Was has made this a good day. Say something about it here.560 responses total.
IAHB (I Am Happy Because) I got here first!
The new Whole Foods is, well, amazing.
Drove past, saw the cars circling the parking lot and decided to go buy my milk at the coop. I'll wait until next week, when all the sightseers have cleared out of the aisles.
The ticket has been taken care of-- don't know if the judge lowered the speeding portion of the fine, but the insurance part was waved as I proved I had insurance. Also, an acquaintance assured me my friend is resilient and will get through her trouble (see previous Agora)... it is still a little hard, now, being shut out.
I guess that they are closing the old Whole Foods?
Was the new Whole Foods opening why traffic on Huron Parkway was backed up almost to Huron River Dr.?
they closed the old Whole Foods and the old Merchant of Vino last week.
i hate whole foods.
When is Arbor Farms moving to Farmer Jacks' old location west of town? We went by and noticed that they are advertising 'low carb' food - Jim says this is probably bottled water - low fat and low sodium as well. I am happy to have received a home-made get well card with four cats on it from charcat the cat and charcat the grexer. Also a free GNU Squirrel Mail webmail account from jlamb, which unlike my ISP is fast and easy to use, labels its links with words instead of just the word 'TRUE", has an address book, and gives you the option of forwarding attachments and revealing the full header. I will forward spamcop replies to it and test if it even displays other fonts such as Cyrillic. I am happy that I was able to walk all the way around the block today.
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re #10: When do you get to meat your counterpart from Russia? ;-P Re #9: Really good news, Sindi. Keep it up! 8D.
Yep, Whole Foods was a circus yesterday. Everyone got a long-stemmed yellow rose and a welcome. Staff was on-hand everywhere giving out samples and helping you find what you needed. But what looks like my favorite part is the new deli & prepared food section. It's a mini-Harrod's. There is indoor cafe seating and and a nice patio, where I sat and enjoyed a delicious bowl of gingered squash soup, a grilled vegetable panini, and watched the show. *Now* Whole Foods would be a swell debrief site. Unless they stay as swamped as yesterday.
ask them how they feel about smaller co-ops like the ypsi food co-op or people's food co-op, also ask them how they feel about unions. whole foods is a yuppie/pc wal-mart. /airs out the patchouli stink
Friends with friends who worked at Merchant of Vino (bought out by Whole Foods and closed a couple weeks ago) tell stories of Whole Foods systematically dissing the MOV employees who were offered jobs at the new WH store. Basically if you ran your department you could get equivalent pay at WH, but for a shelf-drone job. I'm sure that more indignities await anybody who took that offer, so that WH can ditch their salaries as soon as possible.
I have yet to see the type of co-op you describe around where I live, I think. We'll be getting an interesting grocery store in my hometown, however. Not sure quite yet how to describe it.
I like the Whole Foods store here in Manhattan, its where I go to buy my alfalfa sprout bread
Merchant of Vino closed? I hadn't heard, and I work at Domino's Farms. That's quite a bummer. They had a wonderful selection of beer.
I loved Merchant of Vino. Haven't yet been to the new Whole Foods, though I need to check it out... see if they carry *any* of the things I loved at Merchant of Vino.
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Very cool. Happy new year!
I have gained 7 pounds since Sept. 1. Today I weigh 100 pounds. (I lost about 20 due to cancer this spring and summer). I was able to sit on the grass for a bit without a cushion.
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IHB my interview with 3M went very well--the interviewer even made reference to wanting to bring me out to Minnesota for a visit. Studiously ignoring the little voice that keeps pointing out that Minnesota isn't much closer to Malibu than Boston...it was nice anyway. Plus, I then went out drinking with my labmates and kicked their sorry little strategizing asses at dominoes. :) Also, the interviewer at 3M was under the initial impression that I was a German rather than US citizen--I wonder if that's a commonly held misconception? Might explain a few things.
Today's job interview resulted in a referral to another job department and a second interview.
(Re #23: Why would they get the impression that you're a German citizen? Because you spent some time there?)
Found a cool Futurama fan site ( http://www.gotfuturama.com ) and downloaded a nice wallpaper for my notebook.
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Humour
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TODODDODODOD STOP YOU MIGHT BE FILTERED
not by me.
re 25: I spent a year there between undergrad and grad, doing research, so I listed that on my resume. I suppose at first glance an interviewer might mistake Uni-Tuebingen for my undergrad alma mater. Or maybe it's just that they assume a natural-born US citizen wouldn't be able to speak any other language fluently :) Spent a significant portion of the weekend reading articles from groups that I'm interested in postdoc-ing in, and was left with an "I can do this!" feeling. Very reassuring.
IVHB I got to see Fleetwood Mac in concert tonight at Madison Square Garden. This was sort of a last minute deal, the seats belonged to other people who couldn't go, and last night I was given the opportunity to get the tickets. I said what the heck, you don't see these guys on tour that often, and besides I've always had a thing for Stevie Nicks, and I'm happy to say the years are treating her well, she's still very hot. Anyway it turned out to be a great show. They did a lot of old songs, along with songs from their new album. Some of the songs really brought back the past. When Stevie, dressed in all black of course, sang "Rhiannon", it gave me chills. Stevie belted out the lyrics, "All your life you've never seen a woman, taken by the wind...would you stay if she promised you heaven?" And the audience singing with her as one, sings "Rhiaaaanon!" "would you s tay if she promised you heaven?" "Rhiaaaanon!" Talk about a song that brings back memories. If you see Fleetwood Mac in concert, it becomes pretty clear before long that there is tremendous chemistry/affection between Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham. They used to be a couple and you get the pretty clear idea that on some level they still love each other. When Stevie did the beautiful song, "Landslide", she sang the first verses, ending with "Well I've been afraid of changing, because I've built my life around you, But time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I'm getting older too" And then Buckingham does a beautiful acoustic guitar solo in the middle of the song, and while he's playing, Stevie goes over and hugs him from behind and they look at each other. And you could see on the jumbotron that Stevie had tears in her eyes. Very moving. Obviously the song speaks of their relationship, and even if they haven't been a couple in a number of years, you can't be on stage in a setting like that and not have it affect you when you sing it. They also did a beautiful duet on "Say You Will", the title song of their new album. They also did old classics like Dreams, Never Going Back Again, Gold Dust Woman, Second Hand News, Beautiful Child, and of course Go Your Own Way and a loud, rockin' "Don't Stop" (Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow") in the encore. One of the show's highlights was during the encore set when Mick Fleetwood did a long bongo solo in "World Turning" that brought down the house. All in all, a great show from one of the great bands. They played two and a half hours without an opening act, setting a tempo and a pace that would blow away bands half their age. Fleetwood Mac, well worth seeing while they are still on tour!
IHB a friend and I sat in his living room and had a very deep, cleansing conversation for several hours tonight. IAHB it's cold, and October is my favourite month. :)
I'm happy because I got my leather jacket back from the local shoe repair place last night, and he did an *extremely* good job of replacing the zipper. Though, since the bike is patiently awaiting my return in my parents' garage (poor neglected bike), I'm still singing along to The Clash, "I've got my motorcycle jacket, but I'm walking all the time."
Re #33: Thanks for the review, Richard - sounds like a great time!
IHB michaela is back. :) Also, I second 36--enjoyed reading the review. Thanks, richard!
Looks like I've gotten my cheapo inkjet printer sufficiently unclogged to print the high-quality photo paper stuff again - mostly I just hadn't tweaked the Linux drivers on my new computer. Now I can print chainmail business cards with the current phone number! (just in time to be late for Ren Fest...)
IHB I swam my 8 laps for swimming class within the specified time to earn a B, I was off by 1 minute and 30 seconds to acheive that A. IAHB I am going to be off from both jobs this weekend. I am going to light the fire, turn on GPR, get out the Micro book and study for the test that is coming up in 2.5 weeks.
IHB Richard's review brought back memories of when I saw them here in DC not that long ago - he's right - they are truly amazing. My favorite song was "Gold Dust Woman" - Stevie Nicks rocked!!! IHB I'm back at work and enjoying it. And I'm even happier because I'm going to Phoenix in two weeks to see the new man. Rock on.
Re #37 - I never left. I just lurk a lot. :)
(What is "GPR"?)
IHB of no particular reason.
I saw Fleetwood Mac when I was 11, back in 1983. Before they all went to rehab. October is my fave month too.
IHB I have the highest grade in my Abnormal Psych class (91%). The next highest grade is a 76%. :-P
condolences!
If that class is any good, it will give you a whole new meaning to Madonna's "borderline"
"Borderline" by Madonna was playing on the radio the night I had my first kiss. What do you think it means, Lynne?
(You're old? ;-))
(heh-heh) ...
HAHA. I cant top Katie's response!
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Heh. Guess I walked into that.
That'd be an interesting item--what song was playing during your first kiss. Wish I could remember.
Re #54 - I believe it was "London Calling" by the Clash.
No song, but it was just after watching Schindler's list. Not sure what that says. :)
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Heh, I was in high school. :)
You were in high school?
No song, but we were in the cockpit of her dad's Cessna (On the ground, it was much later when I joined the Mile High Club)
Hmm... some weird song on a mixed tape the guy had made.
Sleep schedule seems to be skewing back towards the normal morning time.
Re #60: Was she a contortionist? ;) I've been in a few small airplanes and they make compact cars look roomy.
IHB Zingerman's Roadhouse is as good as I'd hoped. (Based on one visit, that is. Certainly further testing will be required. :)
Indeed. The menu is changing regularly (they say daily, but I only have two samples, several days apart). We should arrange a grex-test. :) IAHB we got the boat back to its dock; the owner was afraid we'd have to fetch up wherever we could and walk back (south) to the marina. The experience was . . . exhilarating. (The boat was one the owner had built.)
Phone call today for another job interview next week-- the employer is the folks that built my parents' house. I'm encouraged that more interviews are turning up in the job search If only I could get to the job offer stage now...
Got the new Neal Stephenson book last night. Pretty good so far...
Some idiot-proof software... wasn't, quite. Given that most programmers are idiots, this code seemed *designed* to frustrate any attempt to modify it usefully. It had unrelated hardware initializations, was set up to cause spurious interrupts if another hardware subsystem was activated, and had zero useful comments. This might have been intended as a minefield of bugs to prevent modification by the aforesaid idiots; touch anything and it breaks. (Or perhaps just a bunch of cruft left over from idiots. Half-dozen names in the headers on some files.) Got it analyzed, stripped out the superfluities, re-jiggered the principles of operation (worked the first time, amazingly enough), found the underlying bug that caused the need for this work in the first place, fixed THAT... system runs smooth as silk now when it used to crash left and right. Damn I feel good.
Neal Stephenson is just a TRP CC.
I'm safely home after my... er, our honeymoon. There is no phone line yet in my new "home," so by internet conectibility is pretty much nil. I'm logged on from my mother's house at the moment, and only to post this message. The ceremony, the day, and the trip were all just terrific.
(#67: have you seen the Metaweb? Stephenson set up a wiki for annotations (his own and others') on Quicksilver and on people/events/concepts mentioned therein. It would probably be interesting if I weren't so afraid of spoilers that I've avoided reading anything on it. http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml )
Where did you go on the honeymoon? (I got behind in agora last time).
IHB I get to see Radiohead tomorrow. I have the homework and the lab work all finished for monday morning, so all I have to do it go to my classes, count some E. aureus, and then I am off to Atlanta! booha!
IHB I had an overall lovely weekend in Michigan. Apple picking with the boy and his parents, Whole Foods and a bookstore visit with mine, and tickets to the Wings v Leafs preseason game Saturday night (the 1-1 tie, not the 4-2 loss). I've missed hockey season. Not quite as much as I miss my boy, but him I can at least call.
Found the PC speakers I knew I had (just didn't know where they'd gotten to). Need a power supply, though.
Congratulations, Steve!
Senna - congrats on the wedding. I'm having issues picturing you *married*, but I'll get used to it. :) Wow. Happy news, indeed. IHB the boy and I have smoothed out our issues, and we had a wonderful, happy weekend for the first time in over a month. It was rough going for a while, but it was worth the tears and lost sleep. Phew. :)
I go to Phoenix in 10 days and we have decided to spend some time at the Grand Canyon! Woo hoo!!
Should you decide to hike down into the canyon (on the South Kaibab Trail, most likely) be sensible about the amount of water you take with you. The last time I was there I was appalled at the number of people who were headed down into the canyon with little or no water, despite the strongly worded warning signs begging them not to do so. Having become dehydrated on another canyon hike, I can promise you that "no fun" is about the *best* you can hope for if you get seriously dehydrated in the canyon. That said, the Grand Canyon is phenomenal even in a part of the country that's brimming over with spectacular scenery. Dress warmly, the south rim is at over 8,000 feet.
That's what I keep hearing. I will dress warmly and I'll take plenty of water.
(or rather, dress in layers.. the temperature climbs quickly in the Canyon once you leave the rim and continues to rise as you descend.)
I don't think we'll be hiking down. Dave has ankle issues, I'm still in recovery. I just want to see it.
ISVHB I am now recovering from the Radiohead concert last night. Awesome stage show, awesome light show, the music is even better live. AND SUPERGRASS OPENED! Sorry. All I can say is wow. wow.
IHB of a cool show on Sunday night... I LOVE Th' Legendary Shack Shakers!
Nice weather not totally wasted, since I finally got around to opening up the inside of my car's door, pulling out the latch mechanism, and cleaning off a lot of dust-infested (and winter-freezing-solid) grease.
I sat outside in the sunshine for a bit yesterday. That was nice.
I am very very happy that I got into a pair of jeans yesterday that two weeks ago would have taken Jesus, baby oil and a shoe horn to make it possible.
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IVVHB the Merchant of Vino store on Plymouth Road - which closed recently when its owner, Whole Foods, opened their megastore down on Washtenaw Avenue - will be reopening soon under its ORIGINAL OWNER.
IVVHB I was just at the doctor. I have been cleared to do many many things (except yoga), he thinks I'm doing great and I'm down 44 lbs.
Wow, John, that's great news about the reincarnation of something resembling Merchant of Vino.
re 89: I'm very glad that rumor turned out to be true!
And I hear that Trader Joe's will open in the old Whole Foods location, but maybe this has been mentioned before? (I don't know Trader Joe's.)
I love TRader Joe's. Lots of cool, healthy stuff. Not as exotic as I thought it would be, but the prices are really good.
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IHB Gareth 's cat scan came out clean and they've now decided he can keep his spleen and that it may be some form of pleurosis. Hurrah! And also that the Merchant of Vino will be back (please, please, please!).
I think, were I still in Ann Arbor, I'd do most of my earthy/crunchy grocery shopping at the People's Food Co-op but Trader Joes does have great prices on some stuff and some good store-brand items that make it worth having one around even in an area with an abundance of natural foods markets.
If pleurisy is an infection of the lining of the lung (which I've had -- NOT pleasant), what is pleurosis?
his organs are trying to attach themselves to each other. His splln has attached itself to his lung, thus the pain.
Not a real word, though sounds like a root with an ending.. which would normally mean an inflamation. In my A&P and Microbiology classes, I have never heard of it as being pleurosis...pleurisy, yes.
Sounds like Gareth is generating some scar tissue. Icky.
I saw an article about Trader Joe's once that described it as part of a new trend to create niche grocery stores that target Yuppies. I can't say that gave me much incentive to visit one.
I don't think it's very yuppy
I'd say it's substantially less yuppie than Whole Foods but if you're so concerned about image that you worry about what your choice of grocery stores says about you as a person, by all means continue to keep it real at Kroger or wherever you shop now..
Re #96 - how do they plan to treat that? Is there a way to fix it? It sounds horrible, but I'm glad he can keep his spleen. :)
Interview on Friday to be technical director at a smallish Michigan college theatre.
Pleurisy (from a medical dictionary): inflammation of the pleura, with exudation into its cavity and upon its surface. May be acute or chronic. The acute version tends eventually to clear up.
Well, I 've had pleurisy twice or three times myself. Not fun. What he said is that the doctor called it pleurosis and that it was in layman's terms: "my organs are sticky and my spleen is sticking to my lung". He said that it ws due to an old infection and that they were giving him some pretty strong painkillers and telling him to drink lots of water (in hopes of de-sticky-ing the organs). I can't find anything on the web for pleurosis save the pleurisy entry myself. Since the only symptom he had was lots of pain, I hope this is the right treatment.
Go Scott!
Re #104: It's not so much about image as about the fact that anything pitched at Yuppies tends to be overpriced.
IHB I was finally able to find a parking place and check out the new Whole Foods store. Quite fabulous, in an overpriced Yuppie sort of way. (Guess my age makes me more of a Guppie than a Yuppie, though.)
Re 110 - If that's what your concerned about, Trader Joe's is hardly over-priced
Congratulations, Scott. :) I'm glad he called you.
Yeah, I was meaning to thank you, Eric. So thanks!
good luck, scott! My parents and I had lunch at the new Whole Foods while I was in Ann Arbor last weekend. I was somewhat surprised that it was even more impressive than the Cambridge version, which is also sizeable. We hit the extensive salad, etc. bars and threw it together with excellent French bread, Parrano cheese (two of my Whole Foods staples) and a selection of olives from the olive bar. Yum. Trader Joe's is an excellent store. Their produce section isn't very good, but they have a large selection of cheeses at more than reasonable prices; cheap pasta, yummy cereals and snacks, and a lot of really good prepared/ frozen foods. With the prices that the large chain grocery stores charge out here, I rarely patronize them anymore.
Twila, how long does pleurisy take to go away? I have had it for a few months now - related to the fluid around my lungs that is no longer there (most of it, anyway).
According to http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/1884/pg17.html pleurosis means "a condition which affects the membranes or air sacs lining the thoractic cavity of the lungs" and was so used by Tennessee Williams in "The Glass Menagerie". According to http://www.lesandhelga.com/sermons/2000/102200.htm pleurosis means ""filling up" those ego-abandoned caverns of our hearts with the spirit of Christ, and supposedly "Every Christian" should know this greek work (also "kenosis").
Medscape and Medline have never heard of "pleurosis".
Trader Joe's around here requires driving and dealing with traffic jams, and then doesn't seem nearly as nice as the neighborhood stores. Then again, the neighborhood stores are generally a lot nicer than the old Ann Arbor Whole Foods, as well. I haven't tried the Whole Foods a couple miles from here.
Yeah, the Trader Joe's in Emeryville was a pain to get into/out of...but they had great prices on wine.
i buy my vitamins there.
Where is a Trader Joe's around A2? Or Lansing/Holt/East Lansing where I typically am? What is it, exactly, anyhow?
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RE# 122 -- One is moving into the former Whole Foods location on Stadium.
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I think there is one in the Royal Oak area... at least I went to one near where the great eeyore now resides...
I checked out the food consumerism mecca generally known as "the new
Whole Foods" on Tuesday. They had a new excuse for being out of stock
of the one staple that i haven't found at a less huge/crowded/pricy
store. ("Not enough room" was their standard excuse at the smaller/
older Whole Foods.) I was on foot, so their packed/gridlocked lot
didn't matter.
Time to bother a few nice little local stores to carry it again.
No sign yet of preparing Whole Foods' old store to be a Trader Joe's.
Try bothering the folks at Big Ten Market on Packard.
What's the staple, Walter?
One of the students in the Cisco class I help teach works at Whole Foods and gave me disappointing news. We were talking about how good their sausages are. The instructor loves the chicken and turkey one, I love the breakfast links. He informed us that the chicken and turkey sausages (which people of Mulism and Jewish faith really like, and people like the instructor who don't eat red meat) is made with pork intestine casings. The breakfast links are now being made with lamb intestine casings (they all used to be made with synthetic casings). I am extremely allergic to lamb. There went my source of no sodium nitrate sausage. I told him that he had better label them!
I am disappointed in their cheese selection since they're carrying pricier more "organic" ones for some of my favorites, but oh well.
Whole Foods got me hooked on Perrano cheese. For that, they can do no wrong.
re 131: Check out Trader Joes for reasonably priced cheeses--assuming that one comes to the Ann Arbor area. Out here TJ has Parrano cheese for $6-7 per pound, while WF charges $10-11, and TJ smoked gouda was also priced much lower than any other local source. IHB I watched the Wings game last night. Game-winner, from Stevie Y, at 1.7 seconds to go in the third--on a beautiful give-and-go with Whitney, beat Potvin cleanly through the pads. Outstanding.
I am very happy that Trader Joes is *finally* coming to Ann Arbor. I have been driving all the way to the one in Farmington Hills (when I have another reason to be in that area). Trader Joes is much nicer than Whole Foods. I am also happy to hear about the Merchant of Vino because I often shopped there when on my way up to my parent's house. Now I can still get nice yummies for the lake :)
What a friend we have in cheeses.
Had a good interview at Albion this afternoon, and I'mdefinitely interested in the job.
IHB I put my phone number on the national "do not call" registry. It is at www.donotcall.gov By placing your phone number on this list, those pesky telemarketers will bae prohibited from callingyou. At least that is how it is supposed to work. When I moved to nyc, I didn't know any better and had them put my number in the phone book. Since then I have gotten a regular number of telemarketing calls, some of which are pretty annoying. Just the other day I was awakened by some lady telling me I won a free two night stay at some resort, the only catch being I had to listen to the pitch from the people selling the condos there. Yeah and if I went, I'd never get out of there with my wallet still in one piece! I also get calls from the new york times and the new york daily news, who keep pushing subscriptions on me no matter how many times I tell them that nobody has the papers delivered in my neighborhood because the papers get stolen by homeless people who go sell them on the subway for food money. And calls for magazine subscriptions and "free gifts" and this and that. I can do without these pesky calls. So I like the idea of the Do Not Call list (which is being challenged by the telemarketers in court) www.donotcall.gov put your number on this list and just maybe you won't have so many strangers calling you in the future.
dude, I put my number on that list months ago
My friend won tickets to the MSU Vs. UIUC Football Game on Saturday. Looks like I'll be there!!!
Re: #129 Fine-ground wheat bran. All the other places carry far courser wheat bran, which is much worse for baking but much better at getting stuck in your teeth. (I had similar experience with non-premium tofu at Whole Foods, but gave up after a bit because other places carry it.) Re: #128 You mean Big Ten down by Dog-o-Mat, or whatever the place just south of State became? I didn't think that the former really did bulk food.
IAHB Michigan got it together well enough to win at Minnesota last night. I really didn't think they were going to after the first three quarters. I had noticed the increase in telemarking calls in September, but somehow I had overlooked the sudden decrease last week, until someone mentioned it, here or on the news, a few days ago. Yeah, the "do not call" registry seems to be working. :)
IHB after a chat with my boss last night I feel much more reassured about being able to find a job/postdoc. It's nice to have an advisor whose name carries a lot of weight and who's willing to put forth a little effort on one's behalf. IAHB we didn't give up on Michigan even after three quarters of awful play, and were rewarded with a 31-point fourth quarter. Actually, most of the reason we didn't give up on them was because there was nothing else on TV. Thank goodness for crappy Friday night programming! :)
I am happy because the location that was Merchant of Vino will soon reopen as a new store under the original owner and called Bella Vino.
The strained whateveritis in my back has suddenly loosened up, so I celebrated the event and the wonderful day with a bike ride.
I don't think I've gotten a call from a telemarketer in 11 days. It's nice. This is, however, balanced out by Meals on Wheels having sent out my office phone number instead of their own (for the second time in three years), so my telemarketers have been replaced by a lot of confused Meals on Wheels cusotmers.
My car got found. Now I just have to go through the bureaucracy of picking it up (which apparrently requires getting release forms, in person, from from the police departmnet in the city where it was found, and from the police department in the city where it was stolen, and then going to the towing company, and then I have to deal with insurance on getting whatever has been broken fixed.
U.Mich School of Music had a great production of the musical "Guys and Dolls." Leslie and I only managed to get in by (1) getting the last ticket available at the window, and (2) Leslie found a friend of a friend who had a spare ticket to sell. It was a smash, with two showstopping dance numbers in the second act. My only complaint is that the writers of the original "book" back in 1950 left out the scene I was waiting for, the craps game between Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson for each other's souls. Now I gotta dig out all my old Damon Runyon books. The last show is the Sunday matinee, which is sold out, but if you feel like gambling (*coff*) you might see if there are any tickets turned back in.
re 146: Yay! Glad you get your car back.
IHB STeve and I had a lovely day yesterday, and I've got a new toy. We borrowed my Dad's monster pick-up truck and drove down to Orrville, OH (just SW of Adron) to pick up a beautiful antique loom (built in 1897). It is now sitting on my front porch waiting for Damon to get home from work to help figure out how to get it in the house where it will sit in state. It needs some restoration to get it into full working condition, but nowhere near as much as I feared it would. It still has a partially finished rug on it. We also discovered Kidron, OH. Kidron is an Amish farming community with some wonderful little shops. Unfortunately most of them were closed when we got there, except for the grocery store. It was almost surreal to drive up to park and see half the parking lot set up for horse and buggy. We will go back and spend some time there when the shops are open. We had dinner at Das Dutch Kitchen, an Amish Mennonite homestyle cooking restaurant. It was wonderful! They are every bit as good, even better, as Frankenmuth. The salad bar, alone, was almost worth the drive (about 4 hours).
Did they have shoo fly pie?
We didn't look, dinner was enough to not even want dessert.
Finally got in a nice long bike ride today, and despite the cold I had enough energy for a typical distance.
IAHB I installed freshly rebuilt fuel injectors in my diesel Volkswagen, and it's running more smoothly than I thought possible. I'm also no longer creating a smoke screen when I accellerate hard.
IAHB I went sailing today.
I am happy that I don't have a cold and that Jim cleaned the VCR and fixed our guest's car window and did his laundry before it rained.
It was a good weekend. Very entertaining in the world of roleplaying. My guitar lessons were also very good-- had a makeup on Friday. My instructor decided to start putting scales (Ionian, Aeolian, Myxolydian, etc.) on chord sheet so I'd start looking at the shapes... explained jazz guitarists have a very different approach to looking at scales. Learning more chords and will probably learn to spell them than just learn them as shapes.
One of my favorite cookbooks is a compilation cookbook from one of my former attorneys, who is a Mennonite and got the cookbook from his church. His mom's recipe for chow-chow is awesome! IHB in 4 days, I'll almost be in PHoenix, and because the weekend is fabulous.
(what's chow-chow?)
It's kind of a pickle relish - makes me think of American chutney.
you can find a nice recipe for chow-chow in the "White Trash Cookbook" that i either left at slynne's or she stole from me when i was drunk. ennyhoo, that it's included in that book oughtta tell you something.
I NEVER stole YOUR cookbook. It was Marae's! :P
Two days until sleep study.
Four day weekend coming up. Well this Friday I have to attend an in-service, but I consider any weekday away from the kids a day off, regardless... We did not have Fall Break when I was coming up, but I'm glad it's so popular now. :)
I heard "Morning has Broken" by Cat Stevens on the radio while I was driving to work this morning. For reasons that I dont completely understand, it has put me in a good mood.
Today I got a Halloween card and a roll of Transparent Duct Tape from
jiffer.
:):)
Uh oh. Do you think she is trying to tell you that your duct tape is too gray?
re 165: ?Transparent Duct Tape?
/makes a Tim Allen/Tim Taylor type of noise
Yup! :):)
Pay day. Yippity! Ventured to the new Super Target that has opened near my house. Happy to find the Target generic brands of food and such are a pretty good bargain. Also happy to find 36 rolls of toilet paper for $7.00. I am now well stocked with food and other items for a month or two. Oh. And IHB I have made a budget and it doesn't involve me living on peanut butter for a month.
sleep study tomorrow night.
IHB Comcast replaced our oldish cable modem that had developed a flaky power cord, and now internet speeds seem a bit zippier than they were before.
We have a Comcast service tech in our Cisco Networking class. He informed me that I need to reset my modem. They did something that ups the speed about 10 days ago. Resetting the modem activates it on our end.
I'd already noted the speed increase on our old modem. With the new modem things seem to be running a bit faster.
In 24 hours I'll be on a plane en route to Phoenix and a fun weekend. It is a smart man who attempts to seduce me with tickets to the Flyers/Coyotes game.
sleep study tonight. Supposedly I will sleep very well.
IVHB the Bronx Bombers, the New York Yankees came from behind in extra innings to win game seven of the ALCS and eliminate the evil and hated Boston Red Sox. The Curse of the Bambino goes on! And this proves there is STILL order in the universe. The Yankees will be going to the World Series, and not the Cubs or Red Sox. The Yankees are SUPPOSED to be in the World Series...Cubs vs. Red Sox could only happen if the world was coming to an end :)
IHB I have successfully migrated my personal financial management software to a format which will operate under OS X. I have even added new features.
baseball is a heartbreaker ,,,,,, both deserving teams lost. ,
No kidding. Big deal. The Yankees are going to the series. As if that never happens. It's getting boring. I'd have LOVED to see a Cubs/Red Sox matchup. THOSE teams deserved to go more than anyone. IHB I'm spending the weekend with Ken. He's in his friend's wedding, so I get to see him in a tux. :)
Looks like the Yankees will buy themselves another championship.
IHB I made the right choice last night and stayed to watch the Wings game to the not-so-bitter end. Another game-winning goal at the tail end of the third period--plus a fantastic clean check by Fischer that just happened to shatter the pane of glass. With Daniel Sedin's head. How I've missed hockey season!
If you could buy a championship, the Yankees would not have lost any games in the post-season. They squeaked by in the 11th inning last night, in the 7th game of the series. That game was as exciting as baseball gets; as exciting as anything in sports can ever be. They can and did buy their excellent team which got them into the playoffs... but as the Los Angelos Dodgers can attest, even if you spend a lot of money, you have to spend it wisely to achieve greatness. The Yankees spend the most money, but they also spend it in the best way. The Cubs and Red Sox will never face one another in the World Series, because one of the two teams would have to win. *That* cannot happen.
I am happy I have more interesting things to do than worry about whether other people play ball well. Today we will be picking grapes.
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IHB my medical tests came back a-ok. And because I saw the Tannahill Weavers in concert last night. Hurrah!
I am happy that my immune system is back to nearly normal as of yesterday, which implies that I will stop sneezing soon.
Sindi, do you have any idea how condescending you sound in #183? I'm sorry that we can't all live such enlightened lives like yours. Sheesh.
I'm not a big baseball fan and have other priorities at times, but I agree. Anyway, the tests say it's not apnea per se but a upper respiratory problem that will be treated by a C-PAP machine as well.
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re 187 & 188.... I see. Perhaps Sindi has more interesting things to worry about because she's likely had to examine her life and its being in possible jeopardy far more deeply in these past months. Which, thankfully, y'all have not had to do. (correct me if I am wrong, Sindi). The whole devoted following of sports teams is completely foreign to me. I don't even know what sports season it is. I have a friend who spends ungodly amounts of money on U. of Tennessee clothes, socks, pom poms, hair clips, stickers, and knick-knacks. It all looks like a big pile of orange and white barf. I respect her allegiance; I just don't understand it. ::shrugs and walks away::
Sindi has made similar comments prior to her recent health problems.
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r183: i have better things to worry about than you picking grapes.
Finally dragged my ass over to Vet's Park and spent 35 minutes on a stairclimber. Even after the cold (which is mostly gone!) I'm still in pretty good shape.
Did a good sound gig for Mary McCaslin last night, at which she sang a funny new song about urban sprawl with a refrain about how if we keep building houses on farmland we'll soon have nothing to eat but Soylent Green.
it's made of peeeeeeoplllle! Of peeeeople! IHB I am wearing a perfume that smells like sex-eee vanilla. IHB I have a black cat that will be indoors on Halloween. Well, he's indoors all the time. Also happy because my friends found a home for a stray they'd been feeding.
I am happy that Eric was willing, able, and available to do sound at Green Wood Friday night. Thanks, Eric! Mary and I went to see John Gorka at the Ark the next night. He was terrific.
I was able to walk to Eberwhite Woods and through it and back on a lovely day.
IHB I had a great weekend with the boy, and I woke up in time for my psychology test. :-P
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Warm weather, perfect for a long bike ride.
I've made significant progrees in the last couple of days in cleaning up my apartment and combining/condensing separate containers of similar stuff and throwing away junk. I even hung a picture that's been leaning against the wall since I moved in at the end of May.
The CT scan is over with. They tried to make me drink 32 oz of somewhat peculiar tasting barium smoothie (with a picture of fruit on the bottle), then the IV went particularly badly and hurt a lot and got blood on me and the floor in puddles but it only took 20 min for the actual scan. Breathe in (10 sec), breathe.... Results in two days. Only 3 IVs left to go, I hope, this year. And six blood draws. We stopped to visit our doctor friend who poked and tapped me a bit and appreciated the pawpaws and the jar of pickled red peppers. And then celebrated getting this over with by going to the library and eating at Dinersty, first restaurant meal for a few months.
That contrast paste is truly awful. I could only get about 1/4 of it down when I had a cat scan. IT would have helped if it were cool or cold, rather than room temperature. That same trip they also gave me a thin drink that tasted slightly of grape, also damn near impossible to choke down.
IHB the weather is so nice, and it appears that I managed to re-invent duxelles without even knowing it had a name. If I find some puff pastry dough, I'm ready to make pork Wellington with high confidence that it will work.
*chuckles*...I wonder if the overnight was the boy's psychology test...
New strings (and a good fingerboard cleaning) on the upright bass. About time, too. It's been at least two years, and it's much more fun to play again. The only down side is that a set of strings costs ~$120...
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I hate even good IVs. I have had three bad ones already (they redid the first two, which were not as bad as this one. I said to leave this one as it was only going to be 20 minutes). The stuff I was given to drink was a thin liquid, white, and did not bother me except for the fact that it was very cold. The second one they gave me was room temperature and bothered me less except that it was hard to drink that much at one time. The cold one hurt my teeth and made me shiver for an hour. I don't normally drink things cold, and have been warming all liquids because I have a drug-induced tendency to choke on cold ones. I had to drink part of a third (cold) one just before the scan. Apparently the barium makes some people nauseous, and the iodine that they give through the IV makes some people allergic. So far nothing has made me nauseous, what luck. Results tomorrow. Next IV Monday.
I'm very happy because I had a great weekend. Phoenix was wonderful, Dave was wonderful, the hockey game was wonderful. It was nice to just sit and talk with him and curl up and watch movies. Thanksgiving is but 5 short weeks away.
re 190. It's rabbit season.
Duck season. I'm glad you had a great time, Brooke. I miss you tons!
I'll be home for Christmas - we should go out!! I miss you too!!
IAHB I had a pleasant conversation with other over sandwiches in the Kid's Room at Zingerman's Next Door this evening. (I'd finished my sandwich when he arrived, but close enough. ;)
The nurse practitioner reports that Monday's CT scan (where I was supposed to drink 32 oz of cold barium sulfate suspension) shows that my chemotherapy is progressing well (but I still need at least three more treatments of chemotherapy): Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 09:07:07 -0400 To: keesan@cyberspace.org Subject: Re: CT scan Your CAT scan shows a very nice response. Enlarged lymph nodes previously seen in the chest have resolved. In the abdomen the lymph nodes have also pretty much resolved and the spleen has returned to near normal size. Looks good! Judy
That's great news, Sindi!
Congrats, Sindi! I'm happy because Dave booked his ticket for Thanksgiving, because we laugh a lot over the silliest things and he misses me as much as I miss him.
Great news, Sindi! Good news for you too, Brooke!
congrats sindi!
Thank you all. To celebrate the good news Jim accepted two translation jobs for me (since I can't be heard on the phone due to laryngitis).
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Don't know if there's an ambivalent item out there, but I'll post here. Got a haircut that left my hair really, really short. All the straight bits have been cutoff, and all I have left is curl. Except for a bit in the front that needs to be blow-dried straight. Better than the dead-cat-on-the-head hair-cut I got last week. It's easier to style than longer hair, but it's so DAMN SHORT!
Congrats Sindi! Hope the rest of the recovery goes well.
I wonder why they use barium sulfate as a contrast agent. It is "radio opaque" but would stay in the digestive tract, and never get anywhere near the spleen or lymph nodes. That note also called it a CAT scan (but CT scan in the Subject): typo, or meaningful?
rabbit season.
Sindi, I wasn't aware that you were going through Chemo. I'm glad to hear that everything is progressing well!
Re the barium sulfate - they made me drink a little bit just before the scan so it must be providing contrast in the background because it is in the stomach and the spleen is just in front of the stomach (when you lie on your back). CT and CAT are the same test by different names. The chemo is half-way through six sessions with number four Monday and they generally check after number three to make sure it is working. I don't recall if I drank barium sulfate for the CT scan of upper body only. I think not. Today we got a really good deal on a very large bag of onions at the market and said hello to a few of the farmers there and got hugs and some free apples. The farmers looked even colder than I felt in the wind.
I am really glad to hear that things are going well for you, Sindi
Thanks to all. Today a grexer gave Jim a 233MHz pentium with a modem/sound card in it that he cannot identify. It is probably a winmodem but Win95 is messed up and says it is not there. Broken software is such fun, or maybe the hardware is also broken. There are two copies of the modem software in there. I was hoping we would get the grapes juiced instead.
Jim is happy because Windows finally detected a winmodem on Com 5. What is Com 5? If he can get Win95 working (and a bunch of games deleted) he can install Win98 on top of it with his upgrade CD and try to run his slide scanner with software downloaded at 56K instead of 33K.
congrats, Sindi.
I'm very happy for you, Sindi. I hope all goes well from here on out.
The actual CT scan report (which my doctor friend emailed me) says there are no longer ANY enlarged lymph nodes and the formerly huge masses in the spleen are now much smaller. I wonder if they will eventually disappear. But I still have fluid around one lung which may be turning solid and should ask the cancer doctor to look into that. Which is not so good but hardly life threatening as my other lung is fine. They took out over 3 liters of fluid from the left lung in August and figured the rest would go away. I am feeling much better than a week ago and only woke once during the night. At first I could not sleep more than 40 minutes at a time and more recently would wake every 2 hours. I have not napped for three days now. I get four more days of being normal before Monday (fourth chemotherapy session of a total of probably six). Thanks for all the good wishes, which seem to be working.
Got one of the old fly-rail locks from the Michigan - they did some backstage renovations this summer.
re #210 - i've never attended a hockey game that wasn't wonderful.
I won a bid for a book (Squanto and the Pilgrims; Red Ball series aka "The American Adventures Series") for $3 on eBay. I would have bought this book any time I saw it in the last 20 years and paid a lot more than $3. It was a favorite book of mine when I was in 2nd grade. I never expected to see it anywhere.
Looks like Dude and I are back together. Weekend approaches, and it'll be fun... seeing Macbeth on Friday night with an old friend who hates people and loves cats as much as I do, and probably Kill Bill on Saturday night with Dude.
Calling him "Dude" reminds me of "The Big Lebowski".
Whooee. Way to go Dude!
"Not on the rug!"
"That rug really tied the room together, Dude".
IHB this item made me think about a great film.... "Where's the money Lebowski?" "I dunno, let me take another look..." (as his head is dunked back into the toilet) RMAOTFL
"give us the money, lebowski or ve'll cut off your chonson... ya! und throw it on za ground und schtomp on it!"
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I've actually never seen it. But it's in my Netflix queue.
I found a nice, though worn, leather desk chair being discarded by someone who moved out. I thoroughly cleaned most of my apartment. This is a real accomplishment. I made dinner for my parents. It's the first time I've ever cooked for guests.
The extra hour of sleep from the Daylight Savings change was much appreciated.
We have a kitchen floor full of Chinese treats - jujubes, dried tofu, fresh tofu, two water chestnuts, green mung been noodles, tapioca noodles, blue and brown preserved duck eggs. And a car full of picked apples. And a plastic dishpan full of sorted grapes ready to juice. And I have regained 14 pounds in two months with only 5-10 to go (depending if I want to weigh more than I used to).
IHB Groklaw's coverage of the SCO v. IBM suit is so *funny*.
IHB I had a nice weekend in Baltimore, treated myself to a new MAC lipgloss
("Spite"), went to a fabulous Halloween party on Saturday and spent quality
time on the phone with Dave.
Played Trivial Pursuit last night. Was the first time I heard of MAC cosmetics :P And here you mention them!! (The question was "What male person did MAC cosmetics have as their spokesperson in 1995 ( i think the year was)?" Let me know if you want the answer.)
(what's the answer?) IHB My pulled neck/back muscle is feeling better....
I'm pretty sure it's Elton John. He's been doing work with the Viva Glam lipsticks for a while.
Actually it's RuPaul.
I am burrowed under my electric blanket, and the cat is sprawled out on top of it. It sounds cheezy but it's times like this that I'm happy to just have a decent place to live, food to eat and people who care about me. Plus the guy (since "dude" does sound Lebowski-ish) addressed me as "sweetie" in an email, and that made me grin.
I just completed a double backup and repartition of my main drive in anticipation of the installation of Panther as soon as I can lay hands on the CDs.
I'm happy because my OpenBSD 3.4 CD's arrived 4 days in advance of the public release.
IM HAPPY Because i just istalled linux redhat 9
I'm happier still now (Re#257, not you Taylor!) because I've got 3.4 running on my net-facing server...smoothest installation to-date. Within moments of opening the firewall, probes starting hitting apache. No worries.
I have now finished four of what I hope will be only six chemo treatments, and the doctor said my progress is astonishingly good and the radiologist was so excited he phoned with the results. What looks like 2"x2" tumors in the spleen (shrunk from 4-5") might just be voids or scar tissue and we won't nkow until the next CT scan after the sixth treatment (at which point I might not need 8 if things have shrunk more). The IV did not hurt as much as last time but still had to be redone once. Jim's flat tire held air when he pumped it up to get us home with. We got to meet four nurses as I start before a shift change or two, and tho none wanted to try a pawpaw one admired our house photos. As usual, I sat next to people with worse problems than me who were getting better anyway. They cut one drug dosage in half which might help the laryngitis or at least the hand numbness. They plan to do lots of CT scans over the next five years (3 then 6 month intervals) then just once a year. This sort of lymphoma is apparently relatively easily curable (over 50%). I am happy that the skin does not peel from all over my body due to treatments like it did for a cheery leukemia patient next to me (who is much better but still has trouble with stairs after one month in the hospital and 25 pounds weight loss.) So who needs a voice.
I am really glad to hear that your treatment is going well.
That's great, Sindi.
Re #258: Overall I'm happy with RedHat 9, but I still wonder why TCL/Tk now uses almost ten times as much memory as it did under 8. I had to upgrade the RAM in my machine just to get decent performance back.
Been working the last several days doing stagehand work, most of it at the UM Sports Coliseum for the "Boris Gudenov" thing. Even got to impress people with my soldering and what bizarre adapters I happen to have in my electronics box.
Do you have a banana to BNC? How about 4 pin jones to 6 pin DIN? (Now I'm just being snotty...;-) ) IHB Just because life is swell.
I'll bet neither of you have a female stereo mini to RJ-11. I had two, until a few days ago.
I actually had an XLR to dual RCA female, where one RCA is pin 2 and the other pin 3. And they needed one, since the original cable had been left in Russia.
Wonderful news, Sindi!
Not sure if this belongs here but... Today I wrote a little javascript utility which decodes base64 and otherwise unmangles email attachments (ASCII HTML encoding, mailer line breaks, etc) and displays the resulting content with only a couple of mouse clicks. I'm sure it's not terrifically efficient, but it works. It allows me to scan and disable image links in HTML mail before opening so I can search the content for things to tighten up my spam filters without sending off http requests which confirm receipt of the spam.
Opus returns!!! :) http://www.bloomcounty.com/opus_returns.html
IVHB I have *finally* certified in Rapier in the Ring of Steel.
Whoo! That took nearly forever! Gratz.
Wow...congrats, Bjorn!
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Bjorn's a Rapierist! ;)
IHB Costco was grovy and took back my Full-screen edition of the the Matrix Reloaded and let me purchase the Widescreen. How bone-headed was I? IVHB after a hellacious commute, work is going nicely, I have a class in an hour and my tummy seems to have settled down. Woo hoo!
RE#266 - What was the application that required 1/8" F to RJ-11? RE#267 - That's a handy connector to have.
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I'm connected to Grex right now via ssh from the Terminal application in Mac OS X Panther. So far it seems very cool, except for some weirdness with the infrared port.
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I hear Panter uses xterm for its Terminal, rather than vt100. One of the disadvantages of that is that xterm uses an alternate screen, so text disappears after being displayed by less.
Hmm. Full screen applications in Terminal do not appear in the scrollback buffer at all. The default term is xterm-color. I can't seem to find the .profile so I can edit the settings... I'd like to change the shell to csh, but I'm useless in vi/vim and chsh runs it by default. On the plus side, the spam filter in Mail is great. Downside, I can't seem to find javascript debugging features in Safari...
Stop complaining.
It was a good week for certifications. I got my USA Hockey referee's card in the mail this week, and then on Saturday/Sunday, I completed the required dives and earned my Open Water SCUBA certification.
re #282: > I can't seem to find the .profile so I can edit the settings... > I'd like to change the shell to csh, but I'm useless in vi/vim and > chsh runs it by default. You can almost certainly override chsh's default editor choice by manually setting the environment variable VISUAL (or if that doesn't work, try EDITOR) to your preferred editor. Changing it in your .profile will of course make the change permanent for your account but there's no reason why you have to make it permanent to get the desired effect.
I got four instead of two hours sleep last night. Big difference.
I was keen on getting an OS X machine eventually, but Apple's upgrade policies are starting to make me less enthusiastic. Apparently there are some security holes that they don't plan to fix in 10.2; the only solution is to pay $130 to upgrade to 10.3. This is the same kind of crap Microsoft was pulling 10 years ago.
IHB I spent Wednesday listening to Janacek, smoking a primo cigar, reading The Atlantic and Harper's, and drinking an entire pot of coffee myself. Well, there were errands in the morning and afternoon, but I completed them. Only one cat demanded lap space: What did I do to deserve this break? Hooray.
Wow. That sounds like a nice way to spend a day. Well, except for the cigar part.
A fifth hour of sleep! And the sun is shining and it is 50 for our walk.
IHB Valerie took the time to answer some nutritional questions for me, as eating more vegetarian seems to be working really well for me. IHB I am down 55lbs in 10 weeks, with no evil side effects. IHB one of my attorneys is getting married in a few weeks - she's such a peach - I'm glad she's happy.
Congrats Brooke!
55 pounds?!? Wow! That's great! :) I'm with the boy, and our friends threw an amazing dinner party last night. It's been an awesome Halloween so far. http://www.livejournal.com/users/saltatoria - for more about the special Halloween dinner and such. I'm too lazy to type more details.
Re: #287 Last i heard, Apple has denied, in writing, the rumors of "no more security fixes for 10.2". Supposedly the company that announced the holed in 10.2 is in Microsoft's back pocket; i've heard nothing on whether Redmond's behind the "no fixes" rumor. (Which would have been a "apply shotgun to own foot" policy for Apple to follow, but they've made stupid mistakes too.)
The third act of the ballet, "Serenade" (choreographed by George Balanchine) was just stunning. My friend Skeeter, who is the assistant technical director on the tour, was able to get out of the theatre in time to accompany me to a Halloween party after the show, at which a lovely time was had by all. The costumer for the tour, a Brit named Declan who is also an armorer, raved endlessly about my armor. I think I was the only person in the whole Power Center who was wearing a costume but was not directly involved with the show. I certainly drew a lot of interested looks wandering through the packed lobby in leather pants and boots, steel shirt and woolen cloak.
We had the first clear weekend day we've had in a while (last weekend, by contrast, we got 12 inches or more of rain in 2 1/2 days) and so [my sister] Cathy and I took her boat out for a ride up Carroll Inlet, a long narrow bay that's perhaps a couple of hundreds yard wide but runs thirty miles up into the middle of the island. We first put down crab pots and then went and set some shrimp pots in much deeper water. We'll go out again tomorrow to check and see if we caught anything. Usually it's pretty easy to catch your limit of crab around here but we haven't been crabbing up Carroll Inlet before and this is the first time we've tried for shrimp/prawns period, so we're not sure what to expect. We went out tonight to see if we could see the aurora but although people have been telling us it's been out all week we've missed it every time, including tonight. That's OK, though, it was a beatiful cold clear night and once we got away from the lights of the city there were spectacular stars and even a few meteors.
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I soloed on Saturday. :> This is a big step towards getting a pilot's license, something I've been wanting to do for a long, long time.
The load-out for Boris Gudenov only took 5.5 hours last night.
Godunov is the original spelling - what is Gudenov?
IHB Ken is coming to visit this weekend. :) IAHB this year is flying by, which means I'm closer to graduation. ;)
IVHB we are going to have my girlfriend Max set up nicely in her new house, as my friends are really being groovy about helping her, and I'm ecstatic because my boyfriend is really awesome.
Re #300: the original spelling is in Cyrillic. Godunov or Gudenov are just transliterations, which depend upon who does it.
Gudenov is in no way a transliteration of the Cyrillic. Godunov is. You can't just substitute any vowel you feel like when transliterating. Gudenov may be loosely based on the cartoon character Goodenough (or however that is spelled). There is an opera Boris Godunov, based on the character of that name who was a tsar in medieval Russia. Stressed on the second o. The first o is pronounced as unstressed a (a as in father) and the u as in fortune. Boris is also pronounced with the o like a, and the stress is on the i (as in machine).
Except that the cartoon character was Boris *Badenov*..
English spelling is marvelously flexible, and that "e" in Gudenov can be pronounced many ways. But that is besides the point. Your transliterating preference is personal - even generally accepted. There is something to be said for consitency, but it is still subjective. There is NO exact transliteration that will cause an English speaker to pronounce the name exactly as a Russian speaker would. The sounds do not occur in English. Look up "Boris Gudenov" in Google, and you will get many "hits" for it.
I don't think Google is a good authority on spelling. I just got 2,030 hits searching on "Goerge W. Bush".
I'm trying to imagine the reaction Rane would have to someone insisting on being similarly sloppy and dismissive of established conventions in his field of expertise as he is claiming the right to be in Sindi's.
I'm not dismissive of "established conventions". They are essential for accurate exchange of information. However I am pointing out that the spelling of Gudenov/Godunov is not a universally accepted convention, nor a necessary one for accurate exchange of relevant information. If you want that, write it in Cyrillic. That is what would be done in precise scholarly exchanges. Philosphers writing in English still usually give the German word paranthetically for many central concepts.
Godunov is transliterated according to the rules of the Board of Geographic Names, which the US Government asks me to use when translating. I don't know of any transliteration system where you can use an e to represent the sound u in Godunov, or u to represent o. This is simply a mistake, not a transliteration, and like Mike pointed out, based on Badenov. I have seen the final v transliterated as f or ff, which represents the actual pronunciation. There are alternate transliteration systems but they all seem to agree on the vowels. The consonants are transliterated variously depending on the language into which they are transliterated and on which system you use in that language. For instance the sound 'y' can be written j or y, the sound j (in judge) as dzh or dj or j, the sound ch (church) as tsch (via German), tch (French) or ch (English). Tchaikowsky has the w of German for a sound pronounced v, and an i where BGN wants y. Russians appear to have their own way of transliterating Russian into Latin characters.
Well, from now on we'll just take anything Rane has to say on Slavic languages with a grain of NiCl.
Nickel Chloride?
Or NeCl, since the vowels should not matter to Rane.
NiCl does not exist. Please provide a URL for these Russian name transliterations by the Board of Geographic Names. I have had dealing with BGN but only know them as adjucating the naming of geographic features for use on US government published maps. What is the Russian transliteration into Latin alphabet of the name we are discussing? Of course, we are not trying to "represent the sound u in Godunov", but to represent the sound in the Russian name. I have no objection to your choice of transliteration, but have only been pointing out that the alternate transliteration Gudenov is frequently used. This cannot be denied, considering the frequency with which it is used and published.
*sigh* New item, perhaps?
*sigh*
*huggles*
The Day is Done. That all by itself is cause for the happy-happy joy-joy two-step.
IVHB I had a great conversation with my ex last night, basically telling him to cop himself on or we were done being friends. He chose to cop himself on.
"cop himself on"?
Get a grip. Check himself.
Re #308: What, you haven't figured it out by now? Rane is an expert in every field. That's why he's so condescending to the rest of us.
Heh. And yet another area to use "Cop yourself on".
Transliterations represent not the sounds but the letters in the original language, by substituting one or more letters in the target language for one (or occasionally more) letters in the source language. I don't have a URL for BGN rules, just the book sent me by the government when I was working for them as a translator. Gudenov is a mistake, not a transliteration. Copying a mistake, no matter how many times, does not make it correct.
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.
Godunov, Boris
(b [schwa.gif] r [emacr.gif] s' g [schwa.gif] d [oomacr.gif]
nof') [this is the pronunciation, with final stresses]
c.1551-1605, czar of Russia (1598-1605). A favorite
of [20]Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), he helped organize Ivan's social
and administrative system. After Ivan's death (1584), Boris became
virtual ruler of Russia, ostensibly as regent for Ivan's young son
Feodor I, who was married to Boris's sister. Boris was popularly
believed to have ordered the murder (1591) of Feodor's younger brother
and heir, [21]Dmitri, in order to secure the succession for himself.
Upon Feodor's death (1598), an assembly of the ruling class chose
Boris as czar. Under his rule the Russian church was recognized (1589)
as an independent patriarchate, equal to other Eastern churches; peace
was obtained with Poland and Sweden, and colonization of the southern
steppes and W Siberia was spurred. Most important, Boris continued
Ivan's policy of strengthening the power of state officials and
townspeople at the expense of the [22]boyars. Yet famine (1602-4) and
popular distrust undermined his support, and when a pretender to the
throne appeared claiming to be Feodor's brother Dmitri, many rallied
to his support and he easily invaded Russia in 1604. Boris died, and
his son, [23]Feodor II, was unable to defend the throne against the
false Dmitri. Boris's life is the subject of a drama by Pushkin that
was the basis for Moussorgsky's famous opera.
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright (c) 2003 Columbia
University Press.
I found 29,200 or so google hits for Boris Godunov (and 52,000 for
Godunov). I found 114 hits for Boris Gudenov, including a description of
how Lee Harvey Oswald went to an opera of that name, and a suggested list
of ways to name your pet guinea pig (Carmen, Otello).
Musorgsky is the BGN transliteration, also Fyodor (two syllables). The ou
in Moussorgsky is via French. Often people want their drivers' license
translated with the French transliteration to match their passport and I
go along with this alternate system of ou for u (both pronounce u as in
lunar), but not e for u.
There is a 1980 painting of Alexander Gudenov by Andy Warhol, along with
Mary Tyler Moore.
You're missing the point, Sindi. The problem here is that Rane is not wrong, ever. If Rane is wrong, see previous sentence.
You guys have been missing the point. And now why the personal attacks? I have not claimed that Sindi is wrong that Godunov is the most common transliteration of the name into English - only that many have used Gudenov for legitimate purposes (forget the joking uses) and it cannot be rigidly claimed to be always a "mistake" because it varies from the dominant usage. Sindi has quoted from an encyclopedia to substantiate the dominant transliteration. I have pointed out legitimate alternative transliterations from the literature. Here are a couple more: Godunoff - from Encyclopedia Americana. Goudounow - from The Victrola Book of the Opera I could probably get lots more by searching in other languages using the Latin characters. For example Gudonov - http://www.akkc.dk/showlistrecord.asp?id=45&recordid45=193 and of course Gudenov - http://www.crms.supanet.com/nov6pl.htm
Borrowed a sander and got the base for my office chair sanded down - tomorrow I can glue it back together!
Rane's last three spellings are NOT transliterations. You cannot transliterate two different characters to ou (first one) or to o (second one, where the two vowels seem to have been transposed). Godunoff is a transliteration of the sort which also attempts to indicate the pronunciation (but the first vowel is actually not pronounced that way). Gudenov seems to be a misspelling of Gudonov which was transposed. Transliteration follows a set of rules mapping one character (or group of characters) to another. You can map one character to tsch, but you cannot map both o and u to the same result.
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The UMS advertising says "Boris Godunov".
But you *can*, Sindi. I understand that this agency or that might set standards for transliteration, and it is also fine that you elect (or are required) to follow one (or more - I presume that if another agency had a different set, you would follow that). This is the same as standards for, for example, publication in journals, where every journal sets its own standards. Some languages are, by the way, rich in diphthongs, and to create a resemblence of the transliterated word to the original, such diphthongs would naturally be used. Here is a definition of transliteration from http://www.ngi.be/NL/glossary/glossang-tz.htm "A method of names conversion between different alphabetic scripts and syllabic scripts, in which each character or di-, tri- and tetragraph of the source script is represented in the target script in principle by one character or di-, tri- or tetragraph, or a dia-critic, or a combination of these. Translit-er-ation, as distinct from transcrip-tion, aims at (but does not neces-sarily achieve) complete revers-ibil-ity, and must be accompanied by a translit-era-tion key. (b) A result of this process. Examples (with English exonyms in parentheses): _______ al-Q_hirah (Cairo); ___________ Vladivostok; ____ efa (Haifa); # Adis Abeba (Addis Abbeba)." Notice that single and multiple character diphthongs can be properly transliterated into single or multiple characters.
IHB people are cluttering up the Happy item with non-IHB responses, and I *love* clutter!
IHB we got the ceramic tile off the wall, most of the linoleum up and the icky bathroom cleaned at my girlfriend's new house last night.
Glad to see that Rane's definition of transliteration is a correct one. According to this definition it has to be reversible, which Goudounoff is not (you can't make one letter out of the first 'ou' and a different one out of the second 'o'). Nor is Gudonov reversible - the second two vowels in the original are different (u and o. Nor can you transcribe one letter to two different letters (as you would need to do to come up with Gudenov, where the first and last vowel are not the same, tho they are in the Russian). If you transliterated all the o's to u's and vice versa, it would be a transliteration - for instance Gudonuv - and could be reversed..
The definition says "aims at" reversibility. It also specifies that a "key" should be provided for transliterations. There is more than one "key". Why John, isn't all this making you Happy Happy Joy Joy? It seems to work for some of us.
I dare you to write a key that produces two different results from the same original letter or the same result from two different original letters, which you would need to do to get Gudonov or Goudounoff. Godunov, Godounov, Godunof, Godunoff, are transliterations because you can reconstruct the original. Well, maybe not Godunof, since Russian does have both v and f.
OK, I think we all have a fairly good idea now what happens when the irresistably persistent force meets the immovable ego, so can we just let the subject drop?
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Good enuff for me.
RE#337 -- I can't wait for the sequel.
(shifting gears in a radical effort to actually post something related to the topic of this item...) I'm just about as happy as happy can be because I just received the results from my midterm late last night (by email). Somehow, on this test that I turned in thinking (at best) I had earned something in the range of an 80% I managed to score 96%. Whoohoo!
Cool!
I got back some more good blood test results, similar to last time. Only four more blood tests (that I know of) and three more IVs this year.
IHB my boyfriend will be here in twelve hours.
Re #341: You're a student again, Bruce?
Never really stopped...academia is a hard habit to kick once hooked :-) It's just that this time I've sorted out the paperwork for a formal grade. I'm taking Hawaiian 101 at the University of Hawai`i at Hilo through their distance learning program.
I'll be in Hawaii in January, we should have a GOG there.
IHB it looks like I'm moving to Baltimore!! My commute will be a bit stiffer, but I love Baltimore and I'll be saving some $$.
I am happy that Jim finally got up the courage to unpack his winter clothing We found at least 20 turtleneck shirts, about the same number of warm longsleeve woven shirts, ditto for other longsleeve shirts, but we cannot find his long underwear. Tonight will be the first frost. He has been wearing the same flannel shirt since August, having forgotten where exactly he put the other things when I was not around. In the process we got rid of one ripped pair of jeans (I declined to fix the crotch since they were also painty, ripped elsewhere, and a size too big, and you can replace them for a dollar at any rummage sale with something that fits), two pairs of long underwear worn out to the point that the holes are about 50%, a shredded t-shirt, another t-shirt with one sleeve missing from the elbow down, a sweater that I would have kept mending except Jim says it makes him itch just to be near it.... He had to see everything in one place to realize he has excess. Computers are next. Why keep a P120 when people are giving us P500s. Does anyone need any cotton rags?
I guess you haven't been out in early morning. I have had to deal with frost a few times. I walked through it once, gettng my shoes and pant hems wet. I had to scrap the windows once, and would have had to this morning except that STeve was at work all night and got home just as I had to leave (the car was nice and toasty warm for me). The cars parted out front had moderate to heavy frost on them.
Frost up here all week but since the frost is a side-effect of the amazingly clear and sunny weather we've been having and the alternative is non-stop really cold rain, I'll gladly deal with the frost..
Some parts of town must get colder than others. Frost would have killed the impatiens and I don't see any sign of anything having been hit by frost here yet. We are in a relatively high area and cold air settles downwards. Tonight Lansing is supposed to hit 20 and Toledo low 20s. Jim's neighbor asked if we could use some cheese - 12 packages showed up! (She does not do things in a small way - last time was lots of lettuce).
Sindi, you're down in the creek valley so it's a bit warmer. I used to notice stuff blooming a week or more apart as I walked up to my house near the top of the valley.
I am at Jim's house this month, actually, which is in a higher area. My apartment has stairs to the bathroom so I have not been staying there. The bathroom (basement) definitely stays cooler than the upstairs. Things bloom earlier near south walls of houses.
I'm happy because Mr. Gelinas came over to my house and fixed a computer problem I've been having. Thanks Joe!
re #347 . goose.. when/where on teh islands? i'm tryuing to get mom out thre in janyary...
IHB it's only supposed to be in the thirties today. IAHB Ken is here for the weekend, and I got to meet one of his best friends last night. We're going to see "Stomp" this afternoon, and I'm having a party tonight so he can meet my friends. :)
Glad to be of help, Steve. :)
Did sound at the Greenwood again last night - could be a semi-regular gig. Plus a good opportunity to experiment with recording.
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IHB I wacked several inches off of m y beard and I now can reach for a pen in my shirt pocket without pulling out a handful of whiskers. In the ambivalent department, I'm happy to report that my son's girlfriend recovered from her accident. She also recovered from whatever affection she felt for him and unceremoniously gave him the heave-ho. He seems quietly resigned to this and perhaps a little puzzled. Nevertheless, everybody';s wounds seem to be healing--a clear reason for entering this in the "Hapopy" item.
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IHB- The Beau is here (and he always makes me happy) and sometime this afternoon we're suppoised to meet up for lunch with my sister and brother-in-law. Sis and the bro-in-law are here for a wedding, and while I don't know the couple very well I was pleased to be able to congratulate them last night when the roomie, beau and I ran into said couple at Applebees last night. I wasn't sure I was going to say hi because, as I said, I don't know them well, but I pointed them out to the Beau saying "Hey, I know those people, they're getting married on Sunday" and apparently the groom's father was walking in right behind me... It all became clear to the bride and groom once I told them who my sister and bro-in-law were. Hmm, IAHB- work is going very well, and while it's not rocket science or anything, it is fun, and I have fun co-workers. And the bosses think well enough of my skills to give me extra responsibilities. I also frequently get asked to train the new temps on some of the programs/ways of doing things. It's cool.
IAHB I have a new computer and it's running Linux! (currently Slackware 8, but i intend to replace it with/add Debian 3 when the other disk arrives).
RE#356 -- I forget the exact dates...late in the month as I remember, probably only on the main island.
IHB "This American Life" had a really interesting piece on Steve Tobocman who is a state house rep from Detroit. It was an enlightening look at the legislative process.
Cool wedding today; a couple good friends getting married. Other good friends in town for said wedding.
IHB I'm down 64 lbs. This really feels amazing. I'm also happy because my girlfriend's house is really coming along nicely. I will be able to install cabinets after this.
I'm up at least 13 pounds. Perhaps we will meet in the middle. If I lose 64 pounds will I be able to install cabinets?
Sindi, if you lose 64 pounds you'll fit into cabinets. Folded neatly.
I can fold pretty small already.
I completely rewrote an nearly useless script which converts numbers (up to about 20 digits) to their long names. I originally wrote it in javascript, and just moved it to applescript. I use it for automating my check-writing, though they're never more than four digits. ;) Anyway, it is far better and more stable now. It loops, but is not recursive. It even handles thousands separators intelligently. Soon it will be available on the website for the excellent shareware text-editing program, Tex-Edit Plus.
IHB- tomorrow happens to be a bank holiday... I work for a bank, this means I have tomorrow off. So the Beau is coming down to spend the afternoon with me. Is good. IAHB- I had a wonderful time (though not enough time) with my sister, bro-in-law and their wonderful host. Was introduced to a wonderful breakfast place too. Was a very enjoyable time.
Was it now.
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A long day, but it worked out pretty well. 8 hours as a union stagehand, followed by doing sound at the Ark. Now it's a beer and Grex and such, in my comfy chair.
sounds wonderfull.... congratzzz
re #374- yes it was, thank you for feigning interest.
Great show at the Ark tonight... Kristen Hersh (formerly of Throwing Muses), Howe Gelb, and Andrew Bird. They all did their own sets, sneaked on to the other's sets, and did a few group numbers. Very wierd, cool, and fun.
I'm happy because I'm going to see Guided by Voices at the Magic Stick this weekend.
Another week gone, the firm move quickly approaches, albeit more manageably, getting closer to Dave's visit, am in a pair of jeans that look pretty kicking on me, got a ticket for New Year's for $240 to go to Phoenix, I'm happy.
Got in 35 minutes on the stairclimber at Vets, and at level 10 (out of 21). 35 minutes is not long enough! I had way too much energy walking home. And this morning I had a few business cards laminated into luggage tags, for the princely sum of $0.79 each.
IHB I got a 12% raise ($1.00/per hour) which is going to make a significant impact on my paychecks! Woohoo! This kind of gets me out of my runt that I was in due to my mistakes I made in Microbiology lab.
You were inside a runt?
a rutt? rut... whatever that saying goes about being in a rutt or rut, or whatever.
(Rut. When your (wagon) wheels are caught in a rut in the (dirt) road, it is very difficult to change direction.)
Being caught in a runt might be more...interesting. Or more illegal.
re #383 .. the 12%is significant, teh resultant $9.33/hr leaves me sad. are your numbers right?
IHB I had a productive weekend, I'm 100% moving to Baltimore, I had a nice dinner with Gary commemorating his 30th birthday, and a man I dated is startint to lament the fact that we stopped. Silly rabbit.
IHB I had a good workout yesterday. (Slight bummage because my arms are sore - those pushups were murder!)
Maybe you should prosecute.
re #383 & 388 .. worked this out in private .. it's alrfight.
We have been trying for several years to trace down the origin of Herman Loth, a hybrid that someone on some junk mail list staff made up by combining two fictional characters that Jim was idiot enough to make up 20 years ago when too many people called for Lady of teh House and Man of the House - Sheila Loth and Herman Moth. Sheila metamorphed to Shelia who, along with Herman Loth (her son?) continues to get lots of junk mail. Finally one company told us they got their junk mail list from Experian, a credit agency like Equifax and Transunion. I went online and after much searching found a link to opt out (which they warn you could have the dire consequences of receiving fewer catalogs and offers) but the link kept putting me back to where I was, so I emailed. I also found an 888 number for credit fraud, called, typed in a made up social security number, which got me to an oral menu system where I could enter the name and address and a made up social security number again, and was told that to prevent further credit fraud they would take Herman off all their phone and address lists for two years. I wonder how they check credit on a nonexistent character and how he got onto their list in the first place. I then emailed the credit manager email list and asked them to contact me since their website won't work. It was a plain link, not javascript. Today I also got a third promise from Comcast to take our addresses off their junk mail lists. They required our phone numbers as well, to put on their do not call list. I wonder why they need that since there is a national one.
edina you'll like baltimore, my grandparents lived there for years. I have a strong connection to the place. Great stadium there btw, Camden Yards, you can see lots of Orioles games there during the summer
Re #393: If you have a business relationship with Comcast, they're allowed to keep calling you even if you're on the national list. It could be they have their own do-not-call list of people they have a business relationship with that don't want to be called.
Richard, I already do like Baltimore. It's just such a fun town, and the people there are awesome.
You are allowed to call anyone with whom you have a business relationship. Today I got email from Experian explaining that they have two lists, one of people with credit ratings and one 'individual reference service' for which they get the names from public records, telephone book, US Census, tax records, and real estate records. I wonder which of these lists Herman got put onto. Someone else once told me they got him from some public record. He certainly does not own Jim's house or pay taxes on it. Nor have we received phone calls for him. I will call Experian now and ask.
I wonder if it works both way.. Hello, Mr. Johnson. The reason I'm calling you at home is to share exciting news about.. <irritated response> But sir, I *do* have a business relationship with you. As an employee of Experian, you are part of an organization that keeps a file on nearly everyone in the country. There's practically not a single adult in the country who *doesn't* have a business relationship with you and is therefore allowed to call you at home. Now, about this exciting offer..
I emailed Experian to let them know that their 800 number for getting off the list compiled from public records no longer works. This generated an automated response containing the same 800 number. I wonder how to reach a real person who will read more than the subject line of my email. Maybe I will have to make up a subject line with no recognizable words in it to get past their filter.
Got a bunch of firewood either cut or split, enough to fill my sheltered storage.
I'm happy because the moving week is nearly over. Part of my lawfirm is moving, and I stupidly volunteered to help coordinate. But things are going better, and I'm happy about that. I bought clothes a size smaller. My honey is here in less than a week.
Tonight really turned out to be lovely evening. Rushed home early from work today to do last minute packing. Tomorrow we fly to Annapolis for a week of hanging with family and partaking of turkey). Part of the hurry was a late scheduled dinner with one of my kodo-fan friends. Kodo have been on tour performing the product of their collaboration with Tomasaburo Bando and are winding things down with a year-end series of performances at a theatre in Sangenjaya. My friend organized an after-show beer and izakaya munchy cool down with three members of Kodo tonight. The plan was to meet for a few hours then head home. 5 hours and far too much beer later, suddenly realized it was 2am and we still hadn't (haven't!) packed. Off off, we go. Well I'm finished packing and it's just about time to wake Yumi and crash myself for an hour or two before heading to Narita but who needs sleep anyways. A lovely evening indeed.
Sleep is for wimps.
Airplanes are for sleeping. :)
Kodo is wonderful. Caught them earlier this year in A2.
We've had several days of cold, crisp, sunny weather with clear skies. The mountains above town and on the nearby islands are covered with a light amount of snow -- just enough to show off the shapes of the trees on their forested sides and the air is so crisp and dry that you can see much further than under normal conditions.. To top it off, the clear skies last night made it possible to see the aurora -- not a spectacular display, perhaps, but curtains of faint greenish light across much of the sky. Definitely a beautiful week in SE Alaska. Forecast for Saturday is 100% chance of rain, however, so I suppose I can kiss the scenic snow-shrouded slopes goodbye for a while. Nice while it lasted, anyway.. And oh, yeah, did I mention that when I went out to pick up lunch this afternoon I could see a pod of orcas surfacing and spouting across the Tongass Narrows from where I work?
A friend in N. Vermont reports 10" of snow recently. In their village the snowplows load the snow into trucks and dump it in the river. The snow is often to the top of doors so they have second story porches on some houses. This is a mountain valley. Her car is having trouble with the hill.
IHB I found that I already had the Jeff Beck album I wanted (it was with some stuff I put in the trunk of the car rather than leave it sitting exposed, and I forgot about it for a few days due to work pressures), and the replacement for my RMA'ed modem just arrived and I am madly pulling down piles of stuff that I missed in the interim.
If Daniel Rosen is still company manager of Kodo, tell him I said hello.
IHB England won the Rugby World Cup today, marking the first time since the Cup began in '87 that it has been won by a Northern Hemisphere side, and the first time since 1966 that England have won a world championship in a major sport (the last having been the FIFA football (soccer) World Cup). England won 20-17 against Australia, the hosting country and the defending world champions, after beating France in the semi-final. Australia surprised everyone bv beating the All-Blacks (New Zealand) in the semi-final. Australia played really well; fortunately for us, we played better.
Why do the call the team the "All-Blacks"?
I think they're traditionally all Maoris, the original Polynesian inhabitants of NZ; plus their tops are, well, all black. I'm 99% sure they are all Maoris, because they are allowed to do this thing called the "haka" before the game, which is sort of a Maori war-dance.
Interesting. You couldn't have a professional team in the US that overtly discriminated based on ethnicity.
Maybe the Maoris are just better or more interested than the Pakeha (the whites). Or maybe there are whites in the team and they also do it; the haka is a national institution in New Zealand, but the Pakeha far outnumber the Maoris - until about 1996 when NZ adopted a partly proportional system of voting for their Parliament, the Maoris were entitled to 2 seats out of just under 100, reflecting the proportion of Maoris to Pakeha. (They could register to vote for one of the two Maori seats, or one of the rest, but not both; Pakeha were excluded from the two Maori seats altogether). There's a bit of controversy involved, as the rugby world governing body recently ruled that the NZers could perform the haka, as it's an ethnic custom, but that Australia doesn't have the right to sing "Waltzing Matilda" before international matches begin; God Save the Queen is played in the presencer of the Queen and the Governor-General (the Queen's representative and effectively the Head of State), but at other times "Advance Australia Fair" is played, which is regarded as rather turgid by the laid-back Ozzies.
What's the objection to Waltzing Matilda?
it's tacky *cracker music*
That's not the objection the iRB rased; they don't consider it "ethnic" enough. Another example of political correctness gone mad where the phrase "gone mad" is redundant.
Re#409: Eric, I last saw Daniel in August at Earth Celebration where he did a showing of some of the pottery he's been crafting in Hawai`i. He's recently been organizing some sort of crafts program under the general umbrella of the Kodo foundation. Normally I only run into him at EC each year but I owe him a beer and may attempt to repay the debt when we pass through Honolulu next February :-) If we cross paths, I'll pass on your howdy.
Thanks!
I had to replace a taillight on the car today. IAHB the weather is much better today than it will be tommorrow.
Got my office mostly put back together today. Although it doesn't seem like it at the moment (still a few piles of stuff lying around) I should end up with more space and better organization. Plus my upright bass is now in a much more convenient location, which means more practicing will get done.
IHB I have the deserts for turkey day done... too many pies... people better eat them or they will be shoved down their throats! IAHB there are only 3 weeks left until now school for a month.
I saw a really wonderful production of Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_ at the Michigan Union Ballroom tonight, followed by a bunch of great local musicians performing at the Old Town Tavern. All in all, a fine, fine evening.
FYI, not everyone on the All-Blacks is Maori - their captain was, and to my knowledge, that's how the Haka started. Quite frankly, if it meant the Caps would win, I would encourage them to cha-cha on the ice.
The Globe Theatre stuff was loaded out last night with no major injuries, just one slip & fall on the Union loading dock (not me). And I'm just tired this morning, no sore parts. And it looks like I'm going to do a somewhat ambitious DIY electronics project, a clone of the famed Teletronix LA2a compressor. Found some websites from people who already did this, and aside from some pricey parts it doesn't look too difficult.
re: 424: Heheheh. Thanks for that.
I may have a chance to earn $300 working on a Pittsburgh Musical Theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for two weeks. . . .
Cool.
re: 423 andd 425 Saw that Tuesday night! Wow. boys playing girls playing boys. All in the name of historical accuracy. It was some of the most powerful acting I've seen in a long time.
whore
re: 12th night: I was at SCA combat practice on Sunday, which is on the first floor of the Union, in a room whose windows look out past a little open balcony that one can access from a stairwell. I was standing there in full armor (which is not very impressive; I don't wear much armor) talking to someone, when I happened to look out the window and see a couple of middle-aged men smoking on the balcony, wearing very nice Elizabethan gowns. Eventually someone went out and talked to them and found out that they actually were in a play. (This is ironic because when SCA people wander around in armor and garb and stuff, we always get asked what play we're in.)
Ahh. That explains the patchwork outfit and partial plate mail I saw someone wearing outside the Union while I was finding parking on Sunday. Yes, the acting in this production was exquisite, particularly the characters Viola/Cesario, Olivia and Feste. This production also featured the most delicate and precise violation of the fourth wall I think I've ever seen. It was as if we the audience only existed in the minds of the characters, so that their playing to us in no way pulled me out of the story.
(What's the fourth wall?)
The wall of the pretend room on stage that is between the audience and the actors. It is invisable and the actors just pretend there is a wall there.
More accurately, the fourth wall is the conceptual division between the reality of the play and the reality of the audience. By overt acknowledgement of the audience, the play is said to break the fourth wall. The risk in so doing is that the audience may be brought out of the reality in which the characters live their stories and back into the world in which the actors play roles on a stage.
An upcoming three days off. Sweet.
Re 434-435 That's a cool concept. What are the first three walls? :)
There aren't any, though I'd guess the reference is to the sides and back of the stage or set, which comprise three elements of the play's reality which would be complimented by a fourth wall between the actors and the audience if that world was real.
The "fourth wall" concept is known with regards to comics too. At least in the circle of online strips I read, "breaking the fourth wall" is considered a bit of a cliche, since it often happens as a result of the author/artist taking a day off, or running out of material, or making fun of his own material, or some other such self conscious joke.
Recently got done working on a production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and her Children". For those who aren't familiar with Brecht, one of his favourite ideas was constantly reminding the audience that they're watching a play, that what's onstage is not reality. We had the back walls & backstage storage areas lit; we had actors dance and talk amongst themselves during scene changes, which were filled with various international rap songs. Lots of fun. Confused lots of people --- but mostly younger: the director said that older people she'd talked to tended to really like it, but that younger people tended to be offended by it --- either because it wasn't what they expected from theatre, or else they thought that the idea was that they couldn't understand the play without modern rap music. . . .
Tonight I found a nearly two-month-old check for services rendered that I had completely forgotten about in my jacket pocket. Woohoo!
whore
Jerk.
Just got back from Thanksgiving in Chicago; no traffic jams and record time today.
Had a VERY nice night/morning. Just got home. Am more contented than I've been in years.
re 444: leaving at 10am helps, doesn't it?
Re 446: 9am, actually. Even better...
Neat weekend with the guy. Mmm hmm.
DID YOU FUCK HIM?!
FOAD
AHAHAHA! FOAD!
Just got back home after a week of Turkey and Christmas shopping. What an odd yet strangely nice feeling it is to fly home to my parents and think "yay, it's nice to be home" and return home to Tokyo, and think again, "it's nice to be home".
Happy because we made it through Thanksgiving and it was okay without the family thing.
I resuscitated my little linux by making a missing symlink after removing some package (elflibs?) apparently deleted it when it should not have. This only took two hours and we learned a lot in the process. I now have a way to download photos and view WORD files as text (I learned to compile these two programs) and LOTS Of browsers - links, links2, lynx, w3m, opera. It is fun doing two downloads at once on two terminals.
IAHB I was (I think) the first into the Grex voting booth. :) (remmers *may* have been ahead of me, of course.)
Only to test that it was working; but I erased my test vote.
I had a great extended weekend with my honey doing various DC things, including entertaining his sister for a few days. How I love being in love.
Found a couple pieces of test gear at the ReUse Center for a couple-three bucks each, a function generator and a transistor tester. Both things I've been wanting better versions of.
...both pieces of test equipment WORK, too! And I finally finished the reupholstery job on my office chair. I'm sitting in it now...
I finally caught Jim's terrible cold. Which is good because it would have been much worse to catch it next week. Jim is a bit better today.
Yay, I seemed to have conquered jetlag in record time. Woke up bright an early at my usual 5am wakeup and only suffered late-afternoon post-travel fadeout briefly around 6pm yesterday. Must have been the beer therapy.
Got a nice little script hacked up to fill in some missing files among my downloads; it checks for what I've got and only grabs what I need, and respects my naming conventions.
LLLLIKE WGET
AHAH YEAH WGET
AHAHAHA< WAY TO REINVENT THE TYRE< RUSS! OH< WAIT< AHAHAH< YOU ALREADY DID THAT ROUND YOUR BELLY! AHAHAHA
AHAHAHHA HE"S A TIRE AND CUSHION ROLLED INTO ONE!! GET IT ? AHAHAHAH WHAT A GUY.
AHAHA< RE YOU SURE IT ISN"T TWO GUYS? HAhah
(jerks.....)
You said it.
I'm happy because I can breathe again, and can stand up without feeling like I'm going to pass out. There's a nasty flu virus of some sort making the rounds here in Ketchikan. Apparently it even killed a 44-year-old man in town earlier this week. If you've been thinking of not bothering with a flu shot this year I can tell you that even if this year's shot doesn't offer full protection against the predominant flu strain going around, anything that lessens your chance of contracting this joy of a virus is worth considering..
Got my DSL kit today, and I'm now DSL-lin' like Magellan! I am quite proud that I installed it all by myself, and did not screw up my phone in the process. Now if this school semester would end already...
How does this flu start? I have something that starts with three days of scratchy throat and coughing.
For me it started out as scratchy throat and coughing, followed by high fever and chills, muscular aches, and later some difficulty breathing. I'm just assuming I got what everyone else in town seems to be coming down with; I haven't done a comprehensive symptom check with any other victims.
That sounds like what Jim had except he did not take his temperature. I have been coughing now for four days but no fever or aches. He has also started to cough again. I hope we just have something new, because it is likely to cause problems if I have what he had and get chemotherapy Monday. This does not combine well with drug-induced pharyngitis. Mike, how long did you have the flu and how long between the first coughing and the fever and chills? I hate to have to cough at all the other patients Monday while waiting 3 hours for the doctor's appointment, too. They said to come in at least to see the doctor and then decide whether to postpone chemotherapy a couple of days.
I tried to get a flu shot at a clinic scheduled at St. Francis Catholic School, on Tuesday, but when I got there no one knew anything about it. There's supposed to be one tomorrow (Friday) at Busch's on Ellsworth Road, from 9 am to 1 pm, so I'll probably try again there. There's a list of local MVN flu shot clinics here: http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2002/flushot.htm
re #474: > Mike, how long did you have the flu and how long between the > first coughing and the fever and chills? I don't think I'm completely over it yet, so it's hard to say how long it'll last. I think I started coughing on Saturday and Tuesday was the worst of it fever-wise.
IAHB a package from Amazon was in my mailbox today.
IHB I got some x-mas packages mailed out. Nothing says love like sending the gift of fire.
Merry Christmas, Dr. Molotov!
Yikes! I need to get my gifts out the door!
Re #478: Should we call you "unajiffer"?
Well, it is being mailed to Ann Arbor... hmmm... I forgot to mail fuel for the smore maker... I guess I am giving the gift of fire container
I'm incredibly happy I found a Formula-1, Ferrari Barbie for my boyfriend for Christmas. He collects F-1 and is a huge Ferrari fan. It's a cheesy gift, but a grand gift none the less.
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Does he like Barbie? I'm happy because I get to see a cheesy Hindi movie tomorrow at a theater. It's been over a year since I've watched a Hindi movie at a theater. And it's always fun when you watch one here in the US, rather than in India.
He's not overly keen on Barbie - but he loves Formula One.
I guess it balances out then :) Is the Ferrari pink?
Oh God no - it's red! She's wearing a little F-1 racing outfit.
Ooh. Sweet.
The list of flu shot clinics I gave in resp:475 is actually for December 2002, which explains why no one knew what was going on at the one I tried to go to. (I wasn't the only one there, though.) Here's a current list: http://www.salinereporter.com/news/20031204B01IJRC.asp?ID=67
IHB I got to see Simon & Garfunkel in concert last night at Madison Square Garden. It was sort of a last minute deal, but I'm glad I went because it turned out to be a really good show. Neither is as young as they used to be, but both of those guys can still sing and they haven't lost their considerable stage chemistry and voices. And among contemporary twentieth century singers, few have voices more familiar to more people than Simon & Garfunkel. S&G did some of their great old songs like Paul Simon singing "The Only Living Boy in New York", and Garfunkel singing "Kathy's Song" Also "Cecilia", "Slip Sliding Away", "Scarborough Fair" and others. Many of their songs are so familiar that at times most of the place was singing along, like when S&G did "America", and Simon was singing "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together, I've got some real estate here in my bag, so we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies and we walked off to look for america..." S&G's guest act (can't all it opening act because their set was in the middle of the show), was the Everly Brothers. I hadn't even realized they were still alive, yet alone still performing. They came on between S&G sets. The Everly Brothers performed songs like "Wake Up Little Susie" and "Dream' (Dream Dream Dreaaaam, Dreaaaaaaaaaam") Then S&G came back on stage and, calling the Everly Brothers their heroes and principal early influence, they did a quartet of the Everlys' "Bye Bye Love" Then S&G did their second set, and Art Garfunkel, who still has a big head of hair, brought the house down as expected with "Bridge over Troubled Water", where he starts out singing in almost a whisper, and at the end is belting out "I will ease your mind like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind...." at the top of his range. It was also cool when they dimmed the lights a bit and they did the beautiful duet of "Sounds of Silence", which of course starts 'Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with you again..." At one point the arena went dark, and they showed clips on the jumbotron of Dustin Hoffman in the movie "The Graduate", and then you hear the opening chords of that movie's theme song, "Mrs. Robinson", and the lights come up and its really Paul Simon live singing the song. "...where have you gone Joe Dimaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you" I thought that was pretty cool. Both Simon and Garfunkel did a fair bit of chatting with the audience, with Simon explaining that they met as sixth graders in Queens fifty years ago, and Garfunkel chiming in that while they've known each other since they were eleven, they didn't start arguing until they were fourteen, so this tour celebrates fifty years of friendship and forty seven years of arguing. Anyway, I wasn't expecting to go to this show, the ticket I used belonged to someone else who couldn't go, but I'm glad I did. I was a bit depressed and the show really cheered me up, and not just because I probably inhaled some second hand smoke from all the marijuana joints being passed around. Simon and Garfunkel are a classic act, and it was nice to see them while they are still around and performing together, which they don't do that often anymore. They are on tour for about three more weeks, if you can catch them I'd recommend it.
(Richard, if only for archive purposes, I'd love to have this copied into the music conference. Thanks!)
It's snowing in Pittsburgh. *A lot*. Forecast is for eight inches (down from ten earlier, but still. . . ) :-D
Remember: The flu shot KILLS.
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Huh? Washing hands doesn't get rid of evil flu VIRUS.
I have just managed to do about 1/3 of my Christmas shopping on-line. Provided everything comes in on time, this is definitely my way to shop!
Busy, productive weekend, but also nicely relaxing. got ina nice dinner and a movie . . .hurray!
Re resp:495: Al Queda is involved with the Japanese now?! Quick, bomb Tokyo!
Weekend was tops. (ran out of superlatives...)
Um, no thanks. I like Tokyo the way it is right now, thank you.
Burning?
My spam filter caught 7 out of 8 spams - everything with keesan, or prescription in it, or BUSINESS, or drug. I have to find some way to filter on the ones with subject line 'hi' or 'hello'. What I would like is a way to filter out anything that is HTML only.
I use spamprobe, a bayesian spam analysis engine which works with procmail. Basically, you train it to distinguish between ham and spam by feeding a list of known spam and another list of known good mail. Check out http://spamprobe.sourceforge.net/ for more details.
Is spamprobe available at grex already? All I really need is a way to filter out mail that is html only, as it is always spam, and all but Nigeria spam is html only.
Procmail can search message bodies for strings, so if you're sure that you want to filter all html messages, searching for html tags should do it. (I personally wouldn't want to do that. Most, but not all, of the html messages I get are spam.)
I get non-spam that is a combination of text and html, mostly from aol users.
That's harder to filter for with procmail.
I find that SpamAssassin does a great job but Grex probably won't have the resources to run it until we move to the NextGrex system.
I am happy to be sneezing and blowing my nose a bit instead of just coughing my head off, because that means I can do chemotherapy tomorrow instead of postponing it another two days. The nurse suggested that I wash my hands frequently after blowing my nose but agreed that would be difficult to do with an IV in one hand. You are not supposed to get them wet. Also I would need to drag the pump along with me to the bathroom even to wash one hand.
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Does that sterilize your hands?
Yes.
I could also try 70% alcohol, which is less stinky than hand lotions. The alarm clock I had set for 7 went off at 7. pm not am. It lost half an hour in 1 hour so Jim will haul himself out of the tub and find me the other one. He feels crummy again, worse than me. Maybe he should take some vincristine. The author has just rounded Cape Horn in freezing rain, sleet, hail and ice with a wind from the east and a bad tooth infection and no place to stay out of the wet except a low forecastle which they cannot even sit up in, with the ventilation hole plugged to keep out the wet and bad air not helped by the dim lamp burning in it. And nothing to eat but corned beef and ship's biscuit and two quarts of tea every day. The cook is apparently there only to feed the officers chicken pie and pancakes and coffee. Someone snuck the author some boiled rice because he could not open his mouth enough for the biscuits. I have to come up with something semi-appetizing for supper, maybe microwaved potatoes. There is a chapter later on curing scurvy with the juice of raw potatoes and onions. I have orange juice. I have it easy. In order to relieve the monotony of four hours watch every night, the author recites to himself assorted poetry, the names of all the presidents, and the numbers in Hawaiian, which he taught himself from Hawaiian sailors in California. Also Erlkonig (in German). When I am trying to ignore the dentist drill, I also recite to myself German poetry and Turkish and Albanian numbers. I should try this during the next IV insertion. bir iki uc dort bes alti yedi sekiz dokuz on. nje dy tre katr pes (forgot six) shtate tete nende dhjet. Freut euch des Lebens.
Oops, thought this was item 28. The author is Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast. In item 28 we have been discussing rigging. Sorry for getting off whatever topic this item is.
Breadboarded up my first microphone attempt this evening... Panasonic capsule, phantom powered via some fun circuitry found on the Web. After several missing wires were finally added, it worked! Now I need a *#$& box from the storage locker to try the more advanced hookup... time to go to bed.
I'm happy because I just received in the mail an autographed book of "the keeper's son" by Homer Hickam (my first autographed anything) he wrote the book "rocked boys" which the movie "october skys" was based on. I read the rocket boys book and fell in love with reading again. I've read all homers other books and rediscovered books I like many years ago.
I'm happy because I got Christmas cards done and 15 loaves of pumpkin bread baked.
Yum Got some of my presents done (Thank you Amazon) Have two more to go, and I can cross this off my To Do list.
Well damn. A day of work later, and I've made two microphones. Pretty much exactly as I'd planned. What went wrong, I wonder? They even work correctly.
You guys have to check out this website. Have fun building your own snowbeing, for sure, but the gallery is a hoot. http://www.naked-i.com/flash/winter/
Link doesn't seem to work. :(
works for me...
Scott, the latest issue of QST MAgazine (a ham radio magazine) has some plans and ideas about rolling your own condenser mics.
Scale at the gym said 299 this morning. That's the first time under 300 in at least a year, maybe more. Now where's that ice cream? :)
I'm happy because today i found out that i passed a course i'm taking at Washtenaw Community College with flying colors!
Congrats Mary!
Yes, felicitations.
I have a growing collection of Hawaiian Ti plants (cordyline fruticosa) which started from some cuttings I brought back from Hawai`i and propagated vegitatively to create the rest of the brood. Four years on and dang if one of them didn't show up in the morning with a flower. Ti produces flowers!? Sure enough, a quick jaunt with google confirms the evidence. Apparently a number of varieties flower as much as twice a year. Presumably ours didn't due to the cooler climate in Japan than is normal for them. Cool.
IVHB in the midst of a conversation with Dave yesterday, he asked me what kinds of rings I like.
You asked for the One Ring, didn't you?
(lol) I'd ask for the onion rings at Casey's.
Heh. My friend asked if I said I wanted the one ring to rule them all - I said I just wanted the one ring to rule Dave. And Casey's does have fly onion rings!
Maybe "fly" isn't the best word to compliment fast food..
(Casey's isn't "fast food", if we're talking about the same Casey's that I'm familiar with.) IHB my performance at this year's Ragtime Bash went well. But there's some collateral bummage; see the bummed item.
Right.. Pub food != fast food != burgers & onion rings, although those sets may overlap considerably.. I'm still not sure "fly" is a great word to describe food..
The ice crean truck that frequented our neighborhood last summer played several tunes, including "La Cucaracha". I found that a little troubling...
Ok - I recant on the word "fly" - and instead submit "tasty". Is that better?
It's that batter.
I believe that "awesomely outrageous" would be acceptable.
Also "big and honkin'".
IVHB I will be driving across Ohio tomorrow at this time, homeward bound. And my attorneys totally hooked me up in terms of Christmas gifts.
I've mostly figured out the guitar part for Rickie Lee Jones' "Chuck E's in Love"... one of the best groove tunes from way back when.
(I can sing that song, fer sure! Maybe you'd play for me sometime?)
(I'll need mucho time with the metronome before I venture *that* song in public!)
Got one of my "new" tube testers working, mainly by cleaning out the meter movement. Finally a real mutual-conductance tester to replace my old Heathkit!
IHB this is the first winter, but IBB this is still fall agora. We want Winter Agora!
er....I meant first day of winter, not first winter ever of course. the days can only get longer now :)
IHB the urgent support-the-team-in-trouble work is done, and even though they were still at work at 3:30 AM they appear to have things in hand. Ah, back to my own project!
IA Very H Indeed Because version 2.6 of the Linux kernel is now officially out. www.kernel.org.
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I am happy because the shortest day of the year wasn't as short as it used to be. Is it my imagination, or is it not as dark at 5:00 pm as it used to be,say, a couple of years ago?
Weren't you living in Cleveland a couple of years ago? Things are just darker there, on average.
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Re 533> I was in Cleveland last year. The year before that India, and the year before that I was in Columbus. I remember it being pitch dark at about 4:30 pm, and it's just grey at 5:00 pm these days.
The more north you are, the earlier it gets dark. But I live north of Cleveland and I have never noticed it being dark as early as 4:30 here before. I know it is pretty dark by 5:30 when I get off of work and still just a little light (but mostly dark) at 5p.
all I know is it is lighter longer now than it was yesterday.
in Pittsburgh it is usually pretty dark by 530 or 6 these days. . . (or it was when I was there up to a week and a half ago)
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I'm just glad I'm living in the southern part of Alaska -- I don't think I could take the dark in Barrow this time of year. After many years in Michigan and a few in the Seattle area I didn't think I was particularly affected by loss of sunlight but the short days this winter have been quite a drag. On the bright side (so to speak) the long days in summer are very, very nice..
You have several choices: