This morning I found myself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and I asked myself, “How did I get here?” The calendar tells me it’s Friday, and I believe it, but this week has been one blur. That’s what happens when you don’t sleep for, oh, a while. I used to do a lot of that in college. Not sleeping. In a given week, I might pull two all-nighters and sleep five or six hours most of the other nights. There were quite a few “five minute power naps” thrown in there, too. One of my mottos was “Sleep’s a crutch!” I still think that, but I’ll freely admit it’s a mighty comfortable crutch. So soft and warm and cozy. And refreshing. And it’s a handy way to demarcate one day from the next. The other night – I could tell you which, but I’d really have to think about it – Chris and I moved the chickens. I live the kind of life where, in the span of twenty-four hours, I can go from having complete strangers up on a stage trying to impress me while reading children’s literature to helping make the professional lives of a group of electrical engineers halfway across the country easier to stuffing sleeping chickens into cat carriers by the light of a weak flashlight. The whole operation was relatively painless. I’d designed the chicken coop to come apart with the removal of a few hinge pins, but the theory wasn’t put into practice until now. The only hitch came when we realized the roof too large to fit into the U-Haul, but it was a simple matter to saw it into two still-sound pieces. I had my doubts, but it was reassembled in a matter of minutes in its new locale. The chickens slept right through the whole thing, including the stop for dinner at the all-night diner, and woke up in the same house on the same perch with entirely different scenery. I don’t know if they were amazed or not. The move is now mostly done. We never got time to properly pack, so there are a lot of loose things still at the old house, and it needs a world of cleaning, but thanks to Chris’ hard work, that should all be taken care of by the end of the day. And I’ll know right when that is, because I’ll be sleeping. Yay, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!

My coworkers refer to this little gem as “The World’s Most Advanced Web Page”. It’s meant to be printed, landscape on legal-sized paper with minimum margins. < proudNerd > It doesn’t look all that complicated, really, but it took me a week or so to get it to work. It gets created on the fly by our software package, drawing in data from a number of sources. It uses HTML, CSS, Python, and a computer language we made up ourselves to create what you see. The problem is that the language underneath web pages wasn’t designed with printing in mind, so it is very hard to manage margins and page breaks and exact layout on the paper. We really shouldn’t be using it at all, but we needed to take advantage of the protability, size, and the fact that every computer had a pre-installed viewer. In the next few months, we’ll be moving to PDF files created on the fly. PDFs are meant to be printed, so I’ll have exact control of the layout, but I’ll need to create the pages at the programming language level – no WYSIWYG editors or anything like that. It will be just like when I programmed PostScript Diplomacy maps by hand. < /proudNerd >

The Leonid meteor shower is upon us this weekend. The cool dry air usually makes this shower worth watching, but sometimes this shower turns into a full-fledged storm. In 1966, for example, an estimated 500,000 meteors were seen in an hour’s time. I can’t imagine that; it would be like watching a rather intense fireworks display, I suppose. It has always been a tricky affair predicting the intensity of these things. It was known that they are caused by the earth travelling through the debris field of a comet, the remnants of the cometary tail, but we didn’t know much about the debris itself. It was supposed that it was a cloud of dust, and if we were lucky enough to travel through a dense part of the cloud, we saw a good show. In the last few years, though, a few astronomers have made a breakthrough. We now know that a comet leaves behind a small but dense trail behind it. With each orbit, it leaves behind another track, but not exactly in the same place as the last, so the net effect is rather like a grape vine wreath. The tracks do eventually dissipate, but the last several hundred years’ worth are still there. These astronomers have now mapped out the precise positions of these trails and can predict amazingly well when we will cross one of them. Usually, we go through mostly empty space, hitting the dissipated dust. This year, though, we’ll go straight through the heart of one of the trails. It’s an older one, so the models differ on exactly how many meteors we’ll see, but the range is (over my new house) between 500 and 2000 an hour. In a typical year, we see maybe 20 an hour, so this should be quite a show. Check the predictions for your area, set your alarm clock for early Sunday morning, and join me outside!

These once-a-week updates will become more frequent, I promise. In time, this place may even resemble a weblog again, with links to content and everything! For now, though, a brief update: We spent the night in the new house last night and even had a fire going in the fireplace. As far as we can tell, the fireplace had never been used before. Having a fire inside is mighty nice! The water is drinkable (we’ve been told), but still comes out of the tap bright orange. Our ground water here is pretty high in iron, and our well has a filter, but the filter wasn’t maintained during the last three years or so. There’s iron build-up inside all the plumbing. We’ve treated the pipes and re-built the filter, but it will take time for the water to wash all the iron away. Hopefully not too much more time, though. We moved most of our stuff on Sunday, filling a 26 foot U-Haul truck. There’s plenty more still to move, though, along with a lot of cleaning. We have to be out of the old house by this weekend. It might happen. In other news, I am holding auditions tonight for Lanford Wilson’s THE HOT L BALTIMORE. This project will keep me busy through December and January, though I expect I’ll be less busy than I am now. I don’t want to be as busy as I am now for a long, long time.

So there I was, getting married. . .	The weather was beautiful. The fall air had done wonders for the trees in the japanese gardens. The maples in particular were stunning. Another week, perhaps, and the leaves would be gone, but this day they were beautiful. The wedding was scheduled for five o’clock, and when five came and went and my wife-to-be wasn’t there, I started talking about running off with my friend Steve. His wife persuaded me to wait until at least five fifteen.
At five ten, she came down the walk.		I’m glad I waited.
She joined me down at the landing. As I mentioned before, she and I performed our own ceremony. We joined ourselves together. I’ll post the text of the ceremony here soon.
We welcomed everyone there, and asked them each to say a few words before we got started. I asked Chris for her hand in marriage. She agreed and asked for mine. It was already hers.		We gave each other vows, exchanged rings, and read each other a poem.
	Then, to show everyone we meant it, we kissed.
	We were now Mr. and Mrs. Wagoner.
The Wedding Party

The papers are signed: We have bought the farm. More later…

A scene from another wedding

A quick update: As predicted, the last week involved far too much to do in fr little time, resulting in tiny amounts of sleep. But, it was all worth it. The play went as good as one possibly could. My favorite comment came from the organization’s board of directors: “We have this rule that the same director can’t direct two shows in a row. But, would you like to direct our next show?” I had to say no, as it would come right on the heels of the show I’m directing in Athens over the winter, and I really need the spring to jump start the new farm. But I asked them to keep me in mind for their fall show. The User Meeting at work was by all accounts the best one ever. My classes were very well received, the talks went well, our customers are happy (some of them rabidly so), and we’ve got new ones on the way. The purchase of the farm is coming right along. The only thing standing between us and closing next Wednesday is discovering that the well is poisoned, but that seems unlikely. Word came today that we’re buying it at 90% of the appraised value, which is fantastic. And, the wedding is Saturday evening. We’ll be driving to St. Louis tomorrow and driving back on Sunday. It’s about ten hours, but after this week, it’s twenty hours I’m looking forward to. Not to mention the good bits in between. We’ve written our own ceremony, and in a bit of a twist, we’re preforming it ourselves, too. I’ll post a transcript (and hopefully pictures) later. And finally, does anyone want to rent my house? It’s got a fantastic garden and comes with a hand-built earthen oven. Maybe I should post a full “For Rent” web page. Maybe when I get back.

Here’s where I’ll be Saturday night when I get married.

Son of a gun! R.E.M. pulled off a secret concert Tuesday night, their first full concert in town since 1992. And I of course missed it.