Quote of the Week

"Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them."

--Suzanne Necker

My mantra for the day . . .

I do not need purple boots. I do not need purple boots. I do need glasses. I do not need purple boots.

But they're really great boots.

Quote of the Week

"I have seen what power does, and I have seen what power costs. The one is never equal to the other."

--G'Kar, in Babylon 5

Blogger lives?

Sorry about the long silence. Between being busy and stressed and Blogger's on-again, off-again thrashing, I haven't managed the will to update at an available time for awhile.

I had a nightmare Friday night. My dreams are usually more along the lines of working for the rebel underground or spelunking on Mars than anything to do with real life, so this one was surprising for having an obvious rl trigger: our CFO is resigning.

I dreamed that my boss quit. Not only would this be depressing in general (he's a good friend and the best boss I've ever had), but with the logic of dreams, they chose not to re-hire his position. I was left in charge of my side of the IT department, and my networking counterpart in charge of her side. This is yet another variation on my place of employment having me over a barrel (one of the reasons I left my last rl job).

Now, at this point, I think this must have kicked the actual stress chemicals in my brain, because the nightmare suddenly cascaded into everything I presently stress over in rl: Because I was freaking out from not having an IT director, I started eating cookies. I have recently promised myself that I will do 1200 calories a day from now thorugh January 9th (with the exception of Thanksgiving--I'll be out of town and have less control over that, so I won't set myself up that way). So then I was stressing about having broken that promise. Because I don't break promises.

Then I did the second freak-out about the cookies, which was, "Oh my god, I'm eating cookies--I have to fit into a wedding dress!" At about this point, I managed to peel myself out of the dream.

So of course, I woke up stressing about a wedding and spent most of the day in that mode. On the plus side, this finally resulted in something constructive. I have spreadsheets, now. And I discovered I could open a savings account online, without ever going into my bank, as long as I set up an automatic monthly funds transfer at the same time. So I opened a wedding account, and I'm going to try to do a small amount each paycheck. That way, I'll have some extra saved up for either the wedding or the honeymoon, wherever I need it.

I also realized that there are two fundamentally different ways of coming at this whole planning-a-wedding thing. One is: "We have $xxxx. Let's throw the biggest party we can for $xxxx." The other is, "We have $xxxx. Let's put everything together on the smallest possible shoestring and save the rest for the honeymoon." If we favor the second philosophy, we will have to do the wedding in the spring or fall. Period. By renting any kind of an indoor venue, we automatically lose most of the flexibility that you can put into budgeting on a shoestring.

There is a third possibility, and I think it's the one that's been causing so much stress: "We have $xxxx. What things do we want to do ourselves, and what things is it worth paying for to avoid putting that kind of time pressure on ourselves/our friends/our families?"

Must discuss with Pete. This is becoming a fundamentally important question, as I now have enough realistic options in my hands that it is becoming time to invoke my sister.

Quote of the Week

"Score one for the little wooden boy."

--Dexter Morgan, in Dexter

Weird Housekeeping

"Since I currently keep house with a machette . . . "
--source unknown

When people used to ask my mother how she managed a career and children and still had time for her writing, she would tell them, "That's easy--I gave up housekeeping years ago." While this is not exactly true, we always went over the house with a fine tooth comb and scoured and scrubbed and put away before we ever had company over. Thus, my notion of housecleaning is to clean before a party.

We're having a party tonight. A cheese party. I spent close to two hours cleaning the carpets, yesterday. Vacuuming (my vacuum never looked inadequate until I had something to compare it with) and using a steamer/shampooer borrowed from my parents. kenilyn did most of the rest of the floor stuff (including a previous session of vacuuming) last weekend. We've done the bathroom and the kitchen by bits and pieces throughout the week. But after two hours cleaning the carpets . . . I feel like I've had my workout.

We will have cheesey movies. Also: fondu, four kinds of specialty cheeses and crackers, a cheeseball, mozerella sticks, and mini-cheesecakes. And pocky, because the cheese section in AJ's was right next to the sushi bar and a couple boxes kind of jumped into my cart. And someone is threatening to bring cheese enchiladas. And I am not informed that people are bringing their podlings and a smaller TV will be set up in kenilyn's bedroom so the sprouts can watch kids' movies while the rest of us are in the living room watching Planet of the Prehistoric Women or Santa Claus versus the Martians or something.

I think that Phil, the philodendren that ate New Jersey, is going to have to go live on the back porch during the party. That, or take over the top of the refridgerator. We could well have enough people that some of them spill into the kitchen, and his current location on our half-wall will seriously block the line of sight.

It's a jungle in there.

Achoo!

Do you suppose I need a flu shot this year? I've never had one before. My insurance company is going to do a reduced-cost clinic, and I could get the vax for $20. The thing is, they're only good against the most common strains of influenza, and I hear a lot of worrisome things about vaxing when the most common strain is not really what I worry about. It'd make me damn sick, but I'm in one of those age/health brackets where influenza doesn't really kill. My concern is more for pandemic influenza, which the shot doesn't actually apply to. On the other hand . . . I work with people who work with people. It's a good way to catch everything. Thoughts?

Quote of the Week

"Some people grow into their dreams instead of out of them."
"That depends on the size of your dreams."
"No. Sometimes, it depends on how how hard you grow."

--Lord Auditor Miles Naismith Vorkisigan; Etienne Vorsoissen, in Komarr, by Lois McMaster Bujold

BANG

Blame Ricardipus. It surfaced in his blog.

Band Automatic Name Generator

Poll

Just for laughs . . . if we were to do something wild get married in Hawai'i, how would this affect whether you'd attend or not? Most of y'all who read this blog will be on my guest list, so I figure you're a good sample population. I looked up a round-trip ticket for the month of May, Phoenix to Kona, just for the hell of it, and it ran about $550. I found hotels in the right area at perfectly reasonable prices, of all things. No worse than you'd pay in Tucson.

Would the cost or time of getting there make it a no-go? Would it be a wonderful excuse to take a vacation, two summers from now?

Fucking ASU

So, the final verdict is: Three of four core history classes are required for Pete's degree. The history department's brilliant idea is to run them sequentially, with only one offered each semester. And he didn't know this at the beginning of the semester, so he dodged this semester's (he said something about knowing who was teaching it, and her politics, and deciding he'd rather not get involved). So he's stuck on campus for four semesters.

I find I am angry and occasionally teary-eyed, but not surprised. I find angry-at-ASU for continuing to dick around with my fiancee is far more therapeutic than tears. Which doesn't stop me from having them, occasionally, which annoys me. In the immortal words of Mark Feathers, "This does not meet my control needs at all." I confess, I had already argued myself into finding March far more sensible than January for an eventual wedding. It's not the additional two or three months that grate. It's the fact that you really can't have an outdoor wedding in May in Tucson. Certainly not if you expect your by-then 83-year-old, slightly fragile, grandmother to attend.

But surprised? Let's put it this way: Pete mentioned maybe he could argue the department into letting him do the last class as an intensive directed readings course. And I had to reply: "Even if they told you, today, that you could do it . . . I'm not sure it would be true six months from now." Fucking ASU. I'm really coming to hate that school, and I didn't even go there or play sports against them.

Quote of the Week

"I go from zero to SMITE in 1.5 Milliseconds."

--Skaven (Jeff)