21 April 2000

Ack! The end of the month is coming too fast! Tonight's schedule includes baking a pound-cake and dyeing Easter eggs, tomorrow is my game (for which I really need to hurry up and come up with an adventure) and Sunday is Easter! Next week I have a dentist appointment and at some point I really need to get my car to the shop for an inspection.

Ack!

Matt and I went shopping last night for Easter basket stuff. I felt sortof bad about telling Matt, "Okay, you have to go out tonight and buy things for me," but last year the holiday sortof snuck up on him and he wound out going out on Saturday night to pick up the stuff for my basket. Naturally, everything had been picked over by then, so I wound up with a six-pack of Reeses peanut-butter eggs, and a six-pack of Almond Joy eggs.

I like both candy bars, but I like an Easter basket with some variety. Matt felt really bad about it, too, especially since I'd gotten sortof overly enthusiastic about his basket and got him some fun, weird candy. So this year, I suggested that we go during the week, at the same time.

I managed to find enough stuff to fill Matt's basket at Target. The Easter candy was pretty well picked over already, but since Matt had told me he didn't want a lot of candy, that was all right. I found some non-traditional stuff to put in his basket, and some non-food things as well. I think he'll like it.

Since I'd gone all the way across town, and then stopped at the grocery store on my way back (to pick up fruit for Easter dessert and some eggs for dyeing) and Matt had said he planned to just go to the grocery store and the drug store for me, I was pretty sure I'd get back well after him. But no, his car wasn't in the driveway when I got home.

It turned out he'd gone into the colonial district, to stop at the candy store there. (Now I'm really looking forward to my basket!) And while he was there, he'd walked most of the way down the mile-long central street to see if some friends of ours who live out that way were home. They weren't, but the walk had stalled him long enough for me to get home and hide his goodies first.

Today is supposed to be the company's spring cookout. The theory is, several grills are brought in, and everyone brings their own hamburgers or hot dogs, and they grill them during lunch.

I hadn't been planning on participating. I don't keep hamburger patties or hot dogs in the house, and I certainly don't have buns for them. But Becky sent an e-mail to a few of us yesterday demanding that we attend, and the cookout organizers sent out an e-mail saying that there were extras for people who forgot and that we should all attend anyway.

So, what the heck? I figured I'd go, eat a spare hot dog, chat with Becky and Jim and folks, breathe a little fresh air, and then come back to my computer. I told Matt not to bother fixing me a lunch today.

Naturally, of course, it looks like rain, and I'm guessing the cookout will be postponed until next week. And me without a lunch. Ah, well, worse things have happened than me having to eat lunch out.

Word of the Day: hypnagogic - of or relating to the state of drowsiness just before sleep

Look! There's a word for it!

I was in just this state last night when Matt started saying, "Hello? Hello? Are you there?" I tried to tell him that I hadn't said anything and that I certainly hadn't gone anywhere, but I couldn't move. Then I woke up enough to realize that he was playing with the voice-chat features of the new version of Instant Messenger. I got up and shuffled into the computer room, and we spent several minutes speaking loudly into the microphone at Braz, giggling to hear our own voices repeated by his microphone a few seconds later.

20 April 2000

I admit it - I'm a geek. I spent most of yesterday playing with my new Palm Pilot (oops, excuse me; it's just a Palm now) and as a result I don't have much of anything to tell you about today.

You may all now heave a collective sigh of relief that I'm not going to tell you about the silly games I downloaded for it.

So now that I'm not sick anymore, I called my dentist yesterday to re-schedule the appointment I'd cancelled, and I'm going in for my regular cleaning next week. True to form, once they knew it was coming, my gums started to swell and feel sore.

Fifty weeks out of the year, my teeth and gums are just fine. But every six months, for the week before my cleaning, they suddenly degrade so my hygienist gets the impression I don't even own a toothbrush, much less use it on a regular basis.

This evening, Matt and I are going to go shopping for stuff for each others' Easter baskets. I'd been sweating over this for a while, because Matt told me he didn't really want a lot of candy in his basket, so after the obligatory fuzzy bunny and a little bit of candy, I didn't have the slightest idea what to get for him.

I think I've got that licked, now, but it occurred to me this morning that I have something else to sweat about:

The Easter baskets are in the guest bedroom closet. Behind four thousand six hundred and twenty-seven boxes of random Christmas crap. (That's just an approximation, of course. It might be much closer to five thousand boxes in actuality.)

At least, I think that's where they are.

Maybe I'll just buy Matt a new basket, while I'm at it...

And, while I'm out, I'll need to stop at the grocery store to pick up some last-minute ingredients for the dessert I'm making for Easter dinner. Namely, some fresh berries and some whipped cream. Though I'm still debating whether I want to go with Cool Whip, canned whipped cream, or get whipping cream and whip it myself.

And I realized the other day that while I was sick, Easter had crept a week nearer and I'd forgotten about dying eggs. Since Matt loathes eggs, we don't usually have them in the house unless I need them specifically for a recipe, so I look forward to making Easter eggs every year. It's fun, and I get several days' worth of devilled eggs out of the bargain.

So I guess as long as I'll be at the store anyway, I'll pick up some eggs and a cheap dye kit.

Word of the Day: burgeon - to flourish, bloom, or grow; to expand rapidly.

I'm sitting here, trying to think of someting that's flourishing or expanding in my life so I can use burgeon in a sentence, and suddenly it occurs to me that, just because it's the word of the day, it doesn't mean I have to use it. This isn't grade school.

The word of the day isn't an exercise in using words in a sentence. If all you wanted was to see the word in a sentence, then you could subscribe to the word of the day list yourself. If all I wanted was to use the word in a sentence, then I wouldn't be sitting here having writer's block about it.

The idea is to let the word lead me in a new direction; to use it as the starting point of a brainstorm that eventually leads to an anecdote or observation. I've been holding on to the word itself too tightly, I think. It's time to let go. I don't have to use the word, or even talk about it, to exercise my burgeoning writing skills.

(Had you there, for a minute, didn't I?)

19 April 2000

I've been waiting to tell you about Matt's other anniversary present for months. Now that he finally has it, I can finally talk about it.

A couple of months ago, Mike Behind The File Cabinet found this online. (Go look! Really!) I'm not sure where he found it, but all three of us in our office thought it was probably the most hysterically funny thing we'd ever seen. (Something about that tagline, "Zen without the wait" just killed us.) We all agreed to chip in and buy one for our office.

It was an instant hit. We've got a couple of potatoes growing in the filing cabinet, and Becky brought us an impressive specimin from her home. Everyone who comes into our office - even managers - stop to examine the potatoes. They open the filing cabinet to check on the growth of our two runner-ups. The little book that comes with the kit is hysterically funny.

Reading that little book, I knew - knew, mind you - that Matt would get a huge kick out of this. So I ordered a kit for him, as well, for our anniversary.

As the day neared, my certainty wavered - maybe it wasn't really hysterically funny. Maybe it was just dorky? But I had a CD from his wishlist, and I couldn't think of anything else to get him, really, except the one I idea I'd had for his Easter basket.

I needn't have worried. He thought it was a hoot and immediately raided the fridge for a potato of his own to start growing.

His present to me kicked the shit out of the bonsai potato kit, though.

He handed me the wrapped box with boyish glee. I shook it gently, listening to the rattling under the paper. It sounded like... Well, I didn't know. But I'm a geek and a programmer - maybe he bought me an Erector set. That would be cool!

Boy, was I wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Brimming over with wrongosity.

He'd got me a Palm V.

I first started drooling over it when I saw Braz's at MarsCon. I bid on one a couple of times on eBay, but always got outbid at the last minute. I'd been waffling over the price - I just bought my Zaurus last year, after all.

But the Palm was so cool! And I'd just about made up my mind to bite the bullet and buy the thing retail as soon as our anniversary and Easter were past.

Matt says he can tell I liked it because I didn't even pick up the wrapping paper from the floor before running upstairs to plug it all in. I love my husband, I really do.

And I don't have to feel guilty about the Zaurus, because K.T.'s broke a while back, so she's interested in buying mine as soon as I've got everything copied off of it.

Yeah, I know - a bonsai potato and a PDA don't sound like very exciting anniversary presents. But then, as I told Matt, I felt like a camera crew was going to show up at any moment with a narrator: "And here we see the mating rituals of the wild geek..."

I'd decided on dinner at the Outback, but when we got there, they had a 45-minute wait already. On a Tuesday! So we went to the Peddler instead. The Peddler was as crowded as I've ever seen it, actually. I wonder what's going on in town that there were so many people hitting the restaurants on a Tuesday evening.

Yesterday was "Free Cone Day" at Ben and Jerry's, too, but when we came out of the Peddler, the wind was picking up and it was too cold to really enjoy ice cream, so we went on home.

I wanted to play with my new toy, anyway.

Oh, by the way, I wanted to apologize for yesterday's entry being so short and hurried. While I was at the beginning of writing it, one of my managers came in and dumped a fingerprint scanner on my desk and said, in essense, "We have to make this work with our application in time for the trade show that's in two weeks. So to have it ready for testing, we've got to have it integrated by the end of this week. Oh, and by the way, I'm leaving for California tonight and won't be back until next week."

So I rushed through my journal entry so I could start working on integrating the scanner.

For once, it worked as advertised, and I'd actually left places in my code to integrate it (I'd known it was coming eventually, I just didn't know when) and so I had the whole thing done before 10. But I couldn't have known it would go that smoothly when I started.

Word of the Day: slapstick - comedy stressing farce and horseplay

Though humor is definitely one of the cornerstones of our relationship, Matt and I disagree on the value of slapstick comedy. While the occasional pratfall or seemingly accidental slip can make me chuckle, and the perfect timing of clowns at the circus leave me breathless, I only enjoy physical humor as an accent to more intellectual comedy. Entire shows based around slapstick leave me cold.

I've tried to appreciate it, but it just gets so boring after a while. Maybe it's a gender thing. (But I still like the bonsai potato.)

18 April 2000

Today is Matt's and my second wedding anniversary. Happy Anniversary, sweetie!

Since we'd each gotten each other two gifts, we agreed to open one this morning. I gave him the They Might Be Giants album Severe Tire Damage, and he gave me the British version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Yay, sweetie!

Tonight we'll open our other presents and go out to eat. I've pretty well narrowed down my dinner request to either the Peddler (which has good food and great atmosphere) or the Outback (which has great food and good atmosphere). I'll probably make a snap decision right before we leave the house.

I don't remember meeting Matt for the first time, which is a source of great amusement to some. It was the summer before my senior year at William and Mary, and K.T. had an apartment about a mile off-campus, in the campus housing reserved for married and/or parent students. (She'd gotten the apartment because of her ill-advised and somewhat spur-of-the-moment first marriage, and she lost it again less than a month later when the college found out her husband wasn't actually living there, but that's another story.)

At any rate, she was living in this apartment, and decided to host a Heroes game. To be honest, I don't remember much at all about the game. I vaguely remember my character - a person with a mechanized armor suit whom the media dubbed "The Vocalizer" because it recorded and used their own voices in order to disguise the character's identity. I remember K.T.'s ex boyfriend, Neil, playing a mutant with the ridiculously pissant power of light control ("It's... Light-Bulb Guy!") and that's about it. I know some other people were playing, but I have no idea who.

I don't even remember that my own boyfriend was there, though everyone tells me he was and I have no reason to doubt them. And Matt was there, as well. Apparently, he even asked P. and I for a ride back to his dorm after the game, which we gave him cheerfully.

No memory. None whatsoever. He was just this guy. I didn't start registering him as a person I should remember until later that year, after K.T. moved into the apartment I was sharing with another girl and he became one of the small hoarde of people who regularly hung out at our place. It was years later before I could even comprehend thinking of him in a romantic way, much less think of him that way myself. So I have no memory whatsoever of our first meeting.

I get a lot of shit for that. Word of the Day: mimesis - imitation, mimicry

I sometimes feel like I am only the mimesis of an adult - I live in my own house, I pay my own bills, I work at my own job... But it doesn't feel real. Like, at any moment, someone's going to yell, "Cut!" and tell me it was a nice try, but they're looking for someone taller, who actually knows what she's doing.

Every now and then, I'll be sitting in my house, and I'll suddenly look up and around in panic. What am I doing with a house? I don't know anything about houses! What if it falls apart? What if I can't pay for it? Mother of gods, it took me three months to pick out a $500 digital camera - what am I doing, thinking I can take care of a $100,000 house?

And married? Whoever said I was mature enough for that, anyway? At least I'm not screwing up the lives of any kids!

Most of the time, I'm okay. I just keep on keeping on, not really trying to think about how I got here, or where I'm going. I work my job, I pay the bills, I carry on with my life. But don't tell - shh! - I'm just faking.

17 April 2000

Well, that was certainly much more like a weekend! Not that anything especially exciting happened, but at least I didn't spend the whole thing in bed with my skull splitting open.

We slept in both mornings, went to K.T.'s game on Saturday, and went to see my parents on Sunday. We wound up at my folks' until almost 9:30, watching a special on the Discovery channel called Walking with Dinosaurs that was just fantastic.

I've got to be the only person in the world, except of course my mother, who can kill mint and ivy. I'd set the potted mint outside to take advantage of our sunny afternoons, and then got sick, and it didn't even occur to me to ask Matt to water the thing. So now I've got six or so shrivelled, pathetic-looking stalks, and three stalks that might recover, if I leave them in the kitchen window for the next several months.

The ivy I brought from my parents' house to plant around the base of my mailbox. Being a vine, ivy's usually pretty easy to transplant - just make sure you get a bunch of the rootlings on the vine covered, and keep it watered until it sets in, and you're set. Ha! Apparently I didn't pay enough attention to it, and the rain washed away the dirt I'd piled on the rootlets, leaving the whole plant exposed and unwatered.

Just call me Liz the Blackthumb.

Tomorrow is Matt's and my second anniversary. He wrapped my presents on Saturday and set them out where I'd see them frequently to tease me. I need to try to remember to bring his presents home from work this afternoon so I can wrap them.

I've warned him already that they're not very exciting. I have trouble picking out presents for Matt - what do you get for a guy that's romantic without being cheesy? So I ditched romance and just went for fun. I hope. Well, we'll see.

Word of the Day: bombast - pretentious or inflated speech or writing

I'm surrounded by bombast. The political season is gearing up: time for even more nonsense than usual from the politicians. I work in an office of a large corporation: managers can't say anything without tacking on at least four unnecessary (and nonexistant) words.

C'mon, gimme a word with some challenge!

14 April 2000

Matt asked me last night where I wanted to go to dinner for our anniversary (which is coming up next Tuesday). Apparently his boss, TB, suggested going to Ford's Colony. (Ford's Colony is actually a local golfing community, but when non-golfing locals refer to it, they usually mean their restaurant.) TB, who used to wait tables there, told Matt to expect to pay around $150 for the meal. I laughed and told him TB was assuming a bottle of wine - that we could almost certainly get out for only about $100.

Still, it seems a little much for a second anniversary. But I still have to decide where I want to go. Well, I'll think about it.

Well, here is is Friday again. I hope this weekend is a little more relaxing than the last one! I'm still feeling ever-so-slightly wobbly around the edges, but hopefully with some rest, I'll be back in top form.

I'd better be. I was thinking this morning about all the things I need to get done this month:

• My car is due for inspection.
• It's time for my bi-annual dental exam. (In fact, I had that scheduled for this week, but cancelled it because I was sick.
• I missed my chiropractor appointment at the beginning of the month. I'm trying to decide if I want to call them back, since my back isn't hurting at the moment.
• It's time for my annual physical exam. I should make an appointment for next week, in fact.
• I need to decide if I'm going to call the cleaning service back and re-schedule the cleaning that was cancelled because I was sick, or if I'm willing to live with the mess for another two weeks. (Well, week and a half.)
• I need to decide on, and then make, something for dessert for Easter dinner with my family.

Ack. It's enough to make me want to spend another week in bed!

I'm not feeling the narcotics-withdrawal nearly as sharply today. Thank heavens. I couldn't finish my dinner last night because every swallow was so painful. (Have you ever taken a bite just a little too big, and there's that sortof painful feeling as it travels down your esophogus? Like that. Only size didn't matter.) I hate being on narcotic painkillers. Or rather, I hate stopping narcotic painkillers

But not enough to put up with the original pain!

Word of the Day: whammy - a magic force or spell; a potent force or blow (esp. a paralyzing or lethal blow)

Being sick sure put the whammy on my leave. Actually, it hasn't yet - I'm trying to work off as much as I can. Thankfully, since this is the beginning of the pay-period, I'll be able to work off most of the missed time. Which is good, because I'm pretty sure if I tried to tell my brother I couldn't make it to his wedding, he'd put the whammy on me again!

13 April 2000

(OnDisplay collab for the month of April)
Spring isn't my favorite season of the year, but it's a close second. My favorite season is autumn. But if I had to rate the seasons with percentages that add up to 100, I'd probably say 40% autumn, 35% spring, 20% winter, and 5% summer. (I hate summer. I hate being hot and sweaty, and I hate that the streets are choked with sullen, bored kids who've been thrown out of their houses by angry parents. The only possible redeeming feature I can think of for summer is swimming. And we don't even have access to a pool any more. Thank all the gods that be for air conditioning.)

But spring ranks pretty high. I'd always wanted to get married in the autumn, but when it became obvious that I was going to go slightly mad well before then from the planning, I suggested changing to spring. Matt laughed at me, but agreed. (That's coming up in a few days. Boy, am I glad I bought him some presents before I got sick. I don't think I could stand to go shopping this weekend.)

I like the sights of spring - things blooming in deft and delicate colors; pale greens re-emerging from long-dormant trees. I like the sounds of spring - birds chirping in the air; the patter of a light rain; the whir of lawn mowers in the evening. I like the feel of spring - warm sun; a cool breeze caressing my face and tangling in my hair; soft new grass. I like the taste of spring - strawberries and raspberries and blueberries have a sweetness then that they don't have - if you can find them at all - the rest of the year.

And all tied up with all of those, I've always loved the smells of spring - sweet flowers, the smell of fresh-cut grass, the smell of a soft rain about to fall, the scent of sun-ripened strawberries... These are smells for healing.

I'm not feeling quite as good today as I was yesterday, but still miles better than Tuesday, so that's good. Maybe I'll go to bed immediately after dinner tonight instead of trying to sit up until "bedtime." I'm still fairly exhausted - this weekend can't come fast enough!

This morning around three, I woke up to use the bathroom, and was struck by the absence of the cat. He's usually in or near our room at night. I was too tired to actually think much about it, though, and went back to bed hoping he wouldn't come in and wake me up too early.

When the alarm went off, it almost surprised me. I slammed the snooze button once, then forced myself upright on the second alarm. (And the time really did pass just like that for me, too: Slam [pull arm back under blankets] [alarm goes off again] How annoying.)

Matt muttered that it was my turn to take the first shower, and that he'd let the cat in from the garage.

"He's in the garage?"

Matt was looking for his slippers. "Yep! He was a little stink!" This is what we say when the cat is being a pest.

"Was he?" I wondered. Usually the cat is a stink on my side of the bed, batting things off my bedside table, licking my face, that kind of thing. I was going to (privately) begin singing the Hallelujah Chorus if he'd finally decided to start pestering Matt instead.

Matt looked at me strangely. "Yeah," he said, "Right about eleven thirty?" He was obviously waiting for me to remember, but all I could do was shake my head. Matt described the incident to me in detail, and eventually some of it sounded vaguely familiar, but in all honesty, I don't really remember much of anything.

Guess those sleeping pills are good for something, at least!

Word of the Day: repugn - to contend against, to oppose

What a splendid old word. Now there's a verb with force! When it's not just enough to tell someone you reject them, no, now you can repugn them! Imagine how much more exciting politics would be if this word were still in common usage - we could get past the mudslinging and right down into the dirt!

"Your political platform changes with every train platform! Are you not enough of a man to stand up and tell the American people exactly what you have in mind? Don't you trust your voters to do what's best for this nation? Sir, I repugn you and your two-faced waffling!"

Yeah! It might almost be enough to make me care.