Inane Chatter

It’s been a link-filled day.  Actually, it’s just been a link-filled couple of hours, and that includes the time from the morning.  Not much time playing on the internet today.  Lots of time running around a federal building downtown (from corner to corner and up and down nine floors (yay for elevators, but I really wish this building would put in those moving sidewalks like in the airport)) and then lots of time in a cramped room that can barely be called a conference room.  It’s more like a storage closet that happened to have a LAN drop and a phone.  But hey, I’m home, I’ve had dinner, I’ve watched an episode of The Inbetweeners, and I’m about to run away to my room to dampen the sound of the band in the basement.  It’s not fair that I complain about them all the time.  I like them, and they’re good, and I (mostly) like their song choices, but listening to the same songs over and over at such a high volume, in the evening after work when all I want to do is relax (and write run-on sentences), gets old.

Anyway, the links.  Dooce made me laugh again, but I’m a little scared that leprechauns are going to tap at my window in the night.  Also, check out these pictures at Desire To Inspire.  Min, I can see you in this house.  Some of the rooms more than others (the 1st, 6th, 9th, and 12th pictures in particular).

For Mom, here’s a link to a really funny Passover-ish post at Three Word Chant.  Happy almost Passover!  (At Wegman’s, of course, Passover started two weeks ago and will go on for quite some time.  No procrastination for them.)

I mean, it’s real, but it’s not the only one.  I really shouldn’t be doing this right now, but I found a couple of links you’ll enjoy and I wanted you to have them sooner rather than later.  I’m thoughtful like that.  First, The Bloggess posted her weekly wrap-up a little late, but it’s funny as usual and she posted a link to this other thing that I think is great.  In so many ways.  And I  just realized (like right this second) that Scott Adams (the second link) is the creator of Dilbert.  The post I linked to just became awesome-er.

One more and then I really have to stop (for now): I found this blog over the weekend, and I love it.  Today’s post speaks to me.

…(’cause it sure feels like that sometimes)…I’ll write about something else.   Like how disgustingly good it feels to run when you’re in the third or fourth or fifth mile and you’ve gotten past the REALLY tight calves and you’re running slightly downhill and “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie starts to play and you’re singing along (through the panting) and you know you’re  hungry, but it’s not that long before John will be home and you can hug him (I can hug him – nobody gave you permission), but maybe not until after the shower ’cause no one appreciates a sweaty hug (and did I mention that my fifth mile is mostly downhill and I was flying?), and then we’ll grill hot dogs for dinner.  ‘Cause it’s spring!  Close enough, anyway.  It was 63 degrees out when I left the house to run this evening.

I finished The Road the other day (Sunday, I think).  I know Mom and Dad thought it was the most depressing thing they’ve ever read, but I liked it.  Yes, it was a bit (a lot) depressing, but that doesn’t make it a bad book.  I definitely want to see the movie.  And now I’m re-reading Bel Canto.  I love it.  It’s beautiful, it’s lyrical, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m in a Frank Sinatra song (“You’re much to much, and just too very very to ever be in Webster’s dictionary”).  Anyway, I love it.

I was expecting it, I really was, but it still took me by surprise.  Roxy had another seizure (two, really – a cluster) about 9:15 last night.  Since December, she’s had a seizure every two to three weeks, and each one has been followed by a second one within 12-18 hours.  And in most cases, one of each pair has been a cluster seizure.  We raised her dosage about a month ago (I think), and I’m keeping the vet up to date.  I don’t think they have any solutions for us.

I’m taking the evening off from the internet, you guys.  I spent all day staring at the computer at work (much more than usual), with NO breaks, doing tedious things (but listening to good music).  Anyway, my eyes have said NO MORE to the computer screen.  So I’m going to strain them a different way and read.

I guess I was awake anyway, and getting up at 5:15 is something I need to start getting used to, but I wasn’t ready for that this morning.  I heard something, and pretty soon after that something resolved into the sound of Roxy convulsing.  I dashed downstairs and found her under the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs.  Poor thing.  I pulled the gate off of her, made sure her head was free, and waited it out.  It was a normal seizure, no cluster this time, and she took her usual half hour to shake it off.

We were both up and irretrievably awake, so running, breakfast, and getting to work all happened a little earlier than usual.  Not a bad thing, I guess.  We took the dogs for a long walk yesterday afternoon (I really like taking walks with John.  And the dogs.  I need to convince him that we should make it a habit.  Even if it’s just a weekend habit.  I like it.), so my legs weren’t completely unprepared for this morning’s run.  I was a little stiff, but it felt really good.  Best thing?  It wasn’t cold.  Yay!

It’s Oscar Night, so I might as well talk about it, right?  But first, I have to see who’s nominated and find out if I even saw any of these movies.  Last year, I hadn’t seen a single Oscar-nominated movie by the time the awards rolled around.

Okay, I’ve checked.  Of movies that were either nominated for themselves or had an actor nominated, I’ve seen Avatar (liked it, but for a technical category, not Best Picture.  I mean, come on, it was a 3D remake of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest!), Julie & Julia, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  Soooo, none of the really good ones.

We’ll watch the beginning for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, but that’s about it.  I’ll check out the highlights online tomorrow.  We’re going to spend our evening finishing Batman Begins (we got too sleepy to finish it last night) with pizza (and maybe wine – classy, I know).

Oh, we caught up on Lost this morning over breakfast, so Mom, Dad, Mindy, call me tomorrow and we’ll chat.

SPRING!  I know it’s not spring yet, but it’s starting to look like it.  It’s sunny, it got up to 50 degrees, we ran a race, the dogs spent the day outside, and I almost opened some windows.  More progress on that tomorrow, hopefully, since the high is supposed to be 55 (!).  It’s been a very cold winter, and I am SO ready for it to be over.

For the last two and a half weeks, ever since John coaxed/supported/shamed me into registering with him for the 5-mile race, I’ve been dreading today.  I wasn’t at ALL prepared to run 5 miles (high winds, snow and ice on the sidewalks, and being forced to run in the neighborhood streets are my main excuses), so my plan was to run as much as I could, counting on adrenaline to help a little, keep a steady pace, and then if I need to walk, try to walk only for one minute and then jog for at least three minutes before walking again.  So I had a plan.  I also took a peek at last year’s race results and I knew that at least a handful of people took between 70 and 85 minutes to complete the race, so I was fairly confident I wouldn’t be last.  But you never know.  Maybe those people decided never to run 5 miles again so they didn’t bother registering this year.  I told John (who wasn’t feeling all that great about it, either) to look for me around 60-67 minutes.  Closer to 67.

It was a beautiful morning (and it’s been a beautiful day), but pretty breezy, so it was still plenty cold (wind chill in the upper 20s, I think).  We joined the crowd at the starting line and John asked me where I wanted to fit in: front, middle, or back?  Definitely not the front (I’ll get trampled, plus I’ll just be in the way of all those super-serious, super-fast runners), and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be in the back (why start there?  I’ll get there eventually on my own), but in the middle, there’d be all the psychological pressure of watching all those runners pass me along the way.  I said something to that effect to John as we threaded our way to the back of the first third of the crowd, and he said, “Well, you know what it’s like.”  I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean that I should be used to watching runners pass me.  Pretty sure. 

The course took us through neighborhoods in Ashburn John and I don’t typically see, and there were a few people out cheering us on.  There was a big hill near the end of the first mile, and just after it, a woman shouted from her front porch, “It’s all downhill from here!”  She was mostly right.  There were a couple of times the course doubled back on itself, so I could see that I wasn’t actually last, or even that close to last (definitely in the last third, last fourth, maybe even last fifth – I’ll post numbers when the results are up).  One of the times we doubled back, though, I saw a guy juggling.  While running.  He had 5 (maybe 4, but I think five) red balls in the air at once while he jogged up the hill.  Pretty cool, very weird.

Just after the 3-mile mark, I realized I was doing better than expected, averaging about an 11-minute mile, and I started daydreaming about finishing in under an hour.  I wondered if John would even be looking at the finish line that early.  (Of course he would.  There isn’t much else to look at.)  Any walking I did was for less than a minute and not all that often (4 or 5 times total), and I was still on track at the 4th mile, so I ran the entire 5th mile and managed to pick up the pace at the very end, enough to feel like I was going to throw up as I crossed the finish line.  That’s the way to do it.    It passed, quickly, and John was there, and my time on the clock was just under 55 minutes.  I don’t remember exactly what, but my official time should be lower since it didn’t start until I crossed the starting line.  My watch said 54:24.  You know that means?  That I can do that without training for it?  It means I can do better.  And it was fun and I liked it and I won’t be afraid to do it again.  Another side effect: my fear of 10Ks disappeared.  I can DO this.

I just checked.  Results have been posted.  My official time (matches my watch exactly, for once) is 54:24.  Out of 280 women, I finished 241st.  John finished 197th out of 316 men with an 8:45 pace.  My pace was 10:53.

I can do better than that.

Anyway, we got home, had breakfast, cleaned up (ourselves, not anything silly like the house), and then John had to stay close to his computer since he’s on call to work today.  I talked to Jess (we’re making lots of plans), and then we filed our taxes.  John wants to buy an external hard drive today (and I need a new Scalzi book) AND I really want sushi for dinner, so we’re heading out soon to do all (at least some) of that.  The big decision for the evening is whether we eat out or bring sushi home (and snuggle in for TV or a movie).  Tough call.

Do you love your Disney princesses?  Do you love the movie Mean Girls?  Bridget found the perfect YouTube video.  Go visit her and see.  I mean it.  Shoo.

Side effects may include the urge to watch all those Disney princess movies.

The end of the workday couldn’t get here fast enough for me.  Nothing against work, but I really wanted to be home.  And now I am, and now it’s Friday night, and now I have to face a 5-mile race in the morning.  If I can treat it like a regular workout, I should be fine.  I just don’t want to finish last.  Please don’t let me be last.

You know how when you look something up in wikipedia, you end up clicking this link, then that link, then this one over here, and back to this one, until you end up reading an article that has NOTHING to do with the first one you read?  (I know you do.)  That doesn’t happen to me as much out of wikipedia, for some reason.  I tend not to click through, or at least not through as many layers, on other websites.  I wonder why.  Well, I don’t, for whatever reason, but I did today, and I found this blog post about an old Newsweek article from 1995 about how the internet won’t last.

How did I get there?

I’m glad you asked.

I started at the latest post on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, and clicked on the link there to an article from Laptop Magazine where he was quoted about what technology he uses now that  makes him feel like he’s living in the future.  That article links to the Three Word Chant blog post that found the 1995 Newsweek article (and makes fun of it).  It’s this last link (or the first one, several paragraphs up) that I want you to read, but the Laptop Magazine article is interesting, and Whatever can be entertaining.  Have I mentioned that I love John Scalzi’s science fiction?  I’ve read Old Man’s War and The Android’s Dream, and I really liked them both.  Wish I had another of his books to read now that I’ve finished Ender in Exile…

Oh my head.  Not a bad headache, just a mildly annoying one.  Have I taken anything to get rid of it (besides a glass of wine)?  No.  I’d have to put the laptop down and get off the couch for that.  Today felt really long.  It started with a visit to our financial guy (early at our request so we could get to work close to on time), then work.  Work started out okay, but then we got news that means our next two weeks are going to be more tedious than expected.  Faces fell, moods darkened.  And on my way out the door, I remembered that I had planned on stopping at Wegman’s on my way home to pick up salmon for dinner.  Last thing I wanted to do, but the only other food in the house was the ravioli we’re having tomorrow night (before the race (I’m SO not ready for a 5-mile race)).  So I stopped at Wegman’s and got out of there pretty quickly (and cheaply) since for once I only bought what I went in there for.  No browsing, no impulse buying.  I’m home, I’m comfortable (aside from the headache), and I think I’m going to read my book for the 15 minutes I have left before I need to start dinner.

Update: I love these pictures.  I want this house.

But good hair.  I went to work today, went to DC, got my picture taken for my new ID for work, came home, and NOW my hair looks good.  Now that I’m wearing my baggy fuzzy pants and my really old, very fragile Murfreesboro t-shirt.  And earrings.  When I noticed my very nice-looking hair, I noticed that I forgot to take my earrings out when I changed into my comfy clothes.  Looks a little weird.  But great with the hair!  All the layers are curving where they should be curving, and there’s depth and body.  So how do I get it to do this during the day?  Wait to go to work until 6pm?  (Nope, that’s no good.  No one will be there to see it.)  Aha!  Get up earlier and – no.  I guess I’ll just deal with it.

It sounded like spring the other morning.  Birds were chirping, rain was dripping, but I looked around and saw nothing but bare trees and giant piles of dirty slush.  Not spring yet.  Or maybe I was in a bad mood.

You go, Roger Ebert!  This article moves along really quickly (short, to-the-point sentences, unlike most of mine), and the pictures of scary weather patterns add to the sense of urgency.  I flew through this article and it set my pulse a-pounding.  A little bit.

I love these drawings/paintings by Rob Gonsalves.  They’re all optical illusions and they all hold up after multiple viewings.  I like the theme of the third one (of course I do), but some of the ones further down the page are amazing.

If you have ever watched a major dog show in TV (or Best In Show on DVD), you will probably find this as funny as I did.

Not a video this time, just pictures, but check out some of these rooms!  I’m not crazy about the antlers hanging from the ceiling, but check out the kitchen at the bottom of the post!  Love it.

John’s midterm was tonight.  He didn’t feel all that confident about it this morning, but he just called and, except for one question that everyone in the class seemed to have issues with, he thinks he did okay.  (That looks oddly punctuated.  I’m leaving it.)    And he’s on his way home early.  I said something to that effect last night, that he might be able to come early, but I totally meant that he takes tests quickly.  Not that it wouldn’t take him very long to write down everything he knows.    But that’s how it sounded.

Okay, one more link and then I’m done for the night.  I’m watching West Side Story on TCM.  I love everything about “America” (the opening lines get stuck in my head for days), but my favorite favorite part is at 3:52 in the video here when Anita and her friend sort of flounce over to the guys to sing the next part.  The flouncing cracks me up.

I hate when this happens, but I’m just not inspired to write much tonight.  John is in the basement with the band, auditioning a bass player (who, based on an introduction and about 15 seconds of eavesdropping while they got stuff out of his car, seems like a perfectly nice, normal person), so it’s hard to concentrate.  I’ve been trying to read through a few blogs I’ve bookmarked to see if I want to keep reading them, but it’s hard to tell when all I can hear is Lloyd singing “I used to love her, but I had to kill her”.  Kind of distracting.  And the dogs are demanding attention in ways that make it difficult to type.  Roxy keeps licking my hands and Riley was pawing at me.  I played with them a little, but that wasn’t enough, apparently.  They’re outside now.

Oh, I gave up on Bodily Harm.  Nothing was happening.  I need plot.  This is not to say I’m giving up on Margaret Atwood.  Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, or maybe I’d like another one better.  I refuse to believe The Handmaid’s Tale was a fluke.  ‘Cause that’s just not fair.  When I really like a book by an author, I want to read everything they’ve written.  And I expect to like it.  So I’m a little disappointed.  But speaking of reading everything an author has written, my fallback  once I decided to give up the Atwood book was to read a new(ish) Orson Scott Card book.  So I’m very happy. 

From what I can hear, the (possibly) new bass player sounds really good.  We’ll have to see what the guys think about how he fits in.  That’s my favorite part.  I love gossip.

I love wineries.  Not just because you can get wine there.  I love the atmosphere, I love the tastings, I love the big rooms and the (almost always) friendly people.  I went to Hidden Brook Winery today to get more of the sweet rosé John loves, and even though I was only there for five minutes, it was such a nice five minutes.  And in an odd coincidence (considering the comments from the other day’s post), NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” played the Sesame Street theme song right after making George Stephanopoulos answer questions about Snuffleupagus.  But it sounded like Elmo was singing it.  Didn’t it used to be a bunch of kids singing?  Did they really change it to just Elmo?  ‘Cause I’m not okay with Elmo being the star of Sesame Street.

Complete and utter failure.  Worst ponytail EVER.  I took the dogs for a short jog this afternoon, and for the first time in months, I put my hair into a normal ponytail instead of the double-decker thing I’ve been doing (which has been working just fine).  Because the ponytail wasn’t tight enough, it slid down the back of my head, freeing all the shorter hair in front to flop around in my face.  I couldn’t just tuck it behind my ears (over and over and over) like I usually would because I was wearing my ear grips to keep my wittle ears warm, so I didn’t have ears behind which to tuck the hair.  Behind which.

John has been in the driveway all morning replacing the rear brakes on the mustang.  It’s not supposed to be this hard.  That’s true of EVerything he does to this car.  Except when he replaced the drive belt a couple of weeks ago.  That one went pretty well.  He got the driver’s side done, but he’s having trouble compressing the piston back into the caliper on the passenger side.  I’ve been googling the problem, but he’s got the right tool and he seems to be doing all the right things.  He’s not ready to assume the caliper has seized yet, but if he can’t fit the new brake pad in, he may have to replace the caliper.  And that will mean he won’t be going to his cousin’s new baby’s christening.  Because it will take the rest of the weekend (bleeding brake lines, replacing parts, adding fluid, etc) and he won’t have a car to drive until it’s done.  So we’ll see.  But if he does go, he’ll leave for PA tonight to spend the evening with his family and then drive to Long Island with them Sunday morning for the christening.  He’ll stay with his parents in PA Sunday night and go to work from their house Monday morning.  So I won’t see him again until after work on Monday.  On the plus side, I’ll have Indian for dinner and watch movies he’s not interested in.  But that’s only fun for one night, not two.  Oh!  Speaking of movies, we watched 500 Days of Summer last night.  We both really liked it.  Joseph Gordan-Levitt was fantastic, and while we didn’t like Zooey Deschanel’s character as much, she was really good.  John couldn’t decide if he thought she was really attractive or not.  He said he wasn’t sure if he’d call her beautiful, or even pretty, but he wants to keep looking at her.  So at least he thinks she’s interesting.  I think she’s very pretty.  She’s got that blue eyes with dark hair thing I’ve always liked.  Like Liesl in The Sound of Music.    And I will watch the musical number (from 500 Days) at least three more times before I put the movie back in the mail.

I finished reading that Stuart Woods novel (Run Before the Wind – I liked it) a few minutes ago, and I find myself faced with a very familiar dilemma.  What should I read next?  I have too many options!  Another mystery?  Am I in the mood for science fiction or fantasy?  Which one?  Do I want to read something light and frivolous or something a little harder?  I really don’t know, and I might not know until I start something.  Please excuse me while I peruse my bookshelves.  That doesn’t sound right.  Probably because that’s not a word I normally use.

I didn’t get very far in my perusal.  Okay, browsing.  Feels more natural to me.  I stopped in the A’s and decided to try a Margaret Atwood novel.  I’ve only read The Handmaid’s Tale, but I like it so much I’ve read it several times.  So I’m going to try Bodily Harm.

Things I Like (in no particular order):

• Reading fiction, anywhere, anytime
• my dogs
• all dogs
• PUPPIES!
• And kittens
• And cats that actually like people
• chocolate
• milk chocolate
• white chocolate
• Paul Reiser
• Mad About You
• Saturday mornings
• sunny days (“sweeping the…”)
• summer days
• trees
• books (and their smell)
• big band music
• lists
• flowers
• BIG bathtubs
• showers with real water pressure
• manicured lawns
• manicured nails (my own, anyway – don’t much care for anyone else’s nails)
• clean sheets
• John’s clean, just-out-the-shower smell (much better than his just-came-back-from-a-long-run-sweaty smell)
• John (duh)
• everyone else I like (but won’t list here for fear I’ll leave someone I like off the list and that person (let’s call this person “H” for “hypothetical”)  will notice and be mad at me for leaving her (or him) off (even though it was an accident and I really do like H) and she will stop visiting my site, assuming  she was visiting and reading anyway, but if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t know I left her off and she wouldn’t get mad and stop reading, so I guess H was reading, which means, again, that I shouldn’t list anyone because I might leave someone off and she’ll get mad and stop reading)
• decorating with books
• my pretty new dining room table
• Ellen DeGeneres
• working from home
• that relaxed feeling as you drift off to sleep

Speaking of that last one, it’s getting close to my bedtime.  More accurately, it’s getting close to that time when I should be in bed reading.

Much as I like sleeping in and being lazy in the mornings, I find that I’m happier when I’m up and moving and it’s early (not crazy early).  As the day goes on, no matter how good that day is, I get more and more tired and worn out and less likely to want to do anything.  That’s mostly why I need to run in the mornings.  If I put it off to after work, I might never get out the door.  Actually, I’m gonna have to change that soon.  I’ll have to get downtown so early that I won’t be able to run in the mornings.

My point, if I had one, was that I like mornings.  Particularly sunny ones.  Oh, right, my other point is that I think I might like to become a morning blogger.  Not sure if that’ll happen, considering how long it’s been taking me to get ready for work lately, but maybe then I wouldn’t feel this pressure to come up with something in the evenings when I’m brain-dead.  What’s that you say?  I’m always brain-dead?  Don’t be mean.

I don’t care all that much about the actual Cadbury creme egg (John loves them – my favorites are the hard-shell mini eggs), but I always laugh at the Cadbury bunny commercials.  I love the tryouts (particularly the lion in the bow), but you can’t beat a clucking bunny.  I know, I’m easy.  But it’s funny!

My camera isn’t taking good pictures for some reason (grainy with no flash, and there are glare or dirty lens marks all over the picture when I use the flash), and I can’t find John’s camera (he’s in class, so I can’t ask), so there aren’t any good pictures of the dining room.  When I manage to take one I’m willing to let everybody see, I’ll post it.  I really want you guys to see it, ’cause it looks GREAT.  Like a whole different room.  Again.    The wall where the couch used to be has four dark, very tall bookshelves on it now.  Turns out the floor is uneven along the wall right in the center of the room, so we have two shelves coming from the wall by the fireplace.  The other two are right up against the light switch by the basement door.  Eventually, I want to put a shelf or narrow table or cabinet or something in the space in between with a mirror on the wall above it.  The buffet (blond wood) is still on the opposite wall, between the windows, but I think we’re going to get two more of the dark bookshelves and put them there instead.  We’ll add doors to the bottom halves of the bookshelves so we can use them for storage space and maybe use the upper shelves for wine glass or something.  Ooh, we put glass doors on the upper shelves…  Yeah, I want to do that.  But that can wait for the next trip to Ikea.  I finished rearranging the books last night, and once again (maybe for the first time in this house), all of the fiction fits on shelves on the first floor.  With room for more!  We have a whole bookshelf free.  That won’t last long.  One new book and we’re on the last one.   And of course I’m not counting the books we have in bags and boxes in the basement (that’s our store inventory), and I haven’t even begun counting the books in Mom and Dad’s basement.  Someday I’ll get around to organizing the non-fiction upstairs.  I LOVE how the dining room looks with all those books on the shelves.

Enough about me.  Except not, because I’m posting this link to The Bloggess because I love the way she tells a story and I laughed at this post.  A couple of times.  Loudly.  And Riley came over to check on me.  Apparently, he doesn’t get why she’s so funny.  But he’s a dog.  What does he know?