The Aerie
Well that's mostly done. Yesterday I finished my degree plan for my degree-planning class at the University of Minnesota. What with the procrastination surrounding actually getting any of the work done, plus the actual work itself, that is what ate most of my time for the month of November and completely pooched my chances at any significant run at National Novel Writing Month.
[Edit:] My daughter is conducting an art contest... enter now!
The only thing I have left to do is round up a faculty member to serve as my area specialist, faculty advisor, or whatever the role is called. This is a specialist who can look iat my program and make sure that what I claim is an Information Security Management degree actually qualifies as one.
I have a couple weeks to find some poor soul and cajole him or her into the job: despite having to turn in my program yesterday, it won't be reviewed for two weeks.
Meanwhile winter has arrived to smack us upside the head here in Minnesota: from 56 on Wednesday the temperature dropped to about 9 degrees overnight. Yesterday I returned to the house shortly after leaving to retrieve something that I (inevitably) forgot, and couldn't get in. The thumb-buttons on our new screen doors had frozen shut when condensation on the metal iced up. I had to free both of them by getting getting a rock, padding the button with my glove, and banging the button loose. This doesn't bode well for the long-term survival of these doors, I fear.
Likewise the trunk of my car was frozen shut this morning when I went to retrieve a box from within. Fortunately the car has those clever rear seats that fold down, and those were not frozen into place.
Today I have to catch up on work at my workplace, since I have let that totally slack off while I got my degree program finished. So of course I'm procrastinating by posting to my blog!
Today after work I'll be heading over to the Red Cross for an unusual weekday evening apheresis, then off to the Professor's for some Tekumel. Out of the house at 6:00 a.m., home at 11:30 p.m.
Bleah! Good thing I invented Dad and Kid days, or I'd have to explain to the police why my grown children thought I was a burglar coming in the door.
I posted this to my church mailing list, but then I realized it could double as a blog entry with a little editing! Yay!
I have a little bit of time at the moment because I just finished the probably-final draft of my degree program for my U of MN class, and I haven't yet stopped slacking off at work, so I thought I'd get something posted...
For people in search of a portable writing device, my wife is a big fan of her Alphasmart Dana:
These are simply Palm devices with big attached keyboards. They are black and white, but include features such as wireless Internet connectivity. They are fairly inexpensive, and delightfully will run on rechargeable "AA" batteries.
For people in search of a cheap used laptop I often point at Que Computers,
An advantage to buying at Que is that you get to play with the laptops right there and verify they work before you purchase them. The disadvantage is that they are quite the nerdly place, and non-geeks might find the piles of strange equipment intimidating.
(I have no affiliation with Que except that I've bought a lot of computers from them over the years. Must be why they moved from East Hennepin Avenue into my neighborhood a couple of years ago.)
It must be noted that many companies sell very inexpensive new laptops, such as the Dell Inspirion at $549 (the usual stripped-down deal that almost always requires additional purchase of OS or memory or something). Nonetheless you CAN find some new notebooks for under $500 with a little looking. If you can stand buying at Best Buy (I don't) you can find loss-leaders at very good prices. Just don't buy their stinky warranty or service agreements (*shudder*).
My family ended our association with Best Buy after a repair clerk sneered at us and said "You can't expect us to repair this VCR for free: the ninety-day warranty is TWO-THIRDS EXPIRED." How much money has this arrogant stupidity cost Best Buy? Well, we were trying to repair a new VCR... I can't IMAGINE how much losing our custom has cost Best Buy over the decades, but I'm sure Best Buy doesn't care.
One can also visit the local Craigslist site:
http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/sys/
Right now there's an IBM Thinkpad for $190. Everything on Craigslist must be viewed with caution, but one advantage to buying a used laptop directly from the seller is that it often will come with the operating system in place. One of the non-obvious pitfalls of buying older, used computer equipment is that such a computer may have problems running contemporary software... and it's often impossible to find the older software that WOULD run quite adequately on the device.
Another group for Frugal Readers is the Minneapolis Free-Cycle
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycleMpls/messages
It has strict rules regarding posting that must be observed, but keeping an eye peeled on this list can garner all sorts of great free stuff. That's where we got our boys' bunk-beds and mattresses, all free.
Hope this is helpful!
Ah, well, another big break in posts. Sorry. Holiday stuff you know.
We have two Big Weeks of Birthdays in this family. First, my twins and I have birthdays one week apart in August. Then our youngest has his birthday right before Thanksgiving every year. My wife is the only one whose birthday is located conveniently far away from other events that it can stand on its own.
So the last week was spent either working on my oh-so-belated University of Minnesota homework, or cleaning the house for, first, the birthday and then Thanksgiving. And of course Thanksgiving was spent cooking.
Yesterday I took my daughter to see "The Fountain" as part of this month's Dad and Kid Days. I've read some pretty cranky reviews of this movie, but both she and I found it exceptional. Complaints about character development et al. seem misguided: this isn't a story about characters, it's a metaphor about love and death. And it's gorgeous, just gorgeous.
Tonight I took my older boy to see "Casino Royale." Quite the contrast, although the cinematography was very good. Regrettably, it's a Bond film, so I was pretty much able to see the plot twists coming a mile off: basically, anything that can go wrong will, etc. And it seemed to drag on a bit around the card-playing scenes. Still the final scene was quite good.
Well it's late and time to hit the sack. Got very little accomplished today which was a pity seeing as I was busy most of the day! But Dad 'n' Kid Days take priority, so that's what I've gotten done over the past two days.
Well, Nanowrimo is NOT working out this year. I'm rather frustrated and discouraged by that, but there are only so many hours in each day, and I haven't been able to fit the one or two hours it would take me to write 1667 words per day, nor the six or eight weekend hours it might take to make up for shortages during the week.
On the other hand Nano has gotten me off the dime and writing again. I may end up with only 20,000 words this month, or even less, but at least I'm writing.
Meanwhile my attempts at Nano have curtailed my posting on here, as has every other thing I've needed to do. So what can I post as a quick summary of events since my last post? Criminy, it's been ten days! I had no idea. That in itself ought to give you some idea of how busy I've been.
The first weekend of November was very busy: Saturday the 3rd I went to an "Anthropology of Play" conference presented by my friend Gio's University department, and featuring Dave Arneson, who for a time was a semi-regular at the Professor's game. I used the opportunity to do a bit of writing, but didn't get as much done as I'd hoped.
Sunday the 4th was absurdly warm, temperatures in the 70's, so the family took advantage in order to finish the batten-down-for-winter chores. The brush in the alley had grown unchecked for so long that the back fence looked like an Italian woman's armpit. I got back there with the limb shears and took down a zillion saplings, along the way finding a grapevine. The vine erupted from the tarmac of the driveway, hung a sharp left and crawled under the neighbor's fence.
Shearing off the vine, I picked up the end and pulled. The neighbor's lilac tree waved a greeting. Pull. Wave. So I started hauling. The lilac tree thrashed and writhed like Dick Cheney being subjected to a Gitmo interrogation. And hand over hand I pulled about half a mile of grapevine out from under the neighbor's fence.
This is good. Hopefully the neighbor's small daughter will not grow up confused into thinking that lilac bushes produce grapes. And maybe the bush will even produce some lilacs.
After that I raked the accumulated topsoil from the tarmac, and fetched the children, who were happy to spend the next hour stuffing detrius into garbage bags. That is, if chain-gangs are happy, my kids were happy.
What with the lifting and the raking and the hauling and the beating of the children with the rakes, by Tuesday I was a complete and utter wreck. I'd had a pulled muscle under my right shoulderblade BEFORE I started the chores, and on Monday and Tuesday my back seemed to be breaking down like a snowman under an endless stream of dog urine.
Fortunately my spouse had given me a belated bithday present of a back massage at a spa that opened up near our home, so Tuesday I called from work and was lucky to be able to make a 6:15 p.m. appointment. The masseuse started off intending a general massage - legs, arms, back, torso, etc. - but then she got to my back.
About 15 blissful semiconscious minutes into the backrub she said "So do you mind if I spend the rest of the time on your back?" And that's what she did. I could feel her using all her strength on what seemed to be a tangled collection of jumper cables stored between my shoulderblades. At one point I suggested wrapping a towel around the business end of a jackhammer - an artist, she didn't appreciate the suggestion.
However the results were excellent - I could feel the difference immediately, and for the rest of the week. The only downside was when she asked if I wanted the "icy-hot" menthol treatement. Sure, I figured, why not?
She quickly spread a cool mixture onto my back of battery acid and jalapeno peppers. I have a high tolerance for pain, but this stuff redlined the needle for sure. I think the idea of the stuff was to distract from the pain under the skin with pain on the skin.
Wednesday was my University class. I did again what I've done before - I looked at the syllabus and prepared for the wrong class. I prepared for the class on the 15th. It's not entirely my fault - the way the syllabus is written does not make it clear for a given date whether the work listed for that date is DUE on that date, or will be given out on that date. So I did the work that would be given out for Wednesday's class, and not due until the 15th.
Despite that, the class went fine, mainly because as I figured out earlier in the quarter, the class is entirely useless. But the class did serve to remind me just how far behind I am in getting my degree program finished... so that priority has gotten in the way of Nanowrimo as I attempt to catch up again.
The other kicker has been work, which has been very busy. In part this is because I basically had a boatload of unstructured work thrown at me at the beginning of October, and very shortly thereafter got yelled at for not having it all figured out yet. Friday, five weeks after starting, I had a lucky day. Both meetings for that day cancelled, and was faced with the option of maybe going home a little early.
But... I had work to do. So I set a goal for myself and told myself that if I achieved it I would go home early. So I sorted my files thusly, and it was only noon. Well, that's too early to go home, so I set another goal, and then another.
Four o'clock rolled around. I had not only sorted my files, I had gone through all my sub-projects and made sure I had gotten each of them organized and started, I had contacted someone from each one and set a meeting for each one, I had also sorted all my e-mail filters so that e-mail arriving would be sorted into project folders. Yeah, I got THAT deep into it.
So by four o'clock I hadn't just gotten something done, I had gotten EVERYTHING done. Given that it was Friday afternoon, I had actually gotten done everything I could reasonably do. I was caught up at work for the first time in maybe ever.
Yesterday was a Day of Household Chores. My spouse wanted me to hang some hooks up in the boy's room, which she assured me were down in the big junk room in the basement.
Diving into the junk room turned into a project that lasted all day. I searched and sorted the junk room, extracted a ten-foot-tall tower of empty cardboard boxes, several baskets of toys that won't be of interest to our children until they have children of their own, and a ton of miscellaneous junk. Then I found the a picture frame, and determined to use its glass to replace a picture that fell off the bathroom wall (when my boys slammed each other against the wall of their adjoining bedroom).
Well the bathroom picture turned out to be adhered to its (broken) glass by some combination of bathroom steam conspiring with photochemicals. So I rigged up a wacky assemblage of wire, clothespins and shoelaces to hold the picture and its glass suspended over the teakettle on the stove, which I then set to emit steam for a very long time. As of this morning the picture is about 75% removed from the glass.
Finally my spouse found the coathooks, stored in the boy's clooset, by which time the basement room was almost completely sorted. Along the way I was forced to stagger back and forth past the new-and-larger cat litter box in the hallway between the dining room and kitchen, and grew thoroughly tired of it. Unfortunately the only way to move the litter box into the basement would be to install a cat flap in the basement door.
I looked on the Internet and spotted a $15 cat flap at Home Depot. I drove over, and heading to the info desk I spotted a promotional table suggesting I buy energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs.
"Hi," I said, "You might sell more of those bulbs if you put the price someplace."
The woman at the desk cocked a wry eyebrow at me. Apparently the retail business is filled with subtleties of price and display which I, as a mere customer, would be best advised not to meddle in.
"Okay," I said, "so where are the cat flap doors?"
"We don't carry those." she said, her voice carrying a tone to match her prior facial expression.
"Yeah you do," I said, "They're listed on your website." Pronouncing the hyperlink was difficult, but I managed it.
She shook her head. "That's a product that's only available on the website."
"Ah. Well, yet another bit of signage that needs to be improved I guess."
Leaving behind someone who was now not my friend, I headed over to the PetSmart which fortunately was located near the Home Depot. Pet door in hand I went home, took down the door that has hung in that place for sixty-five years, hacked a hole in the base with a circular saw, a hand saw, a router and a belt sander, and screwed the cat flap into place.
It didn't fit, so I enlarged the hole. The cat door was so cheap that while the outer frame, containing the flap, mounted to the door with screws, the inner frame was provided with double-backed tape only. Nonetheless I got it into place, and spent an amusing few minutes convincing the cat that it was now possible for it to move through the previously solid door.
Finally I hung the hooks in the boys' room, then I repaired the new exterior light which a neighbor had mounted for my wife earlier in the week.
By now I was exhausted. With the best of intentions I opened the laptop, but ended up merely staring at it. Finally I watched a few minutes of Saturday Night Live, but either it sucked or my exhaustion prevented me from finding anything funny, or both. After dozing off during Weekend Update, I headed up to bed.
This morning was church, where I started blogging again finally. Now I'm done and can turn my attention to my U of MN homework. And when that is finished, then I can start looking at writing my Nanowrimo.
By which time, no doubt, I'll be exhausted.
Well, not doing too badly on the National Novel Writing Month thingy. Despite having no plot, I managed to produce about 2400 words by the end of the night last night. I had to stay up until about 3:30 a.m. doing it, but I did it. Today I managed to get about another 1000 words done after work, so with about 3400 words or so I'm not too far off the 1667/day pace, with the weekend arriving to help.
Of course, now I get to start integrating Nanowrimo into the process of finishing my college course, so that just adds to the fun. At least it keeps things interesting.
Anyway I'm over at Professor Barker's house for his birthday, which just so happens to fall on a Thursday, so we brought over a pie. Inevitably, I am working on fixing one of his computers: this one his wife's computer. While it's churning away at some patch update process I'm filling this out. But now I can smell the coffee brewing downstairs, so I'd better get back to it...