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Riley is dumb

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Riley has shown this behavior before (probably last spring), but I think he’s getting dumber.  I took them for a walk this evening and on our way back, he attacked a fake bunny.  A ceramic bunny that didn’t look real.  At all.  And when I pulled him away from it, he charged the one right next to it.  FAKE BUNNIES.  Come on.

Today improved dramatically.  Once I headed home for work, anyway.  This morning, I was late picking up my coworker, Gabriel (not his real name) , because it foggy.  And rainy.  And DARK.  And traffic was kinda bad.  Then I couldn’t find his apartment, again because of the dark.  And the fog.  And the rain.  But we got to DC in good time (I think the fog (and the rain (and the dark)) kept everyone home.  Or it’s spring break around here.) and had plenty of time to get ready.  The day went fine, nothing major to report, and I’m very happy to be home.  Although I did wonder why I was getting more congested as the day wore on, and then I remembered that I didn’t take my medicine this morning.  Any of it.  Because it sits next to my bed and it’s usually the first thing I do in the morning, but it was really early and very DARK.  And I was trying to be quiet and leave the lights off and get ready in the hallway so John could sleep.  I was gone before his alarm went off (at 6am).  Too early?  Yes.

Update: Post title changed because John felt “Riley’s an idiot” was too harsh.  🙂

How NOT to waste a Sunday afternoon

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Hmm.  Well, that really depends on what you consider a waste of a Sunday.  And I think that entirely depends on what sort of weekend you’ve had or what kind of week is coming up.  For me, this Sunday, wasting the day would have meant doing nothing.  If you know me, you know that I consider doing nothing on a Sunday (or any day) to be one of the best ways to spend a day.  Normally.  But I have a very busy, somewhat stressful week coming up, with a long commute at either end of the work day and very little time to get stuff done.  Today, not wasting my Sunday meant being productive.  So I went to the grocery store (Wegman’s, of course) to stock up for the week ahead, went to Staples to buy a laptop bag for work, got my car cleaned out, paid the bills, filled out the census form, and did what little picking up was required to put the house back into the shape it was yesterday morning.  That part was easy; Jess and Chuck aren’t that messy.  And now I’m done with all of that and I can spend the rest of the day doing whatever I want.  I think.  And what is that?  I think it’s reading.

But first, I’ve seen a few movies recently.  John and I watched District 9 last weekend.  It was not at all what I expected, but that could have been because I didn’t see any previews or read anything about it before I saw it.  It was interesting, certainly, and gory enough for three movies, but I can’t say I want to see it again.  We watched Dean Spanley and then Stardust with Jess and Chuck last night.  I think I really liked Dean Spanley (it was not at all what I expected – took me completely by surprise when I started to see where it was going), and I think I’ll like it more when I can see it again.  Jess performed her magic to get our DVD player to play her Region 2 DVD, and we’re very impressed.  Stardust is one I already knew I loved.

I’m a little chilly, so I off to take a nice warm bath, read my book, and…I feel like there should be a third thing to keep the rhythm of the sentence going, but I can’t think of anything.  🙂  My goal for the evening is to not stress out about tomorrow.  I’m as prepared as I can be.

Cleaning up

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So now the bathrooms are clean, the guest room beds are made, and upstairs is vacuumed.  I still need to clean the windows and dust.  At work (need I say it was another long day?), I basically cleaned out my entire desk.  I threw out what I could, but everything worth keeping is important enough to actually have with me in the training classroom.  So it all came home with me today.

I’m meeting Jess and Chuck around noon tomorrow in Chantilly, but there’s stuff I need to do first.  Sounds like I need a list.

  1. Lord & Taylor is having a shoe sale.  I could go on Sunday, though.
  2. Buy a laptop bag (for work) at Staples.  I’ve found the one I want.  That can wait until Sunday, too.
  3. Get my car washed, inside and out.  I think the place I go is closed on Sunday, so I have to do it tomorrow.  I’ll be carpooling next week, so my car should be in good shape.
  4. Dust.
  5. Clean the windows.
  6. Go to the grocery store.  I don’t even know what I need to get yet, but I won’t be able to feed Jess and Chuck if I don’t go.

At least I’m not traveling yet.  If this were the last weekend before all the travel, I’d be way more anxious and making many more lists.

My computer, thanks to John, is now running perfectly with its new hard drive and shiny new Fedora operating system.  And I get to use my pretty pink laptop with the nice keyboard.  (It’s really a pleasure to type on this keyboard.)

I think the condition of the house has been holding me back.  A half-clean house, so close to being mostly clean, makes me feel like I’m more in control of how and when I exercise, what I eat, and how I feel about myself.  You know?  If the house is clean, then I’m successful, and I have more energy and more enthusiasm for exercise.  But we still have too much clutter.  How do we get rid of all this crap?

I must be crazy

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Am I an optimist or an idiot?  I know which one I felt like this evening.  I had two days’ worth of evidence that going to work early was not going to mean I could leave early, but I decided to give it another try.  I was at work by 8am today.  Again.  It was almost 6pm before I left, and I worked through lunch.  (Like I usually do.)  So I’ve officially given up.  Or, according to Einstein, I’m insane. Of course, my schedule changes completely starting on Monday, so it hardly matters.

Man, that was negative.

My hard drive arrived yesterday (yay!), so I installed it when I got home.  That part was ridiculously easy.  It shouldn’t even be called an installation.  I unscrewed the old one and screwed the new one in.  Done.  Of course, I was still missing an operating system, but John downloaded Ubuntu for me last night and burned it to CD, so I popped it into the CD drive .  And ran into errors.  Pages and pages and constant scrolling of errors.  John came home, burned me a new CD, ran into more trouble, and has spent much of the evening trying to figure out why I can’t install Ubuntu on my laptop.  Eventually, he gave up.  I just watched him install Fedora instead.  I’m installing Linux; I really don’t care which version.

Heh.  John just named my computer Flyza Minnelli.  (Do you watch Modern Family?  You should.)

SO much better

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I’m still sniffling (and snuffling) and coughing, but so much less, and I feel SO much better.  I ended up working later than I planned (again, I know), but I still had an hour of daylight when I got home, so I went for a short run with the dogs.  It felt really good, and I feel really good.  I thought it might never happen again.  I didn’t do any cleaning tonight, though – wait! Not true.  I cleared off the island.  But there’s a lot more to do, so that’s how I’ll be spending the next two evenings.  Probably.  I should.  I’m sure I will.

No internet again today.  I miss my blogs.  It seems a little ridiculous to think that I may have to set aside dedicated internet time the same way I set aside exercise time or reading time.  But hey, if that’s what it takes…

Lately, I’m getting all my news from the POTUS Sirius radio station (110 – “Politics of the United States for the people of the United States”) in the mornings and a handful of Washington Post headlines throughout the day.  Not as well-rounded as I’d like, but that takes internet time I don’t have.

I just made a resolution to stop complaining about not having enough time to play on the internet.  Starting…now.

Our local WETA channel is showing Ed Sullivan’s Rock and Roll Classics, a DVD set they’re trying to sell.  It’s something I’d love to have, but for now, it’s making it really hard to turn the TV off.  John is glued to the screen, and I keep running back and forth so I can actually see The Turtles or The Young Rascals.  I’m ready to settle in for sleep, but PBS keeps pulling me back in.  Such a bad influence.

Late night, short post

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That’s been happening a lot lately (short posts).  Sorry.  I spent my evening watching Gosford Park instead of playing on the internet.  I had a much easier time following what was happening (and who all the characters were) this time, and I liked it.  The first time I saw it, I was SO confused when it was over.  John remembers it as the most boring 4 hours he ever spent.  Clive Owen doesn’t do it for him, I guess.  I don’t always like him, but I do in this movie.

And here.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is fine, but Clive is all rumpled and scruffy and HOT.  I like.

I’m not a risk-taker

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I went outside today.  For about 10 seconds.  John is trying to figure out why the airbag light is coming on in his car, so I stepped out into the driveway to see how it was going.  John said, “Um…” and pointed to the layer of pollen on the hood of the mustang.  Point taken.  I went back inside.  I just finished the third Dresden Files book, and I’m probably going to pick up the 4th next.  Mostly because I’m too lazy to put much thought into what I really want to read next.  And because I don’t think I can concentrate very well on anything that isn’t brain candy.  If I had another Dean Koontz novel, I’d probably read that, too.  Instead.  Whatever.  I’m staying inside today, and maybe, if John loves me, he’ll bring me egg-drop soup.

Baby fish mouth

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I need to get over this major congestion/sore throat thing.  I don’t feel sick, I just need a new head.  Around 2am, I moved into the guest room so I could do all my tossing and turning and snoring and sniffling without keeping John awake all night.  To his credit, he did volunteer to be the one who slept in the other room, but I when I need to sleep propped up (like I do right now), I sleep better there (or on the couch), where I can pile all the pillows in the house into the corner of the bed and sit up comfortably all night.  Stupid allergies.

John is late getting home today.  He’s supposed to be working on a project for class, but he hasn’t been able to get some program to run, so he planned to meet with the guy who wrote the program after work today at 5:30.  Then the guy rescheduled to 6:30.  And John has no idea how long this meeting will take.

Okay, he just called (7:20), and he still has no idea how long this will take.  We decided that if he’s not on the road by 8, he should get himself a sandwich (they’re at Panera), and I’ll figure out dinner on my own.

What AM I doing?  I just spent 20 minutes condensing compiling combining meshing (what the hell is the word I’m looking for?) CONSOLIDATING (there it is!) my work bookmarks and home bookmarks, and I’m not done ’cause now I’m organizing them.  Yes.  I separate my books into fiction and nonfiction and then alphabetize them, and then for extra fun, I organize my browser bookmarks by type of site (work, blog, reference, shopping, etc) and alphabet.  I bet no one’s having more fun on a Friday night than me.  🙂  And if I needed a clearer indication that there is something wrong with me, it’s that I’m not starving right now.  I’m barely hungry.  I had a bowl of frosted flakes with a banana sliced up in it for breakfast around 8 this morning and one of those Smart Ones frozen pasta meals for lunch about 1pm.  That’s it.  Wait, I had half a bagel around 3.  But still.  I’m usually hungrier than this.  Of course, the more I think about it, the hungrier I’m getting.

I just heard from John (8:20), and he’s finally on his way home.  So dinner can wait for him.  Pizza it is.

Allergies suck. And blow.

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Who likes to get to work early and then work late?  I do!  (Brown noser.)  And my throat hurts.  I’m pretty certain I can blame this on allergies and the change in the weather.  But it SUCKS.  So much.  And even when the ibuprofen is working and my throat only hurts a tiny bit, it hurts a lot when I sneeze.

Enough of that.  I spent about half of today reminding myself that it wasn’t Friday.  I thought yesterday was Thursday, too.  But tomorrow really IS Friday, and that’s nothing but good.  John is running the error checking/scanning thing I couldn’t find the other day on my poor broken laptop, but it looks like it froze in the middle of it.  So much for that.

(My throat hurts when I yawn.  What’s up with that?)

I have nothing internet-y to share with you today.  I’m sorry.  What with getting to work early and then staying late (and actually working the whole time) and then making dinner and spending some quality TV time with John, I haven’t had time to play on the good old interwebs today.  My plan for the next 12 hours is to take my medicine, go to bed with water and ibuprofen nearby, prop myself up on several pillows, and hopefully wake up tomorrow morning with a relatively clear head and non-scratchy throat so I can run.  It’s been several days.  Oh, the humidifier.  Can’t forget to set up the humidifier.

Good news!  Tomorrow’s pollen forecast is low.  Hope it stays that way.  I don’t want to have another of those springs.

Go be your own country already!

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As if we needed another reason not to move to Texas.  Go read Jess’s take on it.  It’s good.

In other news, I had the BEST sandwich for lunch today.  Turkey on honey wheat bread with sprouts and avocado slices.  SO good.  And it came with baby carrots and ranch dressing (GOOD ranch dressing) and a cookie.  If you have an Apple Spice Junction near you, I recommend it.  At least that sandwich.  And the ranch dressing was green!  I’ll admit it made me a little nervous at first, but it tasted great, and it’s been six hours since I ate it and I feel fine.  Maybe turning a dairy product green for a holiday isn’t such a good idea.  Not without a note or something.  You know, like “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Your ranch dressing is green on purpose!”

Computer hell

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Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  It’s not THAT bad.  I have several computer options besides my own laptop.  Could be worse.  Anyway, as I think I mentioned yesterday, my computer crashed on me twice last night.  It did it again this morning, and then one more time when I booted using Ubuntu to see if it was a Windows problem.  Clearly not.  And Ubuntu gave me a message that said my hard drive is failing and it has bad sectors.  That’s what I remember, anyway.  I can’t say for sure because it crashed.

I tried to run a scandisk thing John told me about, but I couldn’t find it, so I called Dell Technical Support.  It took me a while to get through to a person, but once I did, she was very nice.  She told me that I’d already done most of the troubleshooting she was going to suggest (I told John.  He said, “You’re welcome.”), so the next thing to do is run Dell’s built-in diagnostic tool.  She told me how to do that, told me that it might take a while, and suggested I call back once it’s done and I can see what errors are found.  If no errors appear, I need to look at the operating system again.

I hung up the phone and ran the test.  I got an error almost immediately about not being able to detect the microphone board, but I’m pretty sure that’s not my problem.  The next error came under the “Hard Drives” heading.  It said,

Msg: Error Code 2000-0146

Msg: Unit 1: DST Log contains previous error(s).

My first thought was “HOLY SHIT!  Daylight Saving Time is screwing with my hard drive!”  And just this afternoon I was gushing about how much I love Daylight Saving Time and all that lovely warm sunlight in the early evenings.  Traitor.

I called Dell Technical Support back and read the message to a new very nice woman.  She told me I need to replace my hard drive.  Yeah, I get that, but what does it mean? I repeated my Daylight Saving Time theory to her.  She laughed.  Then she apologized for laughing.  (I forgave her.  I laughed, too.)  And then she told me that it means one of the disks on the drive is damaged.  It either can’t read or can’t write.  (Poor illiterate disk.)

Since then, I’ve googled the error message and found out that while I can probably manage to use this hard drive for a little while (I can try to make it stop using the bad sectors), it’s on its way to total failure, so I might as well replace it.  It’s not that expensive.  And DST stands for Drive Shelf Test.  Whatever that is.

So I need a new hard drive.  In the meantime, I have options.  But I’ll miss my pretty pink laptop.

ETA: This mustard is awesome!

Now with more inanity!

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Some days I wish something interesting would happen to me so I could write about it.  Most of the time I’m just as glad nothing did.  I don’t need excitement.   I just need to know I can come home every day.  (That sounds so sad.  I need a lot of other things, too, but we’re not talking about that right now.  Read into that what you will.)

Jess (pyromaniac in disguise) wrote some good stuff today.  (“Wrote some good stuff.”  I have a way with words.)

If you know your classic paintings, you may enjoy this video.  You’ll probably enjoy it even if you don’t know that many, if I may use myself as an example.  I found it courtesy of this post from The Bloggess.  There’s a lot of other good stuff in that post, too.

I’m happy to provide links to interesting things, but I can’t let that be all I do.  That would be boring for me.  Of course, right now I am boring to me.  Mm.  Boring is no good.  Smoothies are good.  (As are non sequiturs.)

Thank the whatever from high atop the thing for autosave!  My computer crashed (for the second time tonight) and I was convinced I’d lost this post.  But no, WordPress has an autosave function, and I don’t have to start over.  Which is good, since I don’t have the energy to redo even this less-than-stellar entry.

And with that, I think I’ll hurry up and post this before I crash again.  But what caused the crash(es)?  Hard drive?  Windows installation?  Wish I knew.  Too bad I’m not married to a computer fixer-upper/programmer/family tech-support guru.  Which reminds me…this is very funny.  ‘Cause it’s true.

I knew the way you know about a good melon

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The produce guy at Wegman’s praised my apple-choosing skills today.  Good to know I have a fallback if my current job doesn’t work out.  I’m not sure where, other than the produce section of a grocery store,  I can market this new-found skill o’ mine.  I also noticed that finally, as of yesterday, there is NO MORE SNOW in the front yard.  It’s mid-March – if it snows again (this season), I’m moving south.

I finished Run today.  Loved it.  I think I’m going to head for something lighter next, like maybe the next book in The Dresden Files series.  Mindy is using my book list (see Books and Movies in the sidebar) for inspiration so she can take a break from her school reading.  That makes me very happy.

Daylight Saving Time started today, but it’ll probably be Tuesday before I’m used to it.  It’s almost nine, and I should be thinking about getting ready for bed (I plan to get up early and run, if it’s not raining), but it doesn’t feel nearly that late and I’m not remotely tired.  Those tiny insignificant issues aside, I’m thrilled about the time change.  I need more hours of daylight.

Wet dogs

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It’s been raining off and on all day (mostly on), so during a break this afternoon, I let the dogs out to play.  They were amusing themselves, sniffing around, eating dirt, and I went back to my book.  A little later I realized I was hearing rain hit the windows pretty hard and I remembered the dogs were still outside.  I rushed over to the sliding glass doors and found two soggy dogs huddled up against the door, trying to get under the overhang.  Adorable.  They’re in now, mostly dry, and being a little clingy.

I’ve already shelved my new books (I had to move about a shelf’s worth of books all over the house, one shelf at a time), and now I’m relaxing.  I think John just gave up on his projects for the day, so we’re going to cuddle up and watch TV.  And skip dinner.  We had a big lunch with Jess and Chuck after the book sale.

Today, I am a noodle

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Wow.  Check this out.  It’s a (short) public service ad from Sussex Safer Roads about wearing your seatbelt.  The music, the slow-motion…I got a little teary.

And if you weren’t moved by the seatbelt ad, be inspired by 40 inspirational speeches from movies cut into one 2-minute speech.  🙂

I was searched the internet for inspiration (of the non-movie speech kind) and didn’t find any.  I’m sure I didn’t look hard enough, but I lack the energy.  The guy I trained today took all the energy I had.  He’d leave the room for a break or for lunch or something, and I’d just slump back into my chair.  I got home a little on the early side, so I went for a run, but that didn’t go as well as Tuesday’s run.  I don’t feel invincible today.  I feel like a noodle.  A cooked one.

Someday I should be prepared for the Oscars

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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.

Links within links within links…

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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…

Take something already!

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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.

Bad hair timing

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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.