Butch's blog

I know today is your first day back to work for the school year, and that you're not feeling well. I hope you enjoyed the presents and cards and the day we spent in Portsmouth.

Sorry the Bier Garden was a bit of a disappointment, but like you said, running out of standard dishes at one in the afternoon . . . that's just wrong. And yea, maybe it didn't match up with what you would have called home cooking.

All that being said, I hope today, your actual birthday, is a good day. I know it's going to be the 3rd busy week in a row, for both of us.

I just spent a little bit of time doing what I was starting to feel like was the only reason why I even went back to the Facbook website: blocking applications that people I was connected with were using because I just don't have an interest in what Facebook game, Facebook quiz or Facebook 3rd-party-app feature most people use beyond the small set I use myself, for my own purposes.
After blocking the eighth facebook app, I started to get a little angry. At least two of these apps I thought I had blocked before. Either there is yet another app on facebook with this or that name, or an app I already blocked has spawned another app to get around the fact that people block it. I really don't care. I'm tired of it. I really only want to see status updates from people that are actually put onto facebook by a person deciding there is something they want to add to facebook, not an automatically generated posting made by a game teasing me with information that I can't get to, because I don't use the app.
I'm sorry; I'm not going to add an app just to see 1 more line of text, and let yet another group mine my information without any value to me.

Part the First: What the hell is going on here

The original idea for this post came kind of early in the year. Of course the problem is at that time of the year, everyone is doing these kind of posts. Programs of all sorts look back on their pasts, talk about current projects and dream about their futures. Toking at some of the title these kind of things get, plays on the US State of the Union, I realized that I am able to do is speak for myself.

And thus the title, “State of this Human.”

The next time the idea of this post came up was around the time of my birthday. And that just seemed rather boring. But the idea kept.

This week (or two) I'm here alone. Seemed like a reasonably good time to be a little bit introspective.

Part the Second: Life in general

Would statistics work here for starting things off? 37. Overweight. Underpaid. How about some categorical assignments? Husband, Father of 2 boys, Technology Consultant. Insomniac.

The phrase that has seemed to sum up everything for me for the last couple of years has been “I'm not really all that interesting.”

I just got off the phone with my mother. This morning they had to put our dog, Gabby, to sleep. This is the second time that I've been unable to be there to say good-bye to a pet I helped raise right before Natalie and the boys were going to be making a trip to my parents, without me.
Gabby was not a young dog. While we never really knew what breeds she mixed, at 13-14 years old, she must have been old for any of them. She had a good long life, and I believe that she was happy for most of it. The only times it might not have been good were when Max was put to sleep, having to adjust to being the only dog in the house, and the last couple of years of discomfort from medical issues.
Today is even sadder, because it is not just not being there to say good-bye to a pet, but also the viewing of the mother of friends that we spent a lot of time with during high school, which was also this morning. I'm still a little stunned that the mother of of close friends is gone. She was someone I knew, and someone that cared for the whole group of us, treated all of us good enough to be family.

About three weeks of Nat's and the boys' summer have passed. And everyone else is getting ready to leave for 3 weeks.
At the start of the summer, Natalie and I put together some activities that we wanted the boys to try do to keep their minds working through the summer. We worked hard through the school year to get the boys writing and to get them to learn how to keep themselves from putting all their work off till the last minute. This is something that we had problems with even getting into the end of the school year. One of the stated goals I had was to give them work to do, and to have them figure out how to meet the objectives for every week.