well, aside from the death of penpen, not much is new. (new computer parts on the way! woo-hoo!)

the coffeehouse on friday was pretty cool, though not many people showed up.

saturday was spent doing laundry and wandering around walmart & lowes looking for shelves. (not my idea, believe me)

sunday it freakin' SNOWED. what was who thinking? ...though, at the moment, the weather does seem to be back somewhere close to normal for this time of year....

sheri, ginger, tony & i played some ninja burger last night. that was fun. i'm not going to be surprised if 'i should have recognized your stylish ninja pacifier' shows up on the site somewhere... ...er, somewhere else...

looking forward to some gaming this weekend...

songs i've learned to play this week:
simon & garfunkel - "america"
cream - "white room"

~PS

well. shortly after 2:30 this afternoon, PenPen, my faithful computer, called it quits. it seems his motherboard failed him. We can only hope his passing was painless and that he will rest in peace.

i'm currently conspiring on how i might acquire a new machine, since i kinda need it for work... ...and for my sanity. until then, i'm stuck with chii - which is ok, but somewhat less than ideal.

~PS

so...while making some upgrades to this site and testing some things... ...i might have accidentally deleted my last blog post. not that it said anything important, mind you, but i didn't actually mean to kill it. alas.

~PS

so things have been pretty cool recently.

we went to the coffeehouse @ watauga on friday and got to see some slides about a trip around south america. there were penguins! this made me happy inside.

on saturday we got to have a little lan party, which was lots of fun... ...and ginger cooked some thai for us too. (thanks ginger :))

the weather has also been really nice lately (until today, anyway) and we've had a couple few picnics over by the creek at milligan - this is a nice thing about living across the street.

we also got a bocce set, which we've been enjoying.

i've also been working on version 2.0 of this website, but this comes as no surprise since tony has already pointed out its inevitability.

other than that, it's been pretty much the same stuff.

songs i've learned to play this week:
caedmon's call "i just don't want coffee"
eli "the lumber song"
pink floyd "wish you were here"

songs i wrote this week:
"two questions"

~PS

this morning on the way to church, i saw the following written on a church billboard:

"the birds are back
the grass is green
God did it again!"

Aside from the blatant cheesiness of this 'message', there was something else about it that struck me as somewhat...odd. As i drove a couple more miles, i began to realize exactly what that was.

The first thing that came to mind was the literal implications of that sign. The idea that 'god did it again' implies that god takes an active role in the natural world, i.e. "look, god's making it rain" or even "god makes the sun rise". these thoughts imply that, if he did NOT actively do these things each time they happened, they simply wouldn't. This gives birth to the idea that, since all natural events are 'performed' by god, all natural disasters are likewise caused by him. Since god is just, the further implication is that he must cause all natural disasters as some sort of punishment or trial for the people affected.

The other thing that struck me was that, the active role of divine agencies in the natural world is a somewhat pre-modern idea and is rarely found in modern or post-modern religions. It IS, however, very common in the ancient religious mythologies - ala, Re (Horus) sailing the sun ship across the sky or Persephone's return to the upper world each year heralding the coming of spring.

so, theologically, isn't this a few steps backward?

~PS

well, penpen's mostly back up in running. as i type, i'm just waiting for the last of my mp3's to be copied back over to this machine. looks like the rebuild operation was a success.

in other news, i spent the better part of the day with Brian West (one of my coworkers)(he's colorblind - can you tell? ;)) going through a bunch of computer-generated php in an effort to salvage it for a migration. this, combined with the fact that i didn't eat anything till about 5pm, gave me a pretty major headache.

on an unrelated note, i've heard that Pink Floyd's 'The Dark Side of the Moon' follows the beginning of the Wizard of Oz in some sort of uncanny fashion. thus far i've noticed no such correlation between 'Comfortably Numb' and Return of the Jedi.

~PS

well, it's been a day. Though it's been quite beautiful outside, i've spent the better part of it inside behind 4 computer monitors. Today's todo items weren't too time consuming, but i've also been doing a software rebuild on penpen, my primary computer. This is one of those times i'm glad i have my own little lan here - makes backing up stuff a lot easier. (fyi - it takes about 2 1/2 hours to back up about 7.5 gb of mp3's over a 10Mbit lan)

this evening warren came over to borrow my old 3.0 dmg. yes, this is the warren i work for. i keep telling him he should come game with us... ...as long as i don't get fired for killing his character.

while waiting for penpen to install & compile, i've also been playing a little guitar...working on a new song, though i haven't actually finished one for... ...a long time.

~PS

While based on a what seems to be a good, energy saving idea, daylight savings time is confusing and evil to those of us who come from strange non-dst states like...oh...say...indiana. Even having lived in TN for the better part of 7 years, this biannual tradition of clock-switching is a less than natural and, i might add, easily forgotten task.

Sheri was telling me earlier this weekend (having been to the bank) how much benjamin franklin was her friend. This declaration, however, was completely recanted as his monstrous DST creation caused us to miss church this morning. She is now strongly favoring andrew jackson.

i have asked god for his opinions on dst, but i'm still waiting to hear back from him...

~PS

1 April 2005 - Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy are the SAME COMIC. This results in the birth of a theory that Darby Conley and Stephan Pastis are the same person.

~PS