Lady-in-waiting

Right now I am drinking screw-top wine from a water glass: throw in some opera glasses and a silver tea service and I might be the classiest woman alive.

Wake up; kick ass

I have two alarms that go off in the morning. The first goes off at 6:45 AM. It is my ideal human alarm. If I wake up to this alarm I can exercise, eat breakfast, put on makeup, do my morning toilette, and ensure that I have my shirt on right side out and am not wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe (three times this year).

The second alarm goes off at 7:30 AM. This alarm allows me time to shower, dress, and not much else.

Mostly, I ignore the first alarm. I turn it off immediately and snuggle in for another 45 minutes of sleep. Today, I turned off both alarms immediately and was nearly late to work. Pretty soon I will be strolling in at about 11 AM and sleeping at my desk.

Villi showed me blackle, which is a black screened version of google that should save watt hours. Unfortunately, I only makes a difference on CRT monitors. LCDs show now difference in power output between a white screen and a black screen. It is a terrific idea, but it has come a few years too late. If you are still rocking a CRT, consider switching to blackle for your search method needs.

Still no closer to finished on any of my finals. Why do I do this to myself?

Happy Friday!

I demand satisfaction!

It's finals week, and there are no sexy parties or keggers to take my mind off the stress like there would be if I were living in a John Hughes movie. I had hoped to get some work done at work, but it is looking less and less likely as more and more things pile up on my desk. Added to this stress, we have our party in a few weeks. The party will require much work: cleaning bathrooms, polishing punchbowls, and nogging eggs.

I did have time at work today to get into a fight (to the death) about canceled versus cancelled. Apparently blogger has made its choice as it is asking me to spellcheck cancelled. Bastards! I challenge you to a duel, blogger.

Cancelled is British, as they double the l on any word that ends in l where the emphasis is not on the final syllable. America, in addition to dumping tea in the harbor, slapped England in the face by rejecting this obscure spelling rule. I am betraying my motherland by spelling cancelled with two ls. Rule, Britannia!

The only issue is that if I embrace cancelled, I also have to embrace levelled, travelled, revelled, et al. Hmmm. I don't know what to make of that.

On a completely different note - do the pinkies on gloves seem unnecessarily long to you? My initial thought would be that I have short pinkies, but I distinctly remember my guitar teacher telling me that I had marvelously long pinkies, well suited to playing guitar, so I am sure the problem is not mine.

What is the name of the Lone Ranger's Nephew's Horse?

Because the second the turkey is devoured we will start decorating for Christmas, I thought I would take a moment to list some of my favorite Christmas songs. Slow news day.

1. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman - Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan
2. Angels We Have Heard on High - Sufjan Stevens
3. The Nutcracker Suite - Brian Setzer Orchestra
4. White Christmas - Chris Isaak
5. Frosty the Snowman - The Beach Boys
6. Silver and Gold - Burl Ives
7. Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt
8. Winter Wonderland - Ella Fitzgerald
9. All I Want for Christmas - Mariah Carey
10. Little Drummer Boy - Bing Crosby and David Bowie

I also like any version of Carol of the Bells and most versions of O Holy Night

Bummmmmmmmmm

Sweet Enola Gay

Twice in the last week I have asked people to put the word local in parentheses (for server connection) and had them use quotes instead. I actually had to tell the guy today that they are the characters above the 9 and 0 key.

Things look bleak for the future.

I am an unabashed novel reader

It was a long and busy weekend of getting ready for Thanksgiving and guests. It was broken up on Saturday with a trip to Invesco field as the illicit party guest of my friend Kristen and a brunch on Sunday with Beth and Erica. Both were nice. The dinner at Invesco was rather unspectacular, the standard catered food and overpriced drinks, etc. But we did get to walk out on to the Mile High Field and look out on the empty stadium which was pretty cool. The actual field was roped off, so I didn't get to run into the end zone and do the Stacy Shuffle, but oh well, it was cool nonetheless.

Brunch on Sunday was lovely. I always enjoy catching up with my girls and chatting up. I made a bit of an ass of myself talking on subjects where I was vastly the inferior, but I'm sure the girls forgive me, right? By the end of Sunday night, I was so tired that I called Richard Marx, Karl Marx. We had a good laugh about that and jokes about the proletariat knowing how to rock and such.

There has been much press this week about Kindle, the new eBook reader. I'm very pro-technology, but I just can't get behind an electronic reader. Amazon launched the product this week and Jeff Bezos said, "the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace." He wants books to stop being so darn analog. They are textand images, right? So they should lend themselves to digitization. For example, I get all of my news online and would never subscribe to a newspaper. The medium, for me, lends itself to electronic delivery. Conversely, my father wakes up everyday and reads the paper from start to finish while he eats his peanut butter and toast. Could he cancel his subscription and eat his breakfast in front of the computer? Sure, but he doesn't. He likes the ritual.

I am the same way about books. I like the look and feel and even smell of books. I like the way they look on the shelf. I like the differences in cover size and shape and color and the random unevenness of the books. I like reading in the bathtub or on the porch or in the grass. I like peeking ahead to see how many pages are left in the chapter and deciding if I should stop now and go to bed or keep reading. I like the heft of my textbooks and the strain I feel when I lift them up on the desk. I like having 3-4 books going at a time, all of them sitting by my bedside, open and laid flat to mark the page: overlapping inverted Vs that look like birds or accent marks. I like the small stains and fingerprints in my cookbooks where I turned the page with my soup stained finger. I like revisiting my earmarks years later to see what was so important to me in 2001 or 1991. I like when the power goes out and I can light a couple of candles and finish the book.

Books are personal and personally historical. They are portable and tactile and perfectly suited to their task. I know that eventually all research will digitize and that is fine. I don't mind the rather clinical reading that accompanies research. But I enjoy the anachronisms and oddities of print. When I travel I will have my cell phone, my iPod, my laptop, and maybe a portable DVD player, but my books will always be books.

Sniffing on a snack

Today, I wanted peanuts and M&Ms but not, I repeat NOT, Peanut M&Ms.

At cornerback - Tuck Pointer

Long and pointless weekend. It seemed to be divided between class and home depot. I also changed a lot of lightbulbs. I both love and hate home depot. There is so much there to buy, but I wonder how much of it I really need. Like the new phone. That was probably too much, and who buys phones at home depot? Me, I guess.

The bright spot of the weekend was a dinner at Carmine's on Saturday. My God, what delicious food. Practically everything was in a cream sauce, which was all right with me, and we got to eat the gnocchi in brown butter and sage. I love that stuff. I know if I tried it at home it would suck, so I just eat it at Carmine's. Not to imply that basketball and BBQ on Sunday wasn't fun, but it wasn't cream sauce.

There is probably more here to report, but I don't feel like writing. Funny, I started this post because I was bored, and I am going to stop this post because I am bored.

Sorry, all.

i just want to tell you how i'm feeling...gotta make you understand

There is a new internet phenomena called rickrolling. The point of rickrolling is to trick your coworkers into to clicking on links that will take them to a youtube video of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.

It is running crazy rampant at our office, and you never know when you will be confronted by Rick Astley's face. It's a little weird. This blog post describes a particularly strange rickroll. I thought it was funny. Enjoy.

Passive agressive blogging

I put away all of the halloween shit, stopping to clean dog piss off the bucket, and then tie ribbon on one fucking basket and which do you notice?

Sometimes, I make bad decisions

Two panic attacks, one crying jag, one badly bruised toe, and an alcohol-induced blackout. All in all, not one of my finest moments.

The silver lining to this black cloud is that I got a reminder about how wonderful and caring my friends are.

Thanks guys.

quaffing

nothing like getting drunk and watching how it's made on discovery. I could watch automation for hours.

In anticipation of tonight's get together, I cleaned and in my zen like trance, I came up with a t-shirt. It will have a picture of an intricately carved bedpost or table leg and then it will say, "you really need to get lathed."

Enjoy your saturday.

Extra-sensory panache

I'm listening to my iPod at work right now. The track changed. I looked over and read Yae-yo, the Beatnuts song, but it was with the Mandy Moore album. Then, duh, I realized it was Yo-Yo, and I misread it.

Next song? Yae-yo. Sometimes the iPod shuffle feature is so lazy.