On my LJ f-list tonight: "imbrolgio" in 1word1day community, right above the latest news post.

How has the rest of my week been? Snickerdoodles and soccer are made of awesome, but the weather has turned chilly and rainy, with no sign of remission before Sunday. Gossip is that we're in for a cold, cold winter. Work awesome will be severely hampered by broken equipment until Monday at least. Capclave is this weekend, norabombay flies in tomorrow, and I am feeling none of it. I blame a combination of factors, most importantly the rain. Last night was saved by cookies and an amazing USA-Costa Rica game. Tonight I failed to study enough, and my room is still only 80% ready for people to crash this weekend.

I am sitting, barefoot, under a fan which is whipping cool air with the bay-and-beef draft from the beef stew simmering on the electric burner. Tonight I ate leftover stir fry, but tomorrow's lunch will be eaten with a spoon.

Usually September rolls in with humid, sticky afternoons and warm nights, but this year school started and the weather broke barely hours apart. I like it; I am about the only person at work who is rejoicing.

I am on the countdown to my fall class - intro to medical genetics - and to vacation! I am going to have so much fun in S. F.: less than three weeks to go.

Quick stew conclusions: om nom nom nom, but needs more salt. Writeup to follow.

Since Pandora took Muse and Bon Jovi and gave me Kevin Rudolf, it is my new best friend. For the five minute increments I'm at my work computer.

When I am organizing my days, I feel very relaxed, despite the extra cat- and plant-feeding I am doing. Then I remember that the last time I did this, I signed a lease, packed and moved in less than three weeks, while feeding the cats and without taking time off work. So perhaps it's not surprising I am so laid-back this time I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Or perhaps I'm filling it with other activities. Last weekend I had a double share of socializing Friday evening, gave blood Saturday morning, attended a Fever/Dream at Woolly Mammoth Saturday night with twistedchick, and had dinner Sunday with dad. That would also explain why I am curiously sleepless; also, I do badly with sleep when I'm not getting enough exercise. This leads to short-term attention memory deficit, why didn't I remember to load any music on my mp3 player, why am I wiped out at 4 PM, why I haven't the sense to stretch out and nap on the couch, today's movie double feature (The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home - stop looking at me like that, what did I just say about sleep deprivation?) and a curious inability to do anything constructive without external motivation.

Thanks to sgsguru's kind birthday gift, I am feeling the need to make an I Love the '70s (and '60's, and '80s, and country, and classical, and conscious hip-hop, and - okay, I just like music) mp3 mix, but I think I've finally been up long enough to fall over and sleep.

"Reunion Hill" is and isn't summer music; this is one of the cooler summers I remember, which is okay by me, but breaking out the DMB classics like "Ants Marching" when it's less than 80 F seems just wrong, however long the days may be. I'm sure August will fix this to and beyond my satisfaction, but for the moment the weather is keeping my attention.

Another reason my eye is on the weather is Friday's company picnic. If it rains this year, that will make three picnics in a row that have been rained out, and the forecast is calling for thundershowers.

Okay, you know what I hate about the 'burbs? Everything closes early, at 9 PM. And I am not an early person.

In better news, hump day is over, and paypal un-choked on my seed account payment (YAY, and wow, two hundred icons), and the sun almost came out for the first time this week. It should be back, oh, next Sunday. My soaked shoes are looking forward to it.

I'm at least two and maybe four days behind my LJ reading list, so if your life has been amazing or not amazing, I don't know much about it.

Reminders about the evils of presenting:

1.) Do not read your powerpoint slides verbatim.

2.) Do not say "um" three times in a row.

3.) Try to remember your audience. A room of people taking an infectious disease class may have heard of MRSA just a couple of times. Make it funny if you can't make it new.

Back during college, when I walked to campus every morning, I eventually learned that sticking dry socks in my backpack went a long way toward dry feet on drizzly (or worse) mornings.

Today's squishy socks were a potent reminder that there are a very few things I might miss about college.

Work started the Summer of Shifting this week. One group is swapping space with another company in the building this week, and during summer proper we'll be expanding again. R&D is promising some rollouts too, with a host of knock-on effects for everyone. I am doing my best to keep my head down and ask pertinent questions while project bosses and senior staff clump at impromptu hall meetings about where to put stuff next.

I've been feeling weirdly laid back this week, which I blame on getting enough sleep. 7-8 hours a night? When did that start? I've also been trying to be a little less insanely driven at work, because my forearms are killing me, and I need to rearrange the ergonomics at my lab bench, or I'm going to be banned from the computer after work.

Cold, bottled unsweetened green tea is not disgusting. "Disgusting" is your first taste of Manischewitz wine during the sedar. Unsweetened green tea is just bitter and a total waste of $1.20, and only really drinkable with honey and soy milk. (And by "with", I mean 1-to-1.) So I'm not doing that again.

This is the first really hot weekend of the year: 93 F yesterday, and on track to match that today. Hence the cold tea. This is great weather, if you have nowhere to go and a cold drink on hand. If either of those conditions are not met, this is, in my opinion, not great weather. If both of those conditions are violated, it is lousy, sweaty, nasty weather. Can it please be October now?

Oh! I am traveling in May! I fly into Chicago on Tuesday, May 20th, and will be exploring the Windy City's summery charms until norabombay and I drive to WisCon on Friday. (I was a lot more excited about WisCon before RaceFail. Now I am reserving the right to sit by a pool with something more than water in my glass Sunday afternoon.) We roll out of Dairyland Monday morning-ish; I fly out of Chicago Tuesday morning. Because I am a genius, I padded my leave request (turned in before the end of February, thanks much) and will have eleven uninterrupted days off work. Chicago and Madison people: meetup? The only hard point so far is the Monday night Cubs-Pirates game.

Spring indications:
lawn mowers buzzing long greens,
light heating branches.

What on Earth moved me to buy three Heinlein novels and one short story collection Friday? I have serious and persistent problems with his fiction, because Uncle Bob does not know best, and yet, I still pick up these skinny time-faded paperbacks. I blame Heinlein's ability to actually tell a story and write witty prose, which means I still remember most of the stories from The Green Hills of Earth. That's a testament to skill, since I tend to lose short stories out of memory faster than I misplace my keys. (Fortunately, the keys keep turning up.) Heinlein is one of the greats of his SF cadre for a reason. Even if picking which Heinlein to read next is much like picking one's way through a minefield. (Citizen of the Galaxy: greatness. The Puppetmasters: erk.)

If one were going to pick the formative authors for a generation of SF fans, I'd point to Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. I am not asserting they were consistently the best writers, but you can invoke the Foundation or "I'm sorry, Dave", or "the one with the lunar revolution and Mike" and people know what you're talking about. It's the background against which everyone reacted (and )is still reacting).

Who are the top authors of my generation, and the next?

I think Bujold, Pratchett and maybe Gaiman are the Big Three authors who everyone in my fannish age cohort has read; I could be wrong, because I am wildly biased about Bujold, and Gaiman really depends on whether you count Sandman or just his novels. The up and coming cohort might include some combination of Scalzi, Doctorow, Gaiman (version YA), Novik, and/or Stross. That totally ignores non-genre novels widely read by fans (Laurie R. King's mystery novels come to mind), and media fannishness, comics (see Sandman), and fan fiction, some (but far from all) of which has surprisingly cool speculative fiction content. And once you open the floor that much, you have to question what pool of readers you're talking about, anyway, and that changes the game (and Big Name Author list) significantly.

This week is going on forever, kind of like winter did. I am beaten down. I am happy to see the forsythia, and usually I'm not a fan of that much yellow in one place. Yet this year I look at it and think it's a pretty sight, especially at sunset, when it looks like so much congealed sunlight. Only without the negative connotations. See what I mean about tired? Also, today's rain is not welcome to stay the weekend. I want to be outside.

My roommates are driving me less crazy, and I've decided to take their outbreak of madness as an inspiration: look! I am not going to pieces and driving the people around me up a wall! I have pulled my act together more than I thought I had! Also, it's obviously time to take up an exercise regimen as an alternative to being in the house and available for roommate upset. I. Don't. Care. The well of empathy is dry until I get seven hours of sleep in a row and talk to people whose opinions I value on topics I find interesting.

Barring that, I will take the "worst of MTV" Youtube challenge. Team K&L were the most interesting thing I saw at WSFA last week when they showed me Tainted Love (unwanted touching from starpeople) and I brought Total Eclipse of the Heart (with inexplicable dancing ninjas) to the table. K&L tried to top this with a video that made Eurovision look like the height of good taste, and I have, thank you, blotted that one from my memory. What's your favorite "how did anyone think this was a good idea?" music video? Bad special effects are not an instant win: utter tastelessness must be on display.

The really amazing thing about rain is that it's not ice. The winter
may be thinking about ending after all!

I would like to complain mightily about Roommate H. putting the wrong dishwasher soap in the dishwasher for the second time this month, but you know, accidents happen.

Life in Apartment A. is otherwise boring. I had an uneventful week of work, attending class, staying up late with books, and blowing off implicit social commitments. I still do not have new work headphones, and I'm ticked I can't try some SR 60 headphones before buying. Audiophiles are in love with them, but CNET questions their comfort over time, so I am wavering.

The only item of note is working overtime today. I was surprised but not shocked that I didn't have the building to myself.

I am watching the Oscars instead of finishing my homework, with a side of reading news and f-list headlines, and trying not to freeze my toes off until my socks are out of the dryer. It's been extraordinarily cold, and snowier this winter than last winter, but we haven't had a proper six-inch mess, just ice. It's almost March, and I'm thinking my days with fluffy snow have come and passed, usually without much accumulation and a transition to rain before the end of the weather event. So no Snow Plus Camera days before next December (if I'm lucky, for special values of "luck"). Fortunately, this means spring is happening any. Time. Now.

This week has seen: unresolved laptop issues, the email about my cousin's little girl's brain surgery on Monday (she's fine - okay, as fine as post-op gets), the latest cultural appropriation round (what's the escalation from trainwreck?), snow, Wednesday's icepocalypse, cancelled evening class, and continued laptop troubleshooting, and Thursday's impromptu 1.5 hour work meeting on What's Changed Since Our Last Meeting (Lots). Also, I left my mp3 player at home. It was sorely missed.

Tomorrow is payday, with 2008 bonus money, and it's also the WSFA Fifth Friday party, which I volunteered to host. By taking the low road (bedroom as storage room), most of the house is mostly presentable, which leaves only food prep and nervous collapse from pre-entertainment nerves. Next time I do something like this, I'm exploring the merits of semi-potluck.

Fortunately, tomorrow is payday, and I get to see people I like, and in a stroke of genius, I foresaw the brewing Steelers Fans Versus Everyone Else conflict and took Superbowl Monday off. I'm debating the value of 1.) going to the free afternoon at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2.) finding someone with TiVo to watch the ads with, 3.) investing some metro time and seeing college people on Sunday. Or combining all of the above, whatever. The point is, it will be a restful three day weekend, except for that part where I have to start studying for class.

If anyone needs directions to Fifth Friday and doesn't have them, comment or email. The ase at livejournal address is broken: use the yahoo address.

I sort of regret not joining in An Historic Moment, but the way I look at it, if I work today, people I work with get to take the day off and be all historic. Also, the only person I have to share the inaugural crowds with is M., who is a great roommate, but whom I would kill if I were to spend an entire cold, crowded day her company. So my lunch break will weirdly coincide with the webcast and the company bandwidth exploding.

I look at a 19 F temp, and say, "sunny, no wind. Nice day!" Speaking of utter insanity.

Icepocalypse has failed to materialize again. Instead I worked 8.5 hours, attended a lunch presentation on supplemental insurance, joined the community chorus, walked something like six miles between all locations, and killed my cell phone battery. In the event of the improbable, I have purchased Regenesis (two miles!), and have hot chocolate on tap. (At 10:20 PM. When your 40% off coupon expires today, you buy the long-anticipated hardcover today.) Apparently, walking six miles with an umbrella - plus the 50 feet (yards?) between lab and my desk, times why can't I remember everything on the first try?! - is about what it takes to tire me out. (People keep asking me for my work number. I keep giving out my cell because I'm never at my desk, unless I'm getting ready to leave it. It's a thing.)

Roads stayed clear, but at one point the little spotlights on residential signage were steaming. The trees are icing up, super-shiny under sodium lights, and doubtless will lose branches before the sun comes up and turns mini-tree-icicles into microscopic prisms. Very picturesque, like most situations waiting to slide out from under you.

Full work week, here I come! I would be relieved at the chance to catch up on work backlog, if I weren't also up at one in the morning.

It is thirteen degrees out. Celsius people: -10 to you. This? This is not on.

Poll #1319344 The Tipping Point
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

In Fahrenheit (sorry!), what is "cold"?

Same parameters: what is "oh my gosh, how is this not record-setting"? cold?

Tickybox?

Also, we're expecting a windy day. Wind chill advisory until 3 PM, brrr!

Dear Mr. Bush, I hope health care providers refuse to treat you on moral grounds. If you don't believe in treating patients, don't go into medicine. Super headdesk FAIL!

This is probably a really harsh judgment, but it's the head-on collision of two people's rights to hold a moral position. Someone has to give; I'm inclined to force the doctor to make way, especially in regions or health care programs where there isn't a choice to see someone else. Who should enforce "morality"? What is morality? I'm inclined to sacrifice codes of should and should-not to compassion for the currently living.

I don't care what the pedants say, it's winter. Cold, dark winter. The day starts late with gray clouds. Sometimes they don't completely cover the sky. By lunch, they've thinned enough that the sun is only masked by gauzy clouds. After midday, the sun falls back into clouds; the difference between indoors and outdoors is temperature (sometimes) and how high the "ceiling" is. Tuesday night I hitched a ride home with two of my coworkers; we saw two accidents on the road, and then the drizzle tapping on the roof shifted to ice.

Took today and tomorrow off work to kill use-or-lose. Finished 90% of my holiday shopping last night. Today I have spoken less than five sentences to other people all day, finished The Fellowship of the Ring, and made dents in two other books. Fabulous, fabulous introvert paradise.

Monday I got to participate in cool bonus offsite training, and ultimately put in a ten hour day plus dinner after work. Call it twelve hours of coworker interaction. It was good, but a lot of face time. So I am super glad I'm not at work for the the rest of the week. Besides all that holiday stuff to do.

This will be my holiday present to me. There is a strong possibility I will scream like a little girl and take a day off work when Regenesis ships to me. I got bored and made a playlist for this book! Okay, so it's getting redone now that I have Dresden Dolls and Coin-Operated Boy in my life (and by the way, is it just me, or is the Dresden Dolls discography tend to the really creepy?). But the point is, I have inappropriate love for Cherryh's novels. If I finish the other books I'm in the middle of, I'm going to reread Cyteen before Regenesis. I haven't been this excited about a book in a while.

California is burning, but DC saw flurries this afternoon. Reactions at work spanned the gamut from horror to gleeful organization of snowball fight teams. My moment of horror today was roommate M. revealing her lustful thoughts about Michael Weatherly. Apparently there's an entire fanbase among my age cohort who don't think he's an annoying frat boy? If only House weren't on opposite NCIS, M. and I could bond over TV!

Yesterday I did not buy film. I called my roommate at the mall and asked her to buy me film, because the grocery store I was standing in didn't have the ISO I wanted, unintentionally sending her to a loving interrogation by the sales clerk / photo hobbyist. I am torn between shame and bemusement that I own such a quasi-hipster item. It's, like, vintage. Vintage happens to other people. I just thrift it. (Except when I realize I haven't thought through the cost of film and development. On the other hand, now I have a camera that gives me manual control over depth of field, which I've been jonesing for since about 3 seconds after I discovered non-automatic settings. This is known as impulse shopping, and is bad and wrong. And yet. Am I ebaying this sucker? No. Instead, I'm buying film!)

My little Kodak film camera is a lot like an inkjet printer: the initial outlay is low, but the consumables will kill your budget. I bought this mostly as an exercise in exploring manual settings, which should keep me occupied until I snap and go digital. If I could control digitized f-stops, exposure times, and the rest on a cheap digital, I would so be there. Unfortunately I've either flunked Manual Focus 101, or it's really hard to get that sort of control on a cheap digital point and shoot. Until then, the arcane mysteries of loading film, setting the exposure, and trying to remember what settings I used when (notebook, here I come) should keep me distracted from the momentum-destroying cold and dark of November through January.

It turns out that not only do I like the idea of getting up before the sun more than the idea of getting out of work after dark, but also that I can force myself to get up with my alarm clock on the new schedule.

Unfortunately, I am lousy at pushing back bedtime to match.

Winter is coming, with all associated joys: somewhere in the last three weeks, the leaves elected to shiver off black branches. The Earth tipped, and the quality of the light after work changed. My roommate said on Friday night, plaintively, "can we turn on the heat?" and I said, "you're shivering! Yes! And do you need a sweatshirt? Put on a sweatshirt, you're shivering like I do when it's thirty degrees out."

(Then it rained Saturday, and was all warm-ish and nice - okay, mid-60s - Sunday. So no more heat for a couple of days, I guess.)

Also, let's just acknowledge that I wasn't eating right last week, and never, ever do that again.

Finally, if anyone's seen anything resembling a creative impulse, or just a brain, will they please point it back in my direction. I'm bored with photoshop, and when your photoshop mojo is missing, something is just not right.

1.) Farmer's market (Okay, Bethesda Women's Co-op.)
1a.) Grape tomatoes in rubbermaid
1b.) Semi-impulse purchase: replacement silver necklace chain. (Original chain busted... July.)
2.) Bethesda library
2a.) Three Octavia Butler novels; neither of the pair I wanted
2b.) The Parable duology is not required reading during election season
2c.) Maybe it should be!
3.) Taste of Bethesda
3a.) Crush of humanity + backpack = annoying
3b.) Blood sugar drop: crankiness is the nicest adjective
3b1.) Uggs in DC are the triumph of advertising over sense.
3c.) Desire to kill young female hipsters carrying fluffy fashion dogs mitigated by chicken and rice. Bless you, Tara Thai, and your short line!
3d.) Cover bands win.
3e.) Cookies for the road.
4.) TJ's and Whole Foods
4a.) How to annoy customers: lie about being out of tortillas.
4b.) How to lose customers: jack Luna Bar prices 20%. Five snacks for the price of six!
5.) Next library
5a.) Parable duology: score!
5b.) How to suggest a book from the comfort of your laptop.
6.) Chili in the crockpot! Laptop + TV roommate bonding time.
6a.) Discover four hours later that crockpot was turned on, but not plugged in.
6b.) Someone's getting up at 4 AM to turn off the crockpot.
6c.) Didn't say anyone was staying up at 4 AM.
6d.) Snack on tomatoes and cookies. Thanks to rubbermaid, sitting at the bottom of the grocery backpack did them no harm. Yay! Pleasant change from last week's smashed, wet, seedy masses.
6e.) Everything that didn't hurt from walking all over two municipalities now hurts from laptop + futon anti-ergonomic principles. Ow.

Also, the weather was every kind of fantastic. I am tempted to use next week's midday dental appointment as an excuse to take an entire day off.

Finally, second picture from the bottom: welcome back, Hamlet.

Dear summer: thank you for giving me peaches and fresh corn. Also, thank you for going away. Sincerely, the loyal opposition.

Tonight's cooking experiment: baked pork chops with crushed garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. 350 F, 15 minutes, flipped at 10 minutes. I used a regrettably heavy hand with the spices, so it may be salvage-or-toss time. K. recommended making pork chops into pork-pasta salad, which might actually work. The side dishes - couscous and tomato-ish salad - came out nicely. The couscous just got olive oil and basil. The salad was one cucumber, seeds removed; a green pepper, a red pepper, half a vidalia onion, and several heirloom tomatoes, with a little olive oil and basil and a lemon squeezed over everything. I think I will have a light lunch tomorrow (couscous and salad), or maybe I will declare Culinary Oops Day and see who I can sweet-talk into a sushi run.

September is apparently my month for good intentions. I'm trying to cook, I'm trying to exercise (not 90 degrees every day! I can bike more than five minutes without dying! Awesome!) and I'm trying be mindful of that whole lactose intolerance thing*. Fortunately, Nabisco has removed every remnant of unprocessed ingredients from Oreos, so now they're milk free, hah! That's one junk food snack back on the list.

*Lactase: there are limits, and I still get dehydrated even when the pills are in the right bag and I remember to look for them. Finally, they're kind of expensive on the per diem.

I finally ate my pork chop of dubious character while listening to C-SPAN radio (what's the difference between NPR and C-SPAN? Not that much, when the boombox is on top of the fridge), and decided it's a good day to be me: not in a hurricane recovery zone, secure job, income exceeding expenditures. Health care! If the banks don't collapse under me and my fellow Americans, because some of my fellow Americans are thoughtless people who vote sub-par hooting primates underqualified individuals into national office, I'm going to hang on until the upturn. There's a lot of people who don't have that confidence right now. I was going somewhere with that, but it's, um, really late, so I'll just plug the Red Cross and your local food bank and remind people that when you vote for out of touch and underqualified people, you're voting for recessions.

Yeah, no rage there. Cough.

I'm watching the Republican National Convention with winamp on. Accidental Giuliani/Jewel mashup for the win., but if Palin's not talking by 10:30, I'm throwing in the towel and catching the recaps in the morning.

One of my roommates is moving out this month, so it's roomie-shopping time. Landlord posted the ad yesterday, and two guys came over today to check it out. One I really liked, but didn't make an offer; one I was 90% cool with, and did make an offer. I hate change, and I hate trying to evaluate people based on a brief interview I didn't really prep for. What magic question is going to make me comfortable with a possible roommate?

How many times can Giuliani say "terrorists" in five minutes? Seriously, can someone do a wordcount on this speech?

The significant local news is TS Hannah's possible near-miss this weekend. I'm personally betting on winds and some downed power lines, but nothing more devastating than that May thunderstorm.

Oh, hi, Palin! Now, less with the screaming and clapping and more with the platform, please. It's like those horrible mandatory high school pep rallies, only I'm not even getting out of class.