Look, the beauty of the internet is that it allows everyone to have their own electronic soapbox – for better or for worse.  And while I would love to believe I am deep and intellectual and artistic and a critic – I am, at the end of the day, a blogger who blogs whatever the hell I want thanks to Google and online hosted blogging platforms and my trusty Firefox plugins.  Want someone to agree with you? There are plenty of people who will.  That IS the blessing and the curse of the Internet.  Want to take someone down? You will have people at your virtual doorstep with pitchforks faster than you can say “megabytes per second”. There are a lot of sheep though, so be guaranteed those following you into battle have very little idea of what they are battling for or again. And personally, I like my sheep, I mean, readers,  smart and able to think for themselves as well as calling bullshit on me if appropriate.  To have good and well crafted discussions in my comments that doesn’t degenerate into name calling and your mama-esque insults.  It’s what I love about my own readers.  Because, my dear readers, you must always remember the golden rule of online communication: If you wouldn’t say it like that in person, you probably shouldn’t online. The written word is often misinterpreted by its very nature. And for some apparent reason, if it is written using bits and bytes, it seems destined to be misinterpreted 100% of the time.  Now let me stepping off my virtual soapbox, so that I may continue…..wait,  one more thing – as an IT person, I see this happen more than I don’t – and I hate how it must always escalate in a a way it never would in real life, face-to-face.  This is a good rule to follow:

Because as someone who has lived this lesson one too man times, anger carries too much risk – risk that usually results in you having to eat crow regardless of whether or not you are right. It’s why I am careful how I rant – in person or online.  And, now, I will step down….

–> I saw my friend’s baby this past weekend – a four-day old baby girl. Cute as can be – and giving her parents too easy of a time.  They are going to get lulled into believing that this parenting thing is easy. But then again, I am the mom of one child who screamed the first four months of her life and wouldn’t sleep if her life depended on it and another child who ate every 90 minutes for the first four months.  While I enjoyed them as immobile children, I like their self sufficiency more. Plus, DJ is just too much fun to mess with the older she gets.

–> I mentioned that over the weekend G constructed Chicken-traz – a maximum security chicken enclosure for our chickens who apparently like to recreate scenes from the movie Chicken Run. Ironically enough, one of our chickens is the same breed as the main character of the movie. And the fact that I can ID chicken breeds of claymation characters scares the hell out of me.  Anyway, they are pissed. I don’t care. They have not breached security yet.  Granted, their motivation given the wet weather has been lacking.

–> Oh and speaking of chickens, DJ wrote a poem on her first day of school about the chickens – one line says “because the roosters think they’re hotties” …. I believe this is where G would point out that I’ll be getting the phone calls from our friend the principal…..

–> I orchestrated a family photo over the weekend – my brothers, their wives, their kids and my parents. I wish I could be more open and share some of them because they are hilarious! As our family members back in Iowa said when I uploaded them to Facebook, I totally captured our family incredibly well.  The goofiness, the humor, the distinct characters……the whole set is perfect even if not one picture is suitable for the type of portrait my parents had in mind. I suspect, however, that they will agree that they are better than the standard photo because we caught us in a way someone not knowing us would not have. 

–> This totally summarized the warning I wanted to give people at work Tuesday: