Getting Old(er) Tomorrow
Last week I was surprised by my family in Illinois. I had gone home for a 20th high school reunion and while there my family seized the opportunity to get a cake and sing happy birthday to me a week early. I was caught up in the reunion at the time and so the surprise was pretty effective.
Today, technology chimed in to help remind me of my birthday as well.
A combination of Outlook reminders and spam email messages recommending Viagra as a back drop seemed pretty ironic or funny or whatever it is.
Tomorrow, is the actual birthday and I’ll be home on my birthday for the first time in several years. I’m looking forward to an easy going birthday with family, and then the day after that I hit the road for two back to back trips. One trip to Orlando for Affiliate Summit Un-conference at SeaWorld and the other the Digital Video Expo in Pasadena California. I suspect all that travel piled on to the travel from last week is going to make me feel my age a bit.
Working on a New Novel – PETER3D OUT
For the last few weeks, I have been working on a new novel called PETER3D OUT. Its a mystery in a cyberpunk future
I’ve been thinking over the premise and plot for several months and now I’m writing this puppy up.
Its going to be published in a very raw, rough draft at http://peter3dout.com .
I don’t have the registration set up yet, but basically anyone that registers (free) can read the book for free and ask questions, edit/proof/ or even piss all over it if you like.
Looking for all levels of critique, but I prefer the constructive types of criticism if I can get it. If not I will settle for the venom that makes me stronger.
Goodbye January! Catching up after travel and sickness
I’ve never been so happy to see February come. For over a week now, there has been some one in our house that was disgustingly sick. I was home with the kids all but one day last week, after returning from a weekend trip to Boston for WordCamp. Thursday, I made it to the office for a day, thinking the kids were better, but two of them were sick again by the early evening.
The third got sick about 1 am Friday morning, and I joined her, Mya, about an hour later. I was completely wasted for about 24 hours and barely functional until late last night. I was able to venture out into fresh air a couple times to watch the kids sledding Saturday after we got hit by a nice little snow/ice storm.
Then later Saturday, my son got sick again, about 4 days after he got sick the first time. I told him he was lucky that he had been OK, enough to go sledding while he could. I think it was rolling down a hill of snow that ultimately put him over the edge and started him puking all over his snow boots.
Corbin was sick the rest of the night. It had been a while since he had been that sick, apparently several years. Despite the fact that he had just watched the rest of us empty our guts all week, he was very surprised that we couldn’t give him a pill or some medicine that would fix his eleven year old stomach.
I had to think back a bit and the last time I could remember him being sick like that might have been when he was about 3 or 4 years old. Talk about lucky, he just didn’t have the experience of being sick like that and literally didn’t know what to do, like not throw up on his own feet, the floor, etc. He’s regularly been the kid in class that received perfect attendance awards.
I don’t think I ever received a perfect attendance award in my life. When I was his age, I was typically sick with a flu bug like that at least a couple times a year.
He thought that after throwing up, he could just launch in and eat a couple hot dogs and drink 3 glasses of water. Big mistake.
I had to sit down with him and basically teach him how to be sick.
- No, there isn’t medicine that fixes this instantly
- No, you can’t drink as much as you want
- No, you can’t eat as much as you want even if you are hungry
- Yes, being sick might keep you awake most of the night
- No, you can not have something to help you sleep (too much TV commercials
) - Yes, its a good thing that you are awake, it might help save your life if you do throw up
- Yes, you have to carry a bowl with you when you walk back and forth to the bathroom
- In the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in the Bucket List, “You can’t trust a fart” (oops too late on that advice)
I had mixed feelings about the fact that he didn’t really know any of these life lessons. It was awesome that he had been so healthy not to have gone through this and learned it the hard way, but I also felt like maybe I hadn’t done something sooner to teach him these basics sooner.
The good news, he knows now!
Finally, last night after the family went to bed, my own appetite finally came back. I had eaten my first normal meal last night, but started actually getting hungry last night around 10PM.
I started doing some basic easy work, busy work you might say last night. Stuff that needed to be done, but nothing that took a whole lot of brain power, concentration or effort. I was saving that for today, for a fresh perspective unburdened by sickness and misery, and now that I’ve finally written a blog article after weeks and weeks it seems like, time to get going on that!


I’ve been running in Vibram’s since September, that is up until about 2 weeks ago.
I ramped up through the learning training curve last fall and things were going fantastic. Loved the results, loved the feel, loved the new strength in my feet and legs after getting trained up, even started to love running for the first time in 37 years, despite always being naturally ‘good at running’. I just read this article about “
Running in grass in Vibrams is like getting a foot massage. It feels great!
My wife and I both use our cell phones for alarm clocks. The damned devices are with us almost all day long every day. I get calls late at night, typically for work, from my business partner and friend Joe Klein who is a few time zones away, sometimes from other friends or family, sometimes business meetings setup at late hours with other internet types who tend to burn the midnight oil. This issue is one that has been felt by my wife far more than it has been in reverse.



