Quick hits

Sorry I've been not very attentive. Life seems to get in the way of Blog at times.
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Dinner with LawDog and his brother last night was good for the company but lame, for the fare. I had to opt for Hobson's choice-- 9:00PM on a Sunday night means there's not much available around here. We went to a chain restaurant (Good Eats), where they managed to mess up pork chops in an impressive feat of poor culinary ability (with a hard fruit glaze of some kind), but worse than that, gave me an inedible mass under them described as "corn bread stuffing" which was too thick for spackle and much, much blander.

How in the hell do you mess up corn bread stuffing?!?

They managed not to screw up the Samuel Adams beer that they brought me, though a glass would have been nice. Apparently the other guys' food was edible-- they ate it. (Of course, they mentioned something about not having eaten for 12 hours, too...)

I don't do the restaurant thing that often. When I do, I like the food to be adequate. I'm mostly embarassed when it might have been inadequate for my guests. Bah. At least the company was nice.
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Leaving town in the morning for unknown time (probably not more than two days) to visit my wife's mother and her dying husband. The crotchedy old bastard had finally begun to grow on all of us, and then he up and decides to die.

I'm taking the kids to say goodbye. All that business about "let them remember him the way he was" is rot. He's drifting in and out of consciousness, and they deserve a chance to say goodbye to him, and he deserves to hear it. When my favorite aunt passed away suddenly when I was 7, I wasn't allowed in to see her in the time between her car wreck and her actually dying. I sobbed and sobbed when I found out that she was gone, and I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. To me, that stuff's important, and allows you to get over the actual reality of the death easier.

At 4+ hours each way, it's not a super-quick trip, but we'll make it a two-day trip, before the inevitable funeral, which may be this actual weekend. I'll take the laptop, but doubt there'll be anyplace to blog from-- I'll probably be with the kids and typing reports for work, and answering correspondence. Though we'll be in Austin, it probably won't be that much fun. Maybe I'll run off with the kids to do something fun for half a day. Hm.
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For what it's worth, in the next hour I should be hitting 50,000 site visits, according to my SiteMeter. My monthly traffic has increased nine times since I first started a meter in October:

I thank you, Constant Reader, for checking in.

Even if it's Ambulance Driver.