After the amazing weekend I had with Kris just these past two days, I'm loathe to return to the "real world" and embark on the stressors that have made the last few months not particularly plesant.

Let's see how this day has stressed so far.

There's the moron in Rental Car Bus line at the airport who kept yelling at me, "The end of the line is back there!" When I said, "Right, the rental car line starts back there, I'm looking for the Long Term Parking Bus," his response was to yell louder, "Yes! THE END OF THE LINE IS BACK THERE!" I stiffled my desire to ask, "Is this the blithering idiot line? Because if it is, you need to go to the front."

Then there's Sprint, the phone company that thinks putting someone on hold or through a maze of phone questions is good customer service. The only thing worse was the clueless salesman who, when asked, "Do you know what it is?" (it being a Franklin USB EV-DO modem, which he just told me, "Uh, yeah, um, right, we, uh, haven't, uh, received those in yet, uh, we're, uh, supposed to get those next month, yeah, next month."), he tried to continue his B.S. answers and replied, "Uh, yeah, it's a USB adapter for our ED-VO cards."

BZZZZT! Wrong answer. Thanks for playing.

Not.

I'm determined not to become annoyed at all of these little things (the server dying, the disks filling up, the unintellible waitress taking our order, the clueless drivers nearly hitting my car, the doggen howling to wake the dead) overwhelm me, but sometimes, certainly today so far, flying back to Vegas Baby sounds like a good, good time.

You know, sometimes you don't want to hear the words. You don't want to know the opinions of people from your life 15 years ago, not because their opinions hurt, but because they're good opinions, and you wonder how different your life might have been if you had known their opinion.

At Fru's wedding tonight, I knew a relatively small number of people attending the event: Fru has a lot of friends who love him and I'm one of the truly blessed people who have Dan in my life. I am a better person for knowing him. Of the people at the wedding who I do know, nearly all of them are Techers. Most of them all recognized me. Some didn't.

One conversation went something like, "Do I know you?"

"Yes, we went to Tech together."

"You went to Tech?"

"Yes."

"Oh my god, are you? Are you Kitt?"

"Yes, I am."

"Oh my god, it's great to see you!"

Big hug for both of us.

We chatted for a bit, with another Techer overhearing us and interjecting, "Yes, this is Kitt, the freshman everyone had a crush on."

I looked over shocked at the person who made this comment. He continued talking to the person next to him. "No, everyone had a crush on her. I had a crush on her. I just couldn't go up to talk to her." "Dude, did you know she just walked up to me and asked me out?" "She did?" The conversation continued, with my standing next to the two of them, my jaw on the floor. Aside from the fact that I had no idea this guy had had a crush on me, much less "everyone," he was also one of the really good-looking guys at Tech when I was there.

The moment hung there. He said it as an off-hand, matter-of-fact comment, one that was a statement of fact from events that happened over a decade ago, but the comment stopped me. I wanted him to talk about it. I wanted to know what he meant. I wanted to rage about the unfairness of the statement, that had I known how different would my life had been? My god, would I have just made the same mistakes with this man that I had made with the other men I dated at the time? Or would I have learned the lessons in love I needed to learn much earlier? Would things have been different? Or the same? My god, tell me, would my life have turned out better?

I continued talking with the group when our picture was taken, a group of Techers in a mini-reunion at a friend's wedding so many years later. All the lives that had continued since those times in school, so many lives with different directions, so many choices made. The comment riding shotgun in my head as I chatted and laughed with these people.

We walked back into the banquet hall after the quiet of the balcony where we had our picture taken, the noise in the hall matching the noise in my head. The music loud in the back of the hall, people talking animatedly in the front.

And suddenly I stopped, the chaos and confusion of the moment gone.

I saw Kris.

He was sitting next to Fiona, the two of them laughing at something Kris had said. The rest of the evening mattered little, the questions I had about my classmate's comment no longer needing to be answered.

I made mistakes in college. I was unobservant and clueless and self-conscious and awkward and needy. I learned my lessons late, the lessons in love the hardest to learn.

But, I learned them.

And this man is the result of those hard-learned lessons. I couldn't ask for a better partner, friend, husband, lover.

"I don't understand how you can find so much to read. I mean, sometimes I'm bored or I have a few minutes, I want to find something to read, and I wonder 'What would Kitt read?' but I can never find the interesting things you would read. How do you do it?"

Or something like that. Kris' sentiment. Oddly enough, Heather asked me the same question recently. I don't have a link blog, nor do I have a well-used del.icio.us account, but, part of Project Decloak™ will probably change that at least a little bit.

Until then, help for Kris: where do I go to get the interesting posts/pages?

Slashdot

Not so much for the discussions, but more for the interesting links.

Kottke.org

Jason Kottke's website, mostly a linkblog with commentary. I don't recall how I found his website, maybe through dooce.

New Scientist

Mostly because I'm a science junky, I'll read the science headlines from New Scientist, sometimes also reading notes from Nature News or sometimes the Science Blog, the former more than the latter. The problem with these sites is that it's a slippery slope into more and more information: some of the articles are behind their subscription firewall, requiring payment to read, which leads to a subscription, which leads to either a stack of unread science magazines or a waste of money. I've been through both cycles.

I visit these websites because they're entertaining, reading more or less on a daily basis.

Dooce, iWalt, Megan's blog and the Town of Or

Heather Armstrong's website, found via Walk Dickinson, whose site was shown to me by Megan. Maybe I can convince Megan to name her blog. My current favorite picture of Mirabelle. I'll also read Town of Or to keep up to date on Jake's activities.

Foxtrot

Been reading for years, there are still some gems in there on occasion.

Photomatt

Matt Mullenweg's summary blogish sort of site. Found his site via Jonas Luster's site, which I found via his Drupal flickr module.

APoD

Or rather, the Astronomy Pictures of the Day, sometimes beautiful, always interesting images about space and related topics.

FactoryJoe

Chris Messina's personal blog. He slants toward social justice with an intensity I'm not able to conceive, much less muster - which is why I'm very happy he's around. The world needs more Chris Messinas.

Jeremy Zawodny

Not sure why I read his blog, in as much I'm not particularly interested in aviation. Must be the Yahoo! and MySQL and tech related postings.

A Thousand Kids

Kathryn Yu's link + photo blog, which I found via Cal's Flickr friend's list when I was looking for my name. Kathryn spells her name correctly, and it was on the same page as my name, so I followed her profile to her website. She reviews music for NPR and has other interesting links. It's where I found the El Boton button sets, which didn't help that hobby at all.

Every once in a while, when nothing from the above sites particularly inspires me, I'll also wander over to these sites:

Digg

But only because everybody's doing it. I don't particularly believe in the wisdom in crowds because the wisdom part requires independence not found in the incredibly connected web (and so such social sites become the madness of the mob mentality), but there are good links in there that are somewhat interesting.

Reddit

Same thinking as digg, with the same caveats.

waxy.org

How can you not love Andy's Linkblog? Apparently his the source for many other sites' "breaking news".

Techdirt

Commentary on important events in technology, more from a what-a-moron standpoint, but the topics are a cross between technology and interesting.

And then there are my bookmarks, which I should merge and export sometime soon, so that I don't lose any of them. There are another three or four dozen websites I'll read in a week. Since it's taken me an hour to write all of these sites, we'll just start here.

So, there you go, a good first pass of What Would Kitt Read. Have at it, Kris.

Better than thousands, I expect.

So far, all of the various conferences I've gone to, with the exception of one, have been technology related. From SiGGraph to the Future of Web Apps, it's been tech, tech, tech and, just for fun, science. Okay, one was ultimate related, a UPA league organizers conference. It was small, and not one I had to spend hundreds of dollars to attend.

The next one I attend will be another ultimate related one, but it won't be to just sit in the audience and listen to other people lecturing. Instead, I'll be speaking!

As part of Project Decloak, I'll be standing in front of hundreds of people, imagining each and every one of the completely naked, talking about ultimate.

My talk is titled "Ultimate for the non-gifted athlete." It's basically a list of all the tips, tricks, and training Kris has taught me or I have learned in the last eight years. Well, most of them. The talk is geared toward the beginner and intermediate athlete who isn't on an athletic scholarship, but wants to play ultimate better.

I'm surprisingly not nervous about the talk, and have it outlined and ready to go, including notes about what studies to look up and what video clips to find. Poor Kris is going to have the talk memorized by the time the presentation rolls around.

My plans are to have the presentation available on an ultimate website. I haven't decided which domain to use for it, though: talkdisc.com or recsportdisc.com. I own both domains. I wanted talkdisc.com to be a combination of the rec.sport.disc newsgroup plus articles and snippets, but ultimatetalk.com was launched between my thinking of the idea and now, and I don't want to have a copy-cat domain name, even if I did think of the name waaaaaaay before ultimatetalk launched.

We'll see. I'll put it up on one of the sites.

I'm convinced of it.

But they're also pretty wonderful, too.

This weekend, I came home from Crate and Barrel with my new "dresser" (think, embracing my inability to use drawers), and found this on my doorstep:

Now, if I can just get the perpetrator to confess, I'll reward her/him with a trip for this: