I have this thing where I feel like reading books on my Kindle doesn't really make them real. Also, I am more inclined to distraction from the Kindle than paper. And you can't take the Kindle on the beach with you, regardless of glare, you would be far to paranoid about sand and salt water. (Or at least I am far to paranoid about it.)

Anyway. I do like my Kindle, and I'm extremely glad I found it. _

Yay yay! I have found my Kindle!

It had slipped down between my matress and the wall. I'd thought I'd checked that, but taking the spare mattress off of my bed made it easier to find.

Now, to contact Amazon to get them to reactivated it... _

There are small children visiting for the afternoon, the children of the people I worked for at Dairy Queen ten years ago (she is visiting while he is kite surfing; we spent the afternoon at a bookstore and a bead store, and then we got ice cream and laughed about how much the DQ had changed since I was there). Playing with the kids is the happiest I have seen my stepdad all week. When she stopped by to pick me up, we thought about not leaving, because he was just so happy laughing and smiling and seeming quite normal.

They are riding my brother around the house like a horse, and he is upstairs, probably crying and monopolozing their mother. _

There is water in my ears, I am slightly sunburnt. I have read Ten Little Indians and am in the middle of a Nero Wolfe novel (also a book about WWII pilots, but the language is weird and I keep reading it before I fall asleep). There have been a couple of sobbing breakdowns, one unexpected when my stepdad went to say goodnight to my sister, she suddenly found herself holding him in the kitchen has he shook with sobs and tears ran down her back. And two, this afternoon, while we hid from the heat of the sun and watched Tangled. Figuring out a movie to watch is hard. We thought Airplane! perfect, silly idiot comedy, oh, wait, whoops, no, forgot the whole pilot and stewardess break up thing. But mostly, blisfull happy beach trip. Our young cousins are with us, and are often nervous of the ocean. This afternoon my brothers put the younger one on a boogie board this afternoon, first to float, then to ride one wave, then a few, and then in the end "No! That one is too little! A bigger one will be coming soon!"

We have played a lot of Clue, which went beautifully with reading Ten Little Indians (less well with The Rubber Band, but I can hear Timothy Hutton narrating Nero Wolfe as though it were on my TV); I won several times in a row. And a lot of Spades, as we always do in a group. _

Conversation with young stepniece, somehow a conversation turned to a friend of hers who is into books about the holocaust.

me: "She should read Number the Stars, The Devil's Arithmetic, and Briar Rose."

her: "Oh, she won't read The Devil's Arithmetic."

me: "It's very good."

her: "She's not allowed to read anything with the word 'devil' in the title." _

We left Boston around 8 at night, and drove all through the night until we got to the beach. We couldn't check into the house until after 3, so we changed into bathing suits in the cleanest gas station bathroom ever, and hung out at the beach. Then we went out for food, and saw Harry Potter 7b. (My stepdad decided it looked too dark and intense, and so he went to see Cowboys vs. Aliens instead.) And then we checked into the house. I sat down to plug my computer in to check on the traffic for my sister from Richmond, and promptly fell asleep, across the bed. _

Conversation last night with the nice, inoffensive roommate, who went with his coworkers to see Captain America this weekend.

me: "So, how was it?"

him: "Not so great. Certainly not as good as the reviews made it out to be."

me: "So, not a fun romp of an action movie where they fight Nazis?"

him: "The action wasn't that great."

me: "But they still fight Nazis?"

So...to rent it at some point, probably. Unless Connor and I have a major breakdown at the beach and go to more matinees than just Harry Potter. _

In the continuing adventures of rewatching Next Generation, I recently got to the Picard as a Borg episodes. They are, still, impressive, of course, but what I was really struck by was the episode that came on immediately after, where the Enterprise went back to Earth for repairs, and Picard went to his brother's vinyard to recover. (Also, Worf's adpoted human parents came on board, since he had just been kicked out of the Klingon Empire or something -- I skip Klingon heavy episodes, they have always bored me. Worf's human parents amuse me.) I don't think I'm used to TV, especially action-y science fiction TV, to do "okay, this really bad thing just happened to our characters, lets watch the emotional fall out." The biggest "action" in that episode was Picard and his brother having a fight in the mud.

Well done, Star Trek, well done. _

I am not complaining about apparently having lost control over the AC such that it's colder in my apartment than I had been shooting for. _

I have my mom's dogs for the weekend. (The split up the dog pack, because my stepdad felt he really needed a dog, and one of the dogs was absolutely miserable without my mom, wouldn't look at him, and sat constantly with my sister in law. So, I have two extra dogs for the weekend, not four. I don't think I would have said yes to four.) The four of us are hiding in my room, which is probably the coolest room on this floor, with the blinds shut, the AC on, and the ceiling fan on. We are all hot and miserable, and I have already turned the temperature down to try to shock the house into being cooler.

Perhaps later I will venture out of my room, at least long enough to do things like make popcorn. For some idiotic reason that I can't explain, today is the only day I wore pants, and I wore full thick jeans and baked. I have changed, since coming home. (My office is properly air conditioned, but the walk to and from the T was brutal.) _

I, somehow, got roped into a ridiculous project that made me want to scream. I thought I was offering to put a fully vetted and ready to go survey into Survey Monkey (entering it, so we can send it onto people) yesterday afternoon, because I am, apparently, at this point the only person in our office who has ever received any training in Survey Monkey (Survey Monkey and our database, but I had rather a lot of training in the database and 20 minutes with someone who was about to move to Chicago to go to grad school who had been our SM expert last summer). It suddenly exploded, there were people constantly making edits and I wanted to scream. So did the other admin who was working on it, as our managers nit picked and nit picked.

Actually, the point of the story was at some point my boss was sitting behind me doing edits on the fly and I was in, editing, doing the <p>and </p> codes for paragraphs (I wonder what bloglet is going to do to that) and some bolds, and she said "do you know what you're doing?"

Me: "Um...making paragraphs? p for paragraph, /p to end it?"

her: "It's html."

me: "Er...yes. I knew that."

I don't know much html, but I knew that. Thank you, Moss, for building bloglet and forcing me to learn such things before you created the wysiwyg add an entry window. _

I was discussing this with Katherine last night, on G-Chat, has the price of pine nuts gone way up? I feel like the Trader Joe's bags used to be >$4 and now they're <$7. What gives? I bought mine in bulk from Whole Foods, or the Co-op in Central because then I could buy just a little bit for pesto. _

I just cast off the flaming peacock sweater I've been working on for months and managed to rip the cast on row in the process. I am seriously upset. I have no idea how to fix this, properly. I am going to see what I can do with a needle and thread. _

My new landlady made me promise to help with the dishes. Meeting her was pretty surreal. _

Because I like the blgomass and don't want it to die, I will post this here.

I am, currently, the person in my office with the best knowledge of our database. My boss is working on getting the Executive and HR people to take me off of the front desk, pay me more, and call me a DBA. (I am guessing she might get two of those, but that I will still be tied to the front desk because sometimes my office is just stupid.) And by "best knowledge" I kind of mean "am the only one who knows how to do anything beyond the supremely basic things, like look up phone numbers." And I am going on vacation in two weeks (hurrah! Beach! Even if this is going to be the weirdest family vacation ever) and I am the only one who has a clue how to query the database. (My old boss, who knew such things, left at the end of June.) So, I am sitting down twice a week with my new boss to try to teach her how to run queries on the database, in case anyone asks her for things while I am gone. I made the mistake of one of the early queries I was showing her involving inner joins, and she freaked out and doesn't get them at all. I actually do get them, but I can't figure out how to explain them. So...help, anyone? I need a very non-techy definition of an inner join. _

You broke already?

_

Had an awesome picnic island day. Then went back to Kelly's, where we all drank too much and nearly fell asleep with my head on the end table and then Geoffrey told us all to go home. Moving will be good. _

I didn't realize my phone which is my alarm clock had shut itself off last night, having drained the battery completely. If I had I would have made sure to turn it on after plugging it in.

Fortunately, I heard my roommate get in the shower. I don't know how I missed her rooster alarm clock but heard the bathroom fans. I have actually been up as long as I meant to be this morning. _

Maybe I should rot13 the stuff about my parents. _

My sister has just described my parents' split (this one, not the first one) as "Mom has just told Chris he failed a test he didn't know he was taking and that he has no chance to make it up."

She has been frustrated with him for years, and I can actually understand that a lot, especially after living with them again. But with both marriage endings, my mom has worked through everything and made a decision without the husband knowing things were bad for her.

Also, both times, she has left with the catalyst being a new guy. None of us really approve of this aspect, and we all rather hope it ends quickly. _