I'm so sorry that we're so stupid. Sometimes, we're really dumb monkeys.

The only job I've ever had where I've had to wear a tie was at Great American Music (long since gone out of business). I can count the number of times I've worn a tie since then on one hand.

I find it vaguely amusing that all of my professional IT jobs have had a more relaxed dress code than a record store in a strip mall.

I can no longer tie a tie from memory but, thankfully, we have the internet.

y workstudy job often sees me sitting at a computer desk. My bosses don't much mind if I plug in my headphones and listen to the radio via the internet as I work. Since I work from 2:30p until 5p most days, I catch the second half of Talk of the Nation, all of Fresh Air with Teri Gross (don't get me started), and the first half of All Things Considered on WHYY's live feed. Of all those programs, Talk of the Nation is the most inane; but it's better than my own thoughts. It keeps me in the news loop.

Today, however, was not the usual programing. I didn't actually know I would be tuning into the Fort Hood memorial service when I turned on WHYY, but I had a major mailing to finish today so radio it was.

All of the speakers were polished and nearly perfect, with speeches that covered the expected ground in eloquent ways. I was impressed. But President Obama's speech really struck me.

Please do not get me wrong; I am not an Obamiac. I am a die-hard political radical who loves the way he is pointing with a lot of his ideas, but I am not in love with Obama because he's Obama. I campaigned for someone else until the race narrowed and voted for Obama because he agreed to work for things I was hoping to see happen. So this praise is not because I drank the Kool-Aid. The following is due praise.

The speech President Obama gave was truly masterful. It was one of the best speeches I have ever heard. (I did speech and debate in high school; my favorite event was declamation, and I qualified for Nationals with a speech by Barbara Jordan. Doing dec meant reading A. LOT. of speeches. I've read and heard more speeches than the average duck here.) He pulled a few different ideas together with innovative and comforting transitions. I think he addressed the crowd in a respectful way, calming fears and making it clear that he was in awe of what had been given.

This is a speech to be heard. Even if you don't normally like President Obama, this is a speech to be heard. Political Wire posted video and a transcript. I challenge you to let the video load, then close your eyes for the next 14 minutes and just listen. Don't let the images on the screen or anywhere else distract you. Listen to the way this speech flows. This is a beautiful speech.

It is the largest shame that a such beautiful speech came to be because of a terrible choice.

The end of the service was also particularly touching:

1. It's a sunny day.
2. I have tomorrow off due to Veteran's Day. Yay government work!
3. The redesigned site seems to have launched pretty well.
4. I already have a few holiday presents down.
5. We're going out for Thanksgiving dinner! How posh!
6. But I also get to cook it on Sunday for El Hubbo's family. I love making turkey dinner.
7. The waffle blight of 2009 appears to be over.

t's probably poor form to say "Dash it all, I need a beer to cool off" at half-four in the morning. Oh well. (Cold beer + computer > computer + cold bath.)

In not-beer-related news, I have a number of invites to Gap's Give and Get sale. This particular shin-dig is invite-only and involves getting 30% off at Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Gap Outlet, Banana Republic Factory Stores, and Athleta. Oh, and Gap donates 5% of your total purchase to a charity of my choosing. My choice--from a limited spread--was Care because of their global poverty-busting focus.

The sale runs from November 12 through the 15th, and the coupons are good online or in a retail store.

I took the liberty of emailing them to folks that might want such things. If you aren't interested, then feel free to disregard. If you are interested but didn't get an email, pipe up (and check your spam folder)! Old Navy has lovely, cheap baby things...and 30% on top of that is not so bad at all. GapBaby is pretty cute, too.

Just above the word count goal for the day!

Our guide, Alvo, is just about to bring the main character & her partner (the fiction-version of mda), and the cloned FLLW, into the ship's arboretum.

Only that much to get me caught up to today's word count goal for Nanowrimo! Cool - I only wrote 600 words on Thurs., and didn't write on Friday, so this makes me hopeful.

Writing about FLLW being his jerky self is helping.

My NaNo word-count is really lovely so I'm going to break from The Adventures of Stompy and Pants and do homework.

These sort of lists keep me motivated, but I think they're terribly boring for anyone outside of my head. So I'm going to be really boring for a bit, because I have an obscene number of pages due very soon. This list is actually sorted in the order that I have declared they are due. (Some of these are drafts that are not officially due until December, but I don't like waiting until December when I know life will explode around then. I'm going to do them now, on a sleepy weekend in early November.)

At 8:45 the housewares clerk snuck (sneaked, I guess people say these days) into the back room and grabbed the Calphalon 12" Everyday Pan and rang it up for me. It was not supposed to be sold -- it's was the bonus gift for buying a 14 piece set. I knew this. The only other place in town I'd seen an everyday pan was Macy's and I already learned the hard way that they wouldn't sell it to me.

I could not bring myself to buy a pan online. It's one of those things I have to touch.

Thank you, clerk with much much much blond hair. I finally have my non-stick, glass lid, everyday pan. Now all I need to find is a 10" pan to match and I will be freed from the plague of giant frying pan handles. Huzzah!

I always forget how many of my internet friends are in Mac-land so I'm not sure how many people this will relate to (beyond Jaimi, who probably already knows about it).

Anyway, this year's MacHeist bundle has been posted...and this year, it's all free! I downloaded the stuff I wanted, and I'm hoping for Mariner Write to open up because Bean just doesn't do it for me.

This is not a bad deal. Not a bad deal at all. OH! PS: 5 days only!

Cue clever and devious plan in...three...two...one!

Sometimes the professor is boring so...

Since I put a fair bit of work and linky text together for a comment on iced_chai's Year of Books post, it would be a shame to leave it in a comment. Basically, she challenged me to come up with 12 books (ie, a year's worth) that have fruits in the titles.

All of these books existed on my radar. Either I've read them before, I've read a review of them, or I've heard a conversation about them on NPR. I didn't have to go digging for anything, really.

In no particular order, I give you a list of books with fruits in their titles:
1. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
2. Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange by Amanda Smyth
3. Cherry by Mary Karr
4. Wild Raspberries by ~ Andy Warhol and Suzie Frankfurt
5. Far Flung and Well Fed: The Food Writing of R.W. Apple, Jr by R. W. Apple, Jr.
6. Strawberry Fields by Marina Lewycka
7. Cranberry Queen by Kathleen De Marco
8. On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
9. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
11. The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden by William Alexander
12. Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman

And livsmama's Birthday!
Happy Birthday!

I hope it's wonderful!

Just under a year ago, I learned that my father and grandmother had been diagnosed with Cancer.

My grandmother's cancer was never able to be pinpointed and she lost her battle on January 11th, just a few short months later.

My father was diagnosed with 4th stage pancreatic cancer. That is the worst prognosis for the type of cancer with the highest fatality rate of them all. Median survival from diagnosis is around 3 to 6 months; 5-year survival is less than 5%. [Wikipedia] Complete remission from it is still very rare and accounts for something under 2% (maybe even under 1%) of patients.

Yesterday, after a year of chemo, blood transfusions, and countless pills, my father scanned clean -- no sign of The Big C.

He's not out of the woods yet, because a clean scan isn't indicative of being completely cancer-free, but saying this is good news would be the understatement of the year.

To quote his doctor, "You know, it normally doesn't turn out this way."

Yep, we know.

They say the cancer will probably come back, but for now I'm just going to soak this in and be happy.

Thank you.

New batteries for the water heater so I can have hot water in the kitchen? Check.

New kotatsu futon + rug? Check. (I had just thrown a regular blanket overtop the kotatsu, but it was rectagular and the kotatsu was square, creating unpleasant drafts that I found defeated the purpose of the kotatsu. But also the new futon is a really pretty plum colour and the old one was... way less pretty, so worth the hideous amount of money.)

New sheets? Check. (I inherited some sheets, but they definitely wanted replacing and I was being a lazy fuck about it. Winter is a good motivator for these things though...)

It's not that cold, but I'm one of those "always cold" people, especially my feets, so not having everything just right was really starting to irritate me.

Bad: My car is going to cost about $800 to fix.
Good: My car is going to cost about $800 to fix.

The mechanic thinks that somehow, be it the car or operator error the car slipped into D2. I trust him and I'm willing to entertain operator error, but I did pull off the road, put the car in park and drive again so that seems... unlikely. They can't replicate the behavior. Whatever. I'm glad it's not going to be a new transmission.

However, the car has needed about $350 worth of work since last January, the brakes have been squeaking so I'm opting to spend $250 on that and am also throwing $200 at the transmission to make sure that there's no maintenance I'm neglecting on the car.

So it's the 5th of November and any hope of getting a little green Quicken Online star for living within my means this month is kaput.

To Pollyanna this whole deal, the car should be right as rain for a while. (Fingers crossed, wood knocked, etc.)

Apparently my day wasn't shitty enouugh so my transmission blew.

I talked to my dad last night about the condo stuff. I feel better, but still sad. He was all "I love you! I'm not going to take the condo away!" And I don't think that he would do such a thing intentionally. I just think he's going to get in over his head. And I still feel grumpy that when my dad was doing all this inheritance stuff that my brother insisted on getting a giant house for himself and his 8 children, regardless of the fact that 2 are big enough to be on their own, and were living on their own before the giant house was purchase and another one is fast approaching adulthood.

And maybe I'm grumpy because there are all these special considerations for Chris because ohmygod 8 kids!

I got a tattoo yesterday. It's a pink flower on my left arm and it is very pretty and I like it.

And it made me realize just how talented the Minnesota tattoo artist was. (So thanks to pickleboot for recommending him a million years ago.) This new tattoo guy said that he'd finish the flowers that I moved before Tony could finish, but I'm still being ridiculous about it and thinking I'm going to take a trip back to Minneapolis and have him finish it.

I left the boy child with Weener yesterday for a bit so I could go see my mom in the hospital. They're not letting anyone under 18 visit. My mom doesn't look so good. She's still on oxygen and antibiotics and the doctor can still hear crackles in her lungs. And they can't get her heart rate under control and where it was atrial fibrillation it is now arterial flutter, which I guess is harder to get under control with medication. The plan is to keep her until her heart and lungs are better and then have her go in for surgery to replace the plate in her leg and all that while she's still there.

My mom scares me.

And then I get scared about my dad and I don't want to stay angry at my parents and then something happens and ergh.

We need a new trash can.

Ned needs a new diaper.

And I have to pee.

Today was the kick-off meeting for the second wave of Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE). You can read a little bit more about it in this newspaper article or at our consultant's web page. It's quite the buzz around the office since it started in April.

Between 2014 and 2019, 60% of the county's workforce will retire. Gone. In addition to this whole ROWE thing attempting to decrease traffic congestion, it's supposed to position us to be an attractive employer as we try to hire 5000 Gen-XYZ workers to replace our workforce. Eep.

We are the first government agency to try implementing ROWE. If you read the comments on the Strib article you'll see that public opinion of us doing this is rather dismal. To that, the trainer said well, everyone seems to think we never work anyway. Just ignore it.

I've been struggling with how this will work for me but in the spirit of trying, I printed out a weekly appointment page and tried to plot out both home and work to-dos when it would be easiest/best to do them. I also made a list of things I'd like to do to my home to make it a little more conducive to work. It wasn't too bad since both work and home are on a pretty even keel right now. No idea what will happen when that's not the case. (Hello December)

Folks, I have been thrust into an employer mandated work/life balance program.