Mattel made WHAT?

And now, for the first time ever, a Barbie that boys will like more than girls: complete with angry ravens comes the Barbie from "The Birds." Too bad Hitchcock isn't around to see this. I wonder if they are going to put out a new Alfred line... maybe we'll get a “Vertigo” play set complete with Monastery Bell Tower.

Just pray that they don’t decide to honor Edger Allen Poe…

Mother's Day

Today, I take off my hat for mothers around the globe and particularly for my own sweet mother. We've got some kind of a connection, she and I. She knows the state of my inner self without asking from a tested distance of 144 miles - I'm not sure what her actual range is, and I'm not sure that I'm willing to move to the other side of the world to find out. She can therefore support me emotionally in a way that no one else can. I'm grateful for that - it's been a huge blessing to me on top of the many other needs she has met for me at the expense of her own personal goals.

Of course there are also several other fine ladies, my grandmothers and aunts, that have always been there for me. I have a close knit family, so I've really been raised by most of my relations. Good things to have, relations. They give life extra zest! My heritage is one of the most important things I've got. I know where and who I come from. That's important to me.

I've got a series of books that my Grandfather and some Aunts put together - the Merrell Books. It's got the biographies and autobiographies of a big chunck of my extended family for a few generations back. I'm even in short paragraph of it.

Today I was reading an account written by my Great-Great Uncle Porter. He was born on Jan. 15, 1900 and died on Dec. 25, 1999. Needless to say, he had a lot of good stories. Besides that, he had a glass eye and he liked to play games that ended with me holding fistful of coins. The man was my hero. Following is something that he wrote about his mother. He wrote a good deal more regarding her communities and church duties, but because we're talking about motherhood, I edited them out for brevity (Keep int mind that Porter was one of 12 children):

"Another interesting side light on Mother..she always breast-fed her babies. This of course, took time and she was not about to just sit there, that would be wasting time. She always had a book or magazine where she could pick it up. In this way she was always well read. She could discuss most issues intelligently. She had a very good understanding of the scriptures. Another trait i admired in Mother was her clean mind.[...] I have never heard her suggest covering up or being deceitful in the smallest degree. Everything had to be honest, even if it hurt.

"My mother worked more than anyone I have known. With this large family, just the food preparation was staggering. It took eight large loaves of bread each and every day; more than fifty pounds of flour per week and everything else in proportion. She kept any rag or piece of clothing, cut them into strips one inch wide, sewed them together and wound them into balls. When she had enough she would set up the loom and weave it into a carpet. Our home, except the kitchen, was covered with Mother's carpet. Straw was put on the floor, then covered with carpet. Each spring the carpet would be taken up and cleaned, the old straw taken out and new straw put in, and the cleaned carpet replaced on the floor. mother made dresses for all her girls. She washed, carded and spun sheep wool into yarn then knit socks, mittens, caps and sweaters for most of the family.

"Many times snow was melted to wash clothes each week. Washing was done with a tub, washboard and soap Mother had made. Washing machines came much later.[...] She did a lot of crocheting, tatting or making flowers. She patched our clothing and darned our stockings. She was up early and retired late.[...] She was and is a wonderful mother."

I'm going to close this post with two toasts found in the book "Toasts - the complete book of the best toasts, sentiments, blessings, curses, and graces" compiled by Paul Dickson:

"Here's to the happiest hours of my life-
Spent in the arms of another man's wife:
My mother!"

"We have toasted our sweethearts,
Our friends and our wives,
We have toasted each other
Wishing all merry lives;
Don't frown when I tell you
This toast beats all others
But drink one more toast, boys-
A toast to - Our Mothers."

God bless mother's - past, present and future (and especially mine!)

-S. A. Taube

Bl-ah-g

Post 18

I just posted a post in the which I made apologies for being away for so long and posting a topic that I'll discuss soon. The "cyber-ether" absorbed it with some mysterious error. I think the keeper of the void has it in for me. I still apologize, but not so nicely. Unpolished topic intro follows:

Topic will be:

"Most things you consider to be evil are really just lonely and lacking in social niceties"

Feel free to comment on the topic before I do, as I can't right now. Consider this virtual circle time.

Write in such a way that if your blog is called upon to die prematurely (as mine are prone to do) they'll have a happy reunion with the good blogs of the past. However, it's likely that their tarnished descendants (like this one) will end up going to the postMaster Demon (and yes I know that's not what it is, but Demon is far more appropriate than what's his bucket)

-Schlange

At A Later Date

(post 13)

Sadness.

I haven't been on a date in somewhere between two and three years. Much of that has to do with me volenteering two years of my life to teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I've been back from my mission for 6 months and just haven't got the guts up to ask anybody to go with me. So, I finaly did. I worked myself up to asking a pretty, nice, and funny girl to go ice-skating with me over the period of about 2 months.(That is to say, it took me 2 months to ask, rather than asking her to go ice-skating for 2 months.) I called her today and asked if she'd like to go. She said, "If you mean Friday or Saturday, I can't. My family is coming into town and I'm going to spend the weekend with them."

OUCH - not so much because she had other plans (and if I were her I would have said exactly the same thing), it's just that I spent so much time freeking out about it for nothing. Now I feel a little ackward about asking again - the same casual invitation, if repeated next weekend would now be not so casual by way of the repetition. How long are you supposed to wait before asking again? Maybe I need to ask someone else to go with me. Maybe then I wouldn't feel so akward asking later. (for those of you who are laughing at me, remember that this is a big thing for me right now... I'm soooooo out of touch with how to deal with women). *Sigh*

If anybody who lives close to me reads this I'd appriciate it if you'd keep this to yourself. If you're a woman who lives close to me reading this, then forget you read it. Think of me as suave and debonair. =)

-Schlange

Pretzels

(Post 11)

So, I learned the key to a woman's' heart. (No, not pretzels, that's just a tongue in cheek reference to a talk about the "Soul Kiss" by President Spencer W. Kimball.) Homework. Really. I'm not even talking about 1967 slang, in which the term "homework" is innuendo. What I am talking about is what I witnessed today in the Computer Science programming lab.

So that you'll understand, let me explain the circumstance that today's (today being today, not "this age") programmers faced in room 1119 of the Talmage building:

It's Friday, February 15, 2008. Valentine's day has come and gone. Lab 3 is due for pass off at 6:00 pm. I'm in the lab at 4:05, I ran there the second I got off work. I'm hungry and tired but I've got to put the final touches on a program that's already consumed 30 hours of my valuable time. Suddenly, Armageddon arrives – or I wish it would. My program freezes any time I push a button. I can't do anything but use the Task Manager to kill it and try again. After 50 such crashes it's 5:20, and I still don't know where I messed up. Tension in the room is building. 20 or so other students are in the room and it's silent except for the rainstorm pounding of fingers on keyboards and a few TA's or private tutors talking the mortally wounded through the valley of death. It's 5:42 and every so often someone screams or pounds something or curses the heavens – the resounding "Why?!?" reverberating off the aching eyes of everybody else in the room. A student jumps out of his chair and thrusts his hands in the air like he's on a rollercoaster and its headed to heaven. He runs up and down the aisle and out the door, all the time laughing and shouting "It works! It works! It FINALY works!" We watch him run past the door three times before he dances back in so he can pass off the lab. It's moments like this that make you understand how things like the word "Eureka" were invented. Every couple of minutes somebody repeats this rendezvous with victory until it's down to me, a girl to my right, two Indians in front of her (from India – or so I guess based on the frantic foreign dialogue shooting from their direction that says, in a voice that defies language barriers, that they are as stumped as I am), and a girl with a guy who is helping her work through her code.

It's 5:49; my program is running now and I only have one more basic feature to add. I do it in three minutes and run the program again. -- *BLUG-RA-GOOP!* -- That's the sensation that runs through my body when even though everything else is working, my output is somehow completely wrong. That means I've got to debug – run through my over one thousand lines of code and look for whatever weird glitch I created. My lungs won't move for a second. This project is not going to make it on time, even though I'll still do my darndest to try (I actualy didn't get done till 7:40 or so). I need a minute to breathe and collect myself so I can decide on the smartest way to tackle my newest problem. So I stand up and stretch and look around. Looks like the girl in front of me is having the same kind of problem. She's pale and looks weary. Her buddy is staring intently at her screen. He suddenly gets a bright look on his faces and says "Look! It's right there! You just have to change that ONE word!" She gets excited as she figures out what's going on. With a few quick strokes on the keyboard, her error is gone. I watch them stop breathing while they compile the program and run it. It executes perfectly.

I wait for the victory dance. It doesn't happen. Instead, she grabs the back of the guy's head with both hands and pulls him in for a kiss… she starts with a quick peck and then dives in for the big one. I look away (PDA's embarrass me – I don't know if that makes me moral or jealous or both). I look back up and they're still at it. I try to focus on my screen but they're right behind it. They'll stop soon, I'm sure. I feel grateful as he pulls back, but my relief is short lived. A split second for a breath is all the time she gives him before she's sucking the life out of him again. I think they would have had a full blown make out session right there in the lab if she didn't have less than five minutes to grab a TA and pass off the program. She turns back to her computer so she can add her name to the help/pass-off queue. He's got a glassy look in his eyes. He's obviously oblivious to everything in existence. Neither his head nor his eyes move and his mouth is half way open. That look didn't leave until he took it with him.

Conclusion: If you celebrated the 14^th of this month as "Singles Awareness Day" maybe you ought to learn to debug.

-Schlange