Governed by serendipity and entropy

I made dinner for eighteen or nineteen people this year -- I've lost track of exactly how many and can't be arsed to think about it too hard right now. Within those people were my mom and her husband, and Dan's mom and sister, who are all meeting for the first time. (Well, my mom and her husband have met ... you get the idea.)

Everything went really well -- there was LOTS of food, everything turned out wonderfully, and other people cleaned up. Seriously -- best holiday ever.

... We will be arriving into San Francisco on December 28th, around noon. We will be in the area until Jan. 2nd, at which point we will be heading to Tahoe to hurl ourselves down some perfectly good mountains until January 5th. We'll be back in SF on the 5th, and then we leave stupid early on the 6th to come back to the small, flat village we call home.

We want to see people. We want to do things. We want to hang out with friends as much as possible, and go somewhere fun for New Years Eve. We want to eat good food and see art and meet new people and just generally have a good time!

We can't wait.

Dan and I have decided that around the Christmas/New Years' holidays we would like to be in / around San Francisco, with a detour to Tahoe to go skiing.

I know that seems like forever from now, but we'd like to start planning soon, since we'll need to buy flights and look for places to stay. Does anyone have any spare rooms or floors we could crash in/on in or around San Francisco, or any leads on places we could rent/stay for a few days in Tahoe?

And, of course, we would love to see friends who live in the area, so let us know if you're going to be around! Like I said, we don't have dates or anything figured out yet, but we'd like to try to get a working plan in place relatively soon.

Thanks!

Nico just peed on my foot while we were eating dinner.

That's the third time my foot has been peed on by a cat.

Is it me?

Dear LG:

Please explain to me why, when my phone battery is running low, you notify me of this fact BY DOING THE VERY THINGS THAT CAUSE THE BATTERY TO RUN DOWN THE QUICKEST -- like beeping and turning on the backlight?

Love,
me

Window kitty -- in several different meanings of the word.

Thanks for birthday wishes! I had a wonderful, relaxed birthday which primarily consisted of going to the locally-owned ice cream shop for birthday ice cream (yay for places that give you a free scoop of ice cream on your birthday!) and then having friends over to have pizza and play Rock Band. pianodan was supposed to play an outdoor concert yesterday that got rained out (despite the fact that it wasn't raining by us, it was apparently raining pretty hard just 20 miles south), so we suddenly had friends who also had the evening free ... so there was much merriment-making.

Plus, I got a lot of work done on a paper I'm writing, got a new cookbook to help us deal with the veggie inundation we're going to experience once the CSA kicks in at the end of June, and had a record number of views on my silly little website. (If you haven't checked it out in a while, you should -- it's exploded.)

So all in all, a very good day.

It's my 39th birthday, to be exact. And no, that's not an "I'm actually 40 and am just saying I'm 39" kind of thing. I actually am 39.

At midnight last night, pianodan and I started watching a Simpsons episode that just happened to be next on the DVD, in which Homer hears that the average life span for a male is 76.2 years old. He freaks out, because he realizes he's 38.1 and has wasted half of his life. Marge oh-so-helpfully tells him, "You're not 38, you're 39!" at which point he curls up into the fetal position and starts rocking back and forth.

Maybe that wasn't the best thing to watch at that precise moment.

Anyway, I've always had mixed feelings about my birthday. Because I'm adopted, my birthday isn't really that big of a deal for my mother. The bigger day for her is the day she brought me home from the adoption agency -- July 24th. I always had parties, etc. for my birthday, but emotionally the more important day for my mom is Coming Home Day. I always got presents on both days, which is cool when you're a kid; as I've gotten older I've realized the emotional significance the second day has for her.

The other thing is that as I've gotten older, and more separated from my family, birthdays always remind me how different I am from them and how little they actually know and understand me. I'm not sure I can explain it without sounding ungrateful or snobby, which I'm not, so I'll just leave it at that.

So, yeah. I'm 39. And yeah, I guess I am freaking out a little bit about the number. It's a pretty big number, and the next number has a 4 at the beginning of it. I don't feel 39. I don't think I act 39, and I really hope I don't look 39. You're only as old as you feel, blah blah blah. 40 is the new 30, blah blah blah.

Anyway, happy birthday to me, my college friend Karen, Richard Strauss, Joey Santiago (the guitarist for the Pixies) and Hugh Laurie.

End of the semester pro tip:

If you're going to send an email to your professor asking that your grade be "bumped up" to the next highest grade, don't be one of the students caught plagiarizing earlier in the semester.

The ending of a conversation with a graduate student today:

Me: "Well, I'm happy I could corrupt you."
Her: "I'm pretty sure that's what you get paid to do."
Me: "I know! Isn't it fantastic?"

pianodan and I are going to Stockholm, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg in August. We were waffling about whether or not to include all three, but we just found plane tickets that let us fly into Stockholm and then out of Helsinki -- for LESS than flying into and out of one or the other! So plane tickets are bought, and our itinerary is shaping up thusly:

Fly into Stockholm
Spend a couple of days in Stockholm (suggestions welcome!)
Take ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki -- and by "ferry" I mean "massive cruise ship"!
Spend a couple of days in Helsinki (suggestions welcome!)
Go to conference in unpronounceable city north of Helsinki
At end of conference, go with tour group to St. Petersburg for three days
Return to Helsinki
Fly home

Generally I hate hate HATE package tours, but I have several friends who tell me that St. Petersburg is not tourist-friendly, and that if you're going to go a tour is really the best way ... so for this, we'll deal with a tour group.

Yay!

The bank that holds my mortgage, Fifth Third, just sent me an offer saying, "Since you're such a good customer, and since you always pay your bills on time, we're going to let you take a month off from your mortgage payment."

Fine print: This offer will cost you $55, which will be added to the principal of your mortgage and will accrue interest, as will the payment you don't make.

So, let me get this right, then .... you're doing ME a favor? Sounds to me like you're looking for ways to charge fees for things to help your OWN ass out.

And if I'm such a good customer and I always pay my bills on time (which I do, BTW), why did you cut my home equity line last month?

Bastards. Sneaky fucking bastards. I hate to think how many people are going to fall for that ploy.

In the last week or so, I've come up with enough data and research for about three papers. I'm still struggling with some of the questions, but the answers are there in front of me; I just have to figure out what it all means.

It's really cool. Now I just have to sort it all out and figure out how to write it up and what journals to send it to. I'm hoping I can get it done relatively quickly, since there's a few other projects that are currently in progress and will need to be written up when THEY run their course.

So, yay me, and yay research!

I came home tonight and heard, once I'd made it in the door and into the kitchen, a high pitched shrill, constant tone. I tracked it through the house (which wasn't easy, given that my head is a bit congested today) and finally realized (after checking all of the smoke detectors) that it was coming from the computer room. PD's been having some problems with his computer, so at first I thought it was his machine. Then I realized it was coming from near my computer. I couldn't localize it at first, and fiddled with some speaker knobs and such before I realized it was coming from a cheap calculator that CVS sent me a while back for getting my prescriptions filled there. It was emitting a piercing steady tone despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, the calculator wasn't even on.

Not having any attachment to this thing at all, nor any real need for it, I opened up the back cover and tried to take out the battery. I couldn't really access it entirely, and once the thing was in my hands the tone was really loud, so I managed to slide the battery a little bit out of the metal casing holding it in place, and the shrill noise stopped.

Until about an hour later, when I heard a deedle deedle deedle boop boop! noise. Deedle deedle deedle boop boop! Deedle deedle deedle boop boop! Deedle deedle deedle boop boop! I was in the other room again, so I come into the study, and the damned calculator, still turned off and with its battery not even completely connected, is making this noise. Deedle deedle deedle boop boop! I ended up prying at the battery with a pair of pliers, trying to get hold of the battery and get it to stop making this infernal noise. Deedle deedle deedle boop boop! The battery is more than halfway out now, and it's still going. Deedle deedle deedle boop boop! Finally, I manage to get hold of a tip of the battery and yank it out. Deedle deedle deedle boop boooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ..........

The noise finally stops, although I swear it continued after the battery was out of the thing for at least three to four seconds.

The thing is now sitting disemboweled on my desk, and I'm just waiting for it to start up again even though its battery is completely removed. And mind you, if it does, I'm stomping the stupid thing into oblivion.

I have never simultaneously wanted something to end AND continue as much as I simultaneously wanted this to end and continue.

We misd you, hish, the lolcats.

We had nachos for dinner. How, you ask, are those brought to you by the letter C?

Said nachos consisted of:

Chips
Cheese
Cow ... and on said cow there was chipotle pepper, cumin, cloves, cinnamon, and chili powder.

(Oh, and there were jalapeños. But those don't count.)

It's currently 5 degrees outside, and 11:21 pm ... and our heater's broken.

Because I don't have time to do these during the school year:

Here's how it works:
1. Put your music on shuffle. (Yes, it's one of those)
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!

Let's go, Dopi! It's behind a cut because it's long.

( Yet another iPod meme ... )

I've been torn about the whole auto industry bailout thing. On the one hand, I really believe the auto industry doesn't deserve to be bailed out. They've been making bad decisions (and bad cars) for too long despite evidence that they should be doing something different. I don't believe the management of the auto industry can pull its head out of the sand for long enough to see what they should be doing, much less actually manage to do it.

On the other hand, the state of Michigan will collapse if the auto industry does not get bailed out. We're close to it already -- the state has lost so many jobs -- not just in the auto industry alone, but in the industries that depend on the auto industry. It's scary up here.

So this was a really interesting idea, posed by Michael Moore (I don't care what you think of his politics in general -- I think this is an interesting idea): bail out the auto industry, thus saving the jobs -- but require the auto industry to do things like build public transportation. Require them to develop and build hybrid and electric cars. Not in ten or twenty years, but now.

Moore points out that Roosevelt mandated the auto industry to build planes and tanks during WWII, and he says the way forward now is to work on the infrastructure of our country AND get the US off of its dependency on oil. Better public transportation and better cars could help do that, and having the auto industry building both would save the jobs. It would also require the auto industry to keep the bailout money within the country, instead of sending it to the factories they're built (or are building) overseas.

This was in an interview with Larry King; the transcript is available here.