Month: March 2003

I’ve spent all day mucking about with DOCTYPEs, conditional funkiness and the perils of unattainable goals. I won’t bore you with the details. My mood hasn’t improved, even after listening to Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub) about a million times today. Thankfully, tonight is bowling, so I get to go take out all my theological and political frustrations on a bunch of helpless pins.

Speaking of bowling, since I lost all this weight, I can’t use my giant sixteen pound ball reliably. It’s hard to control and it goes all over the place. I’ve switched to using the house fourteen pounders (which are all pink for some reason, not that I have a problem with that – the 12 pounders are baby blue). I’ve bowled really well for me (high score of 146 last week) the past couple weeks with the fourteen pounder, and am tempted to go get my own light girly ball. I think tonight will be a combo-swearing night, as long as W doesn’t bring the kids.

I did smile momentarily today when I reaized that General Conference is this weekend, and I don’t have to go to church.

This weekend, I read articles about the Wright Brothers, an artist who makes photo-realistic art out of fabric, Degas’ ballet paintings, and an interview with Maya Angelou. Along with yesterday’s freak snow storm, and church, the stories help slide me into a deep funk. There’s all kinds of stuff rolling around in my head, and none of it is making me very cheerful.

Let’s start with the Wright Brothers. These guys competed against several world governments and top scientists of the day to become the first men to launch an honest-to-goodness powered airplane. They did it through sheer determination and a talent for breaking large problems into component pieces. They solved those smaller component problems on the way to a solution to the big problem. The article contained excerpts from several letters sent by the brothers to relatives and friends, and a couple news stories about them. The writing in the letters and articles was so beautiful in both form and vocabulary that it made me ashamed of all this tripe on my site. I want to be a good writer, and this site has turned into a journal, only a couple one step removed from the form of my instant messages and e-mails.

Second, Maya Angelou. She’s seventy-five and is never bored. I’m bored all the time. I’ve lost some piece of the fire I used to have. I’m too complacent and willing to sit and let things wash over me instead of standing up and taking the wave head on. I’m tired and unwilling to fight a lot of the time. Ms. Angelou has lived an amazing life, written books, poems for Presidents, sung for albums and still finds time to learn languages and teach. I can barely find the energy to cook when I get home from work, much less do anything else productive.

Third, let’s talk about church. Or, let’s not. I can’t decide what I should say here. My family reads this crap, and so do several people from church. Let’s just say, I’m having a hard time getting up and going every Sunday. I’m having a hard time biting my tongue. There was a whole paragraph here about the other things I hate about church, but I just deleted it. I get why people leave the church now… it’s hard being Mormon when you don’t fit into the “mainstream” of Mormon culture.

Not gonna talk about the war… not gonna talk about the war… not gonna talk about the war… I got flamed over at A Small Victory. I’m not going to say what it’s about or why I got into it other than I couldn’t resist. Go read for yourself (I am taking bets though on how long it will take for someone to call me a Nazi).

I met Jen and Max for lunch today. Max is my favorite little kid ever. I know, he’s my son, but it still counts. I asked him what he wanted to do tonight while he was sitting there gnoshing on chicken nuggets. Max piped up and said, “MAKE COOKIES!!” We’re going to dust off the cookie sheet, pull out the flour, sugar, baking soda, vanilla and butter and make ourselves some chocolate chip goodness. I then asked him what we were going to do after we made cookies. Of course, he said, “We’re gonna eat one!” And we will.

Each paragraph in this post will be completely unrelated… if you hadn’t caught that already. I’ve been keeping this quiet since we launched it, but I just can’t anymore. I met with a couple guys from DevEdge on Wednesday to see if we could make our product faster/better/happier. Now, I’m pretty confident that I’m good at what I do. I do my best when at all possible, and the best I can under circumstances that dictate something other than the best. Ok, back to the DevEdge guys. They came in, and told me my DOCTYPE wasn’t in caps, and that was a problem. Fine, I can live with that, and they said it doesn’t affect the pageload anyway. I’m not hip on DOCTYPE’s anyway, and it’s easy enough to fix. That was it. That was the only problem that I have control over. They actually said they learned some new tricks looking at my markup, and that makes me happy. So, what was it that they were looking at? AOL Search. We quietly relaunched it earlier this month. I was able to shave a second off the page load time by totally redoing the markup underneath. Other than a couple places in the results that I don’t have control over, there are no tables, and everything is contained in DIVs. There’s one inline stylesheet. Oh yeah, and it had to look EXACTLY the same as it did before, and I had to learn a new language in like two weeks to get it done. This has been a good week for my ego.

Yesterday was pretty brutal as far as work and stress levels are concerned. I spent a lot of time in meetings, writing documents and dealing with money stuff (we’re refinancing the house, which means lots of paperwork and finding old documents). My general stress level hasn’t been good lately with a bunch of new responsibilities at work on a new top-secret project and a lot of swirl around other stuff. It’s a whirlwind that follows me home every day.

Jen suggested I take a bath last night, and I love her for it. It kept me away from the TV, allowed me to finish reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and introduced me to a great new mix of flavors. Before I get to that, I have to confess something. I’m addicted to Bloody Mary Mix. Being Mormon and all, there are never any spirits in the mix, just the spicy goodness of Mr & Mrs T’s Bloody Mary Mix (the normal stuff, not the super spicy version). I usually drink it in a mug full of crushed ice. It’s kind of like super-chilled gazpacho (the cocktail that eats like a meal). I think you know where this is going, or do you? The other thing I have to tell you is my obsession with good gummi bears (yes, I spell it the German way, because they’re German and that’s where I first had them). Jen bought me a big bag of Black Forest Gummi Bears (the original and still the best, no gummi worms or coke bottles for me – give me the little squishy bears and watch me smile like a doofus) for my birthday. Ok, on to the story. So, I take my mug o’ mix, a bowl of multi-colored edible bears, a bottle of water (in case I get lost and dehydrated) and my book up to the giant tub in our bathroom.

I was a little apprehensive about mixing gummi’s and bloody mary mix, but you know, they’re pretty good. I wasn’t dipping them or anything, but I’d take a sip then eat a bear and I didn’t throw up. It’s not quite chocolate and peanut butter (but what is?), but it’ll do. I spent an hour up there nursing my mug and my bears, reading the final chapter of Mr. Eggers’ book (the last ten pages really are heartbreaking and genius).

I feel a little better today. I’m still not sleeping well, but I haven’t broken down and run to get a forbidden soda, and work doesn’t seem so helpless today. I’m whittling away at the pile of documentation I have to write, and dealing with the constant flurry of interruptions without killing people. I think this skipping CNN thing is working.