It’s been just under three months from that first oh-no-is-that? moment until today.  I don’t pretend to know what that feels like for you and Jason and all of the other people that love you, of which there are many, as I know that you know.  You’ve known that this was coming for a while, and I personally like the curly, I get why you’ll stick with the scarf.  So since today was the day, it’s time to follow through on my end of my assertion.

I’ll grow it back out when you’re growing back yours. If I could do more to support you in a helpful way, I totally would.

Alisa and I have been a part of the same community for over a decade now.  Anytime a group of people have been together for that long, there are underlying grumbles around, well, most everybody.  I just never hear that about Alisa.  I haven’t met anyone yet that has met her and doesn’t at least like her; most everyone that I know loves her, as I do.

So if you know someone struggling with cancer, just love them the best way that you know how: making dinner for them, taking out the trash, picking up their mail, bringing them a latté, reading in the same room with them for an hour, just whatever.  She’s two states away, but this is something that I can do from here other than send the late-night emails when I can’t sleep and send her crazy emails.

I’ll think of her every (third) morning when I am shaving at a minimum.

I love you, dear.  Keep kicking ass.

Geof

This post will generate a tweet that will be my 100,000th update with the service.  I joined Twitter on 23 Jan 2007, which means that I have 2,285 days of tweeting and a slightly disgusting 43.7 tweets a day.  Mind you, this includes conversations — a lot of conversations — and that has jacked up my tweet count pretty high.  If you don’t know, I’m @gfmorris.

What do I tweet about?

• Whatever’s on my mind.  You know, like when I used to blog about being sick, except shorter.
• I used to have this whole GEOFCON gag.  I get complain-y.  I do this to blow off steam.
• Going back to whatever’s top of mind: if I am physically present with someone, my tweeting generally grinds to a halt, because the extrovert part of my personality gets all into having someone to engage.  I tweet when I’m alone.  Clearly I’m alone a lot.
• I really do think out loud on Twitter.  Posts for here often come from Twitter.  Sometimes, that means that I’m letting half-formed thoughts out there in a brainstorming experiment that makes me look really stupid.  Occasionally, I delete things; most of the time, I don’t mind looking daft.
• I tweet a lot about insomnia.  I created the #OIT tag for Obligatory Insomnia Tweet.  To wit: my 99,999th tweet was about how I didn’t sleep well last night.
• I used tweet a lot about sports on that account.  Now I have an account specifically for that.  I’m sure that this makes the lives of people who follow me for non-sports-related tweets very, very happy, especially when I start getting angry.
• I have a lot of accounts, but only three that are truly by-me.  The third is a private account that I probably won’t give you access to, and it’s the one where the really fun stuff happens, mostly late at night when I am distressed.  Anyway.
• But a lot of my tweets show my love for people, I think.  I got a lot of that back on 20 Sep 2010 — it kept me going and out of a really bad place.

I’m very thankful for Twitter.  Now I can go back to tweeting without caring what post number it was.  I’ve been worried for the last month that I’d roll past 100k and not notice.

So the other day I Googled my full name and my full first name just to see what came up.  One of the things that did was some stupid Web meme I’d done here on the blog.  But it seemed interesting to me to answer those questions again seven years later.  Here goes, with extant content in italics if it doesn’t change..

0) What’s your name and website URL? (optional, of course)

Well, my full name is Geoffrey Franklin Morris. I have many URLs, but I guess I prefer linking to GFMorris.net the most these days. That has varied over the years.

1) What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why? (two sentences max)

Without a doubt, it’s putting managing the build of unpressurized flight support equipment for on-orbit replacement units on the International Space Station.  When stuff breaks on-orbit and the astronauts have to go outside to make a fix, the chances are (>80%) that it’s something that my company built, and of that hardware, it’s about 50-50 that I managed the job.

2) A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? (one sentence max)

I wish that I wrote here far more often, but the stuff that I want to write about these days shouldn’t be publicly available (but it will be in the future).

B. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? (one sentence max)

Become a hobbyist computer programmer: I have all the good intentions and the O’Reilly texts to match and none of the output.

3) A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? (two sentences max)

I’d like to be better at being fully cognizant of what I’m doing and what I should be doing, which are only occasionally the same thing. 

B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)

This is an easy question: I would dearly love to have been an apprentice rocket scientist under Wernher von Braun. I can learn all the management stuff, personal and professional, from just about anyone, but in terms of designing rockets? I’ll put WvB up against anyone, warts and all.

4) A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

I think that they’d say that I’m loving, passionate, and giving.

B. Now list two more words you wish described you…

Tall and athletic.

5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes– three sentences max)

I’m really passionate about project management: I’m working on a master’s degree in engineering management, and I just obtained my Project Management Professional certification (#1571776) last month.  I have a strong passion for the hockey program at my alma mater, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I played a small part in keeping that program alive and forward into a hockey conference that will help us thrive into the future.  I guess you could say that I’m passionate about manned spaceflight in a time when that’s not seeing any traction.  :(

6) (sue me) Write–and answer–one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)

What is your worst habit, and what do you believe is the underlying cause of that habit? How can you best eliminate it?

I didn’t answer this then, but the answer is somewhat the same: it would have been “procrastination” six years ago, and this time it’s “the failure to start”, which is somewhat the same thing but not completely.  One of the reasons that I can be bad about procrastination is because I haven’t broken the work down into small enough pieces.  If I’m stuck with a project, I often break it down into smaller chunks that I can do with 20-minute efforts.  When I do that, I’m successful.

[Bonus: What is one question you wish people would ask themselves?]

What are your good qualities?  Do you define yourself by external things (work, family, home, church, car, etc.) or do you focus on your inherent qualities that will be true regardless of season?

Family lore says that my brother was born on December 9, 1972, following a moderate snowfall in Wichita, Kansas, that made it a little difficult to get the hospital. We’re not talking being blown off the road and waiting hours for AAA—they left that one to me to do thirty winters later. No, it was just, “Oh, we weren’t sure that we were going to make it okay, but we did.”

I found out on Saturday morning that Doug has to work first thing on Monday morning, which spoiled my underground plan to leave for south Mississippi in about nine hours to surprise him. I mean, I have one brother, right? And he turns 40 today! And I haven’t seen him since May, so we’re due. But we’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll greet him with a shaving cream pie.

A number of you who read this site have met me, so that photo in the header may leave you wondering if we really have the same parents. He’s slight built, dark-haired, dark-complected, and so dark-eyed that it’s nearly impossible to know where his pupils end and irises begin. He’s introverted, but not shy. He has a big radio voice.

But we both have the same propensity to tell bad jokes—although his are worse!—the same family, and the same values. (Okay, I’m the family Democrat.) We’re pretty different, but we were in tandem back in May as Dad recovered from surgery. We have a rhythm, and when we hit our stride, we’re a hell of a lot of fun.

Doug Morris is my brother, and you may not have him. Nope.