Today I have a container of leftover salad plus a hamburger made of half of Chris’ from last night and half of HouseApe 3.0′s from last night. And yet I don’t manage to lose any weight?

We’ll all know tomorrow. If you don’t see this message, you’ll know what my decision was.

but his memory was already failing, and this was the last time he really recognized any of us.

He was born in 1911, on a homestead in Saskatchewan, the third of 8 children.

I first met him in late 1966:

That’s my father in the centre (my god, he looks young!), and his father, who died at 96, on the right.

He died in his sleep, with his children at his bedside, and I think he would say he’d had a good run. I want to say I’ll miss him, but honestly, we lost him to dementia a year ago. So I am mourning a piece of my childhood, which was truly excellent.

This happened so long ago that my shame knows wide bounds.

Here are some Irish dancers on a flatbed trailer. The platform is well-chosen – 12 or 14 100 lb girls can make a hell of a racket pounding clogs on steel-framed timber.

I recall my one experience with significant offshoring. I was working at a company that had recently emerged from bankruptcy. It was a large company, one that had been a bit of a media darling before the fall, but the high-flying was actually spectacular mismanagement and when the chickens came home to roost, there were a mountain of chicken shit to clean up.

One of these heaps of acrid manure was the fact that this company had been managing many millions in funds held in trust on spreadsheets stored on accountants’ hard drives. The regulatory bodies involved took a dim view of this (why did it take a bankruptcy to reveal this, I wonder?) and the company was given a certain short length of time to implement some form of actual system.

They did this by spending a large amount of money with a small software firm for a DOS based product. In 2004. The owner of the small software firm almost certainly got rich on this. However, part of the deal was that this product had to be brought into the 21st century, and the quick and cheap way to do that was to take the development offshore.

Those of you who have had some experience with offshoring will know what resulted. Work done on the quick is never good, and is not made better by being done by people who don’t speak the language or have any connection whatever to the business. We spent most of our days trying to undo the damage that had been done overnight, or rather to undo the effects of the damage, because while we could see the source code, we couldn’t change it. All we could do was attempt to salvage some performance from the torrent of shit data that was thrown at the system.

It didn’t matter in the end – the company, rescued from death and scraping back into the black at last, was sold and the rescuers pocketed tens of millions. The software was dropped as the branches switched over to the purchaser’s software.

However, it is spectacularly bad in a project manager.

Chris and I went to Seattle over the weekend. Grandma and Grandpa had volunteered to Tend the Ravening Horde during the final four days of spring break, so Chris and I took the opportunity for a little getaway, a little free-and-easy Us time.

We didn’t do much that would excite most of you – we arrived in Seattle early Saturday morning, parked, wandered past the opening of the Pike Place Market, and then went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the Gaugain show. We saw that (CROWDED) and then spent the rest of the day at the museum. Yes, we spent an entire day at a big art galler

The hotel room was nice, thanks for asking. The hotel has a pool on the 35th floor but it was filled with kids. We’re not talking 10 kids here.

We drove home Sunday morning because we had to do grocery shopping and make sure we were at the ferry terminal in time to pick up the Ravening Horde.

Anyway, the thing I have been Remiss about is processing pictures. I’ll try to remember tonight.

“Damn,” I said, “I just realized that if I want a mistress, she’s not only going to need to be a woman who doesn’t want a full-time commitment, she’ll need to have daddy issues.”

“There are quite a few of those around,” Chris said.

She’s helpful that way.

Not that I know anybody who is in a sorry state due to their own stubborn stupidity and selfishness, or anybody who is feeling any sort of satisfaction therefrom, you understand…