Disjointed Kitsch

My oldest is about to graduate high school. All the adages about it doesn’t seem so long ago certainly apply. The road to this point has not been easy but it has been worth it. There were many times that I didn’t believe he would actually make graduation on time with the rest of his class. There have been arguments, fights and punishments over things large and small, over effort (or rather lack there of), grades, and attitude.

It’s not that he’s not a smart young man. He’s very bright (ok, all parents say that) when he applys himself. It’s just that he has a hard time of doing just that. He must have decided that it was worth it and since late in his Junior year he’s applied himself more and I think been pleasantly suprised with the results. His Senior year has actually been quite good. Perhaps he just has Senior-itis since the beginning of 8th grade.

His next level of education is life: job, driving, making his way into the world. Perhaps that’ll involve additional schooling or the military (which he has talked to us about). I want for him what my parents wanted for me: success in whatever you do coupled with a secure and supportive place to return to while spreading the wings.

Since we’re planning an extended vacation to Hawaii to celebrate this event, he won’t be looking for a job right away, and I don’t think it’ll start to seem strange until September when my youngest heads back to school and he doesn’t. I image he’ll live at home for a while and that’s OK with his mother and me. Learning life takes awhile.

While reworking my site I installed the Mandigo theme. I noticed that the FAlbum plugin that I use for my photos page was formatting oddly. I was able to resolve the problem by using a theme specific “falbum.php” file and replacing the basic “get_header” php statement with the following:

<?php
get_header();
$alwayssidebars = get_option('mandigo_always_show_sidebars');
if ($alwayssidebars) {
	include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar.php');
	if (get_option('mandigo_1024') && get_option('mandigo_3columns')) {
		include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar2.php');
	}
}
php?>

That’s it! FAlbum started producing the correct page layout.

With my oldest about to finish high school, it’s a shame I didn’t know about this wonderful grade improving technique years ago.

Perhaps there’s hope for my middle school daughter!

I like fantasy football and every fall/winter I play in 3-4 leagues. Sometimes I win it all, sometimes I’m an also ran, other times I loose horribly. Every year after the SuperBowl I look forward to the next season so I can play again. I’m not much of a hoops watcher, although March Madness grabs my attention, and hockey, although watchable isn’t something I follow. Baseball is OK, but I don’t pay much attention to it until late September and the playoffs. However, I miss the fantasy sports world and figured I give Fantasy Baseball a try, at least for a year. Who knows, I might get into the game if I have a more vested interest in the players.

ESPN.com has free leagues and I found the most appropriate league to give this a try. The league is called “I Hate Baseball” and my team is the Keene Black Flys. Since I know next to nothing about “who’s who” in baseball outside the household names in the paper, I picked an autodraft leage that scores points based on pitching and batting stats.

We’ll see how this goes. Might actually be fun. At the very least I’ll have a new topic to talk about with my buddies that do follow baseball.

In May of 1993 I moved my family to New Hampshire from Sunnyvale, CA to take a position with the Engineering group of PC Connection. When we moved the owner of the company, Pat Gallup, advised me to look for housing in Keene, NH even though I would be working in Newport, NH. According to her, PC Connection would likely move the Engineering group to Keene in the “near future”. So we moved to Keene with the hope that the 35 minute commute to Newport wouldn’t be forever. I left PC Connection in 1996 never once having been based in Keene, although I did work out of their Bradco St. facility for a few days.

I took a job in Brattleboro, VT, a 25 minute commute, with a company called Modern Age Books. That gig lasted less than a year and earned them the nickname, Modern Age Crooks.

For the last 9+ years I’ve been with NewsBank, inc. in various rolls working out of their Chester, VT location, which is a 45 minute commute from Keene.

In the Fall of 2005 my boss started talking about opening a “development office” south of Chester in order to attract more technical talent from the lower valley area. The effort stalled, but eventually got its legs back in February 2006. By that time he decided to open an office in…. KEENE and asked me to run the place. By the end of April we leased space and the transition began!

Today, June 1 of 2006, was the first full day that I’ve worked in an office in Keene, NH that I’ll be returning to day, after day, after day… My commute is 2 minutes. I live 1 mile from work. I can think about walking and biking to work instead of driving the car. My 5 year old car that has 83,000 miles on it from commuting to Chester will start to get a break. I’ll be fueling up less than once per week. Today I was able to each lunch at home, pick up my son from school, make a bank deposit, and return a library book all during working hours!

Perhaps good things do come to those who wait and preserver.