Haiku-lio

Rainy day today
It got my groceries all wet
Tea brewed in transit

Almost Thanksgiving
Why do you have your lights up?
Wait 'til day after

Isn't she lovely?
Isn't she bee-yoo-ti-ful?
Yup, indeed she is!
(Inspired by the Stevie Wonder ringtone I have for when M calls. She just called.)

Got into test group
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Yet another game!

Save Community!
Best show on TV right now
Please do not cancel

Don't Do What Donny Don't Does

So, yeah... You've probably already heard that there was an earthquake around these parts. What was probably a normal Tuesday afternoon in California was a bit of a new experience for Maryland, and mistakes were made.

* My first thought was that a large truck was driving by. Apparently, my instincts believe that trucks come in sizes ranging up to that of a large building.

* I had just turned on the oven when the initial tremors came up the pike. Two hours later, I realized that maybe I should have turned off the gas oven when the kitchen started shaking. Because open flame and broken gas lines tend to lower the value of one's house.

* I followed the rule about getting under a doorway at first, but then wanted to make sure that it wasn't actually a JC Penny's rolling through my neighborhood, so I went to the window to look outside.

I'm sure after more Monday-morning quarterbacking, I'll come up with more, but you get the idea.

Incidentally, it appears that the only damage sustained on my house is that a pen fell off a dresser in my room. I can't be 100% sure that it wasn't already on the floor before the earthquake, though. I also can't be sure if the toppled mess on PG's art table was due to the quake or due to a messy kid.

The Weather Outside Is Frigh... Ah, It's Too Depressing To Continue

This past week saw a rise in the outside temperature with plenty of sunshine. It was delightful. It was refreshing. It was everything I look for in a Spring day.

It was short-lived.

Currently, it's snowing/raining/icing outside. I shudder to think what my drive home tonight is going to be like.

In other news, I have a Baby 2K7 update a-brewin', full of tales of shopping and such, but at this point, I think I'll just hold off until tomorrow's non-stress test, in case there's something noteworthy there, aside from the 7:30 frickin' AM appointment time. That way, I can just put everything together in one tidy little post. Well, maybe "tidy" isn't the best word to describe my posts.

Bakin' Away

It's been a rather hot week. The past three days have been over 100 degrees. Overnight temperatures are what the noon temperatures were about a week ago. It's a bad scene. Not as bad as Chicago '95, from what I'm hearing, but still pretty bad.

Some might blame global warming on this. Global warming is caused, in part, by electrical plants pumping out exhaust. The way to cut back on this is to use less electricity. But when it gets this hot, you have to use lots of electricity for your air conditioning. That makes the electrical plants pump out more exhaust, which makes things hotter, which makes us use more air conditioning, which uses up more electricity, which makes the power plants pump out more exhaust, and so on.

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but the real story wouldn't make for such an interesting line of thinking. Let's see your average TV talking head admit to that!

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We scored ourselves some very good Orioles tickets last Sunday. M works with someone who has some connections and, in the case of last weekend, some extra tickets.

Since we picked up the tickets on the way to the stadium, we didn't have any section or row info to look up beforehand. All we knew beforehand was the seats were in the lower level on the first base side. When we got the tickets, I saw that we were in Row BB, which I figured meant that we were in the 28th row of that section (A through Z, then AA though whatever). I suppose if I had given the matter any thought, I'd realize that there aren't that many rows in any given section at Camden Yards.

But I didn't really give it much thought, so I was pleasantly surprised when the usher led us all the way down to the second row behind the Orioles dugout. I had brought along my camera, in the hopes that these seats would be good enough to get some good pictures. They were good enough for some great pictures.

We also found out that if we moved over a couple of seats, the TV camera could see us when a left-handed batter was up at the plate. M's sister was in Chicago at the time, watching the White Sox-Orioles game in a bar, so she saw us on TV. She was very excited about that.

The only drawback was that it was a hot sunny day, and there was no shade where we were sitting. The big heat wave hadn't arrived yet, but it was still in the 90's. If the game hadn't been so exciting, we would have left much sooner than we did. But it was very exciting, and the Orioles ended up winning in the bottom of the ninth after trading the lead back and forth throughout the game.

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No update on the computer classes thing yet. I still have some questions about it, and I have e-mailed them to the person I met with at the open house at JHU CCI last Wednesday, but she has yet to respond. Assuming her answers are what I want to hear, or close enough to it, I'm going to go for it.

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My best score on Brain Age remains 22. I got that again last night. The other night, I was feeling a bit off, and it told me that my score was 75. I got all depressed about it, and then it told me that it miscalculated and that my score was actually 36. Hoo ha ha! If it didn't cost $130 to get a new DS, I might have chucked it against the wall, just to teach that smartass floating head a lesson.

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I've finally started doing the Sudoku puzzles that come with Brain Age. Now I'm hooked. My prefrontal cortex is getting a lot of exercise!

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I've added some links over there on the right. Geek Philosophy is The Flick Filosopher's general blog about things that would interest the geekier members of society. It also currently has a weekly update of the gas prices at her local BP station.

Alien Loves Predator is a webcomic that's really more about living in New York City and such, but the main characters are an Alien action figure and a Predator action figure.

It is, in this blogger's humble opinion, very funny.

All characters in the strip are played by action figures. And Barbie dolls, since most female action figures have costumes that don't accurately represent New York women.

I should mention that the subject matter in Alien Loves Predator is very rarely kid-friendly. I should also mention that, despite the title, there is no Alien-Predator lovin' going on. They just share an apartment.

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Hey kids, what time is it? It's iTunes time!!! I tried to find my old 20MB flash drive last night to see if I could get some of the good stuff on my home iTunes list transferred over to my work iTunes list, but I couldn't find it. So we'll just have to deal with the same old stuff this week. Though there's a chance there will be some new variety, since I've sorted the songs differently this week (by the date they were added to the list).

1. "This Town" - The Go Go's
2. "Stone Cold" - Rainbow
3. "Baby's Coming Back" - Jellyfish
4. "Automatic" - The Go Go's
5. "Sympathy For The Devil" - The Rolling Stones
6. "Too Much" - Elvis Presley
7. "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World" - Prince
8. "Magnet and Steel" - Walter Egan
9. "China" - Red Rockers
10. "All You Need Is Love" - The Beatles
11. "I Can't Fight This Feeling" - REO Speedwagon
12. "Love Gun" - KISS
13. "I've Told Every Little Star" - Linda Scott
14. "King Of Wishful Thinking" - Go West
15. "Lucky 4 U (Tonight I'm Just Me) - SHeDAISY
16. "That's All" - Genesis
17. "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" - R.E.M.
18. "Insensitive" - Jann Arden
19. "Apology" - The Go Go's
20. "What A Wonderful World" - Joey Ramone
21. "Cantaloop" - US3

* I don't really have much to say about this week's list. Other than it seems to have an awful lot of Go Go's in it. But that's not really a bad thing.

All Quiet On The Warm Front

As is often the case with late-winter snowstorms around here, the 18 inches of snow melted almost completely away in the space of 5 days. As of this morning, we still had a few small piles, representing the mounds of shoveled snow that piled up during Sunday morning's car dig-out. At peak height, those mounds were about 4 or 5 feet high.

The most impressive snow melt in my memory was a week or two after the Blizzard of '96. 7 foot high piles of shoveled snow in my work's parking lot went down to non-existent piles within the space of an 8-hour workday. That evening was foggy as hell.

More snow is supposed to come on Monday. I'm hoping that those turn out to be unsubstantiated rumors. I have places to be on Monday.

The Weather Outside Was Pretty Gorram Frightful

It was going so well. Temperatures staying well above freezing for pretty much all of January. No snow, no ice, very little static electricity. It was a great winter.

Then the stupid groundhog saw his shadow, and a little more than a week later, it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

I spent over 2 hours yesterday digging the front walk, the sidewalk between the front walk and my car, my car, and M's car out of 18 inches of snow. Well, the cars were under about 3 feet of plowed snow, since we have to park on the street.

It is my belief that snow is punishment for our sins. I paid for my sins with an achy back.

Luckily, I've been pretty good, so an achy back is really the only aftermath to my Sunday toils. And on the plus side, my sweetie really appreciated the effort, so I've got that going for me. Still, all things being equal, I'd rather it be Spring.

The Weather Outside Was Kinda Frightful

We just had our second Almost Big Snow this week. It snowed enough to make driving a kinda hairy experience, but not enough to justify staying home for a while. I was lucky that the actual storm had passed, and that the drivers on the interstate were mostly considerate and non-idiotic. I did see a red pickup sitting in the median lawn perfectly upside-down. Wheels directly up. I'm guessing it happened while the storm was still going on.

In other news, I have finished reading The Perfect Mile. It tells the true story of Roger Bannister, John Landy, and Wes Santee as they all try to become the first man to run the mile under four minutes. If you know your history, then you probably know who does it first, but it builds the suspense so much that you almost forget. Plus, I didn't know if either of the other two guys ever got under four minutes too. It ends with a major race between two of them (with the third doing commentary on the TV broadcast) that turned out to be very exciting.

I grew up very exposed to the world of track and field, so I found the book to be very captivating. I don't know how a layperson would like it, but I think it would draw such a person in too. It is, according to the cover, a bestseller, so there has to have been plenty of non-track people who went out and bought the book.

Anyway, I'm now set on getting my mile time back under at least seven minutes, and maybe even six. I haven't run a sub-six mile since the mid-90's, so it will probably take a lot of work to get that. I'm finding that, despite having the running bug again, my overall laziness is keeping me from actually doing anything related to running, however. Looks like it's gonna take a whole lot of work.

Don't Like The Weather? Wait A Minute

As I was pulling into work yesterday, I noticed that the Outside Temperature readout on my car's dashboard said it was 70 degrees outside.

Then the rainstorms came later in the day.

This morning, at the same time of day, the temperature readout said 35 degrees. That's a 50% savings on Fahrenheits!

The Dark Season Is Upon Us

The weather has starting going cold. It's just a matter of time before the cold, dry air starts drying out my hands, causing the skin to crack (yes, yes, I know I can always put lotion on, but I don't like having my hands all greasy). Soon, I'll be cringing everytime I have to touch a doorknob, knowing that static electrocution awaits me. Washing my hands will become an ordeal, as I wage a constant battle to keep my rolled-up sweater sleeves from unrolling their inexorable descent into wetness. In just a few weeks, the clocks will change, and I'll be driving home from work in the dark, blinded by the headlights of my fellow commuters. And then the snows will come, and the roads will become deathtraps. Then comes the soul-crushing cold.

I really don't like winter.