Something Swift this way comes…

So I’ve been working my tail off lately. The week starting after Thanksgiving (USA) began a time of hectic work for me. This is actually oddly unexpected because the Christmas holidays are supposed to be our slow season. I don’t think the folks around got the memo about the TPS reports. So I’ve been working on various projects, putting out multiple fires and getting everything into a stable state once more. Odd how two days off will apparently cause things to go straight down the tubes.

On a completely different track, I brought home an Eee pc last night to work on it – being a linux user in a tech company in south GA means I am the ‘Linux Guy’ company wide. Nothing like a little job security, eh? *laughs* So, anyways, I brought this tiny little thing home to work on it since I knew I wouldn’t get much of a chance to at work today, the wife absolutely fell in love with it. She loved the fact that it was so small that she could slip it into her purse and take it out when she needed it instead of having to carry around Yet Another Bag. She also really dug the interface to it. She noted when she faux-typed on the keyboard that she’d likely have to trim her fingernails to be able to use it because the keys have so little depth to them. But I showed her how it worked and how it runs (it uses the Ubuntu operating system and the Sugar user interface) and she was deeply in love with it after only about 5 minutes. I think I’ve made my wife fully and finally into a comfortable linux user. So that’s likely the next thing she’ll be asking for on her wish list of tech toys. Not that her list is all that long – she loves a geek and geeks out when she can, but she’s not full-blown hard-core geekgurlie. That’s okay though, one geek in the family is enough I think.

Other news, well, most of the regular readers of this little page on the web know what’s going on in my life right now that’s hugely momentous. I’m not going to talk about it here, but I do wish that those who pray please send up some words for us that everything goes smoothly and in our favour. Things are coming to a head and we’re working towards fruition of a three (going on four) year project that is likely the hardest thing I’ve ever done and is likely to be one of the hardest emotional things I’ve ever gone through. I thank you guys for the love and support that we’ve received so far on this and only ask that you continue to pray for us.

To everyone else who are now scratching their heads and going ‘WTF??’ I would like to wish everyone a happy holidays. But more than that, I want to tell you Merry Christmas. And yes, there is a difference .

God Bless, and to all a good night.

S

Also, a short one while I should be driving to work and instead am lazing a bit before heading out:

WooHoo to Bru! Only a little while left before she’s done with school and can get to work on her dissertation.

Maybe then she’ll have time to do things like Boardgame night, post in her blog more regularly, and in general worry less!

I love ya Bru,

Yer lil’ brother
S

So, I upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.7 this morning. Most of you probably won’t notice any difference as most of the changes are on the back end, but that’s what I was doing at 7am this morning before going to work. I guess we find the time to squeeze in the things we like to do when we can.

Aside from that, I’ve had a hectic couple of weeks. Several major systems went down a week and a half ago and I’ve been putting out fires ever since. Just when you think you’re going to get caught up with work it seems like something else dumps on you. I hate the thought of being so tired that I miss something, that I mess something up, so I try to stay with it, stay honed and focussed. Fortunately that works for me .

As many of you know, the wife and I are trying to adopt four children…as we have lived together for the last year, they have come to be my kids in all but the letter of the law. I would jump in front of a bus to save them…I love each of them and their own special unique personality. I can’t quite explain how much, how feirce is my love for each of my kids, but I know those of you who are parents (and soon to be parents! Congrats J!!) probably understand all too well what I mean by that, how I feel. I had a thought today though. I was working on a customer’s systems and watched their youngest boy crawl around on the floor, babbling happily to himself. It was a sad thought and one that still cuts me in the middle a little.

You don’t know how lucky you are. You get to watch all of your children grow up, be there for their milestones, be there for the night terrors and the emergency visits to the doctor when they won’t stop coughing. That time that the took their first wobbling steps and sat down *OOF* on their tush. Whether you have pictures or videos or just memories, you have that. We were lucky to be able to get that with Buggles, but with the other three, we missed those first steps in their lives. We didn’t get to experience that with them. We didn’t get to comfort them through the still watches of the night as they sobbed out their infant fears. I am jealous of the people who parented my children before me – not enough to be vindictive – just enough that it saddens me that these kids, so perfectly made for us that it makes my heart ache with love when I hold them in my arms, it makes me deeply sad that I couldn’t be their father from the first. It breaks my heart, too, that they’ve had to experience some of the things that they have, being ‘in the system’ as they have been for years, and I can see its mark in each of their faces, of the way they carry themselves. They are brilliant lights, shining in black velvet, forlorn at times because they are beginning to let go of their fear and mistrust, beginning to rely on us and love us. It makes me want to weep that they have had to harbor that fear and mistrust at all, but it makes my heart sing with joy when they come to me and show their love, respect, and trust in the little ways that they do. Wordless, they’ll each one crawl up into my lap one by one and hug me as tight as their little arms can. Whispering I love you doesn’t encompass the depth and breadth of feeling that I have for each of them.

I pray daily that I am a good father to them, that I can raise them up in the way that they should go, that I can be a rock for them. That they can always trust me to do what is best for them and not with-hold my love and affection from them as so many do from their children. I pray that I can be the person that they will always be able to trust with their hearts – both when they’re soaring with joy and crushed with despair. I just want to love them forever, they’re as much my babies as if the wife and I had conceived each one of them, and I love them greatly. Sometimes the weight of my love for them is astounding, and I can only pray that the impending adoption proceedings go smoothly and well, that there is nothing to halt our final joining as a family in the eyes of the law. I pray that one day I will be able to hold their children and tell them how much I love them, and how much I love their parents.

The traffic lights…they turn blue tomorrow.

S

So anyways, life is going fairly well. I’ve finally found and joined a church where I feel at home. The folks there seem to accept me for who I am, and they don’t seem to judge me – that’s something that’s kept me from bein active in my faith for a long time…and I realized that I shouldn’t try to blame other people for my lack of effort.

On other fronts, I managed to do some really cool stuff with linux at work. I’ve set up a ubuntu server running a piece of software named Bacula and Partimage Is Not Ghost. Finally I also set up a service on there called PXE using tftp. This basically sets the machine up to be both a backup server (Bacula) which can back up any files from any machine running the Bacula client on a network, and a Image server. By ‘image’ server I simply mean that I can take a snapshot of any hard drive on a network (that’s where the PXE comes in) and save that image to disk, so that in the event of having to roll an installation of an OS and software back out to a given machine, it allows me to boot to the server across the network and pull the image directly to the hard drive. For anyone who has gone through the heartache of having to re-install an OS, then re-install all of their software and try to recover any and all data from a backup, this simplifies the matter greatly.

I know, geeking out right? I was so freaking excited when I finally got everything working together like I wanted it. The coolest thing about it is that all of that software is free and open source, so you can take an old box running next to noghthing in hardware and set it up as a backup machine. My next goal is to mount a shared drive across the network to the unit from a NAS (network attached storage) and have it save all the images and backups to that. That way the box is just a middle man server that does all the work. We’ve currently got it running on an (ancient) refurbished machine. The system specs are: p3 800 mhz proc, 128 mb ram, 20 GB hdd. The whole installation with all services and everything (including the Xubuntu desktop so other techs in the business can administer the box) averages out to about 3GB installation. You can’t even run windows in that small of a space.

I suppose that if I really put my mind up to it I could script the images and automate a process where every six months the machines re-image themselves back to state and pull the latest backup information, but if I did that there would be little maintenance work for us to do! *laughs*

So that’s some of what I’ve been working on lately, how about you? Drop me a line there in the comments and let me know how you’re doing.

S

So not a lot has been going on lately, work wise. I’ve been going and doing and enjoying the things that I get to do – it’s good to have a job where you at least love the work itself. In my family however, another change is about to occur. My grandmother on my father’s side is almost 100 years old, she’s lived a long life, most of it hard – she’s always been a hard woman to be close to and I guess that’s where I get some of my standoffish nature from. I went and saw her this past Sunday and she’s reached the point where she doesn’t want to go on anymore. She’s stopped eating and can only take a little liquid without sicking it back up. She’s not in any pain, just in a pure misery. She’s reached the point in life where she’s just tired of living, and feels like she’s ready to go I suppose. I know that a lot of it has to do with the fact that her husband, my grandfather, died almost twenty years ago and without him I guess she probably has little to truly live for. I don’t know whether to feel better about her passing because she’s truly in a misery with life, or to feel sadness…a sorrow for the imminent passing of the strongest woman I know. I guess it’s going to end up being both. It’s strange, my grandfather’s death hit me like a hammerfall, stunning me with grief at his passing when I was 13, and I railed against it wishing it undone. Now, almost two decades later, I’m a grown man and I’ve come to understand a few of the complexities of life (not all by any means) but I can understand how she can be just so tired of living alone in that big old rambling house that she’s spent the majority of a century in.

She told me while she was there that she wakes up at times, confused, afraid, that she doesn’t know where she is, and it’s an hour or more before she finally tells herself that she’s at home. She says that she’s tired of it, and I believe her. I guess death holds no candle against the loss of one’s mind, the firm knowledge of your place in the world, of who and where you are. I can only speculate at this point, but I know that the idea of becoming so senile that I have to depend on someone else for everything scares the hell out of me, and I’m a young man yet. I can only imagine how hard it is on her – a woman who helped raise four children through the depression, through two world wars, through countless life changing events that she could never have dreamed about in her wildest imaginings as a young girl in south Georgia. She has seen things happen that are the stuff of science fiction, and we take it all in stride as everyday ordinary blase occurances that are part of the natural order of things – in our blind reckoning, they’ve always been this way and they always will be, how little do we realize the earth shaking events that occur in our own time, blind to them by complacency that the world will never change, that we will be young and in possession of all our faculties forever…I suppose that when the time comes for me to pass away, I can only hope that I will be at a place where I will be grateful for my life’s passing, and not regretful that I didn’t live life up until the very end. I’ll miss my grandmother when she’s gone, but in this, the young middle of my life, I can look on it with a different eye – one that sees the passing as a blessing, an answered prayer to ease the misery of being alive day after day without a reason or will to live. May God bless her and ease her passing, and may He hold her hand through the end.

Thanks for reading, I know it’s a little depressing this time around, but I guess you pays your money and you takes what you get.

S

For those of you who are interested in seeing the photos of the trip, check out my flickr stream:

Here

Other than that it’s back to business as usual, but you know how that goes, so I’ll spare you the indignity of walking through a day of setting up yet another network. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and had at least as much fun as we did, and that you did /not/ have to suffer the indignity of having to pull over and puke in the middle of the street in pouring rain. Yum.

S

So, the good news of the month is that mom is finally home! Went tonight after work and saw her for a little bit and she looks outstanding. So much better than when she was in the hospital, and much stronger now. Of course her caveat for all of that was ‘But I still have rubber knees’, but that’s okay. It’s just good to see her finally better and home. I can’t say ‘well’ yet because she’s not – she still has a good bit to go, needing to gain back a good bit of weight and rebuild her strength, but to see her actually able to sit up and feed herself (albeit through a tube) is a great improvement. I have been praying for her for a long time now, as have so many others (and thanks to you folks who have kept her in your thoughts and prayers, you’ll never know how much it means to me that you have), and I think that the prayers are being heard. Heard and acted upon.

As good as it is to see her home again where she’s happiest, I must admit that I’ve been low this week…bronchitis and sick headaches every day all day have worn me thin. There are times at work when I walk by the mirror and catch myself looking into it, checking to see if I’ve become so paperthin that light is showing through from the other side. Now, of course those that know me are aware that I will never be what someone might consider ‘thin’ physically. However, emotionally and mentally I am just completely drained down and rubbed thin, like the middle portion of a long set of stair treads that has seen a century of feet passing over them. I sometimes feel swaybacked and worn down to beyond the grain, a state that no matter how much sanding and staining you do will fix it. I think that the worst of it is the constant blinding pain of the headaches. I’m used to getting headaches…used to get them every day as a young teenager and even as an adult, but the ferocity and sheer mind-blasting pain of these is beyond my scope of reckoning. I’m sitting here right now writing this in a cozy little laundry area of my home, a nice soft light with some soothing music playing and the left rear side of my head and neck hurt so badly that my eyes have puffed up greatly and are watering from it. I tell ya folks, it’s an experience and a half, and while it reminds me that I’m still alive I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

Enough about me. I have to say that I’ve been listening to NPR a good bit on the radio whenever I’m in the vehicle driving from one place to another, and hearing about what’s going on in China and Myanmar…I wonder sometimes that the very earth does not try and shudder us off its back at times like these. I can only listen with mounting sadness at the number of lives lost in such terrible tragedies, so many of them children that never had a chance to grow up and experience life. For them the life experiences came too suddenly and tragically to an end. I can’t help but wonder where we’re headed as a species. We kill each other in droves, we torture and maim and figure out new and more efficient ways to deliver death and destruction to one another, all the while acting like we can compete with our environment for sheer violence. What do we do in a world where 20,000 people can be killed at one swipe – not by disease or famine, but by natural happenstance? On the one hand, the indomitable spirit of humanity to rise above the obstacles in our path amazes me…but the most base and selfish of us act upon this Earth as well, keeping those who would help others out, misusing things sent to salvage and save people in need…I know that there will never be an end to war as long as humankind walks this world – it’s in our nature to beget bloodshed and violence – but in that contention we also have to deal with ruination and destruction raining down on us from the very world we inhabit. I guess the weight of the world rests on no single man or woman’s shoulders, but it’s at times like these that I look upon the others of my world and see that the most noble and altruistic of us must needs contend with the basest and most evil of us. I suppose the most troubling thought to me through all of this is that in the end, a month, two months, a year from now someone will mention the Chinese earthquake, or the tragedy in Myanmar and I’ll shrug and say ‘Oh yeah, I remember that’, and go back to whatever meaningless task has claimed my attention at that point. We live in a world that neccessitates a degree of numbness to function at any rational level, and that ability to cast that numb pall over my own life just to be able to sleep at night scares the absolute hell out of me. It’s this numbness that, let loose among our other more noble emotions, allows us to become the Jeffery Dahmers, the Ted Bundys, the Adolf Eichmanns…our numbness towards the strife around us is the enabler of the rage and despicable contempt for our fellow humans. Maybe one day we’ll learn to overcome things like cancer, AIDs, influenza…but I fully believe that we will never cure the root cause of our warring and destruction of one another – that insensate disregard of the plight of those around us.

I guess the deep thoughts were closer to the surface tonight…sorry folks. Sometimes you pull a card from the deck and it’s all aces. Other times you pull a card and see that it’s a business card for a shrink that’s been tucked away inside the deuces and treys like some benign party-favour to remind you that we’re all just a little bit crazy. For the people who dislike the random rambling diatribe above, I suppose there’s always the ‘back’ button on your browser, but I fear if you’ve come this far, then I’ve already wasted far too much of your time for backing out to help much now.

S

Okay, it looks like the new script works, though for some reason the last post I tried, it posted in GMT instead of EDT, so things were just a little bit wonky. It may do it this time as well, but we’ll see. As for why I’ve been so quiet, well, I made up a post with my neat-nifty little desktop blogging widget last night and the little fucker ate my entire post when I hit ’send’. It said ’sent successfully’ but it lied. Kblogger destroyed my life! And now I’m just another burned out crack-head living on the corner, mumbling into his beard trying to score some smack…Oh wait, that’s not right. I’m actually just a little miffed that Kblogger ate my post, and so it sent me on a hunt to find a new blogging widget. Since I like vim…okay, love vim…I found one that, after a little tweaking, I can use to post directly from my favourite editor. Nice, neat and simple! Just like me. I’m pretty simple.

So, anyways, about what’s been going on with me. As it just so happens, the wiffy and I got sick over the weekend, both of us with colds, and let me tell you, it /SUCKS/ having a cold when everyone else around you is nice and perky and the day is bright and shiny and the sky is full of those puffy little white cottonball clouds. It thoroughly blows. But that’s okay, cause I think I’m starting to get a little better. Well, maybe.

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I have become comfortably numb.

Or at least I have tonight.  Been a rough day today.  Good news to report about mom though – doctors say she’s looking good, her sugar levels and electrolytes are good, but she’s going to have to be very careful in the future about checking her blood sugar and making sure that it doesn’t get so astronomically high again.  They say that she should be able to come home tomorrow, so that’s a week spent in the hospital for her, again.  I don’t know how she can stand to be in there…I mean, I know that the will to live over-rides everything, and now that they’ve got her levels in control she can think reasonably and realize that it’s saving her life; however, I don’t know if I could lay there in a hospital bed day in and day out, listening to the beep and wheeze of the machinery, the squeek of the sneakers all the nurses wear now and the the laboured susurrus of the breathing of a sleeping roommate.  I think it would drive me quite literally mad.

I was speaking with her on the phone two nights ago and she said something that struck a chord within me – “Jamie, these things happen and they take something out of us, these sicknesses take something that I don’t think we can ever get back.”  I think part of it is the tightly controlled insanity of any institution that we are forced to be in – whether we are forced against our will or grudgingly go along with it, I think that part of the thing that steals that bit of spirit (or life-force if you prefer the term) is the routine rigor of exhausting waiting while you’re tended by people who will forget your face as soon as their time to clock out comes.  My mother is one of the wisest women I know, and I don’t think she will ever come out and fully talk about the times of enforced madness, exhausting drudgery that she’s had to endure time and time again.  I don’t think she’s embarrassed by it, I think she probably just doesn’t want to burden anyone else with ‘her problems’.  The irony of the situation is that by talking about it, by lancing that boil and draining the wound of some of its poisonous feelings, she could likely gain back some of her dignity, self-respect, and peace of mind if not the physical strength she’s so sorely lacking right now.

I did make her promise to try and be a ‘good girl’ when she comes home tomorrow, that she doesn’t try to get up out of bed and take care of herself, to let dad take care of the things that needed to be done, to say ‘let the vacuuming and cleaning be damned’, because if she tries to get up and ‘putter’ all she’s going to do is exhaust herself and dad, and end up back in the hospital.  I think that likely scares her more than anything.  Talking to dad the other night before I called her and he sounded about at the end of his endurance – not hard for someone that’s survived a liver transplant and some of the other things he’s had to live through, but he sounded really rubbed raw.  It scares me sometimes to hear him like that…he’s always going to be (at least in my mind) the big man that worked until all hours of the night and then came home and watched TV with me while I read in the living room, or working out in the barn with something while I played with the neat tools and learned how to plane a board or hammer a nail straight in (still have a hard time with that one!).  To hear him sounding down like that reminds me that he’s getting older, hell we’re all getting older, but I hate to think of that.  Life seems to get harder every year I live it, and I don’t know who to write my complaint letter to about it.  I suppose my TS list for the chaplain will have to suffice.  When it’s all said and done my pitiable complaints probably won’t stack up against the sins I’ve committed through life, but maybe it’s not about keeping score.

Anyhow (hate to start with that adverb, but hey, who’s reading?), to tell you a little bit about my day – at least the rough part of it, at the end of work I started feeling really bad. Nauseous like I was going to puke my guts, head swimming, light headed.  Driving home, I ended up feeling like the top of my head was floating about three inches above the rest of my skull.   I suppose that my blood sugar had dropped low, at least that’s what the wife says.  When I arrived home, I had her test it and it was 107 – normal.  I guess I need to go get checked for diabetes, God knows I’m fat enough to have started worrying about that long before now, and the fact that it runs on both sides of my family is bad enough.  I can hear some of you – one or three in particular shouting at me from the back of the empty auditorium that I need to get up off of my ass and go see a doctor about it.  Yeah, that and the ulcer, and the trouble sleeping, and the….the list goes on.  Life is full of ailments and sometimes I just don’t want to have to sit there and hear the doctor tell me what I already know – that I’m slowly killing myself.  Thanks Doc, I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks.  Dr. Obvious M.D. strikes again.  So now (see how I didn’t start out with ‘anyhow’ again?) all I’m dealing with is that washed out weak feeling and the slow burning pit of indigestion that my stomach is bubbling up at me trying to tell me I need to go get checked in case I really am developing an ulcer.  Ain’t life grand?  Peace of mind isn’t about being outside of all of the pain, distractions, anxieties and clamours of life, but about being in them and being able to cope with them successfully, to be able to be at ease with yourself and your surroundings, no matter the difficulties we’re facing.

I suppose that’s too long to carve on my headstone.  Maybe just something like:

cat Swift > /dev/null

s

Visited mom in the hospital tonight after work. She’s still in ICU, but she looks better. I’m not going to say she looks 100% better, but I can’t count the bones in her hands anymore. I have to say that seeing her laying there in the bed with all the tubes and machines hooked up took me back to the time after her first cancer surgery – worrying that she wasn’t going to be strong enough to make it through, but the last thing she said to me tonight before I left was ‘don’t worry about me baby, I’m going to be fine and you don’t have to worry’. That’s my mom for you – laying there in pain and trying to console me. That’s a hell of a woman for you….of course, that’s my mother. She’s always more concerned about what someone else is suffering/dealing with than she is with her own situation. She’s a blessing to me, my family, and everyone that knows her. I know she doesn’t see herself as such, because we’ve had conversations before (even one recently) about how other people have told her she’s such a blessing to them, that she lifts them up, and she just doesn’t see herself in that way. She doesn’t understand what it is that she does that makes people love her, that makes them want to be around them.

What did we do to deserve such a blessing in our lives? I don’t know but I’m just thankful that even in the pain and misery that she’s in that she still has the heart to worry about someone else’s troubles. That shows me that she has not given up on wanting to strive to get well, to get better, to get over. It’s those times that I know she has to lay there in the dead of the night thinking that it might just be easier and less painful to go on – we’ve all had those nights (at least the people in my family have) but the fact that she hasn’t withdrawn into herself that much gives a bit of light at the end of this dark path. She’s still the same beautiful, loving mother that I’ve always looked up to and respected for her wisdom and strength. Hopefully one day I can impact others lives as much as she has impacted mine and the people around her.

I know that here lately all of my posts are centered around my mom, and if she were coming here and reading all of this, she’d probably give me the 3rd degree (did I mention that I also got my amazing sarcasm and razorsharp tongue from my mother? *grins*) for airing her situation to the entire world, but on the bright side, I don’t think she’ll have to worry about it. Only a few people know who I am, or even care, and those few people generally know what kind of woman my mother is, and know the struggles she’s had with cancer. You guys keep praying for her, keep the pipelines open and the words going up for her speedy recovery…from this and all the other problems she might face along her recovery from cancer.

I hope that anything you might be going through isn’t as bad as all of this, and for those of you who will pray for her, thank you for it – whether you think it helps or not, it does.

S