The last solo tuck-in...for awhile

Well, I got my twins tucked in for the last time solo for a while anyway. My wife, Lord willing, is on her flight now from Orlando so she should be home around 2230 or so. Both my older kids are home and my son was a huge help this weekend with the twins. He worked extremely hard on his math facts this weekend; we did four sessions just today and he is so close to mastering. My oldest daughter just returned from a trip with my in-laws to Ogdensburg to visit one of my father-in-law's brothers.

I've made minimal progress through Mere Christianity this week but did make it through the chapter on virtues and social morality. This book must be taken in small bites otherwise one's mind may choke!

Today is day 18 of my Purpose Driven Life journey. This experience has been very positive so far. Recent readings focus on the need to be connected to other Christians. In short, its a team sport and we need to stick close to help each other make it through life.

Along the lines of my Moleskine obsession, I'm on page 181 of my first pocket version with a squared pocket in the shrink wrap ready to step into my jounaling world. I've gone completely retro by using a really cheap Parker Reflex fountain pen just to get a feel for using a fountain pen. What the pundits say is true - a fountain pen does glide very nicely across the right kind of paper. Just don't try it on the sketchbook papers found in the Moleskines or other notebooks. I think it clogs the nib and makes writing with it more like a ballpoint. I have my eye on a Waterman Phileas as the next pen to try, but I may wait to see if someone will buy it for me for Christmas :-).

Better than Survivor...

I've been home with all four of my children this week while my wife is attending a scrapbooking conference (and I though only us IT people had conferences!) in Florida. So far things are going well. The kids are done with school for the week so that relieves a bit of pressure in the morning to get everyone ready. One of the twins was sick when my wife left but now is better. As you may guess, the other twin is now sick and was just laying all over me after dinner. Since she is the "cat" of the twins (versus the other who is a "puppy"), it is unusual for her to be overly affectionate.

I'm starting to make some headway through Mere Christianity as well as going day by day through The Purpose Driven Life. On the more secular side, I've been enjoying reruns of ST:TNG on SpikeTV from 1300 - 1500. Think of it as my daily siesta.

I have another teaching gig starting up next Thursday at Syracuse University. I'm going to lecture on EJB programming in six weeks. It really should be twelve weeks so I think I'll resort to just doing lectures with no labs. I guess this client of SU wants to use JBoss. I'll be scrambling to learn that application server and associated Eclipse plugins before next Thursday. Yee Haw!!!!!!

Mean Time to Twin Toddler Destruction

Mean Time to Twin Toddler Destruction (MTTTTD) is a variation of the metric Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) often used to describe mechanical or computer-based reliability. MTTTTD is defined as the elapsed time (T delta) between time T in which one picks up all toys used by a pair of human children and time T' in which the same twin toddlers are released to play with said toys.

Just General Catching Up

Its been quite a while since I've entered anything into my blog. Perhaps because I've been busy or perhaps because I've spent so much time journaling into my analog blog that I've neglected my poor blog.

The kids are now back in school, the twins are two, and Scouts is in full swing. I've spent a fair amount of free time providing "geek" support to some missionaries in Honduras. To say working on this project has energized my spiritual life would be an understatement. Its simply awesome to be a sender!

Books I'm reading now include C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. I guess my desire here is to dig into the fundamentals of Christianity for when I encounter those who do not (yet!) believe. Because of its reference by one of my friends, I'm reading Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life . I'll be on day 12 tomorrow and its already having a positive influence on my life. I anticipate that I'll re-read with some other folks at some point just to solidify the concepts. I even have another friend of the family using it as a witnessing tool. According to this evening's Dateline, 20M copies of the book have been sold and the church that Warren pastors is vibrant and alive. There is even a network of bloggers sharing their own thoughts on the book! Next on the radar screen is Grace Awakening which, if Swindoll's broadcasts are any indication, should be an excellent read.

My wife is off to a scrapbooking conference this week so I'm home alone to trash the house and catch up on lots of reading, writing, and good old fashioned deep thinking/praying/meditation. Well, I better stop typing and get ironing my kid's clothes for school tomorrow!