Beau Jackson

Ok, for the computer geeks in my small band of readers, this will make sense and be funny:

I’ve seen these Yahoo! Avatars on a few sites, so I decided to play around with them myself.  There seems to be a way to link them into a site dynamically, but I’ll be darned if I can find a way to do it.  So, using the trusty alt+printscreen and a little trimming in paint, you can now see the avatar of me from our vacation:

If I was a better graphic artist, I’d have tailored the horse to look more like Moon.  He’s black, but he’s an appaloosa so he doesn’t have the white stripe on his face or the white socks on his feet, and he’s got white spots on his butt.  Close enough for government work though.

…and I’ve been awake for the last hour.  After three ibuprofen and a lortab, the pain in my mouth is beginning to subside.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoy not being able to sleep.  grumblegrumble.

I’ve been pondering suffering a lot the last few days.  There are a lot of reasons for suffering – not all of them bad.  But when it’s all said and done, I guess what really matters is how you deal with it.  I don’t think I deal with it very well…it’s a character flaw I guess.  I try not to complain, or whine, but…here I am telling the world about it in the middle of the night.  Amongst the Catholics (maybe others?) a common expression when suffering is “offer it up”.  Give your suffering to God as penance towards past sins – yours or others.  I try to do this, but I think that my penance must be diminished when I complain about it.  If you’re not suffering willingly as a penance, does it really count?

Actually, the main reason for this post is to distract myself from the discomfort.  I learned how to purl last night, and some other nifty knitting stuff.  That’s another thing I wonder about…why “purl”?  Why “knit” for that matter?  I wonder if the words have some kind of meaning in another language.  Like, “knit” means “tie a small knot” and “purl” means “knit only backwards”.  Word entomology (I think that’ s the right word) is fascinating.  I often find myself learning where a word comes from and getting this little joy out of it.  The other day I read that the word “excruciating” comes from the Latin words that mean “out of crucifixion”, which makes perfect sense when you think about it…it just never occurred to me before.  I know…I’m a dork…I’m rambling here to distract myself…cut me some slack! ;)

More rambling…I took a look at the early morning news, and they had an article about news-anchor-person foul-ups that have been immortalized on You-Tube.  Some of them were quite funny, but you have to feel sorry for these folks having there mistakes broadcast over and over.  I guess they chose their careers though.  There was one of a (very gay) weather guy that has a meltdown when a cockroach crawls up his leg.  Now I can understand the meltdown – I don’t like cockroaches either – but what made it funny was that he did this little sissy-boy shriek and whine, and then totally did the stereo-typical-flamboyant-gay-man routine explaining what happened in front of the camera.  Limp wrists and everything.   I’m not trying to pick on gay people in general here – but if you’re going to live up to the stereo-type, I don’t feel bad about making fun of you for it.  You can make fun of me for being a stereo-typical-wanna-be-farmer-and-computer-geek if you want.  Umm…I think there’s a stereo-type for that somewhere.

Well…here it is 20 minutes later and I don’t think I can sleep yet, but I’m running out of stuff to ramble about.  I’m thinking at this point that maybe my surgical wounds have become infected (yay) – I’ll definitely be calling the oral surgeon once the office is open.

Signing off…enjoy your sleep!