Category: Life with Pratts

Tornado!

We’re getting a taste of what Alabama and Missouri suffered. A tornado touched down in Western Massachusetts, with two confirmed deaths in my old stomping grounds of Westfield. Mike Dobbs, whose “Out of the Inkwell” blog is a link over on the right, lost every tree in his Springfield yard, and one of them destroyed his car. The lightning/thunder/rain here, closer to Boston, has let up twice, only to get even worse again each time. The lights have flickered a couple of times, so I’ll post this now in case we lose power.

Update: news reports corrected the two deaths in Westfield. They were actually in West Springfield, a neighboring town.

Gray car, gold card

Bought a new car today. A 2011 Honda CRV. I’d set the money aside for it a while ago and told the dealer I didn’t want financing. After the test drive the salesman said that accepting financing was the only way I could get the deal without having a bank check in hand — as if that were possible to get on a Sunday. I said goodbye, and made it clear I wasn’t kidding. I ended up buying the car with my Amex Gold card.

Saturday notes

  • Took the fam to dinner at the Legal Seafood Test Kitchen (LTK) in Boston. Spent $193, including tip, but worth it for the quality of the food and to celebrate Eric finishing his freshman year of college.
  • How could I have forgotten that the Roku HD player remote controls the fan speed in the Haier air conditioner on the porch?
  • My definition of physical fitness is weighing 165 pounds and being able to run 13 miles (half marathon distance) any day of the year. The way things are going, I may need to come up with a new definition.

DOuG of Arabia

I’m watching Lawrence of Arabia on TCM. One of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was seeing the 1989 reissue in a downtown Boston theater.

http://youtu.be/RQA_ldX0VI0

What made it so memorable, besides the fact it’s a great movie, was that only days before I had returned from Arabia myself. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I spent a month there on business, and it was a very busy, unusual month. I turned down an invitation to see a public beheading, from an American who had been working there for ten years. He told me the single most important issue confronting the Kingdom, and in turn America, over the next 20 years would be the Islamic Revolution that had begun ten years before in Iran. He wasn’t wrong.

A blogger’s final post

I started using WordPress in September, 2006 with the then-current version, 2.0.3. A bit over a year ago I was curious about the differences between WordPress and the previous leading blogging software for self-hosted sites, Movable Type. (Mark Evanier uses an outdated version of Movable Type.) I found this item by a blogger named Derek K. Miller. I was particularly interested in Miller’s discussion of a WordPress plugin that generates static pages, instead of using a WordPress caching plugin as a way to speed up sites on shared hosting services. (I later decided to cache.)

Miller was a writer worth reading, so I checked out some of his other posts. He was a musician, husband, and father, living in Vancouver. Reading Derek K. Miller’s posts, it quickly became apparent that he was a very sick man, and he was being treated for advanced colon cancer.

Derek, you have a big and loyal following — fellow musicians, fellow Vancouver residents, and others whose lives are affected in one way or another by cancer. Because of that I didn’t link to your blog, and I didn’t contact you, but for the past year I’ve been following penmachine.com. I am saddened to learn that you died two days ago.