Nerdery Public

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?

Been a long time since posting, as you may have noticed by the rollover to the empty page. Lots of things, mostly work, intervening to keep me away from the keyboard.

Been contemplating this weblog’s name (Convinced She’s Write) and while I like the wordplay, deciding that the wordplay is misguided. Cogitating on other grand titles…

In the meantime, here’re some links to things I’ve been working on:
* ACTiVATE program: pairs women with technologies developed in universities and labs, and prepares us to set up businesses. Even if my technology doesn’t net me a business, I know a lot more now about heat and light and satellites than I did a few months ago.
* Work for the Department of Veterans Affairs on a requisitioning system – the company’s writeup is here… Not that that tells you much technology-wise. Cool technologies (ASP.NET, web services, windows services), lots of interesting errors to track down.
* Raising BEAUTIFUL daughters.

A few other things, too. Life’s never dull.

Finally getting over my cold/cough combo. Opened up the dryer to find that some number of Kleenex had shown such great remorse over their lack of continued need that they had torn themselves to pieces in my dryer. All over my work slacks. Ah well. At least if I have to sneeze now, there’s a reasonable chance of some small snippet of tissue being attached to my ensemble somewhere handy.