So, back from the road and back into the dreary toil of everyday work. Woe betide me.

Last week was a welcome relief. After two weeks of business, pressure, and annoyances, being up in Indianapolis was a nice break, even if it was still doing company business. This week, I have an hour-long presentation to give tomorrow on the fascinating topic of material handling within the department (at least it’s scheduled for an hour – I’m not going to sweat if it clocks in at less than that). After that there’s some paper work I need to finish up, then more all-day batches of electronics adhesive. Only eleven more to go!

The weekend recap!

So, I was looking through old e-mail and I came across this from September, 1997. geniealisa had sent me a list of pointers of how a woman can please her man. I sent it back, with my own notations added. I laughed myself silly over it as I was re-reading it, so I’ll share it with you here…

The following is from a 1950’s Home Economics textbook intended for High School girls, teaching how to prepare for married life.

Well, y’know, Indianapolis isn’t such a bad place. It’s very Midwestern (in a big-city kind of way), but not nearly as built-up as, say, Chicago.

The work that we came up here to do went off without a hitch. In fact it went so well, we really finished everything we had to do by Tuesday afternoon. Too bad we have to fly back Thursday and couldn’t change our tickets. Ah well, more time to relax away from the office…

Tuesday night, I had a lovely dinner with Tsuki. Tsuki is the fellow you may have seen at Midwest Furfest or Anthrocon in the white serval suit (mmmm, stretch velvet…) He took me to a tasty local steak place, and the filet and the conversation were both quite enjoyable. Afterwards, I got the nickel tour of Indianapolis, passing the Veterans Memorial (it’s freakin’ huge I tell ya!), the Scottish Rite Temple, and Millionaires’ Row along Meridian Avenue. Some neat stuff, and it actually showed that Indianapolis has quite a bit of character to it (unlike, say, Charlotte or Atlanta).

Today was pretty uneventful. I spent the morning working on the presentation I have next week. This went swimmingly, although I’ll need to stop by work this weekend to take pictures to go with the presentation. And probably grab some graphics off the net to augment things. The afternoon was spent noodling around, reading some of my old e-mails from about five years ago, and generally being bored. We slipped out at 4 PM and headed over to the Indiana State Fair.

It’s a state fair. Pretty much what I expected – as much going on as at the North Carolina State Fair, only spread out over a larger area. The home crafts displays were interesting, and the horses were beautiful (and HUGE! Six feet tall at the shoulder wasn’t uncommon). I spent a lot of time walking around thinking, “Wow, I’ll bet Dan would like this.” I miss my woof. Anyway, as we left, the big headline act for the evening was going on (Kenny Chesney, a country singer of some renown, I’m told). It was a pleasant way to spend the evening, much better than camped out in the hotel room, anyway.

Tomorrow we have a morning meeting to wrap things up, then it’s off to the airport to wing our ways homeward. I’m looking forward to it!

8/12/02 – 10:42 AM, somewhere over Virginia

Taking a page from Mirko, it seems like the only time I can find to update my LiveJournal is when I’m in the air.

It’s been over a week since my last entry, and you can see hints of the cause of that gap in my last entry. Basically, last week was pretty hellish – trying to make a couple of drums of product for a customer, and then trying to ship it out. The latter turned out to be a bigger challenge than the former – you gotta love paperwork. It was one of those deals of “for want of a nail, the war was lost”: I had some problems entering some raw materials into our warehouse. Without the materials in the warehouse, I couldn’t tell out inventory tracking system that I had consumed those raw materials to make product. Since there wasn’t any product, I couldn’t tell the shipping system that we had something to ship. And thus I couldn’t ship anything. It took a concerted effort, several hours of banging my head against the wall, and multiple phone calls, but I finally got it resolved. When I left work on Friday all the t’s were dotted and the i’s were crossed – or something like that. Anyway, the rest of the week was unpleasant, and I was an extremely unpleasant person to be around, let alone read about. Looking at it that way, I did you a favor by not writing in my LJ. You’re welcome 🙂

On Saturday we had a big excursion planned. I woke up at 5:30 AM and Takaza got up at 6. We puttered a bit and then met up with Janelle, Beth, and Sherry. The five of us drove three hours down to Charlotte, NC, where we met up with some friends of mine from my SCA days, Chris and Tracie, as well as Brophey and Rasslor, who had driven up from Atlanta. The nine of us went to Carowinds, a nice theme park located just south of Charlotte on the NC/SC border. It was a great day – hanging out with friends, riding roller coasters, and hanging out at the water park there. The only down side of the day was after Dan rode the Hurler (extremely rough wooden roller coaster) he noticed that his wedding ring was missing. He was distraught, and I comforted him as best I could. We checked with Lost and Found before we left the park and left instructions on how to contact us if they found the ring.

After we left the park we headed over to BD’s Mongolian BBQ, which was just fantastic and really hit the spot after a long day in the sun. We enjoyed ourselves so much, we left later than we should. We finally got home around midnight following a long and tiring drive home. It was exhausting, but it was worth it.

Sunday found me up around 8 AM (’cause I’m silly that way). I had a relaxing morning of reading the paper, drinking coffee, phoning my parents, and chatting with Rustitobuck and Linnaeus about MFF stuff, as well as sending off my registration report in time for Sunday’s meeting. By the way, in case anyone hasn’t registered yet, be advised that online registration for Midwest Furfest is coming within weeks!

Dan finally woke up at about 1:30 PM (I’m so jealous of his ability to sleep late like that!) and we bummed around a little bit, snuggling a bit and chatting about the weekend and the week to come. We went to take a shower and as Dan was taking off his glasses to put them on the counter, he reached down and picked up something shiny. It was his wedding ring that he had forgotten to put back on his finger after he took a shower Saturday morning! We both burst out laughing in relief. As much as I’m glad we don’t have to replace the ring, I have to admit I was looking forward to being able to pledge my love to him all over again. I love you so much, Dan.

So Monday morning found Dan going off to work and me heading off to the airport. As I type this I’m on an itty-bitty plane (Embraer of some variety) flying from Raleigh to Cleveland. From there I head over to Indianapolis on a similar plane. Gee, I love flying Northwest (insert sarcastic tone here). There has *got* to be a better way to fly to Indianapolis. Ah well. I’ll be spending the next four days in Castleton, just northeast of Indianapolis, visiting our microelectronics division, Thermoset. Tomorrow night I’ll be having dinner with Tsuki, but I’m not sure what will be going on Wednesday night.

I’m really glad for the time away from the office – it couldn’t come at a better time. The only drawback is that the hour-long presentation I was supposed to give last week got postponed – to next Tuesday. So I need to find time during this trip to at least make an outline for that and at start making Powerpoint slides, I suppose. The good thing is that if I run shorter than an hour, I don’t think anyone will really care.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll more to write about later.

It’s been a weird day. I’ll explain why…

So first, why so quiet on matters of substance for the last week? This was a very hectic week for me. A project that had been on the back burner was suddenly moved to the very front burner. My boss is out all week (family medical stuff, not good) and so I was left trying to line up the resources I needed on my own and at the same time try and schedule all the work to be done so we could meet the customer’s ship date. All of this left me grump and antisocial after work, I’m afraid, and it was better that I not try and write about anything then. I don’t get in these moods often, but I know I’m not pleasant to be around when it happens.

Fortunately, everything fell into place on Friday and so the week ended on an up note. There was one bright spot to the week, too – Donald and Janelle had the Gang over for dinner on Wednesday. There was much socializing, a fair amount of geeking (not a big surprise, considering where a number of the members of the Gang work). Chicken was grilled, and some tasty wine was sampled. We finished off the evening with some truly amazing truffles from San Francisco’s Joseph Schmidt Confections – the Jamaican rum truffles were tasty, and the double latte one were to die for. At my suggestion, we paired the truffles with the divine Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royal cognac. Oh my. It was a lovely end to the evening. We also picked up the beautiful quilt that Janelle and Beth made for us to commemorate our Commitment Ceremony. I love it – the light-colored squares have little paw prints in them and each one has a larger paw print embroidered on it. Mind you, our friends aren’t furry, but they understand what is important to us. And they’re just really damn cool people. Thanks guys!

So, on Saturday we were originally planning join some of the CarolinaFurs to volunteer at the Conservators Center, building cages and whatever work needed doing, then hanging out for a cookout. Unfortunately, we got a call on Friday saying we could pick up Takaza‘s CPAP machine on Saturday. Since he’s been waiting for that, we had to skip the CCI trip and pick up the CPAP instead. We ran a few errands as well, picking up a shirt for Takaza (taking advantage of the Sales Tax Holiday, whoop-te-do) and stopping by Borders. I’ve been wanting to pick up a book on proper nutrition and diet and I think I found a good one. At 600-some pages, though, it’ll take a while to absorb all that information.

Today started out strangely. I woke up, as I often do one weekends, at about 6:30 AM. Dan was awake next to me, which is extremely out of the ordinary. He hadn’t slept well during his first night of using the CPAP (as you can see from his LiveJournal) and couldn’t get back to sleep. We snuggled for a while, which was lovely, then got up. My usual Sunday routine is catch up with net stuff for an hour or so, make coffee, read the Sunday paper, call my parents, and then maybe Dan will be awake. Well, his being up already threw my whole routine into disarray and left me feeling oddly off-kilter (although I’m certainly not objecting to the company of my dear wolf!). I got in my usual routine, though, and I felt better. We relaxed a bit later in the morning, then headed down to Wally World to do our weekly grocery shopping. Since we’ve been back, we’ve both been kind of lazy, me catching up with folks on FurryMuck and Dan napping. It looks like it’s about time for dinner, though, so I’m going to go wake him up and see how he’s feeling.

As a side note, I’ve laughed myself silly over Dan’s new LiveJournal icon, which gives you an idea of what a CPAP mask looks like:

Houndstooth: Canine Networking – now this is a technology I like!

You know, some people dream of going on wonderful vacations – cruises, trips to Europe, that sort of thing. I wanted to do that too, until I found a certain site last night. This is what I want to do, oh yes. It’s a pity that the package we would like would be more than $2,500 for the two of us, though…

OK, this time around I’ve got another Celtic-influenced instrumental, but a radically different one from the first song I posted. And with this one, you get a story.

Click here for the backstory, or just skip straight to the music

So, instead of treating you to a recap of the weekend’s events, I’m going to just point you to Takaza‘s entry – saves us both time 🙂

One item of interest to repeat from his journal, though: We compared the prices of about 90 items that we commonly buy across four different grocery stores: Harris Teeter, Kroger, Lowes’ Foods, and Wal-Mart Super Center. It was not a great surprise that Wal-Mart was cheaper on average than the other three, but the real surprise was by how much: 20% cheaper than Lowes’ Foods, and about 30% cheaper than Kroger and Harris Teeter. In some ways this sucks because I really hate shopping there – narrow aisles, stupid people in large numbers (moo!), and they don’t have a lot of the brands we like. But those are some pretty compelling numbers. The major drawback is that I will absolutely not shop there between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, no matter how much money we’re talking. Anyway, all that took about four hours but when I looked at some average grocery bills and annualized some of the price differentials, we’re looking at an annual savings of about $800-$1,000 by shopping at Wal-Mart instead of Lowes’ Foods. I’d say that was four hours well-spent.

Today we spent some nice time just snuggling (something we don’t do nearly enough sometimes). After that, it was a bit of housecleaning, then we did some shopping. When we got back I mowed the lawn (I know my wuff loves me – he brought me out a glass of ice water while I was mowing 🙂 and then we sat down to a nice dinner of cheeseburgers and Futurama. Yay!

On a side note, I joined the Grey Muzzle mailing list (for furry fans over 30 years old) last week, and I have to say that so far I’m not impressed. I was hoping for some interesting discussion about furry fandom from a more mature perspective. What I’ve gotten instead is 30-50 messages per day with what amounts to a rehash of alt.fan.furry, by a lot of the same players, no less. I haven’t posted there, except for a short introduction, for the same reason that I don’t post to AFF – these people aren’t looking for a reasoned discussion and a calm, even exchange of views. They’re looking to convince the world that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and by god, they’re going to beat that into everyone’s head. Yeah, right. I have better things to do with my time, thanks. I’ll hang on for a while longer in hopes things improve, but I’m not optimistic.

I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do today, and I don’t feel motivated to do any of them.

I need to start making up my presentation on material handling (“Don’t drink the toluene diisocyanate, kids!”) I’m supposed to give in two weeks. That dovetails neatly with the 20-page document I’m supposed to be revising that is the basis for the presentation. Meanwhile, I need to start taking my experimental results for the last month or so from my coating project and compose that into the project document so we can get the damn thing off my desk.

And I just want to take a nap. Bleah.

At least it’s Friday. If I were to be completely boring, I go home after work, go to bed early, and get a good night’s sleep. Fortunately, I’m not boring. Current plans now are to go out with a few of the Gang tonight for a nice Italian dinner, followed by heading over to a local dive to see one of my favorite bands: Carbon Leaf. They’re a Richmond, VA-based band with a great Celtic-influenced rock sound with a few touches of jam-band mellowness. Should be a late night since the first set doesn’t start ’til 11 but hey, I can sleep in tomorrow. And as for this weekend…nothing! Yay! No plans whatsoever. I like those kinds of weekends.

Howdy zenwolph!

I’m going to completely steal an idea from rigelkitty (and hope he doesn’t mind) and start a bit of an occasional series aimed at introducing people to some great music they may never have heard of. I’ll start out by saying that the music choices are from my personal collection, thus are subject to my particular whims and prejudices. My musical tastes lean heavily to Celtic- and folk-inflected music, and especially with music that tries to cross boundaries of various styles, such as Celtic rock.

With that in mind, here’s my first selection: Eileen Ivers’ “Crossing the Bridge”.

This is the title track from her 1999 album (on Sony Classical, of all labels) and it really has all the things I love – some traditional tunes, some great funky grooves, and some wicked fiddle playing. Eileen Ivers has been playing and recording for over fifteen years, including original lead fiddle for Riverdance, and was a founding member of Cherish the Ladies (and equally fabulous, but more traditional, band).

This MP3 will only be up on my server for a week or so – I’ll be rotating it off to make space for new selections. I only ask that you let me know if you download it and listen to it – did you like it, did you hate it, would you like to hear something else? Let me know, and that way I’ll know if I should keep putting up these selections.

(Update 7/29/02: Link to song removed to make space on the server. Sorry!)

If I were maybe a wolf or a dog/I wouldn’t have to speak/Wouldn’t have to talk/Just eat my dinner and go for a walk/And howl at the moon
And if I were laying there just like you/All curled up the way dogs do/I’d dream that dream that your dreamin’ too/And howl at the moon *

Slow getting started today. I’ll be over in the building across campus all day making yet another batch of material for the electronics project I’m working on (only fifteen more to go!). If I start by 9 AM, I should be done by 4 PM. Hopefully. Yeesh, there’s still all the testing on all these products to do, too. I can hardly wait (shyeahright).

Dan’s off for another sleep study tonight, so I’ll be all alone. I’ll probably jump onto FurryMuck and see what’s shakin’, and probably upload some more of the pictures we took on the way home from Anthrocon. Probably do a little cleaning around the house, too. Depending on the weather (i.e. none of the fun sporadic afternoon thunderstorms we’ve been seeing), I may skip the gym today too, in favor of mowing the lawn. We’ve gotten just enough rain to get the grass growing again, but I think the brown patches are pretty much gone for good. Looks like we’ll be paying for another reseeding this fall – ouch! According to the news reports, we’re now an official Federal Disaster Area – makes me feel all special. I heard last night that we’re running a rain deficit of twelve inches since last September. It’s going to take some long, rainy days to make up for that, and there’s none of those on the horizon.

In news of much less import, but still kind of a downer: Well, The West Wing is a fabulous show, but you knew they couldn’t hang onto that great cast forever. Variety is reporting that Rob Lowe (“Sam Seaborn”) will be bowing out of the show in the spring of next year due to a salary dispute. Maybe they’ll bring back Emily Proctor (“Ainsley Hayes”). Assuming, that is, that CSI: Miami doesn’t work out for her.

Well, off to wallow in powdered aluminum. Whee!

* – Find out more about this song here.

So, it only took almost a month after we bought our digital camera, but I finally got around to this:
Photos from Casa di Canine

We’ve posted pictures from last weekend’s trip down to my parents, Rob and Janet’s Fourth of July Party, and most importantly: Anthrocon!

Take a look, enjoy, and hey, you can even print the pictures at Shutterfly. The nifty software to drive all this is Gallery, a freeware program that does a wonderful just of handling PHP in such a way that someone who doesn’t know beans about PHP (i.e., me) can deal with it. More pictures coming over the next few days, I’m sure.

Happy birthday, rustitobuck!

So ever since Anthrocon we’ve been reviewing our finances and what we saw just didn’t add up. Something had to give, and unfortunately that something was Mephit Furmeet. I’ve been to every Mephit Furmeet since 1998, so I’m pretty bummed about this – it’s a fun con, and great place to relax with friends. Maybe next year, I guess.

On the bright side, the vacation we were going to take for MFM can now be used elsewhere, like for the party we’re throwing at the end of September to coincide with NC Pride. We’re still in the planning stages on it, but hopefully the Pride Party will be as much fun as the Memorial Day Party was. We’re also planning on flying up to Chicago for a Midwest Furfest staff meeting, probably in September. According to the Furfest website, that would be September 8 or September 22. Hm – we’ll need to figure out which of those might be the best for us.

Damn. Even without MFM, September is going to be a busy month for us…

Here is a completely startling statement: I don’t care for kids. I can deal with a wide variety of stresses in my life, but when I peruse that list I don’t see children on there. Fortunately, Takaza deals with them much better than I, which usually keeps my shortcomings as a nurturing adult hidden.

What causes this dramatic revelation is that we are visiting my parents’ house in Anderson, South Carolina this weekend. My sister and two nephews – Chris, age 7, and Tim, age 5 – are here as well. Now, let me preface this by saying that I love my family, and I even love my nephews. But that doesn’t mean that I always have to like them. Chris, in particular, is a bundle of energy, single-tracked in that way that only a seven-your-old can be. Tim is much quieter and charming, and comes up with the most amazing statements sometimes. Bless his heart, Dan has patience enough for both of us and can deal with them – me, my first response is to pretty much leave the area and not deal with them.

So, we got in yesterday just past 1 PM and had a late lunch of leftovers (but they were tasty leftovers, so that’s OK). After that it was few hours of lounging in the pool and savoring the respite from the fiercely hot weather that has plagued the area for the last few weeks. Of course, we figured it was just a few hours, no need for sunscreen. Well, on the bright side, Dan can now apply for theatrical roles as Lobster Man, and I can be his understudy 🙂 After some more lounging about some more, we went to work on dinner: grilled boneless leg of lamb, roasted potatoes, oven roasted onions, and a tasty salad with walnuts and gorgonzola cheese in a balsamic vinaigrette, all served with a delicious Australian shiraz/cab/merlot blend called “Sarah’s Blend”. You know, just sort of scraping together whatever’s lying around…

So this morning it’s been an exercise in keeping the kids quiet (aka an exercise in futility) while everyone was slowly waking up. Mom and I went to the store so they could pick up their Sunday New York Times, plus fixings for a nice brunch of bacon and eggs, and while we were out apparently Chris woke Dan up several times to ask if he could play games on his computer. Given that Dan isn’t a morning person (to say the least), he’s not particularly in a happy mood right now and I can’t blame him one bit. But Mom is cooking up the bacon and it smells delicious. I suspect everyone will be feeling better once we get some food in us.

Urgh. Woke up at 4:15 AM this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. I just know I’ll be a barrel of laughs come 9 PM tonight.

Well, in about 40 minutes we’ll be jumping in the car and driving down to my parents, after a stop by a certain patisserie. Should be a pleasant visit, and we’ve got some stuff to work on during the trip – need to refine some e-mails, and work out the wording on the invitation e-mails we’re sending for the Pride Party in September. Of course, I know Takaza – he’ll be asleep during most of the trip while I’m driving. That’s OK, though. He put up with me waking him up at 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning 🙂

More anon…

She’s strong and tall/but scared to fall/her roots unknown…

Short weeks are strange, particularly when you skip Monday. I’m left not knowing what the hell day it is.

As much as I’d dearly love to hide under the bed and sleep this weekend, we’re heading down to my parnts’ place in glorious Anderson, South Carolina. At least we don’t have to do any late-night driving; instead, we’re going to get up early on Saturday morning and drive the five hours down there. As much as I love my family (and I know they’re reading this 🙂 I’m in social overload right now, so I might not be at my best. Ah well, maybe if I go to bed early tonight and tomorrow night I’ll feel better come the weekend. (And by the way, lamb will be fine for dinner, Mom. Mmmm, lamb…)

Not much going on at work today. We have the monthly department meeting, which usually pretty much makes a complete hash of the day. I need to devise some viscosity tests for the dozens of coatings I’ve made over the last few weeks and I’ll probably run those this afternoon. It’ll be fun to run – the viscometer is attached to a computer where the software is so old it has to run on Windows 3.11. It’s always a joy to use because I have to refamiliarize myself with the interface. Microsoft is an evil, soulless behemoth, but at least they’ve improved their interface over the years.

Next weekend we have nothing planned. I wonder how long we can keep it that way. About the only thing I can think that we want to do between now and then is catch the stage performance of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at one of the local gay clubs before it ends its run on July 27. Maybe one day next week – I’ll have to talk to Takaza and see what he’d like to do.

All right, I’d better start writing this up or I’ll forget all the good stuff (well as good as the good stuff gets).

My goodness, this is a long travelogue!

Finally, someone finally got around to inventing a Tivo-like device that works for radio (plus a whole bunch of other neat stuff). It’s only first-generation, but I see the beginnings of great things – plus This American Life whenever I want it!*

(NY Times autoregistration thingy courtesy of Marc Majcher)

*(Yes, I know I can get This American Life off the web, but I refuse to deal with RealAudio. Ick.)

Well, it was a mad scramble, but we got everything packed last night. I don’t know why I stress so much about this stuff – it’s not brain surgery, if we forget something it will All Be OK – no one is going to die if I forget to pack the charger for my MP3 player. Still, I was cranky and irritable last night – I hope Dan didn’t get too ticked off at me. Anyway, we got everything in the car and ready to go for this morning and got to bed a bit late – 10:30.

Naturally, I didn’t sleep very well. I never do the night before a big trip. I’ll be a basket case tonight after about 10 PM, but that’s why Dan is doing the latter half of the driving instead of me. I’m terrible at driving at night anyway – I get blinded by the oncoming headlights and mesmerized by the white lines in the dark. Unfortunately for poor Dan, this means he has the joy of driving through DC and Baltimore. Sorry, love – I’ll take that stretch on the drive home, I promise! At least it’ll be after rush hour…I hope.

So now there’s nothing left but to sit at work until 3:30 PM rolls around. Funny, my concentration is just crappy this morning. I got revisions to one project plan off, and now I need to start writing the materials handling document so I can send it to the team for review before our meeting Tuesday afternoon. How do you stretch “Don’t eat it, drink, it, get it on you, or even look at it!” into an extended QS-900-compliant document? Guess I’m going to find out.

Man, I need a nap.

Today’s word of the day is:
chamfron ‘sham-fren noun [ME shamfron, fr. MF chanfrein] (15c) Armor used to protect the front of a war horse’s head in medieval times

Usage example: “And the audience was later stunned to learn that Lynne Cheney was not, in fact, wearing some sort of hideous rusty chamfron on her head during a speech that made the souls of children wince, but was merely roughly 47 layers of shellack and makeup she must apply every morning to better cover the scales and the fissures.”

(From Mark Morford, of course. Who else?)

Well, looking over my Friends Page it looks like lots of folks are packing up and getting ready for Anthrocon. We’d be doing the same except that we’re working with limited vacation this year and too many conventions, so it’s going to a few days off here, a few days there. For Anthrocon we’re only taking off Friday and Monday, so we’ll miss out on whatever festivities there might be on Thursday – oh well. Four days is one day too many for me at a con, anyway.

This week has alternately been creeping and flying past, depending on how much I’m worrying about Anthrocon. Work has been a bit of an adventure, with project status meetings, and the surprise announcement of the fact that I have to make a one-hour presentation on material handling to the department as part of the annual safety training – and I have three weeks to prepare. Dandy. On top of that, I was given responsibility of the department storage room, a 60′ x 40′ room which has become essentially a junkyard for unwanted or unused equipment, pipes, wires, and who knows what else. Naturally, we just received a safety citation since two-thirds of it is pretty much just heaped on the floor. It’ll be my job to sort through it, see who owns what, put in a shelving system, and generally bring order to chaos. At least I have a few months to work on this. Of course, somewhere along the line I also need to do my lab work. Bleah.

So, Anthrocon: Our plans right now have us leaving at 4 PM on Thursday – I’ll be picking up takaza from his work and then we’ll hit the road. We’re only going part way, though – we could make it to Philadelphia Thursday night, but that would mean rolling in sometime after midnight and paying for the more-expensive hotel room. Instead, we’re stopping in Edgewood, Maryland. This is nice because it will let us get up in the morning, make a last-minute store run for this all-important in-room munchies and sodas (though how often we’ll be able to get by the room is an open question). We should arrive at Anthrocon before noon on Friday and we’ll work on checking in as soon as we get there (I doubt we’ll have much luck, though).

As I mentioned before, we’re on Operations staff – one side-benefit of this is that we can bypass the lines at registration and pick up our badges and supersponsor packets at Operations. Yay! Anyway, both Dan and I are scheduled to work in Artists Alley from 5-6 PM on Friday, 3-6 PM on Saturday and 1-3 PM and 4-5 PM on Sunday (I think I have those hours right…) I’ll probably be helping out elsewhere, too – perhaps at the Volunteers Table, or wherever else I’m needed.

You Midwest-Furfest-types that are going to be there: we’re probably going to get together in our room Friday evening (after dinner most likely, since I don’t see us finishing up all the Artists Alley stuff until 7 PM or so, really) with aureth and possibly rustitobuck and mirkowuff. Any staff members who’s like to stop by and discuss constuff (particularly anything related to registration of publications) is welcome to join us. If you don’t see us and can’t find our room number, Dan and my cell phone numbers are in the staff directory on the Furfest website. And yes, since we’re complete geeks, we’ll be checking e-mail throughout the convention as well. Who knows, there might even be some LJ updates, too 🙂

Dig my new LJ icon – ain’t it cute? That’s me in the foreground, and Dan behind me.

Here’s a daredevil thing for me to do: trying to update my journal before coffee. Yeah, I’m just a wild man.

For some reason I thought I’d written here since Monday, but evidently I was mistaken. Well, let’s talk about the week past, and plans for the coming week of travel and conventioning…

This is gonna be a long one

As I was saying last night before I was so rudely interrupted by sleep…

Well, it’s going to be a busy week for me, even though it’s only three days at work. Today and tomorrow, at least, and probably Wednesday, I’m making three batches of coating per day. At two-and-a-half hours each, and trying to slip in testing of previous batches during the hour hold time I get in each process, it’s going to be pretty hoppin’. Fortunately, that should finish off all the batches I have to make and next week can be devoted to testing and writing up all this mess.

“So,” you’re asking yourself (because you talk to yourself. Weirdo.) “What are you doing for the Fourth of July, Duncan?” Well, not a whole hell of a lot, and I’m loving it. Rob and Janet (and Ian) are hosting their annual house party, whereby they invite a few dozen friends to crash at their place for a long weekend, consume interesting alcohol, eat lots of grilled food, and stay up far too late. The theme alcohols for this year are gin and vodka (only the good stuff, if you please). For last year’s Cinco de Mayo party, tequila was the theme and that was where I learned there’s some excellent tequilas out there that aren’t expensive at all. I’m not much of a gin fan, but I’ll try some if only to remind myself why I don’t like it. The Grey Goose vodka I’ve had was excellent, as was the Belvedere – I’m interested to see what else Rob comes up with. The nice part about this is that we’ll probably only stop by for a few days out of the long weekend, and relax the rest of the time. The one fly in the ointment is that takaza has to work on Friday while I have the day off. That kind of sucks but we’ll work around it.

Next week, of course, we’re off to Anthrocon. We’re driving out on Thursday and stopping at a hotel in Aberdeen, MD for the night, then arriving around noon on Friday. We’ll be rooming with rustitobuck and mirkowuff (By the way guys, Dan inflated the air mattress and checked it for leaks last night – he says it’s nice and comfy). Both Takaza and I have volunteered for Operations staff (they recognized the big red “S” on our foreheads, you see) which as near as I can tell means we’ll be assisting with the cash registers at the Con Store and in Artists’ Alley, though I’m happy to help out wherever I’m needed. I’ve come to the conclusion that working at cons keeps me from getting bored, and this is a Good Thing.

The week after that we’ll be heading down to South Carolina to visit my parents’ place and see my sister and my two nephews. That should be a lot of fun, too.

The last weekend in July is, tentatively, unclaimed. I somehow doubt it will stay that way, but we’ll see.

As an aside, howdy to Tango (vt_komainu) who thought he could sneak onto my friends list without me noticing 🙂

Well, back to the lab. Laters!

You know, for a weekend where we set out to do very little, it turned out that we actually accomplished a good bit.

Courtesy cut for those who don’t want to hear about our *fabulous* weekend

Brophey had it right:

“It’s okay now, my dog found the chainsaw.”

Bwahahaha!

A very fun little movie – not particularly deep, but the kind of summer fodder I enjoy. Of the $7.75 we paid, I’d say with was worth $6.75 so I don’t feel ripped off or anything.

It’s a link-o-licious kind of day!

First off, we have, that bane of our society: Kinder Eggs! Who knew such evil was among us?

This is worth reading if only for the headline: Today’s recipe: Grilled Martha

Apparently hen parties invading gay clubs is a rising problem over in the UK. Somehow I just don’t see that happening on this side of the pond…

Did you know that there’s a Dog News weblog? Isn’t that just cool?

Morons on Parade #291

Meaningless meme propagation

So we headed down to Emerald Isle last Friday.

Read all about our weekend at the beach!

Damn, I’m feeling good! Why? Well, a couple of reasons.

First of, it’s Friday. yay, Friday!

Second, in just a few hours, we’re heading down to the beach. Surf and sun (well, surf anyway) await!

Third, I just got back from the gym, where I had my quarterly body composition testing. The short version: All that exercising is really making a difference!

Here’s the long version

This week is taking forever…

Tomorrow after work, takaza and I are going to be heading down to Emerald Isle, North Carolina, located on the Bogue Banks. Our friends Donald and Janelle invited us as well as Thomas and Sherry (Sherry’s cool, of course, because she has Cliff, the Inexhaustable Husky) down for the weekend to a condo that they’ve rented for the last week. I’m not sure what we’re going to be doing down there, but I reckon we’re going to do some swimming (without any unfortunate incidents, I hope), vegetating, and generally enjoying the company of our friends. We’ll even be {gasp!} out of email contact!

All of that is, of course, assuming we can get through today. Bleah. Still have some material tests to run and some online training to go through (yay), then to the gym. Tonight’s looking like pork chops on the grill. Oh, and laundry, so we’ll have something to wear to work next week when we get back from the beach.

Oh, something that amused me from elynne‘s journal (although apparently the meme is spreading): Things on my interest list that aren’t shared by anyone else
Clearwater Hot Tubs – A little place that has hot tub suites, located outside of Chicago. Lovely, just lovely.
Halsted Street – The Main Street of Boystown, the gay ghetto of Chicago
Pat Cassidy – A man with a great radio voice, he woke me up every morning on the late, lamented WMAQ-AM. He’s now holding a similar position with former rival WBBM-AM.

Wow, out of 84 listed interests, only three singletons.

Well, back to work…

Y’know, I thought the new toothphone mentioned in this article is a pretty spiffy new gadget.

It becomes quite funny, though, to anyone who’s ever seen the deleted scenes on the Hedwig and the Angry Inch DVD.

Everybody Loves Nude Swedish Farmers!

A calendar featuring nude farmers armed with pitchforks, shovels and wheelbarrows is creating a stir in Swedish agriculture circles. A national farming organization, which presented a similar, hugely successful, calendar last year, is worried that the new version made by a local group of farmers could defeat the purpose of the original calendar. “They’re surfing on our wave of success,” said Ann Linden, one of the creators of the 2002 calendar. Linden said the first version, featuring waist-up, black-and-white photographs of nude, young farmers in farm settings, was designed to change the image of Swedish farmers as “grumpy old men with hats.” The new version, featuring glossy pictures of tight clusters of completely naked heavily drugged blissed-out grumpy old men with hats completely doused in Swedish meatball gravy and plying each other with large fresh garden cucumbers while body-painting the message “Swedish farmers do it with lutefisk” in body glitter on each others’ shaved chests, is just plain weird. “And what’s with this hot pink donkey right here?” Linden might’ve asked, pointing to the July photo. “What the hell are they doing to it with that salad spinner?”
(Story here, Read more stuff by Mark Morford)

That’s funny, I thought I’d updated my LJ over the weekend. I guess I planned to do it, even constructed the entry in my head, just neglected to actually sit down and write it. How very odd…

So anyway, picking up the narrative from where we left off, we wound up heading over to Boston Market for dinner on Friday. The ambience leaves a lot to be desired, but their chicken is quite tasty, and it’s a fast-food place where the food is even slightly good for you. Though the steamed vegetables had been steamed into submission. I think I’ll skip those next time. After that, it was back to the house to relax and geek out on Furrymuck. I haven’t been on Furrymuck lately, and it was nice to chat with some of the good folks there.

Saturday was a bunch of errands, which takaza has already described so I won’t bore you except to say that the wine shop is quite nice, if a bit sparse in inventory right now, and the Italian store has a truly fabulous selection of goodies (which you can order over the net, too!). Dinner was indeed decadent, as I made a tasty carbonara sauce.

Carbonara sauce recipe here

(Hooper X: “‘What’s a Nubian?’ Bitch, you almost made me laugh.”)

Glorious Friday!

Not much on the agenda for the weekend, and this is a Good Thing. Got the daily gym trip after work, then dinner, which will likely be supplied by one of our fine local eateries since we don’t really have jack in the house to cook – heck, it’s been almost two weeks since we went to the store. On the one hand, that’s good because it keeps the bills down. On the other, the choices start to get a bit lean by the end of the second week. So a trip to the grocery store is on the agenda for Sunday.

Also this weekend, I need to take back the shirt I picked up at Kohl’s last week. I don’t know what they define a XXL as, but it fit more like a large on me. Sheesh. It’s a bummer, too, because I like the pattern. Guess I’ll have to keep shopping. I’ve found I like some of the tropical-type print shirts that I’ve seen. And y’all can just keep your Big Gay Al comments to yourselves, thankyouverymuch.

Other stuff for the weekend: teach myself PHP. No problem, right? Actually, it’s a side-project I’m kicking around as an experiment with web forms. We’ll see if I can figure it out or not. Probably poke at some Midwest Furfest stuff too, and see where we stand on a couple of items (like sponsor goodies). Tomorrow (June 15) is a big deadline for some things, and I’m interested to see if that deadline has been met.

Well, off to the gym. Y’all have a great weekend!

So, where would I like to live? Well, here’s what FindYourSpot says (link courtesy of J’s Notes):

I want to live where?

Dreary week, and having problems finding my motivation. I thought I left it in the top left drawer of my desk, but no luck.

What kind of week am I having? On Tuesday I had to make a batch of conductive adhesive (adhesive with metal powder dispersed into it). The mixer I was using shook a screw loose. The screw dropped into the pot while it was mixing and it got knocked around in there for a couple of hours. By the way the pot is Teflon-coated. Er, was Teflon-coated. Oh and by the way, all that Teflon had to go somewhere – into the adhesive. Teflon is not a good conductor. Into the trash goes that batch – a full day’s work wasted. With any luck it’ll be up and running tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath.

Yesterday I was trying to assemble the machinery I need to start testing some UV-curable coatings. Pretty simple – air-powered mixer, mixing shaft, dispersion impeller. Easy, right? First it appears that all the mixers are in use. I find one squirreled away in one of the labs and grab it. Then all of the chucks are either in use or don’t fit the available mixers. I go to Home Depot – none of the chucks they stock will work. I come back and take the one chuck I can find to the model shop and have them drill it out so it will fit on the mixer shaft. Now I need to go hunting for a suitable mixing shaft and dispersion blade. Part of the problem is that the six or eight technicians we have all guard their equipment jealously, and stuff gets hidden away so no one can find it…and then they forget where they put it. Or they won’t tell anyone where the stuff is. It’s like working with a bunch of third-graders, I swear.

OK, rant over. The good news is that I found out that a bunch of my old SCA friends are keeping online diaries, just not on LiveJournal. They’re all over at DiaryLand, where they’ve created a nice little network of folks. Keeping up with friends seems a bit more difficult using DiaryLand’s system – you have to load each page individually, rather than have everything dumped into a Friends page like on LiveJournal. But now I can see what’s going on with Jen, Jason, Wendy, Mel, and Genie. Fortunately, Genie has seen the light and also has a LiveJournal (geniealisa, to be specific)- hi Genie! Why am I so happy to have found these folks’ diaries? Because they post wonderfully cracked entries like this.

Well, that was fun.

The past few days’ silence was due mostly to our trip to Columbia, Maryland for Jen and Alan’s wedding. Jen is a dear friend from my days back at Virginia Tech and in the SCA, and someone I don’t get to see nearly often enough anymore. It was a fun occasion and I got to see many old friends I hadn’t seen in years. It’s always fun chatting with Tracie (and her boyfriend Chris is both cute and a fun guy to talk to – a big improvement over past…uh, never mind). With any luck, we’ll be meeting them in Charlotte sometime in August for a weekend at Carowinds. Yay!

After the wedding (which was around noon) we grabbed a small bite at Boston Market (surprisingly tasty, actually), then went back to the hotel and napped a bit. And stuff 😉 After a few hours, brophey and rasslor came by and we went to a local Mongolian BBQ for dinner, then hung out at Best Buy. Next we went to a small laser tag place that had Dance Dance Revolution and I determined once again that I may be gay but I have neither the rhythm nor the coordination that’s supposed to come with my orientation. Hey! I got gypped! 🙂 After that we crashed back at the hotel and watched part of the Canes/Red Wings game (then 2nd of three overtimes) before Brophey and Rasslor headed home and we went to bed.

Sunday we got a surprisingly early start and were even able to get a good breakfast at a little coffee shop around the corner from the hotel (which beat the heck out of the $10 buffet the hotel was serving – ugh, cold bacon and rubbery scrambled eggs, no thanks). Brophey and Rasslor met us there and we drove the two hours down to Kings Dominion. We rode roller coasters, enjoyed the beautiful weather, and then headed home. Lots of driving for a short weekend, but we had fun so it was worth it.

Today was pretty nondescript – getting back into the swing of things and wondering why I was so darned tired. Ah well, I reckon I’ll get some good sleep in tonight and tomorrow won’t be so bad. I hope.

OK, now this is just downright cool. Using a ruler, Scotch tape, some rather strong magnets, and nine steel balls, you can build your own Gauss Rifle.

(The magnetorheological fluids are pretty keen, too – in fact, my employer has a division that makes them!)

Well, I’ve finally gotten off my butt and started the process of revamping my website. This is a much cleaner design than I had before, and is also my first venture into cascading style sheets (CSS).

I still need to re-do my furry page (woefully out of date!) and my Mage page, but the home page, biography page, and coming out page have all been done. I’m open to any comments on style, colors, design, or whatever y’all might have!

MEN DO TALK ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS – You Just Have to Know How to Listen

Mmmm…Mike Piazza… 🙂

Y’know, RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a truly nifty thing – it takes your site’s content and publishes into XML. What does this mean? It means that if you have the right client, you can gather the content of several different sites into one place – pretty cool, if you read a lot of weblogs or that sort of thing. I mention this because LiveJournal recently turned its RSS feeds back on, so you can combine people’s journals into the mix. A very cool concept.

The fly in the ointment? I haven’t found a Windows client that I like yet. The user interfaces leave a lot to be desired. I’ve tried Amphetadesk, FeedReader, Headline Viewer, and HotSheet – either they’re too slow, too clunky, or don’t display the results properly (granted, that last one could also be the fault of the sites supplying the XML). I have yet to work my way through the web apps – maybe the answer I’m looking for is there. I really like the concept, and I’m hoping I can find an implementation that suits my needs.

And speaking of fun geek stuff, here’s a link especially for rustitobuck that probably represents a good synthesis of both of our views:
TiVo: Why I hate the company–but love the product.

Some cool/amusing things:
1. Last week LiveJournal founder and Supreme Leader bradfitz asked for any questions LJ users might have about the service. Today he answered them. Quite amusing and informative.

2. Interested in setting up a wireless network, but didn’t want to spend too much money? Boing Boing has pointers to $35 PCMCIA WiFi cards and $53 WiFi access points (after mail-in rebate).

3. Morford strikes again!

Onward, Armies Of Happy Sequined Darkness
With music blaring from more than 20 sound trucks, hundreds of thousands of people danced and marched through Sao Paulo Sunday in what was billed Latin America’s biggest gay pride parade. Police estimated the number of people at 400,000, twice as many that took part in last year’s parade. Waving rainbow flags and dancing to the sound of disco and techno beats, the multitude of gay men, lesbians, transvestites and drag queens marched some three miles for show at the Praca da Republica, a downtown square that is home to many gay bars and clubs. “Holy sh-t on a rope with a dangling Jesus, they have gay people in Brazil?” puled Pauly Pomentori of the Buena Vista trailer park and Homemade Leather Belt Depot in Woonsocket, South Dakota, fluffing the fur on his taxidermied mongoose named Red while simultaneously kicking the cat off from dry-humping his shin. “I feel all closed in and surrounded by the debauchery and immorality, by all the sin and transgression against the Almighty, so many happy flamboyant colorful fun-looking crazy gender-whacked sexed-up people out there, and I can’t even steal the Spice channel. World’s going to hell, I tell you.”

How do you write a big wrap-up when you didn’t do much? Ah well, we liked it anyway.

Courtesy cut for those who don’t want to read the minutiae of our weekend

Wow, this week has flown by. I need more four-day work weeks 🙂

We’re slowly getting used to not having a whole houseful of people. Last night was pleasant – takaza and I each taking some quiet time on our computers, then eating dinner (yummy burritos!) while watching our newest addiction, then a relatively early bedtime.

This weekend we’re kicking around possibly joining the furry outing at Paramount King’s Dominion in Richmond, but given that it’s going to be hot and cworded, plus Hypersoic XLC is reportedly still down, we’ll probably take a pass.

Another possibility is that Madstone Theaters is opening up a six-screen theater which will feature “art-house” and independent movies, and they’re showing a bunch of free movies all weekend. I’m leaning towards “The Man Who Wasn’t There” because it’s by the Coen brothers and I love their stuff. They also have “Brazil” (brilliant movie, but rather depressing) and “The Piano” (lots of naked Harvey Keitel, but pretty dull otherwise), among others. Madstone has opened theaters in Cleveland and Denver and the reviews seem to be pretty positive, so if they have a good thing going I’d go so far as to buy an annual membership to support it.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to being able to sleep in some this weekend (well, at least until 8 AM. Hey, that’s sleeping in for me!) and relaxing a bit. We’ll see how good I am at it 🙂