Friday evening and I'm off duty for the day

I'm done for the day. Nice day, really, but long.

I checked the blood sugar before dinner and it was vastly too high, so I leapt up to the health club and did a half hour on an exercycle and got it down to something tolerable at least. Time to stop screwing around and get back to the gym. I alluz feel better when I do, anyway.

Laura the amazing agent tells me that it looks like I've got a new book contact coming in shortly. Hot day-umn!

Heather Fox, the equally amazing PR person, sent news of a great book review on Slashdot.org of the Firefox book.

I'm going to watch some toob if there's anything good on and then fall asleep. The day starts early tomorrow. And goes forever.

Friday evening and I'm off duty for the day

Friday am

It's Friday am and I had just a moment to post.

Getting out the door and on the road proved to be quite problematic. The Last Thousand Last Things kept biting me. Finally, I was almost packed up and ready to go... and I dropped the cell phone into the toilet! It was a clean toilet, but cell phones Don't Like Water. I grabbed it out quickly and stripped the battery off but no good--it was dead. BLEAH!!!! The Verizon rep said that I might be able to get it back, but not sure. It was possible that we could dry it out--that'd take a day or so just to see if it worked--but if I can't get it to come alive again, he said, there wasn't any way I could recover my (colossal) phone book. Uh-oh...

I was thinking about not having my cell phone to get in touch with everyone and vice versa while I was driving up and *then* having to find a Verizon store to get a new phone and activate it and THEN having to re-enter the 250 phone entries in there right now. {shudder} However, I got a suggestion a while later to try a blow dryer to get the water out. And lo! it worked well enough to get the phone alive. Suffice it to say, without describing the rest of my travails, my phone book was safe and all is now well. I'm buying the phone book software for this phone asap.

I made it to Seattle okay but it's a looooooong drive. Got up about 5:30pm to Seattle and visited Elisabeth at her store, the Seattle Teacup. Wonderful to see her once again and she really is looking amazingly less stressed than when I last saw her, which she attributes to having gotten out of the writing business entirely. :) I bought a number of gifts there, restocked my tea, and then headed south to Uwajimaya to meet up with Brian and Fong and Raymond.

Raymond is now nine months old and is even cuter than the pictures we saw of him a couple weeks ago, although it was hard to believe that that was possible. :) We picked up a whole range of sashimi and headed back to Brian and Fong's house in Burien and made a huge sushi dinner, which his parents were able to join us for. I really like his parents; they're wonderful people. Very late in the evening, I moseyed back north, checked in to the hotel, offloaded vast quantities of stuff from the car (when you drive, you can travel heavy--I did), and eventually went to sleep.

I'm now going to leap around and try to grab everything and head out for my first meeting du jour. Oy veh.

Friday am

Out the door... any minute now

It's the dreaded Last Thousand Last Things! I'm looking for a rebate form for a hard disk so I can get that off in time, but I think I'm mostly packed. I'm sure there are things I'm going to forget and things I couldn't find--never did find the new black silk vest for the tuxedo but I did find my cummerbund at least.

I'll try to update this while I'm gone. I'm hoping to have a great time in Seattle. :)

Out the door... any minute now

The plants are doing well :)

In all of the fooferaw going on today, the plants are doing well. The rest of the impatiens I planted yesterday are taking very well to their new homes. And the melon and crookneck squash starts I had in the cold frame (and that I was worried about) are starting to poke their heads up rather vigorously. I figure to have a bunch of extra squash & melon starts soon enough. :)

I'm looking for my new tuxedo vest and my cummerbund. I'd also really like to find my good tuxedo studs. :( The joys of moving, I guess.

My new business cards are scrumptious, though, so things are looking good.

The plants are doing well :)

Wednesday am

Got awakened at 5:00am by someone repeatedly trying to get the Hult Center (which has a phone number one digit off of my office line). Bleah. I unplugged the phone after the third try--they'd phone and it'd ring about 1-1/2 times and then they'd hang up--but it was too late; I was awake.

Got up, hacked through the 3000+ emails that came in last night thanks to the current incidence of the Sober email virus on the net and built my to-do list for the day.

My new business cards are happening although, alas, not on glossy paper as I'd hoped--they didn't bother asking me before they printed and they just romped off with a high-quality non-glossy paper. Well, I am hoping it all turns out well. Should be able to pick 'em up this afternoon.

Selecting windows and doors and knobs for the new house later today.

A new hard disk came in with a nifty USB housing, so I have a quick-and-dirty USB external disk. I like that a lot. I'm inhaling tons of files from various places on the system so I'll finally have a good backup of them... as well as being able to finally put 'em all in one place and one time and sort them into their right folders. Might find a buncha dupes to clean out, too--the eternal problem of multiple files in multiple locations.

I'm going to run over to the dry cleaner and the drug store. The day's rolling!

Wednesday am

I'm in pre-game

Tuesday afternoon: I got the book proposal done and off. I have an interview article to dash off tonight and I have client work to assemble. And there's packing for the STC conference and cleaning the car and doing some bills and picking up the dry cleaning and my new business cards, too! Oy.

I'm in pre-game

Johnny Hart's a jerk

I remember reading B.C. 30 years ago and laughing my butt off. Well, it was funny then: there were really good jokes, some good characters, and snappy dialog. But in the last 15 years or so, Johnny Hart's become a world-class jerk. Apparently, he's become some sort of vastly conservative Christian fundamentalist, the type the makes me think "Jesus called; he wants his religion back." (Oddly enough, the instant I finished writing "Jesus called," the phone rang. It wasn't Him.)

His strip on May 1 was ranting about evolution being (a) wrong and (b) anti-Christian. Well, if you're a literalist, then yes, I suppose it disagrees with both of the different creation stories told in Genesis 1 & 2, but if you're a literalist, you've already got much bigger problems on your hands, so wotthehell? As far as wrong, um, no, it ain't, but again, if you have no idea what a "theory" is, then you'll never understand why it's more important than a creation myth.

But actually, the thing that I object to Johnny Hart about--apart from the rather misogynistic view of women, apart from the touting of a brand of Christianity that is peculiarly American in its vulgarity and its proud, peasant ignorance, apart from the occasional slams of Judaism and Islam--is that he isn't funny anymore. (The Wizard of Id, which Hart co-authors, has suffered a similar fate of being dull since Gawd talked to Johnny through the Bible and the PTL club in 1989, but it's not particularly obnoxious in its promotion of his religion. It's just tedious for the most part.) Johnny's said he views his comic strip as a ministry. Well, that's certainly his right, but why couldn't we have him print this drivel in Jack Chick pamphlets and leave the space in the funny pages for funny comics? I'm writing a note to the Eugene Register-Guard and asking them to dump his strip in favor of something that's actually funny. If they want to keep running B.C., they might put it on the religion page. I encourage you to write to your local papers and ask them to dump B.C., too.

Johnny's a Christian, so I'm sure he'll understand.

Johnny Hart's a jerk

Sunday night

Lessee: had a 3-hour STC conference call Saturday am from 7-10 (oy). Covered a lot of good info, though. Moved Susan into her bedroom--exhausting. Had to do a choir thing Saturday night--I enjoyed the singing.

Sang again today at church. Still tired from all the toting and lifting from yesterday. Got a bunch of planting done in the backyard: eight planter boxes cleaned out and full of impatiens, the last barrel with six-packs of lobelia, snapdragons, and marigolds, and a bunch of tomato plants. My bush peas are coming up nicely and the sweet peas are showing their heads at last. Huzzah!

And I'm enjoying new episodes of the Simpsons and Family Guy and researching podcasting on the net.

Sunday night