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I will be going to Prague, Czech Republic this spring 2024 for a week-long class field seminar!

Strike is over, my book sales leapt up, and I lost 3 pounds, so I’m back in the game!

They are getting big!

I’m a bestseller now so I take it all back. (kidding… sorta… Odine is 100% correct.)

I got a big grant proposal submitted today.

I have a job interview for a project manager position. It will be a decent pay bump if I get the job. Wish me luck guys!

I got a new car. Going to replace the engine in the other one and give it to our kid.

I finally got released today after my kidney levels finally cooperated. It feels so nice to be lying in my own bed again. I’ll finally get to see my son again in an hour or so. I won’t be able to pick him up for about 5 more weeks, though. This is the longest I’ve gone without being able to see him in-person.

Two days operation and I am doing much better. I am surprised how little pain I have now. I’ve progressed to eating soft foods and have been getting up to walk a lot. My new, shorter digestive system seems to be functioning pretty well so far, too. I am hoping to get sent home tomorrow.

You can’t have a conversation about this Kennedy without talking about vaccines and the fact that he knows only surface level information about vaccines and clinical trials. The fact that he knows just that surface level information is why he is so dangerous with his claims about them; he knows just enough to sounds like he knows what he is talking about, but he doesn’t understand the details and nuances. That makes the rhetoric that he spews extremely dangerous. I am very sorry to hear about what your father experienced with the vaccine. From what I have read in the journal articles about myocarditis and severe inflammatory responses to the Covid vaccines, the prevailing understanding is that individuals who experienced them typically have proteins present that result in an immune overreaction to the vaccine. There is also ample evidence that the rates of myocarditis and similar reactions are even more prevalent in those who got Covid but did not receive the vaccines (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9467278/#:~:text=Conclusion,those who received the vaccine.) Unfortunately, it is impractical to test everyone for such proteins ahead of vaccination. That is why governments started advising a much bigger block of individuals than likely actually has that protein response to consider alternative vaccines. Such reactions were not caught in the clinical trials due to the extremely small probability of individuals having those reactions. Clinical trials are designed first and foremost with safety in mind. That is why they start with small sample sizes during stage 1 to test for safety issues. In stage 2, the sample size is chosen very carefully to then check for evidence of, in this case, immune response (development of antibodies), while still keeping the sample size low enough that if there are adverse reactions in a size of the sample that would not have been caught in stage 1 due to rarity of those reactions, the number of people potentially harmed would still be extremely low. Moving on to stage 3, the samples are the largest they will be in a controlled experiment to test if the end goals for the study are met. In this case, that means the modulation or prevention of Covid in patients receiving the vaccine. However, once again the sample sizes cannot reasonably capture the most extremely rare events that may occur in less than 1 in several hundred thousand individuals. That is why every single medicinal product is monitored by regulatory groups after they hit market to watch for extremely rare adverse reactions to offer subsequent guidance. In fact, the first several years after a product is released is referred to as Stage 4 of a clinical trial. In normal circumstances, the general public hears very little about any of these stages or the process, only typically that it takes years to go through. That time frame is usually due entirely to a lack of funding and resources to handle the manufacturing, logistics, and recruiting aspects of the trials in a short period of time. With the whole world throwing resources and money agh the problem at the same time, those challenges were mitigated and allowed for all of this to happen in a time frame that saved and/or greatly helped a tremendous number of people. Kennedy and his ilk do not understand how these things work, nor the way that the field of statistics provides context to the numbers that they throw out there as evidence of wrongdoing.

Welp, guess I am done parenting. (He didn’t notice there was no diploma in there. It arrives by mail in a couple weeks.)

Mark Hamill liked my comment on Facebook today so I'm pretty much a celebrity by proxy.

I finally scheduled myself a mental health appointment. It's not for another month, but hey. Today has been a pretty bad day for absolutely no reason at all, even with the last few being good ones. Shit's fucking hard man.

We celebrated our son being one month old today. Side note: All mentions of him have been purposefully kept off Facebook.

Our little guy has been around for a whole year now! I can barely believe it.

Autumn in the mountains of NC is indescribably beautiful.

Good news, obstacle cleared, for now. This is still a year-long process, but I think I am better prepared than most people.

My second interview went well. I think I have a good shot at a job offer!

I got a check I wasn't expecting! Bonus money!

THE MURDEROUS HANDS OF DISNEY my all time favorite nightly quote

The little guy is both crawling now and constantly pulling himself up onto his feet on anything he can find. There goes being able to put him down in one spot.

The more shows come out, the more I think Order 66 didn't really do anything did it?

So…. on strike. Working on a few personal projects. I am planning to shoot a short scifi film. There’s a couple space shots and I was assuming I’d need to do them as cg. I talked to a few friends who do that sort of thing and it’s not cheap. I was on YouTube watching videos to see if I could teach myself— cause that is the sort of thing my ADHD brain does… but 3D software vexes me. Anyway, happened upon a couple videos that showed that oddly, doing it the old school way is actually easier than CG now. With a decent lighting set up, a mini dolly, a green screen, camera and model spaceship you can do what ILM did decades ago with a few clicks in after effects (which I DO know how to use.) So obviously, I needed a spaceship. Off to some kitbashing tutorials, and a great one on “panelizing” by Adam Savage… I decided to convert this old batplane toy my kid nabbed at a garage sale a decade ago k to a chunky armored spaceship. So batplane, plus a lot of cut out pieces of styrene, parts from a macross valkryie armored fighter, a Russian fighter plane missile kit, another anime robot fighter plane, and a Space 1999 Eagle shuttle. Bunch of glue. Spray paint. 34737273 exacto knife blades. Cost me maybe around $30 in supplies.

Well I was inspired by watching Star Trek Picard season 3 and I pulled this model out and built it. I wanted to do something different so I went with a gold finish. I think it came out pretty well!

I just had this image of Lyra in high school telling her friends she’ll met them later cause she’s going to go smoke out with her Aunt Tami first.

Thanks! The first two weeks, especially, were very tough, but we pushed through them. It didn’t help that we didn’t have everything we would need, in part because he got here two weeks before his due date, but also because there were some things we just didn’t expect to need until he was older. It is nice. It to have to run out to Walmart or Target at least once per day anymore. fortunately, my wife's parents have also been staying with us to help us out with a lot of things. This would have been so much harder without them here. My parents came out, too, for a while, which was also good.

Behold! My new kitties!

But it literally is your life to take. You accepted responsibility for this animal's life and well being when you adopted him. You owe it to him to make his passing as peaceful as possible. I would feel much more guilty letting my pet suffer pain, and for far longer than is necessary, just to assuage my own feelings.

It's been a few years now, but I talked about my Dad here before. During the last few years of my Dad's life, he was very sick and I was essentially his primary care person. I would call him every day or go to his house every other day to make sure he was ok. Sometimes it was like he had just given up on life, and wouldn't take care of himself. I would have to do a lot of things for him like taking him to the doctor, shopping for him, cleaning the house, etc. This was on top of working full time and going to school. I was under a ton of stress at the time. Despite my efforts to help him any way I could, my Dad would talk a lot about dying and being with my Mom who had passed away in 2013, how he hated life, and would get in moods where he would take things out on me. I knew rationally he was depressed, but when he would say things like that, or would even get nasty and lash out at me, I would secretly sometimes feel like he should just hurry up and die. I felt so guilty for that because I also loved my Dad very much.

thanks guys, I appreciate this

I think that's a somewhat normal reaction/feeling. I told the chaplain I was kind of pissed at my mom for fighting so hard when she was dying. I just wanted her to go peacefully, and she had to be a stubborn pain in the ass like she usually was. I had a friend whose dad was dying from CJKD and she told me when she got a moment alone with him, she literally told her dad to let go already because it was killing her mom and siblings to have it drag out so long. And she loved her dad dearly and was heartbroken to lose him. Your dad has been sick from addiction for a long time and watching him slowly die sucks. You aren't a monster. Watching someone die slowly is painful, and dementia usually makes people unpleasant, to put it lightly.

Also I too had that thought about my mom before about just dying. The quality of life for her was just so awful. It’s literally like watching someone commit the worlds slowest suicide. And it’s selfish. I was way more prepared for my mom dying than my sister

I took a T-rex to the mountains

I have a second interview for this job later this week.

My husband's boss has called him twice and he actually went out for a happy hour and left his work phone at home? I mean, to me it's a good thing but I'm petty and enjoying the fact that this guy can't get ahold of my husband and ruin dinner plans for the 5628th time. If that doesn't work, doggo on a boat.

The truck I ordered in April came in today.

Here is a cat loaf tower. It is good.

I have been reminiscing about old times so I decided to see if I still remembered my Nightly password- good news! I do! I have a kid! He's almost 5. His name is Winston. He's amazing. He's also challenging as heck. Like, suddenly in the last two months he has almost no impulse control. We are working hard with him on it, and he's working really hard too. For awhile there he was knocking everything over in the house when he got upset. Now, he's not doing that much. But man, he's been so challenging lately. He super hates brushing teeth right now. I think it might be a sensory thing? He said, "I don't like it because I don't want thistles in my mouth." Same kid, same. Anyways I wanted to post and i didn't know where to post so hi everyone it's good to see your fake faces!

I've heard the wait times on requisitioning a probe droid from tech dept. to the outer rim is an absolute nightmare, what with logistics being understaffed and all due to too many executions and force chokings. Also Kevin from maintenance is snowed under lately with repairs to sandy droids with burned out motivators and fried circuits. Advice from requisitions is to try your luck with Dewbacks'r'Us. Or, walk.

Omg y'all, I was talking to this dude and he mentioned that he liked horror movies, and one of the ones he mentioned was Leatherface, and I was all like "I'm totally friends with the guy who wrote the screenplay" and he didn't believe me, and I was all like "Uh-huh, my wife gave him good advice when his kid was little, and in fact, his kid just graduated high school last week, and you can look him up on IMDB because we're totally cool with each other" and now I am apparently best buds with Seth, and also may need to send Oliver a graduation present. Oliver, receiving random envelope with a check in it: Who TF is this?

Bud Light Lime FTW. Only shitty beer I will drink. When Carhartt pissed off all the fundies for being woke or some shit, I got a free jacket from our local gifting community from one of my kids classmates lol. That probably identified us as being woke too.

School update!! Despite occasionally trying to say otherwise, Noah wound up rather liking his school. And he did so incredibly well academically. They just threw him into algebra without testing his math level. We’d just barely started algebra in homeschool. I think he was maybe 4 weeks in, but he picked up right where they were without missing a beat. Even I’m impressed with that! He finished the school year with all As except science, which was a B, and all As on all his final exams. Can I just say how validating that is for me as his main homeschool teacher? This is a rigorous classical school where all the core classes are actually honors classes, and he crushed it. I didn’t even know how much anxiety I had about his academic “readiness” until it all started to dissipate. Noah also has zero social anxiety. I didn’t know that was possible for a 14 year-old. On his very first day of school, he mixed up his class schedule and wound up dressing out for PE only to discover when he walked outside that it was lunch time instead. So there he was, obviously in his PE uniform an hour early in front of the entire class. But he was just like “oh oops”, went back inside for his lunch, and found a table of kids to sit with. The he just went on about his day. When he told me about that after school a part of me was completely mortified for him, but he didn’t think anything of it. I told him that if that had happened to me I would have rather moved to Siberia than go back the next day. He thinks I’m weird. So anyway, he made several friends in the 2 months he was there. Even went to a birthday pool party the weekend after school ended. Luke also did amazingly well this year. He started school in January and was behind in reading and writing, which I expected as we’d barely started formal lessons with him. Since he was in the early childhood program in Houston in ‘19-‘20, they immediately set him up with group speech therapy, a paraeducator for one-on-one reading/writing, and a pull out group for social skills. He, like his brother, totally crushed math. His teacher mentioned to us several times how advanced he thinks mathematically and how quick he picked up new concepts. And by the end of the year, we were told that they recommended that he start 2nd grade without the one-on-one reading support as he has now “caught up” to his peers. Reading and writing skills are so varied at this age that I think he’s still kinda on the lower end of “on level”, so we’re trying to do more reading with him this summer. He’s actually really into a lot of Dr. Suess books and we’ve found him reading them spontaneously on his own several times now. We’ve also noticed an improvement in his expressive language and story telling. One of his biggest challenges is telling or retelling stories and answering why and how questions. He’s started to voluntarily retell events from his day or from his shows, and he even stops to correct himself when he gets something out of sequence. My favorite thing though is how all of his teachers and paras and therapists keep going out of their way to tell us how kind he is to them and to his fellow students. I try to cling to that now that it’s summer and he has a meltdown every time we ask him to do anything that’s not watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft.

I think I’ve been unknowingly waiting my whole life to read Dr. Seuss books to my son.

Hahaha I love kids. I just pushed back and said no we really need virtual because we have no childcare. It went pretty well, there was one point of contention around para support and we wanted them to make sure they have a good plan for next school year. Basically he is being over-served currently because there is another child in his class who has 100% shared para support. They want him to become more independent, which is absolutely the goal, but the start of a new school year is a bad time to pull the rug out from under him. In all honesty, the principal always HAS to have the last word and when you mix that with my husband it can be a flash point because he likes to make sure he got his point across. He got a little snippier than he probably had to, but honestly he's still pretty pissed about how things went down last year. I'm wondering if she thought that in-person might defuse that, but in all honesty, virtual is better because I can give him some off-screen signals that he needs to chill. Our phone conversations have usually been worse than our in-person interactions, but this particular principal really gets under my skin. I feel like she tries to make her problems every one else's problem. We've been though 9 different principals over the years between our 2 kids, and I've only had 2 have that have acted like this (and the other one is at Q's former private school, which, we basically left because of that attitude). She tried to get rid of him, and now we are back and she's stuck with us. That relationship is going to take awhile to repair, if it can be. Unfortunately because her behavior earlier triggered us because of some past trauma, I probably will never be able to trust her. Overall, though, E is doing really well now that we've got his medications dialed in. He's made a lot of progress in his PT goals for writing and cutting. I think everyone is on board with what we want E's skills to be when he moves to middle school in 7th grade. The goal is no para support, able to write out his math work, and can use a laptop or computer to write out his longer response work. We are still working on letter formation in some cases.

In Seattle with Icy! Had dinner last night with Jacob and the family, Tami, and Nicole. And we took zero pics.

She’s lying I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t hang out with her if you had a gun to my head

Reaching for infinity Frozen moment

At least now we will know who the drunk guy she almost runs over is on the next Zoom