Man, I love Chicago. Driving down the Kennedy Expressway toward the loop I just got the feeling I was home again. We’re staying under the L on Jewelers Row and we’ve been walking up to Gold Coast, River North, and shopping the Magnificent Mile. We went to dinner last night for our anniversary at Carmine’s. We used to go there when we were dating in college so it’s a full-circle come-around. I also forgot how much I hate Chinatown. I expect anyone with any interest in animal rights or cruelty issues are probably similarly disgusted in Chinatowns everywhere.

We’re having a great time. It’s time to leave, though, for Macomb to see my family. Then we’ll drive to Effingham to see Brandi’s family. Hopefully we’ll be able to drop by Champaign-Urbana to hang out a bit. It’s funny just how much a few years in CU changed my life. I’d probably be living in New York training with Sensei Serge Clark and doing massage now if it weren’t for a fateful, snowy day gazing out the window of Larry’s archaeology lab. Things are going pretty swell the way they are.

Edit:  When I say ‘under the L’, I don’t mean it in an Elwood Blues sort of way.  The Silversmith Hotel is great.  We were really disappointed to see our old hotel, The Cass, was bought by Holiday Inn and consquently sucks.

We’ve been playing around with budgeting and tracking spending.  I actually have a box of receipts on my desk from the last month or so that I had planned to go through and categorize in Google Docs or an Open Office spreadsheet.  It’s daunting looking at this big box of random slips of paper.  I have no idea how people track spending.  I carried a check register in my wallet for awhile and tried to record each transaction as it occurred.   Not very successful.

Now I’m trying GnuCash.  Brandi had some experience with Microsoft Money and it seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for our needs.  I also don’t use Windows so it wasn’t really an option and GnuCash is free.  I downloaded transaction from American Express and imported them easily, but my credit union, North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union, only offers CSV downloads.  GnuCash doesn’t recognize CSV.  So, I wrote a python parser to convert the CSV file to QIF, which GnuCash does understand.  Here’s a link to secu2qif.

We’ll see if we get anywhere.  While I was parsing I did notice that both the state and federal revenue services have issued  us refunds, which was a nice surprise.  They were both quite quick, I think.   Boy, that mortgage interest deduction was a nice benefit.

I think I’ve finished trashing bad music. My trash contains a little over 5GB of MP3 and OGG files. So long!

I’ve also been listening to a lot of my dad’s music lately- Del Shannon, Dion, The Drifters, Eddie Cochran, The Four Tops, The Cascades, and others. I try to imagine what the music meant to him, what it reminded him of, or if he identified with something in it. I’ll never know, but I expect he’d approve. Anyway, it’s pretty good stuff so I’m not complaining.

I think Don Henley was right- I should leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina. Maybe Hanalei would be better…

Grieving is a strange situation. I’ve read a few books on losing a parent since my father died and have been open about how I feel, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. (Obvious joke: My dad is missing!) Honestly, I didn’t expect this to be so difficult. I thought that I had come to terms with the man my father was, his abusive history, and my feelings about it. Still, his death has has a tremendous impact on me and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.

I dream of my dad most nights and often wake up crying. I haven’t cried in my waking life yet, which I find unsettling. Last night I dreamed my wife and I were there, at my father’s house, and my dad was trying to get us to take Lady, the dog we had when I was about 10 years old, home to North Carolina with us. He thought she’d be a good watchdog while we were away. I don’t recall why I was crying, though. Prior to his death, I did not often recall any of my dreams. Now, though, I frequently remember them with clarity and they’re often breathtakingly realistic to the point that I don’t know I’m dreaming, which is pretty unusual for me.

I feel sort of silly wondering what it all means and wondering what lessons I should take away from his life and death. I do, though.

Brandi and I returned from a wonderful weekend in the mountains of Virginia to discover a half dozen frantic messages on my voice mail.  My dad had been pretty sick.  The chemotherapy and radiation apparently weren’t helping.  He died Saturday morning.

I just spent a few days in Fort Worth visiting friends. I also discovered that having a salt water pool is pretty awesome. Here are some pictures.

We took a three-day weekend and attended the annual meeting of the North Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club. We stayed at the Eastern North Carolina 4H Center on Albemarle Sound. We kayaked in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and in the Scuppernong River Preserve. We think it’s time to buy a couple of flatwater kayaks. Have a look at the photos.

Wishing I was there now…

I was just reading a brilliant conversation between Sam Harris, atheist and intellectual, and Rick Warren, Christian. From the article, The God Debate:

WARREN: Why isn’t atheism more appealing if it’s supposedly the most intellectually honest?
HARRIS: Frankly, it has a terrible PR campaign.
WARREN: [Laughs] It’s not a matter of PR.
HARRIS: It is right next to child molester as something you don’t want to be. But that is a product, I would argue, of what religious people tell one another about atheism.

It is my opinion, and I’m not alone, that atheism is the most persecuted religious belief in American today. My own mother has wondered aloud what keeps atheists from murdering and raping innocent people. In the mind of many people of religious faith, ethics are the exclusive domain of the faithful and atheists, having no fear of eternal punishment, are free to do as they please. I left that conversation amazed that fear of damnation is the only thing keeping people of faith from committing horrendous crimes. Of course, the truth is that faith does not prevent those things. Anyway, Harris was right in that the public relations battle is being won mightily by fundamentalists.

Brandi and I spent the weekend in Charleston, South Carolina, with her father recently. It’s a lovely city with an obviosly long history. Rainbow Row made us wish we could afford a home there. Well, except for the inevitable hurricanes.

We also visited Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. I’ve never been to a real Southern plantation before and wasn’t disappointed. It had the requisite lovely gardens, impressively large house, and it even had a swamp replete with alligators. The most interesting part, however, was the ’slave talk’. It was really educational. Now I understand why some Southerners aren’t ashamed of the Civil War. It seems the prerogative of the Plantation is that slaves were damned lucky to be so well provisioned and looked after. Slavery was, according to them, a fine lifestyle choice that many white Southerners were jealous of. If only the whites could live as well as slaves, they said! Indeed!

I wanted to smack the orator in the face. I wanted to jump up and scream. Really, I wanted a refund so as not to support that revisionist, racist monstrosity with a single penny of my money. I was left wondering, though, if they feel funny talking that crap in front of black people. Simply amazing! Of course, they also kindly pointed out that Harriet Beecher Stow picked the worst possible example and that she was a Yankee just trying to cause trouble. (!) They also trotted out the tired old refrain about the North instigating a war for economic reasons and abolition being a real burden to blacks. Thanks for the education, racists!

All in all, we really liked Charleston. After my rage turned to nausea, we all had a really nice time. I’d like to pretend that I believe South Carolina hasn’t institutionalized racist propaganda, but it’s hard in light of the evidence. In fact, they were flying the flag over the statehouse as late as 2000. Or, perhaps the confederate flag really is a noble symbol of blah blah blah. Treasonous, seditious, and racist. Whoa. Angry again!

My grandmother died this Saturday at the age of 82. I feel honored to have known such a fine person. It’s sad that not everyone had the opportunity to know her love, grace, and compassion.