in case you're wondering where your host has been, he's wondering the same thing. i haven't intended to checkout like i have but just got caught in the wake of change. with a new job comes new routines, new people, new focus, new hours, and quite simply just new, new and some more new. now that i'm going through it i realize i was in great need for some more 'new' in my life. and aside from the neglect this part of my world is seeing, things are going swimmingly, i just haven't yet hit on a steady cadence for my days.

last night while i cooked dinner, bella sat at the counter and sketched me (below). the details are great, from the print on my shirt (which is dead-on) to the korean bulgogi in the skillet (which was so good), to my cable-wrap glasses (which are mightily bent right now) to the smile and wide-eyed gaze (sleep deprived delirium) her eye was quite succinct. unfortunately that keen eye had to also nail my flared and stubby legs. dumb luck that.

while visiting with my friend in utah, sister-keri, back in february, we had many discussions about all sorts of things. now that we were both parents and doing that whole adult thing, some of these dealt with parenting and one of the more interesting touched on family mantras. the family she grew up in struck me as being very happy, very healthy so i asked if there was an over-riding message tha...

our bathroom door doesn't lock. come to think of it, our bathroom door doesn't even latch. it stands wide open much of the time, occupied or not. casting a glance that way while walking down the hall often results with spying bella sitting on the john chin resting on her bracing arm and her legs dangling from the seat.

you may think that given the state of our door hardware, people would respect that when the door is swung closed, the room is occupied. we're not quite there yet. five minutes before the writing of this thought i was attending to my late afternoon constitution when the door pushed open enough for bella's head to pop through. "oh!" she exclaimed. "sorry dad, i just need one of these." her arm reached to the back of the door and pulled a bath towel off a hook and she and it disappeared. she called a "thank you dad" out as she quickly ran down the hall.

i'm not a math guy but this equation is one which i'm all over. that is, if bella is hurriedly after a full size bath towel, something pretty bad just went down. there was a time i'd try to figure out if it was one of my valuables or another's but parental experience has shown me that it is always my stuff. the kids have yet to be employed and therefore haven't acquired anything of merit or value. the last thing marty voluntarily purchased out of need or desire was back in 98 and that item fell when bella was just three. so what is left is a house chock full of dad-stuff. and it's not like i prefer delicate and costly electronics or anything. and certainly not stuff that couldn't withstand being doused with a bowl full of milk that got upended during a scuffle between bella and alex for the remote while yelling "my show, no my show, no my show, NO, MY SHOW".

many more of those sorts of battles and that argument will become a moot point because marty and i are in agreement that we're not replacing any more broken household items until the children leave for college. if you could see some of the antics that go on in our miniscule tv room, you'd know the tele is already living on some serious borrowed time.

about a year ago, my family attended a carnival put on by a university near our home. we just kicked around and rode some rides and had a pleasant family afternoon. about two months later while walking through another part of our community this young guy stopped us and asked if we had been at that carnival. we told him we had. he said he thought he had a picture of me and my son he thought was pretty good and wanted to share it with us. i gave him my email address but never heard from him (i think what i wrote on the scrap of paper, later proved unintelligible to him ... shocking that).

last weekend, and almost a full year later, we were at another university function and he appeared again. he confirmed we were still those folks and said the previous mailing was returned but he still wanted to get it to us. this time i let him do the writing and good to his word this showed up in my inbox the very next day.

turns out he is a student photographer working for the school's paper. in additionally looking at his other work it is clear he has some serious skills. rachit, i sincerely thank you for making the effort to place in my hands a moment that will always warm me. hat tipped.


click to enlarge

i'm reasonably certain there's a game afoot in my home called 'hide dad's shit'. there are simply too many of my possessions that go missing at any given time for any other explanation to be plausible.

distrustful of my hunch? when i find my favorite tie rolled up in the bottom of marty's twelve-year old moon boot in the back of the coat closet ... downstairs ... i'm feeling rather convinced.

i share in a small professional consortium of sorts. there's just three of us and i am for certain the pup of the litter. one of the two taught me everything i know about web design and the other everything i know about web development. we all used to work together. now we don't even live in the same state and in one case not even the same country.

several years back in a ski lodge atop the canadian rockies, the three of us made five-year projections about our professional lives. one of us nailed it, one surpassed it and one, well, one keeps meandering towards the light but hasn't yet held a straight line to its source.

chris wanted to create a jackpot product. a sophisticated and enticing utility that would allow him to support his home while investing his energy in something he believed in. four years later he is performing enterprise-level implementations of a wiki-fashioned, microsoft-centric, intranet manager he calls thoughtFarmer.

bookguy privately covets the notion of hopping industries. i won't get into the specifics of his aspiration but the venture would offer him new sorts of mental exercises using his very impressive technology chops as well as his gift for oration and unavoidably, leadership. he is unconsciously adrift towards such a change, he just hasn't noticed the oar in his hand yet. i predict he will soon look down and see it though and when he does decide to lower it into the water it's better than a done deal.

and i, i managed to stay diligent and patient about things until i secured a position with the one institution in my city that i hoped to secure a position with. and time has aged it well.

i'm glad to see the three of us trending in such positive directions and i wish my cohorts much success. i wish myself an ounce more, or as bella would say, a worm's bite more, than them because as the runt of the litter, i need to be that much better to hold my own on our next ski boondoggle.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. a gooder name

i start my new job today. you should have seen me last night. it was like the night before the first day of school. picking out my clothes. getting all my desk supplies organized in my book-bag. double-checking my alarm clock, which is to say i asked marty twice if she had set her alarm. she had.

and check this out. here is the sort of stuff my new boss does.


and, for reference sake this has been the nature of my work to date.


i ask, how could two fellas with such disparate, yet brilliant, subjects of expertise create anything short of breathtaking and wondrous? i agree, we just can't miss. this is going to be a super-fun and rollicking experience.

in preparation for my new job, and more significantly, my exodus from my previous one, i'm going to take the week off. i'll be back on the 10th.