Polgara and Belgarath are both several thousands of years old, so I really didn’t read them as smug or arrogant, rather jaded and cynical. Beldin was jaded and cynical personified.

I’m in my mid-50’s and honestly can identify with them at times, although I do my best not to act it.

Garion’s treatment is probably evidence of the Eddings’ proclivities toward children. They were both convicted of child abuse and spent time in prison for it about 10 years before “The Belgariad” was written. Their adopted children were also permanently taken away. Like many others I had no idea of that until after David’s death in 2009.

I reread it about 8 years ago and I’ve had both my boys read it as well. It certainly did hit a lot differently. For one, if I was Garion I would have sent Ce’Nedra permanently packing in short order destiny be damned. I still loved Prince Kheldar (Silk) though.

There have been so many authors and celebrities whose work I have enjoyed over the years just to come out and be scummy trash that I’m at the point I just want to enjoy the art and not know who is behind it. That feels a lot like being a ostrich with its head buried in the sand, but I’m not really sure what the alternative really is.

LOTR… Of course, since this is really the start of the genre as it exists today. So when you read it and think that it’s full of tropes… Continue thinking a little bit and realize that LOTR CREATED those tropes.

The Belgariad by David Eddings. I’ll come out and say it, David Eddings was a horrible person, but this series is worth reading. He’s dead now so you won’t be supporting him if you get these books. The followup series “The Mallorean” is not a must read, it’s basically a retread of “The Belgariad”. As are his later series “The Tamuli” etc…

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson. A lot of people will recommend Mistborn, or the Stormlight Archive, but both of those series are just parts of a greater arc called “The Cosmere”. I would recommend starting with Elantris or Warbreaker, both of which are standalone books, but are in the Cosmere. Then go to Mistborn series 1, then tackle Stormlight Archive. Be warned, each book in SA is longer than LOTR in its entirety. But it’s well worth the read.

A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay: One of my wife’s favorite books. Not a series, but worth the read.

Memory, Sorry and Thorn by Tad Williams: Excellent series that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

Destiny’s Crucible by Olan Thorensen: I liked this one a lot and continue to follow it, although it’s starting to get a little long.

The Riyria Revelations and Chronicles by Michael J Sullivan: Both of these series are great and worth the read.

Life is too short to eat bad chocolate.

VLC

Firefox

WINISD (more of a love hate relationship)

Ehh, it’s not that bad normally. I went on and did another ~2500 jumps in the subsequent years.

This was probably the worse situation I was put in, in my entire skydiving career. The fact of the matter the only real safety device in skydiving sits between the jumper’s ears. Most accidents occur due to a bad attitude, or ignorance of how to safely do things.

8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a wedding jump for their ceremony.

Not a big deal, but the two getting married were very inexperienced jumpers with less than 100 jumps each. The rest of us were all highly experienced with hundreds if not thousands of jumps. At the time I was sitting a bit over 2000 jumps and was active on both 4-way and 8-way competition teams. (Not my videos, but fair representations of what I was doing at the time).

We planned a jump which would put the newlyweds at the base where they would not need to do a whole lot. Unfortunately the bride had the bright idea that she wanted to come in and dock on the formation, which she did not have the skill set for. I coached her on several jumps having her dock on me. She was terrible, but she did manage to dock on me the last two coach jumps. Part of my coaching was what to do if she goes low and finds herself under the formation and unable to get back up. People falling together fall slower than an individual.

Fast forward and we have a practice jump about a month before the wedding. The groom goes out with another experienced jumper in the base, the bride next then the rest of us diving out.

Well, the bride misses the formation, much like I figured she would. Except she doesn’t follow her training and she just sits there under the formation. She was about 500 feet under the formation when she starts waving off, which is the signal she’s about to deploy her main parachute. The formation breaks and tracks for their lives, which we literally were.

She deploys and it turned out that I was closest to her. I passed less than 20 feet away doing 120mph where she was slowing to less than 10mph. She later said I sounded like a jet airplane passing by. Had we hit, it would have been fatal.

I grounded her and gave her a good chewing out. We spent the next weekend doing more coaching and I told her if she wanted to do the jump she had to be in the base.

The wedding day came, but unfortunately the weather the day sucked and we didn’t get to do the jump that day. We did it about a month later where the jump went pretty well and safely.

Sex?

No such thing.

Parachute not opening?

Any.

I was on a ski trip in Banf Canada and on this particular day we were skiing at Lake Louise. My group consisted of three siblings, two brothers and their sister. Then me and one other guy. At this point I should note that their father of the siblings was a zone manager for Chrysler at the time.

The sister decided to spend the day in Banff so wasn’t skiing. The two brothers were very advanced skiers and wanted to spend the day in the back bowls. Which was way above my skill level as well as the other guy. So he and I spent the day skiing together.

At lunch time we decided to eat at the chalet up on the mountain which was only accessible by ski. It was crowded and by chance sat across from two older men and we started chatting. It came out that they owned automobile dealerships. My friend mentioned that the father of the people we were here with was a zone manager for Chrysler. The two men looked at each other and one asked; “You’re here with -name of siblings dad- kids?” We hadn’t mentioned their names at all and the man went down the list of all the siblings names (they came from a very large family that has 6 kids). The guys knew ALL of them by name.

So here we were 3000 miles from home at a ski chalet only accessible by skiing to it. And sat across from two men that not only knew the siblings father, but worked with him and knew their names too.

They took us out to a very nice restaurant in Banff later that week. It still remains one of the greatest occasion of happenstance I have ever experienced in my life.

Jeans and any clothes with graphics printed on them I will turn inside out. Jeans, because they typically have rivets that can grab other clothes in the wash. The back of those rivets are smooth and won’t pick as much. Clothes with graphics because it will wear the graphics less.

Otherwise it is irrelevant if the clothes are inside out or not.

I have to admit that it is something that concerns me.

My process includes going back over the grates with a wet cloth.

This was one I was looking at when I decided upon the one I got. The main reason why I went with it was due to it using a metal surface.

Is yours usable when the grill is hot?

NEVER use grill cleaners that use steel bristles. EVER.

It’s been long known that these bristles come loose and pose a danger. I’m rather shocked that they are still being sold, but here we are.

THIS is the grill brush I use. It’s very effective and much safer to use.

When the investment money stops flowing, that will be when you see AI disappear.

My company is in the middle of rolling out Microsoft Copilot or what ever it’s called. Here is the thing, CoPilot comes with Office and the company just spent a ton of cash on next year’s Office licenses. MS sold the people writing the checks that Copilot comes with Office and a project was created to specifically roll it out.

Fast forward another year, there will be polls of the employees how useful Copilot was in the past year… The employees will give their feedback. Then next year’s negotiations of Office licenses will include a discount for “removing” Copilot. As it’s not needed or even useful.

Then AI will disappear from our daily lives.

I’m guessing in a year, but honestly I think it might take up to 5 years as the money flowing into AI right now is insane and enough to keep it propped up for quite some time. I just hope it’s no more than another year.

I have an Anker Solix 2kwh unit backing up my sump pumps. I’m looking to expand it.

In the next 5 years my plan is to add solar to my home with at least 10kwh of battery storage, or more if I can afford it.

It’s not the dish that impresses, but the preparation.

One year, my family and I were at my middle brother’s house for a summer time visit. He had a party and grilled chicken. My brother never really learned how to cook and it showed. People barely touched it and there was a ton of it left over.

Fast forward another year and he wants to do the same thing. I offer to cook so he can attend to other more important party affairs. The only thing I did differently was I started with fresh good quality chicken and not mass frozen bagged stuff from Tyson. I also brought my instant read thermometer. Otherwise it was just salt and pepper on the chicken, although I used a ton more than he did.

Same number of people, same amount of chicken… There were NO left overs. I also made my cubed potatoes, those were gone too.

It was all technique. I used virtually the same ingredients he had the year prior.

I didn’t make it, but I let it happen to teach a stupid company a lesson.

Worked as a Change Manager for a manufacturing company. They built stuff destined for landfills and you probably have one of their appliances in your home.

To set the stage, my job prior to this was as a Problem Manager/ Major Incident Manager for a large insurance company. On major incident I worked was the when a Pure Storage technician came in to replace a failed drive. A bug in the Storage O/S allowed an active drive to be shown as deactivated and safe for replacement. This did not happen all the time, only during a certain set of circumstances. I don’t remember the details of that though.

My fellow IT professionals know full well what that means. That array supported a Tier 1 app and the whole thing went down hard. Not just hard, but it corrupted the database that required a multi-hour restore to fix. I also ran the Problem record on that one and knew everything about the who, what, and why of that outage.

Fast forward a year and I accepted the contract to be the Change Manager for this manufacturer. In comes a change request to replace a failed drive in a Pure Storage Array, except this time instead of paying for a service contract, this company cheaped out and did all the service in house. Which I didn’t know Pure Storage allowed you to do, this was 6 years ago, but this company somehow managed it. The storage guy was a bit of prick and hated the whole Change process. Which I get to be honest, but if you want to play in an enterprise environment you need to follow procedures. So he submitted his change with little to no detail and only one director on the CAB had any familiarity with storage systems. So I started asking technical questions, which generally is inappropriate of a Change Manager as that’s not the job. When I asked what the O/S version was, I got heavy push back that it wasn’t relevant. When I attempted to state WHY I was asking, I was told the change was approved and to move on. As replacing a failed drive in such a large array is generally regarded as low risk. My boss actually reprimanded me for taking so much time and extending CAB longer than it should have been.

I asked her (my boss) who was on call for Major Incidents the time of the change and… It was HER. LOL

So if you’ve guessed that the Storage team of this company were idiots and the O/S version their Pure Storage Array was running on still had the bug, you are a winner winner chicken dinner. They also had the fantastic luck to run into the circumstances as well.

Cue another Major Incident that my boss had to manage. It took over a day to resolve and all the while several production lines were sitting silent. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss in production. If not millions.

When someone with almost 30 years (at that time, I’m over 30 years now) tells you that something can happen, because they’ve seen it before… FUCKING LISTEN TO THEM.

I didn’t have anything to do with the Problem Process at that company, but I did sit in on it and you’re damn straight if I didn’t deliver the biggest I fucking told you so in the history of that company. The company also bought a support contract from Pure, I made sure that was a task on the Problem Record.

As to the biggest mess I made personally… I was 2 or 3 and had the bright idea of smothering myself in an entire jar of peanut butter. My oldest brother was baby sitting me at the time and our mother made him clean me up. Apparently the smell of peanut butter and water was so bad that my brother, even 53 years later, cannot stand peanut butter at all.

Guy here…

I met a girl at a social club party. It was a ski club that we both belonged to. We hit it off at the party and we learned that there was going to be an informal gathering of ski clubbers at a local entertainment complex the next weekend. I had never been to it so she said she would show me around.

I thought we both had a good time. At the next ski club meeting I gathered my courage and approached her with the intention of asking her out on a date.

She told me that I was “a lost puppy that is always around”. I apologized and told her that it would never happen again. I took responsibility for my actions and made sure that I never crowded her again. Which is what happened at the entertainment complex. I didn’t do it deliberately it was due to my own social awkwardness coupled with being neurodivergent.

As a part of that I put her in the permanently do not date category. The thing was we somehow ended up in the same clique. So we found ourselves in proximity anyway, although I did my best to not crowd her.

Then she invited me to a party that she was throwing. At the party I met her finance, which was a surprise as I didn’t know she was even seeing someone. But I was happy for her. Her fiance was a bit of a twit though and somehow he managed to dislocate his shoulder… I was the only person there that stepped up to help him. She didn’t even attempt to step in. Actually she glared at us while I was helping him.

Fast forward to the next ski club meeting and she sought me out and hung off me the entire meeting. I really didn’t think anything about it, other than she was being appreciative that I helped her fiance…

Well I was wrong, but didn’t learn that till about two weeks later when my girlfriend and I finally revealed we were together… Which actually predated the party mentioned above. My girlfriend wasn’t at the party because we were keeping our relationship a secret for a while and she was traveling.

It turned out her meeting me at the ski club meeting was her attempt to get me to ask her out. Which I had three inviolate rules against. One, she made it clear from the beginning that she did not want to date me… You know the whole lost puppy comment. Two, I do not get involved with people in committed relationships. She never came out and stated that she had broken up with her fiance. The third and most important rule is, I do not cheat on my significant other… Period.

So she would glare daggers at me anytime we were within proximity. This started in January of 1994 and continued till the week that the original entertainment complex where all of this started closed in 1998. 1998 was the last time I ever saw her and it was by chance in front of that same complex. She glared at me just as hard that day as when she found out I was already seeing someone.

So she rejected me and I kept the peace and we became… While not friends at least acquaintances going around the same group for a couple of years.

I didn’t really reject her, so much I was already seeing someone else and was keeping it secret until we decided to announce it officially. I did not consider this girl close enough to tell her beforehand and I did not give her any reason to think I was interested in her.

I still received glares for years though.

In case you’re wondering about the secrecy… My girlfriend was considerably older than me. We just felt it wise till we figured out what we were going to be to each other. We fell into being serious rather quickly and dated for over 3 years.

So say we all

Have you thought about sitting down with him and talking about it?

Relationships are built upon one thing… Trust.

Trust requires communication.

The wheels on the f’ing bus go round and round, round and round and they f’ing keep going round and round…

Every parent with a toddler.