I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I have the best wife in the
free world. I took the kids out for a bit yesterday morning, while Kathy went
garage sale shopping. When we returned, she said “Ok, everyone stand in
front of the car; I’ve got a surprise for you!” We all dutifully lined up,
and then she lifted the garage door to reveal a great 4’x8′ HO scale model
train layout. I’ve had a couple-decade-long sporadic love affair with model
railroads, but have never gotten past the initial phase of building one.
Kathy found this one at a garage sale and talked them down to half their
asking price, which was probably about a quarter of what it was worth. It
came with a power pack, two locomotives, a bunch of cars, and the layout
itself, which has two main loops and a number of turnouts. What a woman!

Kathy and I had a date scheduled last Friday. I asked her on the phone that afternoon if she was interested in going to catch X-Men at the $2 theater in town. “Well, I had planned a little surprise, actually. I hope you like it.” I reassured her that I was sure I would, hung up, and proceeded to wonder what she had in mind. After I got home, we turned over the kids to Rene Johnson, who had evidently coengineered the surprise, and Kathy started driving us toward Canyon Lake. We traversed The Devils Backbone on the way, a section of state highway that winds along the top of a beautiful ridge of hills northwest of San Marcos, and which is home to a succession of seedy bars and BBQ joints I kept telling Kathy I thought she was taking me to.

We ended up at Hill Country Resort, a complex overlooking where my mom has a timeshare which overlooks the lake. “I thought we could eat at the snack bar, play some miniature golf, and go swimming,” Kathy said. Unfortunately, the snack bar had closed, so Kathy asked me to get our suits from the car while she double-checked the membership number in the office. “They’re in the suitcase!” she shouted after me as I headed to the car. I opened the trunk, found the suitcase, noticed the snacks, Doonesbury book, and changes of clothes that were therein, wondered briefly about their presence, resigned myself to the fact that I never know where things are or why they’re there, and headed back with the suits.

When I got back, Kathy was still in line, and said “Well, if you haven’t guessed yet, we’re staying the night.” My first thought was “No, we’re not,” but then I realized that was the surprise she had in mind, and the suitcase abruptly made sense. She assumed I had figured it out by that point, but I was, of course, still completely without a clue.

A highlight of the evening was going to visit the Louisiana Grill, which had opened nearby two weeks previously. When we walked in, nobody paid any attention to us for several minutes until an 8 year old boy materialized and said he’d go try to find us some menus. Another woman then wandered by and showed us to a seat, followed shortly thereafter by the 8 year old who had come up with a pair of mismatched menus. As we were looking at the dining options, a big, boisterous man came out from the back shouting “Who wants wine?!?!” with an iced tea pitcher full of the red liquid. “It’s free!” he went on, and began to distribute it to the interested parties. “Actually,” I heard him say from across the room to another patron, “it’s not really wine — it’s grape juice with Everclear in it! I’ll get the good stuff for you all next week.” Well, it turned out that the big guy was Keith, that he owned the place, and that 3 of his waitstaff hadn’t bothered to turn up that evening, which is why he was shorthanded. But the food was good, the view of the lake and sunset were great, and we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner and our last big outing before little Maggie arrives.

I listened to The Bridges of Madison County this past weekend, and was left with very mixed emotions. On one hand, it’s a nice, well-paced, evocatively written piece of fiction with some wonderful characters. It’s a treat to get to know Richard Kincaid and Francesca Johnson, and to see their strengths and weaknesses as individuals. On the other hand, the portrayal of marriage as something less meaningful than being swept off one’s feet by a brief, passionate encounter grows tiresome when it’s so oft repeated. Just for a change of pace I’d like to read of a soul-expanding delightful romance between a husband and wife. (Baroness Orczy did a wonderful job of this in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and threw in some great swashbuckling too. Gotta love the classics.)

Need a nice laptop? I’ve put my hopped-up iBook on the auction block. You can watch the auction or bid on it here. It’s a great little machine, and I’m going to miss it — at least until my G4 arrives.

I just placed an order for a dual-processor 450MHz Power Macintosh G4 with a Radeon card. It’s going to replace the G3 that’s currently on my desk. I’ll also be selling the iBook, which will be supplanted by the Dell laptop I’ll be using for work. (I suppose I’ll switch back to Eudora, since Outlook Express for Windows seems markedly inferior to Outlook Express for Mac, which I quite like.) Anyway, the G4 will set me up well to be able to do some pretty serious video work, both for church and for The McMains Chronicles. The only challenge is getting one of these stupid Internet vendors to actually ship me a camera. Shop4Digital is the latest in the doghouse, as they advertised stock on their website and then took a week after the order was placed to get back to me with the news that they didn’t have the camera I’d ordered. Schmucks.

This weekend we had the pleasure of a visit from Kathy’s cousin, Heather
Price. Heather has spent the last half decade over in France and Italy
pursuing a modeling career, and has now decided to begin a shopping service
there for visiting women. It had been a long time since Kathy had seen
Heather, and this was the first time I’d met her, so we pretty much crammed
our time with conversation, interrupted only for wrestling with the kiddos.
Liam especially seemed to take a shine to her, and she assured us that his
pronounciation of her name was superior to that of most Europeans.

In order to administer websites of any complexity, it’s vital to have
software designed for the task to help out. I have a number of tools in my
kit, but the one that I’d be most loathe to part with is Conversant, the super-powerful
software that runs on the server where this website sits and provides great
administrative tools, a built-in stylesheet editor, a discussion group,
content management tools, email and newsreader access to the site, and much
more. Now, because Conversant is actually a very well-thought-out groupware
platform, the good folks at Macrobyte
Resources can add great features with wild abandon. The latest example
of their hard work and Conversant’s flexibility is the group
calendar they’ve just added to all the Conversant sites. It interfaces
seamlessly Conversant’s other features, and is one of the
more powerful implementations of web-based-calendaring that’s out there.
Kudos to all at Macrobyte for their excellent work. (Full disclosure: I used
to work for Macrobyte, though I think I’d still feel the same way about
Conversant if I hadn’t.)

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a wonderful, rather unappreciated movie which hits on many of the same themes that Good Will Hunting approached. The story is that of a boy who shows tremendous aptitude at chess and the subsequent struggle between reaching his potential as a chess player and living the life of a normal boy. The cast and their acting is excellent, James Horner’s score enjoyably melodic, and the children charming. Definitely worth renting and making sure you have time to watch uninterrupted.

One of the delightful things about living in this part of the country is
that all of the towns, big and little, have festivals celebrating the
produce or aspect of their culture they’re known for. Perhaps foremost among
them is the Poteet
Strawberry Festival, though Spamarama and Art Car Weekend aren’t
to be missed either. This weekend marks the 31st annual Chilympiad, which benefits the local
chapter of the American Red Cross and a little girl who’s suffering from
cancer. Of course, one can’t have a chili cook-off without a parade, and
this morning’s was a doozie. My favorite participants: the local low-rider
club, who had their hydraulically enhanced vehicles out in their full glory,
the chinese dragon being pulled by the lawn tractor, and the Harley Davidson
riders, who both by dint of numbers and battle-readiness would have the odds
in their favor if it came to a showdown with the Army Reserve Unit that
preceeded them. Dang, them hawgs is loud!

Kathy went in for the last prebirth sonogram on Monday, and everything looks
good. There had been some question previously about the placental alignment,
but it seems to have shifted to a more appropriate orientation. The little
one is about six and a half pounds now, and they expect her to add another 2
pounds by B-Day. The due date remains around the second week of October.
Best of all, they checked, and she’s still a girl.