After a month and a half of debugging, my software company, Saguaro Studios finally released version 1.0 of Oratorio, the presentation package for church music. It’s been getting mentions on Macintouch and MacNN, and I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback from people trying it out, so I’m happy with the release. Now I can finally get back to programming features, instead of the far less exciting debugging I’ve been doing.

This afternoon, Origin took all of us who work here out to the Alamo Drafthouse, a fun movie theater in Austin that has comfy seats and waiters that will bring you the food and drinks of your choice while you’re watching a movie. Today’s feature was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I have, of course, seen innumerable times, but never on the big screen. It came as a surprise to me how many little things I noticed that never came across on the television – cats being beaten, gorilla paws suddenly pulling away the feminine hand turning the pages of a book, just how cute the little bunny was. In spite of the fact that I’d voted to see A.I. instead, I was pleased to find myself enjoying the film all over again. (The enjoyment was probably enhanced by the fact that for 15 minutes preceeding the movie, they played drive-in movie theater intermission reels from 1959 with psychedelic music behind it. It felt like a scene from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Snack Bar.)

Last weekend, the family and I went up to Denton for a few days. I had a consulting contract, and Kathy was looking forward to visiting with some of our old friends from up that way. We stayed at a Best Western which had just opened, and which still had some bugs to work out. Notably, the cleaning crew left our door wide open all day, the staff only answered the front desk phone about 50% of the time, they had trouble authenticating credit cards, and the power went out for about 90 minutes on Sunday morning. (Admittedly, the last item was probably not their fault, but it had already become enough of a comedy of errors by that point to just add to the effect.)

In any case, we were able to squeeze some good visits with a number of dear friends in, though I’m afraid we missed several others I wish we had been able to see. (Sorry Pierces, Morrises, Leaheys, Hugheys, and others!) It was interesting to be back in Denton again after a year’s absence. The experience was closely akin to that you get when you go back to visit the parents after having been away at college for a year, and find lots of tiny, but cumulatively unsettling, changes about the old homestead. But the trip as a whole was quite enjoyable, though enough of a working holiday that we were immediately ready for a weekend after the weekend.

Ever since Liam was born, I’ve had a low-level irrational fear that he was going to drown himself; I even had a nightmare or two on the theme. This concern was given a bit of fuel when we moved into a house with a swimming pool that had no fence around it.

In order to assuage my fears, we’ve made getting a fence up one of our priorities since the move. We hired a good friend who did a beautiful job to build the fence for us. We were really excited with how nicely it spruced up the pool deck, and how pleasant it would be to be able to let the kids run amok in the backyard without that concern. And then as we stood admiring it, Liam came up, took one look, and slipped right between the bars of the fence without batting an eye. Argh!

So, Kathy painstakingly removed each of the vertical pieces of wood and nailed them 1/2″ closer to each other — close enough to keep Liam out, but still far enough away to permit us to see the water. She was just finishing up resetting the last of the slats over this weekend, and what does the ungrateful boy do?

Learns to swim.

He made it about 15 feet without help of any sort on Saturday, and was back and forth enough that I have no doubt he’ll be able to recover if he finds himself in the water unexpectedly. It was nice to see the hard work we’ve been doing with him on learning pay off so handsomely at last.

Now, if we can only get him potty-trained…

While working in the garden recently, Kathy was surprised to turn over a pile of dirt and find a gold ring with a tremendous diamond in it! She took it to the jeweler to have it checked out, and it turned out that the diamond was fake, though very pretty, so Abigail, who had become enamored with the item, got to keep it.

A few days later, Kathy was doing some more work in the garden, and found another ring, this one with 21 tiny diamonds in it. It too went for a visit to the jeweler, who determined that this one was real! So, since none of us are big jewelry wearers, we’ve put it up for auction. Now go bid up the price!

On Saturday morning, Kathy asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to do that day. “Let me think about it,” I replied. By 10:30am, I’d thought about it, and decided I wanted to go to the beach — about a 3.5 hour drive from San Marcos. Kathy wasn’t up for 7 hours in the car, but helped me get the 3 elder kids packed up, and off we went. On the way down, we alternated between reading books, singing, watching for seagulls, and listening to stories on tape, finally arriving at about 2:30pm, when we pulled off to the first beach we could find.

Much to my surprise, the recent tropical storms blowing through the Gulf of Mexico had dislodged so much seaweed that it had formed 3 foot high mounds all along the shoreline. I had to actually lift the kids over to get them into the water. Once over, Liam was pretty skeptical of the waves at first, but gradually warmed to them over the course of the afternoon. He was jumping around in the shallows without me by the time we left. Emily, of course, dove right in and had a great time hunting for shrimp and crabs in the seaweed drifts with some other kids. Abby never did develop a fondness for the waves, but after some time out in the water was having enough fun to forget to ask if we could go someplace without them.

On Sunday, I took Emily to see The King and I, which was being staged by our local community theater. It was a typical community theater production, with a wildly mixed pool of talent, a cast of thousands, an orchestra that seemed to consist mainly of trombones, and “Siamese” men who were dressed in outfits that late-70’s giggolos would have rejected as too garish, but no less fun for that. Emily hasn’t had much experience with theater yet, so we talked about the different pieces of music, theater customs, the roles of the various people involved, etc.

When we got home, we discovered that Liam had taken the opportunity to give the new cat a haircut while Kathy’s back was turned — one of those situations where parents teeter precariously between grounding for life and uproarious laughter. Kids these days.

There are some authors who, whenever I happen to notice a new book of theirs in the store, I will purchase without a second’s thought, knowing that their work is inevitably excellent, solid storytelling and that I won’t be disappointed.

But then there a few authors whose work I wait for with bated breath. When the latest book finally hits the shelves, I go buy it immediately, get a 256 oz. glass of iced tea, catheterize myself, and install myself in the recliner for the duration, devouring the tome in as close to one great literary swallow as I can.

One such author is Neil Gaiman, to whom Ross introduced me several years ago, when Neil was still sticking to graphic novels and short stories as his forms of choice. His third novel, American Gods, has just hit the street, and I’m agonizing that I’m in the office instead of reading now. In the interests of economy, I’ve ordered it from buy.com, but have been sliding down to Barnes & Noble during my lunchtime on the days I’m in Austin to sit in their big comfy chairs and read their big comfy hardback. So far, it does not disappoint, though the returning to the office suffers a bit in comparison. My protestant work ethic has thus far won out, and I remain employed, with only about 60 pages under my belt to date.

Darn it.

As penance for having taken so long to post anything recently, I’ve put up a full family update, with photos, spell-checking, and all those newfangled features the kids these days like so much. Read about it here: Summer Comes Round Again.

Lately I’ve not been posting too many entries here. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve been pouring a lot of time and effort into starting a new software and consulting company called Saguaro Studios. Today is a bit of a coming-out party for the company, as I’ve just sent out the press release announcing Oratorio, a package designed to make projecting lyrics for church music quick and easy. We’ve been using it at Three Rivers Church for a couple of months now, during which time I’ve been adding to and refining it weekly.

Though it’s sucking up a lot of extra time right now, the idea eventually is to be able to use the business to balance the demands of home life and income generation a bit more easily and to provide the flexibility that a regular 9 to 5 job lacks. However, that’s for the long term, and for now it’s exciting just to have the first product out in the public eye.

I spent this past Monday through Wednesday serving on a jury at the Hays
County Justice Center here in town. Though most people are usually eager
to avoid jury duty, I had never been on a jury before, and was
interested to see how the whole process works and how it differs from
courtroom television. It turns out that a real trial is to CourtTV as
CSPAN is to Schoolhouse Rock — much more drawn out and less actively
entertaining, but with a rigor one hopes for when deciding matters of
some import.

The case was a civil one, which means that no-one is being tried for
breaking the law, but instead the plaintiff is seeking damages from the
defendant. The people being sued in this case were a family who’s young
boy was riding an ATV on their property in the country and had a
collision with a passing motorist. The boy was miraculously unhurt,
aside from a few scratches, even though he was flipped off the ATV which
spun away into some nearby trees. The woman driving the car didn’t end up
going to the hospital, but was seeking reimbursement for her subsequent
and future medical care, plus twice that sum for pain and suffering.

The decision ended up being a surprisingly difficult one for us. Though
the plaintiff’s previous medical history seemed to indicate that much of
what she’d been treated for was due to previous accidents, I felt
strongly that this incident was pretty much the little boy’s fault, since
it was evident that he’d been in the habit of riding into the street to
turn around, which is illegal to do on an ATV. Several of the other
jurors, however, felt that the driver of the car was at fault, since she
had been in a spate of other accidents, and admitted to being a bit over
the center of the unmarked caliche roadway when the collision occurred.

Though we only had 3 questions to answer, we deliberated from 3:30pm
until a bit after 9:00pm. I got to be the jury foreman, which mostly
meant that I got to ask people not to interrupt each other as we
discussed the issues in question. We were all more than ready to go home
by the time we reached a decision, which was that liability for the
accident was to be shared among the boy, his father (who had evidently
not tried to keep his son off the street), and the driver of the car. We
awarded the plaintiff a sum equal to a month of her medical care, since
that seemed consistent with the severity of the injuries she had
suffered as a result of the accident. Several of the jurors were
reluctant to do even that, since her care had been principally
chiropractic, with only an X-Ray to diagnose a claimed injury to her
soft tissues (which wouldn’t show up on an X-Ray).

Though I’m not anxious to repeat the experience again soon, it was
intriguing to get that kind of a glimpse into the workings of the
judicial system. It’s remarkable to see the sheer number of resources
that are mobilized to deal with these disputes, and by extension, what a
high value our form of government places on seeing justice done. At the
risk of sounding trite, it makes me a bit prouder to be an American.