Right hand, meet left hand. No, I don't think you know each other.

Today, I am frustrated. I am frustrated because of the things that I did not get done. I am frustrated because of the things that break that I am unable to fix. I am frustrated at the lack of change in me, at the shadow on me. I am frustrated because even as I know all the things I have, I get greedy, get irresponsible, become what I despise.

Today, I am happy. I am happy because I know that I was able to help two people. I am happy because I at least know what I need to do tomorrow. I am happy because the floor is clean, the stable is swept, I didn't have to cook and still got good food to eat, and I don't have to wake up cold and hungry. I am happy because I had fun going over to eat at one of the teacher's houses along with other teachers yesterday. I am happy because I have cool, clean water to drink, running water to shower in, power to run my computer, and internet access to talk to you all.

Sometimes, we don't have a lot. But even in not having much, we are richer than we could ever imagine.

I made a kid do push-ups in car line today. He was acting up a little, causing some trouble, throwing other kid's backpacks at yet other kids. I had tried moving him, talking nicely, so I told him to do ten pushups. I wasn't overly strict about it, I let him do little girly pushups (sorry to all the little girls who can do real push-ups.) That didn't solve the problem so about 5 minutes later, I made him do 5 real pushups. That did solve the problem. We'll see if it works tomorrow or not. I'm also pretty sure most of the highschool kids think I'm mean, since I don't let them go around and congregate with all their friends when they're not in the spots they are supposed to be in. I guess I am mean. Wait until we start doing basketball. BWHAHAHAHHAHA. *cough, cough* Excuse me, I had something caught in my throat. Anyway...

I ate supper in like ten minutes and then left to come back over to my office to make sure a file I needed downloaded. I'm thinking of going back and just sitting for a while, just to have company with other people. I think this is a good and a bad thing, and if you can download and decipher the reasons why I say it's a good thing and a bad thing, then you'll also further understand why it is that I might be frustrated. So while it's a good thing that I am attempting to engage other people, it's also a bad thing. Yeah. I'll leave that there, and you can take it for what it's worth.

In semi-technical news that probably won't interest most of my readers, I am going to do some new software development using InstantRails, a framework for Ruby on Rails. There are some simple things that I think I can do that will make some people's lives around here a lot easier, and InstantRails should let me do it in a platform independent way that will be most excellent. I have been trying to download it for ages, so the fact that I finally got it makes me excited.

This brings up one frustration that I have, that I don't really have anyone here that I can talk to about this kind of stuff. I really don't think anyone else here at the school is technically inclined enough to be able to have a conversation about this without me having to explain everything in a fairly non-technical manner. Like, back in the states, I could have a conversation with my roommate about (how are ya?), "Yeah, I was working on this system today, and it's a classic three-tier architecture with .NET as the client-side and the middleware, and there was some esoteric bug where with version .8202 of .NET 1.1 that caused the middleware to crash, but the client needed to be .8202, so we registered the DLL from .8467 since the client didn't use that, and it was all ok." (Please note, he actually ended up having to do something similar once.) OK, most of that was probably something you could parse, but not really understand. But if I started talking about the fact that I am using Ruby because I like the interpreted language features, the fact that InstantRails provides me with the whole stack for rapid development, and that I can eventually use LAMP to serve the solution, you just lost it. That makes me frustrated sometimes, but I live with it.

Speaking of frustrations and what I talked about earlier, I have to thank you folks, because talking to you means that I am probably not going back to supper to revel in the good and bad of the company of others. So really, thanks.

Guys group tonight. I'm really trying to resist the option of getting out where it seems the grass is greener. No need to make it like all was right, were I to leave, where else would I go? The physical is not the concern.