For Aunt Shyla

Lately Jack has taken to finding the most random things to be hilarious. Yesterday it was when I sneezed while playing with him on the floor. He went bonkers, so of course I milked it for all it was worth. Luckily we were able to catch the laughing fit on camera this time.

Not Entirely Sure

I'm not really sure what I want to write about today even if I really shouldn't feel the need to write about anything in particular as this is my blog after all, but I want to write about something, so I think I may just ramble for a little while and see where things go.

This morning I sent of my resume and portfolio to yet another potential employer. Yesterday I followed up on other jobs that I had either applied for or saw new listings for and all of them had been "filled" so I went my merry way towards the next ones on the list. This particular job is actually here on campus in the mechanical engineering department. They are looking for what seems to be a junior-ish web developer to help with the department website. I took a look at the website and can't really see why they need someone but I'm not going to complain.

I called up the contact within the department to ask if they were still looking for someone and they said that they were, so I got a few more details and sent off my information. According to the job listing the only real requirement is that you have a proficient knowledge in at least one of the following programming languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, or mySQL. Lucky for me they weren't another employer looking for Flash and .NET programmers, and also lucky for me that I think I could consider myself at least proficient in three or four of the languages asked for.

Seems like I fit the bill, at least at first glance. The contact in the department told me that they would review my resume and portfolio and then most likely call me to set up a preliminary interview. It's a waiting game now I guess.

I'm cruising right along in my efforts to re-read the entire Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan before the next book comes out on November 3rd. I'm almost finished with the third book (my favorite) and will be trying to finish at least 2 per month for the next couple of months. I may want to try and cram as much in before the start of school as I can if possible because I've got a couple of literature classes, but we'll see how things turn out. There are also a lot of other things happening this summer that take up time too.

Conquer Club Trivia is doing as well as can be expected. I still haven't found a lot of time to stock the system with questions (there are only about 300 or so right now), but Russell was kind enough (and much more tolerant with me than I probably deserve) to help me find a bug in the system that was allowing repeat questions when it shouldn't have been. It turns out that I had made another what we now call "Caleb Mistake" in an entirely different place that was backing things up wrong. It's now fixed though, so that is good.

The first day the site was live I had 96 unique visitors, and the next day I had 156, but that has been the record so far. Since then things have tapered off rather dramatically and it seems there are about 25 to 30 visitors a day, which is respectable for something that only fits such a small audience anyways. If I can get more questions in I think it will help a bit, but like I've said before, I don't expect it to be anything that is wildly popular, especially since I'm not making any money off of it in the long run.

I finally broke down and asked my first every question on the BYU 100 Hour Board this week, something I've always refrained from doing on some sort of strange principle before, but I had a fun question after going to dinner with Holly the other day and figured since we personally know one of the board writers I could address it to them personally and have a little fun with it. Now I just have to wait and see how long it takes for them to find the answer I guess.

Which leads me to another thought. The BYU 100 Hour Board is old, like really, really ancient, and as far as I can tell hasn't had a proper face lift in quite some time. It has the appearance of a website built in the late 90s in my opinion and doesn't seem to function all that well according to the writer that I know. Obviously given my current area of interest this has me pondering and considering the idea of making a website with a similar approach, but in a much more aesthetically pleasing way. We'll see if anything substantial comes of the thought down the line, but it's at least something to think about.

Jack is crawling, but that certainly seems like old news at this point. He now stands up next to the furniture with only one hand and steps to the side so he is barely holding on. He also has learned to push boxes against walls and use them as step stools to get to drawer and cupboard handles that he has been a long time in pursuing. Even yesterday I found him unexpectedly hanging onto the cross-bars on the back of our kitchen chairs with both feet off the floor and on the cross-bar between the chair legs. No fear, that's my son it seems.

He is also getting a bit better at sleeping through the night. Sometimes he still wakes himself up, but now he doesn't necessarily need to be fed in order to get back to sleep. Many times I can just rock him in the rocking chair for a few minutes and he's out cold again. If he does eat, he doesn't chow down on six or eight ounces of formula like before, he's lucky if he makes it through two before nodding off. I take it as a slow and steady move towards not eating at all during the night and sleeping more soundly because of his heavily increased physical activity during the day.

Solid food have been an interesting endeavor to say the least. He loves his rice cereal, but basically refuses any sort of "baby food" that we've tried. We have gone with peas, applesauce, peaches, pears, squash, and a couple others, but his reaction is to spit it back out, clamp his mouth shut and give us a look of, "Are you seriously trying to feed me that?" So, we eat a lot of rice cereal, share Daddy's mashed potatoes from time to time, and luckily we've added oatmeal to the list of things we'll eat as well. I'm thinking he is just going to go straight from the rice cereal to the real people food, sort of like Cymbre did back in the day.

I guess that is enough rambling for one day, I'll try to get some new pictures of Jack up sometime soon for everyone who likes to see those. Maybe some from our recent trip to the zoo or something.

Time for a New Look

I was tired of the boring and dull greenish look of the blog this morning, so I decided to spice it up a bit. Something a little more extreme if you will.

Not Sleeping Well

When Holly left town with Jack for a full month I thought I would catch up on some sleep, maybe rest up for the coming semester, etc. What happened instead was that I developed some sort of sleeping problem that I cannot seem to shake.

I've had trouble sleeping before in my life, but usually it lasts for a few days, maybe a week at most where I can't get to sleep until really late at night, but I can always manage to wake up just fine the next morning for the most part.

This time around I not only can't fall asleep, but I also can't wake up, and when I do sleep, even if I don't wake up during the night, the sleep is not restful to even the slightest degree. I spend the rest of the day wishing for naps and wishing I didn't have to be to work so early in the mornings.

The most unfortunate part of the whole situation is that I feel terrible about the lack of sleep because I want to be helping with Jack during the night since Holly had to do it all on her own for a whole month. Luckily, Jack is starting to learn to sleep through the night a little better, but sometimes he still wakes up and I try to help if I can.

What I wish for most is that I could solve this problem and get into a pattern of healthy sleep that would allow me to function at a much higher level.

Sideburns No More

This morning I decided I was tired of my sideburns so I shaved them off during my shower. I'm not sure what it was that motivated me to do so exactly. They didn't seem to fit with the shape of my face anymore, and they are kind of itchy in the warmer weather, and I have never had a good way of trimming them when they get really long without getting a full haircut.

I guess it was sort of a conglomeration of several things. Anyways, now I don't have sideburns anymore, so we'll see how long that lasts.

A Battle with the Toilet

Shortly after arriving at work this morning I got a phone call from Holly. Apparently the toilet had started flooding the bathroom for what appears to be no really apparent reason. Luckily I had the scooter at work, and that meant I could get home rather quickly.

I made it home in about five minutes, sent Holly and Jack on a run to the store to get Jack some diapers because he was almost out, and then set to work figuring out how to fix the predicament the bathroom was currently in. I put in a call to the maintenance folks at Wymount and about ten minutes later a guy showed up to make sure the toilet drain was clear. It didn't take him very long, but he had the unfortunate news of letting me know that the cleanup of the water was basically up to me because they didn't have a crew available today.

That meant that I got to throw down all of our towels and then pick them up, wring them out in the bathtub and repeat the process over and over until the almost 1 inch of water filling the bathroom floor was gone. It took a little while, but I got it all taken care of (luckily the water was just clean water). The biggest problem is a rather largely sized wet spot in the hallway between the bathroom, bedrooms, and living room. I got out our box fan and put it to work, and then had to come back to the office because nobody else was in yet.

Holly told me a bit later that Wymount finally sent some guys over with a carpet vacuum to suck out most of the water and leave an industrial fan to help speed along the drying process. It may dry faster, but I'm sure that noisy fan isn't making Jack all that happy.

ABC Quiz for Kicks

A - Age: 24

B - Bed size: Queen

C - Chore you hate: Dishes

D - Dog's name: Never had one

E - Essential start your day item: Shower

F - Favorite color: Blue

G - Gold or Silver: Silver

H - Height: 5' 7"

I - Instruments you play: Used to play the trumpet and piano, but not anymore.

J - Job title: Operations Manager

K - Kid(s): Jack (5 months)

L - Living arrangements: Wymount (gotta love the cinder blocks)

M - Mom's name: LuAnn

N - Nicknames: Boy

O - Outrageous idea: Starting a scooter gang

P - Pet Peeve: Being late

Q - Quote from a movie: "In 50 years when you look back don't you want to be able to say you had the guts to get in the car?" - Sam Witwicky

R - Right or left handed: Right

S - Shakespeare Play: King Lear

T - Time you wake up: 6:30am

U - Underwear: Yep

V - Vegetable you dislike: Most of them

W - Ways you run late: Doesn't happen

X - X-rays you've had: Too many to count.

Y - Yummy food you make: Peanut Butter, Honey, and Doritos Sandwiches

Z - Zoo favorite: Fish

New Office Space

With the imminent arrival of our second child it has been on my mind lately as to how I am going to make room for another little one to live here in our small Wymount apartment. Space is sort of at a premium, and we have enough stuff that rearranging only does so much good in the long run. Add on to that the fact that we will just accumulate more stuff when the new baby arrives and I have my own little cocktail for living space disaster.

However, a few weeks ago I had an idea. This particular apartment has a rather "largish" walk in storage room attached to the bedroom, which we just had a bunch of stuff thrown into in order to get it out of our way. I thought that perhaps if I were to take the time to clean it out I could maybe alter it into a sort of half storage, half office type of area and free up a bunch of space in the second bedroom for a second baby.

After several hours of work this past Saturday the following results came to fruition. I think it turned out rather well, and after a couple of days "working" in my new office I'm beginning to wonder why I never thought of it to begin with.

Sound Asleep

I don't know if anyone else experiences this phenomena.

Most night I sleep fairly well. I wake up rested well enough to go about my activities for the day and I don't feel too terribly groggy or like I am dragging my feet. Sometimes I feel a bit tired, and some days I feel like I have a little extra energy. I figure it is about the same with most other folks that I know.

However, on occasion I have a night where I absolutely am dead to the world. Last night was one of those nights. I'm talking about the kind of sleep that is so intense you never move and when your alarm goes off in the morning it feels like your limbs are full of cement and you can't move them. Sleep so intense that when you sit up for the first time you have to wait a minute before you get up because you aren't sure you are really awake.

The strange thing about this is it never happens after I've been exhausting myself with physical activity, or when I'm sick. It just happens on random occasions, not very often, and sort of comes out of the blue. I can't come up with an explanation for it, but I feel so awake the day after I sleep like that I wish I could do it every night.

My Perfect Workspace

I often go on and on about how I wish I had this amazing dream office that was filled with all sorts of wonderful things like a massive desk, four computer monitors, picture windows, and huge bookcases, but if I am 100% honest with myself, I really need much less to be happy when I am working on anything from paying the bills to writing code for a website and everything in between.

Today is a slow day here at the office and I'm trying to keep up to speed with my blogging goals for this year, so I thought it might be fun to expound on my perfect "workspace" for a little while, using the constraints of the small apartment that I currently share with my wife, son, and soon to be second child. Obviously that means I don't have much space, perhaps barely a corner of a room to work with, so lets see what I can come up with that seems reasonable.

Computer: I currently own a nice 13" Macbook, which is more than capable of meeting my computing needs. If I need to upgrade my RAM or my hard drive capacity I can do so for a relatively small amount of money in the future without needing to replace the computer altogether.

Computer Monitor: The laptop I own has a very small screen which is fine for when I am on campus or working away from home, but when I need to really buckle down and be productive a bigger portion of real estate is much appreciated. For this last Christmas my parents gifted me a great 22" flat screen monitor which works like a charm and when connected to my laptop gives me plenty of space to work. Many days I will use just the external monitor, but sometime the dual screen is nice for whatever I'm working on at the time.

Printer: Doesn't need to be anything fancy. All I need is black and white printing mostly with the occasional color print, so the basic inkjet that we currently own works like a charm, no need to change anything in this category.

Desk Chair: I like a comfortable desk chair, especially since I spend a lot of time sitting in it. Right now I have a great chair that I received as a birthday present a couple of years ago, and it works like a charm, the only problem is that it is a bit on the big side and as more children keep arriving I'm a bit concerned it might be taking up too much space at the moment. Mostly my chair just needs to be good enough that I don't get sore sitting in it for long periods of time.

External Keyboard & Mouse: Already have both of these and don't plan on replacing them anytime soon. I like wireless for my mouse, and would prefer wireless for my keyboard, but the wireless keyboard available from Apple isn't full sized yet, so I'm current wired in that regard.

Filing Cabinet: I have enough papers and records that I need to keep on file that a filing cabinet would be a wonderful addition that I don't have at the moment. I don't need a large one by any means. One of those small two-drawer types would work just fine, or even one that has a small drawer for office supplies on top and a filing drawer below would work well.

Shelving: I am not sure that I need an entire bookshelf, especially not if I have a filing cabinet or a desk drawer of some type, but one or two medium sized shelves of some type would be nice. Just enough room to keep my reference books and perhaps some other random items that I use on a regular basis.

Desk: Right now I'm working with a $5 desk that I bought from the BYU auction when I first got married, but if I'm honest it is about twice as big as I need it to be and if I could find something smaller that had just enough room to hold my monitor and keyboard/mouse I would be alright. I don't do a lot of writing or "open desk" work so extra desktop space is not a necessity for me right now, if ever.

Office Supplies: There are a few things that I like having on hand so I don't have to go searching for them. They include: Pens, Scissors, Ruler, Three Hole Punch, Printer Paper, Rubber Bands, Paper Clips, Stapler, Lined Paper, Manila Folders, Highlighters, Mechanical Pencils, Labels, and a few other random things I can't think of off the top of my head.

So, I think that is a reasonable list of things, and the great thing is that I already own most of it, excluding the cabinet or a smaller desk. The only problem I'm facing at the moment is where to put my workspace because the apartment isn't all that conducive to me keeping it in the same room as the babies, especially not when the second one arrives, and I'm not a very big fan of having it out in the living room with everything else.

One idea I have been tossing around lately is to reorganize the oversized storage closet we have into a sort of makeshift office/workspace if I can find a table or desk small enough to fit. I think I could make it work for the time remaining that we have here in Provo, and it would allow me to shut myself off from the party crowd as well because of the small door it has. The only thing I'm worried about is whether it is too cramped, but when Holly is gone in June to visit her family in Redlands I think I may give it a test drive and see if I can find a way to make it work somehow.

Jack Loves Clapping

On Sunday evening Jack was being a bit fussy and when it was finally time to go to bed he was having a bit of a tough time settling down to try and fall asleep. It was one of those times when he didn't want to sit up, didn't want to lie down, didn't want to lay on the floor, didn't want to suck on his pacifier or eat his bottle, etc.

The only thing that had worked to any degree for me the entire evening was putting him in his crib and then sitting next to it with my arm hanging over the side so that he could play with my fingers and bend them or squeeze them or lick them to his little heart's content.

So, when he started crying as Holly was attempting to put him to sleep I suggested that she go lay him in the crib and see what happened. She did, but it wasn't helping much until Holly started clapping. Yes, you heard me right, she started clapping. Apparently she does this from time to time to distract him from whatever is making him cry and shorten the crying fit by a good amount of time.

The strange thing was that she was clapping really loud, as in the kind of clapping you do when you are trying to be just a little bit obnoxious about it, not the kind of polite clapping you do at the end of a performance or speech.

Of course, Jack being the strange little boy that he is at times thought the clapping was the perfect sedative and promptly rolled over on his side and got a serious bout of the droopy eye syndrome so common in little babies who just can't stay awake any longer. A few more minutes of clapping and he was basically out, so Holly grabbed the closest book she could find, The Search for Wallace Whipple (my favorite of all time) and read him the first two pages.

He fell asleep and didn't wake up for 7 hours. Ridiculous I say, ridiculous!

Showertime!

Last Thursday was a bit of a rough day for Jack and I. We both woke up with some strange cough/runny noses and had a bit of a tough time dealing with it. Both of us were coughing and sneezing and moaning all day trying to get over it. By the time it we were ready to lay down and go to sleep for the night we needed to give Jack a bath, but I decided it might be good for him to take a shower with me because I could stand at one end of the shower and turn the water up nice and hot so the steam could help relax him and make his cough feel a little better.

Wheel of Time Book 12: Now Three Books

This news is at least a week or two old, and I meant to post about it back when it was fresh on my mind, but I can post about it now that I have a few spare minutes in my day.

The Wheel of Time series has been ongoing for years, and it is one of my favorite series of all time, only recently surpassed by Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. I've been waiting for Book 12 of Wheel of Time for almost 4 years and it was scheduled to be released this coming October as I have mentioned previously here on the blog.

As it turns out while working on the book, Brandon Sanderson, the replacement author for Robert Jordan, has discovered that he cannot possibly write the story in the way it was intended in any less than 800,000 words. To put that into perspective consider that most mass market books are published at about 200,000 words at most.

So, with this revelation the editors and publishers decided to release the book as three parts, the first of which will be titled The Gathering Storm and will be released in mid-November of this year. The following two books should be released in November 2010 and November 2011 respectively unless something crazy happens.

Here are some pertinent links to the information:

1. Tor Books Press Release

2. Comments on the Situation by Brandon Sanderson

3. Interview with Harriet (Robert Jordan's wife and editor)

In the end, I think I am okay with this situation. I simply don't want to wait past the end of this year to get some more of the story that I can read. If it takes three more books to finish things the right way, then by all means, I will buy each and every one of those three books. Besides, I'm a huge Brandon Sanderson fan, and I'll take all of his writing that I can get.

Decluttering My Life, Step 1: Deactivate My Facebook Account

Yep, I did it. I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of days ago because the concept behind that site has officially becoming boring to me. There is never anything all that exciting going on with Facebook except for the poorly designed layout changes from time to time, and the site has grown far to big for its britches if you ask me.

It was one thing when Facebook was only available to university students. At that point it held a certain mysterious appeal for me, knowing that a bunch of hormone induced teenagers wouldn't be cluttering my wall space with their absurd speech patterns was quite comforting to say the least.

Then Facebook sold out. They opened the doors to everyone and their MySpace crew, and things went downhill fast. Then was the introduction of "applications" and I knew my time was growing short.

I hung on for a while longer, knowing that my wife enjoys seeing the activities of my friends almost more than I do from time to time, but in the end, it was a waste of my time, a waste of society's time, and overall a waste of time in general.

I've got so many things on my plate right now that I'm looking for ways to simplify, adjust, and come to grips with the most important things to occupy my attention. Watching constant "someone saw someone and it made that someone so happy the other someone wanted to smile at someone" statuses is the epitome of inane in my mind. Thanks, but no thanks.

Ask yourself this: If Facebook has grown to the point where you are now considered a rebel to not be on Facebook, don't you think that tells you something about the world nowadays?

For Your Information

Anyone using the email addresses listed below to contact me should be advised that none of them work anymore. I have finally condensed myself down to two addresses, one for my Google accounts and applications, and one for more professional work uses.

These ones no longer work:

cg.flanagan@live.com
caleb.flanagan@hotmail.com
tournamusprime@hotmail.com
tournamusprime@yahoo.com
tournamusprime@aim.com

If you want to get ahold of me use either of the following two addresses:

cg.flan@gmail.com
calebflanagan@otissito.com

Also, some of you may wish to know the proper way to contact me via instant messaging services. Another post will follow shortly outlining those details. Thanks.

The Gravity of Skiing

My dad sent me the following article this morning in an email with the attached message:

If you've ever wondered why your father never taught you to ski, here is the answer.

The Gravity of Skiing by Dave Barry

I haven't attempted to ski for years, but recently I decided to take another stab at it. I was hoping they'd done something about the gravity problem.

Gravity is the biggest drawback to skiing. Without gravity, it would be a carefree activity: You'd put on your skis, head for the slopes and just . . . HOVER for a while. Then it would be time for ``apres ski''

(French for ''no longer skiing''). Instead, you have gravity. Huge amounts of it. Ski areas are located smack dab on top of giant gravity piles called ``mountains.'' Most areas also use machines to make more gravity at night. Thus powerful forces are always trying to suck you, the skier, down the mountain and into large fixed objects such as buildings. This is why the Number One Rule of Skiing Safety is: ``Never go up the mountain without a good reason, such as it is summer.''

This lesson was driven home to me dramatically the first time I tried skiing, which was in 1964 at a ski area in southern New York State, where much of the time, instead of snow, you ski on frozen mud (or, as we say in ski-area terminology, ``excellent conditions''). I went with my friend Lanny Watts, who knew how to ski, and who -- after watching me fall down repeatedly while I was still in the parking lot -- decided that the best way for me to learn would be to go straight to the top of the mountain and see what happened. What happened was, I slid off the chairlift and went back down the mountain very fast.

Q. What do you mean by ``very fast''?
A. I mean that, because of the Theory of Relativity, after a few seconds I had traveled in time back to 1963, and was still picking up speed when I penetrated deep into the woods.

Eventually I learned that the best tactic for skiing is: Never go DOWN the mountain. Always go SIDEWAYS, which involves less gravity. You want to creep laterally along the slope, like a giant parka-wearing crab, until you reach a safe place, such as San Diego. This can take months but it is better than going down the mountain.

Also you want to make sure you have the right equipment. And when I say ''the right equipment,'' I mean, ''not skis.'' Even so-called ''modern'' skis still have the fundamental safety defect that has plagued skis from the beginning: They are slippery on the bottom. If I were designing a ski, it would be called ''The Inertia,'' and the bottom would be a combination of golf spikes, Crazy Glue and Velcro. My advertisement would be a photo of a skier standing on an extremely steep slope, such as the side of the Chrysler Building, not moving at all, just sticking straight out horizontally, like a gargoyle.

If we had such a ski, skiers, freed from the threat of going down the mountain, would be able to focus their attention on the true essence of modern skiing, which is trying to contact other skiers via cell phone. I saw a LOT of this during my trip. Every 30 seconds or so, there'd be beeping, and all around me, people would frantically start unzipping layers of designer ski attire to see if it was their phone ringing. If it was, they'd have a conversation like this: ``Hello? Hello? Where are you? Have you seen Bob? He was with me, but then the gravity got him. Although one of his legs is still here.''

My final tip is: If you're skiing with your wife, and you foolishly ride up the mountain on a chairlift with her, and for reasons that are never made clear she fails to get off at the top, so they have to stop the whole chairlift and make it go backward and help her remove her skis so she can climb down, and she is very embarrassed, this will turn out to be YOUR FAULT. Don't argue! Just accept it, and apologize.

Honey, I'm sorry.

New Blog Title Image

I had a few moments between assignments this morning and decided that since I really liked the header image I made for Crackerjack Coalition months ago that I would alter it to fit over here at Archelon Kingdom as well.

I hope you like it. It's nothing fancy, but it is more unique than the standard blogger template header for this particular setup.

Brett's Birthday

Yesterday was my boss, Brett McInelly's birthday. Since it was Sunday we couldn't really do anything for him, but Jennifer, my other boss had the secretary from the main department office whip up this cake from a picture that Brett had in his office. I just wanted to share it because I think it looks pretty cool.

I've Replaced My Cell Phone

Just so everyone knows, I have the same phone number, so you don't need to get a new one from me. Between Holly and Shyla I have managed to recollect pretty much all of the phone numbers I had before, so I should be good to go now.

The Lost Art of Written Letters

This is an older post from another blog that I wanted to transfer over here because I'm changing the focus of the other blog.

It's no secret that in this day and age some of the great things from days of old are disappearing one small piece at a time. Surrounded by technological advances, and a new website to become a member of each day when we wake up, it seems to me that inter-personal relationships are becoming entirely dependent on some sort of technology to be maintained. To a certain extent this isn't such a bad situation, especially when it makes it far easier to communicate in a rapid fashion, but in other ways it seems to take away some of the connection you get when being someone's friend.

Nowadays a large portion of my friendships are conducted online as a member of Facebook or one of the various other social networking websites. There are friends on Facebook of mine that I haven't been in the physical presence of for several years on some cases, even when I live in a relatively close vicinity. There are days when I find this helpful because I'm sure some of them I wouldn't have a clue about if social networking sites were not available, but part of me longs to have something a little more tangible.

I'm one of those people who has multiple email addresses for various things, one for work, one for registrations, and one for personal contact. The interesting thing about this is that for some reason I have this innate dislike for the impersonal nature of using email for casual personal correspondence. I have this feeling that sometimes things from the "old world" so to speak should be retained. This is where the lost art of handwritten letter writing comes into play.

Remember back in elementary school when your 4th grade teacher told the entire class that you would each be getting a pen pal from some faraway country? I do, and I remember it being a pretty exciting thing to share letters from someone across the globe. I remember when as a class we would take time and each write a letter to another 4th grade student and put them all into one large envelope to be shipped out the next day. We were always really excited to show up to class a few weeks later and have our teacher reveal a return envelope full of letters for us.

Part of me longs for a return to the days when going to the mailbox meant something each day. It could be a letter from a friend, a postcard from a relative, or some other exciting news from what seemed like an incredible distances when only nine years old. I'd love to get more than some inane credit card offers, mailers, or magazine subscription offers when I go to check the mail. It would be great to get something worth actually reading on occasion.

If I could find a way to get the people around me to write letters once again, and not just type the words out on a keyboard each time I would think it a small moral victory. Until then however, I think I'll have to cope with getting everything in some form of digitized text.