Category: Personal

Shut up.

Now that that’s out of the way, I wanted to let you know I’m now on Google Plus. This is me. And now that I’ve synced G+ with Twitter and Facebook I’ll probably use that as my main social network, at least for stuff I want to share publicly.

By the way, in case you’re wondering how I did it, I have this article by PC Magazine to thank. After some back and forth with a variety of different options, this seemed like the simplest and most painless method. I’d love to see links and photos get formatted properly at Facebook, but that’s probably being unrealistic.

And now I’m off to crawl back under the rock from whence I came.

On the occasion of my wife’s graduation from nursing school…

A toast to you, the healers:
you fixers of men,
and women, and children;
you soothers of the aged.

You body mechanics,
you protectors of life,
you guardians of spirit.

You shepherds of the bowel.

You ushers of the soul
(coming in,
and going out)
and of nourishment
(going in,
and coming out).

May you wear your pins with pride.
May you sleep soundly in daylight.
May your skin glow under fluorescent light.
And may you never need to take
the peerless service that you give.

Na zdrowie! To your health.

I know I’ve been neglecting you terribly, friends. And I hope to remedy that soon, even if it means posting whatever comes off the top of my head in snippets barely longer than a Twitter post.

But until then, I’d like to once again share this story about Christmas in my house. Here’s hoping your holidays are every bit as wonderful as they can be.

I grew up in a very large family: I’m the youngest of ten kids. Yeah, you read that right. I have five older sisters and four older brothers — an even 5/5 split. To make things even more surreal, there was an eight-year gap between my youngest sister and my youngest brother, so most of my siblings are at least ten years older than me, with the difference in age between me and my oldest brother clocking in at ten days short of an even twenty years. So even in my earliest memories, my siblings had significant others, and very shortly thereafter, kids. (I now have a niece and two nephews who are married. But I’m not a great-uncle, yet.)

In addition to that, my dad’s biological mother died shortly after he was born, and his father got remarried, which made for five separate and distinct branches of the family tree just two generations back, counting the families of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and paternal step-grandmother. And many of them came from big families. (We’re talking about turn-of-the-century reproduction statistics here, mostly for recent immigrants to the country; this was not at all abnormal.)

Anyway, to sum up: we’re a big family. So the holidays were always a fairly substantial production. Continue reading “Repost: And to All, a Good Night”