Finding Clarity

Overheard at the lunch table:

Stephen: cough cough
Monte: Stephen, cover your mouth when you cough.
Stephen: cough cough
Monte: Stephen, cover your mouth, EFFECTIVELY, when you cough.

This parenting moment brought to you by allergy season, and my legalistic kids, who need all the loop holes closed.

And around, and around

UPDATE:
You'll think I'm making this up, but the thief logged into the stolen PC again, this time TO PAY HIS CELL PHONE BILL. Now, let's think about this for a second, Zeke (may I call you Zeke? Great. Anyway . . .) You left the STOLEN computer on once before, and for your trouble you were rewarded by suddenly losing massive amounts of data. The sort of "thanks for playing" parting gift that should have been at the very least a cautionary tale, warning you to chunk the darn thing in a nearby ravine (admit it, you're surrounded by ravines) rather than risk being located through it. But Zeke, you believe in the inherant goodness of humanity (we all like that about you) and as such, you probably believed the worst was over. Right? Either that, or you don't understand the concept of the Internet as a vehicle for two way communication. Because, Zeke, when you pay your cell phone bill . . . you know, the one in your real name and with an accurate address on file, then you're just saying, "hey, Monte, here's the stuff you need to have me arrested. I ain't got me no silver platter or nothin' but we'll just consider it implied."

I'm sure when the cops arrived, Zeke was more than a little taken aback. I imagine him being handcuffed by the sherrif's deputy on the porch of his double wide, very near the ravine where he should have thrown the computer, saying, " Well played, Monte Ellis. Well played."

The moral? If you are a flippin' thief, and you steal one of Monte's PCs, for heaven sake, look into the cash only disposable cell phone option! (I like the fact that he pays his bills. You want thieves with senses of personal responsibility and accountability.)

Oh, and my apologies to Georgia. I was misinformed. It was Louisiana. However I'm sure Louisiana jails are just as lovely and accomodating as anything you'd find in Georgia, so no worries there.

Poor Zeke.

Goin' around and comin' around

This is hilarious. As many of you know, Monte works for a storage company managing their data and computer systems. The company has stores all over the US and Canada, and four months ago in one particular store in Georgia, the store was robbed. The glass windows of the store were shattered in the middle of the night, and the site's computer was stolen. Now this sort of thing, unfortunate though it is, has been known to happen and it's usually just a matter of filing a police report and an insurance claim. For the most part that's the end of it--you never see the thieves or the hardware again. However, in those cases the thieves in question are smart enough not to plug the computer back in, turn it on and then leave it on for long periods. The Georgian thieves, bless their hearts, didn't suffer from the same burden of intelligence and/or a suspcious nature. Today, Monte noticed the computer from Georgia was turned on, logged in and ready for action somewhere in Texas. Now, you and I would simply notify the police, who would then say in a somewhat snarky voice, "where in Texas?" We'd reply "well, it doesn't work like that . . . we have a general idea, we don't have an exact location," and in response we'd get a very terse and abbreviated geography lesson involving the size of Texas, followed by a comparason of our problem to sewing implements and large amounts of piled fescue. The computer would sit in Texas and blink inquiringly but patiently at us, and not much else would go down.

Monte is not you and me.

Not even a little bit.

Monte, on the other hand, saw that the machine was turned on, and since he has a program that not only tells when company computers are on, but can also change things about those computers at his discretion, he did what Monte would do.

He started uninstalling stuff.

The thieves will discover upon their return that they have no more Microsoft Office among other things, and that he's looked at their e-mail, at their pictures (this is me-n-zeke robbin' a store, this is me-n-Zeke at Stone Mountain, etc.), portions of their drive are erased, and if they turn the machine on again he has other even more sinister ideas he's dying to try. I think one of them involves sending out an e-mail using the thieves own account to the people in their address book that reads, "Don't trust me, I'm a thief. I stole the computer that sent you this e-mail. If I were you, I'd rethink the life choices that brought you into contact with someone like me, who clearly experiences no moral or ethical delimma when it comes to comitting a freaking robbery!!! HELLO?!"

Wait, I'm being told it was burglary. They were burglars. That's not as cool. It makes them sound like that creepy cartoon dude painted next to the grimace in all McDonald's playlands. Still, can you imagine the burgular's dinnertime conversation tonight? "Dang it Zeke, I told you we was not supposed to turn it on and leave it on! We's been hacked! Now we caint use us that Excel spreadsheet you was workin' on to finish out our dang taxes Zeke!"

High in the middle and round at both ends

We visited Ohio during spring break, while Monte was getting the house ready for the realtor. Mason and Shauna have this thing between them, where sometimes, I think they get each other on a very weird level :-) On the last night, M&S stayed up talking late into the night, and in the morning, Shauna had some very funny quotes:

MASON: "I used to tell people I was an alien, and to prove it, I would speak in alien and tell them my body was a costume and I had a zipper in the back."
SHAUNA: "And people would believe you?"
MASON: "I think I believed it myself."

That just goes to show, if you tell a lie often enough, grade school boys will eventually believe it.

Big Changes

We put our house on the market on Friday, as the first step in our "moving to Oklahoma" master plan. Monte has wanted to move back for several years now, and finally it seemed like the right time even though I still have mixed emotions about it. I will miss the green mature trees and rolling hills of my childhood home, but to everything there is a season, and I believe there are great opportunities waiting for our family in Oklahoma. Plus the boys will get to spend real time with their grandparents which is the best of all reasons to be closer. So keep us all in your prayers as this thing gathers steam . . . and that the housing market cooperates!