Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

This is my 101st blog entry on this blog. Woo hoo!

I am having another night-before-leaving-for-a-trip frustrated apathy session. Even though I made a list of what needs to be packed for my 8:30am flight tomorrow (meaning that I will have to get up at 5:30am) , I’m still struggling to make it all happen.

My biggest hurdle that I just need to get past? I wanted to just take a carry-on suitcase. But I have slightly too much stuff to take, plus I’d have to rethink my toiletry liquids that normally just get thrown into checked luggage. Would it be easier if I were a guy and didn’t have to worry about all the extra stuff that even not-too-girly girls have to worry about? Who knows.

I’m flying to New York, then taking a taxi to my aunt’s house in Brooklyn. From there, we’ll be driving upstate to a friend’s house for the night and most of Sunday. Then it’s back to Brooklyn where I’ll work remotely on Monday (and hopefully catch Heroes that night), attend a seminar in Manhattan on Tuesday, and then leave on Wednesday.

I need dress shoes and clothes, as well as jeans and sneakers and t-shirts and sweaters (polar fleece and lighter, slightly more dressy sweaters). Plus toiletries and undergarments, a laptop, books for the 5-hour flights… and also some of my company’s products to give to my aunt and her family.

Still, I think it’s ridiculous that I can’t just fit everything into one small suitcase and my laptop backpack. Well, I’m not getting any less sleepy and I’ve managed to procrastinate a good 25 minutes away just by convincing myself to turn on my computer and check this week’s weather.

Phoebe (who is growing into a teenaged cat) is sleeping in front of me on my desk and not helping. She looks so cozy… 

Ben, this one’s for you.

Yay, I figured out how to embed video with the stupid pared-down version of Movable Type through Yahoo webhosting! However, workarounds are not a good solution. But I will work with them for now.

Did I forget to mention that the main catalyst for cleaning a large portion of our house this weekend (hey, it’s a big house so we didn’t get to all of it) was because we planned to have company over for the premiere of Heroes? Well, my coworker Laura came over a little after seven and we ate pizza and drank root beer like typical Utahns (or maybe Ben had a real beer, I don’t know) and watched Antiques Roadshow as a prelude.

It was a "goldmine" edition of AR where most people are flabbergasted that their stuff, like a Civil War era silk flag emblazoned with an eagle, is worth $75,000-85,000. And there was a woman with outrageous pins and other decorations all over her hat and shirt. And a guy with a NASCAR t-shirt. Dude, is that really how you want the whole world of AR followers to see you? In your McDonald’s-sponsored racing fanboy gear? Whatever. I’m not saying you should wear pearls. Well, actually, I think that you can wear whatever you want. Because then it’s a topic of conversation and ridicule with my friends at home!

We (okay, me mostly) were giddy with excitement and anticipation for Chapter One of the Second Season of Heroes, and it did not dissapoint.  I think it was good that they had a break to work on some aspects of the writing… there were some twists and turns that kept me quiet and not calling out sarcastic or snotty remarks. The worst part of the whole hour was the very end, when the big "To Be Continued" came up on the screen. As Cathy so commonly says: Ack!  

Laura left at the first commercial break of Journeyman, which the commercials made out to be Quantum Leap with less quirky humor and less needs-suspension-of-disbelief-sci-fi and a less cute main character. Ben and I watched it all the way through, and I liked it. It was different with flashbacks to the nineties, not the fifties, though. And of course the fact that we have very little idea of why this guy (uh…. so memorable that I forgot his name) is being sent back into the past to alter other people’s lives and possibly cheat on his 2007 wife with with his fiancee who died in 1999 or so. Weird. I bet there’s a lot of fanfic already brewing on that show.

Next Monday, I will be staying in Brooklyn with my aunt and her family. I’m attending a one-day seminar on Tuesday for work in Manhattan, so wheeee! I’ll get some more Delta miles and maybe learn me sumthin’ good about email marketing and writing for the web. I’ve visited her in NYC when I was a kid and did some of the tourist things, so I don’t care too much about that.

But I haven’t asked what kind of TV my aunt has… though I can only assume that it’s not a big-screen with an HD Receiver of Entertainment Glory. I know that Heroes will be just as good on the small screen, though maybe with a little less mind-boggling Entertainment Glory. I’ll have to learn to live with that. 

Wow, in my nerding out about weather in that last post, I forgot the two main reasons I pulled up a new entry for today, the most important day of September this year.

Two reasons:

1. Monique’s birthday! Happy Birthday, sis!  Welcome to the mid-to-late twenties!

2. The new season of Heroes premieres tonight!  Eek! Too excited! 

I’ve been pestering my poor coworker Laura every day to ask if it’s September 24th yet. She’s coming over tonight to geek out with us and maybe eat some pizza. I can’t wait! 

Until then, that paycheck-earning process known as work is calling me from afar. I try not to listen, but then it turns into this high-pitched whining noise and the neighborhood dogs start barking and it’s just a mess.   

A nice cold front came through the Utah Valley on Saturday, and Ben and I celebrated with a big hip-hip-hurrah! It’s Fall! It’s also been cloudy all weekend and raining on and off, which is weird. We were (are?) in a drought throughout the summer with the hottest, dryest July on record… many days topped 100 degrees (F). That reminded me of the summer I spent studying near Madrid, when the local thermometers touched 40 degrees Celsius and the apartment where I was living with an older couple and another American student didn’t have air conditioning I said "Never again." Well, I haven’t been to Spain since, but I didn’t expect Spain heat in Utah. At least we have air conditioning.

Weather? Who cares about weather! Talk about something else.

Like how I went to a summer camp in Dayton, Ohio when I was fifteen and met a girl who desperately wanted to be a meteorologist. At the same time, our early-eighties TV at home only went up to channel 39, which incidentally was the Weather Channel. I learned early on in life that the Weather Channel was a much better predictor of a snow day than the local weather. But the local news is what I had to watch at butt-ass-early-o-clock in the morning to see if my school was closed. Hooray for Northeastern Ohio Lake Effect snow!

I think the point of all this is that I woke up shivering, since we’d left a couple windows cracked for fresh air as we cleaned all day yesterday (with some impressive results late in the game).

There’s still a lot more cleaning and organizing to be done, but maybe now that the kitchen/dining room/living room area is tidy and clean (like with real all-purpose cleaner and everything) the rest of the house will be easier to maintain. Ben is still working on the family room in the basement… I’d say that nearly half of that is clean. The rest is Ben’s personal disaster area, but he’s taken his  precious time away from the last throes of fantasy baseball and even turned off the attention-demanding sights and sounds of Harvery Birdman Volume 1 on DVD ("Why watch it for free when you could pay for it?" as the insert says).

I am hoping that Ben and I can keep the place clean (if not cleaner) through the holidays. I want to have people over (a small gathering of friends, not a "party", Ben, even though you’re turning <censored> this year) around our October birthdays. Then my aunt and uncle are coming to visit at the end of October, and then we’ll probably be taking a trip home to NE Ohio to visit various parental units and other relatives and someone will probably have to come in to make sure that the cats haven’t eaten each other, and then it’s already Thanksgiving time and then Christmas and then holy shit 2008.

Wow, is it really Fall already? 

My sister Monique went to Germany for a nerdoscience conference, and then bought a Eurail pass and went to Italy for the first time. She spent a year in college studying in Paris, and is not new to traveling alone or in Europe. So after her conference, she traveled through Milan and into Venice, where she stayed at a hostel. I hadn’t heard from her in a few days, and was starting to worry… then received a note that she was alive. With some interesting notes about Venice, if you ever plan to travel there.

She said it was okay for me to post her email message, so here you go.

—-

So here is the skinny, my dear sister.

As you know, I wouldn’t have believed it if you had told me I would feel this way, but Venice is RIGHT UP THERE with my list of least favorite cities. Next to … I dunno… Sacremento, which was totally dead when I was there briefly with <ex-boyfriend>.

I checked out of my hostel after about 3 hours total of sleep, took the early train at 10:30am from Venice to Milano Centrale… and it was delayed an hour and a half.  So it’s a good thing I didn’t pick a later train or something because of how often I have heard that this kind of thing happens… at least I was sitting in the train (air conditioned, with a FREE toilet) on the tracks while we were delayed for this hour and a half. The train station would have driven me nuts. And as you know I never figured out how to work the phones with my phone card… still haven’t… so here I am, paying 9,90 euro for internet for 24 hours at the airport so I can feel connected.

The story from last night which I didn’t have the time or energy to tell you was that I almost got into a fist fight at a pizzeria last night with a waiter who told me AFTER I finished eating my 14,50 euro meal that there was a 25 euro minimum for credit cards. There was a big American Express sign on the wall and no mention of a minimum… so I argued. Got nowhere, but luckily I had a 20 euro bill… The waiter was like "i have to work, and the card company takes a percentage" or something like that. !!! I had a major adrenaline rush and was fighting off tears as I was rushing through Venice in no particular direction.. at 8pm… with nothing to do.

Then I went into the only food store I found there, which understandably was ridiculously busy. I didn’t have an alarm clock so I was looking for one and thought I’d ask a cute clerk who was loading shelves. No such luck… he was cold as ice. I swear, they were even nicer in freakin’ Paris, which is known for being rude!

Yeah… so I’m tired. And it’s 5:10pm and boarding for my flight for Amsterdam isn’t another 3 hours. I can’t even TELL YOU how relieved I am to be on the internet….

—-

I spent a year as an exchange student in Norway many years ago (when I was 17) and at the end of the year, traveled with a bunch of the Rotary Club exchange students living in Norway around Europe (a chaperoned trip). We spent a day in Venice, and I remember the mega-touristy feel of the city and how stinky the water was. And that I probably wouldn’t put it on the top of my list of places where I’d like to again. So keep all this in mind if you feel like you want to see Venice. Go to Norway instead. It’s beautiful!

Our house is a mess. This is due partially to the fact that there is always a work (or works) in progess, such as assembling furniture, painting or hanging things on the walls, electrical work, etc. We bought a Craftsman tool organizer for the garage over a year ago, because I foolishly thought that having a large, delightful organizational tool would encourage Ben to put his tools back after using them.

He does have a few tools there, but most of them are scattered around the house. I did have a few basic tools of my own before we lived together, but Ben quickly laid claim to them by hiding and losing them. It got to the point (while we were still living in a two-bedroom apartment) that I decided I had to purchase my own tools, label them with my name in indelible marker, and keep them hidden.

And so I have a nice ratchet screwdriver with all the bits I could ever need, a hammer, a small plier set, a tiny screwdriver set, a measuring tape, and a smattering of nail, screws and picture hanging hardware. Not much, but I can always find what I need… unless Ben has lost all of his 8,435 screwdrivers and begs me to use mine. I threaten his life if I don’t get the tool back immediately. Yet, somehow, my measuring tape has disappeared and yesterday my multi-bit ratchet screwdriver was also missing.

I think we were assembling my sheves and I refused to continue until he brought back my screwdriver. He grumbled but went to look for it and, miraculously, found it. This brings me to yesterday’s Quip of the Day.

"Ben, can I ask you an honest question?"

"No."

"Do you think someday you’ll ever be more organized?"

"Do you think someday you’ll stop bleeding when I stab you in the eye with this screwdriver?"

And we busted up laughing. Sometimes his answers to my questions allow his should’ve-been-an-improv-player personality to shine through. He was worried when I said I was going to blog that comment that it might be interpreted as domestic abuse. I would like to assure the world that there was no stabbing involved, in my eye or elsewhere.  It was only a stab at humor (yuk yuk). 

In the past few weeks, Ben and I have taken a combined three trips to the new IKEA in the Southern Suburbia of Salt Lake City. We were overwhelmed the first time we went there (and someone was a little cranky about being there at all, but I’m not going to name names), but wrote down a lot of product numbers and went home to think about it. It was such a refreshing change of scenery than the standard furniture stores (boring, expensive, mostly not our style) and Target selections. It was even cool to see alternative stuff to Bed Bath and Beyond (though I’m still not sick of their selections, since I bring a little home with me each time I go…. 20% off at a time with the frequent coupons).

I ended up choosing this (desperately needed) shelving unit for my office:

So today I cleaned up my office a little and made space to assemble the almost-five-feet-tall-and-wide unit. Well, it wasn’t quite enough space with the current placement of my desk. But Ben helped  and everything turned out well. I then spent a good chunk of time sorting through the piles of crap laying around the room and feeling giddy with delight while organizing. I think I got lazy on my OCD, so just organizing now makes my adrenaline rush. Nice.

Meanwhile, Ben has been downstairs in the semi-finished portion of the basement fixing MORE idiot wiring in the house. This time, we decided to move the TV to the wall where there is a light switch, and then remembered that the outlet there was actually connected to the light switch that also controls the overhead lights.

So he fixed that with only one trip to Home Depot. He also reported that the wiring scenario behind the light switch was not up to code and he fixed that too, whatever the problem was. All I know is that he had wire clippers and pliers and said at one point, "I’m going to turn the power back on now in the basement. If you hear screaming, please take me to the emergency room." 

I guess he felt he had to say that, considering last week when I was not interested in taking him to the emergency room, even if he needed it. 

We’ve been very busy and handy around the house today. And no injuries so far. I also put together some accessory drawers for my new shelves (kind of a pain to put together, but they look really nice and I sure do like drawers). Ben also made a screen (from scratch!) for our basement family room window. He’s kicking himself for not doing it a year ago, considering how easy it was to do. Oh well. Now we can have some fresh air down there and not risk losing our kitties to the big, bad world. Or letting any mosquitos inside that are infected with the West Nile virus. Not that there’s any water in the area!

I really think that I’m incapable of writing short posts. Is all of what I said important? Probably not, but bandwidth is not an issue for me, so…. I guess it stays. 

The Heinlein Archives are now available online. They’ve already been slashdotted, but I figured I’d share the link anyway. Also, for some reason, I thought they were simply “available online.” Silly me…. everything is “available to purchase online!”

Incidentally, it was thanks to my friend Sam Gordon that I decided to pick up Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” several years ago, with which I learned to grok the influential mainstream beginnings of the literary sci-fi genre. Also that Heinlein extended some pretty crazy chauvinism in his writing and “Dorcas” is a real name.

Okay, rather than forward this email on to all of my friends, I’ll just post it here. I’d love to give credit to someone, but no name was attached.

*** 

I have 2 large dogs.  Recently, I was buying a large bag of Purina dog food at Wal-Mart and was in line to check out.  The woman behind me asked if I have a dog.  Duh!!  On impulse, I told her "No, I am starting on the Purina Diet again.  Although I probably shouldn’t because I ended up in the hospital the last time.  I’d lost 50 lbs. before I woke up in the intensive care ward with tubes coming out of me and an IV in both arms." 

I went on to tell her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry.  The food is nutritionally complete, so I was going to try it again.  (By now, practically everyone in line was enthralled with my story, particularly a tall guy who was standing behind the woman.)

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me.  I told her, "No, I was sitting in the street licking my butt when a car hit me."  I thought the guy behind her was going to need help as he staggered to the door laughing.

***

Incidentally, I was just at Petsmart yesterday to buy some more cat food for our cats. Loki had been having some issues that are probably related to a sensitive digestive system (I’ll spare you the details) and the vet shoved some Hill’s Prescription Diet I/D on us… which seemed to help. But because this new vet that we’ve gone to a couple times seems to be sponsored by Science Diet, I did some internet research (yay!) and was given the obvious advice to look at the ingredients on the bags of food before I buy.

It turns out that the more expensive stuff, like Science Diet, has mostly corn meal and chicken by-product and pork by-product in it. Also, that stuff called "powdered cellulose?" Sawdust!  Always good for fiber.

The cheaper (though not the cheapest) Purina One cat food seemed to be the better bet, because it actually listed chicken by itself as an ingredient. And brewer’s rice had a higher billing on the  Purina ingredients list than it did on the comparable Science Diet mixes (I was specifically looking for mixes that are good for urinary tract health and sensitive stomachs/hairball control).  Rice is one of those binding foods that I eat when I’m a little… um… loose in the intestines. So rice makes sense in a cat food for a cat with a sensitive stomach.

Here is a photo from last Thanksgiving of Loki happily splayed out on my sister’s lap. Also, it’s an adorable shot of Monique!  She’s much more photogenic than I am.

I’m also posting this because I miss her… and she’s at the tail end of a tiring trip to Europe. Boo hoo, right? Well, she had some brainy conference to attend in Germany last week and spent the past couple days making her way (via Eurail and hostels) through Milan and Venice. She reported this afternoon that Italy is terrifyingly devoid of the internets. I was happy to hear from her after several days of not even an email… which is quite unusual for her, and I was starting to worry. But now I know that everything is fine so I feel better.