Funny how you don't realize how much you do around the house on a daily basis until you get sick, don't get to do it, and then try to pick up the pieces afterwards. I think that today we're finally going to get a handle on the mess in the kitchen—it seems like every time we've turned around, the kitchen's been a mess again, and we've never managed to get it thoroughly cleaned up.

You know, this social life thing is pretty good for me. Since changing jobs, it seems that we've been hosting visitors at our house about twice a month. It's hectic, and it's difficult to keep the house as clean as I'd like, but I have to admit that it's comforting to know that if I don't show up at work for a few days, there are people in this town that would actually worry enough to call the house and check on me.

Jeff's headed out to see his parents tomorrow. Their computer is acting pretty unstable, so Jeff's going to take his trusty software and know-how and apply the good ol' Wipe And Reinstall tactic on it. I should go out there with him—his folks haven't seen me in a while—but quite frankly, there's so much to do here at the house that if I want any hope of getting a rest break before Sunday, I'll have to stay here tomorrow and get stuff done.

While driving back from buying my lunch today, I was thinking about the concept of age, and how much it matters to people. We have a twofold conception of age in this society—we are obsessed both with our chronological age and our mental age. Due to our obsession with numbers in base ten, we see numbers that end with a '0' as being somehow more significant than others, more indicative of a stage of life, than any number in between.

Normally, this isn't a problem. But things get interesting when mental age doesn't equal chronological age. We as society members expect everyone to mature somewhere along an expected scale. We have certain expectations about the emotional maturation of two-year-olds versus forty-year-olds, for example.

I have a few minutes left before the end of my workday, so I'm going to sit here, look occupied, and type out today's random thoughts. I promise that I'm over my depravity from yesterday; it would take a while to explain why in the world I posted what I did, but suffice it to say, it was just one of those things that, once you heard about it, is hard to get off your mind.

Well, I had a nice little bit of commentary ready to go for this evening, and then I decided to put it down and go do some other stuff for a while. I went to see X-Men with friends, and then chatted with the crew (tonight: Jeff, Katharine, Jessica, and Brian) over at the wondergeeks' apartment.

Then I came home and checked my email. Discovered that my sister's getting married in September. Needless to say, this is a bit of a surprise. She and her husband Jackie divorced in December of last year or January of this year—I don't know when the divorce became final. I didn't know that she was dating someone seriously. I now know that his name is Carl, but I don't know a last name.

I really wish Taylor Gifts would get the hint and stop sending me crap. I've got to call them again tomorrow to voice my opinion and perhaps they'll leave me alone, dammit. Junk mail annoys me.

The cover item this time around has got to be one of the most obnoxious products brought to market in the past year or so. It's called "Big Mouth Billy Bass," and basically it's this fake mounted fish that you put on your wall. It SINGS and wiggles. It is the most utterly classless thing I've ever seen in my life. To me it screams "REDNECK!" I can't even find it funny. I have to wonder what marketing genius came up with this one. Here's hoping he got stock options, and that they tank in about four months and he goes back to doing whatever he was doing before (used car salesman?).

It was a productive weekend.

The parents are safely back home in Arkansas; my house is clean; the dishes are washed and put away; and life is ready, thankfully, to get back to normal.

Since my parents and I only see each other every six months now, it's commonplace to see changes every time we DO see each other. I think I was most shocked this time by how much older my father looks. He is fifty-six now, and he looks much older. I think a lot of it is that his hair is completely white. Not that off-white yellow that some people get, but a shocking pure snow white.I'd rather have that than grey hair, actually.

My mother no longer colors her hair, for which I'm grateful. I've never really understood why women color their hair to hide grey. I'd say that my mother's hair is now 25% grey; I wonder how many of those I put there?

I'm sitting here at my desk, looking totally busy, with Fatboy Slim's "Kalifornia" humming in my ears. I'm pondering lunch—I'm supposed to meet someone for lunch today but I don't know if it's going to work out or not.

I'm a bit disgruntled—one of my new favorite sites (kuro5hin.org) got nailed by some dumb-ass 3l337 skript k!dd3z, and as a result they've taken the site down. Sigh. I really liked kuro5hin.org—it was like Slashdot, but without a lot of the crap, and it was a lot more focused on geek life and culture instead of just 'Open Source Rooolz!'

(Sorry. I like Linux. I even have a penguin cap. But I'm not as rabid about it as some people I know. I agree that it's a good OS, and that micro$quish has major flaws, but I do graphic design professionally. The Gimp, the image editor for linux, just isn't robust enough yet for my uses.)

Here's my question for the evening: what makes a geek, a geek? What is it, exactly, that gets you entrance into this peculiar little world?

And, I suppose my true question is…why am I in it?

I ask myself this sometimes, and tonight after Heather and Jess visited, I've really been asking myself those questions. It's sometimes difficult for me to listen to the wondergeeks talk about what they're doing with their lives, because I always feel that in comparison, my life comes up lacking.

This, I think, is because I'm torn between what I'm good at doing, and what I feel that I should be doing. The two aren't the same, and I know it.