I’ve had an aggravating two weeks. My computer started messing up, seemingly at random. After a few days of half putting up with it and half trying to figure out the problem, I had to take it to a shop and have an expert examine it. After a couple days, (the shop was busy), the expert informed me that my hard drive was dying.

With a new hard drive plugged in, I spent the next few days reinstalling all my old software — everything from basic hardware drivers, to MS Office, to Acrobat Reader, to Firefox, to Photoshop, to every other program, large and small. And to top off the madness, I lost a lot of data with the old dead hard drive. Oh God, I lost a lot of stuff.

I have an external hard drive for backing up my data, but I never set it up to automatically run a back up. It was easy enough to just manually run the back up before I went off to bed at night, so I didn’t “bother” with setting up an automated system. But what started up as backing up each night, became backing up once a week, then once every couple weeks, then once a month, then once every couple/few months, then . . . lost data. <sigh>

So I’ve lost everything new I’ve created in the past few months — since January. Argh! This is why my posting hasn’t been on time the past couple weeks. I’ve just finished up recovering from this catastrophic idiocy.

Now let me quickly throw out some updates that I’ve skipped in this time.

* * *

Remember my farmer’s tan sunburn? Well, it turned brown.

And my brother doesn’t think I can tan as well as he. (But the rest of me is pretty pale.)

I was considering showing a follow-up pic of my one year after finishing P90X, but what with the Anthony Weiner scandal going on right now, I’d feel kind of like a pervert showing my naked torso online.

* * *

Here’s a pic of my brother showing off his new t-shirt:

That’s his drum kit hauler he’s pointing to. See, minivans can be cool. (At least that’s what he claims.)

* * *

Calfgrit6 has been challenging me to games of Pokemon a lot lately. A couple weeks ago, he pretty soundly thrashed me, and it was like flipping the competitive switch in his personality to the ON AND LOCKED position. He can now read well enough that he can play all his cards without his big brother’s help. He can go through his card collection and choose the best matches for his deck, and he’s proving pretty good at deck construction, as well as playing.

* * *

Pools are open for the season, and we’ve been a couple times. Next week we’ll be at the beach for three days.

* * *

Our boys are in year-round school, and this is their last week in class this year. Starting in July, our boys will be a 1st grader and a 5th grader. I can hardly believe it.

* * *

My t-shirt store is getting visitors and customers, now. Something funny happened, in the stressful meaning of “funny”: By coincidence, a blogger wrote a blog post referencing my store and I held a give-away contest on a message board I frequent on the same day when my store stopped working for a few hours. I wouldn’t have discovered the problem for many more hours if the blogger hadn’t contacted me and told me it was gone. I was fit to be tied for about an hour as I figured out the problem and fixed it.

Then a few days later, another, completely unrelated error crashed my site again for a couple hours. Oh for the love of sanity! Maintaining a web site is hard enough without random crashes stopping visitors and business here and there.

* * *

I’ve at last made a Bullgrit Facebook page. Check it out and Like it if you want to be updated when I make a new blog post or have a sale or coupon for the t-shirt store.

Thanks,

Bullgrit

July, 1990

The club was jumping on a Saturday night. I was scanning the room, taking in the crowd, looking for a dance partner. I noticed one chick giving me a pretty direct look. She had long, dark brown hair, blue eyes, tanned skin, and was wearing a hot pink top/miniskirt combo. She looked young, but to be in the club she had to be at least 21 years old, (unless she had a fake ID). I was about to turn 23, myself.

People were moving back and forth between us, but she kept her eyes on me. Definitely, I had to approach her. I made my way through the crowd, and she had a big smile on her lips and in her eyes. I leaned in to ask her to dance without having to shout over the pumping music. She said yes, and we made our way to the dance floor.

We danced together through several songs, both fast and slow, and then left the dance floor together. We formally introduced ourselves to each other, and I met her friend. We stayed together the rest of the night, dancing some more, talking some, and I got her phone number before we parted.

A few days later, the day before my 23rd birthday, I called her. I asked if she’d go out with me for dinner on my birthday, but she said she already had plans. Oh. Yeah. But she suggested we make Saturday night a date, and I took the offer.

I spent my birthday playing games with my friends, but I kept thinking about that girl in the hot pink outfit I had met in the club.

Date night came, and we had a good time getting to know each other. She was, indeed, 21 years old, and an education major at the university. Smart, sweet, genuinely nice, pretty, warm, soft, smooth . . . ahem.

The first date led to a second, to a third, to a tenth, and on. We got along just perfectly. When we weren’t in class, or at work, we were with each other. We just loved being together. We’d hang out at her apartment, or at my apartment, or somewhere on school campus.

I wouldn’t call it “love at first sight.” It was more like just finding that perfect fit. We could sit in the same room together, not having to say anything to each other, and we just felt perfectly comfortable. We enjoyed just being within sight of each other, and especially within arm’s reach.

We became tighter and tighter over the weeks and months. A year passed, and it was obvious we had become a part of one another. At over a year and a half, we got a dog, together. We named the dog “Geordi,” after Geordi Laforge of Star Trek: the Next Generation – a show we watched together every Saturday night. This was a sign of a real commitment to our staying together.

A couple or so more years passed, and we were going into our final year of college. (She had completed her first degree, and was about to wrap up her second. I was a late starter.) We decided marriage was the best next step.

May 20, 1995 — 16 years ago, today.

The week after college graduation, we got married in her hometown, after almost 5 years of dating. I have the photo of her in her wedding dress on my desk at work. It makes me smile. She’s so different today, but so much the same, too. She’s still the little thing she’s always been, and still looks considerably younger than me. She’s still smart, sweet, genuinely nice, pretty, warm, soft, smooth . . . ahem.

And I’m still the silly nerd that apparently endeared her to stay with me. I hope so, anyway.

16 years of marriage, plus 5 years of dating; we’ve been together for 21 years of our lives. That just doesn’t sound like it can be right. I don’t feel old enough, she doesn’t look old enough. But thinking back, it seems that our life has progressed perfectly naturally.

We still like just hanging out with each other. We can still sit quietly in a room together and be completely comfortable just with each other’s mere presence. The cliché is to say we go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or peanut butter and jelly, but that’s putting two different things together. I’d say we’re like peanut butter and more peanut butter.

Bullgrit

I don’t like yard work. I like the look, the smell, and the feel under my feet of a freshly groomed yard, but I really don’t like the work. I never have. Yet, as much as I would like to just never have to do it again, I don’t want my wife to have to mow our yard, and I can’t bring myself to pay a professional lawn service to mow our yard.
 
I mowed my mom’s yard and my dad’s yard when I lived at home. I also mowed 4-6 other yards for weekend money when I was a teenager. Since being married, (16 years this month), I’ve mowed the yards of our homes. So, I’ve been mowing for over 20 years of a 30 years time span.
 
Several years ago, my wife had to mow our yard because I was injured and just couldn’t do it for a couple weeks. It bothered me to see her out there around our home doing my man-job. It made me feel like I was failing at being a man and a husband. Strangely, not being able to mow my own yard bothered me more than not having a job when I was laid off.
 
Last week, my wife went out and mowed our yard because I was having to work late every day. The yard was already over due for a mowing when my late working hours came up, so the yard couldn’t wait just another week. So she went out and did it herself. Again, her having to do that in my place bothered me.
 
Why not just hire a lawn service? Because it’s my responsibility. As much as I may dislike it, it is a symbol of my duty as a homeowner, a husband, a man. It’s not like plumbing or electrical work that I just am not trained for, and might make a big mess of if I tried. It’s lawn mowing – something I am very well trained in and very well experienced with.
 
When we first moved into our new home, a year and a half ago, one of our new neighbors was talking with me about our yards. He’s an Indian, (from India), probably in his 30s, and he asked if I did my own lawn mowing. He asked if it was something hard to do, or if it was something to leave to professionals; he had never mowed a yard before. This concept amazed me. I told him, “Well, I’ve done it since I was 12 or 13, so it ain’t too hard to do.”
 
Heck, it takes me less than an hour to mow and trim and rake my yard. It’s not a complicated thing, it’s not a physically hard thing. But it is a dirty activity, and a sweaty activity, and loud, and a bother that I really don’t like. But still, I do it, despite having options to let someone else do it.
 
I’m sure there’s probably some psychological issue with me, why I almost desperately cling to this activity that I actively dislike. But is it just me?
 
Bullgrit

I’ve felt déjà vus many times in my life. I wouldn’t say I get it a lot, (maybe a dozen times in my life), but judging from how déjà vus is portrayed in movies and TV, I guess I get it more than script writers or directors or producers. Maybe they’ve never felt it. Or maybe I’m feeling something else, and I’m misusing the term?

In movies and TV, déjà vus is identified when something happens again. I mean, actually happens again. Like in The Matrix, when Neo sees the cat walk past the doorway, and then he sees the cat walk past the doorway again. <Keanu Reeves>”Whoa, déjà vus.”</Keanu Reeves>

That’s not how I’ve felt déjà vus. My déjà vus isn’t actually seeing something happen again. It’s almost totally just a feeling of having experienced something before. Being a feeling, I don’t think it could be accurately portrayed in any kind of visual medium, like movies or TV.

Yes, I know that many people call, “déjà vus” when something actually does happen again — like when they see a second person trip over a cord stretched across the floor in a high-traffic area. But that’s just using the term to be funny. Right? Like saying, “I read your mind,” when you predict what someone else is going to say. You didn’t really read their mind like a psychic. Right?

I’ve walked into a room for the first time ever and had the gut-level feeling that I’ve walked into that room before. The feeling only lasts for a few moments, and it’s not a memory. It’s a weird sensation. I remember the first time I ever felt it: I was at the home of a friend of my parents, (I was probably 11-12-13 years old), and I was standing in the kitchen looking out into the living room. Someone walked across my field of vision, and the sensation struck — it was like momentary blip in reality. It wasn’t disorienting, or disturbing. It was just a sensation of, “this moment — everything around me — has happened before.” And then the feeling was gone.

Have you ever felt real déjà vus? Is my description what you felt? Or am I the one who is weird?

Bullgrit