Category: blogging

Where write about writing, and my website sounds familiar.

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thom yorke in a cave


Good evening from Wednesday night, which was a slightly more productive than the bust that was my Tuesday night. I did manage to get my hair cut, which was one of the things that’s been nagging me – but I missed mowing the lawn again… tomorrow, I guess. Work today was an 8hr exercise in futility: lots of math, thinking, crystal-ball-peering, planning and plotting… all with not nearly enough satisfaction at the end of it all. I keep hoping the direction will return to what I’m doing, and know I’m partially responsible for feeling without it. I can do my part to operate under whatever pieces of direction I can assemble, but I know I won’t feel 100% “purposed” again until I get some better clarity from above. I suppose this is all a learning experience, a primer in big-business red-tape… but I still have little tolerance for aimlessness. Enough with this.

The premise of this article fascinates me: that there are still areas on this planet which may remain relatively untouched by human development. It gets me thinking about how many other sealed-off isolated little ecosystems are out there. Little tiny worlds that exist only unto themselves, knowing nothing about anything else outside their walls. What if our whole galaxy is just some little sealed-up pocket of space in someone else’s world, waiting for some sanitation workers there to break through into our sheltered existence while drilling for a new sewer system? Yeah, I like thinking about things like that.

Well, it was only Tuesday I wrote about the eventual leak of Thom Yorke’s solo album as The Eraser (which happens to have one of the best album covers I’ve seen in a long while), and wouldn’t you know it I “happened” upon it while webbing around tonight. Needless to say I was ecstatic, and could hardly wait for the electric pulses coming down the coax to be converted into music. It took some ingenuity to find the dang thing, since it hadn’t really hit the “mainstream” filesharing sites yet (and I’m not exactly sure I’m still young enough to know where the “mainstream” filesharing sites are anymore anyway). Turns out it “officially” leaked sometime on Tuesday, maybe even Monday night – so I am indeed a few days off “fresh” when it comes to illegal album leaks. I’m still listening now, but I’m pretty much bound by my abounding enthusiasm to like this album – either that or eat my words. It’s crazy that an album can make me this happy.

Oh, and I dunno if you guys noticed – but I got like 4,000 spam comments overnight, check out the proof:

That’s a lot of spam in a short amount of time… it was just a couple days ago I was talking about hitting 30,000, and here I am about to break 40,000… I am so popular; with spammers; yay.

Goodnight.

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work-shirking


Lots of words, little to say. Random stuff I put together to make an entry.

So what do you think folks? I mean, about the blog, that is. How’s the blog doing these days? Still keeping your interest? Still inserting enough media and humor and current-event stuff to be relevant and entertain you? I dunno, I’m not thinking of giving up or anything – just interested in a blog “physical” of some sorts… wondering what’s working and what’s not. Strange I guess, when, ultimately, I don’t care… I’ll write what keeps me writing in the end. But I try to keep a good pace: funny stuff, pictures, charts, etc. I feel like I post often enough to consider myself a “regular” blogger, not some fly-by-night joker who posts next to never. I think I’m doing a fine job… right?

Does being a dad make you dumber?

I, for one, am beginning to wonder. Before we had Keaton, I prided myself on my ability to multitask, think clearly and logically, and plan with multiple contingencies. I was the “solid” one between Sharaun and I: the one who paid the bills, the one who would’ve been on time had she not held me up, the neat-freak, etc. But now, something seems off… ever since Keaton was born, I feel sometimes like all my cylinders aren’t firing properly.

Take for instance Sunday night, we had been invited to a birthday soiree down at the local pizzeria for a friend of ours, had known about it since early in the week and was actually looking forward to it. Come Sunday though, Sharaun and I both blanked on it. Sitting on the couch, eating some Chinese takeout, and watching TV – we got a call from someone at the fete asking us, “You guys still coming?” Case #2: After missing my 2nd Lasik evaluation last week, I’d rescheduled for Monday morning – even blocked out my work calendar from 8am-1pm so I’d get no meetings scheduled on top of it. Problem is, I didn’t write down what time the actual appointment was. Feeling like a heel, I just headed up guessing 9am (and got lucky). Strange though, those kinda brain-farts never used to plague me so…

Interestingly enough, I picked up a copy of Scientific American while sitting in the waiting room of that Lasik eval and happened on an article about how women’s’ “multitasking and cognitive” abilities actually increase during pregnancy and after childbirth. In addition, the study noted that fatherhood had quite the opposite effect on men, their multitasking and cognitive abilities showing a decrease upon the miracle of childbirth. Almost like a trade, the man seemingly giving up some of his mental-mojo so his mate can better care for the new life they created (my editorializing). Anyway, it was comforting to see that I’m only getting stupider because of science, not because of anything I’ve done (unless you count making a baby). Now… what the heck was I talking about…

Well, despite a series of hiccups with my Lasik schedule – I did manage to bottom out on price and dates and setup an appointment for lasering this Thursday. That means, as you read this, I have only two more days as someone who’s vision-impaired. I managed to do a little wheeling and dealing, bringing the cost down to something I feel is fair – although I still have this feeling I could get a couple hundred more knocked off if I really played hardball. For me though, I have the money – and at some point during the negotiations I began to feel guilty, quoting “fake” prices I’d got from “other” Lasik places… but I did manage to get the original quote reduced by $400 per eye. That’s on the best laser currently available, at least according to my research. I’m now more excited than ever, and literally can’t wait to go under the knife/laser and get it over with. I have high hopes that I won’t be one of the unlucky 1/10,000 folks for whom the surgery actually worsens their vision… keep your fingers crossed for me, k?

Work has been hard for me lately. Not the part where I get up and go to a building every morning at 8am, not the part where I sit at my desk or go to meetings or send mails. No, not even the part where I meet deadlines. The part that’s been hard has been the actual “work.” With some recent shakeups that’ve been going on, I’ve become horrible unmotivated. Oh, I’m still getting things done, sure… but I haven’t cared for more than a week now. I know this will pass, it always does… and then I realize my “not caring” has put me into a little hole that I’ll have to do double-time to dig out. This is fine with me, it’s a known cycle and I’ve accepted it. It’s almost like I have a manic-depressive or bipolar work ethic. For months I’ll be balls-out, 200% burning the candle at both ends and proud as hell of the work I’m doing. Then the lull will take over, and I’ll go into a “maintenance” phase where I’m simply reactive, doing enough to get by and keeping a low profile. Thankfully, the overdrive times seem to outnumber the lulls, leaving me with a solid B+/A average – again something I’m comfortable with. I don’t see an easily identifiable endpoint to this current funk; Thursday’s surgery won’t help, neither will the long weekend or the following weekend’s planned camping trip. The week-and-a-half long trip to FL in July certainly won’t shore up my dedication, and sunny summer days are like the crack to my work-shirking crackhead personality.

Love ya peoples, goodnight.

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back for more


Lazy Saturday spent on the couch trying to catch the iPod repeating a song on random; gray and rainy Sunday with a trip to church in the morning and not much more than a banana and some peanut butter to liven up the afternoon. I didn’t have big plans for the weekend, but it’s not like there was a lack of things I could’ve been doing. There’s so much to do around the house. I could’ve fixed the one sprinkler in the backyard that still doesn’t pop high enough; I could’ve fixed the pocket door in our master bathroom, which has been off its track now for probably a year; could’ve replaced the filter in the air conditioner intake thing; could’ve used the blower to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling of our front porch; maybe pulled the plethora of weeds rooted in my backyard. But no, I did none of those things, instead I sat around surfing the web, holding the baby, and listening to music. I did, however, manage to upload a new series of pictures to Keaton’s gallery, so you should go check those out now.

Speaking of Keaton, I’m happy to say that she’s “officially” sleeping through the nights now. The few long ones she had before were encouraging, but since it wasn’t consistent we weren’t quite ready to say it was real. Now, though, she goes down for between 8 and 9hrs each night – sleeping right through to morning. Now, this isn’t that much of a change for me, being as I wasn’t the one waking every 3hrs to stick my teat in her mouth – but I know Sharaun appreciates it. I keep telling Sharaun that if and when we have another baby, we’re gonna be lucky if he or she is half as good as Keaton is. We’ve had it so “easy” with this little one: she’s not fussy, she’s playful and cute, and she’s sleeping all night before 3mos. Keep it up Keaton, I’m fully expecting a valedictorian cheerleader who shuns sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Fingers crossed…

Tech content ahead, readers beware.

After all my surmising and postulating last week about what the cause of my website slowdown was, I think I’m comfortable now saying that I’ve ID’d it and addressed it. Over the weekend I continued to see solid performance from my blog and gallery pages, and my loadtimes on the backend were vastly improved. So what, you may ask, was the issue after all – and what did I do to fix it? I promise this won’t be another long webmaster entry, just bear with me.

The culprit? The Omni Explorer bot. A nasty, dirty, incredibly aggressive bot which was crawling my webapges with such frequency and voracity that it managed to gobble up gigs upon gigs of my bandwidth. I zero’d in on the Omni bot through my usage statistics, noticing it was the number one requester of my site over the past few months. Keying in a simple Google search brought up several folks ranting about the bot, and it’s unquenchable thirst for data. Eventually, I landed on the webpage of the bot’s company, where a goofy-looking apology about its aggressiveness is posted along with instructions on how to block it from indexing a site. In the end, I went with a stricter method of blocking than the Omni Explorer page recommended, as I’d read elsewhere that the thing had been caught ignoring the file they suggest using as a block.

I changed my .htaccess file, uploaded it, and the results were both immediate and amazing. My site sprang to life, responding to requests in a timely manner and looking spry again. And, so far, things have remained that way. So that’s it, the story of how I resurrected my site by denying the raping, ravaging Omni Explorer crawler/bot.

And, before I leave the topic of blogging, I wanted to mention that I added a live spam-comment counter to the sidebar. It shows how many comments the my Akisment spam blocker has currently shot down since it was installed. Check it now, and refresh the page when you’re done reading this entry to get an idea of frequency. Stuff like this is fun for me…

Nerdy stuff over, for those who skipped it.

Before I go, I wanted to pass along a link to what I thought was a great idea: an invitation for folks to list their most “visceral” song moments, right down to the whens and whys of it. I did something similar once, although I think my theme was more “songs that give me chills;” but, it still fits. And what do you know, Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept shows up on both my list and the one linked above. Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that much – I knew there was something magic about that song the 1st time I heard it… still gives me chills to this day. I actually thought it might be fun to go back and revisit that entry, adding additional information along the lines of what’s on the goodhodgkins.com list (along with the actual song). Maybe sometime this week…

Goodnight, I have nothing more for you.

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stressed


Happy Friday friends, boring entry for non-techies ahead… I’m afraid. Before you read it, I’d like to say that after writing it – I made some simple changes to my access files, and I’ve been having stellar results thus far. Keep your fingers crossed, maybe I have a working blog again.

If you’re reading this right now, consider yourself one of the lucky few who got through to what’s becoming an ever hard-to-reach sounds familiar. I apologize for the server problems folks, I assure you they are not of my making – in fact I’ve been have trouble finding something to pin the blame on. Right now, I’ve chatted several times with my hosting service’s tech support – and been assured that the server I’m on is functioning just fine – so the problem either lies with my pages themselves, or with the amount of traffic I’m sustaining (and thus asking the server to fulfill). Armed with this, I pored over the server usage logs to see just what might be the culprit.

Suspect #1 is blog comment spam, which has grown to a staggering amount (~3k pieces per day). All this comment spam activity is scripted and targeted at the same piece of PHP code, meaning it’s making numerous simultaneous database requests all day long. Since none of the spam makes it to the main page, I’m happy – but there’s no way to stop the database traffic without turning off commenting altogether, or implementing a login scheme – neither of which are attractive to actual commenters. Suspect #2 is the Coppermine application I use to power my image galleries, as the slowdown coincided somewhat with its introduction. I’ve often wondered if its code is super inefficient or sloppy, but the only way to test is to shut the galleries down for a month and watch the results – undesirable Suspect #3 is my own star-power. That’s right, I may just be too popular for my current hardware. I know, hard to believe – right? Let’s examine the evidence:

Below you’ll see my monthly bandwidth usage statistics from October of last year through February this year. You’ll notice that I was fairly solid around ~1-1.5GB of monthly transfer for an entire year there, up until October 2005 where you’ll start noticing some significant growth through February this year. In February, I hit 4GB transfer on the month – that’s a substantial difference from my ~1GB past year.

Now let’s take a look at March and April of this year. After a fairly smooth rise to the 4GBs of February, something happens and site usage freakin’ takes off over the past two months. Doubling over the course of March to a whopping 8GB and then increasing another gig in April to 9GB.

You think it’s a coincidence that Keaton was born on February 27th? That entry certainly generated some increased interest in the blog, and perhaps even bumped up my regular readership to some degree… But what are people looking at? Digging deeper below, they’re looking primarily at this very page. Viewed ~20,000 times in the month of April. However, some percentage of that, maybe 10%, is me writing and refreshing; and my blog-specific stats program clocked “unique” visitors at ~9,000, meaning half of those 20,000 hits were repeat customers. That’s impressive to me, especially since it doesn’t count web spiders and other forms of bots or indexers (which, incidentally, made up about 12% of April’s 8GB of transfer). The data below also shows that my image gallery is the clear runner-up to sounds familiar, being viewed 9,000+ times on the month.

Yeah, so what?, you may ask. 10GB monthly and 20,000 hits is peanuts, really. Especially when my hosting package allows me 250GB on the month. So why am I so bogged down at less than 10% of my allotment? I still have no idea, and I’m actively pursuing it with my host. As soon as I can find some relief, I’ll make the changes – I’m even willing to spend more money monthly if it comes down to it. As of now, I’ve taken some aggressive steps to block some greedy bots and spiders from aggressively crawling my domain – hopefully it’ll give some relief. Thanks for sticking with me through the crapiness… I appreciate your patience.

Before I close the topic, however, some random stats I enjoyed:

  • 83% of you come to my blog via a bookmark, while 13% arrived via a search engine.
  • Of you 13% who arrived via search engine, most of you came from a Google image search for “spider bites.” The next biggest chunk of you were searching on the term “crumbelievable.”
  • If you were referred to my blog, it was likely from myspace.com. Although I don’t understand this, and can’t find a link from myspace to me, that site accounts for 27% of my non-spam referral traffic.
  • In April, 13% of pharaohweb.com’s 9,828 unique visitors bookmarked a page (that’s 1,324 people).
  • 23 people visited my pages from a WebTV console. They still make those?
  • 80% of you are here and gone in 30sec, only 8% stick around as long as 2min. On the other hand, 212 of you were here for more than an hour. 30sec… what the eff is that?

I had big plans to write something here at the end with a little more meat, but I don’t have it in me. Until Monday, I aced another week. Love you.

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what can i do to get you into these eyes today?


Uneventful Monday, other than what’s in the paragraph below. This week is full of holes for me, effectively useless from a work standpoint. Monday and Tuesday morning shot with Lasik consultations, Wednesday gone to a day trip to Oregon, and Friday consumed by my eyes getting lasered. My only full day in the office being Thursday… not that I mind, but I just feel so disconnected from work lately. Sharaun’s out running errands, and I’m at home tending Keaton. After several circuits of the living room and hall in her dad’s arms, she’s now sleeping quietly in her swing – looking a little angel far from the screeching banshee I struggled with just 10min ago. My website is still acting up, no help from the hosting company as yet – which saddens me as they’ve been so responsive over the years. Today I either hit a run of good luck, or the server was acting as it used to – because my page loads were fast and enjoyable. But as I try to post tonight, I’m hampered by timeouts and slow-loads. Who knows folks, I may end up having to switch hosts out of this whole deal… something I’m not looking forward to at all. Well, I think that’s a sufficient expository paragraph, eh? Yes then, let’s move along shall we?

Went in for my 1st Lasik evaluation this morning (you can read that as yesterday, since I’m writing from the past). It was a loooong experience: a battery of exams with a bit of good old fashioned salesmanship thrown in. There are several options: lasers, better lasers, tear-duct protein plugs, higher-order aberration correction, power windows and ABS, etc. It was clear to me that the Lasik business is a very lucrative enterprise – so much so that your ability to wheel and deal is huge. I casually mentioned that I was getting evaluations at a couple other major surgery outfits here in town, and was immediately offered “their lowest price minus 10%” as price-matching. I’m fully confident that I won’t end up paying more than 80% of the original prices I was quoted once I’m done shopping around and pitting surgeons against each other for my business. Seems odd… bargain-hunting for elective surgery… but there are so many places that do it and it’s become such a competitive industry – it works to the consumer’s benefit. Either way, I’ve got my surgery scheduled for Friday morning – with the caveat that I can call in my lowest “shopped around” price and get 10% off that anytime prior to the procedure.

Goodnight.

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catching up


I apologize for my website of late, the performance is horrible. The page either loads incredibly slow, or times out altogether. I have no idea what’s causing this, but am fairly certain it’s nothing of my doing. I’ve been running the same pages with the same scripts for quite a while with decent performance… and all of the sudden things are gummed up. I’ve narrowed it down to any page which accesses one of my MySQL databases (as both this page and my gallery pages do), so it seems the problem lies there… somehow. I have noticed a sharp increase in the amount of spam comments the blog gets, up to about ~3000 per day now – and that might be the culprit. I wrote to my host’s tech support – but so far they’ve only offered me an upgrade package to a dedicated server (rather than the virtual slice of a server I now share with others). This sounds appealing to me, but also ticks me off… I should be able to expect my pages to work. For crap’s sake I only have a measly three databases and a handful of scripts that call them. So, dear reader, I’ll do what I can to fix the situation – but until then I apologize if your experience here is frustrating.

But, just to make it all the more frustrating – here’s a link to Keaton’s gallery, where I’ve uploaded some annotated snaps from our weekend in Oregon which you’ll read more about below. Oh yeah, today’s entry is mad disjointed… and I make no apologies, as it was written in fits over the last week, often for entries not posted (as the gaps in writing last week make evident).

Let’s get started with random paragraph #1.

The other night on TV 20/20 ran a story about a girl who had to have half of her brain removed, due to a rare brain disease that was causing her to have debilitating seizures. Yes, it was a storyline on a popular medical drama recently. Anyway, they showed video footage the girl’s family took when she was a baby – and cut to her parents saying how happy they were when she was born that they got a “healthy baby.” Yes, aren’t we all… it’s what we all hope for, a healthy child with ten fingers and ten toes. But, when this family’s little girl turned four – something went wrong. I think about that all the time, how things can look so normal and right for so long – and then, seemingly out of the blue, go so terribly wrong. I think about that with our daughter, how perfect she is, how healthy and happy and beautiful. Watching a show like that before Keaton tugged at my heartstrings, watching it now that I have Keaton – it full-on hooked my heartstrings up to the Concorde and took flight.

Continuing with random paragraph #2.

Showering at my folks’ place these past few days, I noticed that their guest bathroom is stocked with a bottle of “body wash” instead my preference a bar of soap. I never did get into the “body wash” thing, just doesn’t equate to a bar of soap to me… leaving my skin feeling all slimy when I draw my fingers across it, instead of the squeaky clean of soap that I like. Anyway, I picked up the body wash to check it out – and read the following off the back label:

We know how special your bath or shower time is…a place for you to be private, reborn, where creative thoughts visit.

Reborn? For me, my bath or shower time is more like a time for me to wash the stink off my ass, sweat off my balls, and grease off my face (although not necessarily in that order). Who are these people for whom bathing is a religious experience? Although, I guess, I can’t argue with the “creative thoughts” coming to visit part – as this whole bit was indeed inspired by a shower…

And, random paragraphs #3 and #4, written last week but never posted.

Why are large conference/meeting rooms always unable to cool themselves properly? It seems like every time I find myself congregated with a large group of folks in big conference room, I’m sweating balls. You’d think that engineers designing these big conference rooms for hotels and the like would take this into consideration and install cooling that could handle capacity. Ugh… now my face is greasy and I’m getting sleepy, thanks a lot hot conference room.

The trip to Oregon has been a huge success thus far. Keaton must have her dad’s genes because she traveled like a seasoned pro – making nary a peep and sleeping the entire time. Last night Sharaun and I slept with her lain betwixt us, which we’ve never done before – partly for fear of rolling over onto her mid-sleep. Well, we didn’t roll over onto her, and I really enjoyed the experience. It may sound dumb, but I loved waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her sleeping face just to my left, her little pink-clad arms flung up above her head just like dad does when he sleeps, her little chest rising and falling and making soft breathy sounds through her tiny nose. I want to describe it as “intimate,” but that sounds kinda pedo… so maybe I won’t.

Let’s end this mess just as randomly, shall we?

I’m so excited about the news that Thom Yorke is doing a solo record, I can’t wait to see what he does with his “spare time.” I certainly love the woodcut-esque flash animation on the frontpage of his solo-centric webpage – I the imagery there is in any way representative of the album’s vibe, I’m down. I’m also excited because the new Sufjan leaked… a full two months in advance of the album’s official release. I’ll write more about it once I’ve had the time to properly digest it.

Well, today (Monday) is the 1st of my two Lasik consultations, with surgery possible as early as this Friday. I’m so pumped folks, so pumped. Talk to you all later, Dave out.

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firsts


A weekend of firsts: First night away from home with little Keaton; Keaton’s first camping trip; Keaton’s first time to the ocean; and Keaton’s first night slept entirely through (she’s been doing ~6hrs for about week, but Sunday night she went 11 hours – in a tent no less). Camping was good, but freezing – windy and in the low 50s / high 40s at night. We bundled Keaton tight, and she really seemed to enjoy being outside. Laying down in the tent must’ve seemed like a circus-colored light show to her, with the wind blowing the canvas walls in and out and the sunlight playing through the trees we were pitched under. I’ve posted the Keaton-specific pictures from the trip in a new gallery, and the more general camping-related pictures in another new gallery – go there or be square.

Speaking of galleries and pictures, I made some simple optimizations to my Coppermine gallery script (the machine behind my photo galleries). I’d had problems with slow loading and updating, and most annoyingly I was getting SQL “max_questions” exceeds errors (seems Coppermine is pretty liberal in the number of SQL SELECT statements it does, and my server limits me to 5000 per hour). I actually think it’s Google’s robot spidering the images that was constantly pushing me over the limit – but regardless of the culprit it was annoying to have the gallery go down for an hour at a time. I added a brilliant bit of randomization to the SQL user, so the gallery will run the SELECT statements with one of four different users each time, randomly. This way, I can effectively have 20000k queries per hour. What’s more, it seems to have greatly improved the speed of the galleries – maybe by deserializing all the queued SELECTs from a single user. Either way, it seemed to be working well over the weekend – but I did get a couple slow loads… we’ll see how it works under the “strain” of all my readers.

Tomorrow, Monday as I write, is gonna be a busy one. Unfortunately, I had to cancel this first of my two much-looked-forward to Lasik consultations… to schedule some last-minute meetings at work. Things were thrown into the air at work Friday, as some major shakeups went down. So much so that my planned travel this week is now up in the air, which is tough because I was using the trip to Oregon to get to my folks’ place for our Mother’s Day visit (Sharaun is meeting me there Wednesday). Now, however, I don’t even know if my work-related travel is still on – although the trip to the grandparents’ place still is, meaning I may have to find my own way there… which may or may not be on the same flight as Sharaun and Keaton. Not a big deal, it’s just that, me being anal, I like to know how I’m getting where I’m going – especially when it’s Keaton’s first plane trip. It’ll work out I suppose.

Three songs from the to-be-released new Radiohead album leaked in live form this weekend, from a recent Thom & Johnny outing – and they’ve got me salivating for this thing. Also, tickets for the show at Berkley’s Greek Theater (a short jaunt for me) go on sale next weekend… and I’m just dying to find a way to go. Too bad I’ll be out of town the day they go on sale, as I know I stand no chance online and the phones will be jammed. I’d love to see them again, any chance I can get really… maybe Sharaun and I can hire a babysitter… or I can take a night off and head over with someone of similarly excellent musical taste. Maybe… just maybe…

Blogging this week could get sparse, as we’ve got more firsts for Keaton which may end up taking precedence: first trip on a plane, first time meeting grandpa on dad’s side, and mom’s first qualifying mother’s day. Until tomorrow, take care out there in the real world… and we’ll do the same here at sounds familiar.

Goodnight.