Category: daily tedium

There was a death in the Lawver family last night as I brutally and accidentally killed my TiBook. Now, it’s not dead dead, but it might as well be. I was putting it away last night when I picked up my case only to realize that it wasn’t zipped up. Unfortunately, the sound the clued me in was my beautiful Powerbook landing with a mortal crunch on the marble base of our hearth in the basement. There it lay, battery sprung out and a horrible crack in its face. The CD drive looked at me from behind its wounds in a grimace.

Unfortunately, it landed on the front right corner of the case, right by the slot-loading CD drive. There’s a big crack in the case right at the point of impact, another right through the bottom lip of the CD drive, and one more small one on the left top side of the drive. The whole case has a sickening lilt to it now, with the right side sitting a little higher than the left. The metal on the bottom is completely separated from the frame, and only held on by the screws. The battery won’t stay in if the machine is moved. The hard drive has a coughing whir.

And the best part is, the computer people don’t have any in stock! So I have to do the whole purchase, approval, wait forever process in order to get a replacement. I think today is a good day to start drinking.

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.

Yeah, it’s my birthday and I’m sitting here on the couch surfing and watching Rummy on CNN. It’s a great day to be 28, I tell you. Mom came and picked Max up at eight for their regular Thursday playdate. I swear I was going to sleep in, but our trip to Matsutake for lunch yesterday has given me a little case of Yokohama’s Revenge and I woke up with some wicked stomach cramps. I’ll spare you the details past the fact that there’s no way I could get back to sleep.

In completely non-war-or-birthday-related news, can I tell you how great NetNewsWire is? Since switching to OS X, I’ve been curiously watching my computer slow down as the afternoons drag on. This morning, I decided to play with top (it’s a unix command that shows you what’s running, and how much of the processor, memory and virtual memory it’s using). Everything grows in memory usage. AOL, Camino, Mozilla, etc. Camino uses a lot more memory than I thought it would. AOL and Mozilla are pretty memory hungry, but I knew that already. The one that really shocks me is NetNewsWire. Even after loading a bunch of posts, its memory doesn’t grow much. It holds nice and steady even after all those connections and posts. It’s so worth paying for it if you haven’t already.

I’m apparently important at work again, which explains the lack of posting the past couple days. I’ve been buried in requirements docs, urgent requests and educational material. My birthday is tomorrow, and we’re trekking to IKEA to shop for fun Scandanavian furniture and knick-knacks sans the monkey. I plan on sleeping in, taking a leisurely drive to IKEA, walking slowly and taking in all the shiny pine. I will then eat a leisurely lunch while I stare at my lovely wife. We may go see a leisurely movie. Then, we’ll take a somnambulent drive back home, where I’ll pick up gourmet pizza and tasty blue collar wings. We’ll have a party, eat cake and laugh.

Then, on Friday, I’ll come go to the doctor and then come back to work ready to wade through more of this… stuff.

Who needs war talk when you can read about Mike ‘s climbing trip instead? I love Mike’s climb reports. Any text that starts with the premise “I did everything right. I did.” is alright by me… and it gets better from there.

My wife, being the amazing wife that she is, recorded the President’s speech last night so I could watch it after bowling (which is a story for another time). You know, I expected to be into the speech and try to find all the problems with it. Instead, I zoned out and barely even listened. I’d heard it all before, and I’m past caring what his rationale is. I’m past caring what names he can call him, and other reasons he can drum up. Nothing I say or do is going to change his mind, or stop the him from taking us down the path he’s chosen.

Does it sound like I’ve given up? Yeah, I thought so. Oh, and if you don’t live in the DC area, and want to understand why we all look like we can’t sleep, go read this and you’ll understand.

I just woke up. Well, OK, a little less than an hour ago. I ate leftovers and they did not agree with me. So, I went to bed and ::poof:: fell asleep at about 6:30. At 9:45, I woke up with a start and well, here I am. I will be up all night.

I just found out my medical school brother and his wife are having a girl!! We’re so happy. Now mom has someone to dress in frilly things, and can stop giving Max that measuring look. I know she wants to put him in cute little dresses and make him courtsey. Now, that twisted desire can move to a new grandbaby, and we can breathe a little easier. Way to go little bro!

I dreamed last night that I got laid off. It woke me up, with a list of things I need to do to prepare for that eventuality. It was scarier than any other dream I’ve had in a long long time. For some reason, it was scarier than my “losing Max” series from last year. I blame Mike and our conversation the other day on the way out of the elevator. It wasn’t long, but we were joking about getting laid off, and he turned serious for a second and said, “You know, it happens to everyone sometime.” Mike, of course, could spend more time with his music and writing funny trip reports for his climbing excursions. Me? I think I’d be totally lost. I’ve worked there so long, my whole professional life, that I’m not sure what I’d do. Ok, that’s too much information… I’m going to stop now and watch Iron Chef.

I went to Glory Days for lunch and I have the gas to prove it. I can not stop burping. I tried Tums to no avail. It’s been almost four hours, and I’m still stifling gigantic man-sized burps sitting here in my office at work. Of course, if I were at home, I’d let them fly because they make Max giggle. I’ll do almost anything to make Max giggle.

I’m going to try to stay away from the political for a while. I’m feeling a fit of zealotry coming on and that bothers me. I’m not a zealot. I’m trying to be reasoned and logical in my thinking, taking in both sides and deciding after weighing the facts. Unfortunately, the anger has taken over a bit and I’m losing sight of that a little. Time to take a break, watch a movie and remember there’s more to life than screaming at the hurricane.