The good news farm is currently having a bumper crop. The latest harvest included this handsome gourd: Chris proposed to his English honeypie, Becky, over Thanksgiving, and she has accepted! The current plan is to have the wedding in England during the summer of 2005. We’re delighted for the happy couple, and Kathy and I are excited at the prospect of having a good excuse to go to England for the first time in either of our lives. (Liam, on the other hand, is already worried about riding the plane.)

Here’s a photo of the beaming duo from back in August, which I think really captures something fundamental about their relationship:

We recently had the sadly-infrequent pleasure of visiting with Kathy’s parents and sister, who drove down from Wilson, New York to spend the week with us. The kids skipped most of their school week, and I took off a couple of days from work to enjoy skipping around the Texas hill country with them.

We loaded up the locations of a few geocaches near Canyon lake before driving out there one afternoon to have a picnic and play some miniature golf. Kathy’s mom especially enjoyed hunting for the caches, finding a cleverly hidden that the rest of us were having no luck whatsoever with. They’re thinking about a GPS for Christmas now.

We also introduced them to The Grist Mill, one of our favorite nearby eateries, and went wine tasting in Gruene. While Kathy’s dad has historically tackled huge building projects during his visits, we managed to limit his list to installing some lights and fixing our water heater this time. (What a treat to actually have a hot shower!) He also enjoyed breaking in his new camera, and got this shot of an army helicopter lifting off from the practice field at Texas State University as we drove past. Some Lazer Tag, shopping, a visit to the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum and the Capitol, and a good deal of romping with the kids rounded out the visit nicely.

Thanks for making the drive, folks!

Tonight I took Abigail to see The Princess Diaries 2. It was pretty much as good as anything of recent vintage that starts with “Disney” and ends with “2” — which is to say not at all. There was one shining moment, however: when Anne Hathaway’s character is crowned queen at the end, she holds a scepter in one hand, and The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in the other. Seriously, I think they stole the prop.

There’s been some interesting press on my Electronic Arts, my former employer, lately. A New York Times article summarizes things nicely. More interesting reading includes EA Spouse, Joe Straitiff’s Journal, and an open letter from the International Game Developers Association.

My time at EA was remarkably free of the sorts of excessive demands documented here until the end of my tenure, when I got transferred onto a team that was actually making games rather than just supporting them. I count myself blessed that I had the option to leave as that vortex was starting to show the first signs of sucking me in. Several of my friends stayed with the company, and have been feeling pretty ground down with little hope for respite, as their current projects are on an overly aggressive schedule.

I would guess that the companies’ labor practices are unlikely to change significantly until their hands are forced. There are always fresh-faced college graduates who are willing to sacrifice their personal lives for the glamor of the industry. And unfortunately, the game industry is showing no sign of anything that will shake up the distribution model in the same way that iTunes and its brethren are starting to do for the music industry. It should be interesting to see how this all plays out over the next few years. For the sake of my friends, I hope we see a happy ending.

Two items:

• Have you ever gotten to work and realized that your shoes don’t match? At least I have the excuse that yes, in fact, I did dress in the dark today.
• Helpful hint, formulated shortly after answering the door a few minutes ago: If you’re a male, and wish to sell me something, don’t give me a limp handshake and then compliment me on my eyes. I will most certainly not buy a magazine subscription from you under those circumstances.

Last Thursday, Kathy and I went to Wurstfest, an annual “Salute to Sausage” and German culture festival in nearby New Braunfels. We had a good time snarfing down schnitzel and potato pancakes, browsing the carnival rides, and watching the leiderhosen-clad septuagenarians dancing to old Teutonic favorites. Musical highlights: Kerry Christensen, an incandescent accordion-playing yodeler, Terry Cavanagh and Alpine Express, a really fun and diverse ensemble, and getting to hear The Chicken Dance three times (and do it twice) in the short hours we were there.

On Saturday, I met up with Ben and took the kids to the Austin Celtic Festival. Predictably, their favorite parts were the SCA combat demonstrations, though the “knights” didn’t let the children whack away at an armored adult as they had in years past. They did, however, have a shooting gallery, where for a dollar players could man a longbow or crossbow and shoot leather-tipped arrows at a line of combatants, who would fall down in Oscar-worthy death throes when hit. The candy-flinging trebuchet was also a big hit with the young ones, as was the reenactment of the Black Knight seen from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. There was a fair bit of good music here too — I have a soft spot for rock bands with bagpipes — but we heard most of it only incidentally as we tried to keep the four kids from wandering off in seven different directions.

As fall has walked in on little cat feet, and the weather in Texas has been cool enough to enjoy being outside without having a river immediately available to jump into, I’ve taken to walking to work when time permits. It takes a bit longer than biking, but is better exercise, and encourages contemplation more than does the same path astride my two-wheeled steed.

Now, because I have a knack for taking anything carefree, beautiful, and wholesome and spoiling it by overanalyzing, I decided to bring the GPS with me this morning to see what sort of distance I’m actually covering and what sort of time I made. Results:

• Time: 22 minutes, 38 seconds
• Average Speed: 3.8 miles/hour
• Distance: 1.42 miles

A little better speed than I expected, and when done twice a day, it’s a pretty nice addition to my nominal fitness regimen.

My brother Chris, who has been off in Augusta, Georgia for the last five years for his medical residency and fellowship, has been offered a job in San Antonio for next year which he has excitedly accepted. This particular job seems a really good fit for what he’s hoping to do as a doctor, both in terms of caring for patients and having a hand in instilling the next generation of doctors with a sense of ethics and responsibility. We are delighted that he’ll be returning to Texas and will once again be a mere hour’s drive away.

Congratulations, bro. We’re proud of and thrilled for you.

I’m starting to experiment with carrying a camera around with me more often, and will be posting some of the snaps that I like to flickr, an ambitious web-based photo sharing service. Aspects of this that you, dear reader, might find interesting:

• The five most recent snapshots will be visible in the sidebar of Ruminations. (Those of you reading via email won’t see them unless you visit the website.) Clicking on any of them will bring you to the flickr site, where you can view or download the full-sized image.
• If you’re using a news aggregator and want to keep an eye on the photos I’m posting, you can do so by subscribing to the RSS or Atom feeds.
• All of the snapshots are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This basically means that you can legally use them for anything you want as long as you don’t make money off of said use and you give me credit for the photo.

I think this will be a fun experiment.

This year we decided to reprise a little Halloween prank from two years ago wherein a pumpkin sitting on our front porch screams loudly and frighteningly at visitors as they approach the door. This year, I was able to add video capture to the equation so that we could immortalize visitors’ reactions. You can see that, and much more detail on the rest of the mischief, at The Screaming Electric Pumpkin.