I was writing to Dad McMains yesterday and realized that a few things I mentioned there hadn’t really made it onto Ruminations yet. So here are a couple of paragraphs from that missive:

The other kiddos are doing well. Kathy and Emily have
been having some really good, heart-to-heart talks
lately. She’s starting to turn into a little person,
rather than just a kid! Since Emily has started doing
school at home again this fall, Abby has been eager to
join in and do some school as well. Kathy’s been
trying to come up with good stuff for Abby to do, but
she’s still young enough that she needs a lot of
guidance and help. Emily’s doing great with going off
to the schoolroom and working on her assignment for an
hour at a time. We’re often in there working together,
now that I’ve started my two days a week at home.
Liam’s still charging around the house, being adorable
and getting into everything. His new favorite toys are
the train cars from a model train set Kathy picked up
cheaply at a garage sale. Unfortunately, the cars
aren’t designed with 22 month olds in mind, and are
rapidly becoming less railworthy. Good thing they were
cheap.

My recent fun project has been getting into video
editing. We bought a digital camcorder, and I’ve been
experimenting with Apple’s iMovie software, which is a
load of fun. I’ve also ordered a G4, which I’ll be
funding by selling the G3 and the iBook, since work
has provided me with a laptop. (Dell, unfortunately.)
Anyway, the video work is a load of fun. Once I put
something worthwhile together, I’ll post it on the
website and let you know.

I’ve just added some code to Ruminations, inspired by a similar feature on Brian Carnell’s web site, which allows you to click on the icons next to any of the stories and see a list of other stories in that category. This makes it super easy to read book reviews, if that’s what’s you’re interested in, movie reviews, if that’s what you’re after, etc. Hooray for Conversant!

Remember Zork? You know, “Go north. Get sword. Kill troll with sword.” Zork was among the best known of a genre of games known as text adventures. Though for the vast majority of people, technically more elaborate games have replaced these prose-intensive efforts, there is still an active community of people on the Internet developing them. The highlight of the year for this group is the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, which anybody can be a part of by playing and judging the games, and which starts today. There are 53 entrants this year, a new record for the competition, and while there are bound to be some stinkers, there are also invariably several gems among the lot. This quirky art/entertainment form is especially intriguing to me because it is one of the few forms of interactive entertainment that can be completely conceived and realized by a single person, which makes for some very interesting results at times.

Since moving to San Marcos, Steve Johnson and I have been playing in the coffee shops pretty regularly. We have been calling ourselves “The Outlanders,” which was the name of Steve’s band in Denton. However, the band there has carried on in his absence, and has asked to retain the name, so we’re trying to figure out what to call ourselves. Travis Schrank has now joined us on percussion, so we’re now a three piece ensemble featuring guitar, mountain dulcimer, pennywhistles, bodhran, banjo, cello, congas, and soon hammered dulcimer. We do celtic, folk, bluegrass, alternative, and whatever else catches our fancy at the moment. So, if you have any good ideas, let us know by replying to this entry.

Our friends Camilo and Barbra Ardila today had their second boy, Micah Denton Ardila. Both he and mom are doing fine; apparently the delivery was straightforward. We’re planning to go visit them in a few hours, once Barbra gets a little bit of time to rest. Congratulations, Ardilas! Camilo is the Assistant Pastor of the new church, by the way, so between their efforts and our own, we’ll be boosting church attendence a fair percentage before we even begin to meet.

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.