Ultranormal

  • Losing Time, Gaining Time

    I spent fourteen hours on a plane yesterday, racing the dawn over the North Pole, getting from Dulles to Beijing. In my sleeplessness, I started thinking about how weird travel days are when you cross timezones. I lost almost a whole day, timewise, being in the air. A fourteen hour flight really took twenty-six hours off my calendar. I didn’t get to “live” that day, and on my personal calendar, it’s compressed to a tiny fraction of what it would have normally been. But, on the way home, I only “lose” an hour and forty-five minutes, so that day gets stretched out. It’s weird, and something only crazy people trapped in airplanes or pot smokers should think about.

    But, since I was trapped on a plane for fourteen hours, I decided that I should keep a little diary of all the stuff I did on the plane. Here it is, minus bathroom trips and meals (they fed us twice):

    1. Read half of The Writing Life
    2. Watched Wizard People, Dear Reader version of Harry Potter
    3. Wrote a queue processor (it’s so freaking cool, I can’t believe I did it on a plane with no internet access and just my little Ruby pocket guide). This killed a good two or three hours.
    4. Listened to some CBC Radio 3 podcasts and Sunparlour Players
    5. Flew over the North Pole, but couldn’t see anything because there were clouds everywhere… total white out.
    6. Watched Ricky Gervais’ Politics stand-up special
    7. Watched The Amazing Screw-On Head (Mike Mignola series pilot about civil war robot secret agent. Yes, it’s awesome)
    8. Watched some Strongbad E-mails and Abigail’s Teen Diary
    9. Watched the first episode of The X-Files.
      • Love that they don’t wear seat belts, the smoking man really smokes in the office, and Scully has shoulder pads.
    10. Played with hbase. I got it running and created a table, but didn’t do much more than that.
    11. Worked on the blog’s admin interface.
      • Bummed that in Firefox I have to wrap HTML5 elements in order to style them. Bah, humbug.
    12. Stubbed out the blog main and entry page. Not how it’s going to stay.
    13. Played some Sudoku (Brain Age 2 on my DS Lite). I’m trying to go back and redo games where I made mistakes and get all my times on the Basic and Intermediate ones under ten minutes. I have no idea if those are good times or not…
    14. Finished The Writing Life. I love Annie Dillard. The Writing Life is a short little book, only 111 pages, but just like Holy the Firm, it’s dense, packed with lots of great quotes, thoughts on writing and life and some of the most beautiful prose you’re likely to ever read. I’m so glad I stumbled on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last year.

    Beijing is big, noisy and “hazy”. Today, it’s big, noisy and drizzling, so I don’t think I’ll be going out. Plus, meetings start soon and well, why go out when I can stay in and nerd it up with a bunch of… nerds?

    I’m seriously jet-lagged. I did all that stuff above while pretty much everyone around me slept. I don’t get how people can go to sleep at one in the afternoon and sleep pretty much straight for fourteen hours, but almost everyone around me did just that. I was there, trying to be quiet, either reading, watching something or typing. I got my upgrade to first class, which made things much more comfortable. I highly recommend it.

    It’s 8:30AM on Sunday morning. My internal clock is somewhere on a train between home and here. If you see it, please tell it to hurry up. I’d like to feel human again.

  • Ring a ring a ding a ring ring ding

    Attention Mom and Dad: your email addresses aren’t working. Boo. Send me an email if you have new ones, k? Thanks! Bye.

  • Way in which I am becoming my mother #89

    I bought a watermelon for myself and I LIKED IT. In fact, I am craving some right now.

  • How to Spend 14 Hours Stuck in a Chair

    I’m heading to the airport in a couple hours, with a very long plane ride ahead of me (well, two, but the second is next week). How long? Well, if United is to be believed, it’s thirteen hours and forty-four minutes long. This will be the longest continuous flight I’ve ever been on (Dulles to Bangalore is twenty hours in the air, but there’s a four hour “break” in the middle). Since I almost never sleep on planes, I’ve compiled a list of things to occupy my time:

    • A bunch of DVD’s including the first season of The X-Files, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (so I can finally watch it with Wizard People, Dear Reader) and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember at the moment.
    • I downloaded a ton of TED Talks and stuff from iTunesU.
    • Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
    • The old standby, the DS Lite
    • A bunch of silly programming things to play with:
      • I’m going to try to write my own queueing server, or if that fails, play with Starling
      • Work on the blog re-write
      • Work on another top secret thingie I’ve been meaning to play with.
      • Adobe AIR
    • A bunch of podcasts
    • And then, if I do all of those things, I can always watch whatever movie the airline provides.\
      Hopefully, that’ll be enough to keep my occupied from Dulles to Beijing (for the W3C AC meeting). I’ll let you know how it goes (if I can get to the internet from China… I hear they have some version of it).

  • Random bits

    Brian woke up at the crack of the middle of the night again. How am I supposed to function like this? Kevin seems to be getting a jump on trying to adjust to China-time as his sleep schedule has been wonky too.\
    I find it really infuriating that Marie Osmond is pimping Jenny Craig/NutriSystem/some diet even though we all know she lost her extra weight by working out 12 hours a day for Dancing With the Stars. Super duper big boo to her.\
    Deadliest Catch is back. YAY! I can never tell the ships and their crew apart though. Boo. I think they should give the crew different colored rain slickers. Or use colored lens-filters-thingies. Something! All of the men look the same- old and bearded. There is one clean-shaved Asian guy though. Him I can tell from the others.\
    Yesterday Brian called me stupid. I think it’s the first time either of my kids have done that.\
    At Brian’s school when one of the kids does something the teachers don’t like, they say, “No thank you. Make a better choice. Blah blah…” Brian totally stole this phrase and says, “No thank you” very adamantly whenever Kevin or I do something he doesn’t like. It’s so cute and hard not to laugh.\
    As part of bedtime, I ask Brian what his favorite and least favorite part of the day is . I usually rephrase the least favorite question, because he doesn’t seem to understand, into “What didn’t you like?” The other night he thought about it for a long time and finally replied, “Cucumbers.” Ha. And no, we didn’t have any cucumbers that day.\
    No matter how hard I try, I can’t get the lived-in look out of my house. I think I should stop watching Design To Sell -type shows and start watching Clean House and just be grateful my house doesn’t look like that. Who knew I was such a minimalist freak?\
    Sometimes, I feel like I should get a life. But then I decide to take a nap instead.\
    Cheers!

  • Bloggy Time

    I feel like I should blog, even though I don’t have anything interesting to write. Sooooooooo, boring stuff it is!\
    I made the best lasagna last night! And the worst brownies. They were fine when we had them about an hour and a half after taking them out of the oven but after they cooled, it was obvious they were severely undercooked. Boo.\
    I am totally obsessed with my wood floors. Look how pretty they are. (This was taken the day after we had them installed, so things are still out of place.)

    Photobucket

    BUT! I totally have a love/hate relationship with my beautiful floors. First, there are probably over a hundred scratches and dents already. We’ve only had the floors for 4 months or so, waah. Second, after scrubbing the floors shiny, if you walk away and look back, you’ll see goopy smudges that were invisible before. Every angle shows different clean/dirty spots. Sigh. Third, even when I sweep and mop twice a day, they are never clean! Every piece of lint and fuzz shows up like a huge spotlight is trained on it. Boooooooo.\
    Um, yea. That’s all I got. TTYL.

  • Pythagoras Switch

    The boys are in love with these videos from a Japanese kids’ show called Pitagora Suicchi (Pythagoras Switch) on YouTube and have made me watch several of them this morning. Not the worst thing I’ve been made to watch…

    \
    And here’s part 2.

  • Spring is Springing

    Blossoms

    I took that with my lovely new camera the other day on my way out the door. Spring is here, and that means my allergies are going crazy.\
    Things are crazy right now. I might get back to regular blogging (you know, more than once or twice a month) in the near future. Or not. I post much more often over on twitter, and semi-regularly on the ficlets blog (where I try to pretend I know something about writing).\
    I’m working on an all-new blogging tool for this blog. I’m doing it for fun as a break from work, so don’t expect to see it anytime soon, but it’s been a lot of fun to play with. Lawver.net has been running Movable Type for almost six years, and actually hosts several blogs scattered over a couple of different domains. I like it and all, especially the static publishing that allows this site to be somewhat performant even when Dreamhost has database issues (which seems to happen more often than not, unfortunately).\
    It’s Saturday afternoon, which means it’s time to go get the boys ready to head over to my parents’ house so Jen and I can go on a date. Hooray, date night!

  • Oy with the being awake

    If Brian doesn’t get back on a regular schedule soon, I think I am going to crack.

  • Example # 158 of how I am becoming my mother

    The fam and I went out for ice cream to celebrate Brian getting his cast off and I ordered a small cup of peppermint ice cream. It’s true!