I think my desire to post here waxes and wanes... but more waning lately than waxing.

Pretty much, life is the same. Work is work, but at least I have a job. I’ve been wrestling off and on (again, more off than actually on) with Drupal in trying to get it to work the way I want it to work with a new site I’m attempting to create. Kids are back in school and seem to be adapting well. The oldest is keeping on top of things, which is good, and the youngest is enjoying middle school and all that entails.

I bought a truck back in August. She’s a 2006 Tacoma Double Cab 4WD Long Bed. I named her Rosie.

I have plans for her, new equipment, new wheels and tires, etc. Naturally those all cost money, which I don’t have enough of at the moment ’cause I just bought a new truck. Vicious circle.

Gail’s off to Ireland this Friday. Assuming she can kick this cough-bug-flu-bronchitis thing she has. Whatever it is. She doesn’t know, doctors don’t know. Hopefully she’ll be OK to travel, ’cause she’ll kick herself if she doesn’t get to go with her ghost hunting group to Ireland to visit the castles and such.

Soccer’s back in season, but I’m not coaching this year. Had originally planned on going back to school, but can’t afford that so now I’m looking at getting a part-time job to get on top of these bills so I can go back. We shall see.

And that’s how my world is turning, in a nutshell. Exciting, no?

I hate car shopping.

As many of you (all three of my readers) probably know, I’ve been in the market for a new/used truck. I’ve been doing a lot of research and have settled on a very specific model. So this past Sunday I went to test drive one. They had the short bed version in stock, but not the long bed. I figured the ride wouldn’t be a whole lot different, so I took it out for a spin. I was rather pleased. It has a stiff ride, which is to be expected as it is a truck, but at highway speeds of 65mph or more, it was a quiet, smooth ride. The dealership would have to order one for me if I wanted it in the green they have (Gail thinks red is too flashy, I detest silver, so green is a nice compromise). The Cash for Clunkers rebates kick in on the 24th, which means I’ll have to purchase a brand new truck if I want to take advantage of the rebates. I’ll have to seriously massage some numbers to see if I can get it in the price range I want. And that’s the part I hate. I like test driving, I like searching tons of car sites, reading Auto Trader, and walking car lots. I hate the negotiation part. That’s part of why Carmax appeals to me – no hassle pricing. If the Carmax dealer by me sold new Toyotas instead of Mitsubishis, it’d make life much easier.

Aside from that, we had a busy weekend. Gail and I took the kids to see the new Harry Potter movie, which we all thought was excellent. Looking forward to seeing last movie. I think the movies themselves have just gotten better as they go along, which makes sense; the kids are better actors, they’re growing up and filling out their roles.

After the movie, Gail asked if I wanted to go to the Apple store, as it was in the same mall as the theater. I said “I can’t go in, I’ll have to buy something. I can only go in there so often and come out empty handed!” She said “So...let’s go.”

I took that as permission.

For a change it felt like I had a somewhat productive weekend. I managed to get a site I’d been working on for awhile up and running. The people I was building it for seemed happy, so that’s cool. Went to a winery on Saturday night and watched Third Stream Giants, a funky band from Fredericksburg. Gail and her mom (who has been visiting since Tuesday) sampled the wine and declared it ‘crappy’, but we had fun regardless.

Sunday they decided to take the kids to an all-you-can-eat ice-cream festival. Figuring I didn’t need to be party to such debauchery (as I would probably partake to a degree that would leave the sponsors of the event wondering what they were thinking in having an all-you-can-eat event), I hopped on the Harley and went down through the countryside towards Culpepper. Ended up putting about 125 miles on the odometer. It was a great day for a ride and I enjoyed the heck out of it. I have the ‘biker’s tan’ now: white hands (from the gloves), burnt forearm, and white biceps. Gonna look like a barber pole at the end of the summer.

With the one website out of the way, I’m going to try and keep the momentum going and finish my writing critique site. My friend Treva said she’d help, as she has more experience with Drupal than I, so here’s to hoping we can actually accomplish something. I don’t have a layout, but I want to get the back end working properly and site flow to make sense before throwing it into a layout. That’s probably doing it ass-backwards, but I’ve never been accused of making sense to begin with.

It’s entirely too nice to be sitting inside, in my drab corporate cube, staring at this screen.

July has been odd. Yesterday the temps were only in the upper 70s and the humidity has been very tolerable. Today we’re in the low to mid 80s. I should be on my bike heading west, into the twisty curves of the some nice roads along the Appalachians, or down into West Virginia. It’s simply gorgeous outside.

As I alluded to in the previous post, Sarah had her All-Star soccer tournament this weekend. Out of three games, her team lost two. Which isn’t all that surprising considering they’ve had about four practices together. Individually they might be good, but soccer is a team sport and you can’t gel as a team with only four practices. But this morning’s game (the third one) the team played well. They won 2-0 and Sarah scored one of those goals.

But I digress in what I really wanted to talk about.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a grammar Nazi. Not that I’m perfect; I’ve made stupid mistakes as I’m sure many of you have, and I’d be completely unsurprised if there weren’t a couple in this post (double negative!). But I have a healthy respect for the language, and it drives me insane when I see ‘your’ or ‘there’ instead of ‘you’re’ or ‘their’. And it’s scary because I’m seeing college-aged kids who don’t seem to know the difference as well.

There’s another word that’s been driving me nuts in the way it’s being used lately, especially now that I coach soccer; the word is ‘verses’. The girls all seem to think that saying “who are we versing today” is acceptable. I’m constantly correcting them. And it was really driven home when I overheard one of the other parents ask the All-Star coach who the team was ‘versing’. The way she said it sounded almost mocking, as if she was fully aware that she was using it completely wrong (and I really hope she was). But how long before she stops mocking herself and using it naturally? I understand language is fluid and dynamic and is constantly evolving, but this is driving me up the wall.

Why do I let it bother me so much? Good question.