Ack! I'm down to only three puzzles in my file. I need to get some more! (I have plenty more; I just haven't put them in the file yet.) The question is - is it worth it? Do you care about the puzzle of the day? Maybe it should be the puzzle of the week? Eventually, I'm going to run out of puzzles, or start running into rephrasings of the same puzzles. What should I do when that happens? Any ideas? You could send me puzzles that you know, but you never write...
I went to Anita's baby shower last night. No, I'm not wanting a baby right now. Anita's husband's sister-in-law brought her toddler with her to the shower, and I was turned off again. Matt asked me when I got home whether we ladies had discussed our own reproductive plans, and whether I got any sympathy for the plight of being married to a man who doesn't want children. Actually, the answer was no. I was sortof surprised, myself, but everyone there seemed to think that either I was in agreement with Matt, in which case that was our business; or that Matt would change his mind eventually.
Anyway, I was proud of myself. I didn't have any cheesecake. I didn't have any candy. I only had a couple of crackers and about three of those little tiny quiches. (I adore those things.) Mostly, I ate a lot of veggies. And some of the best, sweetest strawberries I've ever had in my life. So I stayed - mostly - on my diet. Which is good, because I'd had lunch at the Olive Garden with my mom, and that used up most of my points for the day.
Wow. There's a very impressive-looking thunderstorm rolling in. Despite the fact that it would give Jeremy screaming fits, I sortof hope it knocks the power out for a while. Any excuse not to work is a good excuse not to work, in my book! (But let me save here, just in case...) I love thunderstorms. I don't know if I was ever scared of them, but my mom loves them, too. When my parents built the house they live in now, they put on an enclosed porch. Mom spends most of her time out there, primarily because she can't smoke in the house. But I can remember sitting on the porch with her during thunderstorms. We'd turn off the lights and watch for lightning forks, counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. When the brunt of the storm hit, we'd watch the trees whip around in the wind and the rain streak out of the sky. They're beautiful.
Where I live is one of the safest places in the world, weather-wise. I've lived here my whole life, and never once seen a hurricane. (Though about once a year it looks like we'll get one. But they always catch the jetstream just off the coast of North Carolina and change course.) Every five years or so, conditions will be right for tornadoes, but the ground here isn't flat enough for them to get very big or last more than a few seconds. I've never seen one myself, though I've seen the damage they do - trees that look like they'd exploded and an aluminum shed crumpled like tinfoil. But only once in my life has anyone been killed by one. (Which is incredible when you consider that we don't have basements to hide in.) The jetstream keeps the weather fairly mild, if rainy and humid. (I don't think of this area as rainy, actually. It takes friends who have lived in other places to call attention to the rain here. I hate the humidity, but when I visit arid places I get nosebleeds.) What other weather patterns are dangerous? We don't get tidal waves or monsoons or flash floods.
Of course, we're pretty well bracketed by military installations, including the largest Navy shipyard in the country, and we're only a couple hundred miles from the nation's capitol, so this will be a very unsafe place to be if war ever makes it over here. But as far as the weather goes, it's pretty dull. (I like it that way. I don't like to be afraid of things. Thunderstorms are beautiful.)
Friday, April 9, 1999
Wednesday, April 7, 1999
Archive - 7 April 1999
Once upon a time, I took karate lessons. It was for two years in high school, and the dojo was owned and run by the senior AP English teacher at my school, who happened to be an old acquaintance of my dad. (This happens when both of your parents have been teachers. You run into a lot of people who knew them at other schools or whatnot.) Anyway, I started taking the lessons because, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, of Karate Kid. I made my folks take me to see it, and shortly thereafter, my dad asked if I wanted to take karate lessons. I agreed, and shortly thereafter, I was taking two classes a week.
I loved it when we first started out. The teacher didn't call himself a sensei, which is what most dojo masters call themselves. We called him shihan, which means "master" and which, I discovered much later, was considered moderately arrogant of him. But that's what we called him. There were a couple of black belts in the class, and we called them sensei. But the classes were good. Advanced students paired with newer students to teach the punches and the kicks, and we learned kata, and we sparred. Actually, I had trouble learning the kata at the full-speed pace of the class, so I frequently stayed late to work on it with one of the senseis. And I loved it. I didn't care much for the warm-up exercises - situps and running and pushups, but I had a necklace that I wore all the time and thought of as my "focus", and it gave me just enough of a mental edge to get through them. I did situps and pushups every morning and night, too - at one time I was doing over 500 situps a day.
But what I liked best about it was the sparring. When I first started with the lessons, about twice a month we'd have sparring sessions. I loved to spar, even when I lost badly. This wasn't tournament sparring. This was a rough, defend-yourself-at-all-costs fight. The shihan sometimes set us up with two-on-one or three-on-one fights. Once he matched a new student against a mid-level student and laughed like a madman when the new student kicked the other student's ass, because the mid-level student only knew how to defend against karate and the new student had learned street-fighting. I loved it. I wasn't taking the class because I wanted the exercise, or because karate was a trendy thing to do. I was taking it because I had become aware of exactly how vulnerable I could be. (This is something men have trouble understanding. I won't say they can't understand it, because they can - but most of them don't bother to try.) But I was in the 9th or 10th grade, I had breasts worth looking at for the first time, and although I'd never once been so much as leered at, I was intensely aware of the target that I was. Part of the territory of being a woman. Later, I would learn that attitude has as much to do with protection as strength, and I would learn how to cope with the feelings of helplessness and fear. But I'm going off on a tangent. My point is, I enjoyed sparring.
A good friend of mine started with the dojo after I'd been there about six months, and I had an even better time, because we always partnered together for practicing attacks and blocks. Because we knew each other so well (he was by boyfriend's best friend) we knew better than to try to pull punches. We forced each other to learn faster and better.
I won't pretend that it was all rosy. Practices were occasionally brutal. I once acquired a hairline greenstick fracture in my shin during a sparring session and I was told to keep fighting, dammit, was I going to roll over because of a little pain? (I didn't know it was a fracture until over a year later when I had some x-rays taken for other reasons. At the time, I thought it was just a bone-bruise.) Once I whined about having to do pushups, and the shihan arranged everyone in a circle around me and we all did pushups until I literally collapsed. But the bulk of the memories I have are pretty good.
I quit taking karate because the fun went out of it. We switched from bare-hand fighting to weapons fighting. When I'd started, we would do a little weapons work about once every six months. By the time I quit, it was every other week. We stopped having the all-out sparring matches and switched to tournament sparring, where you stop after every blow that lands and bow and start over again. I'm short, and all my favorite moves involved taking a hit on the arm or in the leg in order to deliver a more telling blow to the stomach or the face. These were good tactics for real fighting, but useless for a tournament, because in tournament sparring the first blow gets the point, not the most damaging. It seemed that the school had shifted away from being a way to learn self-defense and into something that was nothing more than a trendy way to get exercise and win awards. And that's not why I was there.
When I took AP English my senior year, I had the shihan as my teacher. He taught a very unusual English class. Senior English was supposed to be World Literature. He picked, almost exclusively, books that had a somewhat oriental philosophy. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, Illusions. We wrote exactly one paper the entire year. The rest of the year, we wrote essays, and then instead of turning them in we read them out loud to the rest of the class. Toward the end of the year, we broke into groups of four or five, and we created multimedia essays. My group did their essay on Finding Yourself, and we must have used ten or twelve rolls of film to get the forty or so slides we needed. We spent countless hours listening to each others' musical selections to pick the song clips we wanted. We drove for hours looking for the perfect spots for our photo shoots. It was fantastic.
As an English teacher, he still taught was I'd been missing in the karate classes: How to take something that's been done, and done, and done, and make it your own. How to take pride in what you do. How to face everyone and everything else without fear.
For those lessons, I will be forever grateful.
11:00 AM - So. Here I am. I just got so completely frustrated with my job that I just locked myself in the bathroom and cried for fifteen minutes. It's not just that the project is hard. I've had hard projects before, and they've been irritating, but not like this. The problem is that I'm pretty good at abstract design. I actually can see a clear picture in my head of how the pieces of this program should fit together. I can even write it up in pseudo-code. It's the nit-picky fucking details that are killing me. Convert this really big piece of information from one data type to another. Yeah, that's how it should be done - the best, the most efficient way to handle the program, but I haven't the slightest damned idea of how to go about it. Close off this library before starting the second, because they won't work in sync. Well, that's not the most efficient way to do it, but I have no control over the two libraries, so it's the only way to do it, but I still have to look up how to load a library in the first place every single time I do it. I haven't the least idea how to go about closing one!
So I go to my task lead for help. He spent the last several months learning how to handle that big piece of data, so I thought he'd have some good tips on how to do the conversion I need to do. He sortof waved in the general direction of some code that does the opposite of what I need to do, and gave me something to feed to the Help menu, which helped a little, but not nearly enough. To make matters worse, it seems like every time I ask him for help his answers get short and terser and more irritable-sounding. (This may not actually be the case; we're communicating via e-mail, which is notorious for transmitting incorrect impressions. But the point remains that this is the impression I'm receiving.) The longer I work on this project, and the more I have to keep begging him for scraps to the puzzle, the stupider and more useless I feel. After an hour and a half this morning of not being able to accomplish a gods-cursed thing, I collapsed under the pressure. I'm still feeling a little rough around the edges, like just anything could set me off at any time, which is not good, because I hate breaking down where people can see.
And I was in such a good mood this morning.
I loved it when we first started out. The teacher didn't call himself a sensei, which is what most dojo masters call themselves. We called him shihan, which means "master" and which, I discovered much later, was considered moderately arrogant of him. But that's what we called him. There were a couple of black belts in the class, and we called them sensei. But the classes were good. Advanced students paired with newer students to teach the punches and the kicks, and we learned kata, and we sparred. Actually, I had trouble learning the kata at the full-speed pace of the class, so I frequently stayed late to work on it with one of the senseis. And I loved it. I didn't care much for the warm-up exercises - situps and running and pushups, but I had a necklace that I wore all the time and thought of as my "focus", and it gave me just enough of a mental edge to get through them. I did situps and pushups every morning and night, too - at one time I was doing over 500 situps a day.
But what I liked best about it was the sparring. When I first started with the lessons, about twice a month we'd have sparring sessions. I loved to spar, even when I lost badly. This wasn't tournament sparring. This was a rough, defend-yourself-at-all-costs fight. The shihan sometimes set us up with two-on-one or three-on-one fights. Once he matched a new student against a mid-level student and laughed like a madman when the new student kicked the other student's ass, because the mid-level student only knew how to defend against karate and the new student had learned street-fighting. I loved it. I wasn't taking the class because I wanted the exercise, or because karate was a trendy thing to do. I was taking it because I had become aware of exactly how vulnerable I could be. (This is something men have trouble understanding. I won't say they can't understand it, because they can - but most of them don't bother to try.) But I was in the 9th or 10th grade, I had breasts worth looking at for the first time, and although I'd never once been so much as leered at, I was intensely aware of the target that I was. Part of the territory of being a woman. Later, I would learn that attitude has as much to do with protection as strength, and I would learn how to cope with the feelings of helplessness and fear. But I'm going off on a tangent. My point is, I enjoyed sparring.
A good friend of mine started with the dojo after I'd been there about six months, and I had an even better time, because we always partnered together for practicing attacks and blocks. Because we knew each other so well (he was by boyfriend's best friend) we knew better than to try to pull punches. We forced each other to learn faster and better.
I won't pretend that it was all rosy. Practices were occasionally brutal. I once acquired a hairline greenstick fracture in my shin during a sparring session and I was told to keep fighting, dammit, was I going to roll over because of a little pain? (I didn't know it was a fracture until over a year later when I had some x-rays taken for other reasons. At the time, I thought it was just a bone-bruise.) Once I whined about having to do pushups, and the shihan arranged everyone in a circle around me and we all did pushups until I literally collapsed. But the bulk of the memories I have are pretty good.
I quit taking karate because the fun went out of it. We switched from bare-hand fighting to weapons fighting. When I'd started, we would do a little weapons work about once every six months. By the time I quit, it was every other week. We stopped having the all-out sparring matches and switched to tournament sparring, where you stop after every blow that lands and bow and start over again. I'm short, and all my favorite moves involved taking a hit on the arm or in the leg in order to deliver a more telling blow to the stomach or the face. These were good tactics for real fighting, but useless for a tournament, because in tournament sparring the first blow gets the point, not the most damaging. It seemed that the school had shifted away from being a way to learn self-defense and into something that was nothing more than a trendy way to get exercise and win awards. And that's not why I was there.
When I took AP English my senior year, I had the shihan as my teacher. He taught a very unusual English class. Senior English was supposed to be World Literature. He picked, almost exclusively, books that had a somewhat oriental philosophy. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, Illusions. We wrote exactly one paper the entire year. The rest of the year, we wrote essays, and then instead of turning them in we read them out loud to the rest of the class. Toward the end of the year, we broke into groups of four or five, and we created multimedia essays. My group did their essay on Finding Yourself, and we must have used ten or twelve rolls of film to get the forty or so slides we needed. We spent countless hours listening to each others' musical selections to pick the song clips we wanted. We drove for hours looking for the perfect spots for our photo shoots. It was fantastic.
As an English teacher, he still taught was I'd been missing in the karate classes: How to take something that's been done, and done, and done, and make it your own. How to take pride in what you do. How to face everyone and everything else without fear.
For those lessons, I will be forever grateful.
11:00 AM - So. Here I am. I just got so completely frustrated with my job that I just locked myself in the bathroom and cried for fifteen minutes. It's not just that the project is hard. I've had hard projects before, and they've been irritating, but not like this. The problem is that I'm pretty good at abstract design. I actually can see a clear picture in my head of how the pieces of this program should fit together. I can even write it up in pseudo-code. It's the nit-picky fucking details that are killing me. Convert this really big piece of information from one data type to another. Yeah, that's how it should be done - the best, the most efficient way to handle the program, but I haven't the slightest damned idea of how to go about it. Close off this library before starting the second, because they won't work in sync. Well, that's not the most efficient way to do it, but I have no control over the two libraries, so it's the only way to do it, but I still have to look up how to load a library in the first place every single time I do it. I haven't the least idea how to go about closing one!
So I go to my task lead for help. He spent the last several months learning how to handle that big piece of data, so I thought he'd have some good tips on how to do the conversion I need to do. He sortof waved in the general direction of some code that does the opposite of what I need to do, and gave me something to feed to the Help menu, which helped a little, but not nearly enough. To make matters worse, it seems like every time I ask him for help his answers get short and terser and more irritable-sounding. (This may not actually be the case; we're communicating via e-mail, which is notorious for transmitting incorrect impressions. But the point remains that this is the impression I'm receiving.) The longer I work on this project, and the more I have to keep begging him for scraps to the puzzle, the stupider and more useless I feel. After an hour and a half this morning of not being able to accomplish a gods-cursed thing, I collapsed under the pressure. I'm still feeling a little rough around the edges, like just anything could set me off at any time, which is not good, because I hate breaking down where people can see.
And I was in such a good mood this morning.
Tuesday, April 6, 1999
Archive - 7 April 1999
Ack! I forgot! I blithely read my morning mail, my comics, and the journals I read regularly, and I forgot to write my entry! Shame and dishonor! I'm not worthy to stain your desktop! How will I ever recover from the ignominy, the embarrassment, the guilt! Please, I beg you, cast me forth, flog me with this noodle...
Ouch! What'd you do that for?
Okay, okay, so I'm a lousy hour late or so. You weren't all that wound up about the puzzle anyway, were you? Didn't think so.
Went to Weight Watcher's last night and discovered that I'd lost the weight I gained over the last two weeks. Yay! Easter candy must be good for me! Well, okay. Maybe next week I'll get my 25-pound bookmark. Getting thinner by the... Well, by the month, anyway. I was so pleased that I skipped the meeting and went shopping instead. (Hey, I needed to pick up some sneakers to go to the gym with!)
Now Roses has some sneakers! No stupid sports-specific shoes for them, nosir! And no lame foam arch supports for me to rip out, either. (No ankle support, either, but you can't have everything, and how much ankle support does one really need for a stationary bike, anyway?)
I need to learn not to go to that store by myself, though. I almost got really carried away. Picked up a new pair of water shoes, since the old ones were falling apart. And oh - check out this strawberry scented body scrub! And look! New socks! And the hair gadgets have been marked down to two for a dollar! How can you beat that??!? Almost got an ironing board, but decided I didn't want to carry it around the store with me. I finally found some shoes with heels that were almost comfortable - but thought that if I came home with three pairs of shoes I'd be setting myself up for another mocking from Matt. (They didn't have them in the color I wanted, anyway.) I had to physically restrain myself from wandering back to the crafts section, because I haven't worked on the knitting projects I've got in two weeks, I certainly don't need any more yarn! I tried on about four hats and decided that I actually look pretty damn cute in straw hats - but I never go outside, so I didn't get one. (Though maybe if I'm very good this week, I'll go get one of the cheaper ones next week. After I see how much money is left after paying the bills.) Almost got a marked-down post-Easter stuffed rabbit, too, but decided at the last minute that it wasn't as cute as I'd initially thought. I finally had to drag myself to the cash register or I'd run out of willpower!
That place is dangerous, I tell ya!
Just took a short break to watch some Muppet movies. How cool can you get? Matt discovered last night that we actually get the new Odessey cable channel which is showing the old Muppet Show episodes every night at 6! Whoo-hoo! Of course, it was less cool when we realized that most nights, we don't get home until almost 7. We'll have to re-learn how to program the VCR, I guess!
I'm in a pretty good mood today. I hope it lasts!
Ouch! What'd you do that for?
Okay, okay, so I'm a lousy hour late or so. You weren't all that wound up about the puzzle anyway, were you? Didn't think so.
Went to Weight Watcher's last night and discovered that I'd lost the weight I gained over the last two weeks. Yay! Easter candy must be good for me! Well, okay. Maybe next week I'll get my 25-pound bookmark. Getting thinner by the... Well, by the month, anyway. I was so pleased that I skipped the meeting and went shopping instead. (Hey, I needed to pick up some sneakers to go to the gym with!)
Now Roses has some sneakers! No stupid sports-specific shoes for them, nosir! And no lame foam arch supports for me to rip out, either. (No ankle support, either, but you can't have everything, and how much ankle support does one really need for a stationary bike, anyway?)
I need to learn not to go to that store by myself, though. I almost got really carried away. Picked up a new pair of water shoes, since the old ones were falling apart. And oh - check out this strawberry scented body scrub! And look! New socks! And the hair gadgets have been marked down to two for a dollar! How can you beat that??!? Almost got an ironing board, but decided I didn't want to carry it around the store with me. I finally found some shoes with heels that were almost comfortable - but thought that if I came home with three pairs of shoes I'd be setting myself up for another mocking from Matt. (They didn't have them in the color I wanted, anyway.) I had to physically restrain myself from wandering back to the crafts section, because I haven't worked on the knitting projects I've got in two weeks, I certainly don't need any more yarn! I tried on about four hats and decided that I actually look pretty damn cute in straw hats - but I never go outside, so I didn't get one. (Though maybe if I'm very good this week, I'll go get one of the cheaper ones next week. After I see how much money is left after paying the bills.) Almost got a marked-down post-Easter stuffed rabbit, too, but decided at the last minute that it wasn't as cute as I'd initially thought. I finally had to drag myself to the cash register or I'd run out of willpower!
That place is dangerous, I tell ya!
Just took a short break to watch some Muppet movies. How cool can you get? Matt discovered last night that we actually get the new Odessey cable channel which is showing the old Muppet Show episodes every night at 6! Whoo-hoo! Of course, it was less cool when we realized that most nights, we don't get home until almost 7. We'll have to re-learn how to program the VCR, I guess!
I'm in a pretty good mood today. I hope it lasts!
Archive - 6 April 1999
Hot damn. Ten people were on the MeadeHall last night! Braz, Jeff, Tom, Mike, Karen, KT, Matt, Shbee, Jeremy, and me! It's a new record! We're usually feeling pretty exciting if we get more than four!
As a result, we stuck around afterwards and chatted until about 10:30, and so Matt and I didn't get to bed until after 11, and now I'm tired. I was so tired when the cat started his usual morning pestiness that it didn't bother me enough to worry about. Matt actually got up and put the cat out, and he even picked up my glasses from where the cat had knocked them. Isn't my sweetie great?
::yawn:: But I'm still tired. And my allergies are acting up, oh joy.
Weight Watchers meeting tonight, too. Moment of truth - how bad was I with that Easter candy? I was pretty good the rest of the week, though. Hopefully that will have offset the candy, but I really won't know for certain until I get on that scale tonight.
I'm sorry this is so lame, but I didn't get enough sleep last night again, I had to wake up before dawn again, and I've got an actual deadline coming up in a couple of weeks. I'm a little distracted.
I actually joined the gym yesterday. Up until now, we've just been paying for the one water aerobics class that we go to. Now, I've got the option of doing something on my own instead. Hopefully, having paid over a hundred dollars, I'll feel obligated to actually use the facilities. (I know, I know, $125 isn't a lot of money to spend on a gym membership, but it's more than I've ever paid to exercise before!) But last night I looked around the apartment and came to the realization that I must have thrown away my old sneakers. So now I have to go get some new ones.
Minor rant: What the hell is with shoe stores? Okay, I understand that if you're going to get really into exercising, you want the shoes that have been carefully designed for your particular pain. Walking and running shoes tilt you forward a bit (because of course everyone knows it's easier to walk downhill) and basketball shoes protect your ankles and the other sports shoes do other things for you. But what kind of shoes do you get if you don't know what kind of exercise you'll be doing the most of? I'm just starting out, for pete's sake! Will it be the stationary bike? The track? The elliptical stair machine? Weights? (Do they have special sneakers for weight-lifting? It wouldn't surprise me.) Don't tell me I should buy "cross-trainers" either. Those things are not normal sneakers, and the price tag agrees. All I want is a rubber sole, cloth that breathes, and plenty of room in the toe-box. I have my own prescription arch supports, so an arch in the shoe is a waste of time. (In fact, I'll probably wind up having to pull the insole out of the shoe.)
Anyhow, I need to go shopping for yet another pair of shoes, which is an activity that I enjoy almost as much as going to the dentist. Wish me luck...
As a result, we stuck around afterwards and chatted until about 10:30, and so Matt and I didn't get to bed until after 11, and now I'm tired. I was so tired when the cat started his usual morning pestiness that it didn't bother me enough to worry about. Matt actually got up and put the cat out, and he even picked up my glasses from where the cat had knocked them. Isn't my sweetie great?
::yawn:: But I'm still tired. And my allergies are acting up, oh joy.
Weight Watchers meeting tonight, too. Moment of truth - how bad was I with that Easter candy? I was pretty good the rest of the week, though. Hopefully that will have offset the candy, but I really won't know for certain until I get on that scale tonight.
I'm sorry this is so lame, but I didn't get enough sleep last night again, I had to wake up before dawn again, and I've got an actual deadline coming up in a couple of weeks. I'm a little distracted.
I actually joined the gym yesterday. Up until now, we've just been paying for the one water aerobics class that we go to. Now, I've got the option of doing something on my own instead. Hopefully, having paid over a hundred dollars, I'll feel obligated to actually use the facilities. (I know, I know, $125 isn't a lot of money to spend on a gym membership, but it's more than I've ever paid to exercise before!) But last night I looked around the apartment and came to the realization that I must have thrown away my old sneakers. So now I have to go get some new ones.
Minor rant: What the hell is with shoe stores? Okay, I understand that if you're going to get really into exercising, you want the shoes that have been carefully designed for your particular pain. Walking and running shoes tilt you forward a bit (because of course everyone knows it's easier to walk downhill) and basketball shoes protect your ankles and the other sports shoes do other things for you. But what kind of shoes do you get if you don't know what kind of exercise you'll be doing the most of? I'm just starting out, for pete's sake! Will it be the stationary bike? The track? The elliptical stair machine? Weights? (Do they have special sneakers for weight-lifting? It wouldn't surprise me.) Don't tell me I should buy "cross-trainers" either. Those things are not normal sneakers, and the price tag agrees. All I want is a rubber sole, cloth that breathes, and plenty of room in the toe-box. I have my own prescription arch supports, so an arch in the shoe is a waste of time. (In fact, I'll probably wind up having to pull the insole out of the shoe.)
Anyhow, I need to go shopping for yet another pair of shoes, which is an activity that I enjoy almost as much as going to the dentist. Wish me luck...
Monday, April 5, 1999
Archive - 5 April 1999
::Yaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwn:: I hate Daylight Savings Time. It's completely useless. Maybe back when they first came up with the idea, it served some purpose, but these days, it's just a has-been concept playing with my sleep cycles. Why do we do this to ourselves? The office environment is not significantly improved by shifting the hours of daylight one way or the other.
My dad likes it. He goes to work at some absurdly early hour of the morning and works ten or twelve hour days, so at this time of year, Daylight Savings Time is the only way he gets to see the sun. But for pete's sake, if he wanted to come in yet another hour early so he could leave at 6 instead of 7 each night, he could probably do that without forcing the rest of us up while it's still dark outside. I hatehateHATE getting up before dawn. It's just wrong.
So last night I couldn't get my brain to shut up, and I wound up lying awake until almost 1am, and the cat woke me up at 4, and then the alarm went off at 6. So I'm not the best-rested chick on the planet right now. All I really want to do is put my head down on my desk and take a nap. But no - I've got to actually function. Write a journal entry, reply to e-mail, do my job... And all this with the sensation of cotton on my brain, and unless I concentrate carefully, my eyeballs keep rolling off in different directions.
So I told Matt to put real candy in my Easter basket. Chocolate, for pete's sake, and none of that weird sugar-free candy that plays havoc with my digestive system. Darling that he is, that's what I got. Almond Joy and Reese's Cup and M&Ms and more. Yum. Only now I'm feeling sortof guilty about it. I'm never going to lose weight like this. ::sigh::
But Easter dinner was nice. I love lamb. And carrots and peas and potatoes and bread and olives stuffed with garlic. Yum yum yum yum yum. I'm paying for it today - vegetables and soup and I'm skipping breakfast. But I only get lamb once a year, so it's worth it.
Okay, this is a really lame, whiney journal entry. But you'll have to excuse me; my left eyeball just rolled under my desk, and I think I'll follow it and take a little nap...
My dad likes it. He goes to work at some absurdly early hour of the morning and works ten or twelve hour days, so at this time of year, Daylight Savings Time is the only way he gets to see the sun. But for pete's sake, if he wanted to come in yet another hour early so he could leave at 6 instead of 7 each night, he could probably do that without forcing the rest of us up while it's still dark outside. I hatehateHATE getting up before dawn. It's just wrong.
So last night I couldn't get my brain to shut up, and I wound up lying awake until almost 1am, and the cat woke me up at 4, and then the alarm went off at 6. So I'm not the best-rested chick on the planet right now. All I really want to do is put my head down on my desk and take a nap. But no - I've got to actually function. Write a journal entry, reply to e-mail, do my job... And all this with the sensation of cotton on my brain, and unless I concentrate carefully, my eyeballs keep rolling off in different directions.
So I told Matt to put real candy in my Easter basket. Chocolate, for pete's sake, and none of that weird sugar-free candy that plays havoc with my digestive system. Darling that he is, that's what I got. Almond Joy and Reese's Cup and M&Ms and more. Yum. Only now I'm feeling sortof guilty about it. I'm never going to lose weight like this. ::sigh::
But Easter dinner was nice. I love lamb. And carrots and peas and potatoes and bread and olives stuffed with garlic. Yum yum yum yum yum. I'm paying for it today - vegetables and soup and I'm skipping breakfast. But I only get lamb once a year, so it's worth it.
Okay, this is a really lame, whiney journal entry. But you'll have to excuse me; my left eyeball just rolled under my desk, and I think I'll follow it and take a little nap...
Friday, April 2, 1999
Archive - 2 April 1999
So, did anyone play any good April's Fool jokes on you yesterday? I wasn't taken in by any. The radio station I listen to in the car was doing it's annual prank, which is to say they were announcing that some absolutely absurd new law had been passed, and playing back the irate phone calls. (I have to admit, yesterday's was a good one - they were explaining that the state had voted to make it illegal to smoke while driving. They even had some guy call in and explain the punishments. I might have believed them if they hadn't done similar stunts for the last three years.) My office-mate was taken in by the announcement of a Microsoft lawsuit against the UserFriendly site, and because they'd been leading up to it for weeks, he scoffed at my proclamation of "April Fool!" My husband could probably have tricked me, but he was so completely disgusted by all the tomfoolery out there that he refrained from doing any himself.
Actually, he did his romance of the week yesterday, and to give him time to get set up for it, I went shopping after work and my dentist appointment. I had thought about going down to Target to pick up something for a baby shower I'm going to next week, but since my dentist appointment ran a bit long, I just went to the grocery store and bought some stuff I've been meaning to pick up, and the candy for Matt's Easter basket. Matt's a little irritated with himself now, because he hasn't picked up anything for mine yet and he's not sure when he'll have time to do it. I'm guessing we'll agree that I'll go shopping tonight for the baby shower gift, and he can dash out to the KMart or whatever then.
I'm excited about Easter, too, because we decorated all these pretty eggs last weekend, and while I'm sure I'll get sick of them before the dozen are gone, right now I've got a real hankering for some devilled eggs! And we're having Easter dinner with my parents, and my mom's traditional Easter dinner (lamb, new potatoes, and peas) is pretty damn good.
Yeah, okay, so it's a sortof boring entry. Who cares? I don't have that many regular readers, and most of you know me in real life and understand that my life is just not very exciting on a regular basis. (And hey - I keep a lot of detailed statistics on my webpages, and there's at least two regular readers out there that I haven't identified yet, but you're both logging in from William and Mary, and why haven't you signed my guestbook yet???)
And hey, I almost forgot the news! Matt and I drove by the house site last night after dinner, and there are stakes in the yard! Okay, it was after dark, so we couldn't really see what the stakes were or what they were for, but it's definitely a sign that they're going to start work any day now! ::grin::
Actually, he did his romance of the week yesterday, and to give him time to get set up for it, I went shopping after work and my dentist appointment. I had thought about going down to Target to pick up something for a baby shower I'm going to next week, but since my dentist appointment ran a bit long, I just went to the grocery store and bought some stuff I've been meaning to pick up, and the candy for Matt's Easter basket. Matt's a little irritated with himself now, because he hasn't picked up anything for mine yet and he's not sure when he'll have time to do it. I'm guessing we'll agree that I'll go shopping tonight for the baby shower gift, and he can dash out to the KMart or whatever then.
I'm excited about Easter, too, because we decorated all these pretty eggs last weekend, and while I'm sure I'll get sick of them before the dozen are gone, right now I've got a real hankering for some devilled eggs! And we're having Easter dinner with my parents, and my mom's traditional Easter dinner (lamb, new potatoes, and peas) is pretty damn good.
Yeah, okay, so it's a sortof boring entry. Who cares? I don't have that many regular readers, and most of you know me in real life and understand that my life is just not very exciting on a regular basis. (And hey - I keep a lot of detailed statistics on my webpages, and there's at least two regular readers out there that I haven't identified yet, but you're both logging in from William and Mary, and why haven't you signed my guestbook yet???)
And hey, I almost forgot the news! Matt and I drove by the house site last night after dinner, and there are stakes in the yard! Okay, it was after dark, so we couldn't really see what the stakes were or what they were for, but it's definitely a sign that they're going to start work any day now! ::grin::
Thursday, April 1, 1999
Archive - 1 April 1999
So. Yesterday the company provided pizza for lunch (one of the many benefits of working here) and we all sat and listened to this guy Ted talk about our 401(k) program. Ted comes in once or twice a year and tells us that unless we're retiring in the next few years that we should be investing in the really aggressive funds, and then we get to have fun asking him questions and listening to him never quite answer the questions. Anyway, at one point, he was talking about inflation, and how there was going to be inflation very soon because unemployment was down so far and everyone had so much money and we were all, and this is a direct quote: "consuming our heads off."
I don't even want to tell you what kind of mental images flashed through my mind at that!
I've been having this memory over and over for the last few weeks. Maybe if I type it out here, I'll stop remembering it so much. When I was in college at William and Mary, I dated this guy that I'll just call P., because our relationship ended rather poorly and he's decided that I am Evil Incarnate, or something like that. Anyway, P. was (and probably still is) very much into the recreational drug scene: marijuana, mostly. I had asked him several times to stop, but he wouldn't. (To be fair, it was from him and his friends that I learned that marijuana isn't quite as terrible as They had led me to believe, though I tried it twice and will never do so again, because it makes me so paranoid I can't even walk around the block.) Anyway, here's the memory that's been plaguing me:
This was still early in our relationship, when I was still trying to get him to quit the drugs. P. was protesting that it wasn't as bad as I made it sound, and he said, "Even my dad does it sometimes!" That, I couldn't believe. P.'s dad reminded me of Dr. Emmit Brown from the Back to the Future movies, in both appearance and personality. He was (still is, I suppose) a professor of physics at William and Mary. But I could not imagine him doing any sort of illegal drug. So I asked P. what made him believe that. P. replied that he'd had a stash (of marijuana) in his room, and it disappeared, and later he noticed that his dad's eyes were red - from the smoke, he assumed.
I didn't say anything, but now I wish I had. What went through my mind was, Doesn't it occur to you that his eyes were red because he had found and confiscated your damn stash and was crushed to know you had it?
Last night, Matt and I went over to KT and Kevin's for dinner. KT has started a journal of her own, called Me Too! Me Too! She doesn't promise to update every day, but that's fine. Updating every day is my special obsession.
Anyway, we went over there last night, ostensibly to talk about the Alternity game KT is running, but really just because. KT likes to cook, so this was an excuse for her to show off her skills for us. Man! That was one fantastic dinner! Weinerschnitzel and salad and baked apples and wild rice and bread and black forest cake for dessert! Yeah, I love having friends who cook... ::grin:: I think it would be kindof cool if maybe once a month we had dinner with them, and Matt and I would pay for the groceries if KT would plan the menu and do the cooking. I think that sounds pretty fair, don't you?
We wound up watching Mulan instead of talking about the game. I have to say, I think Mulan is definitely one of Disney's best offerings ever. They didn't mutilate the original story very much, and they didn't mutilate the culture very much, either. I was thrilled when I first saw it that 1) the father wasn't a short, fat, doting imbecile; 2) the mother was still alive and not a terrible person; 3) the daughter wasn't rebelling against the rules of her society; and 4) that Disney didn't turn it into a romance until the very end (and even then, the romance was implied more than shown.) I want that movie. I suppose I should wait until after Matt's and my anniversary to buy it myself, although I already know what Matt's getting me.
I had a fantastic day yesterday. I think I just sortof decided that I was going to be in a good mood, so I was. I did a little whining about going to aerobics (the jelly beans are gone now) and Matt and I got into a little snip-fight when we both misunderstood what the other person was saying, but I cheered up pretty quickly. We looked over the gym - 3GI finally sprang for a corporate sponsorship, so we're thinking of joining - and then went to class, and wonder of wonders! the locker room was a comfortable temperature, and I got my hair into a bun on the first try, and I got used to the water quicker than usual (and Matt teased me by whining about it in role reversal, but I just thought it was funny) and I worked harder than usual in class (knowing in advance, you see, that I was going to be having weinerschnizel for dinner, which is pretty heavy on diet points) and just generally had a great evening.
That's for those of you who are tired of reading my whining. ::grin:: Who knows, maybe I'll have a great day today, too. The weather is still fantastic, so why not?
I don't even want to tell you what kind of mental images flashed through my mind at that!
I've been having this memory over and over for the last few weeks. Maybe if I type it out here, I'll stop remembering it so much. When I was in college at William and Mary, I dated this guy that I'll just call P., because our relationship ended rather poorly and he's decided that I am Evil Incarnate, or something like that. Anyway, P. was (and probably still is) very much into the recreational drug scene: marijuana, mostly. I had asked him several times to stop, but he wouldn't. (To be fair, it was from him and his friends that I learned that marijuana isn't quite as terrible as They had led me to believe, though I tried it twice and will never do so again, because it makes me so paranoid I can't even walk around the block.) Anyway, here's the memory that's been plaguing me:
This was still early in our relationship, when I was still trying to get him to quit the drugs. P. was protesting that it wasn't as bad as I made it sound, and he said, "Even my dad does it sometimes!" That, I couldn't believe. P.'s dad reminded me of Dr. Emmit Brown from the Back to the Future movies, in both appearance and personality. He was (still is, I suppose) a professor of physics at William and Mary. But I could not imagine him doing any sort of illegal drug. So I asked P. what made him believe that. P. replied that he'd had a stash (of marijuana) in his room, and it disappeared, and later he noticed that his dad's eyes were red - from the smoke, he assumed.
I didn't say anything, but now I wish I had. What went through my mind was, Doesn't it occur to you that his eyes were red because he had found and confiscated your damn stash and was crushed to know you had it?
Last night, Matt and I went over to KT and Kevin's for dinner. KT has started a journal of her own, called Me Too! Me Too! She doesn't promise to update every day, but that's fine. Updating every day is my special obsession.
Anyway, we went over there last night, ostensibly to talk about the Alternity game KT is running, but really just because. KT likes to cook, so this was an excuse for her to show off her skills for us. Man! That was one fantastic dinner! Weinerschnitzel and salad and baked apples and wild rice and bread and black forest cake for dessert! Yeah, I love having friends who cook... ::grin:: I think it would be kindof cool if maybe once a month we had dinner with them, and Matt and I would pay for the groceries if KT would plan the menu and do the cooking. I think that sounds pretty fair, don't you?
We wound up watching Mulan instead of talking about the game. I have to say, I think Mulan is definitely one of Disney's best offerings ever. They didn't mutilate the original story very much, and they didn't mutilate the culture very much, either. I was thrilled when I first saw it that 1) the father wasn't a short, fat, doting imbecile; 2) the mother was still alive and not a terrible person; 3) the daughter wasn't rebelling against the rules of her society; and 4) that Disney didn't turn it into a romance until the very end (and even then, the romance was implied more than shown.) I want that movie. I suppose I should wait until after Matt's and my anniversary to buy it myself, although I already know what Matt's getting me.
I had a fantastic day yesterday. I think I just sortof decided that I was going to be in a good mood, so I was. I did a little whining about going to aerobics (the jelly beans are gone now) and Matt and I got into a little snip-fight when we both misunderstood what the other person was saying, but I cheered up pretty quickly. We looked over the gym - 3GI finally sprang for a corporate sponsorship, so we're thinking of joining - and then went to class, and wonder of wonders! the locker room was a comfortable temperature, and I got my hair into a bun on the first try, and I got used to the water quicker than usual (and Matt teased me by whining about it in role reversal, but I just thought it was funny) and I worked harder than usual in class (knowing in advance, you see, that I was going to be having weinerschnizel for dinner, which is pretty heavy on diet points) and just generally had a great evening.
That's for those of you who are tired of reading my whining. ::grin:: Who knows, maybe I'll have a great day today, too. The weather is still fantastic, so why not?
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