Here I am, back from a week in Louisiana. In August. Seeing my Dad and Step-mom again was wonderful, as was hanging out with my brother; all people of whom I don’t see nearly enough.

The getting to and returning from Louisiana part wasn’t so great, thanks in large part to the pendejos at Northwest Airlines. On the way down they didn’t put my bags on the plane. The folks in New Orleans International said that every flight out of Detroit that day was missing about twenty pieces, which would show up on the next flight, which would itself be missing about twenty pieces, ad infinitum. I can only imagine that the pendejos of Northwest met at the pendehum (the place pendejos go to learn their trade) that morning and decided to show how indispensable the union was by pissing off all the passengers.

On the way home we were delayed because one of the planes was suffering a case of Mechanic’s Strike and had to be swapped out for one which somebody won in a package of Crackerjacks.

On a brighter note, class starts next Monday so I have been putting together my syllabus for the semester. This year I am coming down like a ton of bricks on, er, goldbrickers who think they can show up to only half of my classes and have a hope in Hell of passing. I will add cruelties as next week approaches.

Plans for buying a house are moving ahead at a moderate but steady pace. Tomorrow I will talk to a banker to get approval on a loan by showing that I actually have a job and won’t be paying for this house with money earned by selling counterfeit Lava Lamps on the black market. Nope. That money is going towards a new set of 36″ rims on my phat Saturn.

I am off for a week of visiting family in Covington, Lousiana. Be back next weekend. Be cool, work hard, and don’t look any wooden nickels in the mouth.

Yesterday evening I had a meeting with John of Argos Bookstore, in which we discussed the whats and whys and wherefores of creating an Argos Bookstore website. This is something we have been talking about, off and on, for most of the summer so far. Now it looks like it will be moving forward.

The meeting was my first experience using free wireless internet access in a cafe. I haven’t yet made up my mind about the whole thing. On the one hand, very convenient. On the other, Kava House had (at that time) bandwidth and connectivity issues, and I had a serious bout of the jitters with visions of spilling my iced mocha into the keyboard of a very expensive laptop computer.

John and I talked for almost two hours, and came up with some exciting ideas about what would go into the site, and how we could present it as a small community, specifically focused portal and repository of certain aspects of Grand Rapids history. In the process of this meeting I also discovered that John is yet another member of the over-educated, under-employed segment of Grand Rapids, from which I seem to draw so many of my friends.

Discussing the fee for building the site was a little awkward. I said “I’ll do it for free!” He said “We gotta pay you!” In the end we worked out some of the details for a trade-type arrangement.

Once the work begins I will throw regular updates up here. I hope things begin soon, as the school year begins at the end of this month and from that point on, until the end of April, my time will once again belong to everyone except me.

When I launched the new version of this site a couple of months ago, completely unstyled and undesigned, Bock warned me that I would never get around to actually designing the thing now that I had the ability to display content. Well, it seems he was almost right.

The color palette comes from the photo at the top of the page, which was taken at the Frederik Meijer Gardens back in early March of this year. The butterfly is a, er, Heliconius Hecale…? Damn. I seem to have misplaced the information guide from the exhibit. Anyway, the colors displayed on the site are all captured from the above photograph, a technique which I first used on the From the Heart Yoga website three years and one version ago. It sure is a lot easier to come up with a good palette this way, instead of endless hours with color swatches.

In other news I recently accepted an offer to become a member of the Waterfall Productions team, so starting next week I will be back to being an employee. Less freedom, but a much steadier paycheck. Which is a good thing to have right now, because I have decided that it is time to buy a house. When, where and how, I will post as I answer those questions for myself.

Things are kind of slow at Steelcase right now, so I am working from home. I haven’t done this in months; not since the 6-week vacation between jobs back in February and early March. Much to my surprise, I am being fairly productive. So far, I have worked out some of the data structure-and-flow issues in a SAP training game; I have installed TextPattern for one client, and am piecing together the logic for the secure client login for another client.

I find I have a difficult decision ahead of me: Ferris State University wants to hire me to teach a Game User Interface Design class during the Fall semester. On the one hand, HELL YEAH!!! On the other, my plate is already pretty full, and what with the Web Design class at Kendall College taking up most of my (otherwise) free time, I would be so busy that I would never see my girlfriend.

I suppose I could just stop sleeping. Again.

On a lighter note, Paula and I saw Star Wars on Sunday. The special effects were fantastic. So much so, that I occasionally forgot that there were people in the movie, too. Overall, I thought SW3 was better than SW1 or SW2, simply because the dialogue was much improved (but still not good by any stretch of the imagination). “Younglings”? Please! What are you, Lucas, a 12-year-old Star Wars fan fiction writer?

After a brief detour through A Game of Thrones, I have picked up Dark Age Ahead again. Check this out:

Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality. [Karen] Armstrong describes it as a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit, always seeking to know more and to extend areas of competence and control of the environment, to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Yesterday was my 36th birthday. I was going to post something about the goings-on of previous June 5ths in the history of the world, but due to apocalyptic thunderstorms I was without power until after 11:00pm.

My weekend had two high points: The first was on Saturday, when Master Lee’s school performed downtown at Festival. The amazing Anisa did her usual brilliant job as our official/unofficial class photographer. The photos will be posted to Master Lee’s site later this week.

For me, the best part of the demonstration was when Master Lee’s nine-year-old grandson, Ethan, performed a solo version of Gung Li Chuan, one of our basic forms. In the photos Master Lee is standing behind Ethan, face absolutely glowing with pride.

Then yesterday my girlfriend Paula, and the afore-mentioned Anisa, and Anisa’s boyfriend Geoffrey cooked an amazing dinner (fish, asparagus, couscous, tiramisu) to help me celebrate while the thunder and lightning and wind and rain and hail raged outside. Bock bought me a bottle of rum, and my parents called to say Hi Happy Birthday

Good food, good friends, a loving family, and a numerically interesting birthday. Could life possibly get any better?