Today I was nearly "one of those people" you read about. You know, those crazy people who try to cross raging rivers in their cars because it "didn't look that deep." Those people who end up washed out to sea or found at the bottom of a drainage ditch.

It rained like mad today. Definitely the hardest rain we've had here in years. We got nearly five inches in five to six hours here in Westerly.

Joe Cascio had asked me to meet him in Watch Hill for coffee, at 1:30. By 1:15 the lightning had finally let up, so I left. Didn't get very far, though. Less than a half mile from the house, I tried to cross what looked like a very deep puddle. There was a car in the oncoming lane that was just sitting there... and I found, too late, that behind him the water was both much too deep and moving very fast.

I got stuck, and the rain kept falling. Here's a movie of it:

Richie (Lauren's big brother) turned five yesterday.

We didn't get to see him, but I hope he had a good day. Eric Pride told me that he and Bonny miss him (so do we).

Still coming to grips with all this. In spite of Mike completely flipping out there at the end, I'm missing them all pretty intensely. But especially Lauren. Every time I think of seeing her again (hopefully someday soon), I get a jolt of pain like I've touched a live wire.

This morning, Mike and Shannon took Richie and Lauren, and left.

I mentioned this on Twitter, but couldn't possibly tell the whole back story there for all the friends who don't know any of it. So here's the back story in the form of a timeline. After the history lesson is a recap of what happened today.

Since then things have just kept on keeping on. Except...

Today Things Get Ugly

Shannon got sick a few weeks ago. Stomach cramps, in the area of her appendix, but they said it wasn't appendicitis. She spent a few days in the hospital, but they never figured out what was wrong. She improved, but still walked with a limp. Her Massage Therapy instructor said she felt a torn muscle in her abdomen, and Shannon was pretty sure that was it.

She stopped going to school. The first few days were understandable: she was in the hospital, or could barely walk. But then she'd miss because she felt a little nauseous (oh, forgot to mention they got pregnant again). Corinne and I were concerned she was losing her motivation.

This morning she stayed home again. Corinne found out while I was taking my shower, and asked her about it. Mike told me she was home while I was eating my breakfast. He said the school didn't care if she missed the days, she'd be able to make it up. Shannon came into the room and I asked her about it. She gave me a completely different story from Mike... basically she sounded defeated. Making up all of her "logs" (practice massages) and schoolwork would be too much work. She'd even have to drive to Hartford (90 minutes)!

I told her/them that she can't drop out, passively or otherwise. We can't support their family forever. Her Massage Therapy certificate was the “end game”: it was to be their ticket to self-sufficiency. Mike, getting angry, said she still has her job at Staples, and they'll keep paying us our $60 per week. (Which covered their two cell phones, but not much else.)

“Don't yell at her about this, it's her choice,” he said. Now I was mad. I tried to explain that this “choice” of hers is costing me money. Everything I said resulted in the same response, almost a dozen times, “It's her choice.”

I don't remember, now, exactly how it happened, but Mike said they'd move out by the end of the week. Entirely out of anger, and now to my regret, I told him to be out within the hour. By this time, we were in the basement (their apartment).

We went upstairs, and he held the kitchen door open. I'm not sure why, as (most?) everybody else was outside. I started to go through the open door, but he snarled, “Don't you touch that door.” Well, I wasn't going to, but telling me not to touch my own door... bah. Anger sucks. I touched it. “What, do you want to fight me?” Sure. Let's go outside.

No, I had no intention of fighting him. I just wanted to say goodbye to the little girl.

Somehow, he ended up over by Shannon's car, talking to her, while I was still inside. I don't remember waiting to go out, but I must have. When I came out, I asked what they were still doing there. “We're leaving!” I told him he wasn't leaving, he was standing there talking.

I walked over to the back door, passenger side, to say goodbye to Lauren. Shannon yelled, “Don't touch my kid!” and Mike came flying around the car. I said I was just going to say goodbye to her, and Mike said I wasn't. Yes, though, I was. I opened the door before Mike could block it, and, well...

He punched me in the left ear. Big roundhouse punch. Maybe it's my height, or my size, or maybe he pulled it at the last moment, but it didn't really hurt. Definitely surprised me, though I didn't fall down or anything. Shannon yelled, “Michael!” I looked at him and said, “You're crossing a line you can't ever come back from.” (Ok, so it was a little awkward, but he knew what I meant and so do you.)

Then I walked back to the car, opened the door (again), and calmly told Lauren I loved her very much, to please be a good girl, and that I may not see her ever again. Mike was trying to pull me away, but I just ignored him. She was scared and confused, but Opa was talking to her calmly so maybe it was going to be ok. She gave me a little smile, and said she'd be a good girl.

I went inside and talked to Corinne. I was crying. Two and a half years of our life had been devoted to helping Mike and Shannon straighten themselves out and become (legally) self-supporting... all destroyed by pride. Probably pride on both sides.

Shannon came back about 90 minutes later with a Westerly cop. He was just her escort as she got some of their stuff, because (she said) she didn't feel comfortable going to the house alone.

We haven't seen or heard from them since. They have no diapers, food, or money. A few clothes. They're probably going to live with Mike's grandfather in North Stonington, but we don't know for sure.

We're both really worried about the kids, Richie and Lauren. Mike and Shannon can fend for themselves (mostly). The kids don't deserve this insanity. :-(

BBEdit 9.2 was released today.

(Sorry about having two BBEdit-related posts in a row like this. I have other things to talk about too, trust me. I'm just warming up again.)

I played a small part, again. Most of my time was spent on the brand-new Lasso module. There are 168 changes in the official change notes. (There were actually a lot more than 168 changes, trust me.) The excerpt listed below includes those I'm particularly happy about or with which I was personally involved.

The blue stuff, below, is what I worked on or was somehow directly involved with.

Additions

• ✫ BBEdit now has a “Sleep” command. ✫

• Lasso is now a fully supported language, with syntax coloring, functions listed in the function popup, and automatically generated fold points.

• There’s a new color setting in the Text Colors preference: “Numeric Constants”. This can also be adjusted on a per-language basis in the appropriate language’s settings (in the “Languages” preferences).

• Added a feature to the language module interface for giving the module control over resolution of include file references.

• The Menus preferences now has a group of commands so that you can assign keyboard equivalents to operations in FTP/SFTP browsers, if desired.

• There’s a new setting in the “Editing” tab for language-specific preferences (Preferences -> Languages): “Tab width”. Edit the value here to set a language-specific value for the default tab width. (I — and probably others — requested this.)

• ✫ BBEdit now implements the necessary hooks so that the following JavaScript functions now work when using “Preview in BBEdit”: window.alert, window.confirm, window.prompt, window.onbeforeunload ✫

• Disk browsers can now explore tarballs (.tar, .tar.gz, .tgz files). When an eligible file is in the listing, it will have a disclosure triangle next to it. Twist it open to reveal the files and directories within. As with other items displayed in disk browser listings, you can view files in the editor view, or double-click them to open in a separate window for editing.

Changes

• ✫ The internal mechanics and UI presentation for recent items have been overhauled. ✫

  I love this one, as the redesigned "Open Recent" menu item is much more usable.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug in the ActionScript function parser. No longer tripped up by a function return type of * (which is the explicit way of typing something as “untyped”).

• Fixed a bug which allowed ActionScript’s get to be recognized as a function-starter in JavaScript files (similar to the function keyword).

• Fixed possible cause of a crash related to populating the function popup in JavaScript files.

• Fixed missing fold widgets for fold ranges containing a single line break.

• Fixed crash when JavaScript functions with assigned names, such as foo.bar[bat] = function() {...}, were not in a recognized/expected form.

• Fixed bug in which using “Save As” did not change the document’s language if the default was something other than “(none)”. This change also addresses a bug in which the document’s language wasn’t recalculated if the file’s name changed on disk.

• A variety of changes have been made to reduce application startup time.

• Fixed a bug in the Ruby module which would cause a multi-line, general delimited input string (%+string+) to fold incorrectly (the closing fold point was one character too soon).

• Fixed a bug in the Ruby module where Begin/End blocks could cause fold points to be be placed at seemingly random places in the document.

• Fixed a bug in the Ruby module where complete for or while loops, written on a single line and within curly braces, could throw off the folding for the entire document.

• Fixed a bug in the TeX module in which a $math$ section within a {required param}, where the $math$ section contained a closing curly brace (e.g. caption{foo $i_{0}$ foo}), would confuse the parser. This tended to manifest as incorrect autofolds and improper indentation in the function popup.

• The Ruby module will no longer detect regular expressions as the first token immediately after a string or another regular expression. This resolves a syntax coloring bug found with the syntax used by the Merb framework (which uses an overloaded ”/” method.)

Now go buy a copy. Or two. Please. More sales at BB means more work for me. (Blah blah blah |BEdit Disclaimer|)

Last week I got an email from John Mello, a reporter working for Mac News World. He asked if, as a BBEdit user, I'd be willing to be interviewed for a story he was writing about Bare Bones. I said yes, and later we talked on the phone for about a half hour.

The article is now published, entitled Apple's Changes Can't Rattle These Bones. Kinda clever.

Among BBEdit's merits cited by the code warrior are its support of multiple languages, syntax coloring, code folding and HTML editing and preview, as well as speedy performance and powerful search features. Not only can it perform a search and replace on multiple files, but it will display the results of a search in a separate window for easy review and manipulation.

Hey he called me a code warrior. That's so much nicer than code monkey! (I'm mentioned by name a couple paragraphs earlier.)

The article is, um… a bit fluffy. It never claims to be otherwise! You can't do a one-page "company profile" as hard news.

He never mentioned my rant about email clients, even though we talked about them extensively. (No surprise he didn't mention it, I really do rant.) I was slightly surprised to find that he never mentioned my relationship with the company (which is currently on hold, but hopefully not for long...). Sean was surprised, too.

A significant point I made in our conversation ("interview") that I honestly thought he'd cover: all the editors give you a decent space to type your code. You don't differentiate editors based on which one gives you the best typing experience. Know what I mean? All of the good editors provide a decent space for entering your text. What matters to me is all the other stuff that I expect of my editor: language support, syntax coloring, code folding, performance and — perhaps most important of all — really powerful search and replace.

Anyway, I don't seem to get into the news these days for anything except the PMC, so it was cool for that alone, if nothing else. :-)