30 June 2000

I woke up this morning to turn over. Not at all unusual; I do it at least three or four times a night. Sometimes I open my eyes briefly and look at the clock, sometimes I don't bother. This morning, I didn't bother. I thought to myself, Hmm... I hope I've got time before the alarm clock goes off to-

Breep! Breep! Breep! Breep! Breep!

Damn.

I don't even remember what it was I wanted to do before the alarm went off.

Here's something that doesn't happen often: I was the one who wanted to go to the movie, and Matt was the one who wanted to stay home.

K.T. asked if we'd like to meet her and Kevin to go see Chicken Run, which looks like a very silly, fun movie. Both Matt and I want to see it, so I told her probably yes, but needed to wait until Matt got home and check with him to be sure. I didn't think it would be a problem - usually I'm the one who's picky about movies and doesn't want to see things. K.T. and I decided we could eat dinner before the movie at the Chinese place in the same shopping center - I'd developed a craving for fried rice about half an hour earlier - and worked out the movie times and figured we'd all be home before ten.

Matt came home, and I told him the suggestion.

Alas, between a moderately crappy day at work and a mild cold that had him sneezing all day and flat-out exhausted, Matt was not in the mood to go anywhere. He suggested that I could go without him, but I knew if I did that, then he'd never see the movie. I don't think it's going to be such a great movie that I'll want to see it twice, and Matt and I almost never rent movies, no matter how much we say we will.

So I relayed the bad news to K.T. I hope she wasn't too upset with us.

So K.T. was sufficiently impressed by the story bit I wrote yesterday for the Word of the Day that I'm thinking of turning it into a complete story, with a plot and everything. I spent a few minutes yesterday brainstorming ideas. I threw one of them at Braz, who told me it sounded like William Gibson's Neuromancer.

I've read most everything else Gibson's written, but not the one book he's best well-known for. Weird, huh? Now I'm trying to decide if I should read it before I write the story, so I know what kinds of things to avoid (I don't want to come off looking like a complete plagarist), or if reading it in advance will just influence me too much.

I know. It's a hard life I lead.

Word of the Day: maudlin - drunk enough to be emotionally silly; weakly and effusively sentimental

Oh, I get maudlin pretty frequently, and not always when I'm drinking. I've been known to weep when I consider my friends, cling desperately to my husband, and cry hysterically at the mere thought of losing my cat. I've even used the word "maudlin" to describe my mood on occasion.

But usually I just call it P.M.S. and leave it at that.

29 June 2000

Ack. Three of my fingernails have torn, and two more have split. (Yes, I mean torn, not chipped or broke. I have very soft fingernails, and they have only two behaviors: they tear off, or they split lengthwise.) And I don't have clippers here at work, so I'm going to have to use the scissors on my swiss-army knife left-handed. Joy.

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is one of those days. I'm not grumpy - quite the contrary; I'm in a fairly good mood - but it's dark and raining outside, I'm sleepy, I'm sniffly, I want to go back to bed, and I can't think of anything worth talking about.

I'm feeling pretty good about work, at least. I'm on a new project that is in essense an extention of the old project, but if it goes through, the four of us who are working on it will have given our office its first major non-government contract, and its biggest single contract ever. Four of us. Heh. It makes me a little nervous, but if we can pull it off, it will do wonders for my career, both in terms of salary and options.

I can't actually talk too much about the project here, since some of my readers are competitors to this company, but one thing I'm pleased about is that my manager noticed how well the Two Mikes and I work together, and decided not to screw with it: Scary Mike will be doing the network stuff, Random Mike will be doing all the hardware interfaces and underlying dlls, the manager will be doing all the really freaky stuff like cryptography, and I'll be pulling it all together into an interface. And, it looks like for this project, I'll be handling the databases, since I'm the only one with any database experience in this team.

I'm actually kindof excited about it. Of course, you'll want to ask me again in September, when the first phase is scheduled to be finished, and yet again in December or January when the whole thing is supposed to be done. If I'm capable of coherence between last-minute panic and the lack of sleep, my whole opinion may well have changed a bit by then.

Damn, I'm sleepy. I can't figure out if it's the allergy attack (darnit, my Claritin isn't working!), the rainy weather, or the fact that I spent half the night sloshing through surreal dreams that faded the instant I awoke.

Maybe it's because I spent half of yesterday with Barenaked Ladies songs bouncing around in my head. The whole morning my brain was insisting that "Enid, we never really knew each other anyway," and the whole evening after I got home from work, I kept mentally humming, "This is me in grade nine, baby." Naturally, I could only remember the choruses, not the verses, so they played on continuous loop until I was ready to kill.

So today I brought the CD to work with me. Hopefully that'll stave off any further mental bombardments.

Word of the Day: dovecote - a small compartmented raised house for domestic pigeons; a settled or harmonious group or organization

Every morning after the war, Joshua went up to the roof to check on the dovecote. It wasn't that he felt responsible for them or anything, but that the chore gave him some slight excuse to get away from the pounding resentment that coursed in waves through the living spaces below.

He especially appreciated it when they needed some care - when the whitewash on the box was peeling, or the occupants required some attention more than simple feeding. After the war, idle hands were simply inexcusable. Even sleep was put to work, excess heat stored to incubate the more-than-ever precious babies, and every minute that Joshua spent caring for the 'cote was a minute he didn't have to be down in the living spaces in the noisy, cold dark.

This morning Joshua opened the front of the box and frowned. They had been fighting again. More and more, since the war, they fought during the night. Mama Sichel had scoffed and insisted that you couldn't tell what they did when the doors were closed. They were only screens and wires and buttons, she'd told Joshua as they'd mixed up the day's rations, and brains floating in vats of amniotic fluid. All you could do, she had said, stirring the pot with unnecessary vigor, was follow the instructions they gave. That, she snapped, actually stopping for a few seconds to glare at him, was what the dovecotes did.

Joshua knew better than to argue with Mama Sichel when she was in one of her moods. But he whispered his theories to the screens as he cared for them, pushing the buttons that fed nutrients into the vats and carefully wiping their screens. Maybe decision-making was what they did, he told them in a fair imitation of Mama Sichel's thick accents, but no-one knew for certain how they arrived at those decisions. Maybe, he told them, looking seriously into the camera lens on top of the 'cote, they argued about it until they reached a consensus.

Maybe, he muttered, they hadn't intended the war to happen at all, and that was why they fought so much, now.

Joshua had been talking to the dovecote ever since the war. Never before had it answered.

28 June 2000

When we were in high school together, Mila and I were best friends.

I'm not sure how it happened - I started out as a girlie-girl, interested in clothes and boys and makeup, too shy to be part of the in-crowd, but by no means part of the outcasts, either. I don't remember meeting Mila for the first time, or what I thought of her before we became friends. My early memories of her are actually sortof sketchy - she wore a lot of black and was into heavy metal; she was constantly reading; she had beautiful long hair, green eyes, and an almost distressingly clear complexion given we were at "that age."

She introduced me to science fiction and fantasy, really. I'd read a little before, but Mila would present me with a bag of fifteen or twenty book about once every two weeks. I got sucked in, and sucked in hard. The two of us spent most of high school with our noses buried in books. Her entire family read that genre of books, so her house was filled with them. I read my way through most of their living room shelves over the space of three or four years.

We didn't agree on everything - I never did quite figure out how she could enjoy heavy metal, for instance - but that was all right. Our friendship transcended petty matters like preferences and opinions. I think I spent more time at Mila's house than my own. I called her mom "Mommy" and for a while even had my own key. I have a sortof spooky story about how I knew something was very wrong a whole day before she told me her father had died. I had a crush on her brother that I never admitted to (everyone had a crush on Mila's brother - it drove her crazy even though they got along better than any brother and sister I'd ever met). I still, ten years later, remember the phone number at her mom's house, even though I still have to look K.T.'s number up every time I call her.

We were more or less out of touch while we were in college. We called during breaks, but our schedules had become so hectic that we didn't get to see each other very often. I managed to track her down - thanks to a chance meeting of Mommy in a bookstore - to invite her to my wedding, and if we'd gone with traditional attendants, I'd probably have asked her to be one of my bridesmaids. It turned out that she had e-mail, so we spent a year or so dropping each other occasional notes. (It's a little odd that we're such bad correspondants when you consider that somewhere I have an entire notebook filled with notes we wrote each other during Latin and History classes.)

She called me a few weeks ago out of the blue and we talked for an hour. She's just finished graduate school and is looking for work. I invited her to come to K.T.'s cookout, and she did show up for an hour or so, but went home early with a headache.

She came over last night, instead, to see our house, get caught up with me, pet my cat, and give me advice on the yard.

Mila has two real passions, now: her cats, and gardening. Aside from general news about our families, we talked about little else. She gave me some advice on how to get grass to grow in our yard and some things to plant and where to put some planting beds and what plants met my requirements of being attractive and low-maintenance.

She's always been about two steps ahead of me in interests and hobbies. She introduced me to a lot of things that I didn't really appreciate until years later. Several times, I've told her about a new hobby only to find out that she'd picked it up years earlier and eventually dropped it.

It makes me wonder if gardening is going to be my next big passion, or if it'll be one of the things I just shrug and nod about.

And as long as I'm talking about passion - one of the things about our friendship that I appreciate is that it's not passionate. We don't squeal with delight when we see each other after a long break, or jabber excitedly about the "good old days." In fact, even though we don't see each other very often anymore, we fall right back into our old patterns. I got the distinct impression last night that we might've very easily wound up sitting on opposite ends of the couch, our feet in each others' laps, reading and petting the cat.

Friendships like this don't happen every day, or even every lifetime. Sometimes, you have to stop and count your blessings.

Word of the Day: malinger - to pretend incapacity (such as illness) to avoid work or duty

The worst part of having plantar fascitis is that it's not visible. No one else can look at me and think, "Wow, I bet that hurts!" So when I'm out and about with other people, I'm always a little hesitant to insist on slowing down because of my feet. Never mind that it feels like there's a sharp, red-hot pebble caught in my shoe; I look perfectly fine, and so I feel like a malingerer when I slow down to a snail's pace, exaggerating my limp a little so they'll remember.

Is that dumb, or what?

27 June 2000

A sample of conversation as Matt and I were going to bed last night:

"I have it on very good authority that boys think about sex all the time!"

"Well, not all the time. Otherwise driving would be pretty hazardous."

"ALL the time!"

"Wow. Think of the distraction the new Beetle would present! 'Look! A breast!'"

About 2 this morning, I woke up thinking I'd heard the cat yeowling. I listened for a few minutes, heard nothing, and decided it was a dream. I adjusted my pillow and went back to sleep.

About fifteen minutes later...

EOWwwwwrrrachKKKKKrrrrrrARRRRRrrrrch!!!

It sounded like an ambulance in a blender. Matt sat straight up. I did, too, and since I'd been lying on my stomach and side, I strained my back doing it. We went out into the hallway, looking for the cat.

Eowwwwwwwwrrarrrrr!

"Downstairs," I said, and led the way.

The cat was on the windowsill in the living room, staring out into the night with hatred, fury, and murder on his tiny little mind. Matt and I lifted convenient pieces of the blinds and looked out.

...nothing.

Eowwwwrrrrrarrrr!

Matt turned on the porch light.

...nothing.

I looked down at the cat. His tail was puffed up like a pom-pom. It had to be another cat - it's the only thing that could've gotten him so angry. That was his yard, even if he never got to go out in it, and he was going to defend it to the death!

I picked him up and petted him and soothed him until his tail was almost normal again. Matt tried to take him up to bed with us, but he ran back downstairs. I could hear his tail smacking into the blinds as he lashed it furiously, but at least this time he left the sirens off.

Half an hour later, of course, he was ready to come up and be snuggly and fuzzy and to pester me until I put him in the garage. As if nothing had happened. Sigh.

Word of the Day: clepe - to name or call. (archaic; past participle yclept still in use.)

I know a lot of people who name their cars. My car has a name, but it's sortof a leftover. My first car was a '79 Plymouth Volare, a clunky white car that came with a radio that was worth more than the rest of the car altogether. The license plate assigned me at the DMV started "BOV" and a friend suggested that this was short for "bovine". The car immediately was yclept "The Cow-Car" and various other friends occasionally threatened to sneak up in the middle of the night and paint Holstein spots on it. (To tell the truth, I probably wouldn't have minded. It would've given it some character other than "Needs a new water pump every two years.")

When I got the new car (well, it was new then) I kept the same plates, and so it, too, by default became the Cow-Car. It didn't work so well for this car, of course, because this car is less clunky and bright electric blue. (It might've been better if I'd gone with the purple car. Then I could've at least mentally recited the Purple Cow poem.)

26 June 2000

Oh, what a great weekend! Karen and Kris and I went to Target after lunch on Friday to pick up water guns and found ourselves sidetracked by the hats. I wound up buying two hats. I was going to put one of them back - I hardly ever wear hats! - but I was informed in no uncertain terms that it was too cute to pass up.

Friday evening we met Matt and Braz and Jeremy for dinner at the Outback. Yum yum yum! I love eating there. It was Karen's first trip, so of course we had to run the full gamut of the Outback experience, from appetizers to dessert. It just wouldn't have been fair otherwise, would it?

Saturday was K.T.'s cookout. I have to say, I'm sortof glad that a lot of people decided not to come. I think the numbers were just about perfect - there were still a lot of people there, and another four or five people and the place would've been too crowded. We ate hamburgers and hot dogs and had a fantastic water gun fight. (Pictures from the party - mostly from the water gun fight - are in the album.)

The water-gun fight wore us out a lot, though. Braz and Kris left around six-thirty or so, and Matt and I left about an hour later, after making sure someone would give Karen a ride later. The four of us went to Ben & Jerry's for some ice cream, but spent most of the evening sitting around the house in an exhausted stupor. The party was worth it, though!

Sunday morning we were all just getting up and going when K.T. called to see if we wanted to meet them to see Titan A.E., which most of us were in fact interested in seeing. We arranged to meet them at the theater, and I panicked at everyone about the timeframe until we were on the road. Getting our snacks made us miss the opening previews, but since they were all for kiddie films, I wasn't too disappointed.

After the movie, we walked across the parking lot to Ruby Tuesday's for lunch. Or maybe dinner. A lot of food, at any rate. I've avoided Ruby Tuesday's for the past year or so - for a while there it seemed like every time I went into one I came out with an upset stomach. But I was fine this time; maybe it's just the Ruby Tuesday's in Williamsburg.

I'm taking this morning off from work - Karen's leaving this morning, and I'll probably head into work after she leaves. I was going to go back to bed after I'd moved my car to let Matt out this morning, but the extremely weird dreams I'd been having all morning while he was getting ready for work made me decide to just get up instead. And as long as I was up, I might as well write a journal entry, right?

Word of the Day: doggerel - loosely styled and irregular in measure especially for burlesque or comic effect; marked by triviality or inferiority (usually applied to verse or poetry)

There was a young lady named Rose
Who was tired of writing in prose.
But her doggerel verse
Is so very much worse
That straight into the trashcan it goes!

23 June 2000

Well, Karen showed up a little before six yesterday evening, and Braz and Kris arrived around 10, and so no one reading this is surprised to discover that I didn't go to bed until after midnight. So I'm a little tired this morning, but reasonably happy.

Carrie and Kathy are going to be staying with us, too, apparently - they'll arrive late tonight with their sleeping bags, and then there will be seven - seven! - people in our little house. (At least, it will probably seem very little with seven of us crammed in there.)

The plan for today is, I'm going to leave work around 11:45 and head home to pick up Karen, Braz, and Kris. We'll meet Matt at one of the local delis for lunch, and then Matt will go back to work, Braz will go back to the house, and I will take Kris and Karen shopping. I need to stop at Target for a watergun or three, and at Sam's Club for hamburger and hotdog buns for the cookout tomorrow. And if we can't manage to waste the entire afternoon at those two places, then the mall is only down the street from Sam's Club a bit!

The evening's plans are a little more nebulous. Jeremy had expressed a desire to get together with us for dinner, but we're not sure where, yet. I gave that job to Matt, and told him he and Jeremy and Braz could work that out and let us girls know when we got back from shopping. (Ah, it's good to be able to hand off these decisions.) After that, we're not sure. We need to be sure to be back at the house no later than 10 to let Carrie and Kathy in. Hmm; a trip to Ben and Jerry's might round out the evening nicely...

Just as a side note, I have to say I think my chair at work is broken. Given how short I am, I like it set relatively high, to keep my arms at a decent position. Carpal tunnel syndrome is one of the few actual physical dangers of being a computer programmer, and it scares the heck out of me. Anyway, while I was typing that previous paragraph, I noticed my arms were at a weird angle, so I checked the height of the chair's armrests against my desk for comparison... Yep; it had dropped again.

I'd blame it on the cleaning staff, but they're not in on Thursday nights, and I didn't notice anything yesterday.

Anyway, tomorrow should be buckets of fun. The radio is predicting sunny weather with highs around 90 for the whole weekend, which makes it a little on the warm side but otherwise perfect weather for a cookout. And since we're all bringing our enormous water-guns to the cookout, I'm sure we'll figure out a way to cope with the heat. ;-)

I recharged my camera's battery yesterday, so I'm sure I'll be running around taking pictures like mad. Especially of faces. The only person so far to give me any negative feedback at all about the eyes page is K.T., who was complaining about her picture more than the concept itself. (To be fair, her picture does suck, and I want to take it over again in better light.) Everyone else has been very complimentary about the concept.

Don't worry, I'll take some regular pictures, too! And K.T. and Kevin recently bought an extension card for their digital camera, so it can now hold something obnoxious like five hundred pictures at once. So you picture hounds will get yours, never fear!

It should be a great weekend. Can't wait. I probably won't get an overabundance of sleep, though...

I just want to wonder right now why it is that I'm getting really lousy service in restaurants lately? Don Pablo's was disappointing last week, and the guy at T.G.I. Friday's wasn't all that good, and our waitress last night at Second St. was pretty crummy - she didn't bring our drinks until we were almost done with our appetizer, and almost forgot to take our orders for our entrees! Is it the season? It's summer, so all the summer-only staff is still being trained? Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I look like the kind of jolly fat woman who'll still tip well even if the service sucks. I'm starting to get annoyed!

Word of the Day: bamboozle - to deceive by underhanded methods; dupe; hoodwink

Now there's a word that should see more use! What a great word! It even sounds sortof shady, in a silly kind of way. It's got that sortof campy feel to it, like an overblown character in a not-altogether-serious 1940's gangster movie.

"Boss! Look behind you!"

"Now see here, Blue Bart, you've bamboozled me for the last time!"

"But, Boss, you've gotta believe me!"

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

"Nice shooting, Angel."

"YOU!"

"That's right, Angel, it's me. And this time I've caught you red-handed!"

22 June 2000

Okay, so no one ever actually uses the forum anymore, so I'm going to chuck it. If you have any objections, then for petesake use the damn thing.

Right. So I actually have some work to do at work today - a week and a half after I'd gone as far as I could, I finally got some new specs to work with.

So I didn't bring any of the books I've been reading and studying to work with me today. I have no illusions that this will actually induce me to actually do the work, but it might get me a little closer.

I know; this is kindof scatterbrained. I swear, if I didn't know better I'd think I was PMS'ing. I've been touchy and irritable and easily upset for several days now. My self-esteem is through the floor, and thinking about how great I felt last week only makes it worse. I'm taking things personally that I probably shouldn't (like K.T.'s negative attitude or the dearth of mail in my Inbox) and overreacting to the things that were directed to me.

Matt spent yesterday evening hovering worriedly because he could tell I was brooding. How do I explain that I know something's not all that important but that I'm going to brood about it anyway without sounding like a complete moron? No, I didn't think you could, either.

Damn it all, I want to be a reasonably well-adjusted human being.

To make matters worse, Karen is going to show up this evening around 5:30 or 6, and Braz and Kris will arrive somewhen around 9 or 10, and I'll want to laugh and joke and smile and have a good time with my friends. Maybe I'll spend today working on an attitude adjustment.

Sorry if this was a downer of an entry. I just suck today.

Word of the Day: abeyance - temporary inactivity; suspension

Does it ever seem to you that life is paused? I was in high school; I was in college; and now life is in abeyance until I decide what it is I want to be when I grow up. Five years almost I've been a programmer, and the longer I do it, the more I know I don't want to be doing this for the rest of my life. But where do I want to go? Do I want to take the track a lot of programmers take and move into management? I was a task lead once at 3GI, but apparently I sucked at it because they never let me be in charge of anything again after that. (Without, of course, telling me why I sucked so I could try to improve. I hate that.)

I love the idea of teaching, but the pay is so awful, and the politics are worse. Sometimes I think I'd enjoy teaching corporate seminars, but I have no idea how to break into that line of work. This area isn't exactly ideal for that kind of thing anyway.

I envy the people I work with sometimes. They love what they do. They're getting paid to do what they love most. That's wonderful. Me? It's just a job. It pays the bills and provides extra money for luxuries. If I won the lottery, I'd quit in a heartbeat. I can't think of a way to pay the bills doing the things I love to do. Too bad for me, huh?

[11:45 am] I love you guys, I really do. I post this kindof whiney, pathetic entry, and I get mail from people asking me to cheer up pretty please and giving me virtual teddy bears to hug (Jeff is so cool!) and everything.

So the upshot of it is that I'm feeling loved and happy and ready to have a really good weekend. Bonus points for a good weekend go to Random, who doesn't even read this journal unless I don't feel like telling a story twice and just point him to a page. He came in this morning with the announcement that he's traded in his truck for a Mazda Miata convertible, and he promised me a ride. Whoo-hoo!

I just wanted to let you all know I was feeling happier now.