razark

I got a call from my ex-wife earlier this evening. She has a cough and a fever. Her mother is nearly 70, has a history of poor health, and recently got out of the hospital. She's always been the type to argue with doctors and always knows better than trained professionals. The kind that thought she was invincible and didn't need to keep isolated. The kind who went to the airport to pick up her boyfriend's daughter who just came back from spending spring break in Seattle. The one who has my two children with her, and expects me to deal with them after they've been exposed to her for a week, just because she can't grow up and deal with reality.

Pick an obscure skill. Learn it. Practice it. Amaze people with it when you are released.

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, I guess. That was horrible. Whiskey was the only reason I was able to sleep at all until I could get to a doc for some painkillers. Not something I'd ever want to go through again.

"From space I saw Earth -- indescribably beautiful and with the scars of national boundaries gone." -Muhammad Faris "National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real." -Carl Sagan "When you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people." -Frank Borman "I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions..." -Michael Collins "The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." -Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud

Not ordered, but encouraged to stay home. Last Monday, the agency told us to work from home if we could. Tuesday, the center went to mandatory telework. Not having a laptop, I had to drag my PC and a monitor home with me. Had to rearrange my bedroom to set up a desk where I could plug the computer into the router. City and state so far seem to be disinclined to order a stay-at-home, and from what I've seen, people don't seem to be too inclined to follow it if they did.

and . That about covers the entirety of music history, right? (And hoping I can sneak in a third.)

Glad to hear it's working. I don't know much about phones. Mine is about ten years old now, and it's starting to have it's own problems. The buttons are starting to act up, and I have to plug it in to charge every two or three days.

Well, did you do it properly, or did you do something silly, like wash your phone with water, instead of champagne?

From here: "Mark IVs were also the first tanks fitted with unditching beams by field workshops. A large wooden beam, reinforced with sheet metal, was stored across the top of the tank on a set of parallel rails. If the tank became stuck, the beam was attached to the tracks (often under fire) and then dragged beneath the vehicle, providing grip." "If a tank got stuck in the mud and the tracks were finding it hard to gain purchase (a common hazard in the artillery-churned no-mans-land of the Western Front), the unditching beam would be chained to both tracks. As the tracks travel under the tank, the beam would dig into the mud, providing a much better purchase, and then the tank would pull itself over the beam that has now dug into the ground. Once the tank had completely passed over the beam, it could be moved to the front end of the tank again, and the process repeated until the tank reached more solid ground." From here. And for extra awesomeness, in use:

How about a godsdamn farkin' manual that explains things, and the expectation that players have the ability and inclination to read it? Or is that just too much to expect these days?

I found bread at the store today. The problem was that when I couldn't find bread, I also couldn't find any flour.

No, the best idea ever is that multiplayer will be optional, if this is indicative of what multiplayer has in store...

Lucky you. It's so much fun when you notice some of the rice is wriggling around in the container while you're cleaning up after dinner...

Before or after eating it? That was not my favorite night...

How much are you willing to spend? There's nothing in physics that says you can't, and if you have a large enough budget, you can get it done.