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April fool

When I left for work this morning, a cold dark rain started up as I walked to the bus stop, but tapered off to drizzle on the walk from the bus to my office.

My lunchtime walk around the block was warm and windy. I had to go around the windward side of the fountain by the courthouse or be splashed.

When I left work, a balmy breeze tried to get me to sweating under my raincoat (mind over matter) and I had to wear sunglasses. The sky was sky blue and festooned with high clouds. The young cherry trees in the neighborhood line the streets with lower, pinker clouds. How grand will they be in one hundred years?

My back door and all my windows are open. I ate cold pizza and drank my beer while watching the sun slant through the trees, through the grass, and across the head of the pink flamingo peering in at me.

Today at work we had cake and ice cream. We took a practice test and our pass rate was 100%, much higher than the team next door, to our trainer's delight. In the actual job part of the day, my research took me to the exactly what I was looking for. I read along in the file through the afternoon, ticking off my requirements as I found them, reaching the last one just when it was time to pick up my stuff and head for the bus.

Is this a joke?

Come for a visit!

What with all the recent festivities celebrating 400 years of white folks in Virginia and the Queen's visit, the Washington Post has glanced briefly southward and noticed that there is a city here. A city with things to do in it.

After three years of renovation and restoration, the state capitol has reopened to visitors. We should go. I've been on the capitol grounds many times, but never inside.

They also found a few other cultural and historical offerings, including the Virginia Center for Architecture, which I'm ashamed to say I hadn't even heard of.

And unlike the article on their last visit, the Post reporters didn't mention boozing it up for cheap even once.

I'm not inclined to vandalism

But every time I walk past a Hummer, I feel the urge to key it.

Again with the bathrooms

If the horror of unisex public restrooms is the patriarchy's shills' strongest argument against equal rights, then maybe it's time for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Really, it's past time, but it's being given another shot.

But the bathrooms! Oh no! After all, it's not like we have unisex bathrooms in our houses!

Oh, wait …

Aren't public restrooms more an issue for local building codes anyway? Besides, if the only drawback to not having equal rights is the right, nay, the privilege of waiting in a women-only line to use a women-only bathroom, then I'll take equal rights. And until I get them, I'll use the men's room if the line for the ladies' is really long.

The bathroom argument, which I've heard before, is pretty old. It seems that the main argument against equality nowadays is that the ERA would require equal rights for everybody and that would be bad because everyone knows that some people are more equal than others. (Lest that be taken out of context, I'd like to say that I was being sarcastic and I do, in fact, believe that no one is more equal than anyone else.)

I expect that's why the ERA is being recast as the "Women's Equality Amendment," neatly cutting out all the people who are being discriminated against on the basis of their skin color, religion, sexual orientation, disability, etc.

Should equality be doled out piecemeal? No. Will I take what I can get? Yes.

New Year's Day

I don't generally wait for New Year's to make resolutions. At any given time of year, I'll decide I'm going to do something and then do it. Lately, however, I've been feeling like I've got too many things that need to be done, but instead of doing them, I procrastinate and whatever it is I'm not doing just gets more in need of being done. It's time to make a list.

First Item: I need to get a new roof. This involves finding a few reputable contractors, getting estimates, and then getting the roof. Also, this involves a lot of money, because I'd like to get a metal roof if it's at all within my financial reach. I would like to get the new roof this spring.

Second Item: In view of the First Item, I need to reestablish my good financial habits. While I'm not spending money that I don't have, I am like a cricket spending a lot of the money that I do have instead of saving it like a good little ant. (I hate ants.) I've developed a full blown case of Nikon Acquisition Syndrome, which will be kept at bay with all the goodies I got over Christmas. I have a demanding automobile, which is getting ready to demand a new radiator, but which won't be kept at bay much longer. Anyway, I need to be a good little ant again.

Third Item: I would like to start cooking more. We eat out too much and I've had the same small selection of recipes in rotation for too long. To that end, we got a couple new cookbooks today! I'm going to try new things and expand my repertoire of standards. Maybe I will even learn to make omelettes properly, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Fourth Item: I will look for an engineering job. I will get my resume in order (again), submit it here and there (again), and finally start going to the local IEEE meetings and network (something I've been meaning to do for the last, oh, two years).

Fifth Item: Clutter! Argh, the clutter! It's taking over! I got started on this item today. I cleared off the stuff that's piled up on the little sofa in my office. I found some of the Christmas cards I received last year. Tomorrow I will clear off my desk.

So, Happy New Year! Akemashite omedetou! May your resolutions be easily achieved and may the Year of the Pig be good to you.

Wait, what season?

I had kind of a shock today when I realized that Christmas was next weekend. Ish. I'm usually really prepared for Thanksgiving, which has the courtesy to fall on the same day of the week each year, but Christmas is harder. There's more to do and it's easier to put off, somehow, especially since I do so little anyway.

I have one decoration up. It's been up for several years now. I should probably dust it off.

That is not to say that I don't enjoy the year end holidays. I like to see the pretty decorations that other people put up. I like getting gifts for people (though I'm glad my list is short). I like baking up the things that I only make at this time of year.

Here are some signs of the season that always make me happy.

The first snows have fallen at the monkey hot spring.

Japanese news covers the opening of the hagoita market at Asakusa. Long ago, when I was an exchange student in Tokyo, my host mother took me to the hagoita market. I still have my pretty hagoita , I'm looking at it right now.

Japanese news covers the start of the New Year's card mailing season. They show us a popular actress dolled up in a fancy kimono dropping cards into a special mailbox decorated with cute, cartoon inoshishi (wild boar, look at this great picture of a temple carving (?)), to signify the Year of the Boar. Which reminds me, it's exactly twelve years since my trip to Japan to visit friends (with whom I browsed through the inoshishi merchandise) and to make an aikido pilgrimage.

My neighborhood has its annual Christmas festival, in which I'm not really involved, but which is pretty to see. This was today. The gaslights south of Broad Street are decorated with red bows, and people are wandering around with little maps looking for the houses on the house tour. The very mellow spectacle included a horse-drawn carriage jingling through the neighborhood and a lady in a red satin riding habit riding sidesaddle here and there and through the parks. There's nothing like horse-based transport to give you a different perspective on your neighborhood. From across Libby Hill Park, I saw the lady on horseback riding along 29th Street and towering over all the parked motor vehicles. Horses are tall! (Oh, how profound!) People on horseback are even taller, but look more properly in proportion to nineteenth century houses than cars do. Huh. Funny how that works.

Black as tar, but oh so sweet

Well, the elections returns are mostly in and it's a good day for some Schadenfreude pie. What with the prospect of gridlocked government and Rumsfeld's resignation, I'm feeling safer and more nationally secure already.

That said, it's sad that the anti-gay marriage amendment was passed in Virginia, thus enshrining in our state constitution both discrimination and really bad wording that is going to have negative implications for all couples, regardless of their gender mix. Also, gay marriage is illegal here anyway. You people who voted for the amendment, you'd better not be the same people who've voted down the Equal Rights Amendment because "discrimination is illegal and so the amendment is redundant." (Another anti-ERA argument I've heard is "Then men could use the women's restroom." As if they'd want to wait in the lines!) On the less dark side, here in beautiful Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, through the heart of which runs an avenue decorated with statues of the Confederate generals, 69.35% of us voted against the anti-marriage amendment. Go us! Too bad there aren't more of us.

We're still waiting to see if we're going to be stuck with another term of Senator Maccaca. I think Webb's 7217 vote lead will stand up to a recount.

My Schadenfreude is somewhat tempered by the lack of a concession speech from Maccaca, but I'm happy about the gridlock, which is definite even if the GOP loss of Senate control is not.

Now, about the pie. I basically followed the Scalzis' recipe. I made sure to use 100% pure blackstrap molasses because that (Or they? Is "molasses" plural?) is blacker and tastes much better than the product usually labeled molasses but which is actually a mixture of molasses and corn syrup. I got the darkest chocolate chips I could find, with a 60% cocoa content. The only changes I made were substitutions (dark rum instead of Kahlua, because I didn't have any Kahlua, and a pastry crust instead of a cookie crust, because I like pastry better), the addition of a half cup of chopped pecans sprinkled on top (because Schadenfreude should have crispy bits), and an adjusted cooking time and temperature (one hour and five minutes at 350 °F). One benefit to not being quite sure of the cooking time was the opportunity to repeatedly stab the pie in its black heart to test for doneness. Once I finally declared the pie done, I put it on a cooling rack and watched it pulsate darkly and evilly as it slowly deflated.

The pie is good. Rich, dark, and very sweet.

Election day

Yes, of course we voted or, as Oz put it, "closed our eyes and did our wifely duty for the republic."

That's republic with a small "r", thank you very much.

And I really voted with my eyes open so I could see the touch screen. We still had those non-printing electronic machines that I think are a bad idea. I read online where someone said they used an electronic voting machine which printed out a hard copy of their ballot for them to verify which was then dropped into a locked box. Yes, a countable, hard copy backup. A must for any free and fair election. So that if for some reason (like, say, fraud) a candidate happens to receive more votes from a polling station than were actually cast at that polling station, a recount can be performed instead of those votes simply being tossed.

Anyway, I feel like I voted and that's the important thing, right?

Not a hiatus

Really, no. I haven't been writing for a few reasons:

1. Cat pee. The cats developed litter box issues and we've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out Why? Why, kitties, must you pee on the carpet? I was using the kitty-cam to surveille the targeted corner of the rug and catching cat pee action in actual pixels. Want to see? Want to hear more about it? No. Neither do I. What I really want is a day where I don't have to clean up any body wastes that aren't mine.

2. Physical therapy. I've been back at PT for the injuries from the accident. It's taking up a lot of time, and, while it seems to be helping, it's really painful. Who knew that the path to less pain involved so much pain?

3. Less caffeine. I noticed a correlation between my caffeine intake and my excessive worrying. I cut back on the coffee and chocolate. Now I'm worrying less and concentrating better on my work, but the stories, they just aren't there. My poor MS is languishing and I'm not moved to write little anecdotes about cleaning out the drains or the continuing saga of the stupid bridesmaid dress. It's something to think about. Getting my work done is good, but being a non-storytelling zombie? Not so good.

A brief note

To the person who checks out mysteries (and other fiction) from the Richmond Public Library and marks grammatical errors:

Please stop.

Thank you.

Various things, because I'm too distracted to write a proper entry

Happy news: My university's computer engineering program got its ABET accreditation, at last. Yay for we who were the class of record! Our degrees, in fact, are worth the paper they're printed on.

Burglar news: Since the arrest of a burglar (caught in the act of actual burgling) a few weeks ago, the rate of break-ins seems to have dropped off dramatically. We are still assiduous about setting the alarm. I still wrote down all the serial numbers of all the electronics we've acquired since the last time I wrote down serial numbers. I'm still planning to take "before" pictures of every room in the house before we go on vacation, so I'll have a reference if there's a break-in.

Burglar thoughts: Also since the arrest of the burglar, I have not seen the guy who has been walking up and down the street rather a lot this summer. They told us to be on the lookout for people behaving in a suspicious manner, and I thought it was odd that this guy was walking by so much. But. He looked like one of my neighbors. And many people in the neighborhood get around on foot. There are bus lines and stores for people to walk to. And you can't report someone to the police for walking down the street empty-handed, though if they're pushing a gas grill or a supercan filled with loot, you probably should. Anyway, seeing as how I haven't seen this guy since the arrest, maybe my suspicions were well-founded.

MS news: I finished my first hardcopy read-through of the novel. Now I have to read it again. And figure out the infill writing. I have to knuckle down and do some serious daydreaming. Staring out the window (constructively) is not quite as easy as staring out the window.

Ancient news: We're watching a Japanese variety show which is highlighting various nifty arts & such of the Edo period. Those Edo people must have had a lot of time on their hands. They carved daikon into chains and they made hard-cooked eggs with the yolk outside the white. They showed how to do the egg thing, though I wasn't paying close attention, so I might have missed a step. I may give it a shot one of these days if I need an excuse not to get things done.

True horror

According to my referral logs, the URL of some death metal group has been pointing to my blog for a few weeks now. So, welcome, death metal readers (if you're still reading). I hope you find the talk of wedding dress shopping, egg frying, and the local crime wave sufficiently horrifying.

Someone local may be disturbed by all the egg talk. This morning Oz found egg all over his car. Judging by the splatter pattern, it was either tossed from a passing vehicle or laid in flight by an angry chicken. (Hey, angry chicken, we are using the cage-free eggs nowadays!)

Or it could be coincidence.

Let's find out with more egg talk. I made, oh, three more tamago-yaki on Saturday. One came out pretty, the next came out too dark, and the last came out close to perfect, so I stopped cooking at that point and gave the perfect one to my mom. She had it for breakfast today and then called to tell me it was delicious and ask how to make it. Heh.

Tamago-yaki, the new obsession.

To finish up, here is an atypical swimsuit shopping whine. The elastic in my old suit is disintegrating from chlorine and from age, since it's certainly no younger than eight years old. Time for a new suit, before the butt area gets totally translucent. I'm very sensible about swimsuits: I want a black Speedo suit with a good back. When I buy a swimsuit, it doesn't take any longer than it takes to drive to the sporting goods store. Well, things have changed since 1998! The big store with the huge rack of racing suits and the depressing fitting rooms is gone, replaced by a trendier big store with a climbing wall and a tiny selection of racing suits, none of which were in my size, so I can't report on the fitting rooms. So, as my shopping has trended increasingly since 1998, I came home, got the model number off my old suit, found it on the manufacturer's website, and ordered it online. Hah! Take that, you stupid trendy store with lots of bikinis and almost no suits for people who actually swim! "Sporting goods," indeed.

You know, I'd be perfectly happy to go to a real store and interact with actual human beings. Too bad the real stores don't feel the same way. It's not that I'm an odd size, but stores rarely seem to carry a full range of sizes anymore. I could almost break out some of these cards.

Looking out the window, full of wist

I've been keeping myself cooped up in the air-conditioned shade of my house. Now I have a weather station with an outside sensor to tell me both the temperature and the humidity level outside. When the display says it's 75% humidity and the temperature is 93 °F in the shade, lying around inside and watching soccer is the intelligent choice. But I really miss going out and walking around during the day. How long is it till October?

My need to stay out of the sun precipitated a not-really-serious suggestion from Oz that we move to Vermont. Hah. We've only ever been up there at the end of May. It was gorgeous, all the flowers in bloom which bloom down here in March? But I remember the signs: "Nightly snow removal, November-April" and "No Parking, Falling Ice."

Three months of soggy boiling heat and temperature winters vs. six months of nightly snow removal?

Virginia wins for now.

On the other hand, it's not like we'd have to remove the snow ourselves …

Stop

The best smelling roses in Church Hill are hanging over the iron fence on East Broad between 25th and 26th Streets. I mean the red roses, not the dark pink ones. The red roses are that dark velvety red, shading to black, and the opening blossoms are perfectly formed. These are the roses you give your best beloved. Stop and smell them. They have that intense sweetness that roses ought to have, but the ones at the florist never quite do.

Be sure to compare them with the roses behind the Davis mansion at 28th and Broad. The pink and peach roses growing by the wall are next in line.

I'm keeping my eyes (and my nose) open. If there are better smelling roses out there, I'll find them.

Going postal

For some unexplained reason, my mail is ending up at other people's houses. This mail never makes it to me, except in rare cases. Sometimes my (correctly addressed, but incorrectly delivered) mail gets forwarded back to sender marked "attempted, unknown." Sometimes it disappears altogether.

All the credit card offers make it to my house just fine. It's only the stuff I pay for, or work assignments, that end up lost.

To the neighbor who dropped off my National Geographic last Sunday: Thanks!

To the person who received my (rare and difficult to find in this country) book on the seventeenth century British civil service and didn't put it back in the mail: Huh? You can't possibly want to keep that book!

To the post office: I've been really nice when I've reported these problems to you, despite the fact that by losing a (correctly addressed) package of work, you cost me three weeks of income and inconvenienced my client. Your failure to read addresses and take mail to the address that's written right on it also inconveniences the booksellers from whom I've ordered things. The excuse you offer, that you are using different carriers for my route, is not sufficient. Presumably all these different carriers can read, so what's the problem?

And we shall mourn

For my next sidebar update, I had been planning to add a link to the Daily Monkey. But now, alas, the Daily Monkey is no longer to be either daily or monkey. Dude wants to spend more time with his family or something like that. A sudden spate of whining in the comments has encouraged him to relent somewhat and he has promised occasional monkeys and an RSS feed. Eventually. Maybe.

Go and click on the pictures to work your way back through the monkey annals. My favorite is the Furi-furi Monkey Dance. We have one of these wind-up monkeys from World of Mirth. The appearance of the monkey drinking anisette coincided with Oz's sudden interest in ouzo, and we subsequently purchased a set of coasters featuring that monkey image. Thus have the monkeys become part of our lives.

Good-bye, Daily Monkey.

Fulton Gas Works

East Main and Williamsburg Avenue

The city thinks it wants to put a baseball stadium in my neighborhood, but they're not thinking about it very clearly. The thinking, or lack thereof, has been going on for a while and the ideas aren't getting any better. The site they're looking at now is the old Fulton Gas Works, snuggled up by the river on the far side of Church Hill from downtown.

Richmond actually has a baseball stadium in a great site for a baseball stadium, or at least the site where there's been a baseball stadium for decades, so we're all used to it, for God's sakes, why change? This is Richmond. We don't do change. If they must have a new stadium, I wish they'd put it there. Unfortunately, the president of VCU has said he wants the Diamond for VCU. Trani's talks with the city tend to go along these lines:

Trani: "I want to knock down all those art deco buildings downtown and replace them with bland glass and concrete boxes."

City: "Okay! Go for it."

Thus there is now some concern in the neighborhood.

The Fulton Gas Works site lies in the V-shaped stretch of land between East Main and Williamsburg Avenue, separated from the nearest interstate by a couple railroad crossings and many two-lane city streets. Here's a handy map. Something not readily obvious from the map is that the site is in a flood plain, along with a park and residential development. (Why is there a housing project in the flood plain?) Also, since this was a coal-burning facility, there's some concern about how toxic the dirt is. But wait, there's more! The combined sewer overflow drains out through Gillies Creek, which runs right through the site. This means that when there's a heavy rain, the sanitary sewage (e.g. poop and pee) ends up in the storm sewers and the whole mess drains out into the river right here. Yummy.

The baseball people seem to be aware of all these issues and more. I'm glad somebody is.

There's yet another problem with the site, the mysterious nasty smell which often wells up from the river, through Shockoe Bottom and up into Church Hill. Okay, it mostly only happens on days when a low pressure system is passing through. We get so few of those. Hah. Are they going to hand out noseclips at the gate when people come to watch their baseball game or concert? (This is supposedly going to be a multi-use facility. But these concerts won't be noisy or bother the local residents in any way. No siree!) Will the baseball team have to use the opposite of Breathe-Rite strips?

One of the days when I was down taking pictures at the site was a stench day. I saw these guys with briefcases walking around down there. Developers? I hope so, and that they were saying, "What's that smell?"

I hope they find a better place for the stadium. I'd like to see the city stick to city stuff. How about environmental cleanup? Elimination of the nasty smell? Improving the roads and public safety problems? Maintaining the neighborhood parks?

I'm dreaming.

Johnny Depp dipped in chocolate

We (or I, mostly) just watched Chocolat, which did not actually feature Johnny Depp dipped in chocolate, even though that's how I've been referring to the movie since it appeared in the mailbox a few days ago. It did have Alfred Molina sort of smeared with chocolate, which is not the same thing at all.

Not that this is turning into an all chocolate, all the time blog or anything . But I'm kind of regretting not stocking up yesterday when we were at the candy store.

Anyway, I put the movie on our Netflix queue because of the soundtrack. One of the people on our local public radio station loves the soundtrack and plays it fairly regularly. I've grown to like it too, but I've never bothered to buy it since I end up hearing probably more often than I'd play it if I had the CD.

Seeing a movie after one has become really familiar with the music is strange. The images which developed in my head over all the times I heard the music did not appear on screen. How weird is that?

Resolved

The last time I made a serious resolution, it was 1998. I resolved to take at least one class per session as a professional development exercise. We all saw where that led. I've been too busy to make, much less keep, resolutions since then. Except for the Year of the Pie resolution (Make lots of pie! Get good at it!), which I had to break when I got tired of eating pie.

Given my past history, I'm rather reluctant to make more resolutions. I do have a few things I need to do:

Get better nutrition. (We eat out too much. I need to take time to cook more.)

Keep the house cleaner. (Since I'm making money again, I may resolve this by getting a cleaning lady again.)

Finish up my Novel in Progress. (The end of the first draft is in sight! My goal is to complete the editing and revising process by October.)

Work fewer weekends. Or, hey, how about no weekends?

Cheerful things

The Pythagora Switch Mini show that I get on TV Japan. We always get at least one Rube Goldberg contraption and the Algorithm Taiso guys. I love Algorithm Taiso (I'm not the only one). Especially when they do it with ninja.

Another Japanese TV thing: during the closing credits of Ojarumaru, the characters all dance around (high kicks, pirouettes, the whole deal) holding dishes of crè brulé

When I found out that I was going to have to squeeze into my interview suit next week, I reduced my calorie intake and started exercising a little more. I also didn't make the extra pies that I'd been planning after Thanksgiving. My butt is now slightly reduced in size and I'm all energetic. Plus, I shall make pie as soon as this business thing is over, so I have that to look forward to in anticipation (as opposed to looking back at in regret).

Sweet Potato Cheesecake next weekend! I'm going to experiment with gingersnaps for the crust instead of graham crackers.

We got a Firefly DVD in the mail today.

I cooked dinner tonight and it was delicious. I'm a fairly good cook, but I got out of the habit when I was in school. Yeah, so I've been out of school since May, I haven't got into the habit again and so we go out to eat every night. But not tonight. And it was better than restaurant food. I should post that recipe, it's very user friendly.

I got many client emails this morning offering me little jobs that I'm not available to take right now. I'm working all weekend as it is. Not that turning away work is cheerful, but I found it funny that I was actually relieved when the new mail appearing at my work email was spam.

On evenings when I think, oh, I have no idea what to write and I am tired. Maybe I should take a night off, the most interesting and unexpected things happen in my story.

Just like voting!

My precinct has the electronic voting machines now.

I don't like them. Until yesterday, I always got to vote on the old, mechanical machines with the big lever and the satisfying kerchunk.

With the electronic machines you don't get a kerchunk, just a little box that pops up and says, "You Voted."

So not satisfying. Because it could as easily say "You're a poodle!" Or "Diebold delivers for its pet candidates." (I forgot to check the brand of these machines.)

I'd feel a lot better about these machines if they printed out a copy of my marked ballot which I could verify myself and drop into a locked ballot box.

Hard copy backups are a good thing.

Copycat

Totally stolen from Mikey: I set up a Frappr map.

Readers, give me pushpins! You register your name (which doesn't have to be your real name) and your zip code (which doesn't have to be your real zip code), and a pushpin will appear on the map. The registration form also stupidly requires you to put in a "shout out." If you add a pushpin and change your mind, or if you want to edit some of your information, post a comment somewhere on this site and I'll take care of it.

If anyone registers, this will be ever so much more gratifying for me than checking my traffic logs. Besides, I like maps.

If no one registers, well, I still like maps.

On buying flipflops

At the end of the season, the only cute flipflops left are either two sizes too large or three sizes too small. They are all marked down for clearance, though. I did find some not-as-cute ones in my size and marked down even more because of the lower cuteness factor. Shoe clearance sections always make me wonder about the store's buyer. Why do they buy so many size 5 shoes? Why don't they buy more 7's? If they didn't always run out of 7's then they would sell more shoes.

And, as long as I'm getting all rhetorical about this, why is it that my friends who wear 5's always say they can never find shoes? They should go shopping with me!

Color me surprised

Lost in a Good Book did not suck.

We (Oz and I both) were really disappointed with The Eyre Affair, which consisted of a slim plot liberally interspersed with lots of authorial skipping around and saying, "Look! I'm clever!" I pretty much thought that would be the only chance I'd ever give Jasper Fforde, but when I saw a remaindered copy of Lost in a Good Book for only US$4.98 (plus 10% off), we went ahead and got it because it was cheap and recyclable.

Skip ahead to this weekend. I'm working really hard on not doing homework and reading fluff is always my first choice for procrastination. This book certainly qualifies. I also found it to be not annoying and even to include cool bits. Does that sound like damning with faint praise? I don't mean for it to, because I can unequivocally say that reading this book is a great way to avoid doing homework.

With apologies to A.C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced nanotechnology is indistinguishable from the blue stuff growing in my crisper.

(I slay me.)

The inductive method

Math is excellent for clearing the mind of whiny, first world angst. I've been working on my math homework for most of the day and I'm feeling much better, thank you. I have a tendency in my spots of downtime to wallow in whatever is bothering me (which is usually not that bad as bad things go).

Lately the whine du jour (or, rather, de la semaine) has been "nobody will hire me because my background is so odd and therefore my career will be in essentially the same place as it was seven years ago except that I have over US$25,000 in student loan debt and no translation clients anymore because all I do is homework."

This is actually quite scary and not entirely unwarranted, because my job hunt has thus far been characterized by a total lack of response to all my applications. But I am not thinking about that right now. I just spent hours on my discrete mathematics homework solving recurrence relations and doing proofs. Very soothing.

Another technique I find useful when I run out of homework and this particular whine gets deafening is to apply to yet another job opening. I did that today too.

Finite states

Procrastination is not too productive, but eventually the guilt kicks in and I do something. Not what I'm supposed to do (homework), but something I should do (submit more resumes to some really awesome jobs that I'm not going to get because of my minimal qualifications). I dither around and find a manga publisher requesting resumes from freelance translators. And consider the cover letter I'd have to write in order to convince them that a patent translator/computer engineer would be the ideal person to hire to translate—what genre? Shojo? Actually, I'd probably do really well with SF, as I can flim-flam improbable science with the best of 'em.

I also watch a video. Oz got Netflix and gave me his account information so I can pick videos to my heart's content. Our queue probably confuses the recommendation engine. So anyway, I watch All About Eve and, let me just say, Bette Davis is fucking awesome. Yes, my pop culture commentary has, like, a half century lag to it. On a more current note, this film does make about the best case against botox I can imagine. I mean, aside from the fact that the whole idea of injecting poison into your facial muscles to paralyze them is just nasty in so many ways.

Why can't I post?

It's not that I don't have anything to say. I keep getting error messages. This happened briefly around Christmas, but it was resolved in a day. I hope my hosting service isn't getting flakey right when my contract is up for renewal.

Tired

Wow. Tired. No energy. No words. Big day, though. I'll have more to say tomorrow.

Is there a secret, undisclosed location for the rest of us?

In which I go first amendment all over the place, so if you're happy about the outcome of the election, you should just avert your eyes and move along. Besides, I use way too many question marks for this to qualify as good writing.

I'm proud of the 1,396,232 other Virginians (45%!) who waited in line to get out their protest vote yesterday. One of my professors told me how she reamed the hell out of her punch card (not her words). "No hanging chad for me!"

But, you people up and down the Mississippi who walked out of the polls claiming that moral values were the most important issue to you? Yes, you all who voted for the man who has told you a big, long string of lies and sent your kids off to get blown up on the basis of those lies (along with the upwards of 13,000 Iraqi civilians who've died so far as a direct result of this foreign policy exercise)? I got your moral relativism right here. Perhaps you meant "moral values" with little air quotes. Maybe those are different from the "do not lie, do not kill, love thy neighbor as thyself" kind of moral values espoused by generally well-respected individuals like your man Jesus.

I amaze myself. I got through that paragraph without using the word "fucktards." I am damned civilized for a commie-pinko-bleeding-heart liberal. Yes, liberal, meaning that I am in favor of lead-free water, smog-free air, paid overtime, access to an adequate level of healthcare and education without risk of bankruptcy, and the moral conduct of foreign policy.

Another professor started class today by announcing Kerry's concession. A few Young Reps cheered. Do they not read a newspaper? Do the humorless little fucks not even watch the Comedy Channel? Has three years of engineering school done nothing for their critical thinking skills? Do you want these people designing the ABS system on your car?

The prof said, "Well, we survived Reagan, we survived Nixon, we survived that long string of idiots in the nineteenth century, so we'll get through the next four years." I'd find that more comforting if I could recall that any of those guys were as actively intent on gutting the Bill of Rights as Bush. I guess the second amendment is safe (like I was worried about that one) and Republicans make as much use of the fifth as anyone, but what about the rest of it? By the way, some of the great people I worked with this summer participated in the National Archives project to preserve the Charters of Freedom. They told me how privileged they had felt to work on the project. People, the parchment is safe. The contents deserve at least as much protection. My latest paranoia is that they'll launch an attack on Amendment 22. (No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…Of course, Bush/Cheney has been elected only once.)

On the bright side, this means another hilarious four years for The Funny Times. I'll be laughing till I cry. And at this point, it's also probably safe to say that The Onion is our finest news source.

Now I'm wondering about inauguration day. Will Dick Cheney peel back the latex and stand before the public in his true, reptilian form as the alien ship hovers over the Capitol?

Theory vs. practice

In theory, we could be cool. We know of cool things to do and cool places to go. When it comes down to practice, however, we can't quite manage it. We are highly introverted bibliophiles, so given the choice of going to a party or basking in a pile of books, we always choose the books. Always.

I went to the library this morning and picked up a couple kids' books and a few novels. I find that young adult books are great when your brain is all tired out. Between caffeine and Diana Wynne Jones, I may make it through engineering school. And the grownup novels look neat too; they're by some authors who are new to me.

Oz has about five security novels tucked into his bag and he's nodding off over one of them.

Why would we want to go out when we can read?

Blank screen

Nothing's happened today so far, but something will. Laundry, chores, looking at the cat-butt-print on my desk and getting mentally prepared to clean it up. Because my life is one big adventure. I've got a trunk full of circuit boards, a stack of bills to pay, more books than bookshelves, and I guess I'll clean a sink, or something, to distract me from all the mess. Is this total first world angst or what? We're going up to Northern Virginia this afternoon to visit Siegfried and Roy, Scooter and Hombre, and Red will make an appearance. We are lucky. And our life is one big adventure.

Notes from the workplace

As a self-employed person, I have been largely out of touch with the everyday workplace issues that make ordinary people's lives hell. Or hell from my perspective anyway. For example, the one-hour lunch break is a bit of a shock to my system. That's no time at all. It takes two or three hours (like they get in civilized countries and at my house) to eat a leisurely meal, relax for a while, maybe do some light chores or, even better, blow off some light chores. I have barely enough time to drive home, eat, wash dishes, and drive back. Lunch doesn't seem complete without checking email and the Engrish of the day, reading the New York Times, and napping. Just imagine how well I'm going to deal with the horrendous commute once it starts.

I really must reconsider this whole "grow up and get a proper job with a health plan" thing.

Kicking and screaming

This week Oz got me a cell phone. He's been bugging me to get one for years, but I never could see the point. I've always worked from home and hence was easy to reach and didn't spend enough time in the car to justify the "I need a phone to call for help if the car breaks down" reason for having a cell phone. I did that weird "keep the car well maintained" thing instead. I've been quite a happy Luddite too, but my prior situation no longer applies now that I'm an intern with a two to three hour round trip commute that'll be starting in two weeks. (I'm dreading that drive; I haven't had to commute for over ten years. The fifteen minute drive to school doesn't really count.)

Thus far, in four days of cell phone ownership, I have set up a phone book, tested speed dial, set up my voice mail, retrieved and deleted a few voice mail messages from Oz, said messages all along the lines of "Ha ha ha! You have voice mail!" Oh, and I made two phone calls. I have resisted the urge to call everyone I know and tell them that I have a cell phone. Resistance is not futile.

Serendipity

Drinking: A nice Caliterra chardonnay, a Christmas gift from my friend Lisa (the same Lisa you'll occasionally see mentioned on Pop Culture Junk Mail).

Doing: Editing red eye out of photographs, making Quicktime slideshows of the photographs so my friends will actually look at the pictures. (Because if someone gave me a CD of 100-odd photos, I might not look at them either—but a movie? Oooh. I like movies!)

Amused by: The cats ripping open a package of egg noodles some time during the night so they could lick the noodles. I found that ants rather like egg noodles with cat saliva on.

Digesting: Home-cooked vegetarian chili. When I got home from the grocery store I found that I was out of cumin, so I substituted Sauer's curry powder (about as whitebread as curry can get). Because curry powder has cumin in it, see? I use Sauer's chili powder too. So sue me. It's what I grew up on. Even so, the chili turned out damned well. I won't bother with straight cumin for this recipe again.

Baking: Lemon-blueberry muffins, except that I'm using a loaf pan because I (a) am lazy and (b) don't have a muffin pan. Roy and Siegfried are both on the South Beach Diet and used our visit as a chance to offload every single carbohydrate product (mainly cake mixes) in their pantry onto me.

And now? I'm going to take my hands off the keyboard for a while. My joints have had enough for the day.

Where does the mind go?

I forgot to write yesterday. I was busy studying for a final exam until after ten o'clock last night and didn't remember about writing words until after I was in bed. Website? What website? And now I must study some more.

Dies on the table

A TV show opens with the Japanese announcer standing beside a grove of blossoming cherry trees. It almost looks real, but the ground beneath the trees is too regular and flat and the light on the announcer doesn't match the light on the rest of the scene. The announcer stands on his mark and neither shifts his feet nor looks away from his teleprompter. Many of these shows use the blue studio effect instead of building real sets or taking the announcer on location. The only TV "talents" who appear at all comfortable with it are the kids.

Captivated by a nascent plot bunny, I begin to think (not that I haven't been thinking all day in the process of doing DSP homework) about taking this setup to its logical extreme. What if the TV broadcasters artificially generate everything until what we see on TV bears no relationship at all to the world we see around us? The implications would be—

Oh. We already have that. Ugh. Never mind.

Du bist ein Schmutzabstreifer!

The love affair with multilingual labeling continues…

Having made it clear that they would like a downstairs bathroom (using bad behavior that suspiciously coincides with my starting engineering school full time), my cats got their wish today. I bought them a new litter box for the first floor and a litter mat to put in front of it, in a futile effort to prevent litter being tracked all over my formerly litter-free downstairs.

The litter mat is labeled in four languages. While the English "litter mat" is dull and utilitarian, it sounds exciting when translated into the other three languages. The French is tapis de litière, which is mysterious and romantic. The Spanish is estera para litera, which is poetic. But the German rocks my world: Schmutzabstreifer! It begins with a satisfying alveolar fricative that slides into a nasal bilabial stop. After the subsequent vowel, we chew upon a meaty sandwich of crunchy affricates, a plosive bilabial stop, and assorted fricatives, washed down with a diphthong. For dessert, a light labiodental fricative and a smooth vowel. Ah!

Ach, mein Shatz! Mein Schmutzabstreifer!

Peeved

I'm afraid I'm moved to bitch today. Bear with me.

Is my school so hard up for faculty that they have to hire people who can't speak English? I love accented English, world English, well spoken English of any extraction. People who think English isn't a beautiful language need to read Alexander Pope out loud—it's better than champagne bubbles bursting on the tongue! But broken, incoherent English that sounds like it's causing pain to the speaker? It's just as painful to me, if not more so. And even worse than the aural unpleasantness is the confusion induced in the listeners when different words used in context together are pronounced in the exact same way. We have eleven more weeks of this.

The homework deluge began this week. I'm going to have to start getting up at 6:00 am so I can get everything done. And my hands are going to hurt too.

The medicine I have to take for my un-diagnosable joint problems has side effects. Over winter break I increased the dosage and my joints have been feeling better. I thought I didn't have any side effects from the increase, but then school started and the side effects became obvious. This drug, which shall not be named, makes you stupid at high doses. I spent over an hour on a homework problem, trying to find my errors. I was having trouble with units! Units! I got over the units thing years ago! Duh. (If you don't understand the importance of units in engineering, go watch Spinal Tap.) I'm not the only person who's noticed this side effect. One of my lab partners last semester had the same problem when he took the same drug for his knee. So it's back to the lower dosage for me. Sharp brain, more pain. These are my choices?

My French TV channel is giving their programming lineup a makeover. They've moved my favorite documentary show to an inconvenient night and they seem to have eliminated the cheesy French cop shows. I love my French cop shows on Wednesday nights. Where else will you see a Chinese person running a prostitution ring in Paris with the character name "Madame Ho"? Where else will you see an interrogation along the lines of "You smoke Pinky cigarettes. We found a Pinky pack at the crime scene. You did it, didn't you? Here, let's type up your confession right now!" Tonight? TV5 is showing French people arguing about current events (George W. Bush is bête. Yeah, tell me about it, French guys.), so I'm watching Japanese TV (I've only got the two channels) and it's a music show with middle-aged Japanese pop singers singing Carpenters songs.

The rest of the peevishness is with myself.

Do I really need to be ten minutes early for every class? No. I like to sit in the front. It's not like I have to fight for my seat. But I'm so compulsive about being on time that I've missed out on two fun photographic opportunities this week. On my way to school I drive down Dock Street between the flood wall and the Kanawha Canal. On Tuesday morning I saw train cars from the circus stopped on a railway siding on the island between the canal and the river. Did I stop? No. I was fifteen minutes early for class. Then, tonight I saw a flock of Canada geese sitting and standing around on the canal which is iced over right now. The brown and black geese on the brown ice, with the green and brown vegetation and the brown iron trestle passing overhead looked so cool. Did I stop for a few minutes and play with my camera? No, and I was ten minutes early for class so I sat in the hall, waiting for the classroom to be unlocked. How boring! Where are my priorities?

And what was I thinking when I decided I had time to write every day? Shall I blame that on my medicine?

Bookmarks

The ideal textbook bookmark is the one I lost (I know it's around somewhere, probably in an old textbook). Two inches wide, eleven inches long, and lightly plasticized, it came in an ad for The Economist. The paper was the same weight as the stock used in the subscription postcards that come in magazines. Subscription cards are okay bookmarks, but they're too wide. If I weren't so lazy, I could cut them in half and they'd do pretty well.

The important thing is the weight of the paper. It should be thicker than the paper on which your book is printed, but thin and flexible enough to bend with the pages, or else it just falls out. For textbooks, you want a longer bookmark. A short bookmark tends to drop down so that its end is below the edges of the pages, thereby making it impossible to find your place and defeating the whole purpose of using the bookmark.

A word on fancy bookmarks: NO. A rectangle of plastic or cardboard with tassel is too thick and the tassels get dingy. The heavy paperclip kind are too thick and rip the pages. Besides, my cats will chew on tassels and doodads and pull the bookmark from the book.

Explicit innuendo

Am I the only one who started giggling at NPR's January 28, 2004, piece on communications decency hearings in Congress?

Congress Questions FCC Decency Rules

According to Mr. Webster, the word explicit is defined as "fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity", among other things. Innuendo is defined as "an oblique allusion, hint, insinuation".

"Explicit innuendo" is an oxymoron. If it's explicit, there is no innuendo. If it's innuendo, you aren't saying anything explicit. The example cited, from a Saturday Night Live Church Lady skit, was not innuendo. It was explicit material being presented as if it were innuendo. Hence the joke. Whether it's actually funny is a matter of taste.

As oxymorons go, explicit innuendo is one of the more useful. I use only unambiguous hints on the man. It saves time and aggravation on both sides.

So after I write all this, I google "explicit innuendo" and find that it's the terminology, with a proper definition and everything, used in the communications industry. Oh well. I still laugh at it.