God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I have this version of the Serenity Prayer bouncing around my thoughts today.

Birthdays and Death

We visited my sister in Kentucky this weekend. I had been looking forward to this trip for a few weeks. In addition to having dinner Saturday night for her birthday, we were also having dinner to celebrate our father. Saturday would have been his sixty-seventh birthday. Unfortunately, he was only there in spirit. After a relatively short illness and bout with pulmonary fibrosis, our father passed away in August.

His death caught me off guard. I knew he was in the hospital and I knew the prognosis wasn’t clear, but I genuinely believed he would come home after a few weeks. The seriousness of the situation didn’t hit me until the day he would eventually die. In a tearful conversation, my sister let me know that there was a good chance he would die that day. After a bit of time, I tried to drive to the hospital, which was two hours away, to see him one last time. I received word that he died before I could get out of Nashville.

Grief comes in waves. Sometimes it’s calm and you feel okay. Then you feel the water move up and down a bit. Before you realize it, the water comes over your head and you’re temporarily under. You didn’t get a good inhale of air in before the wave caught you off guard and now you’re choking on water. It feels turbulent and it feels as though it will never stop. Suddenly, the water is calm again and you feel as though you can relax a bit, but now you’re a little more cautious.

Saturday was my father’s birthday. I knew the waves would be active. I also fully expected a memory from Photos and a reminder to call him. I received both of those. As much as I liked seeing his face in the first photograph, it was bitter sweet. A photo of me holding my son, with my sister on one side, my father on the other. The photograph was likely taken eight years ago. He always looked old to me. His hair had turned white when he was a young adult. From stories I’ve heard, his hair turned solid white shortly after high school graduation. I always think of him with a Steve Martin look. The memory hurt and I decided not to watch it.

I wanted to spend time with my sister. I knew it would be a tough weekend for her, with his birthday on Saturday and her birthday on Sunday. She will forever be reminded of him as her birthday approaches, which seems cruel. I am so grateful that I was able to spend time with my sister this weekend and that we were able to go out for dinner. She wanted to eat at Jasmine’s, which is a Thai restaurant in Murray, KY. A restaurant that our father would have struggled to choose a meal. His food choices were always very safe, which is another polite way of saying bland. My sister and I joked, wondering what he would have chosen. My money was on ham fried rice.

System 7 - Wikipedia

This would be followed by version 1.1, which included LaserWriter driver version 7.1.1 and added a hidden extension called “Tuna Helper”, intended to fix the “disappearing files” bug in which the system would lose files.

I totally hit this bug the other day while playing around with my Classic running 7.0.1 and assumed I had somehow corrupted the partition. I am glad to know I didn’t break anything, but I started an apparently unnecessary erase and install earlier today.

Peak computing.

I tapped out at work after a half day. I am just not feeling well and I wanted to rest.

Eleven Days, Post Election

I have been tuning out on news and most social media, but I have been tuning into how I feel and how I am processing where we are at. I initially felt equal parts anger and despondency. I am thankful that I sat with those feelings and did not rush to share them. They were raw and unrefined. After eleven days, they have softened a bit. I still feel sadness and disappointment, but I am trying to prevent these feelings from driving my experience.

The last eight years have taken their toll on me. My stress and anxiety levels have remained elevated and regularly peak to new highs. I don’t want to admit to the amount of time I have lost with my family due to my anger and anxiety over the news and the state of our government. I have spent too much time staring at my phone instead of being present in the moment. I lost my sense of humor in 2016 and have never fully regained it. It’s easy to blame the polarizing President-Elect, because he comes across as an awful person, with questionable scruples. However, I mostly just blame people. I blame a party who repeatedly decided to nominate the most unqualified individual to lead their ticket and the people who either decided to vote for him or those who decided to sit it out and let it happen. If you’re not going to take this assignment seriously, then why should I?

🔗 2004 was the first year of the future

I adore the thought and care put into this retrospective of 2004, which was the year I graduated high school and began college. It feels like a lifetime ago (maybe two).

🔗 Election Day

It’s tempting to imagine that the person who would feed a group of strangers every morning just because they’re camped at his doorstep and hungry is somehow different than the person who would vote for concentration camps. But they’re the same person. We’re all the same people.

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.

I’m trying to find inspiration at the end of this week from this snippet of The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.

💿 Merrie Land

Damon Albarn began work on this album in the aftermath of Britain’s EU referendum. I keep coming back to this album after our own referendum and I wonder what it means for our country and our people.

When I was younger, I typically counted seconds too fast; now that I am older, I typically count seconds too slow.

🔗 The Yale Review | Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the Art of Children’s Literature

Regarding Ole Risom and Richard Scarry’s I am a Bunny:

I never read it as a child, but I can now attest to its elegant, quiet beauty, because it was my daughter’s first word book ever, and I read it to her several hundred times. I never tired of its pictures or its words, the simple zen-like magic it evokes of the inevitability of the passing seasons always somehow putting the reader in a pleasant passenger-seat view.

I adore this book and have always loved reading it with my kids.

Early voted this morning. Voting for democrats in Tennessee feels a little like pissing into the wind, but I will always vote. 🗳️

🔗 Charles Schulz on Being a Good Citizen

Loved stumbling across this on kottke.org today. I needed this, especially with all of the dooming that is going on this week.

🔗 How I Experience the Web Today

🎯 Nailed it.

Drinking coffee and monitoring the weather as we prepare to start our week long DisneyWorld vacation. We’ve always been very lucky and have avoided significant rain on our previous trips. We may not be so lucky this time. Hoping for light rain the entire time. 🤞🏻

Twenty Years

The passage of time is omnipresent in my digital life. Photos regularly surfaces memories of past events. I frequently enjoy with these memories, but there are occasional reminders that outline just how much time has passed. A memory and reminder of my nephew’s twentieth birthday hit me especially hard this week.

I had just started college when my brother called me with the news that my nephew was born. My nephew, Dallas, was named after my brother’s favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys. Fittingly, he was born during a Monday Night Football game featuring the Dallas Cowboys. You can’t make this stuff up.

Twenty years feels impossible. I understand that transition period is in the past, but it doesn’t feel possible that it was twenty years in the past. When I think of Dallas, I still think of him as being four or five years old, his age when I graduated college. It’s wild. I was also warned about the speed at which time passes as you age, but even with those frequent warnings, I feel as though I am ill prepared for this experience.

📺 Susan Kare demonstrating the Macintosh Interface in 1984

So much respect for Susan Kare. The amount of thoughtfulness put into the iconography and interface design of the original Macintosh is incredible. I love these time capsules.

🔗 How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?

Interesting perspective. My hometown, Mayfield, Kentucky, has seen a similar change over the years. There have been many immigrants, mostly from Mexico, who have moved there for opportunities and are now part of the community.

Finished reading: Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words 📚

I received a printed copy of this book. The quality of the print is extraordinary. I loved reading it and found the book inspiring.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

Quote from The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, an attempt at capturing a certain Aristotelian sentiment. I ran across the quote this morning while reading Make Something Wonderful. Steve attributed the quote directly to Aristotle, but I found the origination of the quote thanks to Check Your Fact.

Finished reading: Treasure Island - Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth by Robert Louis Stevenson 📚

And you may lay to that.

Third day in a row of spending the majority of my time in my bed. Two negative rapid antigen Covid tests, but you never know. Whatever it is has really taken me down. I was scheduled to travel for work this week. Honestly dejected that I had to cancel, as I had made quite a few plans. C’est la vie.

Localization of dates frequently trips me up. I find myself regularly searching for the following document: Unicode Technical Standard #35 - Part 4: Dates.

Proactively storing this link in my Pinboard for future reference.

After much consternation, I got back on my bicycle last month. Sixteen rides for over eighty-seven miles in August. Just took my first ride of September this morning. Hoping to exceed one hundred miles this month.