Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Do you know what that is? That is the smug-ass grin of a married woman. Hell yes. I'll write with details soon, but I just wanted to gloat a bit.
How the world can change.
It can change like that.
Due to one little word:
Married.
See a palace rise
from a two-room flat
due to one little word:
Married.
And the old despair
that was often there
suddenly ceases to be.
For you wake one day,
look around,
and say:
"Somebody wonderful
married me."_
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(17)
12:47:17 PM,Thursday 15 January 2009
In honor of the namesake of our accommodations tomorrow:
Me last night, Weimar-style. Note kickass thermometer-compass cufflinks and evil henchcat.
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02:36:57 PM,Sunday 11 January 2009
My girl.
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01:03:38 PM,Sunday 11 January 2009
We went out to Dances of Vice with Martin and several of our other friends last night, and it was glorious. Just glorious. Martin gave us a box of the Best Cupcakes I Have Ever Eaten as a wedding present and we watched people do the Charleston and we watched buxom dancers pupate alluringly and Martin looked a dish and everyone was radiant and giddy and ridiculous. Best Dances of Vice ever. I wish there was an instant Baltimore-NYC conduit we could slip through on select weekends, because I'm gonna miss that boy more than ever when he leaves today.
Also, tomorrow. Boston. We're almost ready with all the little details. I've been listening to the soundtrack of A Catered Affair and bawling like a sap for a week and a half. We've got rings, clothes, shoes, train tickets, dinner, room all straightened out. Pretty much all that's left is doing laundry, buying breakfast to take on the train, and dropping K.'s keys off with her mom so she can check on the cat. Yesterday I called to make an appointment with the Justice of the Peace, and the clerk was like, "3:30. $75 cash. But she'll only charge you $50 if you show up on time."
Eeeeh!
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(3)
12:47:30 PM,Sunday 11 January 2009
My croissants got all squished. Wah.
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(1)
01:23:32 PM,Saturday 10 January 2009
Blogging from the elevator, which appears to be stuck on my floor, unresponsive to both internal and external buttons. Fortunately K. is on the case and is looking for the super so he can come and bust me out.
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(4)
07:59:29 PM,Friday 9 January 2009
K: Whatcha doing?
M: Googling "myopic keratomileusis".
K: Myopic Carrots of Eleusis! An Ancient Greek pulp novel by the author of Bunnicula.
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(2)
10:51:43 PM,Tuesday 6 January 2009
So because I'm on vacation I kind of forgot that yesterday was Monday and didn't do a single one of my four things. But I also found myself doing one of my four things last Saturday before I realized it was a weekend. Rather than getting a huge ugly red mark all down my calendar this early in the year, I'm gonna give myself yellows for yesterday and just do my four things this Saturday, then try to get back to the weekday routine after the wedding. (I'm giving myself Monday and Tuesday off.)
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02:31:48 PM,Tuesday 6 January 2009
[After half a week of me sitting at my desk all day, not getting my work done]
K: Do I have to get you some Adderall?
M: So I can be even more focused on finding things to do besides working? I'm pretty damn good at it already.
{sigh}
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06:42:12 PM,Sunday 4 January 2009
You know what would be a good productivity tool? Something that locked your browser but gave you the option to unlock it for a specific time period. You can choose when to unlock it, but the amount of time it stayed unlocked would be determined by the program. The longer you let it go before unlocking it, the longer your break interval would be. So if you lock it and then work uninterrupted for twenty minutes, when you chose to take a break, you would get, say, a whole ten minutes of time to browse. But if you only worked for four minutes and then unlocked it, you would get only a minute. I'm not sure how the numbers should work, exactly, but it would punish taking constant quick breaks to refresh the browser and reward periods of uninterrupted work with a correspondingly large period of uninterrupted browsing time.
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(10)
05:12:44 PM,Sunday 4 January 2009
I don't know if it's aftershocks from last year or a taste of what's to come, but it seems like this week has been full of topsy-turvydom. The other day I had to order a serial card for my laptop, since the USB-Serial converters had started causing me problems with the captioning LED display. I ordered a PCMCIA-Serial converter and didn't realize until it arrived that my laptop didn't have a PCMCIA cardbus, but only an ExpressCardbus. So I ordered an ExpressCard-Serial converter and got an RMA on the other one. A few days after Christmas I went to the Post Office to mail it off, along with a couple of late presents for my brother's wife and stepson. I remember thinking to myself as I put the labels on the packages, "Now, don't mix these up. That would be pretty stupid!"
I mixed them up. I hope the nice men at the Quatech factory enjoy their t-shirts.
Then today K. and I decided to make macaroni and cheese -- the fancy kind, with a roux. So we made an expedition to the store braving wind and cold, and go to the deli counter. "Do you have extra sharp cheddar?" I ask. "You mean ultra cheddar?" says the deli guy. I laugh. "Sure. Half a pound of ultra-mega-maximum cheddar extreme, please." Oh, I laughed then.
We got home to discover... half a pound of American cheese.
Then we ordered pizza.
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(3)
07:41:35 PM,Thursday 1 January 2009
So. Obligatory year in review post.
This year has been hard for a lot of the people around me, but it's been pretty damn good for me. My mom continues to struggle with chronic headaches, which sucks massively. K.'s mom and grandma got into a car accident, though they're both doing amazingly well (especially her grandmother, who is some kind of superhero), K.'s sweet old cats died, several people I know lost huge amounts of money in the market and bank crashes, and there's been misery and pain throughout the world. I've been thinking a lot about Zimbabwe, where tyranny, poverty, and cholera have combined to make things unspeakably bad. What on earth be done? Not much. I've given some money to the NYC food bank, the ACLU, and the Obama campaign, and I think they'll all help incrementally. But I'm not sure what's going to happen in the next five, ten, or twenty years. I'm hopeful we'll all still be here to figure out what to do next.
For me, 2008 was pretty great. On the work front, I'm pretty happy. It was disappointing to fail the May CCP fair and square and to fail the November one on a technicality, but I've been really happy with my job and I'm a lot more confident in my steno skills. I'm no longer subcontracting to a single person, though I do work with some interpreting and captioning firms as well as directly with universities and other clients. So that's been really nice, not having to answer to anyone but myself and the people I work for. I was able to make it through the long dry spell of summer without going into debt, and I was even able to afford a new computer and steno machine, which has been unspeakably nice. I'm still frustrated with the limitations of commercial steno software, and I continue to put off learning Python, but that's definitely something I want to address directly this year.
Other things: I haven't played much music at all, and I really want to fix that. I played a few times in an amateur orchestra downtown but then the conductor decided he wanted to make it a professional orchestra that toured every other week up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and I was not so down with that action. I really miss playing. One of my big goals for the new year is to find some sort of regular group I can play with. K. and I getting married is big, but it's happening in 2009 so I guess it doesn't count as part of the 2008 retrospective. What else? I've been reading good fiction, though I'd still like to do more of it. I had a big problem with slacking on the internet over the summer, but I think I'm getting better at managing it. I've got a daily Leechblock timer of 2 hours per weekday for my favorite sites (the blogmass, Livejournal, and Google Reader), and I may start narrowing that down as things get busier. But doing the transcription work has helped to keep me from wasting my free time. I've been going to coffee shops (like the Square Root in Brooklyn) that are laptop friendly but require passwords for internet access. My natural reticence to talk to people conspires against my bloodthirsty internet habit and usually results in my not asking for the password, which means I get a hell of a lot more done than I would otherwise. I got another NaNo novel done, which felt good. I've been studying Sign since May and I'm able to carry on a simple conversation, though my syntax is still way more English than ASL and I can't really understand most uncaptioned vlogs. But I'm getting better, and having a private tutor plus a conversation partner plus possibly a native ASL-speaking CODA giving me occasional tips all help me to build my chops.
I kept up my habit calendar for five months, but then let it lapse in December. I'm planning to start it back up today, but I have to figure out what I want my new goals to be. I had been doing pushups three times a week, and then CCP practice, 30 quiz questions on ASLpro, and three to five minutes of twists on my twisty board every weekday. I finally wound up being able to do 100 pushups in a row around the end of November. Well, first I did 100 really wussy butterfly pushups (barely going down and up at all, but very rapidly), and then I was able to do it with my elbows fairly respectably bent. I'm really, really sick of the CCP/RMR test files. I've done them all a bazillion times, and they were never very interesting to begin with. I'm already able to do the fingerspelling at ASLpro on the fastest speed pretty well, though sometimes it takes me a couple tries to get it right. They have a pretty small stock of words, though, so I'm worried I've just memorized the patterns of their lexicon and I won't be as good at recognizing unfamiliar ones. Oh, and the grinding noise of the twisty board drives K. slightly spare, plus it's kind of a ridiculously easy exercise, without much in the way of muscular benefit.
So this year I think I've decided on my provisional four things, to be increased in difficulty when they get boring: 1. 100 situps daily, plus 20 minutes on the recumbent bike at the Pratt Gym or 50 squats (ugh). 2. 15 fingerspelling words on ASLMS, on the "Deaf" speed setting, which is insanely hard, plus 15 vocabulary words on ASLpro. 3. Two audiobook files (they're about 3 minutes each) on my steno machine, into one big file, which I will review at intervals and bolster my dictionary with as appropriate. 4. At least one line of Python written per day. I think that's pretty good to start with. They're deliberately easier than I think I can do, but if they were at all challenging, I'd be too intimidated to even try them; I know myself. So I'll start up again on crazy easy and then adjust them when I find myself losing interest. The main thing is to make a start.
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(4)
05:26:49 PM,Thursday 1 January 2009
"Ross's approval" came out "rosacea Rolf".
Um... what?
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02:22:18 PM,Wednesday 31 December 2009
Oh, latest update in the gadget saga. I decided to stick with Verizon and get a Blackberry Curve. Part of me had been strongly yearning toward ditching Verizon (my contract had expired) and running off to T-Mobile and the G1. I'd played with it several times in the store and liked a lot about it, plus the T-Mobile would have allowed me to get a cheaper contract. I've been using my phone for three things: calling K. (mostly for brief logistical things, but once or twice each day), calling my mom (for longer periods, usually once a day) and checking my email when out and about. I'd been paying about $100 a month; $60 a month for 900 minutes (400 wasn't enough to call my mom every day; I could call K. for free, since she's also on Verizon), and $30 for email charges (since I didn't have an email plan and had to pay by the megabyte). Checking email was bloody awful, too. I had to press three different buttons and it took about three minutes to get going, with interminable wait times between each button press. If I had gone with T-Mobile I could have listed my mom as one of my Top Five and called her for free, which meant that I could have gotten by on the 350 minutes a month plan, but it also would have meant that K. would have to spend minutes whenever she called me, and that didn't seem right. If Verizon had promised to come out with an Android phone in the next year, I might have waited and kept my terrible phone that even muggers don't want. I really like what I've seen of Android, and I'd love to use it. But I was able to get the Blackberry Curve for free, since I got a $70 rebate and a $100 upgrade allowance. And the new plan worked out to $100 a month for 900 minutes and unlimited push email, so I'm paying the same as before, but hopefully it'll be four thousand times less onerous to check my email now, plus I'll have a qwerty keyboard to send text messages and write to-do lists with. It's not as sexy as the G1 (or the second generation Android phone, which I was seriously considering holding out for), but it was the sensible choice. I'm looking forward to playing with it when it arrives.
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(8)
08:55:34 PM,Saturday 27 December 2008
So I just made myself a cup of Egyptian Licorice tea (inspired, I must admit, by this comic. Suck on it, DAR!) and placed it under the coffee table to steep. A few minutes later, the cat came up and scratched the floor all around it, as if to bury it beneath a layer of dirt. Fortunately we washed our floor a few days ago. But seriously. What the hell, cat? He's been observed doing this to his own food dish after eating from it. We hypothesize he's trying to save it for later, so other unspecified beasties can't take it away from him. Never seen him do it to one of ours, though. Weird.
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(5)
10:06:07 PM,Thursday 25 December 2008
V unq whfg svavfurq gur grfg, naq V gubhtug gung znlor whfg znlor V unq cnffrq. Zl urnq jnf fcvaavat, zl unaqf jrer funxvat, zl urneg jnf tbvat yvxr n cvyr qevire, naq rira gubhtu V unq qbar guvf gjvpr orsber V jnf sbetrggvat gung V unq gb fryrpg "bhgchg gb nfpvv" engure guna "rkcbeg gb gkg". Fb gur svyr pnzr hc fvatyr fcnprq. Gur cebpgbe, n irel fjrrg thl jub grnpurf ng zl sbezre fgrab fpubby, jnaqrerq ol. "Rirelguvat bxnl?" "Lrnu, lrnu," V fnvq, "Whfg tvir zr n zvahgr gb svther bhg ubj gb trg guvf svyr qbhoyr-fcnprq." "Bu, qba'g jbeel nobhg gung," ur fnvq. "Jura V trg rirelobql'f svyrf, V cevag gurz bhg qbhoyr fcnprq naq fraq gurz bss gb gur APEN. Whfg tvir zr gur svyr nf vg vf naq V'yy svk vg sbe lbh." "Ner lbh fher?" V fnvq. "Orpnhfr V xabj vs V qba'g fhozvg n qbhoyr-fcnprq svyr, V'yy trg na vafgnag snvy." "Lbh pna gehfg zr. V jba'g yrg lbh qbja," ur fnvq. Naq zr, fghcvq zr, vafgrnq bs gnxvat gur rkgen zvahgr gb pyrne zl urnq naq svther bhg ubj gb qbhoyr fcnpr zl svyr, qrpvqrq gung V fubhyqa'g ubyq uvz hc nal ybatre naq gung vg jnf ehqr gb ershfr n snibe naq gung V whfg jnagrq gb trg bhg bs gurer naq pnyy zl zbz naq gryy ure gung V gubhtug V unq svanyyl qbar vg. Fb V ohearq gur svyr gb qvfp naq tnir vg gb uvz. V nfxrq uvz bar zber gvzr vs guvf jbhyq erfhyg va na vafgnag snvy. Ur cebzvfrq zr vg jbhyqa'g. Nf fbba nf V yrsg gur ohvyqvat V fgnegrq xvpxvat zlfrys naq unira'g yrg hc sbe gjb zbaguf. V guvax jung zhfg unir unccrarq vf gung ur gubhtug gur tenqvat obneq jrag ol gur uneq pbcvrf ur cevagrq bhg, jura npghnyyl gurl tb ol gur svyrf fhozvggrq ba qvfp. Fb lrnu. Vg'f zl snhyg naq V srry vaperqvoyl sernxvat fghcvq, ohg V jvyy abg or znxvat gung zvfgnxr ntnva. Vg'f n ybat gvzr hagvy Znl, jura V pna gnxr gur grfg ntnva. Nf ybat nf V qba'g pubxr, V srry cerggl pbasvqrag. Gur rkgen zbarl jbhyq unir orra avpr gb unir guvf frzrfgre, ohg V thrff V yrnearq n inyhnoyr yrffba naq nyy gung oynetu. Fghcvq, fghcvq, fghcvq.
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(6)
12:44:20 PM,Thursday 25 December 2008
I should also mention that Moss and Julia are wonderful, even though our train arrived too late to have a proper luxurious lunch with Moss as we were planning to. But we got to hug him and tromp the icy wastes with him before he went back to work, and then Julia hung out with us and led us all over town, pointing out important landmarks like the snowman with the mushroom cloud for a head, and then she went to wait with us in the train station, even though our train home was late too. It was supposed to take off at 6:45, but at 7:10, she was still there, and we said it was totally fine with us if she went home, but she said, "Oh, don't worry. If it doesn't leave by 8:00, then I'll give up." So at 7:59 it still said, "DELAYED" in big angry yellow letters. She was all, "Sorry I jinxed you, guys. I guess I'll go h..." and at that instant the clock turned from 7:59 to 8:00 and the signboard said "NOW BOARDING". It was brilliant. Julia is a woman of great and mysterious powers.
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05:01:03 PM,Tuesday 23 December 2008
K. just blogged, but I want to say something too, even though a lot of you guys already know about it. We're getting married on January 12th, 2009. Yesterday we went to Boston to register; they have a three-day waiting period, like with buying a gun. It'll allow us to get married at any time between December 26th and February 26th. January is perfect, though, because we're both off work for the winter and we'll be able to enjoy hanging out in Boston for a day and a half instead of rushing back to the grind right away. We're going there in the morning, getting married all ninja-style (no witnesses, no guests, nothing but us and the cold, hard hand of the Law) in the afternoon, having a nice dinner in the evening, and then spending the night here (in the Bernstein Room), before going home sometime the next afternoon. Then, through the magic of Governor Paterson and the full faith and credit clause, we'll be considered legally married in New York State.
K. proposed to me pretty early on in the first year I'd been living here. I remember I was still working that night job, and we didn't live together, though I slept over at her place pretty often. I was just getting up at 10:30 or so that night, heading off to work, and as I pushed the button for the elevator, I heard her draw in her breath. I turned around and smiled at her, waiting to see what she'd say. I figured it was along the lines of "See you tomorrow," but instead it was "Marry me." I sprang across the hall in what felt like one step, said yes, cried a little, hugged her tight, and went off to work. We've had the idea in the back of our minds since then, but we didn't fix the details until a month or so ago, when she suggested the whole eloping thing. My parents got married with two witnesses in the Norwegian Seamen's Church back in 1961 after they'd known each other for three months. I think this wedding might have a similar lightness and devil-may-care bounce to it, even though we've been together almost five years (come April if you count when she asked me to be her girl, come August if you count when we started living in the same city.) Not that much will change externally other than the legal stuff (some of which, though not all, has been covered by the domestic partnership we registered a few summers back) and the rings, but it's important all the same. I want it. I can't wait. I love this woman.
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(19)
04:26:16 PM,Tuesday 23 December 2008
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Theme Song
They misspell "principle", but otherwise it's pretty cool. It even uses YouTube's new closed captioning feature. Even though I work with Deaf people, it's been interesting to see how much my work overlaps with other disability issues. I've captioned a cross-disability variety show; CARTed for several forums on wheelchair accessibility in public transit, disabled housing, and blind-safe hybrid car design; and last week I CARTed two meetings for physical therapists about IEP protocol and testing the gross motor skills of kids with cerebral palsy. I like getting exposed to this stuff. It's very different from the sort of experience I had working with severely developmentally disabled (and often physically disabled) adults; because most of them were nonverbal, we never got to see the self-advocacy angle. It's important, and I'm honored to be able to do my bit in facilitating part of it.
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(4)
04:00:07 PM,Tuesday 23 December 2008
