I'm cautiously optimistic that things are slowly returning to normal over here. The machine that hosts domesticat.net is actually located in England. (This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a British friend who once worked for an ISP.) Yesterday afternoon, meaning late yesterday evening GMT, the uplink to the machine died. It took somewhere between six and twelve hours to get everything restored.

Then, of course, shortly after the server uplink was re-established, our cable modem went nuts. Our cable provider's DHCP server elected to barf on us. Thus no net connection for most of the day.

Oh, well—there were plenty of tasks that needed doing. This year's Stanley Cup is proving to be quite entertaining; for the first time in my life, I have friends around that enjoy hockey. Tonight I did something I've not done in years—called someone up on the phone and said, "Hey! The game's on! Are you watching?"

Realization #598393 that you're older than you feel:

You go to your high school's website. First, you goggle that they've got a website. Then you happen to read through the faculty list and you realize that one of your high school classmates is now teaching there.

Then it dawns on me that the classmate in question—Joshua Harrison—is one I haven't seen in seven years.

Seven years.

Seven years since I moved away. It seems so quick for me, but I know that everyone else in that class has had the same seven years to move on with their lives, as well. Most of them have probably married, settled into their lives, started having children. Since I have not seen most of those people (all 33 of them) since graduation night, my mental image of them is frozen as they were then.

I have trouble picturing some of them married. As parents. As adults. I have no doubts in my mind that they probably picture me the same way—ugh.

Okay, for those of you using Netscape 4.7x to read this site, the Easter Bunny has a present for you: you can now read all pages on domesticat.net again. After weeks of pondering what I could do to make the site both HTML 4.0 compliant and have workarounds that would make the page readable in Netscape 4.7x….

I had a momentary flash of brilliance.

Now, let's take a look into the deepest, darkest corner of the house.

What's in your refrigerator? On my quest, just now, with my trusty Handspring Visor in hand, I found:

Sean's parents and grandparents showed up early this afternoon to take some of my extra irises off of my hands. I gave them three bags full of irises that are ready to transplant. Most will bloom blue-on-purple or purple-on-purple, but there are a few that will bloom white-on-white.

Speaking of—one of those is blooming at the side of the house. It's absolutely beautiful; highly ruffled, almost-glowing white petals over white falls. Very nice. It's wasted over on the side of the house where no one sees it. Next year, though, it will be much more prominent.

There was no entry last night.

I wrote many words and decided to post none of them. It was better that way. There's a difference between writing to actually explore what you're feeling, and writing just to hear yourself complain. It took me a few tries last night to realize that I was trying to do the latter, and that my true wish was for the catharsis of scrawling things out with the knowledge that no one would read them.

I have to think that shortly after someone figured out the concept of writing, someone else came along, saw this new invention, and thought: "Aha! Now I can really get a dig or two in on that rat bastard that pissed me off!"Despite the fact that we have the appearance of adults, we often act like the emotional second-graders we are.