We attended a wedding this past weekend at a neat little chapel. Afterward, as we were waiting to stand, I commented that I really liked the pastor. Jen did too, and said something that suggested that he’s just the type of person we’d like when starting to attend church.

The truth is we’ve been discussing it for years. More to the point, Jen feels a pull towards something structured. I feel a desire to introduce my kids to church at some point and see what they think. Neither of us like our options around here.

If you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and died for our sins, only to be resurrected and walk the Earth 3 days later before miraculously ascending to Heaven to be with his Father, then you can attend 1,492 churches in our city. If not, then you can mow your yard and take your kids out for breakfast on Sunday mornings because there ain’t nothin’ here for you. Nothing. Noth-ing.

And that’s just not going to cut it for me. I’m sorry, but it’s not. The accumulation of my experiences, knowledge, and spirituality guides me to believe that the story of Jesus Christ as written in the Bible is not true. I don’t have FAITH that His story is true, and those of you who Believe should know better than anyone that you can’t give me faith. You can’t teach faith, you can’t pass it off like a good recipe. You can only encourage it and provide a place for it to grow.

I believe in God. Does that surprise you? Did you realize that people could do that? Even if we are a process of evolution, something on a different plane than us created this world, this galaxy, this universe of diversity, and it wasn’t human. I’m aware of how small we are.

So where does that leave me? I believe it leaves me with millions of other people in their 20s, 30s, with new ideas to old questions.

Do I feel alone? No. I feel watched, even guided. I feel loved. Love beyond that I feel in my home. But I don’t have anyone who requires me to kneel down to them, or drink their blood or eat their body. I don’t feel a righteousness to spread a seed of religion, and I don’t feel bad for not attending a house of worship with other people.

What about Jen? Oddly… very oddly, we differ in this thought. I have encouraged her to seek out a church that she’d like to attend and I would go with her initially and scope it out. We could take the kids, listen to what the church has to say and decide whether or not she wants to stay, and to pass along their teachings to our kids.

You see, I know that there are good people who attend church. Lots of them. They are our neighbors, our friends. But we don’t talk about religion and never will. We can live in a tight community of family values and happiness without bowing our heads and praying to the same person. We do it every day.

I think when I started this blog I was fine with just not thinking about God and religion. My answer was quite simply, “I don’t know.” Then at some point I got really mad about religion. I’m still pretty mad at the things that people say and do in the name of religion, but much like watching the bad news at 10:00pm, I know there are more good things than bad happening out there. These days I feel like I need to search my feelings and be ready to answer my kids questions. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought for these past couple of years and I think I am closer to happiness in my feelings and closer to God than ever before. And I didn’t have to chant, sing, eat, drink, kneel, hug, shake hands, open my wallet to a church, or declare my divinity to anyone.

How is your belief system coming along?

Jen and I saw The Dark Knight.

It takes a while to process a movie like that. I find myself choosing my words carefully because it deserves more than the average “it was great!” review.

From the very beginning, every scene of this 2.5 hour movie was special. It was smart, sexy, seedy, creepy, maniacal, and unique. Gotham looked more like a real city than ever before, with a touch of early 1900s Chicago. Batman was as bad ass as ever, with the best toys. He flew more like a bat than ever, kicked more ass, and used modern technology like never before. Bruce Wayne was as pompous as can be, acting on top of acting, and done in a way that perfectly shaped that role. Commissioner Gordon came into his own, Alfred and Lucius were graceful and thoughtful. Rachel Dawes was fine, but would have been better with a reprise from Katie Holmes. Harvey/Two Face was awesome. I loved Harvey, and I loved Two Face. The graphics on Two Face were freaking creepy and awesome, and his madness didn’t seem too far of a jump from the character of Harvey.

Then, there is the Joker. I don’t know how else to say it except that as a full grown man, he gave me the willies. I can’t recall a time I saw a character so perfectly constructed to be what it was in its fictional, illustrated world. I know that Heath Ledger died before this movie was released and I suppose there was an extra draw for the public to see the film due to that. Still, I can tell you without any bias about his death that he played the best villain I’ve seen in any movie, ever. SO creepy, so twisted, so “mad” and so flawless in his desire for and execution of chaos. And did I mention creepy? Yeah. I’m sad that he won’t get to play the role again, and glad for him that he left this world having done something so talented with his time.

This is not a movie for kids, nor a movie for those with a weak stomach, but I’d recommend it to everyone else. It’s easily the best Batman movie made, and a real gem of cinema. I can’t wait to see it again.

This was the weekend to beat all. And I feel like it.

Saturday we ate pancakes at the grocery store cafe, and did our grocery shopping early. Afterwards, Sebastian and I took Puck to get vaccinated and Jen went shopping with Zoey for a b-day present. One of Zoey’s friends came over for a play date in the afternoon, and then we packed the kids up and took them to Papa and Lou’s (Jen’s parents). Their faces light up when they see the house and Jen’s parents are just excellent grandparents. It’s a treat when they get to stay overnight like they did Saturday.

We were dressed up and headed to my cousin Andrew’s wedding. He married a wonderful lady named Renata (pronounced Henata) whom I met a few years ago and I really like. The wedding was at 7:00pm, and in a very small Christian chapel. It was a lovely place, and just the right size for the mostly-family gathering. The ceremony went smoothly, officiated by a guy who did not have to read his words and spoke to the bride and the groom with confidence in his convictions. Bubbles lined the reception line, as they found their very large Jaguar limo at the end of a red carpet.

We left there and headed down to The American Restaurant in the Crown Center complex, which is known to be one of the more swanky establishments in KC. Valet parking, open bar, and a high ratio of very nice servers to patrons. We got there a bit before 8:00pm, and chatted up our family until the wedding party arrived around 9:15pm. Dinner was excellent, although they could have served me liver and beans and I would have eaten it with passion at that hour. A live jazz band played in the corner of our private room, and we enjoyed the toasts of my uncle, and the maid of honor, and best man. Jen and I snuck over and said hello to Andrew and Renata and congratulated them. I hope we get to see their house soon and spend more time talking with them. I have a feeling they’ll have a lot to say with life coming at them so fast.

Andrew is a special guy. He was a straight-A kid all his life, a top performer in sports, in school, and now in business. In my mind, I think I always envisioned him being happiest if he found a life-mate with someone who was special too. He did. Renata is an extremely bright person, having practiced medicine, business, whatever life threw at her. She’s special, and together they’re just right.

After a tremendous wedding cake and coffee, we parted around 11:00pm and headed home to put our exhausted bodies in bed.

Sunday we went out and took pictures at a park with Chris’ Jen and our camera. We recently went to Portrait Innovations for more studio pictures, but they didn’t turn out as well as we hoped, so we wanted more. It was fun and we got some great pictures. Afterwards, Jen and her kids came over and played until it was time for the 2nd, famliy and friends reception for Andrew and Renata. We got to the reception at 1:00pm (kid nap time, oh well!) and enjoyed the amenities and conversation. We transferred our huge gift (note to self: buy smaller gifts when it’s 105 degress outside) and headed home around 3:00pm. Hockey was at 4:30pm, and the families joined us this time. It was neat to have the kids there, and it was the first time Sebastian had seen me play like that. I hope he likes it enough to see it more when he’s older. I had a double-header, so the kids went home after the first game and I joined them as a very tired daddy right before bed.

Bedtime stories, cleaning up, dishes, shower, upload some pics, and die in a heap on the bed. Sebastian woke me at 1:00am and needed me so I slept in his room on the floor for the remainder of the night.

Today, I feel as if I was either in a fight or a car wreck. Maybe a fight in traffic? Yeah.

Google Mail is now offering a service of hosting the mail of any domain, not just gmail.com addresses. I’m given the option of running all of my brad ‘at’ almostlucid.com email through Gmail, and I’m very excited. It alleviates the problem that many people have with their domain’s e-mail system: crappy web mail. Mine has been unreliable, eating email, and sometimes being down when I really need it.

Last night, I went through the steps to convert brad ‘at’ almostlucid.com to Gmail and after many failed attempts, was successful. The failures were not Gmail’s fault, just a lack of knowledge on mine.

Now, I get to use the speed and reliability of Gmail for my domain-specific email addresses. That includes about 50% of all of my email and every comment I get. I dig.

If you’re hosted by me and would like in on this deal, let me know.

Note to those having issues with Google Mail Uploader: The key for me was that I had to use Thunderbird to POP my messages off of my old server. IMAP does not use the format that Gmail uploader needs to get your old mail into Gmail, and IMAP is the format that most people are using these days. Use POP.

One limitation I found was that it only pulls your Inbox over. I had messages in a folder too. However, I got around that by uploading my Inbox first, deleting all messages from my Thunderbird Inbox, and then moving my saved/folder messages over to my empty Inbox, and uploading that again to Gmail using the “archived email” option in the Google Mail Uploader.

After a really fun weekend, I found myself getting sick on Monday. By Tuesday I was down for the count. Chilled, totally clogged sinuses, sneezing, achy. I stayed home.

Here was my “sick day”:

5:50am Get up because Sebastian is up. Jen runs. I play with Bass and take a shower while he watches home videos on the computer. I finish up and we go eat breakfast together.
6:45am Jen returns and Zoey begins to stir from her wonderful 4-year-old sleep.
7:00am I listen in on a work call while entertaining kids. I shoot off an email about being sick.
7:30am I work in the basement a bit, answering work email and taking care of some minor site fixes. Kids join me in the basement and play without much intervention.
9:30am Jen takes kids shopping and to music class.
10:30am I’m chilled and lay on the couch wrapped in the slanket.
11:30am Everyone’s home for lunch. They eat, I watch them eat, not hungry.
12:00pm Kids go play in a baby pool at a neighbor’s house. I work a bit more.
1:30pm Quiet time. Sebastian and Jen sleep. I watch Alice in Wonderland on the couch with Zoey and snooze a bit.
4:00pm We play inside while Jen makes something for dinner.
5:00pm We play outside while dinner cooks.
6:00pm Dinner.
6:30pm Playing outside with neighbors. People talk, but I’m zoned out.
7:15pm Bathtime. It’s my turn and the kids were being good so I went ahead and did it.
8:00pm Bedtime for kids. Zoey reads Hop on Pop to me and I read two books to her. Jen sings to Bastian.
8:30pm Jen and I look at the budget for the next couple of weeks and talk about money.
9:00pm TV.
10:00pm Bed.

I still feel like poop today but I went to work anyway. It’s quieter here. We did have a family photo shoot today that I went to over lunch. Sebastian, the kid who thinks everything is funny, didn’t smile once. He doesn’t know how to suck it up and smile when you don’t feel like it… yet.

This is one of those things that sucks about being an adult. If you’re sick, no one will baby you all day because there are real babies around. You can’t watch the Matrix trilogy and snooze on the comfy couch all day because there are people who rely on you to “be you” regardless of how you feel, look, smell, taste, or sound like. Jen faces this during the school year too. She’s been teaching 9 years now and I don’t recall her taking 1 sick day.

Oh well. I’ll heal up here in a day or so and hopefully find somehow to put together a couple of nights of good sleep and non-crazy days.

What do you do on your sick days?

My trip to Detroit was successful. I had several criteria for being able to say that. First and foremost, I wanted to make sure that it was necessary. We had two very full days in a room with all of the top dog players from the various companies that make up our rather large partnership of web site administrators. I was called upon and volunteered a lot of information, and was made to feel useful and an important part of the meeting. I also learned a ton of information that I didn’t know, and gained knowledge on the coming year’s events in a way that I would have never learned over the phone (from this group). I hear from travelers all the time that much of it isn’t necessary, but rather just quid pro quo, and I don’t ever want to take a trip like that.

The second big part of the trip was meeting many of these people face to face, whom I’ve worked with for 8 months now. I missed out on seeing one or two people that I was hoping for, but I met probably 15 people who really filled in some visual puzzles for me. You can’t substitute shaking someone’s hand for anything else, and it was important to me to do that with as many people as I could.

The third most important part was the actual traveling… which of course was not easy but it was not a disaster. My flight was delayed leaving KC, which meant a missed connection in Chicago, which meant that instead of getting in Tuesday night at 9:00pm, I rolled in just before 1:00am. And of course that meant I ate horribly (Snickers for dinner!) and got very little sleep before the big meeting. Additionally, the three day meeting was so productive that we finished it in a long two days. People exited the meeting Thursday night unceremoniously and I was left to my own devices for my return flight on Friday at 1:40pm. So, Friday instead of going to the office I got up early and went to the airport to fly standby. It was my first time doing that, and it worked out very well. As a bit of a retraction for earlier shittyness, I had good seats on the way home and arrived in KC 6 hours earlier than expected. See: early start to weekend.

Could I do this all the time? No. I am tired of it already and I just had a four day trip. If I had to do this again next week and the week after? I’d go crazy, my marriage would suffer, and all in all I’d be very unhappy. Kudos to those of you who do it and make it work. For the spouses out there who think it sounds fun, exciting, or anything like a vacation I ask you to believe your spouse when he/she says it sucks.

That being said, I did enjoy many things about my adventure.

1) Eating on the company’s dime. I ate well and never reached the limit.
2) Sleeping in the middle of a very comfortable king sized bed and not having to make it up each day.
3) Having an excuse to take a break from the regular craziness of my day-to-day job.
4) Flying. I hate the seats on most airlines, but I actually really enjoying flying. I always have.
5) A break from the norm. Enough to make me miss it greatly.

As for Detroit, I can’t say much. I didn’t experience the city, just the outlying area that I needed (Southfield). From what I gather in my experiences and discussions with the locals, they are a pretty diverse crowd, with a corrupt government, and a strong tie to the auto market. Good and bad sports teams. Snowy winters, hot summers. I didn’t get the feeling that they were all that different from KC.

I’m home now, and the kids look bigger, and feel better to hug. They were very excited to find presents in my suitcase, and I loved being with them today. It’s great to be home.

I’m going on my first business trip tomorrow. I’ll be gone for 4 days, 3 nights to Detroit. I’ve found myself in a mix of emotions about the excitement of being trip-worthy to my company and also the frustration of missing Jen and the kids while I’m gone.

It’s not a great time to leave home. Sebastian is a boy best handled with teamwork, and Zoey is a sweet and sensitive girl with big girl emotions now. However, it’s just a few days and no time is great to leave kids at home.

I have friends who do a lot of traveling for their jobs. One of them travels weekly Monday through Thursday and has two small kids like me. He likes it better than his last job but hates being away from home. I don’t fault him, but I think our priority list is different. I just couldn’t take a job like that. If this one turns into something similar (not likely) I would look elsewhere. I still get calls weekly from people wanting me to take jobs at my old employers so I guess I feel like the market is still good for what I do.

I’m taking the computer and a camera… so I’ll see you on the road!

I’ve not mentioned it this week because I didn’t want to jinx it. Also, I didn’t want to claim any early successes before I had some sort of conformation. However, it appears that Sebastian is excellent at using the potty. That’s a toilet, for you lay persons.

Last Sunday, we made the big trip to Kohls department store to find Big Boy Underwear. Yes, it was the pilgrimage that all parents make at some point, in hopes that their kid will love underwear as much as they do. We found some Elmo underwear in his size and put them on as soon as we got home. He was very excited.

I’ll spare you the details of everything that happened along the way, and skip to the good part. Today, Sebastian left the room and went into the bathroom without any prompting. He closed the door behind him, saying “I want some privacy.” Through the crack in the door I peered and watched him pull down his pants, sit on his Cars potty seat, and pee by himself. He pulled his underwear and pants back up himself and flushed. We need a higher stool so he can wash his hands himself, but beyond that I am proud to say he is pretty much potty trained. Furthermore, today was the first day he put his poop in the potty as well, and the celebration afterward was not unlike a team winning the superbowl. I’ve been handling human poop every day for 5 years straight, folks. This is a big day.

Zoey’s potty training was more like changing an adult’s diapers. You know they are smart enough to know better, and the poo is huge, but you just can’t convey to them how important it is to get to the toilet as soon as you feel it. Luckily, she figured it out before she really had to (preschool).

For those taking notes, I think we did two things better this time around. First, we waited to introduce the potty until he was at least 2 1/2. Second, we practiced going potty in the morning and after bath time at night, when he was due for a diaper change anyway. He figured out how to control it that way before we introduced underwear. Finally, we took him often to the bathroom but we didn’t ever push him to go unless we knew it was really time. In short, we didn’t pressure him like we did Zoey.

We’ve got a couple of packages of diapers left that will serve as nighttime reinforcements for a while. I’m hoping though, that it’s the last box of diapers that we ever buy. EVER.

Gonna lay it out for ya right here. Just gonna throw it out there as a note of interest and let it be.

Sebastian is driving us crazy. Were he not 2, I would say he’s gone completely batshit crazy and is ready for the insane asylum. Luckily for him, he IS 2, and therefore allowed to be a totally off-the-chain insane-in-the-membrane ass hat. And so he is.

I am the King of Patience. Jen is the Queen of Patience. We tag team him with the Patience and we try and break his spirit with the Understanding. He is mighty though. He is smart, and he knows how to work a situation.

Bedtime consists of crying, squeeling, snotting, and the saddest, biggest bottom lip you’ve ever seen on a baby boy. He is inconsolable, and conversations (through crying, snot, and tears) usually go like this:

Me: Oh, Buddy, let me get you a Kleenex.

Him: NO! I don’t WANT a Kleenex! (I get one anyway and put it beside the bed)

Me: Ok, Little Man, I’ll just put it here in case you need it.

Him: NNNOOO! You don’t do that! (wailing increases)

Me: Ok, I won’t do that.

Him: Nooo!!! You don’t do that! (now talking about ‘not’ doing it)

Me: Do you want to blow your nose?

Him: NNOOOoo!!!!!

Me: Okay.

Him: Nooo.

Me: You want me to blow your nose now?

Him: Yeah.

Me: Ok.

That conversation takes about 3 minutes and is ear-piercing loud on his end. I talk so soft that he has to be quiet to hear me. The typical bedtime routine is about 25 minutes of that.

Yes, this is TOTALLY a phase. It’s just one that I’m not too fond of.

One other note. Zoey is freaking amazing. The worse Bass gets, the more sympathetic, understanding, and helpful she is. It’s really quite remarkable, and only further goes to prove what an amazingly smart, compassionate and wonderful girl she is becoming.

I’ve really enjoyed our playfulness this week. A major project at work ended on Monday and with it went the huge knot in my stomach. It’s so much easier to be happy and playful, and creative when you’re not thinking about code and encryption and deadlines. I’ve loved our puppet shows, playing “horses”, and how we’ve really made each other laugh this week. Now if we could just get Captain Crazy to accept his bedtime as part of life, we’d be golden.

I don’t do many meme’s, but when Shan asks for something, it shall be done.

One word answer quiz.

1. Where is your cell phone? pocket
2. Your significant other? out
3. Your hair? dark
4. Your mother? here
5. Your father? watching
6. Your favorite thing? laughter
7. Your dream last night? trains
8 Your favorite drink? milkshake
9. Your dream/goal? freedom
10. The room you’re in? office
11. Your hobby? hockey
12. Your fear? fear
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? vacationing
14. What you’re not? young
15. Muffins? sometimes
16. One of your wish list items? driver
17. Where you grew up? Missouri
18. The last thing you did? email
19. What are you wearing? kahkis
20. Favorite gadget? camera
21. Your pets? loving
22. Your computer? lifeline
23. Your mood? good
24. Missing someone? sister
25. Your car? aging
26. Something you’re not wearing? sneakers
27. Favorite store? music
28. Like someone? yes
29. Your favorite color? black
30. When is the last time you laughed? today
31. Last time you cried? weekend