Thursday, March 30, 2000

30 March 2000

Okay, just now I feel like a complete idiot.

Matt and I took a look at our diets and realized that we'd let the lazies creep up on us again. The way our evenings are scheduled, we buy dinner rather than cook it at least twice a week - on Saturdays, when we're gaming, and on Mondays, when we grab subs or sandwiches quickly before the Hall. (To be honest, the Monday dinner is left over from when we were taking water aerobics on Monday nights and didn't have time to cook between getting home and driving up to the office to get online.)

And we frequently eat out on Fridays. But just lately, we've been getting lazy and eating out on Sundays, too. And the occasional Thursday. Which only left us with two nights a week that we were certain to actually cook.

This is not good for diets.

So we decided, in order to force ourselves to stop eating out so often, we'd make up a menu every Sunday for the coming week. This has been the first week, and so of course we did it. On the menu for tonight is a barbeque chicken recipe I like to make. This morning, when I went into the kitchen to take my medicine and water the plants, I opened the freezer door to take out a packet of chicken so it would thaw by the time I got home.

I just now realized that I never actually took out the chicken. I got distracted and just left it in the freezer. It's not a disaster or anything. I just feel sortof dumb.


We had a nice, fairly lazy evening yesterday. Matt had made beef stew in our Crock Pot, so he didn't have to do any work for dinner. I didn't have a Hall session (for once), though I tooled around on my own and came up with what I hope will be a fair solution to the fact that both Braz and I hadn't wanted to move things along quite as fast as they did, though I still need to run it by Braz. I started writing a related story about Zoya that I might post when it's done. (But then again, maybe I won't. We all have our little secrets.)

I watched an episode of Babylon 5, decided I wasn't in the mood for the next couple of episodes, and read my book. It's getting harder and harder for me to get into the Black Company books, so I didn't read much of it. I chatted online with K.T., then watched the last ten minutes or so of The Sopranos and went to bed around ten. I think I actually got to sleep before eleven. Shocking.


My manager's supervisor stopped into my office yesterday to tell me about a new project I'm going to get today. He didn't have many specs, but it sounds relatively simple and short-term. But it'll be nice to have something to work on. Sometimes I enjoy being lazy, but having work to do makes the days go faster.


Word of the Day: proscribe - to condemn, or forbid as harmful or unlawful

Corporate culture is funny. I'm not supposed to use the internet connection for anything but company business (and thus, working on this journal, surfing the net, and chatting with friends are all proscribed). I'm not supposed to install any program on my computer that the company doesn't own - even if I own it. T-shirts and jeans are proscribed as well, even though I never deal with customers or higher managers.

Of course, being corporate culture, there are backdoors to all these policies. The rules for internet use are treated like the laws for speeding - everyone breaks them. As long as it's not causing problems, no one really cares. The programs I've wanted to install were installed to a Zip disk which I take home with me every night. In the unlikely event the company's computers are ever exhaustively audited, I'll simply pop out the disk and let them at it. "Casual Friday" slips around the rules on clothing, and besides - being a woman, I've got any number of nice shirt that are just t-shirts with pretty prints. Guys in the office silently protest the anti-jeans rules by wearing pants that avoid being jeans only by being a slightly lighter weight of cloth and more solid in color. Or else they wear worn, baggy things to which jeans would be a marked improvement.

If you know the rules well, know why they exist, and know how they are enforced, nothing is really proscribed.

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