Parks Pages dot com

My wife pointed me to this site:

It's a 20-minute video that talks about why we have so much stuff -- why there's so much to buy, why we buy it, and what it really costs us.

You should check it out. It's worth the time.

Well, yesterday was Tara's and my nine-year wedding anniversary. We didn't really celebrate it -- life has been consistently getting in the way. There are just too many things that we need to do to allow us to do the things we want to do.

We did take the kids out for some games and munchies at Lucky Strike, but that wasn't really an anniversary celebration. In fact, we weren't even thinking about our anniversary much. It was more of a consistently-appearing epiphany, a *DING* "it's your anniversary, stupid!" kind of moment, jumping up at odd times during the day.

So, to honor this momentous occasion, albeit a day late, I present to you the vows we made to each other on that day in June, nine years ago, standing outside the carriage house in Ann Arbor.

Tara Marie, I choose you
to be my companion, my partner, my lover.
I choose you to be my wife.

And to you, I make this vow:
I promise to love you.
I will be a pillar of strength in your times of sadness and trouble.
I will remember the love you hold for me when I feel anger or fear.

To you, I make this vow:
I promise to honor you.

Yesterday (June 26), a freak, crazy storm passed through Plymouth while I was upstairs on the phone, working. Our power flickered and my call dropped, but she called me back on my cell phone.

While still chatting, I heard a huge gust of wind and a smattering of sudden rain, and with a *WHOOSH* it was gone.

I looked out the window at my neighbor's roof and saw some leaves on there and could just make out the rain hitting the shingles. I remarked on the rain, and my wife mentioned that the car windows were down.

Boom, we run downstairs and I go close the car windows, but by then, my wife had found it: the remains of our gazebo. The canvas top that goes over the wire frame was caught in the wind, came partway off, and was used to pull the poor thing over.

Here are the photos:

I just went to help my wife with SmartFTP, the program I've been lauding for several years. It's free, it works very well, and, well, its free. Heck, even LifeHacker promotes it as a great program.

They have this 72-day rolling upgrade schedule. If your install is over 72 days old, they want you to download the latest one with all the bugfixes. I've used this for many years, and I've updated it many times. Of course, now that I'm on the Mac, I use a different program, but for the PCs, it's been SmartFTP all the way.

So I went to help her with it, and it asked us to install the latest version. Cool. I did it. And then: Bing!

So they've converted to a pay version -- now you have to BUY it or it will STOP WORKING.

So I've been moving away from this whole spiritual thing and more into reality and understanding the world as it really is. But every now and then some of the old superstitions pop back up as though they were natural, and not learned behaviors.

For instance, today my 8-year-old daughter was cleaning her room and listening to some Disney CD she received as a gift -- you know, the kind with a bunch of pretty people groomed by professionals, doing covers of successful songs as though they were real artist, pushed on kids as part of the Disney exploitation machine -- when I heard a decidedly un-Disney-like song coming from her room: Runnin' with the Devil.

Now, I don't know this song, and it kind of caught me off guard. I mean, running with the devil ... you know, Satan, Lucifer ... that guy. I realize the song is pretty much harmless, but the whole devil thing struck a chord. I mean, she shouldn't be listening to songs about the devil, should she?

But then again, why not?