atomicthoughts.com

The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunk of an average day, I am a moron.

— Nick Hornby, “Fever Pitch”

The only problem I have with my dual 19″ monitor setup at work is that when something beeps I don’t know what it is. Right now I have 14 windows open, not including all the systray extensions and other cruft. It really drives me nuts when I hear a beep and can’t track it down.

My life is pretty good when that makes the list of things to complain about though. :)

My boss, who is also a very good friend, scheduled a staff meeting this morning for this afternoon. She’s given up on staff meetings as process, and certainly a last minute meeting like that had to be about something specific.

I messaged her during the day. “Do I have anything worry about for this meeting?” Then I sent her this link at dictionary.com.

Turns out I was right to be worried. She announced her retirement, effective sometime in March. I’m sure there will be more to follow.

Penguins are so sensitive to my needs.

I spent many hours today bending a Movable Type plugin to my will so I could send an email to an address and have it automatically post to the site. Somewhere in the 3rd or 4th hour I briefly wondered why this was suddenly so important to me, but couldn’t give up the fight to a stupid little Perl script. Bend! Break! Submit to my will!

After I finally got it to do what I wanted, I stumbled across a program that lets me post from my desktop, which is really all I wanted in the first place. It took about 3 minutes to install, and works flawlessly. Naturally.

Like a lemming flying off the cliff, I also present my 2003 in Review.
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I spent the last 2 weeks in, for me, Internet Hibernation. I logged in enough not to have a big backlog when I returned from Work, and to make sure nothing blew up. I checked a few sites a few times, and that was about it. No postings here (obviously). Not much time spent reading anymore. No more than an hour online, and that was spent gathering sites about building a mosaic table top.

This major break through all started a month ago, during Jane’s birthday party. Without even noticing I went 24 hours without logging in. 24 hours! This was simply unprecedented by me, previously only achieved by a wedding (mine) and a death (my mom’s). That was it. I had to log in to tell everyone my kids were born, after all.

Then a few weeks ago we took a trip out of town. I was offline for 3 days off and lived to tell about it. I even stumbled across an Internet Cafe of sorts, and managed to restrain myself.

The trick now is it find a happy medium. Somewhere between taking a complete hiatus and checking my email every 12 seconds like a lab rat attached to a joy buzzer.

My daughter turned 4 this month.

We have a tall green plant/tree in our corner, which she has named “Albert Bangbone”. Actually that may be short for something much longer, but I can’t remember.

She got a fish for her birthday. His name is “Candyfellow Rainbow”, but we have permission to just call him “Rainbow”

There is an event named “Zoo Lights” in which they deck the Zoo out in christmas lights. You go at night, so there are no animals, and it’s quite beautiful. On the night we went there was a band, and a harpist, and some choralers. The kids sat still for a good 20 minutes listening to the carolers. When they finished, with no prompting or hesitation, Jane walked right up to the conductor and told her how much she liked the singing. She also thanked them, then turned around and left.

This week we went to dinner. Cassandra was noting a lack of chicken in her chicken enchilada, and a small discussion about it broke out among the adults about it. A few minutes passed, and suddenly Jane started saying “Excuse me, excuse me.” Soft and respectful, too quiet to actually get her attention, she was signalling to the waitress. She noticed anyway and headed over, where Jane informed her that her mother needed some more chicken, please. After the meal, Jane let the waitress know how much she loved her hair. On the way out, she gave her a hug.

My daughter appears to be as extroverted as I am in. Go figure!

My good friend Dave has woken from his slumber and started posting like a maniac. I have to post a little bit just to keep up, ya know.

Well, that’s not really why. When your Grandma even comments on how long it’s been, something has to give.

Not to make this entry entirely self referential, I offer this two revelations:

• I am unable to turn an oven off when I’m done with it. In fact, sometimes I manage to turn it up higher after it’s emptied.

• For 2 or 3 years now, any bread I buy comes home squished. The last 3 times I’ve even made a special point of trying to not squash it, but it still ended up buried under a few cans and some milk.

I get to walk my daughter to school in the morning. We walk for about 3 blocks holding hands and talking, then another 3 while she runs / hops / skips / jumps / flies along, stopping every third of a second to pick up a rock.

She’s so excited to go to preschool! It’s wonderful! I love holding her hand for those three blocks. I love putting her backpack into her box at school. I love watching her shyly wade into the new group of kids she’s still feeling out.