wink ;)

2003.08.22

The long wait is finally over...

10:36 PM PST :: comments: 0

and it only took a month. It was supposed to take 8 months. Not that I'm complaining or anything.

Huzzah!

2003.08.10

Bike Goodness

10:18 PM PST :: comments: 0

Got on my bike again yesterday--the first time since my surgury. I'd forgotten how natural being on a bike feels. Boy did it feel good.

We need to talk

09:05 PM PST :: comments: 1

I'm increasingly bothered by the habit people have of prepending serious statements with the phrase "We need to talk", or "I have something that I need to tell you." Those phrases do nothing but make me feel pre-emptively defensive, guilty and all around bad, all before the conversation even starts.

I know that the point of "We need to talk" is to get my complete and undivided attention--to announce that this is a serious conversation. But that could be done with a simple "Hey...you got a minute?" which is much less confrontational and does not conjure up associations of "You're in big trouble" or "Let's just be friends".

Even worse is when people use "We need to talk" unnecessarily. As in "We need to talk...can I borrow a pencil?" If the topic is trivial, then we don't really need to talk and your insistance that we do only pisses me off. Just launch right in to whatever it is that you are going to say and don't introduce it with a false signifier of importance.

2003.08.07

Delayed Delivery

03:15 AM PST :: comments: 0

On our vacation we visited quite a few college friends, one of which I had roomed with for a summer. When I arrived, he told me "I've got something for you." It was a letter. Unopened. Adressed to me. From Tree. Postmarked Aug 15, 1995.

[Apparently the mail had gotten lost, and by the time it finally arrived, I had moved out (but my roomate had not). So my roommate threw it in with all of his stuff as he was moving out and it got buried in a box somewhere. It remained unfound through multiple moves and was finally unearthed by his wife last month. They were going to send it to me, but by then, we had already made plans to visit them. So they decided to just hand it to me when I arrived.]

Tree and I had been dating for a year and a half when she wrote that letter. I opened it to discover a typical mushy "I miss you, here's what I did today, I love you, I can't wait to see you in two weeks" letter that we had sent to each other frequently that summer (and every summer that we were apart).

I've never opened eight year old mail before. I imagine that it was like opening a time capsule (I've never done that either). All these memories about what the texture of our relationship and the flavor of our love came rushing back. The (relative) newness of our desire. The aching of separation which forever afterwards became entangled in my mind with the damp lethargic heat of summer. The thrill of pet names which have not been uttered in years because they've evolved and morphed into unrecognizable new ones. The anxiety of insecurities whose butterflies have long since been put to rest. The delight in the trivial minutia that comprised each other's lives.

I was simultaniously feeling nostalgic while reading the letter and cracking up laughing with my friends over the absurdity of just being handed a letter from Tree eight years late while she is standing right there in the room with me.

The back of the envelope reads "P.S. - get my package!" Neither of us has any idea which package that refers to.

2003.08.05

Happy Birthday to G

05:35 PM PST :: comments: 0

I'm back from vacation. It was quite good. I saw tons of people that I haven't seen in a long time. I'm so glad that I got to see everyone.

And I'm so glad to be home. We stayed in 10 different houses in 13 nights. (And the first and last nights were in the same place too, so we moved sleeping quarters 11 times!) Everyone gave us great sleeping quarters, but all that moving around gets exhausting.

More important than any of this boring vacation stuff is this: I have a new nephew! He's awsome. I got back into town just in time to be there for his birth. I've never held such a young baby before. He's so small. And yet so large (especially considering that he was inside my sister until just a little while ago).

Happy Birthday G!

2003.07.17

Vacation

10:20 AM PST :: comments: 2

Wow. I've been really bad at this whole blogging thing recently. I"ve had lots of thoughts, but none make it onto paper (errr...keyboard). Well, expect things to get worse. I'm going on vacation for the next few weeks, and my internet access will be sporadic at best. Don't expect much from me until I get back sometime in early August.

2003.07.08

Ummm, OK. I guess you can shout if you need to.

11:41 PM PST :: comments: 0

Grandma came up to visit. Whenever she wanted to check her email, I had to drop the resolution to the lowest level so that she could read her mail because her eyesight isn't quite what it used to be. When she wanted to reply to some mail, we had this little discussion:

Now I know why grandma is always shouting at us in her emails. Its a lot more forgivable now that I know the reason.

2003.06.30

On Being Taken Care Of

01:47 AM PST :: comments: 0

My recovery is coming along nicely. I no longer need to take pain-killers and I'm almost back up to normal walking speeds again.

Tree promised to take good care of me during my recovery. I am somewhat crestfallen to discover that this does not entail Tree actually doing anything for me. It merely seems to mean that she gives me more time to do certain tasks.

For the past week, I have been doing all of my standard household chores. I wash the dishes every day. I fold the laundry and take out the trash. I water the garden. The day after my surgery, Tree attempted to vacuum, but she gave up in frustration and I was forced to do it myself. It is still my job to fetch things (especially anything that is up high) and to do anything that she finds troublesome (like attaching hoses to faucets). I have cooked less than normal, but not enough to be statistically significant (extra eating-out throws off the calculations too). I went grocery shopping and I load and unload things from the car. Tree has graciously exempted me from weeding the garden, which is interesting because that wasn't my job in the first place.

In terms of household chores and activities, its been an absolutely normal week, except with added pain. The only perk that surgery has bought me is a weeklong extension on cleaning the bathroom.



Admittedly, my recovery is going very well and I was not in nearly as bad off as I had expected, but this is not my idea of "being taken care of". This is my idea of "normal". I may have set my expectations too high, but in order to have had my expectations met, I would have had to have dialed them down to zero.

Ah well. The fact that I was able to to do everything without undue difficulty proves that I didn't need much taking care of in the first place. So no harm done, really. Just lamenting that I was not able to milk my surgery for more pampering.

2003.06.28

Whose house is this??

01:21 AM PST :: comments: 0

We just painted our house. (Or, more accurately, we paid someone else to paint our house.) It is now white with green trim as opposed to grey on grey. It looks great. However, my brain doesn't immediately recognize it as our house when we drive up to it. This will take a little getting used to.

2003.06.27

Well, that's interesting

12:32 PM PST :: comments: 0

I'm not sure what to make of this. This article makes it clear that the money is in the connection businees, not the content business. But it is also well known that there is an immense bandwidth glut. With near infinite supply, the price should trend towards zero. So why is the price of broadband around $40/month? Especially if we're only using about $2/month? Hmmmmmmm...

If you were thinking about what to get me...

03:00 AM PST :: comments: 0

one of these would be nice.

Dreams

02:57 AM PST :: comments: 0

Alex thinks that it would be fantastic if we could swap dreams as a way of getting to know each other better. I'm not so convinced. I know that my dreams are so surreal as to be incomprehensible even to me, and I'm the one doing the dreaming. When I try to describe them to someone else I just sound like I'm babbling randomly.

Plus, as soon as I wake up, I start forgetting huge chunks of my dreams. Dream journals don't help because I simply cannot write fast enough. It would take two or three pages just to describe a single scene in one of my dreams because everything is so incongruous and random. By the time I've described anything, I've forgotten everything else.

What I really want is some way to record my dreams. Someday that will be possible, right?

2003.06.24

Sorry State

06:51 PM PST :: comments: 0

I thought I was recovering nicely, but today I feel absolutely horrible. The pain at the site of the surgery is to be expected, but I felt totally out of it as well today. My head hurts and I can barely stay awake and I feel in a fog. My naps are full of fever-dreams and do little to refresh me. Its like all of the narcotics that I've taken over the past four days have kicked in at once. And not in a good way.

I'm doing a little better now than I was earlier. Lets hope this keeps up.

Hurg...

03:30 AM PST :: comments: 0

Just finished wrestling with a particularly tough bit of CSS layout for a site I'm working on. Uphlgrph! I really hate IE and its buggy implementation of CSS. It's so maddening to have everything looking perfect in Mozilla and Opera and totally wonked in IE. You know that the code is "correct". You know that changing the code will mess it up on Mozilla or Opera. But you know that nobody can view it at all in IE, and therefor you have to do something to make it work. Sigh.

I really underestimated the amount of time I needed to finish this project. Luckily, my project manager is far better at estimating than I am and billed what turns out to be an appropriate number of hours.

(BTW, debugging is not made easier when on serious painkillers. As if you didn't already know that.)

wink ; )