Category Archives: writer’s challenge

blind date, relationship, writer's challenge

The Memorable Blind Date (sort of)

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Mama Kat ‘s up for yet another writer’s challenge . This week’s choices left me hanging a bit. But then I decided to follow Mama Kat ‘s lead and modify the prompt a bit. Mama said:

1.) Tell us about a memorable blind date.

2.) Other than the birth of a child or your wedding, write about a joyous moment.

3.) Write about one of the most difficult decisions you have made in your life.

4.) Share the best picture you took last month and explain why it’s your favorite

But all of these prompts left me in a quandary. So I decided to write about the nearest thing to a blind date I have ever been on. (Coincidentally, it is also one of those joyous moments that formed another prompt.)

The Prelude:
I was an antisocial brainiac nerd in high school. Being huge, a football player, outspoken, smart, and an egotist conspired to make me one of the least popular people amidst my peers. Even so, I did some dating, just not a lot. Sophomore year of high school, a really neat girl moved to the area and was assigned to the seat beside me in biology class. Over the course of the next few weeks I became smitten with her. She was beautiful and smart and fun and … So I finally ramped up my courage and asked her out for a Friday night. I was planning to attend the school play with her.

When I asked, she immediately told me no, she couldn’t go out then because her grand parents were visiting. Ok, a minor shoot down. I could live with that. But then on the Friday night in question she shows up at the play sans grand parents, making it real clear I was snubbed. We didn’t really speak to each other much after that. At least not for the next few years. We both dated other people, but saw each other in classes and in church group.

The Blind Date:
Senior year, just before Halloween, I got invited to a big Halloween party being held in a country barn by some classmates. Given the description of my popularity above, such invites were not a common occurrence in my life. I figured that something must be up, but wasn’t sure what it could be.

And then she, the neat girl from above, talked to me. It was clear that she was hoping I was going to attend. So I said yes and along with my lifelong friend G (mentioned here) attended the party. I spent most of the evening talking to the girl in question. It was clear we both were entranced and felt something growing. After the party was over, I convinced her to go driving the streets with me and G (or it may have been she convinced me – I was in an euphoric cloud and don’t remember). G was the perfect wingman, driving us all around while we talked and talked. (And in looking back on it, I owe G. a lot for being so nice that night.) The upshot was that the evening had become somewhat of a blind date.

The Aftermath:
The next week she and I went out on our first official date. We survived the flashing of the porch lights by her dad as we sat and talked for hours past her curfew. We became a couple. We dated and saw each other and fell deeper and deeper in love. We survived the separation of attending colleges thousands of miles apart and attempts to break up and … That was 36 years ago and we have now been married  for 33+ years. G. was one of my groomsmen when we got married. Yes, that’s right. The girl who shot me down, snubbed me, and was the object of mutual avoidance for several years is my lovely wife L. All goes to show that first attempts don’t mean everything. And that love can win out.

P.S. The answer to yesterday’s question is have a birthday. May 22 is the day with the lowest birth rate in the United States.

age, writer's challenge

Writer’s Wednesday

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Mama Kat just keeps on issuing the Writer’s Challenges. This week she offered the choice of these tasks:

1.) Describe your significant other’s most attractive quality (on the inside).

2.) Tell about a time you stole something.

3.) Choose a poem you like. Take the last line and use it as the first line of your own poem. (creativewritingprompts.com

4.) Write about a scary encounter with one of your old professors.

It took a bit of pondering to decide which of the topics I wanted to tackle. The poem was first off the list. Even though I have had poetry published, it was more a mistake on the editors part than any ability on my part. Suffice it to say, you don’t want to read my doggerel.

Stealing was the next possibility to go. I lack anything of interest to report. I may have stolen a tee on the golf course at some time (by accident), but that is the height of my career in larceny.

That leaves waxing poetic about L or writing about scary old professors. I don’t have many scary encounters with professors to report and I have a hard time narrowing my view of  L down to a single quality. What to do? What to write about? I guess I’ll go with the professor story.

Some background. I was ready to graduate in 3 years from the ivy league college I attended as an undergrad. But … the college had a one year proficiency in a foreign language requirement for graduation. I had started off by taking Russian since it could be useful in my area of study. That was a fiasco. The professor kindly gave me a D for the course if I agreed to never again take a Russian language course. So the next attempt was Latin. That fared no better.

You should understand, I knew at least 30 different computer languages at that time (more now). I could absorb a computer language in days. I just could not learn a foreign human language. Things were getting a bit desperate for me. It is spring and I’ve already been accepted to graduate school with an assistantship, etc starting in the fall. But it is all contingent on actually graduating. In spite of the language debacles, I will still graduate cum laude if I can just get my foreign language proficiency.

Fortunately for me, the college was a pioneer in foreign language immersion as a rapid method of teaching languages. So I went to visit John Rassias , the professor who founded the program to see if there was any chance of saving my posterior. He believes that if I go to one of the off campus immersion programs, I can come back at the end of the summer and test out of the proficiency requirement. Thus I would graduate and head off to graduate school, etc. So off I head off to the School for International Living for immersion in French over the summer.

Time passes and the end of the summer arrives with me back on campus to test for proficiency. Since I only have two days to be on the way to the other coast for graduate school (if I do indeed graduate), it is decided that the French department will convene a panel to test my proficiency. Immersion programs concentrate on spoken language, so the panel exam is going to be in oral format conducted entirely in French. The next morning at 10am my future is going to be decided by three scary old professors giving me an oral exam in French. If I pass, I graduate and leave for grad school by 2pm that day. If I fail, … Needless to say it was a tense night for me.

At 10am, I walk into the room to face three professors. John Rassias is anything but scary. He reminds me of a big friendly grizzly bear. One professor is the chairperson of the French department. She has the sternest visage of any professor I have ever had (that might be my memory colored a bit by stress). The final professor is an avuncular looking gentleman who turned out to have the sharpest tongue I have every experienced. The exam starts with John giving a background to the whole problem and laying out the task before the panel. Fortunately I can follow the whole conversation and the questions from the rest of the panel (I think to this day that John was speaking slowly for my benefit). I interject the appropriate Oui! and Non! to the questions asking if I understood the process. And then the exam began.  After an hour and a half of intense questioning and conversation, the panel begins its debate. At least 20 minutes is spent listening to the panel argue, in French, as to whether I should pass or not. Do you know how stressful it is to listen to your future being discussed in a language you are still uncomfortable in, hoping you didn’t miss something that was important, and answering the occasional volley when a new area of probing is suggested by the panel? I do. At noon I finally walked with shaky legs and a signed proficiency letter to give to the registrar. But first I had to find a restroom.

In looking back, the whole experience made graduate school easy for me. My thesis qualifying exam and even my orals were trivial compared to the stress of my French oral. Having been through that experience, I never again worried about facing a test or thinking on my feet. It also was the real beginning of my comfort in talking to public audiences. After all, what is a crowd going to do to me that a panel of professors didn’t.

Now on to something more fun to reward you for putting up with my meandering story. Here’s a chance to see how old you really act.  I came out with this smiling fellow when I tried it:


You Act Like You Are 23 Years Old



You are a twenty-something at heart. You feel like an adult, and you’re optimistic about life.

You feel excited about what’s to come… love, work, and new experiences.

You’re still figuring out your place in the world and how you want your life to shape up.

The world is full of possibilities, and you can’t wait to explore many of them.

Not too bad other than guessing 30+ years wrong on the age. How did you do?

pvr, software, writer's challenge

Writer’s Challenge Response

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Mama Kat ‘s been at it again with a new Writer’s Challenge . This one was a bit tough for me to respond to because some of it is ground I already covered here and some of it … So here it all is in the form of a Q and A session.

4.) Tell us about your pet! If you have a weird infatuation with your dog or cat we want to hear about it (or if they just plain drive you crazy)…but please don’t compare them to children. It’s just not the same.

If you want to hear about the dogs of our married life, go here . It was a topic a bit ago.

3.) Who was your first bloggy friend? How did you find each other? Do you still correspond?

Given that I am prehistoric in computer years, my first online friends predate blogs and even the existence of the internet as we know it. I don’t know that there was a first that I can single out, but there is a group of people from that time were dedicated sounding boards and late night talkers.

We met via various BBS’s from technical and management discussion issues. Many of the acquaintances made then survived the development of the internet and changes in our various life directions. It was interesting to see discussions move from BBSes to email to the predecessors of chat rooms to … The dynamics changed at each stage and the people involved changed as well since we were all growing up and having families and … Not all that different than what happens today as people shift from chat to blog to twitter to skype to vlog to …

I still occasionally talk to some of them (now more than 20 years later), but the conversations have tapered off as we all headed of in different directions – personally, professionally, and geographically. One is a professor at Harvey Mudd College, another is a teacher at an Indian reservation college, one died, another went insane, …

You didn’t ask about the real nut cases met via the internet. One of the more outstanding oddballs used to wear a loaded sidearm into the server room, run a porno empire’s servers as his second job, had a duly certified art school that he owned and ran (specializing is certain types of art if you get my drift), and registered really odd domains just so he could make puns on the names. Other than that he was a pretty normal nerd. I still get a note from him every couple of years now. [As an example, he once registered the domain evil.com just so he could claim to be the root of all evil (root@evil.com) *AND* he put it as the logo on his business cards.]

2.) Ask a loved one to use 6 descriptive words to describe you and report your findings. How well do they know you?

Given that L is under the weather, the words would probably have been “go away and let me be”, which doesn’t say a lot about how well she knows me. After 30+ years of marriage and close to 40 years of knowing each other, we probably know each other as well as two individuals can know each other. As my mother put it a few years ago when we had been married for longer than I lived with her and dad – “You’ve had him longer than I did; any thing you don’t like is your problem now.”

1.) Describe your latest obsession.

I’ve been looking at memory models and their interaction with digital TV. This is brought on by the PVR craze typified by Tivo and others. Some of my earlier work work before Tivo existed was in the development of context sensitive search relevance and how it applied to digital TV guides. Now you can build your own digital TV with your own program guides with  about $20 of hardware from EBay and some programming elbow grease on top of Open Source software.

Why is this my obsession of the week? Because you can do a great amount with very little and the problems all are amenable to solution by divide and conquer – i.e. you don’t have to have a blinding flash of insight to see a solution, just break the problem into pieces and solve each piece in a workman like way. It means one can get enjoyment without delaying gratification for long periods. But there are also places where a flash of insight could change the whole view of how to approach the problem. So you get the quickies and the long term rewards as well.

Computer Whisperer, irritate, writer's challenge

What do I do …

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… that drives my mother crazy. Heck, why stop with mom. It drives my wife and my MIL and at least half the people I know crazy. The other half just haven’t run into the issue. Can you guess what it is?

What I do that drives everyone crazy? I know that at least some of you reading this blog know me in real life. So what is it? And no, it is not go for months without a shower. It involves none of my grooming behaviors, real or imaginary. It also doesn’t involve drunken orgies or the ilk. Can you guess now?

Still puzzled? The next hint is that does not directly involve my intellect (or lack thereof). It also does not involve my appearance, sex, education, or current job. Can you begin to see through the mist which is slowly clearing from your mental vision? Got a guess now?

Now for a give away clue – it involves computers. Can you guess now?

Give up?

Alright.

My deep, dark, and dirty secret that drives people crazy is that I am the Computer Whisperer. I can walk up to any computer, think a few good thoughts, say the appropriate words, and viola – everything starts working just fine.

If the computer has been freezing up on you for days, all I have to do is walk into the room and it behaves perfectly.

If you haven’t been able to get that web site to accept your input and have resorted to sitting on hold for hours in the hope of getting through to customer support – let me sit down at the keyboard and all will suddenly work and your order will be complete in seconds.

If you’ve been trying to get your printer to power on and/or unjam – let me caress it and it will work like a charm.

You keep getting the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) – let me just touch the keyboard and the machine will run perfectly for hours.

In and of itself, being a Computer Whisperer is not calculated to drive people crazy. It is more calculated to make you really popular late at night around deadlines. The real issue is that people have been getting strange and irreproducible results for hours and have drug in other people to verify that it isn’t working and I walk in and it starts working. You can see how that might rankle a bit. I have had my wife insist on other people coming over to see that her computer isn’t working right because she knows when I walk in it will start working perfectly. And perhaps more annoying, all those vexed people know that as soon as I walk out of the room, their troubles will resume until I return. A good computer only responds to a Computer Whisperer it can hear and see.

The worst part is that I don’t even have to know anything about the computer in question. I have been at sites with main frames down and waiting for the system engineers to arrive, walked into the computer room, and suddenly all is working again. Back in the early days of programmable calculators, my fellow graduate students used to come to my office so that their “broken” calculators would work long enough to finish the assignment. When I was at a national lab, I had a colleague that would drag me over to his area at lunch time just so his computer powered detector would work. (I got a lot of free lunches that way.) It’s probably good I never became a system engineer – it’s hard to repair that which works while you are there and then quits when you leave!

(This post is a response to Mama Kat’s writer’s challenge for Thursday – I just figured I’d get it done a tad early.)

christmas, grandpa, winter, writer's challenge

A favorite winter memory

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Mama Kat’s writer’s challenge for this week allowed me to choose to write about a favorite winter memory. I figured I would also combine it with Christmas and kill two birds with one stone.

I remember the winter season around Christmas the year when I was 9 or 10 with special fondness. That was the year that I got my first shotgun for Christmas and my brother got a rifle. It snowed afresh a few days after Christmas. We were living in a small Nebraska town at the time, across the street from Grandpa and Grandma J. The fresh coating of snow and subzero temperature made for perfect rabbit hunting weather. The snow meant that the rabbit tracks would be visible and easy to follow in the overcast dimness of the day.

Grandpa, dad, my brother and I went down to the creek bottom and began hiking along the creek looking for fresh tracks. Looking back on it today, I realize that grandpa and dad didn’t even bring their guns, a pretty sure hint that they were doing this for us boys rather than for table meat. Over the years I have become pretty certain that the whole hunting trip was more to instruct and check out how responsible my brother and I were with our new guns than to bring home anything edible. At the time, no such thought even entered my head. My senses were full with the crispness of the day, the joy of traipsing along the creek bank, eagerly looking for signs of game, the seemingly endless variations in shades of gray and brown in the dim overcast light, and the time spent with grandpa and dad.

Although we saw several rabbits, they remained safe from both my brother and I. Our aim was pretty poor, even considering how excited we were and the fact we were using brand new guns. My brother and I tried out each others guns with no better result. It didn’t matter to us. We were hunting with grandpa and dad. The world was a good place.

After several hours of walking along the creek, it was time to head back home. We were happy and tired. And I think we all got something out of the hike and talking. Sadly, it was one of the only times I would ever go hunting with my grandfather. The next year we moved back here to the town where I now live and about 100 miles from grandpa J. By the time I was old enough to drive, he and grandma had begun to suffer ill health. They were eventually moved to a house down the alley from where we lived so that there was someone to take care of them.

(Writing this brought to mind how different my two grandfathers were and yet how they shared certain things when it came to the grandkids. I’ll have to use that as a topic in the future.)


Editted to add: The next post, Grandfathers, does just that.