Some random things that happened or I thought about this past week...
» The first day off due to the snow and ice in the area was fun, and I was able to get all sorts of things done (see the point immediately below). The second day was torture as I was bored, had no reason to step outside, and utterly nothing to do inside. I haven't been as glad to go to work in a long time as I was on Wednesday. At least I was able to get out of my apartment...
» I added a new skin to my set at BlogSkins. It's called (appropriately enough) "Snow and Ice" and while it's a relatively simple design, it's been the best received of my designs so far. I wonder if people there are beginning to wonder whether I'm only going to do imageless designs. Well I will until I find a hosting situation where I can limit external linking of my images to specific websites, forcing users to either save the images into their own webspace or look really foolish.
» A little birdie showed me a link to this silly yet addictive Flash game that's been making the rounds. It's set somewhere in the polar regions of the Earth and the only characters are a penguin at the top of a cliff, and a yeti with a baseball bat at the bottom of said cliff. All you do is click your left mouse button twice: once to get the penguin to dive of the cliff, and once to get the yeti to swing the bat. With luck and timing, you launch the penguin like a ball, and the program will tell you how far the bird travels. The longest I've hit it was 588.3 (Feet? Meters? Who knows?). What's your best?
» On the Academy Awards nominations--or more specifically the one category I care about, Best Original Score--the only surprise was that I didn't realize that Horner scored "House of Sand and Fog". I haven't yet heard the scores for "Cold Mountain" (I tend to take a dislike to soundtracks that relegate an important part of the musical experience of the film to a tiny handful of tracks at the end of the disc) or "House of Sand and Fog" (I've long since gotten to the point with Horner that unless he cuts loose and enjoys himself with a project or does something interesting, I feel I know exactly what he brings to the table). But of the scores I have listened to, "Return of the King" is the obvious class of the group. However, if the Academy decides to vote elsewhere thinking that they gave Shore his award for his work two years ago, then I wouldn't mind seeing Newman win the award for "Finding Nemo". It's a precious, bouncy score which is pleasantly reminiscent of his work on "Oscar and Lucinda". I would back Elfman this year (it's almost painful to see how overdue he is for some kind of recognition) if I didn't feel that his work on "Big Fish" didn't sound so thin and dull.
This evening I am enjoying an unplanned day off because of the general inability of the eastern half of North Carolina to deal with snow. Yesterday, the area was inundated with somewhere between 2 and 4 inches of a combination of snow and sleet. Even though I think most of the area would have shut down anyway if it were simply snow, the added sleet convinced the Powers That Be in this area to say "Screw it, let's all stay home."
For those of you that are reading this and have no clue as to what I am talking about, when there's sleet on a cold day after there's been a decent amount of snow, the sleet will freeze over the snow like Magic Shell topping over ice cream, turning everything into a fragile skating rink. For a city for which the running joke is that there is only one snow plow, this can present a bit of a problem. Hence, everything closes down.
Of course, I don't mind. I would much rather watch snow from the comfort of my warm, lighted apartment than to spend it at work, and deal with scraping large amounts of snow off my car while wondering how the drive home is going to be. It encourages my lazy streak, which I am more than happy to indulge.
So, let it snow, so long as the power holds (like it did not last year at this time) and I have enough food.
I've added a new design to my BlogSkins.com profile. It's called "Dusky" due to the darker colors dominating the scheme. I discovered something interesting in the process: the W3C's validation service doesn't like the raw Blogger tags. It makes sense now that I think about it, but it was strange at the time to send something that I thought was valid XHTML and have the validator cough up a lung. Live and learn, as the cliché goes...
It was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday today, and I stopped by a gas station this afternoon on my way to work to pick up a sandwich and a soda to munch on while I settled into the day's tedium. To my surprise—given that the convenience store part of the station is usually a pretty sleepy place when I normally stop by— the place was packed. The clientele was different as well; in addition to the usual assortment of small-payload truckers and professional suits, there was a family with about two children running about.
Maybe the knowledge of what day it was and what it was supposed to mean was rolling around in my head, but I made an observation which I normally pay no attention. I was struck by how diverse this group of people was—the group was mainly black, but there were two white men, including myself, and two Pakistanis behind the counter (they could have been Indian—I'm not really sure and I figured it was too rude to ask them outright)—and that nobody really paid attention. Everyone was waiting patiently in line, some of us chattering about the Carolina Panthers' victory in Philadelphia, as the guys behind the counter scrambled to deal with us as quickly as they could. And everyone seemed to be in a good mood. Now, I know that a line at a gas station counter isn't—or shouldn't be, depending on your point of view—a monumental example of racial harmony. But I was somehow struck by how pleasant and right it felt.
Therefore I was surprised when I got to the counter and joked with the guys at the counter about how busy it was, and one of them countered with "Yes, we're not used to having them in here."
One beat, two beats went by as I he must have registered my puzzled look.
"The kids," he qualified. Relieved, I agreed and joked with him a little more as I paid for my lunch and he bagged it for me. I walked out and took a deep breath, feeling that it was going to be a good day.
Then that I remembered that I still had to go to work. Ah well...
I'll admit it, my weekend was a waste. I could blame it on football; there were many interesting games going on despite a distinct lack of Purple in the teams playing (Mel, Mike Martz is a wuss. Discuss.) this weekend. I must lay blame, however, on rampaging man-eating monsters from outer space.
Seriously.
You see, I picked up the Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set, and have been working my way through the set. The only problem? There's too much to see! Each of the four films comes in its original theatrical release *and* a special edition version, both with commentaries. Also, each film comes with a second DVD with exhaustive--and enlightening--making-of documentaries. Finally, there's a ninth disc filled with whatever bric-a-brac they couldn't fit elsewhere.
I skipped past Alien (as I already had it on DVD--and it's special edition will be the last thing I see in the set) and spent the weekend with Aliens and Alien³. The highlights were the special edition of Alien³, which added 30 minutes and made the film watchable for more than David Fincher's outrageous visual style, and an interview in the Aliens supplement where James Horner drops that psuedo-British accent as he rants about the troubles during his scoring of the film followed by a hilarious coda where he talks about how he and Jim Cameron patched things up in time to do Titanic. At least I found it funny.
And I haven't even touched any of the commentaries! This set is going to take a long time to go through, I'll tell you.
It's only six days into the new year, and I'm horribly tempted to add another resolution to my list: never put anything perishable in my refridgerator ever again. It's probably doomed to failure, which is why I won't put it on my list of resolutions. But I am tempted. And those of you who are smart enough to read the title of the post, notice the word "refridgerator" three sentences back and put the two together are already probably cringing in the awful realization of what must have happened. I'll torture you with the details anyway. This past Sunday, I had my parents over for dinner and to watch some football.
So, this past weekend, I Cleaned.
And by late morning on Sunday I started in on my kitchen, the last thing I needed to do. I did a couple of dishwasher loads to wash what dirty dishes I had and cleared off the garbage that had accumulated. Then I decided it was time to clean out the refridgerator and freezer. Now, with a steady diet of frozen dinners and snack foods (which I will hopefully be weaning myself from this year) I didn't use the refridgerator much over the past year. It ended up as a repository for restaurant doggie bags and leftover food from my frequent visits to my parents' place; where food would be placed and promptly forgotten. The error of that use of the fridge came back to me the moment I opened the door and felt as much as smelled the spectacularly pungent odor of whatever was rotting within.
Now, it would have been a simple matter if the only thing I had to do was shovel everything into a garbage bag and tote the whole thing--at the furthest edge of my arm's length I could allow while still gripping the bag--to the nearest dumpster. And indeed, that was where most of it went. However, there were dishes in there that I needed to salvage--one of my plates, and a casserole dish and two Tupperware dishes that belonged to my mom. So those needed to be cleaned. And to be cleaned, they needed to be opened. I opened the first one (a Tupperware dish that held what was left of peas and ham), I ran from the kitchen to the bathroom coughing and gagging just shy of the point of vomiting. Taking a couple of moments to settle down and take deep breaths, a scrambled back into the kitchen to get back to work. A couple of minutes of work would pass before I was again overcome and had to flee.
After two hours of this, and after I opened the entire apartment up to let the wind blow the stench out (and one phone call to my brother in New York to ask about how to kill the stench in the disposal unit), the kitchen was clean. The refridgerator was clean and completely bare. And I had an hour to spare before my folks showed up. Plenty of time to run over to the grocery store and make a restocking run. Yes, I made sure that the only refridgeratable items I bought were soda and juices--stuff I know I would consume long before they could go bad.
I'm generally not one to make New Year's resolutions. At least not publicly. I have a nasty tendency to ignore or let fizzle things or projects that I publicly announce, even if I only tell one person. Does anyone remember my NaNo 2002 story? No? Exactly my point. So, making statements about what I'm going to attempt to do this new year usually means doom to the resolutions I make rather than using them as mandates for the coming year, which is how they're supposed to be used.
However, I started seeing and reading the inevitable lists of resolutions and predictions on the web, which got me thinking. What did I want to do this year, so I can look back at this time in 2005 and think "damn, that was a good year." I think it's because 2003 was pretty much a waste of a year for me. Thinking back, all I really got accomplished was:
» Writing roughly twice as much in NaNo 2003 than I did in 2002.
» Meeting close to a dozen new people in this year's NaNo.
Sad, isn't it? I thought so too. I'll even go as far as to say that 2003 was my Year of Existing; not much happened to me, and I didn't do much to make things happen either. It just was, and as a result it's making me restless to do something about it, and to do it now.
This self-induced malaise (the best kind!) led to my heightened interest in looking at other people's resolutions and predictions, which in turn heightened my own interest in making my own resolutions. I'd try predictions, if I didn't think of them as the cosmic equivalent of Bullwinkle's rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick ("Again?") and thus pointless if not amusing. But resolutions? These I could do, could control (which is why you will never see resolutions out of me like "fall in love"), and therefore sounded much more interesting. So, I cobbled together a list of four resolutions that I could either accomplish or make great strides towards accomplishing. They are (with notations and appropriate comments):
» Become healthy and fit.
I could have said "lose x pounds" or something like that. But I seriously believe than you can be healthy without being anywhere close to in shape, and look extremely fit and have {insert name-brand disease here} rolling around inside threatening to ruin everything. I want to be both healthy and in good shape, so that why the semantics are that they are.
» Purchase a house.
I like the apartment complex that I live in (it's not inertia alone that's kept me there for 5+ years), but it's high time that I start looking for a house, likely of the townhouse or condominium varieties. It'll probably be the most difficult, and thus the most thought-out, purchase I have ever made or will make, particularly since I'm leery of the hidden costs that are out there. And to be honest, I'm a little scared; I know the apartment routine and am comfortable enough with where I am. Of course, being comfortable is probably what got me into a year like last year. So, off I go.
» Find a source of income based on what I like to do.
This sounds nebulous, doesn't it, like I'm going to pack up and move to some post-modern California and squat on a piece of land, prospecting for gold. It's nothing like that. I just figure that, just like everyone else I know, I could use a little extra money coming in to make life a little less worrisome when the bills roll around. So, if I'm going to do that, it might as well be doing something I like to do. What, do you ask? I don't know yet. I do know that this is the most nebulous resolution, and thus the one most likely to fail.
» Create and release something substantial that I can take pride in.
This covers so many things that I want to create, but have never done for whatever reason. Finally putting together nakaithus.net. Writing a piece of IF. Finishing a NaNo story. Putting together and playing those role-playing ideas that have rolling around in the back of my mind for ages. Getting back to Fourth Point, for that matter. You get the idea. There is too much rolling around in this skull of mine not to do something with.
So there they are, my resolutions for the coming year. I would like to say at this time next year that I did all of these but to be honest , if I get half of them done, I'll be happy. Also, I know that I won't get any of them done without some sort of prodding to keep me focused on these tasks. Can I get you, the humble reader to help, so supply the pressure I need to get going and to keep going? Cause I feel like I'm going to need it.