It was one of Those Mornings™, the kind that you know are going to find you on one of those days when you aren't looking; the kind that, once fate decrees is yours, is inescapable.I left fifteen minutes earlier than I believed I needed to, but as I crossed the city to reach our compact little downtown, I realized it wasn't going to be enough. Worry caused me to push the accelerator a fraction of an inch closer to the floor before I realized something so odd and so silly that it made me laugh out loud:

What were they going to do to punish me for being late, put me on a jury?

As I made my way through downtown, carefully following the directions to reach the fabled Free Juror Parking, I called the courthouse and apologized. "I'm stuck in traffic," I said, "but I didn't want you to think that I was skipping out on jury duty."

The voice on the other end of the phone chuckled and told me to drive safely.

I'm not sure if I came up with this word, or if one of my friends did, but we have universally adopted it and I think we need to share it with others. I show no results for it on Google, which makes it very likely that one of us really did make it up, but I don't know who gets the credit or blame.

check-ninja


v. check-ninja'd, check-ninja·ing, check-ninja·s

The tickets are booked. I will disappear for a little while in late July, and I would be lying if I did not say that the nighttime pathways of my mind have taken me more than once down the thought of sand between my toes. It's peace and quiet I'm after, both for myself and for the friend who is kind enough to host me, but there is yet much work to do before I can board that plane without undone tasks.I am the sort that is good for crusades; when it comes to code I am more stolid than gifted, as Gareth and several other true coders, whom I count among my friends, can attest.

Taking a break from my unofficial hiatus due to code work…

Courtesy of Chris Petrilli, I present to you Ministry Script.

'Alejandro Paul designed Ministry Script to be "A time capsule that marks both the American ad art of the 1920s, and the current new-millennium acrobatics of digital type." The idea was to make as many possible variants of each letter as he could possibly handle.'

"Well, I think about friends in the back of my mind
Are they still just kids frozen in time
The mirror won't lie as the days fly by
Are they all no better off than I?"
—Sugarbomb, "What a Drag"

Rechecking my rig
by domesticat.
[me resting at the top of Licklog Mountain (peak #2 of the day)]

From wikipedia:

• Class 1: Hiking.
• Class 2: Simple scrambling, with possible occasional use of the hands.
• Class 3: Scrambling, a rope can be carried but is usually not required.
• Class 4: Simple climbing, with exposure. A rope is often used. Natural protection can be easily found. Falls may well be fatal.
• Class 5: Technical free climbing. Climbing involves rope, belaying, and other protection hardware for safety.

I asked myself on the way home: would I have done this if I had known what I know now?

Yes, yes, absolutely yes.