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Matt McHugh.com - Blog - March 2010

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March 17, 2010


Hmm. Seem to have fallen a bit behind in daily blog entries. Eh. So it goes.

Here are some updates on random things that have gone on in the last two weeks or so:

  • My 9-year-old son won "Most Unique" in the local Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby. He did design the car, drawing on paper exactly what he wanted: a smooth delta shape with a hemispherical bubble on one end like a submarine viewport. I carved it. That hemisphere was a bitch, but really sold it. I let him hold the sander a few times, so that qualifies as helping. He painted it himself, though. Of course, I helped tape the edges to get clean stripes. The car ran like molasses, but it looked great.
  • We watched the two Chronicles of Narnia movies in two nights. My 6.5 daughter really seemed taken with them. She kept saying she wanted to watch them again with her grandparents. My son enjoyed them as well, though when I explained the religious symbolism, he seemed a little less enthused about them. Church and CCD have done a fine job of nurturing his antipathy toward religion.
  • We had tremendous wind storms and flooding in my little corner of northern New Jersey. My house was spared any damage, but I know plenty of people who didn't get off so lucky. I tell you, I've never heard wind like that. Twelve solid hours of 40+ mph gusts. I was tense the entire time. Spent four hours the next day picking up branches. Like I say, we got off very lucky.
  • My employer announced the relocation of about 40 positions in the U.S. and Europe to Asia. With times as they are and lots of advance scuttlebutt, this did not particularly surprise me. But it's still a little unnerving. I've never been particularly worried about losing my job (except as a result of me shooting my mouth off one too many times!), but this clearly demonstrates it's a possibility. Nobody at the company has my experience or talent, but that's not to say the company can't decide it can do without them. I may be irreplaceable, but I'm not indispensable.
  • I've picked up again this brief history of the Catholic Church book I bought a few years ago and have failed to get through twice. It's quite short -- 250 pages maybe -- but maddeningly dull. Forty pages in and I'm so sick of words like "ecclesiastical" and "eccumenical" and "ecclesiology" and "catechesis" and all sorts of Greco-Latin churchy jargon that I barely understand after 16 years of Catholic school. When they gonna get to the good parts with the Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation?
  • Rather than blogging, I've taken to venting my spleen daily by posting comments to articles on CNN.com. Sometimes, if I'm sarcastic and inflammatory enough, I can get replies that border on death threats. I shouldn't enjoy it so much, but God help me, I do.


-- mm







 





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