Well I made it through Thanksgiving in one piece. On Wednesday I went over to my mom's and cooked up the brine mixture for the turkey and helped my dad get a bunch of things done around the house like getting all the chairs down from storage and such in preparation for Thanksgiving.

On Wednesday I did a very short bout of unplanned babysitting for a friend then ran to my parent's house again to brine the turkey, help my mom make a pecan pie, make a chocolate pie of my own and do a small bit of cleaning up. On the actual day I ran over to get the turkey in the oven and picked up the kids over at their mom's house and drove back to my parent's house to finally have dinner with everyone. There was a little scuffle between the kids at first but after that things went fine.

For all the extra work the turkey didn't show it too much aside from being nice and juicy. No extra flavor despite all the extra effort gone into adding more flavor. Oh well. The chocolate pie was a hit though.

Today I hung out with the kids while their friends were over all day and there was much video game-ness had. Tomorrow there's gonna be a limit on it though. I tried to help my son do up a book of his comics to print out but we ran into a couple of complications in doing so and eventually we scrapped the idea of a book. Darn printer needs a gripper edge and if you try to print a booklet back to front the gripper edge, naturally, switches sides and throws off the whole thing. It can be done but we had wasted a couple of hours trying to get it ready and it still really wasn't so we sort of said forget it.

The kids are in bed now and I'm basically depressed as hell. Money's tight and Christmas is coming soon. Not sure how I'm gonna pull this all off. I read that Christmas Eve is the most stressful day for single parents. It's true. And it's coming way too quickly.

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The film American Beauty always makes me think of my life. It's less like my life now as much as it is like my life that I lived when I was married. For I was very much like Lester in the film. Except without the teenaged daughter, of course. "Dead already" is, I believe, how he described himself at the beginning of the film. That's how I felt most of the time, unfortunately. Also, it should be noted, that I wasn't the only one that felt my life was a lot like that. My best friend's girlfriend long ago told me that I reminded her of Lester. Or vice versa. This was before I got divorced, of course. I remember she said she hoped it worked out better for me than it did for him in the film.

Anyway I just watched that film. It made me get all misty, as it usually does, and I don't know why I watched it again. I guess I just remember it was a good film I related to.

That same friend called me from work just a bit ago. He said the he'd have to cancel because he was exhausted and his... heh. I almost wrote wife there. Finacée, actually. His fiancée was feeling crappy because of some physical therapy that she's had to be in since giving birth to their son. I understood, of course. The idea of a Sunday DnD session seemed a sketchy commitment at best. It's too bad it couldn't happen tonight as I actually could sleep in tomorrow morning if need be.

Oh well. I called my other friend and told him we're off for tonight. Though he could come over if he wanted. We don't do enough stuff together. I miss that. I got him to come over the other night to discuss, amongst other things, this idea I had had recently.

I had watched something sort of randomly on YouTube and it was a cosmologist talking about the universe and I suddenly had this idea of how space might work from it. They didn't talk about this idea but they talked about other things they knew about the universe. And then I drove to pick my kids up from school.

On the way there I had this idea about how gravity works. I had the idea that matter attracts (gravity) and that space repels (also gravity, in a way). I couldn't sum it up so concisely at the time. But I was sort of excited about it. I called my friend over to talk about it and I blathered on kind of incoherently. I asked someone online what I should do about this and they suggested seeing a college professor. So that's what I did the next day.

I went to my alma mater and into a science building that was apartments an houses when I went there. Anyway the guy I talked to was very nice and we talked for somewhere under an hour. I thanked him and went over to the Fine Arts Center. A drawing of mine was still hanging there in the first floor hallway near the entrance. A former teacher wanted to keep it there. He's gone now. Dead. The drawing, of a dying man, my grandfather, actually, is still there. I walked the art floor looking at the things hung up there. The gallery was closed unfortunately as a show was going up.

Anyway I went home and the next morning... well... You know how you have something you can't figure out and you go to sleep and the next day you wake up and there's the answer right there, unbidden? Well that was my morning. I wrote an e-mail to this professor summing up my ramblings as "matter attracts, space repels." I was excited about it. I also made sure to thank him for his time.

I got an e-mail back from him late that day. What I had proposed was, in fact, correct. But I was beaten to the punch on the idea. Einstein beat me to it, it seems. He called the measurement the Cosmological Constant. Later scientists figured out that this had a positive value like I was proposing. If I have to lose out to anyone... well... you could do worse.

That same day I was contacted by someone I had called long distance to talk to. A girl. I wasn't looking for more than a conversation but it seems she might have been. I explained things to her as evenly as I could that I wasn't really, you know, looking for someone. Romantically. And not someone hundreds of miles away as she was even if I was. I've been through that before and, right now, I'm not eager to go through it again. I haven't heard from her since. I didn't mind conversation. It can get lonely here by myself for most of the time.

My birth mom came into town that same day. Well... the day before I wrote that girl, actually. She had tracked me down a few years back. I never was interested in finding my birth parents. I know some adopted kids are. But not me. Not once, really. Anyhow I was wishy washy and met her anyway since everyone around me seemed to be curious and encouraged me to do so. Peer pressure in my thirties. Just what I needed. Anyway there's a similarity between this girl that wanted me to call her on a daily basis and my birth mom. They both seem to have more feelings for me than I do for them. It's not a pleasant feeling. Then there is the guilt and such of not saying no. Again, me being wishy washy.

Anyway she was coming into town and wanted to see me. She called when I was out and so then, instead, called my parents. She had met them when I had met her. The whole situation was a huge pile of weird that I don't ever want to relive. I never called her back. My parents, on the other hand, made plans and met with them. At first I had a very good excuse not to meet with them because I had already agreed to babysit for a friend that afternoon before she had ever said anything about meeting. The very same time they arrived, actually. Then it turned out they were arriving sooner. They know, unfortunately, where I live. I got another call saying that they were on their way in. I didn't pick up. Then I left the house for an hour. I didn't want to be called by anyone. Or worse yet have anyone stop over. I sat in a random parking lot surfing the web on an unlocked wi-fi signal for some nearby business. After an hour in the rain I went to babysit.

When I got home hours later my phone kept ringing. I didn't pick it up or look at it. I can guess who it was though.

I tried to make a website design for my dad's business last night to help him out. Maybe help get customers in or at least be a good way for customers to find the business. I got pretty far along until the program crashed and I lost it all. Man I was pissed. I went to get Chinese take out and a couple of action movies. I sang along to Audioslave at high volume while I drove. By the time I was full and the Bond movie was over I felt better.

And now I'm eating black beans and rice and typing this out. I think the yard needs one more rake to get rid of the leaves that blew over from across the street. That tree never drops its leaves until late in the year. I've been telling myself I need to rake these up for weeks now. I might do it today. Or tomorrow.

Always tomorrow...

“Design is 70% dealing with people, 3% the idea, 2% selling the idea, 2% the brief, 2% being pig headed, 1% printing, 3% eye for detail, .6% invoices, 2% coffee, .7% tracking, .1% warm glow, .6% panic, 1% 4am, .6% staring, .2% checking, 1% letting go, .8% keeping hold, .7% estimates, .3% checking, .4% proofs, .1% colour, .9% understanding, .4% marketing, 1% checking, .8% beach ball, .5% mice, .3% keynotes, .4% persuasion, .2% bragging, .5% smiling, 2% knowing when to stop.”