Jeff Blogs

From an early age I was told I was not quite normal. That seems like kind of a harsh thing to tell a kid especially if you are that kid’s parents. The thing was, I thought that was a good thing so I grew up thinking that not being normal was actually a good trait to have. I can’t really explain why but I just seem to have the ability of piecing things together slightly different than other people. In some ways this has been a great thing. I have a knack of looking at something from a different perspective and providing an observation that might otherwise go unnoticed. On the other hand this can sometimes get me in trouble or at least into an area that is uncharted and pretty weird. The invention of the computer and more specifically the Internet hasn’t helped at all; in fact it has made matters worse. Now I have a lot more information at my disposal I tend to put it together in rather unique ways. Take e-mail for example. Like many of you I get up each day and check my email and find out that more than half of my in-box has been filled with SPAM. Usually at this moment I take a severe detour to begin trying to understand why unwanted email was named after a canned meat product but I’ll spare you from that and try to get right to the point. Unlike most people, I don’t just immediately start deleting these unwanted messages. Instead I read each one. I blame my mother for this. She always said that if someone is willing to take the time to send you a letter you should at least have the common courtesy of reading it and acknowledging them. So for some unknown reason I started replying to SPAM and what I found is that those people really don’t want you to reply because they never respond back or if they do it is usually to ask me to quit emailing them. That seems a little messed up don’t you think? Today I got an email and I thought maybe I would share it with you.

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Growing up with the last name of “Summers”, this was always my favorite day of the year. I mean how many people can say that they have a day that commemorates them for the next 3 months? Not only that but even Mother Nature pays homage to you by making your special day the longest day of the year. According to scientists and the Farmer’s Almanac this is the day where the Northern Hemisphere is tilted more towards the sun than at any other time of the year hence there are more hours of daylight on this date than any other. The days from the first day of winter until today have gradually gotten longer while the days from today until the first day of winter will slowly get shorter. Given this information it is important to take full advantage of this day and live it up.

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As I arrived home from work I was greeted by a flashing light. That’s not to say that an LED was sitting at the door, it’s cord wagging waiting for me to arrive to play with it. It just means that as I walked through the living room I happened to glance over at the telephone answering machine and noticed the flashing light that indicates that there is a message waiting. The answering machine is an interesting device. I have now successfully lived through an era that began before this device was invented. I distinctly remember getting my first answering machine after we were married. I remembered the sense of freedom that I felt knowing that I no longer had to worry about being home or missing a call. Now if I was not at home someone would be able to leave me a message and I could return their call after I returned. It was an amazing feeling, quite liberating to say the least. I look at that now and think how pathetic my life once was that I would get excited about something as simple as a telephone answering machine. Now we take that kind of technology for granted. We have voice mail or a similar capability built into nearly all of our personal communications devices. Still, there is just something alluring about seeing a flashing “messaging waiting” button.

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For as long as I can remember I have only slept 3-4 hours a night max. A lot of times it is even less than that. For whatever reason I just cannot sleep any longer than that. This means that I am up between 20 and 21 hours a day. So while everyone in the house sleeps, I am up doing something. It drives Trina crazy since she never knows what she is going to wake up to. One night I couldn’t find some spice in the cupboard so when Trina got up I had completely rearranged the spice cupboard. She is still trying to find stuff from that episode. In most cases my nights are filled with fairly normal activities such as programming, writing, or research. That of course leads it its own set of strange things like the night that I decided to rewire the house for networking. There is nothing quite like seeing the look on your wife’s face when she comes down to find holes in her walls and wire strewn across what was a clean house when she went to bed 8 hours ago. I thought I should have gotten credit for drilling holes in the walls without waking everyone up but obviously that didn’t count for as many points as I thought it should. Lately I have been trying to limit my destruction unless explicitly given permission before Trina goes to bed. I had to put that last part in since Trina says it doesn’t count if I go into the bedroom at 4 AM and ask her questions or get her approval since she will never remember that by morning.

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