The left picture is a typical sunny day in the office. I've been sweating like a stuck pig when the temperature outside is below 20, and so the days when it's cloudy are actually something of a relief.
I love the change of seasons, and it's pretty calming to look out the window and see snow falling. I think I generally like practically any weather that's "isolating," in the sense that it evokes images of a cacoon. (This, at least, helps me generalize my like of rain, snow, and fog.) There's always a sense of mystery when it snows, or when fog banks roll in—it brings this to mind:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
(TS Eliot, "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock"; incidentally, if anyone is looking for a present to buy me for Christmas, a collection of Eliot's poems would be pretty cool. Make sure it has Hollow Men, The Love Song, and Wasteland.)
So the weather this week has made me happy. The days when it's not cloudy look like this:
These are the weeks when I really am grateful to be here.
Naturally, I trained and taught this week. I'm learning how to ref point sparring, which has proven to be a bit more traumatic than I expected. Fortunately, I have a few months before it really matters, which gives me a bit of time to learn it all. I was not very good on Tuesday and marginally better on Thursday.
I also fought on Tuesday. I'm slow and not good at fighting. But again, I have a few months to work on things, which is good, and hopefully I'll get a couple pieces of equipment that will help me exercise for it a little. I'm trying to straighten my hips—the one "opens" more than the other—and it would be nice to have that sort of control. I never really had to work very hard for my skill in the martial arts, I don't think, but now that age is catching up with me, I think conditioning is going to play a bigger and bigger rôle.
Work has been busy, and so I've been keeping out of trouble for the most part. One of our servers crashed, and so I'll be spending part of next week putting it back together. It's caused not a couple problems in trying to release a beta of one of our products.
I've also spent a fair amount of time trying to track down several bugs. We're going to start regression testing once one of them is ironed out, and that's going to take up some resources, too. I have lots and lots to do. Which is much, much better than going hungry.
I plan on actually taking pictures today. I didn't get to last weekend because of a memorial service I went to for a family friend. It was good and appropriate, and I was glad to see some people I haven't seen in a long time.
I also expect to do a little shopping for necessaries and some stocking stuffers. Unlike some people, I can't finish all my shopping in a single go, because I never know what to get people (or myself; hmmph).
Ohio State is in the national championship, mostly because no one else wanted to go. Hopefully we won't embarrass ourselves this time around. At least January got more interesting. I'm definitely going to watch the Illinois–USC game as well. I'm excited about that, almost as much as the OSU-LSU game.
The Flyers are doing okay. I haven't seen nearly as much hockey as I should have at this point in the season. I'm going to have to buckle down and watch versus or something. Of course the real annoyance in this case is that crapcast has degraded our cable service, and I think they're doing it on purpose in order to force people to switch to their digital service. Not like there's anything good on the Boob Toob anyway—why would I want to have more channels of the same garbage?
Also, I have to leave you with this clip, of one of my favorite Pinky and the Brain episodes ever:
3 comments:
No it's because unlike some people you probably didn't only get one day in which you got to go to the city to buy presents.
As for self presents, pretty shiny phone/camera/etc-thingys that are shiny and pretty come highly recommended I understand.
TV is a complete waste of time. Unlike say the internet.
So if you had a video of that why did you insist that I read it?
The tissues routine is to repeatedly taunt a sulking child with "don't smile-tissssuuuuussss" really loudly until they smile and get very angry and possibly throw things at you. (tissues because they are going to need one to mop up the tears they are so insistent on shedding over the travails of their lives. Hahah I wrote lices at first.)
Nothing makes the whiney/sulky child angrier than the tissues routine in my experience. And it often makes them think twice before whining/sulking again.
Yes, because they learn that whining only gets them mocking and derision and eventually they stop doing it. Taunting their pain is way better than ignoring it.
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