I’ve spent eleven great years with my sweetheart, Bryan, and I’m looking forward to the next fifty. He tries to pretend he’s a gruff, hard-nosed, ex-football-lineman attorney, but I know better… he has the biggest heart I’ve ever known. Thank you for everything, honey!

And more thanks to all our family and friends, whose caring makes the world a better place.

Instead of a cohesive blog post, tonight I have just random thoughts. I’ll probably wake up with a fully formed essay at 2am, but until then, this is all I have.

• I ordered a used Powerbook G4 for the college-bound elder smug son off eBay. The seller sent me an autographed Eli Manning football by mistake. He’s already corrected the mis-shipment, but it was pretty hilarious.
• We missed our annual tradition watch of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. With the wonders of modern digital cable, we found it repeating this weekend and have it set to record. The dogs are very cranky with us.
• I am very psyched for our upcoming five-day extra long weekend in Vegas – we’re leaving Friday night. We’re taking the teens; this trip is in part a graduation present for the previously mentioned elder son. We have tickets and backstage passes for The Phantom. (Vegas also has tremendous photography opportunities for the younger one.)
• Speaking of elder son, again… this morning we got up and the son had made cinnamon rolls and coffee. (They were Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, but still… the thought was there.) I could get used to having him out of school! He starts college at the end of March.
• I missed a lot of really interesting stuff while I was out of town. My RSS reader stored up 682 posts in the five days was offline – ouch!
• It’s starting to seem an awful lot like spring here – my fingers are crossed! The temps are hovering in the 50s, it’s occasionally sunny, and the daffodils are sending little shoots into the air.

Happy spring!

Smug son Zach is a photographer and artist. In my biased maternal opinion, he’s a pretty good one.

Last summer, he saved up enough money from his lawn mowing to buy the game console of his dreams. Instead, he chose to buy himself a digital camera – a high-end point-and-shoot Canon S3. He uses it a lot, often taking 1,000 shots a day using different settings, and ends up with some really good images.

His school photography club is having an art show at a coffee shop downtown this month. Zach has three pictures on display. I was privileged to attend the artists’ reception with him last week.

Seeing his work framed and hung, contending very favorably with that of much more experienced photographers, was wonderful. He received lots of positive feedback at the event.

The club is primarily senior girls, and Zach is a fairly geeky sophomore boy. It was amusing to walk in, see all the girls cheerfully say hi, and watch him turn a hundred shades of red. Poor Zach.

I’ll probably buy one – or more – of his photos, just to support him and hang on our wall. Yes, I could print them out (again) for nearly free, but this teaches him copyright, pride in his work and the value of a unique piece of art.

On another subject entirely, work is wild and woolly this week, and I’m not finding any time to get online, write, or visit others’ sites. This too will pass. I hope.

Last week, a producer from CBC broadcasting contacted me about participating in their Spark technology trends radio show; this particular episode focuses on online collaboration. The show included an overview of the site Ficlets. My participation is limited to a couple lines from a ficlet, but the show in its entirety is pretty interesting. CBC has uploaded the show podcast and written a blog entry about the show (including links to the ficlets highlighted on the radio show).

I wasn’t asked to contribute because my writing is particularly wonderful, in fact the Ficlet featured is not one of my better ones. I was contacted because I wrote a viable sequel to a piece written by the creator of the site, Kevin Lawver.

Nonetheless, it’s been fun.

In other notes, I’m going to be offline for a few days for personal travel; this will probably be my last post until next week.

They also cannot vote because they are 1) dogs, and 2) have the IQ of a mushroom. The latter deficit, however, is not a barrier to voting, nor running for and winning elected office.

The closed primary is frustrating, it feels like disenfranchisement. (Don’t even get me started on the electoral college!)

Not all states operate that way. Why can’t all registered voters select a primary party of their choice and vote or attend a caucus, without having to declare a party affiliation?

Washington’s primary isn’t for a couple of weeks anyway, but it’s pretty anticlimactic when my vote is unwanted.