Blogosity

Watch Out For More Of Those Pesky Low-Flying Pigs

I've got a date to go to the Art Museum this weekend with one of the women who responded to my online personal (I'll call her J1). We chatted last night, and she seems very nice indeed. She's originally from Iowa, but attended the college across the street from me (so she's very familiar with my neighborhood) where she studied Growth and Structure of Cities. Since one of the forms of snobbery from my upbringing that I just can't seem to shake is the instant implicit ranking of educational institutions, this impresses me favorably as to her smarts and adventurousness (Iowans, and mid-Westerners in general, aren't usually all that well represented in small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast). She works for the City urban planning office, but is thinking about switching jobs because the whole city government culture is getting to her. She dislikes being resented as "rocking the boat" for trying to do a good job. She's also a former Peace Corps volunteer (for about three years), which also impresses me--not that I would have wanted to be one, mind. Her favorite book is The Poisonwood Bible (perhaps not surprising in a Peace Corps type), which was also T's favorite book (T was the woman from Arizona I couldn't quite get together with last year). Me, I liked it, but found it depressing as hell. Pride and Prejudice or A Dance to the Music of Time is much more my cuppa.
As first dates go, the Museum isn't quite as low-risk as a movie (where you can be together for two hours without talking, and then immediately have something to talk about), but since her idea of a perfect date (out of the choices match offers, anyway) is a walk over cobblestone paths through blooming perennials I figure that the Museum is a similar kind of experience without being quite so subject to the vagaries of the weather--not something you can count on in late November in this city. Besides, I love the Museum and feel very at home there.

On a More Positive Note

My online personals have finally started getting some results. I don't know why it is--maybe there was some big story or something in a local paper that got women to give it a try--but the number of people who've looked at my profile has zoomed in the past week or two--to almost double what it's been in the six (?) months since I first posted, and I actually got three emails from interested (and interesting) women. I may even get another date out of this. Woohoo!

Hanging Out

Spent the weekend up at the Institute hanging out with my college buddies Rhode Island Red and Job. I can't quite believe that it's the first time the three of us have been together since college, fifteen or so years ago, but I can't specifically recall any time more recently. Did Red and I make the six hour trek to visit Job by car together some time in the past couple of years? I can't really recall. Maybe we just talked about doing that.
Job noticed, and Red confirmed, something that badger pointed out to me last year, which I had used my power of denial (not quite a super-power, but pretty strong) to refuse to think about, which is that I may have sleep apnia. The upshot is that I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow. Dread, dread.

So, To Summarize

I am Linus, Kermit, Tom Bombadil, Frank N. Furter, Jean-Luc Picard, Snape, Confucius, Archie Andrews, George Washington, and I was written by Jane Austen. Any questions?

I Didn't Think This Would Ever Happen

But reading badger's adventures in Boston made me homesick for Ol' Bean Town. Or at least the Peabody Museum.
Somehow when I go there on business, I never get around to going to the places I used to love: the Peabody, the Isabella Stuart Gardner, the Museum of Science, the Boston Public Library... wow. Nostalgia. I'm never nostalgic.
What, never?
Well, hardly ever.
I miss people, usually, not places or events. Like, I miss badger and rook something fierce, but Orange County not at all. I didn't half hate it the way badger did, but I don't think there was any place there that I actually liked--well, except the koi pond at Fashion Island. What can I say, I'm a sucker for koi.
On reflection, though, the image that really seized my imagination was not going back to Boston and rattling around the museums on my own, but how nifty it would be to go with badger and watch her fizz with enthusiasm.
And then I think that it would also be really cool if badger and rook came to visit some day and got to play with my gaming buddies. badger and The Librarian would get along like a house on fire, and I'm pretty confident that rook would have a lot of physics geek stuff in common with WS, one of The Librarian's pair of husbands, and game geek stuff in common with D, W, and P from my other group. And of course, they both already know MdS.
So I guess it really is the people, after all.

Mind Boggling

I'm currently about half-way through a fabulous book that badger gave me, called Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee, about the geology--particularly the formation of--North America, particularly as revealed by travelling back and forth across the country on I80. The Pennsylvania portion of I80 runs over 300 miles through Pennsylvania, but I only take a small stretch of it near Pittsburgh; most of the time I travel on I76, which passes through most of the same geology but at a different point. Going right through the tunnels at Kitattiny, Tuscarora, and Blue mountains is one of my favorite parts of the trip. Next time I go, I'm sure I'll be thinking of the enormous amounts of time and the huge forces that went into making those mountains, and then wearing them down again. I've never read another book that gives anything like the sense of deep time that this one does; it gives me temporal vertigo to contemplate.

Woohoo!

Jane Austen wrote you. You are extremely aware of
the power of a single word.


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I Have a Cold

That I just can't shake. Nothing to compare to badger's ailments, or even minnie's, but it's making me lethargic and grumpy, and I can't take any sick time--I mean, I could, but then I'd lose vacation time at the end of the year because I have to finish the stupid project that I'm working on. If I'm going to I'd rather be sneezing and sniffling at work than sneezing and sniffling on what's theoretically my day off, so screw it. If I give it to everyone at the office, it serves my company right for its stupid rules about vacation carry over. Of course, I should have taken more time before this, but I'm in no mood to be fair. Enough blogging, time for bed.

Too Much Vacation Time

I have 19.75 vacation days and 6.75 holidays left to me this year, and I can only carry over 10 vacation days and 0 holidays. Thanksgiving and that Friday are 2 holidays, Christmas and the day after are another two, and New Year's Eve is one, so that's 1.75 "floating" holidays I have to take. I think that I can just do it, if I take all the Fridays off between now and the end of the year and the last two weeks of the year...but it's not certain whether my boss will let me.

Next year I'm hoping not to have this problem, because I'm taking a couple of vacations early on in the year: one to visit R and S in Vancouver, and one to visit my brother A and his family where they're on sabbatical in Florence. Plus I probably have to go visit my family in the Bay Area; my grandmother isn't in that great shape at the moment, and although it's nothing life-threatening so far as I know, she's just about to hit 92 I think it is and it just seems like she's starting to wear out.

Drives Me Crazy

Saturday K called for the first time in about three weeks, and wanted to have lunch together; I got her message too late for lunch, but called back and suggested we could have lunch together Sunday. She objected that she had A on Sunday, but I pointed out that wasn't any reason the three couldn't have lunch together. We agreed to meet at the local grill at noon. I felt clever for suggesting this, since having A at the table would sharply limit the scope and duration of her complaining about J.

Noon comes and goes, and they don't show. So I call them at home, and she had forgotten that we were supposed to meet there; then it turned out that A wanted to eat at home, because he had just rented a new video game and didn't want to be parted from it. Would it be okay with me if I just went over to their place and had something to eat there. Fine (J wouldn't have let A get away with that).

So I go over and K scrounges up some soup mix from a bag and that's lunch, and of course since A is absorbed in his video game, lunch is accompanied by one long litany of complaint about J. K is sticking to her J has become a pod-person theory. He looks like J, he sounds like J, but he doesn't act anything like J. Way to practice those empathy and observation skills, K. I guess this means that the only thing you've ever noticed about him in the eighteen years you were married was how you could always get him to do what you wanted, huh?

The place was markedly less tidy than before, not that it was ever exactly spic-and-span, so I'm guessing there was some substance to J's complaint that he did all the housework. K is talking about getting a boarder, to help meeting the mortgage payments; she refuses to consider moving to an apartment that she can afford, 'cause then the ten years in the house would have been for nothing. No, I'm thinking the ten years went for nought when they frittered away whatever equity they had managed to build up in the place. If selling the place would only realize enough to pay off the mortgage and home equity loans, despite the huge amount that the neighborhood has appreciated in the past decade....K still doesn't have a permanent job; she's working full-time at the zoo, and they're flexible about her schedule, but even though they'd like to hire her they don't have open positions. I kind of doubt she's getting benefits. Still, because at the moment they seem content to keep the current arrangement indefinitely I get the feeling she's stopped looking.

I finally pled chores that I had to go do, and fled.

Greylisting

Sourceforge seems to be pretty relentlessly mined by spambots. I use sneakemail to create disposable email addresses (Yahoo Mail+ now lets you do pretty much the same thing), which lets you delete the address if a company sells it to a spammer, but it doesn't really help when the address has to be somewhere on a web-page where people can find it. Whenever I created a new disposable address to use as the contact for a sourceforge project, within a few days I started getting spam on it. Now, though, sneakemail provides a greylisting option on a per-address basis, so I'm giving that a try on my current sourceforge forwarding address. With a little luck I can go back to spam-free mailboxes.

Favorite Jane Austen Novel

Austen-tatious: A Jane Austen Blog has a poll up

New Toy

I bought a copy of RPG Maker 2 for the PS2 last weekend, although I haven't even had time to boot it up and look at it yet. It looks like the kind of thing that I'll either get bored of quickly or it will devour my life. The big selling point of this one over the prior (PS1) edition, besides the somewhat primitive 3d graphics, is that this one is USB keyboard compatible--which means that you can enter text with a keyboard instead of selecting it letter-by-letter with a joystick. Since I gave up on the first one after playing with it for a few hours (I bought it used for about 10 bucks, so no biggie) precisely because trying to create dialogs was maddening, I have hopes for this one. If I never blog again, now you know what I'll be doing.

iTunes

I've been contemplating taking a look at iTunes, now that I'm a Mac owner and all (I understand that there's a Windows version of iTunes now, but I've heard that there are some problems with accessing it through firewalls and the recommended fix is to temporarily disable your firewall--which is insane if you're running Windows). One thing that I wonder about is how much of a hassle will it be moving files back and forth, since I don't have an iPod (at least not yet). Can I just hook up my Arcos Jukebox via USB? Obviously as a last resort I could burn CDs and re-rip them to put them on my Jukebox. Or maybe not a last resort. Everything I have on mp3 so far I've ripped from CDs I own, so I don't really bother backing them up; if I started buying individual songs I would certainly want either to have them backed up on some more permanent medium or know that I could re-download them, but I bet iTunes doesn't allow you to keep redownloading a song....

Recent Reading

The Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold (sequel to The Curse of Chalion)
The Jupiter Myth, Lindsey Davis
The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie (reread)
Getting to Yes, Fisher and Ury (reread)
Green Rider, Kristen Britain
Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett
How Free Are You? Ted Honderich

A whole bunch of manga: Samurai Deeper Kyo, Angelic Layer,
Zodiac PI, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Sana's Stage, Brigadoon, Chobits,
Confidential Confessions, Dukylon, Forbidden Dance, Jing King of
Bandits, I.N.V.U., Planetes....

What To Do?

I haven't heard from K in about three weeks, i.e. ever since I helped J move. Last time I talked with her I asked her to call me when she was ready to talk, even if it was just to yell at me. So now what? On the one hand, it's kind of a relief, on the other hand, maybe I should try harder. I feel guilty about feeling relieved, and about not trying harder to surmount this barrier, if that's what it is. But contemplating yet another bout with her, and her tears, and her berating J and me just drains my sympathy away--and I'm thinking that me getting snippy with her may even be worse than me not calling her, and really screw things up beyond repair. Maybe a cooling off period is just what she needs. Or maybe I'm just good at rationalizing non-confrontation, having done it, oh, all my life.

Light On The Blogging Lately

Badger noticed that I've not been blogging much lately, and what I've written seems pretty depressed, but that's not quite true--it's more that I haven't been doing much anonymous blogging lately, and when I do blog anonymously it's mostly to talk about things that I don't want my friends and family (except badger) to read, which naturally leads it to being about more depressing subjects.

I actually have five other blogs, for various topics: one on personal-but-not-anonymous topics, one on philosophy (I'm way behind on working on a post for that), one on politics and current events, and a group blog with my RPG-ing friends.

[Update: Astute readers might notice there are only four other blogs listed; I forgot to mention my reviews-only blog, mostly 'cause I haven't updated it in way too long.]