looking for the mouse...

HERE is a neat article by author Clay Shirky on the topic of where our society, as consumers of media, are going. His theories are fascinating, and I particularly like the way he makes parallels between modern sitcoms and gin pushcarts from the early industrial revolution. here's a snippet of one of his punchier points, for the link averse:

So [watching less television is] the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

the title refers to the fact that a friend of his has a 4-year old who sprung up in the middle of a dvd to root around in the cables behind their entertainment center to "look for the mouse". because children today think that if their entertainment isn't interactive, it's probably not worth sitting through. as someone who hasn't sat down to watch tv on anything approaching a regular basis in three years, i heartily agree with the kid.

GUM. BO.

yesterday dawned uncharacteristically cloudy and cold for a texas spring. from a low of 50 to a high of 65? this is our winter weather, not our april weather! so, i did the only thing a right-thinking person could do to console herself in such cold temperatures. i made gumbo. i made yummy, dark brown roux, added andouille sausage (because bratwurst does not a good gumbo make!), peppers, onions, okra, mushrooms, and - at the very last possible minute - sweet texas gulf shrimp. yum!!!

the last time i did this, i left it all in my big soup pot and heated the whole mess up whenever i wanted leftovers. this had the unfortunate consequence of overcooking the delicate okra and shrimp and so it was a bit ... mushy ... after a few days. this time, i packed it up in small tubs and froze it. of course, we ate it for dinner last night, but as anyone who's made stew or casserole or sauce knows, the best time to eat it is the day after cooking. after all those lovely ingredients have had time to really SOCIALIZE, get to know each other, converse, buy each other a drink, make out, mingle themselves inextricably, smoke a cigarette... the next morning when they're all putting their socks back on and promising to call each other is really when you should be setting out your bowl and spoon. i'm looking forward to dinner tonight in ways i'm afraid i cannot put into words. forgive me if i drool.

thanks to rose for the lovely suggestion... and for shopping for all the bits with me ... and for not murdering me when i interjected, "crap! i have no celery!" while standing before a nearly-done roux at the stove last night.

hairdos

i got my hair cut today. i love my stylist; he's an atrociously cute gay boy who can give me a men's business cut or a modern girly cut with equal aplomb. today his hair was EXACTLY the same color as his skin, only about three shades darker. it gave him a weirdly monochromatic look, so he said he was going to get some lowlights to break it up and make it more interesting. he sorta looked like a ken doll, really, but after "don't ask. don't tell." was repealed and ken could just come on out of the closet and tell barbie how badly she needed that lip wax all along.

now, last week, i had an amusing conversation with a fairly buttoned-down and well-groomed sort of lesbian i am acquainted with. she and i were with a group of friends at a play in phoenix. the play is a whole other post in itself, but i'll summarize it with the blurb they used in the publicity "lesbian erotic fiction dramatized and set to music." now, i ask you, aware readers - do you think any lesbian story EVER needs to be dramatized? i mean, further than it already is by virtue of the fact that it's a lesbian story, whether fiction or non-fiction? anyway, we were sitting in our seats waiting for the show to start, and the two rows in front of us were reserved. just a few minutes before the show, a gaggle of fashionably mussed and well-dressed lesbians came in and filled up those reserved seats. and the lady next to me leaned over and whispered, "doesn't anybody comb their hair anymore?" she had a point. these ladies were pushing the bed-head look to its fashionable limits. being the straight-shooter i am, i leaned over and whispered back that they had stopped issuing combs to lesbians born after 1980, because of the budget cuts. of course, by the time that had wended its way telephone-game-style down the row of friends, it came out something like "they stopped making combs in the 80s because of the petroleum crisis." whatever.

then i walked out of my hair appointment looking like one of those uncombed gals from the play last week... my stylist gave me a modern girly cut today, and bless his heart if he didn't try to iron it flat so it would lay down against my noggin. curls just don't do that, but if he pastes 'em down with gel and i put my motorcycle helmet on right afterward while the gel sets, i can kinda make 'em behave for a few hours. i can't wait to see what the wedding planner and the photographer have to say about that...

screaming babies

THIS IS AWESOME!

It's totally safe for work, just a serial from the comic strip Non Sequitur on the subject of small children on commercial aircraft. Really, as much as I travel, I've been stunningly (*crossing my fingers, toes, and a few hairs for good measure*) lucky on this score. Yesterday, I was on a plane with a small child and his mother, and they were both very well behaved. He was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old and I base this guess on what I know about language development in kids. At that age, tykes have enough word-sounds at their disposal to communicate pretty much exclusively with their caregivers. I offer you a hypothetical: I'm standing in the kitchen at my sister's house (okay, maybe this isn't entirely hypothetical) and my niece comes in there and says, "muh!" So as I stand there, I start running through all the things that this could signify - Mom, More, Movie, Mickey and the Motorcars, Marvelous Mel's Monster Movie Marathon... I'm at a loss. I don't know what the kid wants. My sister passes by and sees her daughter plaintively trying "MUH!" louder and more insistently at the idiot grownup who is alliterating in the kitchen. "Oh," she says. "You want more milk, honey? Ok. Bring me your cup." Whereupon, my niece toddles off and comes back with a purple plastic elephant, I think; whatever it was did not look like anything I would describe as a 'cup'. My sister performs some ancient Indonesian massage ritual on the elephant that looks like something Indiana Jones does when disarming booby traps in the Temple of Doom and when she finishes, there is a hollow space inside the elephant that she pours milk into. She performs the ritual in reverse, hands the elephant to my niece, and the kiddo toddles off happily, sucking on the elephant's trunk. I think.

Anyway, that's about where this particular flying kid was in his stage of vocabulary development. He made sounds that only his mother could possibly have interpreted as words, but he had no trouble parsing her instructions regarding sitting up and keeping his seat belt buckled. She did a good job keeping him quietly entertained, fed, watered, and calm throughout the flight. So, if you flew to Tucson yesterday with a little boy who likes his Thomas the Tank engine and were sitting next to a gigantic amazon who was working a crossword -- kudos to you and your kid for flying well. Not everyone manages it so gracefully.

rollin'...

this weekend, rose and i got out together for some much-needed road therapy. we rode down to college station to visit my godsons and took the mobile dog unit with us. it's amazing how cars that are BLAZING up the lane to our left will suddenly slow down when confronted with a dog kennel on wheels. i find it hysterically amusing. i imagine that guys who drive old police cruisers get the same sort of giggle when they come up behind someone who suddenly starts driving a lot more lawfully after they catch that shape in the rearview mirror. we seem to create waves wherever we go, and i'm part exhibitionist, so i like it.

there is something kinda magical about driving a motorcycle. people NEVER stop to talk to me at gas stations when i'm in my truck. i've been told in various contexts that i'm not really approachable. sometimes that's a compliment, and sometimes it's not, but for one reason or another... i'm not approachable. unless i'm on a motorcycle. then people want to know "how far you ride that thing" and "what kinda bike is it" and "are you a real girl" and all those sorts of questions. it's TEN TIMES WORSE when i have the dogs with me. this is actually fine with me, because i really am a pretty friendly sort and i love talking about projects i've worked on and, as i said, i'm part exhibitionist. rose and i built that trailer two christmases ago, and it's fun to explain to people how we got the idea and how we engineered it and put it together. it's not complicated, but it is unusual.

rose's dad had a great story for us recently: he works at a deli and this couple pulled up to the store on motorcycles with a trailer just like ours in tow. he got to chatting with them about it, because he thought we were daft to build ours in the first place and he wanted to know what madness had possessed them. it turns out they had seen one on the highway a few years before and had been so intrigued they turned their truck around and followed it for a few miles to snap a picture and study it. he asked what the bikes and trailer they had seen looked like... sure enough it was us. he said he felt proud to tell them that it was his daughter's trailer they'd seen. winning converts over left and right, we are!

of course, we ourselves got the idea from seeing someone else pulling a trailer like this behind their motorcycle. in fact, i nearly flipped rose's bike trying to get a better look at it, because i was still riding on the back of hers at that point. anyway, it's been fun to have it out every time and the dogs sure seem to enjoy it. it beats the heck outta tying them to my pillion with a bungee net. they'd probably sit still if i got them some little doggles to wear over their eyes, but i don't think i could teach them how to counter-lean in the slow turns...

pusher

i hurt my neck last week by sleeping "wrong" on a plane to denver. i had a couple of very bad days and took a lot of advil and did a bunch of stretching and it mostly chilled itself out. yea! then i came home and slept "wrong" on a plane and played a rugby game. why? well, because i'm firmly convinced that people think i'm brighter than i really am and i occasionally have to prove that point. ok, i might be lying about that last part. but have you ever fantasized about how much better volleyball would be if they'd allow tackling? if you have, then you probably understand why i can't give up rugby in any permanent sense.

so i spent an hour or so saturday putting my head and neck into tight corners that really weren't conducive to recuperating the erstwhile injury. meaning: i re-injured it. and then i came home and cried about it until rose offered to go get me a muscle relaxer. sometimes, i wonder if "muscle relaxer" isn't her personal secret code for "pillow over your face" but whatever. i injured myself a while back so i had a couple of pills left over from those prescriptions and she dug one out and gave it to me. and it worked! my muscles relaxed and i drifted off to sleep after muttering some particularly choice nonsense that popped into my head in the twilight of consciousness. this is how rose gets her revenge. she records these silly mutterings in her brain and reminds me of them the next morning after i've had some coffee. i am always properly contrite after being reminded how odd the dark corners of my nigh-sleeping brain are.

i awoke in the middle of the night and i needed to get up and go to the bathroom. you would be AMAZED at how heavy muscle relaxers make you. i was three times my normal bodyweight as i moved across the room. or, at the very least, it was three times harder to move myself across the room.

the next day, i chewed down advil all day long and kept my tender knee on ice and stretched a lot and my neck was JUST FINE. that was great! alas, all the scrapes and bruises that i'd been able to ignore the night before due to the adrenaline of having played a great game of rugby started catching up with me. further, this was when i started to notice that every muscle i owned (except my uterus, really) was in pain. ouch.

sunday night we're settling in to bed and i start crying about how sore i am and rose growls: "do you want a muscle relaxer?!?!" (emphasis mine) i think she was about ready to kill me. instead, i asked for just a painkiller and another round of anti-inflammatories.

monday night... lather, rinse, repeat. this time, when rose suggested i take a muscle relaxer i suggested that she bring ME a painkiller but get a muscle relaxer for herself. it won't shut me up, but it'll certainly make me easier to tolerate.

dear the universe:

please to stop immediately with the stealing of my stuff. in the past week you have robbed me of my bluetooth earpiece (in Houston), my etymotics headphones (in Denver), my ethernet cable (in Huntington Beach), and a copious supply of advil. ok, i probably ate the advil. but i only did so because you keep stealin mah shitz! so cut it out.

yours truly,
thalassa

Holy Crossdressing Chinese Princess, Batman!

Find Out Which Disney Girl You Are! created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Mulan A free spirit, a beautiful soul, all things that most people would tag on a lovely girly girl - but you're more boy than anything! Sometimes you're considered a 'nerd' or 'dork', but that just comes with the package - you even embrace your inner nerd. Go you! Mulan 79% Pocahontas 75% Esmerelda 67% Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) 67% Snow White 67% Belle 63% Jane 63% Ariel 50% Jasmine 46% Megara 46% Cinderella 38% Tinkerbell 29% Violet 21% Alice 21%

mission drift...

for those of you who observe easter: Happy Easter! He is Risen!

now, onto the topic at hand: mission drift

yesterday rose and i went off to help out at my sister's house. they recently replaced their carpet with wood flooring in deference to their highly allergic and now crawling youngest daughter. since the floor went in, their garage has been storage/workshop space. we went, ostensibly to help replace baseboards, but because the garage space had to be reclaimed first, we ended up minding the babies while my brother-in-law hauled trash and returned unused floor bits, etc. we left just as b-i-l's mom came over to dye easter eggs with the kids. (a narrow escape! i liked the clothes i was wearing!)

on our way home, we received a TOP SEEKRIT COMMUNIQUÉ from our commanding general, i.e.: the lady who had invited us over for dinner. our mission was to procure a cheesecake for the consumption and delight of the troops -- under cover of broad daylight. not just any cheesecake would satisfy the general, however. this particular cheesecake had to be unfrozen and ready in the next 15 minutes. after consulting all relevant sources of clandestine intelligence, namely rose's sister and her encyclopedic knowledge of all things procurement-related, we agreed upon a mission plan. we would approach the nearest greengrocer's establishment and attempt to procure a cheesecake in full view of everyone, without even the most rudimentary groucho-marx-style disguise. obviously, it is always best to procure cheesecake components, bivouac in the vicinity of an enclosed heating device and construct it yourself, but the 15-minute constraint prevented this course of action.

when we arrived at the greengrocer's, our driver and our gunner engaged in an evasive maneuver designed to sow confusion and doubt in the minds of the enemy, and to accommodate the gunner's busted leg. (the gunner busted her leg in utah on another mission and is in intensive therapy to recover the use of it before bike weather descends fully upon us). the gunner bravely took over the driver's post while the driver penetrated the perimeter at the greengrocer's in order to recon the location of the cheesecake and attempt to procure it. she had ALMOST made it safely inside when she was accosted by a member of a youth paramilitary organization, an all-volunteer brigade of the fiercest young women American society has to offer. these young women are known collectively as "The Girl Scouts", although intelligence indicates that they break themselves into age-based brigades of "Brownies", "Juniors" and "Cadets". the young scout was, according to the driver's debriefing report, likely a "Brownie". the youthful scout spotted our driver quite easily, assailing her directly but from behind the safety of a paperboard shield which bore her troop insignia and a piece of propaganda about cookies. the driver deflected the attack and kept moving, putting off the assault with a clever line about "buy[ing] some on my way out."

safely inside the perimeter, in the very heart of the greengrocer's base, the driver attempted to ferret out the location of the cheesecake. along the way, in order to maintain camouflage, she was forced to pick up some sugar-covered marshmallows in the shape of a rabbit. the locals use these items to celebrate the annual spring holiday of 'Easter' and refer to the candies simply as "Peeps". intel cannot uncover the reason for naming rabbit candies after bird sounds, and recommend further investigation into these so-called "Peeps". shortly after being forced to grab some "Peeps" for camouflage, the driver spied a bottle of very expensive wine on a very good sale price, and realized it would make an ideal club weapon in case she found herself further accosted by more of the paramilitary youth scouts. failing that, she could drink the wine later and realizing the value-added proposition this presented to her troop morale, she gathered the wine up and proceeded to her mission objective.

at last, when freed of the crowds of locals bearing "Peeps" and "Cadbury Eggs", the driver spied the bakery sign and made straight for it. there, in an unguarded case, she found three cheesecakes from which to choose. selecting the most lovely of the three for presentation to the general, the driver proceeded to the scanning devices en route to the exit. the driver found, with no small measure of luck, an unmanned station and was able to clear her purchases without being spied or noticed unduly by enemy forces. she began to make her exit out a door other than the one by which she entered, so as to avoid the "Brownie" troops. unfortunately, the "Brownie" had anticipated this course of action and had positioned reinforcements at the exit door. the driver considered using her improvised club, but these scouts had a large armored chest with them which was likely their weapons locker. they also had an assault vehicle parked nearby with trained drivers inside. feeling her chances of making a quick assault and good escape were nil at this point, the driver succumbed to the crowd of "Brownies", and emerged a few minutes later with only a slightly thinned wallet and a few boxes of Thin Mints and Samoas weighing down her step.

The ultimate lesson here: Mission Drift is a terrible thing. "Peeps", good wine, and Girl Scout Cookies are the price you pay for failing to stick to the core cheesecake procurement directive. Don't let this happen to you!

i'm headed out to do battle...

i'm off to do battle with the bike. i hit an algae-covered low water crossing the wrong way about a year ago and my bike slid on its left side up the opposing bank after dumping me in a creek and ripping my jeans off my right cheek. the good news was, thanks to my atgatt policy (All The Gear, All The Time!) toward protective gear, i stood up completely unscathed. head intact, skin intact, bones intact, pride... well, my pride was damp but otherwise unharmed. unfortunately, the bike did take some damage. the clutch handle and rearview mirror needed some work. the left foglight was all cattywompus, but still working. i ended up replacing both mirrors with prettier ones, since the left one was past saving at that point. the clutch handle was repaired with a lot of grunting and a little bit of wrenching. the foglight, however, has been doing its best to demonstrate "walleyed" ever since. walleyed (for the non-southern among my readers) is a compound word, pronounced WAWL-ide, and refers to a person whose two eyes point at opposing walls simultaneously. i've tweaked that light, i've wrenched it, i've beaten on it with a hammer... it just won't line up right and then stay that way. so, today it gets replaced. i've had the replacement lamp for about 6 months now, but it's been too damn cold out to work on the bike, let alone ride it much...
so today i'm taking advantage of the fine springy weather and replacing my left foglight. with a nod to my late granny tootsie, who averred that it ALWAYS storms on good friday, but not until the afternoon. so i'm gonna get to it and be done before the storm.

coffee... must have... coffee...

you've seen, i trust, those cartoon sequences in which a character crawls across the hot burning sands of the sahara chasing a mirage that looks like water? and then all the infinite commercial variations in which they bump into something completely improbable in the sahara, like a coke machine? improbable, but utterly satisfying.

i would be utterly satisfied if i could go crawling down to my kitchen and find a mug of hot coffee waiting for me. rose had a meeting this morning, and she had to jump up and run to it without making coffee first. she's a lot smarter before her first cup than i am and therefore infinitely more qualified to operate complex machinery like a coffee pot. although i'd LOVE to have a coffee pot like the one below, i fear i'd only be awake enough to use it after my 3rd cup. and then only when i wasn't on some cold medicine that warns you not to drive or operate heavy machinery under its influence...



EDIT: i ventured down there to make coffee, rationalizing that if i was smart enough to write this, i was also smart enough to make coffee. i spilled grounds all over the counter and i poured brewed coffee on my yellow dog. i made coffee, but with absolutely ZERO points awarded for style.

the new regime begins

HappyBox has met her demise. the were-cricket did her in and it was time for a new thang. so i bought a mac. above, you can see the new queen, ShinyBox, looking down from her cardboard throne on the bones of her fallen predecessor. true to reputation, i've been able to just plug in and run with all my existing hardware on ShinyBox. my keyboard, trackball, printer, external drives, GPS, and coffee cup warmer (thanks, sissie!). it all just works. i'm thrilled!

i got my WoW setup all squared away but of course i'm having to miss wow tonight because i'm traveling. so... i'm blogging from the admiral's club again.

i had some friends in from out of town this weekend and we went out to see the sights in the gayborhood. it was fun, i got to scoot a boot, and then we went for breakfast afterward. y'know, there are some people who really shouldn't drink alcohol... we were sitting next to one of them at breakfast this morning. he arrived late and loud with suspicious stains down the front of his shirt. he'd either spilled a red drink all over himself, or he'd puked on himself. either way, he was sloppy drunk. he spent the entire meal embarrassing his friends and attempting to get our attention as we noshed at the next table over. his name was curtis merillo, and he was from central missouri, originally. he wanted everyone to think he was from the FBI or CIA or somehow affiliated with secret agency of some kind... but mostly he was a jackass. the best part of the meal was when we were leaving. he reached out to try to high-five me, as though we'd shared some victorious experience, his surviving a meal without me stuffing my fist down his loud, stupid throat. so i grabbed his hand, shook it, and in the most pleasant tone i'm capable of using, i told him he was obnoxious and embarrassing and should have a good night. and i skipped off home to get my short night of sleep.

nothing beats the build-your-own crepes at cafe brazil for putting me in a good mood at 4 am. i damn sure wasn't going to let curtis merillo kill it for me.

congrats, lady!

my baby sister got married on leap day. she eloped! i'm proud of her and happy for her, and i just wanted to congratulate her and wish her all the best and many happy years.

It came from the swamp...

I took my dead computer off to my friends' house this weekend. There was going to be an exceptionally high concentration of geekery there, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use my friends for free tech support. Or for a source of expendable RAM that we could feed to my motherboard, however you want to view it. The good news is, they have a server with the same RAID controller that my dead motherboard sported so we were able to simply plug my drives in and watch them work. Yea! In addition to that, there was some griping and whining about the configuration of the case and how the video card was in the way of getting the drives out and blah blah blah cry cry cry whine whine whine blah blah blah. The hysterical bit about that is that the guy doing the crying was the one who PICKED THAT CASE IN THE FIRST PLACE. He spec'ed the computer for me three years ago, and my dear friend jaasper was the one who got stuck building it. I made stew and kept jaasper fed and watched him do all the crazy kit-bashing. I'd never done it before and while I'm certainly capable of reading the documentation and putting a kit together from scratch, it is far better to do such things with an advisor on hand. If the advisor is further willing to twist the tiny screwdriver himself in exchange for dinner, so much the better. Anyway, in the process of yanking the drives out of the box so they could be hooked up to the server, we discovered the most likely cause of the fried RAM. It was a WERE-CRICKET!!! (and it came from the swamp...)

A scary, hairy, desiccated, fried cricket slid out of the case when we pulled the cover off the backside. The hair was mostly dog-looking, but the way it was fused to the exoskeleton (I guess by the electricity?) the carcass quite seriously resembled a were-cricket. I had a computer bug!

Many, many thanks go to my friends for getting my hard drives back up and running so I could get all my data off them! Now I must merely bide my time, grow my patience, and refresh my web browser every 30 minutes until I see that my new Mac has shipped.

wow.

i don't know what to say about this but that it's just so pretty it makes my heart ache... i shiver listening to it, and not because it's 40 and raining in "hot"lanta. i've always loved this song, i've just never loved a recording of it before.


for laura h: The song is "Hallelujah" by Lenoard Cohen.
swiped from the youtube poster:
Canadian indie singer-songwriter Allison Crowe's uniquely potent interpretation is heard on her album, "Tidings".

woe.

MY MOTHERBOARD ATE MY RAM!!!!

on friday. *sob* happybox is dead.

i was trying to run a long, computationally heavy process on my home PC (which i had dubbed happybox) because my work computer was occupied with deadline-based work. i thought it was taking too long, so i popped into task manager to see how much RAM it was using, and discovered it was using much less than i expected. weird. i checked to make sure i had the right target total in my head and the computer only reported 1GB available. now... i could've SWORN i put 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM in the case, but y'know it's been a couple of years and i have no head for these sorts of hardware details. it's why i've never been a good gearhead. you can't describe a car as having "one of those 2.something litre V-whatever thingies" and expect to be taken seriously. so the total ram available was half what i expected, which meant it was time to troubleshoot.

so i shut 'er down, cracked open the case, looked into happybox and found 2 x 1GB sticks hanging out of the motherboard. right, then. that meant either one stick was not seated properly (and had never been?) or i had some bad ram. so i put rose to work on it, because i was frantically trying to finish that aforementioned deadline work. she swapped the sticks to other slots, but it still only reported 1GB, which meant that either one pair of slots (a channel) or one stick of RAM was bad, but we didn't know which. we tried swapping the sticks into opposite channels to narrow it down, and then the computer wouldn't boot. this meant the RAM in the primary slot was bad, and i assumed that because of this it wasn't reading the (nominally good) RAM in the secondary slot.

i didn't think it through because if i had, i'd have recognized at this point that my bad slot had fried the RAM in it and putting more RAM in the computer would be a waste of money. instead, i went to Fry's and bought more RAM. but when i got home, reason took hold of my brain before i even unwrapped the new stuff... which meant i tried to ID the bad slot before putting the new RAM in, just in case it was what had fried the old stick. either that first round of swapping sticks into opposing channels or something in this later troubleshooting step exposed my poor old good ram to a bad slot on the motherboard. i'll never really know. all i know for sure is that i have at least one bad slot on my motherboard, and by "bad slot" i mean "vicious ram-eating slot." it munched down 2 1GB sticks of ram on friday, and i'll be darned if i'm feeding it any more.

so, in light of this woe and tragedy, i'm buying myself a mac. because if i'm going to use MacOS, it's not going to be windows' bloated, big-brother-like version of MacOS (aka: Vista) it's going to be the real gosh-darned thing. and, well, mac runs wow in addition to VMWare, so all the fun stuff i want runs natively and anything i absolutely must have windows for, i can have on a Virtual Machine. color me silver. :)

happy birthday, sis!

to my beloved younger sister, a wish for a happy day with many happy returns!

rock on, boss...

my boss kinda rocks. actually, he rocks a lot. we recently had an exchange where i told him i was considering transferring off his team to a job that entailed less travel. i ended up staying where i am, because i like my job better than i'd have liked the other one, but it put him on notice. and that was good. so he said he'd take some steps to get me less travel and more variety.

i guess i still don't think that talking about things is really going to change them, because i expected my life to carry on just as it has and eventually by mid-summer i'd see the results of a gradual shift in my assignments. not so. he just told the people who've been borrowing my time that they have advanced all the time they're going to get until the end of june with what they have on my calendar now. color me thrilled and pleasantly surprised.

and to keep this post from being a complete snoozer for those of you who don't care what i do to earn my filthy lucre, i'll share that the carolina pizza & pasta works makes a TASTY shrimp etouffe in honor of the impending Mardi Gras holiday. ayeee! and they make GREAT crab cakes, too. *wink*

it's finally happened...

i've been recognized by the staff of my local starbucks. they know who i am and make conversation with me and recommend drinks i might like based on the variety of drinks i've ordered before. not being a creature of habit, i never order the same thing twice. well, unless it's early in the morning. early in the morning, i just stumble in clutching my travel mug and ask them to fill it up with whatever is on tap and has the most caffeine. that in itself probably ingrains me in the memories of the morning shift, but i'm not much for making conversation at that point in my day.

this recognition was by the night shift. this whole event probably has been delayed by the fact that i travel as much as i do, but i had hoped to avoid becoming a "regular" at starbucks. i suppose it was inevitable, though, given how much i love coffee. and the internet. and coffee.

i'm a nooyawkuh.

i spent last week in the vicinity of philadelphia for work. i was teaching a class at the corporate mothership and it was nice to get to walk around and shake hands with people i only know via e-mail. there used to be a lot of confusion about me and another woman with my name who worked in that office. she would occasionally get my travel itineraries or expense checks, i would get help requests that were directed to her, sometimes my flight schedules would return me "home" to the philly airport. she recently left the company, so the confusion is much reduced, but i still took the opportunity to introduce myself in person to the folks who keep my work rolling along.

then, rose came up to spend the weekend with me. she has a dear friend who lives near philly, the one we visited at halloween. i had been staying with him all week instead of in a hotel near the office, so she came up and joined me.

friday night we spent painting the kitchen. rose has an amazing and fantastic skill (which is for rent, if you make appropriate arrangements with me...) at home renovation: she can "cut-in" paint freehand. that's right... NO BLUE TAPE required. she just stands on top of a ladder with her tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth, paintbrush in one hand, paint cup in the other, and makes PERFECTLY straight lines along the wall/ceiling boundary. i'm pretty good at stringing up painter's tape and working the edge, but by the time i can get a room taped, rose can already be done cutting in so it's ready for paint rollers. i'm seriously in awe. so the homeowner rolled paint on the walls, rose cut the walls in ahead of him, and i? i did the perfect job for a very patient, slightly anal retentive engineer in a kitchen renovation being run by artist-types: i removed all the nasty old pink contact paper from the cabinets. it was foul. and you'd think after all these years the glue would've lost some of its hold, right? not so. apparently, those 50's contact paper manufacturers had not yet glommed onto the disposable world mentality. that stuff was stuck on so tightly, i started theorizing that it'd formed a symbiotic life form with the wood paneling of the cabinets. i fantasized that i was peeling up entire civilizations of some very sticky higher life form, cutting them into strips with a razor and harvesting them so they could go to the landfill, convert more of our household garbage, and someday take over the world! muahahahahahahaha!!! or maybe it was just really late at night and something in the sushi was getting to me.

the next day, we got up and drove to new york city to see Avenue Q on broadway. and by "we got up and drove," i really mean that we all piled into my rent car and i had to do urban battle from behind the wheel of a rented saturn. i survived without too many country-mouse-in-the-big-city moments, and even earned the hoots and applause of all my passengers when i flipped off and honked at some ignorant redneck in a land rover with alabama plates when he cut me off. i got us where we were going, used lola's navigational skills to find us good parking, and did all of that in time to pre-order us some wine for the intermission. w00t!

after the show, we walked down to the empire state building, where we were turned into mice, lured with stale limburger through a maze of passages, elevators, snaked lines, gift shops, hawkers, vampires, and cranky tourists, and finally got out onto the observation deck. it was pretty up there, the view was beautiful, and a bit overwhelming. you know, at one level, in your head that there really are that many people in the city. but until you stand up there and look out at all the twinkling lights, it doesn't really hit you JUST HOW MANY people are in the city. rose showed me all her favorite haunts from her college days, as far as you can see them from the top of the empire state building at night anyway, and then we headed back down for dinner.

we taxi'd to little italy, found a likely-looking spot, and settled in for a truly delicious meal. i had lobster fra diavolo, the red version, and it was served in a bowl approximately the size of a tire. from a semi. f'real. we had to move EVERYTHING on the table just so they could wedge this bowl in before me. the funny thing about shellfish, though, is that it's like 80's hair: lots of hard shell, little actual content. by the time i'd shelled the lobster, the clams, and the mussels i had a manageable-sized meal and didn't feel overstuffed. but i did feel richly and extravagantly treated. so it worked. yum! the fra diavolo red sauce was spicy and tangy and just what i wanted.

i made it home in time to play my geeky game where we wiped out three times attempting an assault on karazhan - a big, difficult dungeon - with a pick-up group of people who weren't really prepared. only a few of us knew what we were doing. it was good learning, but i look forward to trying it again sometime in a group that survives the whole experience. :)

oh, and i got my first official philly cheesesteak. and, yeah, it really is that much better than what you get out here in the hinterlands. i'll have to go back!