I’m in that geographical range that the Weather Channel has been warning about a nor’easter for. We woke up this morning to what looks to be 6-9 inches of snow. The weatherman says our area got, on average, a foot. Doesn’t look quite that tall to me, but haven’t been out as yet.

Lest you tag me as lazy, the reason I haven’t been out is I’ve been dealing with a system issue for my client, interacting with the network admin team down in Texas, testing the deployed patch, and then waiting around for the go-ahead to deploy into Production. Now I have the go-ahead, and am waiting for the admin team to call back so that we can actually get this done. Grrrrrrr…. up since 6:30 am (and I’m not an early bird) and still not done with dealing it at 12:30. And still don’t have my walk shoveled.

It’s snowing the first “real” snow of the year. Not that 1-3 inches is that big a deal, but it’s better than the dusting we got earlier. The whole point of this wonderful post is to direct you to a WashingtonPost article that was wonderful… To give you a hint (and a taste, in case you read this after they’ve taken down the article), the title is: “The Wipe Stuff
Milk & Bread Are Staples of the Storm, But Toilet Paper Brings Up the Rear”. Turns out the whole MBTP (nice acronym: milk, bread, toilet paper) run thing is a myth. We all have plenty of the white papery stuff in stock to deal with being snowbound as the white fluffy stuff falls from the sky. Wonder if the MBTP index is just a victim of BJ’s.

H5N1, aka avian flu, you have the honor of being the only virus I know by a name other than “bug”. The papers have added a new word to my vocabulary: “pandemic”. I assume it’s something like panic-epidemic.

Advice abounds as to how to avoid the flu: get your flu shot (it won’t help, but the authorities are still advising it). Stay away from chickens. And my favorite, from a flu expert at the UK Health Protection Agency: “Avoid being in touching distance of [birds that could be affected]. Don’t kiss chickens.”

Will keep that in mind.

In the theory that writing it down will let my brain get off the spinning carousel for a while:
– hmmmm, what would that new tattoo look like?
– kid 3?? what on earth would we do with 3 of ’em?!
– performance appraisals: gotta make ’em worthwhile to him (I only work with hims on my teams at the moment – not being sexist) and to me
– it’s hard enough to get her to sleep at our house. How on earth do you expect a sleepover at YOUR house to work?
– dirt-biking: yeah!
– OPIC, OPIC, OPIC… why couldn’t I remember what that acronym was during the exam!
– I swear if I have to debug another firewall issue, I’m going to … set fire to the daggone wall
– “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in a poor man’s hat”

Brain spinning faster, not slower…. Brain wave acceleration. Or maybe that’s just the beer talking.

We got us a new puppy! Rufus, whose name comes from both the movie Dogma, and from a surprised recognition that the name actually comes from the Bible (Romans 16:13 – Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord). Somehow puts Chris Rock’s portrayal in an even weirder light.

Rufus is a beautiful pup: his mom is a huskey and his dad is a border collie, so he’s got these wonderful blue eyes and ears that stand up. We took him to a church picnic yesterday so that he wouldn’t have to stay in his crate all afternoon. I think we rated an extra notch or two by our Sunday school kids, just for having such a neat puppy.

The girls are getting used to having a puppy in the house. He’s done the Snoopy grabbing Linus’s blanket thing a bunch of times to Callie, and grabbed Cora’s teddy bear a bunch of times, too. So far, the teething damage has been minimal: he seems to have more fun grabbing something and running with it rather than chewing on it. Looking forward to maybe having a running partner when he gets a bit older – little guy’s fast!

The last couple of years have been hectic, work-wise, such that my workaholic nature easily amassed a large PTO balance, since I never really took any time off, even given that I had to eat my PTO balance down to 0 when my daughter was born. Our company has a limit of 120 hours that you can carry over from year to year. I started the year with 119.

Did some math tonight. Given my accrual pace and the limited amount of PTO I’ve taken thusfar this year, I need to take 15 days between now and the end of the year just to break even to the 120 barrier again. Plus I’m taking a week of training at the end of August that doesn’t count towards those 15. So, we’re talking a month away from my various projects in the next six. Uh, I think I’ll be losing vacation time. Damn.

We have a cat, Joe, who’s lived with us now for 6 or so years. He was a shelter cat, picked up from a no-kill shelter to be a companion for our other cat, Harley. Joe wasn’t a kitten when we got him, but we’re not really sure how old he is. He’s lived a good life with us, been reasonably well-behaved and is definitely a gentle and loving cat.

The problem: we had our basement renovated, including getting new carpet installed. Joe has now decided that that carpet is much to be preferred over his litter box for a portion of his daily activities. Joe’s gotta go.

Just to reassure folks that we’re not animal-dumpers, we’ve actually invested a fair amount of time and dollars in solving this problem with this cat. This has been fairly long and involved, as I’m horribly biased against getting rid of animals for reasons of inconvenience. And like I said, he’s a generally good cat. He just seems to think that this particular carpet is more appealing than litter. The vet checked him out and gave us the non-reassuring news that it’s behavioral, rather than physical. As in, he’s just chosen to do things this way: there’s nothing physically wrong with him.

So, tomorrow (I think) I’ll be taking Joe to live with my mom, in hopes that her carpet isn’t as appealing. This solution has its drawbacks, in that it (of course) comes with strings attached. Mom’s pushing that we not get any more cats because she doesn’t want any more “dumped” on her. I’m allergic to cats and really not a fan of litter box duty: it’s an easy enough constraint, though I’m chafing at the idea that she thinks that because she’s volunteered to take the cat and in fact is unhappy with the idea that I’d give him to anyone else that she’s entitled to then claim that I’ve “dumped” the cat on her. I haven’t decided just how much to point that out to her, or to point out that in fact in our family’s history she “dumped” two cats who were similarly causing destruction in our family’s newly refurbished basement into another home. Keeping those quietly in my back pocket for family peace…

So, Joe, you’ve been a good cat till now, and I’ll be happy to visit you at Mom’s. But your pooping ways just can’t stay and our attempts to cure you have been for naught. Harley will just have to pick on someone else…

Had to stop by my alma mater the other evening to return some books to the library. It’s the summer session, so the set of students out and about is pretty slim. Over and over, though, each student that I did see had a cell phone pressed to his or her ear as they moved about campus. Standing at the bus stop in the dark: cell phone dimly glowing. Walking to the library alone: cell phone to the ear. The best was two students obviously walking together: both with cell phones to their ears.

The entry’s title is ‘Communal Non-communicativity’: it’s as if we’ve decided that there’s no value in the chance encounter communication. Each spare moment is precious, and that communication slot has to be used for something important; something already known; someone on your speed-dial.

That same night, I had my cell phone hooked to my belt. Earlier in the day, on my walk to the supermarket to grab a bite for lunch, I had called a friend. Making good use of the time, I thought. The other day, on my drive home, I called another friend I hadn’t talked with in a while, just to catch up. The odds of me finding the time after I had gotten home were just so slim, using the commute time worked wonderfully to catch me up on her life.

Been running across articles and reading a book lately on Americans lack of shared experience or random cross-pollination of ideas. What we lose when we concentrate solely on our individual interests, be they an iPod full of “our” music, customized news sources, chat rooms online, … That’s a whole entry of itself. But it was just surprising to see it in action so forcefully on a walk across a darkened college campus.

What Memorial Day means to me:
* a 3 day weekend
* lots of sales in the malls driving enough traffic to them that make me want to stay away
* barbeques (though we managed to miss firing up the grill)
* a heavy sense of gratefulness for those who have served or are still serving in areas that caused them to risk their lives. I’m not naive enough to think that all of them were serving for noble reasons: some were paying the bills, some saw it as a ticket to a better life, some saw it as a path to glory and girls. But all put a heck of a lot more into their job than I do mine, and had a greater impact and sacrifice than most of us will ever be asked to give, whether or not they ended up giving up their lives in the line of duty. So, thank you, Brad, Uncle Doug, Pappap Croft, Robert, Uncle Ted, Uncle Ron, Chuck, Matt, and the millions of other service men and women who put their life on the line (either literally or in the sense that they could have been asked to at any moment) to meet our country’s call.

I’m daydreaming of tattooes again. My husband had at one point drafted a design for me that mingled 26.2 (distance for a marathon) and 9.8 (meters per second squared: acceleration constant for things like falling out of an airplane with a parachute strapped to your back). I shouldn’t be for at least a couple of reasons: one is that someone pointed out to me a Bible verse that specifically compares tattoo marks with cutting your bodies for the dead (see Leviticus 19 specifically verse 28). Now, that verse also comes directly after a verse that talks about not cutting the hair at the sides of your head (??) or clipping the edges of your beard, which suggests to me that I may be missing a cultural context. I’m not one to fall back on cultural context, though, so until I know what that context is, that verse still weighs somewhat heavy.

The second reason is that if you get a tattoo, you can’t give blood for a year. I’ve been giving plasma lately, through a process called apheresis, in which the Red Cross hooks you up to a machine taht takes blood out of one arm, spins it to get the plasma from it and then reinserts it into the other arm. Apparently, the plasma is useful for controlling bleeding. Downside is it takes longer and both arms get to get poked rather than just one. I figure, though, if the worst that happens to me is I get poked twice, and it helps save someone else’s life, I’m definitely getting the better end of the deal. Given that plasma stockpiles don’t keep for very long, and that they’re always low at the various blood banks there’s a reasoning that says I may indirectly cause the loss of someone’s life over a silly tattoo. Everyone’s got a purpose in this world: if mine’s just to produce plasma for someone else, well, that’s a pretty humbling reason to be alive (ooh: I can produce cells) but remarkably dumb to goof up by putting ink in my bloodstream. (The reason you can’t give blood for a year after a tattoo is because the ink gets in your bloodstream and can cause an allergic reaction in someone else. Not something I realized when I got my first ink at 19, that the ink would circulate in your blood and could cause allergic reactions.)

I’m still daydreaming of that tattoo though. Not sure where I’d put it. If we decide to have that third kid (and so I can’t donate blood while pregnant) then maybe at least reason #2 won’t be in play. But I need to have done that plane jump and earned that marathon to get that particular one, anyway. Marathon planned for October. Plane jump when?