Browse: Page 9
By J. Timothy King on November 25, 2012
Tessie-cat passed away sometime last night. She had been part of our family for almost 19 years. She was being treated for chronic kidney failure, and we expected her condition to irreversibly deteriorate within the next several years. Meanwhile, we all gave her lots of attention in her last months.
We discovered her under the buffet, stretched out over the warmth of the heating vent. It appears that she passed away in her sleep.
We don’t sit Shiva or say Kaddish for a lost pet, but please remember the family in your thoughts, as we are all sad, and are going to miss her very, very much.
-TimK
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Tessie |
By J. Timothy King on November 22, 2012
So it’s Thanksgiving, and…
What are you doing online today?!
As for me, my side of the family is getting together for a big holiday bash tomorrow, and my Beloved’s family on Sunday. So that means I have another day to prepare the big Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday offer I’ve been working on, which I promise I will not talk about until tomorrow at the earliest. And that’s my excuse for why I’m online today.
But since you too are online, you might enjoy this fun Thanksgiving Song of Gratitude by Bob Baker:
So whatever your plans today, remember the hope we all have, and give thanks for everything (as the Apostle Paul put it), singing and making music in your heart.
Happy Thanksgiving!
-TimK
Posted in Humor | Tagged holiday, Thanksgiving, video
By J. Timothy King on November 8, 2012
Links and things that I’ve run across recently.
First Snow
Or to quote Lorelai Gilmore: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have flakes. Flakes have been sighted. Flakage, if you will, has begun.”
Yesterday afternoon and into the night, the season’s first snow in the Boston area (and if I recall correctly, in New England generally).
I settled in, and popped in Gilmore Girls season 1, disc 2, episode 8, “Love, War, and Snow.” Sigh.
A Motto Worth Remembering
Continue reading “Bits & Pieces 2012-11-08”
Posted in Bits & Pieces, Libertarian, Politics | Tagged Bob Baker, Gilmore Girls, holiday, Hurricane Sandy, Ivan Tyrrell, Joe Griffin, photos, psychology, racism, service, Thanksgiving Comes First
By J. Timothy King on November 5, 2012
I am truly humbled by the overwhelming response to my daughters’ bnot mitzvah. We had over 2 dozen family and friends who came out for the service.
Firstly, a public apology for the length: 3 hours, a whole hour longer than a normal service— I knew it was going to go longer than our usual service, but I truly didn’t know that long. I don’t know how we could have estimated that badly. And it wasn’t any single thing on the agenda, either. It was just lots of little things: too many people all trying to cram into that tiny VW Beetle. We went an hour over, five minutes at a time.
However, I was truly impressed with what my daughters accomplished and how well they performed. All their practicing clearly paid off. Now, I helped them practice their Hebrew, and I know what they did, but I couldn’t have gotten up there and done it, because I’m just not that good. And they delivered their speeches with power, confidence, and a bit of panache. I told them—and not just as a proud father—that it was one of the best bnai mitzvah I had ever attended.
But all the work I put into my speech over the past two weeks also paid off. Continue reading “The Bat-Mitzvah Speech”
Posted in Judaism, Religion | Tagged bnai mitzvah |
By J. Timothy King on October 25, 2012
Links and things that I’ve run across recently.
Or Maybe I Need to Learn to Talk Like John Moschitta
… or Paris Geller.
My mind goes back to one episode of Gilmore Girls (“It Should Have Been Lorelai”, season 2, episode 14—and no, I didn’t know that off the top of my head) when Paris was trying to coach Rory for a debate, and trying to get her to up her wpm. (And Gilmore Girls, if you remember, was all about increasing the wpm.)
I finally sat down and turned my sketchy notes into a first draft of my bat-mitzvah speech: 1014 words. At 125 words per minute (a reasonably average speaking speed), that’s over 8 minutes of talking, which is 3 minutes too long.
So I need to cut about 40% of those words. Or else maybe I just need to learn to talk faster.
(However, I’m thinking I’ll clean up and post the full version of the speech in these pages, in a couple of weeks after the bat mitzvah is done.)
Do You Remember the “Internet”
Continue reading “Bits & Pieces 2012-10-25”
Posted in Ardor Point, Bits & Pieces, Books, Inspiration, Technology | Tagged bnai mitzvah, DreamHost, encouragement, fetchmail, Gilmore Girls, Paul Harvey, postfix, The Computer Chronicles, video |
By J. Timothy King on October 19, 2012
Photo © 2008 Paul J Everett CC BY 2.0
Just a super-quick post today, for my comrade-in-arms and fellow-blogger Jim “Suldog” Sullivan, who reports: “Christmas items have already been spotted on store shelves in the Boston area. GRRRRRRRR… THANKSGIVING COMES FIRST!” (Exclamation point added.)
So I thought he’d really appreciate this photo, for which I actually searched Flickr with especially him in mind. (And now, Jim, you’re free to poke nasty fun at me on this topic… But only this topic! 🙂 )
As for me, I tend to divide the year into two seasons: the birthday season and the holiday season. As soon as the weather begins to get cold, I grow a beard (my face’s winter coat), and my thoughts turn toward cold trips in the car and warm nights sitting before a roaring fire (which I can’t do so much anymore, since none of my close family has a fireplace handy, making a roaring fire slightly inappropriate). The holiday season is full of eating good food, playing fun games, visiting with family, looking back on the previous year and toward the next, putting up decorations, listening to holiday music, and watching football. Continue reading “Halloween Pumpkins Are Working Overtime”
Posted in Humor | Tagged holiday, Thanksgiving Comes First |
By J. Timothy King on October 18, 2012
Links and things that I’ve run across recently.
NOTE: I’ve been light on the posts, because I’m working feverishly on the next novel, Ardor Point #2… which I need to come up with a proper name for. Currently, the two top contenders are A Reason to Live and Finding Light.
Race Relations on the Internet
Seen on Facebook…
Is it bad to hate a certain race?
… cuz I like running the 5k…but the 10k really takes a lot out of me…
But Maybe Margaret is Right about the Hair Dye
It really hit me the weekend the girls came back from camp, and I asked my Little One to help me out with a new profile photo. While they were gone, my Beloved and I did a little small-scale clothes shopping. And I thought it might be time to try to update the photo. Continue reading “Bits & Pieces 2012-10-18”
Posted in Bits & Pieces, Humor, Marketing | Tagged Charlotte Abel, earthquakes, Lenore Skenazy, spam, video
By J. Timothy King on October 10, 2012
In early August, while the girls were at camp, I spent a lot of uninterrupted time with Tessie-cat. At almost-19 years, she’s even older (in cat years) than I am. I call her “my geriatric cat,” which is what she is. All she did for the whole week was to sit on the back on the couch, in her favorite spot, and sleep, taking brief breaks to eat or pee or poop or remind me that she depends on me for everything, including attention. After so many years, when it comes to our relationship, she’s really still just a kitten.
And during this time we had to spend together, a truth acutely implanted itself on my consciousness, that no relationship lasts forever, because all creatures die, for one reason or another, and probably far too soon. My relationship with Tessie, I thought, will eventually end as well, and probably not too many years hence.
A thought like that really puts in perspective how annoyed I get at her when she begs and begs and begs for attention, at the most inconvenient opportunities. Continue reading “The Joy of Old Friends and New Family”
Posted in Books, Family, Love and Relationships, Love through the Eyes of an Idiot | Tagged Amidah, anger, cats, Facebook, friendship, Jenna Elfman, kindness, love, Randall Batinkoff, relationships, Tessie, Touched |
By J. Timothy King on October 8, 2012
In preparation for my daughters’ bnot mitzvah, I’ve had to order several items from online Judaica stores.
When placing the latest order, I realized—in one of those flashes of the obvious that I had previously been blocking from my cognizance… I realized that I had been using my first name, Jonathan, because it’s a good, Hebrew name, even though I myself am not Jewish.
“Is it okay for me to enter ‘Jonathan’ as my first name?” I asked my Firstborn daughter.
“Jonathan is your first name,” she said.
“Yeah, but I don’t usually use it.”
“You use it on your bank accounts.”
“That’s only because their computer systems are too stupid to grasp the fact that everyone else in the world knows me by my middle name, Tim. I’m only using ‘Jonathan,’ because I don’t want them to know I’m not Jewish.” Continue reading “Is It Ethical for Me to Use My First Name?”
Posted in Judaism, Religion | Tagged ethics |
By J. Timothy King on October 4, 2012
Links and things that I’ve run across recently.
When a Cat Takes Over Your Life
I apologize for being absent this week. We’ve had a small family drama… involving our cat.
If you subscribe to my Facebook profile, you know that Tessie-cat got sick and then started acting seriously weird. As I’ve mentioned before, Tessie is old, quite old, almost 19 years old. On top of that, we’ve been behind in her vet appointments (as well as our dental appointments). So we kinda freaked out.
Two vet visits and $440 later— Didn’t see that coming. We’ve discovered that her kidneys are beginning to fail, a common dysfunction in geriatric cats. This explains all of her symptoms, but it means she’s now on a special diet. And we get to start that diet off by injecting her with fluid twice a day for a week and a half, which she doesn’t seem to be enjoying too much. (I think the experience traumatizes me more than it does her, though.)
I do have a post in the incubator about old friends and how short life is. That post is near the top of my list. I hope to publish it next week. [UPDATE: Here it is!]
… and SQL Stuff
Continue reading “Bits & Pieces 2012-10-04”
Posted in Bits & Pieces, Software Development | Tagged Babylon 5, cats, Michael O'Hare, software engineering, Tessie |
