Why I work

Originally posted circa August 3, 2004:

Latest bulletin from the Olde Dominion, the Commonwealth; from Columbia, the gem of the Ocean.

Aunt Rolene sent me a very nice email about setting aside some special time with Diane. Thank you, Aunt Rolene: I took off both Saturday AND Sunday from work to spend special time with Diane and to give Diane some li'l tyke respite.

Diane has been acutely ill (a cold) from a little sniffle Isabel caught, and then spread to the rest of the family (Isabel and I were least affected), so we've spent extra time in bed, recovering ... I think I actually slept 4 hours last night, *WOW*. Besides the colds, the whole family is in excellent spirits. Isabel woke me this morning, on time: 7 am on the dot, with her joyful, open-mouthed, squawks. Elena Marie had already left with her Mama to shower and then to leap into her dress; after that, she joined us in bed, entertaining Isabel, who was delighted to see her Ate (big sister).

I've restarted my martial arts training, practicing kenjutsu every night, which I enjoy very much (and which is making writing this email difficult: my arms are heavy). I've also been playing through a game of go every night (not last night, unfortunately): specializing in the games of Takemiya Masaki, as I'm best able to understand and to play his moyo (center-oriented) style in my games.

So, I was preparing to leave for work this morning, kissing each of my darlings goodbye. Elena Marie enjoys the leave-taking, cheeringly shouting a "Bye!" Diane rushed me out the door, as Isabel is now able to crawl from the dining room to the front door with speed. But Diane queried Elena Marie first: "Why does Papa go to work?" Elena Marie looked at her mama quizzically. Diane pressed forward: "... so Elena can ...?" Elena Marie didn't answer the question, just shouted out another "Bye!" to her departing Papa, and then went out to the entrance to wave.

All who work are called to answer that unanswered question (first posed in music by Charles Ives), and I believe that my answers are pretty much the same as every other working person's, but sometimes it's good to summarize them and then meditate on them.

1. Because I can: I'm blessed with ability and with a task to which I can apply that ability


2. Because it's my vocation to provide for (and to protect) my family, and the fruits of my work give that.


3. Because I learn from work, about myself, about others, and about the things which my work affects


4. So I can return home a better husband and father


5. So others can return home to their families and friends


6. So the country and the world can be a better place.

Insh'Allah.

So, I'm off to do that.

After writing this email, my sweetie called me. She had arrived, and parked outside the facility so that Elena Marie could complete her message. I strolled through three sets of armed guards, two check-points and a gated barbed-wire fence to rendez-vous with them in our little Mazda so I could hear the special message:

Diane: "Elena, Papa goes to work to give Mama ..."
Elena: *smile* *look* *look* "Pera!"
Diane: "So that Elena may buy ..."
Elena: "dresses!" *bounce-bounce* "And, Elena tried them on and turned around!" (Elena Marie exults in modelling her acquisitions)

Diane then handed me a tin full of muffins (Elena Marie had been asking to 'bake a cake' this morning): "Elena, what are we giving Papa?"
Elena: "'anana mffins!"

With her message delivered, Elena's mission was complete. "Bye!" she cheerily dismissed me. I waved them off, and walked back to the facility, knowing why I was returning to work.

Back in the Groove

It's been over a week since my last email, and, as I promised my sweetie daily email reports ("I'm here; I'm alive; I'm happy"), I'm sure I've caused at least one person some consternation. But there it is — I've spent the last week in bed, with an illness that has been, thankfully, only inconvenient and fatiguing, so I've been out of the loop during that time.

I started to get back into the groove on Sunday when I went to Mass, and then, in the evening, I exercised (which felt very good) and played through a game of Go (my model, Takemiya, lost because of one single misjudged play, at play 43 (a game lasts usually 250 plays), so I wasn't extremely happy about that, especially since the rest of the game was excellent ... I should play though it again, channeling his challenger, O Reissi, because his play was sharp, inventive and brilliant).

This morning I woke up chipper. I said, "Today, I am going to work!" and felt very happy. Funny, the majority of heart attacks occur Monday morning: people would rather die than return to work. But, for me, as you know, my work gives me pleasure, fulfillment, and the opportunity to create and to serve. Today, at work, was a good day: productive and cordial (as usual, things were in a state of near pandemonium, but I was serene throughout ... probably confirming in some minds that I am the representation of Loki here on Earth, but so it goes).

Speaking of Norse mythology, the weather here has been rather Visigoth: cold, gray and wet. I love it! I don't care what the studies say: if every day were like this, I would be in my element, as it were — an expectant thundershower with peals of lightening and a torrential downpour would be a very nice addition, as well. By the time Diane and the children return (1 December, with her brother, YAAAY!) I expect several layers of snow on the ground. All I need are two goats, two ravens and one giant-slaying hammer (Hmmmm, I already have "god's own hammer" as my friend Mike Wuerthele called the mallet he and I used to be creative with the various home-improvement projects going on in the basement) to complete the picture.

Ummmmm, yeah.

Had a bit of a Fall cleaning of the house today, so everything's pristine: 2 loads of laundry, change of bedsheets, bathroom sparkling, dishes done. A new house, and a new me. Just lying on the bed for a second felt very sweet (and I would've fallen asleep and slept through the night if I hadn't stood up right away — first day back at work was a shock to the system after a week in bed)! Treated myself special tonight by having a bit of supper and then a latte and choco-coconut bun (I know, I know, but I hope the carb blocker and the exercise later tonight will cancel it out).

So with the paperwork (mostly) up-to-day, the house cleaned, and a recovered self, I'm back in the grove.

Time to sweep the deck, to exercise, to play through a game of Go, and to hit the S-A-C-K!

Go Congress and Dainty Diane

Originally posted August 1, 2001:

I spent all last week at the Go congress, lost most of my games (which I wasn't too happy about), but I learned some good things that have my game better (which I am happy about). Monday, back in Virginia, I played at the NOVA Go club and won my game handily using some of the techniques from the go congress. My roommate in my dorm at the college at York (York, Pennsylvania: it's biggest attraction is a coffee shop that serves greasy meatloaf as its lunch special -- ugh!) was a minister (Methodist), so we would have conversations long into the night about Faith and Grace. We didn't know out voices carried until someone from another dorm banged on our door telling us that it's hard to sleep at 1 a.m. with loud conversations ... *blush* hehehe!

I also had the pleasure of talking to one of the vendors of go books/equipment. She told me that she was living off of royalties from a contract her (wholely-owned) company set up with NEC in Japan. NEC puts a Go program on every computer it sells there, and for that they pay her (I think) $0.10 per copy. Galing! She wants to do that again for the Macs, so she was quizzing me about my Mac-OS X skills (which're good, so, *hope*, maybe I can get a piece of that action). At any rate, that got me thinking: creating a simple, "killer app" and licensing it to a hardware vendor sounds very possible now (instead of the difficult path: creating the app and selling it as shrink-wrapped media). Diane, I believe, has come up with two business plans off this idea.

Kwento: I was preparing to shower. I laid out the foot towel, then carelessly stepped on it whilst still wearing my slippers. Diane exclaimed: "Hey, don't walk on that with your dirty slippers! Think of my dainty feet!"

Kwento: My sweetie had an urge for a fast-food burger and McFlurry. Whilst I was getting the food, she waited for me in the car. I returned carrying the goods, and she said, "I didn't know 'facial' was spelt with an 'i'." I didn't understand her until she pointed to a big neon sign outside a spa: "F-A-I-C-I-A-L" was how it was spelt. I turned to her: "Wheal, Hoouney, when you in da Soufh, you spail 'faicial' waith an 'ah-ya'."

News Epigrams

A renaissance writer sent a long missive to a colleague, apologizing for its length because he "didn't have time to write a short letter" -- I have the modern-day problem: I don't have time to write a long post, so the below epigrams must do for now.

• This contract has got me working again; so now I'm working on everything again: last week I set aside time to play a game of go during the evenings -- I was able to play through three games last week. Not very satisfying, because "Cosmic Go" Takemiya didn't have any challenge winning the games I played through. I love his go, but I love playing through games where he faces an earnest challenge. This week will be much better, as I'll be more selective: when "Thickness" Otake and Takemiya play, some very entertaining games are made.
  
  I did, however, get to play through the magical game between Yamabe (one of the 三羽烏 ("Three Crows") of which Fujisawa Shuko and Kajiwara are also members -- Shuko created an opening that accentuated thickness and became so popular when he demonstrated it in China that it is now known as the "Chinese opening") and Go Seigen (the co-author of the new fuseki (opening) that so revolutionized go playing throughout the world that its effects are still being felt today, 50 years later), and that game was scintillating, as it always is when I play through its moves.
  



• I'm suffering a case of "Logician's Absurdity": that being (re)defining Number. This seems to be a phase logicians experience, much to the amusement of their mentors. The crisis for me is that the things computers call numbers are of little value to the things I need to do, computationally (because, unlike normal software engineers who are satisfied with the IEEE standard, I need computer models of numbers to model, you know, Number, not some extra-logic compromise packaged in N bits ... and, yes, I'm always pushing things to their breaking points). The first step in the crisis is to (re)implement the peano series, which works perfectly well with infinite induction, but in practice gives one a bad aftertaste (after all, 1,000,000 has 1 million successors to zero), so I've gone ahead to the "next" kind of logical representation of Number ("next" being defined differently from one logician to the, *ahem*, "next"). I'm going in the Gödel numbering direction; not in the functional Church encoding. Yes, I am feeling rather silly, but I'll stop when I think I'm not getting any more utility out of this endevour.



• There is this thing ("thing" is a technical term) in mathematics called quantification which I am, again, currently exploring, because when unified with type theory may yield the expressive power I need to do the following task:
  
  

  There is some concrete type T that I will define at a later time where the following predefined properties hold [...].

  
  
  My problem is that the predefined and at a later time are usually reversed in (mathematical) problem-solving (you have a predefined type with properties expressed at a later "time", not the way I'm going about it); so I'm hoping that existentially quantified types will allow me to express the problem and then to solve it.

Okay, enough of all that [oh, yes, I'm also doing paid work in XML, but that a different story, with not much to tell] ...

• I was ferrying Elena Marie about one day when she asked: "Papa, why did you need to scrape your car windows? Why?" ... she often asks 'why' more than once, just to show her sincerity. [Diane, to me, when I gave her an extra bit of ice cream after a firm denial to her entreaty: "She's turning into a master negotiator" Me: "I get to see you and the children on the weekends: your sadness has 5 times the affect on me; so I'd rather see you happy." Diane: "*Harumph!*" (but it was a slightly pleased harumph)]. My quick answer: "Because Jack Frost covered the windshield with his magic faery dust."
  
  I need hardly mention, given my wild imaginings and a 5-year-old's curiosity, that my quick answer turned into an hour-long deconstruction of Jack Frost's motives (Elena Marie calls him "Jack-the-Frost", like we Christians call the Big Guy, "Jesus-the-Christ"), his appearance (including clothes (green seems to be a favourite) and hair (wavy and shockingly bright red-orange)), his skittishness, his size (EM: "Is Jack-the-Frost small?" Me: "I'm not sure, as I haven't seen him, but I remember reading a story of him being very tall, towering over other people"), and his wealth. Elena Marie made plans to catch him the next morning so she could throw him into her jail (?!) until he surrendered his pot-o'-gold. Okay, so I was more than a bit liberal in my story telling, but I figured that was that and put it out of my mind.
  
  The next morning, Elena Marie presented me with a present: a cut out drawing of a man in green wearing a pointy green hat over a shock of red hair.
  
  My, my, my!



• Isabel Marie has learnt a new skill: when I arrived home Thursday night (to work on taxes ... Beki called during one of my "I've got to get this third corporate form done on time!" spates and crowed: "I hate to tell you this, but I've already done my taxes -- I filed them in January. Teehee!" Me: "Okay, you must explain how you hated telling me that, because I heard what sounded like triumph." Beki: "*snicker*") she greeted me with "Papa, watch what I can do!" as I watched her skip away from me down the hall [Diane, soto voce, "She just learnt to skip today"]. So, everywhere we went this weekend, we did so at a stutter pace: to the baño, to church (Me: "Okay, Isabel, but no skipping in church", Isabel: "okay, Papa" skip-skip-skip), in church (Me: "Isabel, no skipping in church", Isabel: "okay, Papa", skip-skip-skip), at the restaurant for breakfast (Isabel: "Papa, I'm hungry" skip-skip-skip); yes, everywhere.
  
  It doesn't help that she has those big-big eyes (Isabel, correcting me: "Beautiful eyes, Papa"), and killer curls.

God, yes, it hurt driving away this morning to go to work 150 miles away.

See, like I said: a short post ... *cough*