they didn’t even ask my about my dental routine. I was floored. I really had been convinced my teeth were decayed and rotting and about to fall out.

So I quickly got my root canal, which wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. There were painful parts, but I kept picturing the birth of my son. I drew on my wife for stength at that time, and it worked extremely well.

The other problem area, the gums, are now almost completely taken care of. The hygenist was in awe at how quickly they had healed, and thought I must be doing the most fantastic of jobs. Today I left the office again on a high, extremely proud of myself for taking a nagging problem of 13 years and finally taking care of it.