At K.T. and Kevin's moving party a couple of weeks ago, T told me that he'd like to get together with Matt and I at some point - perhaps he could come over and make dinner for us? I agreed that sounded nice, and started making plans for a small dinner party. T interrupted and said that he'd prefer trying out a new recipe on just the two of us to start. "I can always get pizza for three of us if it's awful," he said.
Last week, he called to set up a time, and after I checked with Matt, I e-mailed him back to verify that Tuesday - yesterday - was clear on our calendars.
Yesterday was moderately hellish at work. We're down to the last week of a deadline - the project has to be done by Friday - and I spent most of the day going line by line with my manager through code that wasn't working trying to figure out why. Finally, around 4, we decided that the actual problem with in my manager's code, and he went back to his computer to go through his stuff a line at a time.
At 4:30, I poked my head in his office. "I've got a guest coming for dinner," I explained, "so I'm going to head on home. If you get it figured out, drop me an e-mail and I'll check it first thing in the morning." He nodded, and I went home. I spent a little while straightening up the living areas and hunting down placemats and napkins for three people.
Matt got home about the time I was finishing up. I told him about an e-mail I'd gotten from T in the middle of the day that had said he would call around six to make sure everything was still on. Matt nodded and went outside to turn on the sprinkler. When he came back, he said, "If T doesn't leave his place until six, that means he'll get here around seven, and we'll eat around eight?" I admitted that sounded like a reasonable estimate. Matt shook his head and went upstairs to log onto the computer.
Realizing that it was going to be at least two and a half hours until I had dinner, I decided to fix myself some popcorn. Just as the timer rang and I was dumping the popcorn into a bowl, the phone rang, and it was T.
He had to cancel.
Well, last minute emergencies happen without warning. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he didn't want to go into the gory details, but what little he did say sounded like his parents were the ones with the emergency and they'd asked him to come to their place and walk the dog. Why he couldn't walk the dog and then come over, I don't know, but I didn't ask. Maybe the dog is incontinent or something and has to be walked every half hour.
T wanted to reschedule for tonight. I don't handle sudden changes in plan very well, especially when I'm very tired, so I asked Matt if we had anything planned for tonight, and he said he thought tonight would be fine, and I passed it on to T.
Matt and I went out to dinner, and in the course of chatting over our dinners and trying desperately to catch the eye of our waitress, it occurred to me that tonight might not be fine.
Having left on time yesterday (which, during a deadline crunch when nothing is working correctly is too early) I really can't do that again today. In addition, I've got a doctor's appointment this afternoon and will probably spent at least an hour on hold with the benefits center trying to get my insurance number, thereby losing around two hours. I decided to give myself a list of things to accomplish today, and if I haven't got them done by the time I leave for the doctor, then I'll have to come back in to the office after my appointment. If that happens, I'll get ahold of Matt before I leave and have him call T to cancel. (Though my dad pointed out this morning that it's when you're working late that it's nice to come home to a ready dinner, so maybe what I tell Matt will depend on just how late I think I'll be running.)
At any rate, I don't blame T for cancelling - I'm sure that his reasons, whatever they were, were good. But I'm still slightly annoyed. Ah, well, them's the breaks. Here's to hoping things go more smoothly today.
Wednesday, March 8, 2000
Tuesday, March 7, 2000
7 March 2000
Blargh. Another late night on the Hall. We're finally getting closer to solving the mystery, though, so that's good. Zoya invited Marten to stay at the Tower, where he'll be safest, and he accepted. If - as Jaret believes - Marten is a demon posessing MoonDancer's body and sent to do mischief, he'll never get better chance.
Marten laughed at Lisl's suggestion that he was romantically interested in Zoya, though, so Zoya's trying to stop considering the idea and wondering what had gotten into her that she listened to that notion of Lisl's anyway. She can't quite get the notion out of her head, though, and it's worrying her - they're getting closer and closer to recovering MoonDancer, and Zoya's trying to convince herself that she can't afford to get wrapped up with a personality that might be subsumed soon. (Not to mention that the Marten personality might be malevolent. She'd like to believe that he's been misguided, but she's too experienced to take anything for granted.)
Naturally, that didn't make any sense to those of you who aren't participating. You'll just have to take my word for it that it's a very exciting plot.
Have you ever had so much on your mind that you can't get any of it out?
The things that I can best articulate are too sensitive to post in this journal. The rest - work and gaming and yardwork - all seem too trivial to bother with.
Maybe I'm just tired; I didn't get enough sleep last night, and because my project at work is due Friday I'm staring unpaid overtime in the eye. Maybe it's because I got caught up in re-reading my own journal, and I'm up to the slightly depressing part where I'm unemployed. Maybe it's because watching Red Dwarf makes me remember graduate school, which was pretty miserable.
I'm not unhappy. I'm actually in a pretty good mood, considering that I'm glassy-eyed from exhaustion. I've just got this knot of dread slowly uncoiling in the pit of my stomach, and I can't pin it down, and I don't know where it's coming from.
Here's hoping it turns out to be nothing.
Marten laughed at Lisl's suggestion that he was romantically interested in Zoya, though, so Zoya's trying to stop considering the idea and wondering what had gotten into her that she listened to that notion of Lisl's anyway. She can't quite get the notion out of her head, though, and it's worrying her - they're getting closer and closer to recovering MoonDancer, and Zoya's trying to convince herself that she can't afford to get wrapped up with a personality that might be subsumed soon. (Not to mention that the Marten personality might be malevolent. She'd like to believe that he's been misguided, but she's too experienced to take anything for granted.)
Naturally, that didn't make any sense to those of you who aren't participating. You'll just have to take my word for it that it's a very exciting plot.
Have you ever had so much on your mind that you can't get any of it out?
The things that I can best articulate are too sensitive to post in this journal. The rest - work and gaming and yardwork - all seem too trivial to bother with.
Maybe I'm just tired; I didn't get enough sleep last night, and because my project at work is due Friday I'm staring unpaid overtime in the eye. Maybe it's because I got caught up in re-reading my own journal, and I'm up to the slightly depressing part where I'm unemployed. Maybe it's because watching Red Dwarf makes me remember graduate school, which was pretty miserable.
I'm not unhappy. I'm actually in a pretty good mood, considering that I'm glassy-eyed from exhaustion. I've just got this knot of dread slowly uncoiling in the pit of my stomach, and I can't pin it down, and I don't know where it's coming from.
Here's hoping it turns out to be nothing.
Monday, March 6, 2000
6 March 2000
Not bad. For a weekend which featured having to use alarm clocks to get up Saturday morning and an afternoon of manual labor, it was a pretty good weekend.
Saturday morning, Matt and I got up early (well, early for us on a weekend - 8 and 8:30, respectively) and after we were showered and dressed, drove down to my folks'. Once there, we split up - Matt rode with my dad, and Mom came in my car, and we all went down to McDonald's Nursery in Hampton. (Nothing to do with the fast-food chain, I promise.)
I hadn't been to McDonald's since I was about eight. I found it vastly more interesting this time. Naturally, we managed to pick the weekend they were having a show - we knew we were in trouble when we pulled into the left-turn lane to enter the parking lot and found a guy with an orange vest directing traffic, and another half-dozen orange vests inside the parking lot. The place was packed.
We headed for the sign marked "Trees and Shrubs" and found ourselves back outside, pushing a cart the size of a small car. After deciding that we didn't really want a fruit-bearing tree and that we were still somewhat leery of dogwoods (that being the tree that had died over the winter) we did a leisurely stroll around and decided on a Japanese maple.
Just behind the Japanese maples were a bunch of pots of tall, bushy grass, labeled - I'm not kidding - "Mondo Grass." I'd been looking for ground cover for the mulch that will go around the tree, and the Mondo Grass was on sale at less than $3 per pot, so I grabbed four pots. (A slight miscalculation on my part; the mulched-in area will be triangular. But the way the grass is growing in the pots, I should easily be able to divide each pot into sections and spread the sections out over the triangle.)
Then we made the mistake of going around the corner into the flowers section. Two of every three pots grabbed my eye. I nearly bought about four hundred little bushy flowering plants. I eventually got a grip and just picked up three pots of what the label said was dianthus, strawberry parfait color. (That place is dangerous. And now I know where it is. Must... Resist...)
My folks paid for the tree - they'd promised to buy us a tree as a housewarming present - and some new azalea bushes for their yard, and we paid for our potted plants, and the four of us headed back to my folks' house. We were there only long enough to drop off the azaleas and for Dad to pick up a shovel, a rake, and a wheelbarrow, and then we were on our way back up to Williamsburg.
It only took about an hour and a half to dig up the old tree (its poor little root ball had shriveled up to something about the size of my two fists) and plant the new one. Dad, excited and happy that we'd asked for his help, couldn't just stop there, so he wandered around our yard and eventually decided to work on erosion control in our back yard. (We'd had a couple of bad storms just after we moved in, before the grass had taken root, so there are deep channels where water flowed.) He had us picking rocks out of the earth and building little dams every few feet in the channels, then packing leftover clay from the tree's hole upstream of the dams.
He pushed the idea of terracing our back yard to both of us, but we're not sure we're really ready for that much work just now. At the very least, we've got several other projects we want to take care of, first - clearing the ditch behind the house, planting some bushes along the ditch to begin a privacy hedge, turning over the soil for my garden plot (nothing big; I'm just planning some tomatoes and maybe squash on the sunny side of the house), and keeping the front yard moderately attractive.
While we were at it, we raked up the excess straw left over from the grass seeding in September. (None of my books had said it had to be raked up, or I'd have done it months ago; I assumed it was meant to compost itself into the dirt.) Oh, well, live and learn, and now we have a bag of collected straw to use when we re-seed this week.
We'd wanted to take them out to lunch, to express our gratitude for their help. After Dad and Matt finished building little dams and came in, we tried to decide where to go. I don't know where the idea came from, but I suddenly said, "Did you know the Backfin's re-opened?"
There was immediate interest. The Backfin had been a favorite of my parents' some years ago, before they packed up and moved to a new location out of our reach. A few months ago, I'd noticed the sign at the location of an old farmer's market, but hadn't ever passed along the news. (The Backfin is one of the few seafood restaurants I like to eat at - they make cornbread to die for - but I'm still not a seafood fan, so the thought got somewhat buried.)
I called to make sure they were still open (it was 2 o'clock by the time we'd finished everything) and we went over. The cornbread was just as good as I'd remembered it, and we were all happy with our meals. Dad was so thrilled, he was like a little kid at Christmas. He announced to everyone who would listen that he'd be coming back for lunch at least once a week. (Dad and I work in the same office, only about three miles from the Backfin's new location.)
After that, Matt and I went to K.T. and Kevin's for the weekly game. We managed to arrive early, but it still took us until nearly seven to make our Heroes characters. I decided to go ahead and attempt to play a male character. I've tried that before, and everyone always forgets - but Heroes is over-the-top enough that I think I can keep it in line. Besides, Greg was already playing the token female.
I thought my character would turn out to be a real brick, with all his extraordinary stats, but it didn't work out that way. I guess he's just got a glass jaw, despite being extraordinarily strong and quick. He's an ex-military spy (he used to sneak into the alien enclaves and take pictures and memorize conversations - even the friendly aliens are notoriously close-mouthed) with the mutant ability to control the atmosphere (generate winds, call lightning, affect the weather). He's called The Weatherman. His real name, because I'm terrible at coming up with names, is Geoffrey Jefferson. (His friends call him Jeff-Jeff.)
After we created our characters, we went on our first mission - to collect some renegades who'd stolen a prototype mecha suit. I can tell K.T.'s trying to set us up for moral dilemmas - the person who stole the suit tried to protest that we were slaves (in her universe, supers are by law required to be "sponsored" by normal individuals or organizations) and that we should be helping her escape - even joining her.
We might have been more sympathetic if they'd just have tried to sneak or run past us to the border, but they attacked us first. One of their number, deranged by the results of experiments done on him by his "sponsor," set a small village on fire. We weren't going to be swayed by an unreasonably embittered normal and a few rogues, even if they had been abused by their sponsors. We called our base and turned them all in.
But Greg's character is wondering if there might have been a seed of truth to what she'd said, and mine is thinking of asking for internal ops next time - immoral sponsors who perform experiments on their wards should be exposed and squashed like the bugs they are! (I told you Heroes was a bit over-the-top.)
We spent most of Sunday lounging around the house, doing the laundry, watching videos, reading, and playing on the computer. I've gotten re-hooked on Red Dwarf, and I'm systematically going through all my videos of it. I'm also in the midst of re-reading the Harry Potter books, and making lists of things I want to buy for home projects. (I bought an herb-garden starter kit, for example, and assuming the seeds sprout, I want to transplant them into a window box. And I want to get a generic spring/summer flag so we can put up our flagpole. And... and... and... Like that.)
It looks like it's going to be another gorgeous day today - sunny and mild. I love early spring.
Saturday morning, Matt and I got up early (well, early for us on a weekend - 8 and 8:30, respectively) and after we were showered and dressed, drove down to my folks'. Once there, we split up - Matt rode with my dad, and Mom came in my car, and we all went down to McDonald's Nursery in Hampton. (Nothing to do with the fast-food chain, I promise.)
I hadn't been to McDonald's since I was about eight. I found it vastly more interesting this time. Naturally, we managed to pick the weekend they were having a show - we knew we were in trouble when we pulled into the left-turn lane to enter the parking lot and found a guy with an orange vest directing traffic, and another half-dozen orange vests inside the parking lot. The place was packed.
We headed for the sign marked "Trees and Shrubs" and found ourselves back outside, pushing a cart the size of a small car. After deciding that we didn't really want a fruit-bearing tree and that we were still somewhat leery of dogwoods (that being the tree that had died over the winter) we did a leisurely stroll around and decided on a Japanese maple.
Just behind the Japanese maples were a bunch of pots of tall, bushy grass, labeled - I'm not kidding - "Mondo Grass." I'd been looking for ground cover for the mulch that will go around the tree, and the Mondo Grass was on sale at less than $3 per pot, so I grabbed four pots. (A slight miscalculation on my part; the mulched-in area will be triangular. But the way the grass is growing in the pots, I should easily be able to divide each pot into sections and spread the sections out over the triangle.)
Then we made the mistake of going around the corner into the flowers section. Two of every three pots grabbed my eye. I nearly bought about four hundred little bushy flowering plants. I eventually got a grip and just picked up three pots of what the label said was dianthus, strawberry parfait color. (That place is dangerous. And now I know where it is. Must... Resist...)
My folks paid for the tree - they'd promised to buy us a tree as a housewarming present - and some new azalea bushes for their yard, and we paid for our potted plants, and the four of us headed back to my folks' house. We were there only long enough to drop off the azaleas and for Dad to pick up a shovel, a rake, and a wheelbarrow, and then we were on our way back up to Williamsburg.
It only took about an hour and a half to dig up the old tree (its poor little root ball had shriveled up to something about the size of my two fists) and plant the new one. Dad, excited and happy that we'd asked for his help, couldn't just stop there, so he wandered around our yard and eventually decided to work on erosion control in our back yard. (We'd had a couple of bad storms just after we moved in, before the grass had taken root, so there are deep channels where water flowed.) He had us picking rocks out of the earth and building little dams every few feet in the channels, then packing leftover clay from the tree's hole upstream of the dams.
He pushed the idea of terracing our back yard to both of us, but we're not sure we're really ready for that much work just now. At the very least, we've got several other projects we want to take care of, first - clearing the ditch behind the house, planting some bushes along the ditch to begin a privacy hedge, turning over the soil for my garden plot (nothing big; I'm just planning some tomatoes and maybe squash on the sunny side of the house), and keeping the front yard moderately attractive.
While we were at it, we raked up the excess straw left over from the grass seeding in September. (None of my books had said it had to be raked up, or I'd have done it months ago; I assumed it was meant to compost itself into the dirt.) Oh, well, live and learn, and now we have a bag of collected straw to use when we re-seed this week.
We'd wanted to take them out to lunch, to express our gratitude for their help. After Dad and Matt finished building little dams and came in, we tried to decide where to go. I don't know where the idea came from, but I suddenly said, "Did you know the Backfin's re-opened?"
There was immediate interest. The Backfin had been a favorite of my parents' some years ago, before they packed up and moved to a new location out of our reach. A few months ago, I'd noticed the sign at the location of an old farmer's market, but hadn't ever passed along the news. (The Backfin is one of the few seafood restaurants I like to eat at - they make cornbread to die for - but I'm still not a seafood fan, so the thought got somewhat buried.)
I called to make sure they were still open (it was 2 o'clock by the time we'd finished everything) and we went over. The cornbread was just as good as I'd remembered it, and we were all happy with our meals. Dad was so thrilled, he was like a little kid at Christmas. He announced to everyone who would listen that he'd be coming back for lunch at least once a week. (Dad and I work in the same office, only about three miles from the Backfin's new location.)
After that, Matt and I went to K.T. and Kevin's for the weekly game. We managed to arrive early, but it still took us until nearly seven to make our Heroes characters. I decided to go ahead and attempt to play a male character. I've tried that before, and everyone always forgets - but Heroes is over-the-top enough that I think I can keep it in line. Besides, Greg was already playing the token female.
I thought my character would turn out to be a real brick, with all his extraordinary stats, but it didn't work out that way. I guess he's just got a glass jaw, despite being extraordinarily strong and quick. He's an ex-military spy (he used to sneak into the alien enclaves and take pictures and memorize conversations - even the friendly aliens are notoriously close-mouthed) with the mutant ability to control the atmosphere (generate winds, call lightning, affect the weather). He's called The Weatherman. His real name, because I'm terrible at coming up with names, is Geoffrey Jefferson. (His friends call him Jeff-Jeff.)
After we created our characters, we went on our first mission - to collect some renegades who'd stolen a prototype mecha suit. I can tell K.T.'s trying to set us up for moral dilemmas - the person who stole the suit tried to protest that we were slaves (in her universe, supers are by law required to be "sponsored" by normal individuals or organizations) and that we should be helping her escape - even joining her.
We might have been more sympathetic if they'd just have tried to sneak or run past us to the border, but they attacked us first. One of their number, deranged by the results of experiments done on him by his "sponsor," set a small village on fire. We weren't going to be swayed by an unreasonably embittered normal and a few rogues, even if they had been abused by their sponsors. We called our base and turned them all in.
But Greg's character is wondering if there might have been a seed of truth to what she'd said, and mine is thinking of asking for internal ops next time - immoral sponsors who perform experiments on their wards should be exposed and squashed like the bugs they are! (I told you Heroes was a bit over-the-top.)
We spent most of Sunday lounging around the house, doing the laundry, watching videos, reading, and playing on the computer. I've gotten re-hooked on Red Dwarf, and I'm systematically going through all my videos of it. I'm also in the midst of re-reading the Harry Potter books, and making lists of things I want to buy for home projects. (I bought an herb-garden starter kit, for example, and assuming the seeds sprout, I want to transplant them into a window box. And I want to get a generic spring/summer flag so we can put up our flagpole. And... and... and... Like that.)
It looks like it's going to be another gorgeous day today - sunny and mild. I love early spring.
Friday, March 3, 2000
3 March 2000
You know what I said on the first about the graphics? I went looking yesterday for a tulip theme for April, and I found the exact daffodil design I'd had in mind for March! Argh!
So now, the question is whether I should go ahead and use the daffodil pattern this month, or save it for April, since I didn't find a tulip theme. I'll probably just wait and use in April. As slow as my flowers are coming up, it'll match better then anyway.
It looks like it's going to be a busy couple of weekends for us. My folks want to buy us a couple of trees - they'd promised us one when we moved into the house, and I'd completely forgotten about it. So we need to get the trees and plant them before Dad hauls us a truckload of mulch (he found a place that will fill the bed of his Dodge Ram with mulch for less than $20 - we'd be crazy not to take advantage of it, even if that much mulch would fill in our entire back yard). And, of course, before we plant the trees, we'll need to go to Lowe's and buy a number of things - Dad suggested getting some peat moss to put around the roots of the tree, to counteract the awful clay around here. And I want barriers to separate the mulched areas from the grass, and stuff like that. And as long as we're putting mulch down, I want to pick up some plants - preferably something that will live around here and doesn't have to be transplanted or replaced every year.
So it looks like the next couple of weekends will be divided between running around to hardware and gardening stores and the manual labor of putting all this stuff where it belongs.
So, K.T.'s decided that she's feeling uninspired about her Werewolf game and wants to do something new. She isn't even interested in finishing out the current quest. After tallying the suggestions and votes, it's looking like it's going to be a Heroes game. A new Heroes game, so I won't be resurrecting Danielle.
While I understand K.T.'s dilemma and frustration with the Werewolf game, I'm slightly irritated. Just once, I'd like to be in a long-running game. Every game I'm in sputters and dies. I've never played a character through more than four or five levels. My MeadeHall characters have been around for a couple of years, but that's a role-playing forum, not a game.
Ah, well. Worse things have happened. If I get too irritable, I suppose I can always go on haitus for a while. In the meantime, I have to think of a new Superhero concept for this weekend.
So now, the question is whether I should go ahead and use the daffodil pattern this month, or save it for April, since I didn't find a tulip theme. I'll probably just wait and use in April. As slow as my flowers are coming up, it'll match better then anyway.
It looks like it's going to be a busy couple of weekends for us. My folks want to buy us a couple of trees - they'd promised us one when we moved into the house, and I'd completely forgotten about it. So we need to get the trees and plant them before Dad hauls us a truckload of mulch (he found a place that will fill the bed of his Dodge Ram with mulch for less than $20 - we'd be crazy not to take advantage of it, even if that much mulch would fill in our entire back yard). And, of course, before we plant the trees, we'll need to go to Lowe's and buy a number of things - Dad suggested getting some peat moss to put around the roots of the tree, to counteract the awful clay around here. And I want barriers to separate the mulched areas from the grass, and stuff like that. And as long as we're putting mulch down, I want to pick up some plants - preferably something that will live around here and doesn't have to be transplanted or replaced every year.
So it looks like the next couple of weekends will be divided between running around to hardware and gardening stores and the manual labor of putting all this stuff where it belongs.
So, K.T.'s decided that she's feeling uninspired about her Werewolf game and wants to do something new. She isn't even interested in finishing out the current quest. After tallying the suggestions and votes, it's looking like it's going to be a Heroes game. A new Heroes game, so I won't be resurrecting Danielle.
While I understand K.T.'s dilemma and frustration with the Werewolf game, I'm slightly irritated. Just once, I'd like to be in a long-running game. Every game I'm in sputters and dies. I've never played a character through more than four or five levels. My MeadeHall characters have been around for a couple of years, but that's a role-playing forum, not a game.
Ah, well. Worse things have happened. If I get too irritable, I suppose I can always go on haitus for a while. In the meantime, I have to think of a new Superhero concept for this weekend.
Thursday, March 2, 2000
2 March 2000
Last night, for no particular reason at all, I was thinking about John Grubb.
John Grubb, Jim Skinner, and Kevin Hulsing. They were inseparable. They liked NASCAR and baseball and beer. They chewed tobacco when they played softball - but not at any other time. They were faithful to their girlfriends, but enjoyed a little eye-candy as much as the next man. They were always ready to help someone in need and to greet you with a smile. Jim had dark hair and a beard; John was fair and always needed to shave. John worked for a local racetrack, collecting money for parking, and he frequently drafted Jim and Kevin to help him. John and Jim were both the sort of charismatic, fun-loving guys who make the South a pleasant place to be.
When I first got to know the trio, I thought Kevin was a charity case. He was somewhat overweight, with red hair and freckles and glasses, and he was deaf, which made him sound sortof stupid when he talked, because his words slurred together. (He got by on a combination of lip-reading and a very powerful hearing aid.) But after I'd known them all for a while, I realized that they genuinely liked him. They were like the Three Musketeers.
It was Kevin who first invited me to join them at lunch, and after that I went to lunch with them at least twice a week. I never talked much - John and Jim talked a lot. It was fun to watch them, though. They joked and kidded around and generally had a lot of fun.
John pestered me for weeks until I finally agreed to go play softball with them and some other folks. I expected to be either teased or patronized - atheletic I am not, and they both played a lot. Jim had the kind of muscles that made t-shirt sleeves look uncomfortably tight. But they did neither. The first time I stepped up to bat, the guys in the outfield didn't even move in, though once I made it clear that I couldn't hit the ball further than the pitcher's mound, they did. But they didn't tease me for that, or try to offer advice. They did tease me when I missed a catch, which was all right - because they teased everyone that way.
When I last saw them, all three of them were preparing to carry on where I had feared to try: They were going for their PhD's. The four of us spent most of our working hours together in the graduate student offices of VA Tech's math department. The three of them were almost frighteningly intelligent - the more so because they looked like such "regular" guys. But when I made my farewells to them at the graduation ceremony where we collected our master's degrees, all three were planning to continue on to a doctorate, though I think John had plans to change departments and get his PhD in statistics rather than theoretical mathematics.
I don't know what happened to them after I left. I don't know why I thought about them last night out of the blue, but it was such a strong, clear memory - from John's "Jack Handy" wall-calendar to Kevin's imitation of the Caddyshack's gopher dance - that I wanted to share it with you today.
John Grubb, Jim Skinner, and Kevin Hulsing. They were inseparable. They liked NASCAR and baseball and beer. They chewed tobacco when they played softball - but not at any other time. They were faithful to their girlfriends, but enjoyed a little eye-candy as much as the next man. They were always ready to help someone in need and to greet you with a smile. Jim had dark hair and a beard; John was fair and always needed to shave. John worked for a local racetrack, collecting money for parking, and he frequently drafted Jim and Kevin to help him. John and Jim were both the sort of charismatic, fun-loving guys who make the South a pleasant place to be.
When I first got to know the trio, I thought Kevin was a charity case. He was somewhat overweight, with red hair and freckles and glasses, and he was deaf, which made him sound sortof stupid when he talked, because his words slurred together. (He got by on a combination of lip-reading and a very powerful hearing aid.) But after I'd known them all for a while, I realized that they genuinely liked him. They were like the Three Musketeers.
It was Kevin who first invited me to join them at lunch, and after that I went to lunch with them at least twice a week. I never talked much - John and Jim talked a lot. It was fun to watch them, though. They joked and kidded around and generally had a lot of fun.
John pestered me for weeks until I finally agreed to go play softball with them and some other folks. I expected to be either teased or patronized - atheletic I am not, and they both played a lot. Jim had the kind of muscles that made t-shirt sleeves look uncomfortably tight. But they did neither. The first time I stepped up to bat, the guys in the outfield didn't even move in, though once I made it clear that I couldn't hit the ball further than the pitcher's mound, they did. But they didn't tease me for that, or try to offer advice. They did tease me when I missed a catch, which was all right - because they teased everyone that way.
When I last saw them, all three of them were preparing to carry on where I had feared to try: They were going for their PhD's. The four of us spent most of our working hours together in the graduate student offices of VA Tech's math department. The three of them were almost frighteningly intelligent - the more so because they looked like such "regular" guys. But when I made my farewells to them at the graduation ceremony where we collected our master's degrees, all three were planning to continue on to a doctorate, though I think John had plans to change departments and get his PhD in statistics rather than theoretical mathematics.
I don't know what happened to them after I left. I don't know why I thought about them last night out of the blue, but it was such a strong, clear memory - from John's "Jack Handy" wall-calendar to Kevin's imitation of the Caddyshack's gopher dance - that I wanted to share it with you today.
Wednesday, March 1, 2000
1 March 2000
I'd wanted to do a theme for March with daffodils, but I didn't get started soon enough to find any decent graphics. So I dug into my repository of themes that I'd downloaded many moons ago, and decided on this. Maybe I'll do a tulip theme for April.
Speaking of flowers, I'm not completely hopeless when it comes to plants! I kill houseplants with startling regularity, but I think most of the bulbs that I planted last autumn survived!
Actually, I'd known that already. Last autumn, I planted a bunch of daffodil and tulip bulbs that Matt's mom had sent us as a housewarming present, augmenting them with some grape hyacinth bulbs that I bought myself because hyacinth flowers smell divine.
The hyacinths sprouted immediately. Short green shoots turned into long green shoots which lay across the ground and turned brown with the end of winter. I figured I'd killed them - that I'd managed to stumble across the one bulb that should be planted in the spring rather than in the autumn. I tried not to let it bother me too terribly much, because about the same time I noticed all the hyacinth leaves were turning brown, I also noticed that the daffodil bulbs had put up shoots.
About a week or so ago, I started getting depressed again. All of our neighbors who have daffodils planted already have flowers. All I have are green shoots. None of the directions I got with the bulbs said there was anything special you had to do to get them to flower! And the tulips haven't even put up shoots yet. How distressing.
This morning, while Matt was scraping the frost off his car, I stepped over to look at the daffodil shoots again. And lo! most of the little shoot clusters are sporting a shoot with a suspiciously yellow bulge at one end. It looks like I'll have daffodils after all!
And better yet, when I leaned over to look at one of the shoots, a bit of purple caught my eye - there's a hyacinth flower, half buried in the mulch! I didn't see any others, unfortunately, and I thought hyacinth stalks were at least a few inches long, but heck, I'll take what I can get! I guess I'll just keep an eye on them and see what happens. Maybe hyacinth flowers aren't really flowers, and they come out of the ground already like that? I have no idea. It doesn't seem right, but right now I'm so thrilled that the daffodils are going to bloom that I don't care.
I wore a yellow shirt to work yesterday.
I broke rules for that. Fat people are not supposed to wear bright colors and call attention to themselves. Besides, I've thought for years and years that yellow looks absolutely awful on me anyway.
But I went shopping a couple of weeks ago, and there was a rack of these shirts. Bias-cut t-shirts, with sortof ruffles around the arms and at the bottom, and when I pulled the grey one on and turned to look in the mirror, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. The way the shirt is made, it calls attention to my curves while de-emphasizing how big my hips are. This shirt was made just for me. It was perfect. I had to have more than one.
So I went back over to the rack. Besides grey, they had them in white, black, and primary red, yellow, and blue. I tried on the black. It made my chest look smaller. The blue looked all right, but my eye kept being drawn to that yellow. Don't be absurd, I told myself. Yellow makes you look sick! But I couldn't stop looking at it. Blue is my favorite color, but for some reason, the blue shirt just didn't work...
Okay, I said, exasperated. Try on the yellow shirt, see what it does to your complexion, and then put it back, okay?
I put the shirt on, wrestling momentarily with the stupid anti-theft device, which was as big as my fist and attached to the shirt in the armpit, of all the stupid places. I turned around...
This yellow didn't make me look jaundiced. It made my skin glow. It made the highlights in my hair lighter. And even more importantly, the way it hugged my curves made me gasp with surprise.
I argued with myself. I don't wear yellow. I don't own a single piece of clothing that has so much as a yellow button, stripe, or flower on it. I'm fat, for petesake - fat people can't wear bright colors!
I tried to compromise on the red. Still a bright, happy color, but not nearly so eye-grabbing. I tried it on, and had the same blah reaction as I'd had with the blue. Apparently the magic of the shirt worked with the very neutral grey, and with the extremely bright yellow, but not with the slightly less neutral blue or less bright red. Normally, I'd have just given up and bought the grey. But, heart pounding, I approached the register with the grey and the yellow.
The same trip, I bought a bra specifically to wear with a shirt I have that tends to slip over the shoulder. You understand? I bought a bra that's meant to be seen. (Well, part of it, anyway.) I've been fiddling around with makeup and hair accessories lately, too.
Is it a sign of increased self-esteem? A reviving fashion sense? A mental spring cleaning?
Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't go away anytime soon. It's kindof fun.
Speaking of flowers, I'm not completely hopeless when it comes to plants! I kill houseplants with startling regularity, but I think most of the bulbs that I planted last autumn survived!
Actually, I'd known that already. Last autumn, I planted a bunch of daffodil and tulip bulbs that Matt's mom had sent us as a housewarming present, augmenting them with some grape hyacinth bulbs that I bought myself because hyacinth flowers smell divine.
The hyacinths sprouted immediately. Short green shoots turned into long green shoots which lay across the ground and turned brown with the end of winter. I figured I'd killed them - that I'd managed to stumble across the one bulb that should be planted in the spring rather than in the autumn. I tried not to let it bother me too terribly much, because about the same time I noticed all the hyacinth leaves were turning brown, I also noticed that the daffodil bulbs had put up shoots.
About a week or so ago, I started getting depressed again. All of our neighbors who have daffodils planted already have flowers. All I have are green shoots. None of the directions I got with the bulbs said there was anything special you had to do to get them to flower! And the tulips haven't even put up shoots yet. How distressing.
This morning, while Matt was scraping the frost off his car, I stepped over to look at the daffodil shoots again. And lo! most of the little shoot clusters are sporting a shoot with a suspiciously yellow bulge at one end. It looks like I'll have daffodils after all!
And better yet, when I leaned over to look at one of the shoots, a bit of purple caught my eye - there's a hyacinth flower, half buried in the mulch! I didn't see any others, unfortunately, and I thought hyacinth stalks were at least a few inches long, but heck, I'll take what I can get! I guess I'll just keep an eye on them and see what happens. Maybe hyacinth flowers aren't really flowers, and they come out of the ground already like that? I have no idea. It doesn't seem right, but right now I'm so thrilled that the daffodils are going to bloom that I don't care.
I wore a yellow shirt to work yesterday.
I broke rules for that. Fat people are not supposed to wear bright colors and call attention to themselves. Besides, I've thought for years and years that yellow looks absolutely awful on me anyway.
But I went shopping a couple of weeks ago, and there was a rack of these shirts. Bias-cut t-shirts, with sortof ruffles around the arms and at the bottom, and when I pulled the grey one on and turned to look in the mirror, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. The way the shirt is made, it calls attention to my curves while de-emphasizing how big my hips are. This shirt was made just for me. It was perfect. I had to have more than one.
So I went back over to the rack. Besides grey, they had them in white, black, and primary red, yellow, and blue. I tried on the black. It made my chest look smaller. The blue looked all right, but my eye kept being drawn to that yellow. Don't be absurd, I told myself. Yellow makes you look sick! But I couldn't stop looking at it. Blue is my favorite color, but for some reason, the blue shirt just didn't work...
Okay, I said, exasperated. Try on the yellow shirt, see what it does to your complexion, and then put it back, okay?
I put the shirt on, wrestling momentarily with the stupid anti-theft device, which was as big as my fist and attached to the shirt in the armpit, of all the stupid places. I turned around...
This yellow didn't make me look jaundiced. It made my skin glow. It made the highlights in my hair lighter. And even more importantly, the way it hugged my curves made me gasp with surprise.
I argued with myself. I don't wear yellow. I don't own a single piece of clothing that has so much as a yellow button, stripe, or flower on it. I'm fat, for petesake - fat people can't wear bright colors!
I tried to compromise on the red. Still a bright, happy color, but not nearly so eye-grabbing. I tried it on, and had the same blah reaction as I'd had with the blue. Apparently the magic of the shirt worked with the very neutral grey, and with the extremely bright yellow, but not with the slightly less neutral blue or less bright red. Normally, I'd have just given up and bought the grey. But, heart pounding, I approached the register with the grey and the yellow.
The same trip, I bought a bra specifically to wear with a shirt I have that tends to slip over the shoulder. You understand? I bought a bra that's meant to be seen. (Well, part of it, anyway.) I've been fiddling around with makeup and hair accessories lately, too.
Is it a sign of increased self-esteem? A reviving fashion sense? A mental spring cleaning?
Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't go away anytime soon. It's kindof fun.
Tuesday, February 29, 2000
29 February 2000
Well, I finished the project I was talking about the other day - the one I wasn't sure what programming language to use. I decided on PHP3, because I know that better than JavaScript or Perl, though that's not saying a lot. And what was this project, you ask? An online I Ching oracle! Go on, see for yourself! Let me know if you find any typos or have any problems.
Now I'm trying to decide if I want to expand the section to include other forms of divination - Tarot cards, maybe. Any thoughts?
Wow. End of February. All last week, I kept thinking, "I should put together the graphics for the journal for March soon," and I kept putting myself off with, "Plenty of time!" Heh. Guess I should've listened to myself. Well, it'll give me something to do today.
We had a great time on the MeadeHall last night. First, the session itself was great - Braz is still pulling around his plot, and rather than starting to figure things out, I think we're getting farther and farther away from the truth. Jaret now thinks Marten is a doppleganger, or maybe a demon posessing Moon Dancer's body. Lisl and Zoya have figured out that he's on the run from someone - or something - and are trying to get him to help. (Zoya thinks that maybe taking care of whatever's chasing him might aid his memory.)
Marten was too busy to flirt with Zoya last night, so Lisl's teasing only served to confuse Zoya a bit. I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or disappointed. Zoya wasn't designed with romance in mind, but it would've been fun roleplaying through it, because... Well, because she wasn't designed with romance in mind. Damn, but I wish I knew whatever happened to her origin story. (I'm missing just about all of my RPG-based stories. It's irritating the crap out of me; some of them weren't too bad.)
Anyway, in addition to the Hall session itself, we were having fun playing with the computer's voices. Matt, Braz, and Jeff all have Macintosh computers, and they were playing with TTS, which is Mac's text-to-speech software. Matt had his set up so that whenever any of us said a line on the IRC channel where we meet, his computer would say it. Not only that, but he had different voices assigned to each of us. (If you've ever heard Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, that's about what it was like.)
At first, Matt and Braz were typing in peculiar names of baseball players for the software to try to pronounce. Karen - who couldn't even hear the results - got into the act and started coming up with peculiar words for it to attempt. Somewhat astonishingly, it managed "supercalafragilisticexpialidocious" with very little problem.
After weird words, Matt mentioned that he was sortof tempted to type in some dirty words. So, being incurable punsters, we started slinging around pick-up lines and dirty talk on the Stephen Hawking theme. ("Put your comet in my black hole, baby!") This was so funny (and took us so long to exhaust all the punny possibilities) that we wound up staying up until 11:30. We might have stayed longer, except Matt's computer locked up on him, and we all spontaneously decided that it was time for bed.
One of the ladies in my office is having her birthday today. I had just been wondering the other day whether I knew anyone with a Leap-Day birthday. So, although she's turning 40, this is only her 10th birthday. Kindof cool, huh?
Now I'm trying to decide if I want to expand the section to include other forms of divination - Tarot cards, maybe. Any thoughts?
Wow. End of February. All last week, I kept thinking, "I should put together the graphics for the journal for March soon," and I kept putting myself off with, "Plenty of time!" Heh. Guess I should've listened to myself. Well, it'll give me something to do today.
We had a great time on the MeadeHall last night. First, the session itself was great - Braz is still pulling around his plot, and rather than starting to figure things out, I think we're getting farther and farther away from the truth. Jaret now thinks Marten is a doppleganger, or maybe a demon posessing Moon Dancer's body. Lisl and Zoya have figured out that he's on the run from someone - or something - and are trying to get him to help. (Zoya thinks that maybe taking care of whatever's chasing him might aid his memory.)
Marten was too busy to flirt with Zoya last night, so Lisl's teasing only served to confuse Zoya a bit. I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or disappointed. Zoya wasn't designed with romance in mind, but it would've been fun roleplaying through it, because... Well, because she wasn't designed with romance in mind. Damn, but I wish I knew whatever happened to her origin story. (I'm missing just about all of my RPG-based stories. It's irritating the crap out of me; some of them weren't too bad.)
Anyway, in addition to the Hall session itself, we were having fun playing with the computer's voices. Matt, Braz, and Jeff all have Macintosh computers, and they were playing with TTS, which is Mac's text-to-speech software. Matt had his set up so that whenever any of us said a line on the IRC channel where we meet, his computer would say it. Not only that, but he had different voices assigned to each of us. (If you've ever heard Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, that's about what it was like.)
At first, Matt and Braz were typing in peculiar names of baseball players for the software to try to pronounce. Karen - who couldn't even hear the results - got into the act and started coming up with peculiar words for it to attempt. Somewhat astonishingly, it managed "supercalafragilisticexpialidocious" with very little problem.
After weird words, Matt mentioned that he was sortof tempted to type in some dirty words. So, being incurable punsters, we started slinging around pick-up lines and dirty talk on the Stephen Hawking theme. ("Put your comet in my black hole, baby!") This was so funny (and took us so long to exhaust all the punny possibilities) that we wound up staying up until 11:30. We might have stayed longer, except Matt's computer locked up on him, and we all spontaneously decided that it was time for bed.
One of the ladies in my office is having her birthday today. I had just been wondering the other day whether I knew anyone with a Leap-Day birthday. So, although she's turning 40, this is only her 10th birthday. Kindof cool, huh?
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