You see, she never takes a shower. She only takes her shower. Same with baths, although we very infrequently take baths. We’re shower people. If she did take a bath, it would be her bath, not a bath.

I don’t often hear people speak of standing under the flow in the possessive case, but my wife always says it that way. I have a hard time thinking of something that I do as belonging to me. It’s so fleeting, there one minute and gone the next.

Well, in my case, it’s there in a lot of minutes before it’s over. I probably waste a lot of water because when I’m home, I shave and brush my teeth in the shower. At the gym, I don’t do it that way, but I definitely take a shower and not my shower.

I think I did hear my wife say once when we were in the pool, “I’ll take a shower in the locker room and see you at home.”

I guess that means that it’s only “her” shower when it’s in our home or the home of someone in our family. Speaking of our, there was a time before we got too big for one shower stall that we used to take our shower. Now I find myself wondering if I wasn’t taking a shower and she was taking her shower.

Then there’s the whole strangeness represented by something my mother would say if I said I was going to take a shower. “Well bring it back when you’re done.”

Why don’t we say “do a shower?” I have tried in the past to make myself just say, “I’m going to shower.” Somehow it just sounds a little uppity.

So, my wife can have her shower. I’ll stick with a shower. As long as we get clean, who cares what we call it?

In the sidebar, there is a poll. Let me know how you say it.

Hay’s version has been performed by many well-known artists, including The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Michael W. Smith, Mario Lanza, Patti LaBell, Andrea Bocelli, Connie Francis, Mahalia Jackson, Cristy Lane, Ann Murray, The Statler Brothers, Jim Reeves, Il Divo, Charlotte Church, Barbara Streisand, Sandi Patty, Perry Como, Andy Williams, LeeAnn Rimes, Aaron Neville, and in a duet of Gladys Knight and Johnny Mathis.

I guess I’ll be in good company. The only ones who sang it as low as I will were Ann Murray and Harold Reid of The Statler Brothers. Well, Harold sang it even lower than I will. I could match him, but I don’t have an arrangement that low.

I will be accompanied by Kristine Evans Lyman. She is so good. I’m amazed at how she picks up a piece of music and just plays it.

At Mormon church services, it is generally not considered appropriate to video tape portions of it, so I won’t be able to show you. That’s a good thing, because if I really mess it up, I can still pretend I did OK. So, you probably won’t see this before

He brought out a lot in me that I only barely suspected I had. For my senior recital, I performed “Libera Me” from Faure’s Requiem. The audience was made up of students, their families, and the music faculty from Concordia University. I got a “whoop” from the audience fo my performance. I enjoyed doing it immensely.

See my recital below. Listen for the “whoop” at the end.

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Julia Child

Of the many things I don’t understand, one of the biggest is why people don’t like buttermilk. I love it. Very few things make me want to lick the container. It is so utterly delicious that I almost cry for joy when I drink it. I know it’s a little dramatic, but that’s me.

I was watching Julia Child on day on one of those cooking shows where she had a guest chef. I don’t remember what was being made. I think it was some kind of fruit tart. I just remember that at the end of the show Julia tasted the item. She broke out into tears of joy. Now, who wouldn’t want to cook something so well that it made Julia Child cry? It was that good! That is the way I feel about buttermilk.

In this I am alone in my family. I had one or two kids who liked it for awhile, but they all have now decided they don’t like it. My wife utterly hates it. Personally, I think that most people hate it because they were expecting something else and were surprised at the stark taste. I mean it has the words “butter” and “milk” in its name, so one might expect a sweet, creamy taste. Once a person’s expectations are shattered, I think the mind goes closed never to open again.

My Mom

On the other hand, my mother approached letting me taste my first buttermilk with some parental wisdom. She wouldn’t let me have any. She said I probably wouldn’t like it. She warned me up front that it didn’t taste like butter or like milk.

We were in a coffee shop. We had ordered breakfast. Mom ordered milk for me and buttermilk for her. I begged her to let me have some buttermilk, but she said, “We can’t afford to waste money. You’ll take one sip and decide you don’t like and then it will be wasted.”

So, when the food came, she salted and peppered her buttermilk, stirred it up with a spoon, and drank it down pausing for exclamations of joy and satisfaction. I watched that glass over the next few minutes. The characteristic streaks on the sides of the glass as pieces of the thick liquid settled to the bottom fascinated me.

Again I pleaded with her to let me try it. She made a deal with me. She would order some for me if I promised I would drink the whole thing even if I absolutely hated it. I agreed.

My glass of the divine liquid came. She offered to salt and pepper it for me, but I wanted to try it without first. I smelled it. Seemed OK. I took a little sip, so little that I couldn’t really taste it at all. I took a bigger drink. It was on my upper lip.

It certainly tasted differently than anything I had ever had before, but I liked it. The unmitigated boldness of the flavor didn’t deter me. It made it better. I almost declined to have anything so base as salt and pepper defile it, but I agreed to let her season it for me. I drank again. Even better. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Years later, when I was a teenager, Mom made a buttermilk and orange sherbet shake for me. Wow! It was amazing!

So, this morning, my wife asked me to make her a smoothie with our Magic Bullet.This is one of those highly advertised gadgets you think won’t ever work or live up to the infomercials about it, or that you don’t need as badly as you think you did when you got it. The Magic Bullet has been a really smart purchase for it. We almost exclusively use it for smoothies, but it is so much more convenient and easy to use than a big bulky blender. It lives up to all of its claims.

The other day, I had improvised a smoothie from the blueberries we grow in our backyard. She asked me to make one for her today. So, I did. It just has frozen vanilla yogurt, low fat milk, and frozen blueberries. Don’t ask me the proportions. I am an artiste!

I wondered what I would have for breakfast and then I remembered the buttermilk I had in the refrigerator. What if I used it instead of milk? I tried it.  I cried a little. Julia would have been impressed.

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Jumpline offers two options for running mailing lists: Majordomo and Mailman. For most of my “career” in dataprocessing, I’ve used Majordomo. It is simple and easy to use. What I have not liked about it is that there is not a visual interface for users to change their own subscription information. This may have changed in recent years, but it did not change quickly enough for me.

I moved all of my mailing lists to Mailman a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it has a couple of problems that Jumpline support has not been able to solve.

1. Mailman crashes occasionally on my sites and I don’t know about it until someone on one of my lists asks me what happened to the list. Jumpline support doesn’t know why.
2. With several lists, there isn’t single interface where I can see what is happening on all lists at the same time.

Crashes

These are very annoying to users. It has caused some of my lists to slow way down in participation. Because I don’t know it has crashed, I can’t restart it.

Interface

On lists where I limit new membership to those who have a legitimate interest in the topic, when someone subscribes, their subscription request goes into a list of pending requests.

Most of my lists are set to only accept email from members and to limit the size of emails, including attachments, to 40K. When someone posts to the list who is not a member or a member posts a very large message, it is held and put in the same list of pending requests as new members.

If I don’t look at that list on a regular basis, I miss things. New members wait many days to be approved and posts that are legitimate may also wait until I get around to checking the pending requests. The problem compounds when I have several lists. Each list has its own separate pending requests. I have no one place I can go to see all requests for all lists.

Solutions

I joined the Mailman users mailing list and asked some questions. The members there, especially a Mark Sapiro and a Dennis Black, helped me solve these two problems.

I still can’t prevent crashes, but now I have a way to quickly see whether the mailing list software is running. On a page I visit multiple times per day, my local home administrative page, I created a script that tells me at the top whether the server is running. If it isn’t, I can easily restart it. In fact, the script itself will usually restart it if it can. If it can’t, I will know to do it manually.

I also created a script that will give me a count of how many requests are pending in each list. It also appears at the top of my home page. When I see any there, I know to go and deal with them.

Technical

You may not care much about this next part. Here are my scripts, with some of the information modified to protect sensitive parts of my server. If you are having the same problems, this should still help you.

First, the following code is written in BASH. My Linux server uses BASH as its scripting language.

Script:

mailmanrestart

Code:

#!/bin/sh
COUNT=`ps -ef | grep path/to/mailman/qrunner | wc -l`
echo $COUNT Mailman processes running
if [ $COUNT -lt 1 ]; then
   /path/to/mailman/mailmanctl -q stop
   /path/to/mailman/mailmanctl -s -q start
   echo 'Mailman stop start done' | mailx -s 'qrunners started' myaddress@mydomain.com
fi

Description:

This checks for processes running on my server called qrunner. It is the name of the main process that runs Mailman. I should have several such processes running if Mailman is up and working. If it isn’t working, the script will stop whatever processes are running and start it up fresh. Then it will send me an email that Mailman was restarted.

And…

Script:

mailmanreqs

Code:

#!/bin/sh
for listname in list1 list2 list3 list4 list5 list6
do
        /path/to/mailman/withlist -l -i $listname << EOF 2> /dev/null
print "%i $listname requests\n" % (m.NumRequestsPending())
EOF
done

Description:

This loops through all of the mailing lists I have named in the “for” command. It prints a message saying how many pending requests there are for that list.

Now, if you are still with me, you will recognize that I would have to log in to Linux and run these BASH scripts every time I wanted to see their results. That will only be slightly more useful than what I have been going through before. I need to execute these scripts on a web page I visit often. That would be my administrative home page where there are links to all sorts of things that I operate.

This page is written in the PHP language. As with the other scripts I presented, I’ve changed some of the path information to protect my server:

<?php

        $mailman = shell_exec("/www/htdocs/private/mailmanrestart");
        echo "<span style='padding-left: 1em;'>$mailman</span>\n";
        $mailman = shell_exec("/www/htdocs/private/mailmanreqs");
        $mmm = split("\n", $mailman);
        $msg = "";
        foreach ($mmm as $m) {
                $mo = preg_replace("/[>][>][>] /", "", $m); // get rid of withlist prompts
                $mos = split(' ', $mo);
                if ($mos[0] != '0') // don't show 0 results
                        if ($mo) $msg .= "<span style='padding-left: 1em'>$mo</span>\n";
        }
        if ($msg) echo "$msg\n";
?>

This first runs the mailmanrestart script. It prints the results to the page. The results should say something like “9 Mailman processes running.” If it ever says something like “0 Mailman processes running”, I will know that I have a problem and should manually restart Mailman.

Then, I run the mailmanreqs script. It returns to me a string with a line for each mailing list that says how many requests are pending for each list. I don’t really care about 0 pending requests for a list, so I only show the ones that have a number other than 0.  It will say something like, “1 list1 requests     4 list2 requests”.

Both of these message prominently display in a place that I will likely see them within a few hours. I hope this will solve the problems I have been having with my Mailman lists and give my users more confidence in using them.

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I started out pretty well. We were on a paved forest road. We wanted to turn around. I put my foot down on the little foot break to put it in reverse, but the break didn’t hold. When I went to change the gear, my thumb hit the little accelerator and I took off over an embankment and the machine hit a small tree. I didn’t fly over the handlebars, but the machine was stuck in the mud.

My companion attached a rope between our quads and he pulled me out. I thought to myself, “There. I’ve had my accident. Now I can enjoy the rest of the day.”

I was SO wrong! I felt pretty insecure about turns. My companion’s quad was wider at the base than mine. I’m wider at the top. Every time I turned a corner, I thought I was going to tip over. Because of that, I tried to keep my speed down.

We found some back trails and took off down a hill. The dirt road was badly eroded. I was worried about tipping over there too. I slowed down more.

I went throug mud puddles and over some pretty rough terrain. Despite being so cautious, I was having a good time. One one trial, there was a very round and smooth log laying to the side of the trail. It was probably no more than six inches in diameter.

My right rear tire went over the log and the log rolled out from underneath it. The quad lurched left and I went right.

I landed face down on the trail. The quad stopped a few feet away, unhurt. Immediately I felt my leg on fire and warm moisture inside my blue jeans. The blue jeans were unmolested. Somehow, underneath them, I opened up two gashes horizontally on my left leg.

I didn’t want to be lying face down in the dirt when my companion noticed I wasn’t behind him anymore, so I worked very hard at standing up. He came back and we decided we needed to go back to our base and tell the other man with us that I was hurt.

It took a while for me to get the courage to look at my leg. It looked pretty gruesome. After cleaning up the dirt and blood, I felt pretty weak and wobbly. My friend drove my truck part of the way home.

I was in bed a lot for the next three weeks. I tried working when I could, but it always made my leg swell up. I finally ended up getting antibiotics from the doctor. Today, it’s doing well.

People ask me if I plan to do get on one of those things again. I heard every horror story people could think of. To be honest, I remember the fun more than I remember the painful end.

For me, it was hours of “weee!!!” and one instant of Thud! I’ll probably do it again.

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It’s very hot down here by our standards. Barbara has these things that if you get them wet with cold water and tie them around your neck, they’re supposed to keep you cool. She put the one in the picture on and we went into the store.

At the checkout stand, the clerk asked her which gang she was with. She, of course, didn’t know what he was talking about. He said that in this area, you have to be careful what color you are wearing. He said that this color, especially in a scarf-type of article, could get you shot.

Well, even though it’s a fairly serious thing, it’s somehow amusing to me. Needless to say, she’s not going to be wearing that thing anymore. I’m glad. I don’t think it does a thing for her looks.

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Around 9:00 PM, I needed to stop and get some allergy medicine and a couple of other items for the house. I also needed the restroom at the store, but it was occupied for about fifteen minutes.

I was not feeling too good when I went up to the checkout line. It didn’t help that the lines were so long that people were packed in the front of the store and people going sideways across the front of the store had to navigate through the two lines.

Even when I’m in pain, I try to be courteous, so I hung back a little to give people room to walk through. I looked down an aisle for a moment and when I turned back around, something seemed different. I didn’t remember who was in front of me before I turned away, so I just let it go. I’m good at that. If someone had cut in ahead of me, that was fine. Without even having enough of a memory to know for sure, I definitely wasn’t going to make an issue of it.

It was a man and his young boy. The boy looked at me and tugged on his dad’s shirt. The dad looked at me and said, “Oh, which line were you in?”

I calmly said, “This one.”

He said he was sorry and moved to the other line. When he got there, he gave me a really angry look and said, “All you had to do was say something.”

I was pretty surprised at his attitude. He seemed angry at me for not asking for my place in line back. I was confused.

After I checked out, I was pushing my cart toward the exit. An elderly woman was counting the change in her purse right in the middle of the way. I stopped and patiently waited. She turned around, took one look at me, apologized, and quickly moved her cart to the side. She seemed scared.

Out at my truck, as I was putting my items in, I was hit by a wave of sinus pain and scrunched up my face even more. It was then that I realized what had happened in the checkout line and with the elderly woman’s panic. It was my face. At 360 pounds, I bet I can look pretty dangerous, especially when my face hurts.

It reminds me of the old prank we used to play as kids. You walk up to a friend and ask him, “Does your face hurt?” When he hopefully answers, “No,” you respond with, “Well it’s killing me!”

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I joked with someone that if people watched me during the hymns, I’d know that a lot of people read my blog. I didn’t really notice any difference today, so I can’t really be sure. I couldn’t tell by that.

Since I first published the blog entry on 7/26/09, over 235 people have read it with 18 comments on the blog and several on facebook. Other than my wife, there were only two responses from members of my ward. One was on facebook and the other on my blog. The one on facebook was from someone whose comment left me thinking she only looked at the funny picture at the top of my blog.

A long-time friend of mine in the ward told me about one other person who read my blog. I had a brief conversation with that peson today, but there was no mention of what I wrote.

I spoke to the woman from my ward who did give me a substantive response and thanked her for helping feel safe in going to church today. Got a nice hug from her and we joked a little about me.

Other than that, it was business as usual. I directed sacrament meeting music. I participated in Sunday School. I saw two of my grandchildren in the foyer during their ward’s sacrament meeting. I taught the High Priest Group lesson.  It’s was a pretty average Sunday.

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Weird Lips

I get a lot of comments about my very strange picture on top of my blog. It shows me with a very wild look and screwed up mouth. I think it almost looks like someone from “The Simpsons“. I thought maybe I would explain it for those who don’t like it or think it doesn’t represent me well.

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