Along with spring comes spring critters. What I wanna know is, with springtime outside, how come they wanna come inside? The other morning there was a bit of commotion downstairs, Becky went to investigate. I was asleep at the time, or I would’ve investigated, of course. I think I woke up as she was coming back upstairs to report a bird in the fireplace. Now, this used to be a routine occurrence in the old days, one that Stephen and I fixed by wrapping wire screening around the top of the chimney (yeah, up on the roof) so the critters couldn’t get in. Apparently, they’ve recently succeeded in building a nest and, in the process, wedging an opening through which determined aviaries are capable of gaining entry to their tomb below. Yes, aviaries, plural. On investigating the fluttering creature, I observed a couple others definitely not fluttering. Well, to make half a long story shorter, I captured the live bird and set him/her free outdoors; and scooped up the two dead ones which were given ignominious burials in the trash can, wrapped together in a plastic trash bag.

And then the invasion of the ants. Couple days later they’re swarming all over the kitchen counter and, I think, there ain’t much Becky hates worse than ants in her kitchen, except maybe mice in her walls. So, laid a bunch of ant killer around the outside of the house, and Becky’s been fighting a fierce battle inside that’s finally yielding results.

So, how come the ant war is Becky’s responsibility, you ask? Hey, I take on the pterodactyls in the fireplace!

Sat in dis ‘ere e-z-chair all day wid da laptop in da lap doin’ varies www thangs whilst watchin’ baskitbull, cajunly takin’ a brake fer yurnary reeleaf an’ din ‘roun’ seben thutty dis eebnin Becky sez “It’s reddy!” so’s ah ups ‘n’ heds fer da kitchin and seez dis crackpot o’ stuff on da stobe ‘n’ takes da lid off ‘n’ Lordy! It’s cone beef in cribbage!!! Ah duzn’t know an’ hazn’t got no idee how da hole day goes by-n-by ‘n’ ah don’t smells it, but dats zackly what happen an’ it ain’t no lye! But, sho wuz good, an’ datz sayn a mouf full! Dat cone beef in cribbage. Mmm-mm!

Um, is dat be plitikly inkrekt? Twarn’t tensional, but ef’n so den, so solly!

Chappells.us has now been sort of joined at the hip with Google Apps, which is part of Google’s strategy to make Microsoft irrelevant to the internet.

Here’s what Google says about it: “Google Apps will let your members communicate and work together online, all for free. Google Apps lets you offer email, instant messaging, and calendar accounts on your own domain name, to keep your group close and build its online identity. You can also design and publish web pages to show others what you’re all about.”

Well, we’ve had our web pages published for quite a while now, in case anybody wanted to know what we’re all about. Or sort of about. So, we’ve already built an online identity, insofar as anybody may have noticed. Seems to mostly just come down to the “keep your group close” notion. Eh. Whatever.

PC World recently ran an article on The 50 Most Important People on the Web. Coming in at #16: Matt Mullenweg, Developer of the WordPress blogging software. WordPress is the software running this Chappells Weblog. Way back before there was a Chappells Weblog, I spent time closely following the progress of two blogging programs in development, WordPress and TextPattern. I also followed several others before narrowing the field to these two. I ended up choosing WordPress because it seemed a better fit for what I wanted. On the other hand, I really liked the people involved with TextPattern. You can tell a few things about people by following the discussions on their “boards” for a while. Everybody involved with TextPattern was warm and open; whereas the WordPress people were somewhat cliquish. The Chappell Family Website is hosted on TextDrive, by the way, which was founded by the same folks (the same person, actually) behind TextPattern. Anyway, Matt Mullenweg didn’t develop WordPress all by himself. It’s an Open Source program, meaning a whole lot of people contributed to development of the program. And that would include — me! Yes, back before WordPress was a major phenonemon, I discovered a few bugs in the program and even wrote the fixes, which were incorporated in the released program. Okay, okay, they were minor bugs and minor fixes, even though one of the principal developers was not able to find the solution after I reported it. But, that’s still not the end of the story. As a participant in the WordPress forums, I actually got so bold on an occasion to criticize something another person said in the forum. Well, he got a little snotty about that, and the two of us had one of those forum pissing matches until the King of the Hill, Matt, stepped in and closed the topic. So, now, at age 22 Matt’s the 16th most influential person on the internet and, at age 56, I’m a long forgotten nobody who contributed a few bytes along the road that got him there. Which is not really worth mentioning to anybody; but just seemed to strike me in a way that sort of bounced around inside my head a few moments like so many other things in life that seem like they might mean something, but don’t.

March 2 was birthday #56. What a number! Becky and I were too tired to do any birthday stuff on the 2nd (Friday), although she did make a cake, and I got my traditional birthday serenade from Jeffrey. I wish we had been recording these every year. What he can do to the birthday song! And every year is different!

So we mostly did my birthday on Saturday, which started off with the KU-Oklahoma basketball game which we were afraid KU was going to lose, the way the first half went, but the KU boys rallied in the second half and pulled it out. We had supper at Carlos O’Kelly’s, and I got some birthday presents later at home, including a radio controlled airplane I’ll have to wait to fly until warmer weather. It’s not exactly an indoor toy.

I remember when I thought I had 20 years to save up for retirement. What I have for retirement now is the same as what I had 20 years ago! Oh well. So now I’m 56 and only have maybe 10 years to work with. Hmm, gonna have to do something different, but I sure don’t know what it’ll be. If anybody has any ideas, let me know!

I’m gonna have to get more “hip” and get tuned in to YouTube. People are now sending me somewhat (though not truly gut-busting) humorous links that turn out to be YouTube creations. When I visited the YouTube site, it seemed to me YouTube had grown to phenomenal proportions in a phenomenally short time. I used to think I was pretty much up to speed with the cutting edge on the internet, but I can see I’ve actually been left in the dust. Thing is, I just don’t know where people find the time to “partake” of all this stuff! You could sit down at your computer in the morning and be there all day by the time you make much headway checking out the latest YouTube offerings, the latest hot blog offerings, the latest…. etc. etc. Anyway, the latest one somebody wanted me to look at was Gollum & Smeagol Sing Barry White, which doesn’t really do that much for me. Another one was this one about Laughter is Contagious which takes a little while to start getting to you but it sort of eventually gets you going.