Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Two of my favorite clients took me and the rest of their team out to a Christmas dinner Tuesday night at Houston’s. The company is run by a mother and daughter team, so even with the other freelancer in tow and the office help I was the only guy in attendance , which is fine with me since I seem to get along well with women, in general. It was very nice and we had a great time.

…altercation with restaurant lady wherein my attempt to give a .40 tip is met with a look of confusion… escorted outside by tall, thin dude with hipster hair. In anger, I jerk my arm away and he pulls a gun and says glancing around nervously at the crowd, “hey, this ain’t M*A*S*H”. Then I start yelling and swinging at him, gun and all.

In real life news, I’m coming down with something even though I’m never sick.

Don’t mistake my lack of updates for inactivity. Truth is, there are a lot of changes in store for me over the next month, which I will appraise you of in due course. You can count on that.

The photo here was taken on the road back from Dallas at 6:10am. When I stayed with Jody this weekend I ended up taking her little gate clicker with me and didn’t realize it until I got home late Sunday night when I was emptying out my pants pockets. It opens all the doors and gates in the complex, which is built like a fortress since it’s in the ghettofabulous part of downtown Dallas. When I called the apartment office about it, they said they didn’t have a temporary one she could borrow nor could they give her a temporary gate code, so I had to drive back up to Dallas after work yesterday to let her in after she got off her night job. Then we went to bed and I got up this morning at 5:00am so I could be back in Austin for work. So, that’s like two trips to Dallas and back since Thursday. It’s nothing but a thang anymore since I’ve gotten so used to driving long distances. Although I would have rather not made the trip, there’s no use getting bent out of shape by something you caused with your own stupidity. I just wish the coffee I got from Racetrac didn’t taste like a charred Incan mummy.

I love seeing my family and spending time with people I care about. I love the stress of it and the break from routine, the familial nosiness, seeing how everyone has changed over the intervening year. I love to see everyone laughing and teasing each other, my aunts and grandmother baking and cooking, and on the other side of my family, my dad and uncle cooking and roasting. I love playing dominos, drinking coffee, and watching movies, everyone packed in like sardines.

To everyone within shouting distance, have a Happy Thanksgiving. Spend time with your tribe.

At the risk of turning this into the adjunct Hollis-blog, another member from TM asked Hollis to be a guest blogger on his site because he too found his Armistice Day speech stirring. So, from the horse’s mouth, here is the full story as told by Mr. Baker.

After waking up from my toasty bed I headed down to IHOP to set up their banquet room for our Toastmasters meeting as is my duty each Monday morning a little after six am. Our foremost octogenarian, Hollis, was already there and had everything set up, of course, even though he doesn’t have to. As soon as I entered, he looked at me in all seriousness and said in his guitar string Texas twang, “Chris, I caught you flat-footed.” I had that sinking feeling you get when you’re in trouble, but don’t know what you did. I said, “How do you mean?” and he pulls out this stack of paper and throws it on the table.

It’s a print-out of a Google search he did for his name “Hollis Baker“. Right at the top of the search results is my website with the excerpted mention I made of him with regards to last week’s meeting and his Veteran’s Day speech, his name bolded out from the rest of the text.

Horror of horrors, my secret blog habit had been found out! This is like being unmasked as a cross-dresser since I generally don’t tell most people I know about my site. I’m actually a very private person, and it’s foreign to me to reveal the things I think about. The good thing was that he seemed flattered rather than annoyed and he gave his characteristic “My compliments.” Then he went on to tell me about how he started his own blog on Blogspot! He is an amazing and interesting fellow, so be sure to check out his blog.

I’m busily surfing and doing a few things here at the library where Jody works her second job. She works harder than anyone I know, with one full-time job, one part-time job, and enough projects to choke a horse. She’s already talking about getting her PhD now that she’s done with graduate school. Even though I do my freelance work in the evenings several nights a week, I still feel like a slacker. The woman is driven.

It’s nice to be able to look over at her reading and helping patrons while I mess around online, adding blogs to my feedlist, so I can view them from any computer instead of trying to store my opml files to the USB drive like I have been doing. She had to be at work at 9am, so I had a nice walk around until the library opened at ten. I went down some unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a McDonald’s swarmed with soccer kids and their parents. I got an egg McMuffin and some coffee then I walked back along this dry, grassy park (Rawhide Park, as a matter of fact) while I sipped my coffee.