Yay! I’m all moved in! I can do whatever I want now. I have space, I have the means I have the tools. All I lack are those ever-reclusive ideas. Perhaps I’ll catch a few today. Doubtful, but possible.

I want to thank my personal Yoda for helping me with the web design. He allowed me to make the mistakes I needed to make and helped me when I needed help. The design looks as good as it does because of his help. Thank you Master Yoda! Your Padawan learner is appreciative!

I still have a lot to do. Pages to build, content to write, Meta tags to write, etc. It’ll be a long process but eventually it’ll be worth it. I’d estimate that it is going to be roughly 2005 when I feel it was all worth it.

I’m hitting crunch time with my freelance work. Books are due! I have more manuscript than I know what to do with! It’s exciting and scary at the same time. I may take February to sleep. But by then I’ll be reviewing pages and I’ll be tired, tired, tired.

I’m tired now. I keep having these revelations at four a.m. for some reason. Last night the baby woke up hungry and the wife and I woke with her. As she was snarfing up her food, my mind started to wander. I realized something very important.

We’re all experts in something, right? Whether it’s web design, science or potato peeling, we can all say that we’re good at something. And, quite often we’re in awe of people who can do things that we either can’t or don’t understand.

That’s the way I am with physics. I’m working to understand it as best I can, but it’s a slow process. A fun process, but slow. Most people with English degrees don’t suddenly decide to study physics on their own. Sure I could take a class, but there’s something about suddenly understanding a particular law of physics that enthralls me.

Here’s what I realized. When you look at a scientist you’re amazed and confounded by all they understand. But to them it’s easy because they can see it. Richard Feynman understood QED because he could see the motion and properties of atoms because he studied them. I can’t.

Imagine your house. You can simply say your address and you can visualize your house. You can see the trees, the wood, the doors, the grass. But if you say your address to a stranger, they won’t be able to see it. They haven’t been there. To them, it’s just an address. A concept rather than reality.

The same holds true for science. If you understand physics, it isn’t so difficult to find your way to quantum physics. Because you can see it. You can visualize it. For the layperson, like me, I don’t have the map. I’m still trying to find it.


I’ve been thinking a lot lately about childhood. It could be because of Matilda being a full-fledged child, perhaps. I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking of what I was like in first grade.

I know that I was really, really confused. My dad had died the year before, so I wasn’t exactly a normal kid. I was a little . . . forlorn, I guess. I’m not sure I always showed it outwardly, but I know for a fact that I acted out on it countless times.

How? Because I was a liar. I lied constantly. Not to my mother, but to my friends about my life.

A memory came rushing back to me recently from when I was in first grade. I was standing at the front of Miss Meyer’s class for show and tell. I was holding a Storm Trooper action figure (from Star Wars, not the Third Reich). I spun an elaborate yarn about how my dad, before he died, made the molds for the action figures and that we had thousands of them laying around the house because he made them.

The thing is, I knew this was a lie. My dad worked for a company that distributed bearings. He’d never once carved a mold for a plastic action figure. I sincerely doubt he had the artistic talent to do it.

But I believed my own lie at the moment. Because in that moment, I knew my dad. He wasn’t my “true” dad, of course. But he was one that was alive in my head.

My own memories of my dad are muddy at best, but for a moment they were clear. Even if they weren’t true. I never mentioned to my friends that I was jealous that they had dads that would help them in cub scouts. I never told them that I was jealous of their dads cheering on the sidelines of soccer games and I certainly never mentioned my anger at them when they told me their dad was a jerk. In my mind I figured at least they had a dad.

Memory is a strange thing. I hadn’t thought about my storm trooper lie for years. In fact, I doubt I had thought of it again since I told it. So why did it occur to me recently?

In a way I want to go back and tell all those kids that I didn’t tell them the truth. That my dad never once carved a storm trooper or any other Star Wars related toy. I want to tell them that the way my dad, in the short time I knew him, was just fine with me.

He may have never made toys but he was a cowboy soldier, a professional hockey player (who didn’t know how to ice skate) and had been bayoneted in the chest during the war (though there are rumors that the scar on his chest was really from when he climbed a barbed wire fence as a teen).

I know these things because he told me.