Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

For almost three years Melanie has been telling me that I need to watch “Friday Night Lights,” but I have resisted because I typically do not enjoy an hour-long drama. I mean, do you know how much I can get done in an hour?

I can get TWO episodes of “House Hunters” done in an hour. That’s how much I can do.

Anyway, the other afternoon Mel and I were on the phone, and she was telling me how she’d watched a few old episodes of “FNL” the night before, and she said, “Listen. I need to talk to you about something. It just makes me SAD that you won’t watch. YOU ARE MISSING OUT. I’ve watched every show you have ever recommended to me, and I just think you need to make time to watch this ONE show I have recommended to you.”

“WELL.” I replied. “It looks like somebody has decided to THROW DOWN THE TV GAUNTLET.”

“YOU NEED TO WATCH.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll watch an episode this afternoon.”

“YOU’VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS.”

And that is why Saturday, January 9, in the Year of Our Lord 2010, will be remembered forever – at least by me – as the day Big Mama called me out on my TV procrastination. She held me accountable. She spoke a hard word into my TV-watching habits. And oh, it did not return void.

Because late Saturday afternoon – true to my word, though lo, IT TOOK ME TWO AND A HALF YEARS – I watched the first episode of season one of “Friday Night Lights.” And then I watched episode two. Then three. Then four five six. And then I went to bed and dreamed that I lived in Dillon, Texas and was a close personal friend of Tami and Eric Taylor.

So of course now I’m totally hooked on the show and made it through episode nine last night and am dying to watch more tonight because the Panthers are driving hard towards a state championship, but, well, first I have to soar to staggering new reality television heights on the wings of love with Jake Pavelka as my pilot.

I mean, just because I have a new-show crush on “Friday Night Lights” does not mean I can abandon my long-standing TV commitments. OH NO IT DOES NOT.

And because I know y’all are wondering (and I know you’re wondering because I have the emails in my inbox to prove it), Melanie is still working on getting her blog up and running again. It’s her story to tell – and oh, will it ever be hilarious when she tells it – so just suffice it to say that the technical side of server switching has been a smidge challenging. Character-building, if you will.

By the way, have I ever told y’all that I like to save the emails from my webhost because they make me laugh? Please don’t misunderstand: I ADORE my webhost people, and they have been so, so kind to me, but every once in awhile they’ll email an update about a server that’s crashed or something like that, and the only words I understand in the email are the prepositions and OCCASIONALLY the adjectives. But most of the nouns and the verbs? No idea.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites. You might want to pour yourself a fresh beverage of your choosing before you enjoy this little treasure.

The exploit is completely valid and usable on the latest versions of openssh for centos / rhel. Initially there was some speculation on my part that it was solely available for older versions (4.3 without the backported patches, for example) but that’s since been confirmed falsed — this is an exploit for the latest and most recent versions of openssh and is 100% confirmed functional.

Here’s what really tickles me about that email: somebody sent it to me BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT I’D UNDERSTAND IT. And considering that our sweet friend Melanie is having to listen to / decipher / process that sort of language as she navigates her way through the server switch, it might not be a bad idea for us to activate some sort of prayer chain.

In all seriousness, she’s hoping to have everything resolved really soon, and quite naturally she misses you terribly.

GO PANTHERS!

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