one of the hardest working guys i’ve met in a long time told me:

my father would give me the lawn mower and say “don’t come back until you have earned at least two dollars”

wonder how that would fly in today’s “my child needs an escort to the bus stop” culture…

while standing at the transfer window after accepting an offer on our car at carmax, another customer said:

i’ve had a great experience and am going to tell all my friends! and i’ve got a big mouth.

we also, had a great experience. and while i don’t have a big mouth, i do have this web site.

ethan got in trouble for writing at school.

ok, it was in chalk…

and maybe on a school building…

and tagged with his name…

but still, we should encourage children to write.

it’s been more than five years since i’ve had a car i enjoyed driving.

on friday night i got to take a sports car on an hour and a half drive through windy mountain roads.

luckily, as much as i enjoyed the drive, it was embarrassing to stop at a light and feel pity from the next lane as the young-in pondered how my family was adjusting to my mid-life crisis.

so this itch will remain unscratched until i actually hit that mid life crisis…

me: logan, can you please take your lego tree house out of my office

logan: i left it there on purpose, i wanted you to be able to look at it and enjoy it

there is one argument that says i am a sucker for my daughter. i would contend, how could you not reward such a thoughtful little person…

given the hunger game like ferocity my children bring to an easter egg hunt, you would think they are not only candy deprived, but haven’t been fed in weeks either.

consider yourself warned.

my daughter needs a tonsillectomy and to have tubes put in her ears because she has almost completely lost her hearing.

she has needed this for a long time but we have deferred surgery because we wanted to be sure it wasn’t going to work itself out without intervention.

now, that we have finally made the choice to have the operation the insurance joy kicks in.

our ent physician can perform the surgery in two centers. we can’t go to the center we would like to go to because it is out of network. but while the second center is in network, they won’t guarantee that all the service providers, like the anesthesiologist, in the second center are in network.

this week the insurance company sent us a threat letter stating that we had better know all the fine print in our insurance plan or have our checkbook ready. near the top of the letter, i guess to delude themselves, they wrote:

treatment decisions are made between you and your physician or health care professional.

i guess if i’m good with paying for everything a la carte, they are correct.

of course this letter is doubly annoying because natalie has been in a months long fight with the insurance company to pay for her routine annual exam. the physician didn’t use the right code originally when submitting the claim (even thought anyone with a brain could have seen it was a routine, covered procedure). when the physician’s office resubmitted the claim as directed by the insurance company, the insurance company rejected the corrected claim as a duplicate.

i really can think of no worse way to manage health care than the system we currently have in place. and we allegedly have “good” insurance and are in good health.

my favorite picture from the week in colorado.

my favorite because i remember when my daughter did the same thing.

my favorite because this time it wasn’t my daughter and now my kids are old enough to only complain about the tramp, not sit down and demand a return home.

my favorite because not only did we threaten to leave her behind but suggested that hungry mountain lions might be coming along shorty and she still didn’t budge.

day one in colorado, skiing in seventy degree weather.

day two in colorado, hiking in thirty degree weather.

day three in colorado, skiing in thirty degree weather with four inches of fresh powder. finally, we got the event right with the environment.

yesterday we were skiing in seventy degree weather in colorado. no joke.

we all have sun burned noses to prove it.

in recounting his school day ethan told me about a new behavior program his teacher created where students would get points every day based on their behavior. this isn’t a private score, but one the whole class sees for everyone else in the class.

ethan said he was very angry about the new program. he was angry because he thinks its being done because of just a few problem kids in the class, and he’s angry because its yet more rules.

like his father, ethan can be good on his own, but if someone creates a rule stating to be good, that’s an overwhelming temptation to break the rule.

when i asked if he got all the points possible he said “no”, he then went on to say that he is going to try and get zero points every day to demonstrate to the teacher that he disapproves of the new program.

i suggested that may not be in his best interest and explained why not, but inside i knew that when a stupid rule is created someone has to say so…

on monday i was performing production support creating tons of files from a content repository. on one leg of our clustered server environment the file creation caused an rsync job to go crazy and spawn thousands of copies. the system load spiked over 500. i didn’t know such numbers were even possible.

today, a colleague called to tell me that my account was locked out at his university because of suspicious behaviors. initially, i assumed he was using the application we collaborated on and the university didn’t recognize “productivity” as typical behavior, but it appears there may be more to it than that.

wonder what i will “infect” tomorrow…