Fiat Lux

Here goes ... into the blog beyond....

Four years ago this weekend, my husband and I took a last minute trip down to Washington DC, to see some sights and visit a college buddy of mine. We knew we were about to move to San Francisco and figured that it would be our last chance to spend some time in DC for a while. It was.

I found myself thinking about that trip quite a bit over this Labor Day weekend. So much has happened, so many things have changed. I didn't even think we'd still be living in California by now. I certainly didn't expect to have changed careers again. You can thank the dot-com implosion for both of those.

What next? Who knows. But I think that I'd like to blog the journey.

Breaking news: Mike Richter to retire. One of the great goaltenders in the game. How long until his number (35) gets hoisted to the rafters in Madison Square Garden?

Addendum:

Mike Richter retires not only as the greatest goalie in Rangers history but arguably as the greatest U.S.-born netminder:

- 301-258-73 record with a 2.89 goals-against average in 666 career games
- 41-33 with a 2.68 GAA in the postseason
- 301 victories is Rangers franchise record
- Won Stanley Cup in 1994, stopping Pavel Bure penalty shot along the way
- Three-time All-Star, named All-Star MVP in 1994
- Netminder for 1988, 1998 and 2002 U.S. Olympic teams, won silver medal in '02.
- MVP of the 1996 World Cup
- Led league with franchise-record 42 wins in 1994.
- Will become just the third Ranger, joining Rod Gilbert and Eddie Giacomin, to have his number retired - that in a pregame ceremony on Feb. 4, 2004

I really didn't want to go to work today. The thought of being all chipper and sales-y on the 9/11 anniversary just felt wrong. Unfortunately, I was scheduled for closing shift, so after a quiet morning at home, off I went.

I had been hoping that it would be a quiet day, but I was wrong. As I walked through the mall, things were pretty normal. One store (Lucky Jeans) had an American flag out by the door but otherwise it was business as usual. We got pretty much a normal amount of traffic for a week day. I did some paperwork and stockroom work to try to avoid the sales floor. Eventually, out I went and I did my thing, but my heart just wasn't in it.

I know that here in the Bay Area, 2500 miles from New York City, most people didn't have the same visceral reaction to 9/11 as I did. It was bad for them, but not in the same deeply painful way as it was for someone like me, a native NYer who spent 3 years working across the street from the World Trade Center.

I kept wanting to ask the women who were strolling through the mall, "How can you just go about your normal lives today? Don't you know what day it is?" It seemed somehow wrong or disrespectful to be out shopping. It did occur to me that going about one's normal day is not necessarily bad. If nothing else, it says that the attacks didn't change how people live their daily lives. And that's a positive thing.

But for me, the wounds aren't healed enough yet. It's too soon for me to treat 9/11 like any other day. Maybe next year, or the year after that, I'll feel differently. But this year, I really wish I didn't have to be at work on 9/11.

I'm heading back home to NYC to see family tomorrow, so today I got a little pampering at a nail salon over in Potrero Hill. A pal had told me that ManiPedi did good manicures & pedicures and she was definitely right. I sat in a big leather chair with heat and massage elements and relaxed while one gal worked on my feet and a guy (first time I've ever had a male nail technician!) did my hands. It was so comfortable I almost dozed off in the middle of it all.

ManiPedi had gotten written up in Lucky Magazine a few times. It's nice to see a good local place get some recognition.

Hubby & I flew home to spend the Jewish New Year with our respective families this weekend. One of the things that really sucks about living 2500 miles away from most of your family is how hard it is to get quality time with them. Try as you might, there's always someone you don't have time to see on your trip home. This time it was my sister. Nevertheless, in 72 hours, we managed to:

-Fly into Newark airport, pick up a really inexpensive rental car (thanks Hotwire!)
-Get lost in NJ as we tried to find our way to Staten Island and from there to Long Island.
-Spend an evening and a morning with Scott's mother, brother, wife, and our two wonderful nieces.
-Drive to Northern NJ for a Rosh Hashanna dinner with some of my dad's family
-Eat like a pig and then drive to Fairfield county CT to spend some time with my parents at their country house
-Spend a day in the country ducking the rain, running errands, and eating like a pig some more (featuring a rack of lamb and lots of homegrown veggies from Dad's garden).
-Drive into Manhattan on Monday for lunch with my grandmother (celebrity sighting: Chris Noth of the "Law & Order" franchise was 3 tables away. He's a hottie!) and some quick shopping at a few favorite stores for bagels and deli we can't get in SF.
-Finally, drive back to Newark and back to SF.

It's funny the wandering lines of thought you follow while driving. I had one today that started with my idly trying to remember the chorus of a pop song playing on the CD at work. Eventually it brought me to the realization that a show tune I've loved for about 25 years is about many things, and one of them is my husband Scott, whom I've been with for almost a decade. And yet it took me this long to put it together.

Something Wonderful
"The King And I"
Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein

This is a man who thinks with his heart,
His heart is not always wise.
This is a man who stumbles and falls,
But this is a man who tries.
This is a man you'll forgive and forgive,
And help protect, as long as you live...
He will not always say
What you would have him say,
But now and then he'll say
Something Wonderful.
The thoughtless things he'll do
Will hurt and worry you
But now and then he'll do
Something Wonderful.
He has a thousand dreams
That won't come true,
You know that he believes in them
And that's enough for you.
You'll always go along,
Defend him where he's wrong
And tell him when he's strong
He is wonderful
He'll always need your love,
And so he'll get your love.
A man who needs your love
Can be
Wonderful.

In reading this over, I wonder, does this sound like a back-handed compliment? I don't see it that way.

This Yom Kippur, I am not, as I should be, in synagogue. One of the things that makes me miss New York is the lack of a significant Jewish community here in the Bay Area. Of the 3 or 4 non-Orthodox synagogues here in San Francisco, there's none that we feel comfortable with, so we haven't joined one. I know there's other options in the East Bay and Marin, but I just don't like having to drive to shul.

I did read an interesting op-ed in the New York Times about the Yom Kippur War (which began 30 years ago today). I was 7 at the time, and I remember the shock of finding out that Israel was at war, the scared faces of my parents and their friends at synagogue that night, and the angry words. I think if they'd known that at the time, Moshe Dayan was seriously considering using nuclear weapons against the Egyptians, they'd have been even more worried. Golda Meir was right to turn him down flat.

At any rate, I feel guilty using the computer today, so I'd better post this and get offline.

For the second time in 2 weeks I've had to fight off a rather high fever (IOW, over 102 degrees F). That's generally not a lot of fun, but what's worse is that despite my having a job with benefits that include paid sick time, acutally using said sick time is not as easy as it sounds.

My company has several hundred, maybe even a thousand, employees. However, only a few of them work in my particular location, so if I wake up sick and have to open the store that day, I suck it up and shamble into work until my relief arrives. My employer doesn't get the best sales performance out of me, and I worry about infecting the customers, but it's just not feasible to have "floater" employees for the Bay Area who can cover for people in situations like that.

It would be nice if there were though.....

Although my heart belongs to the New York Mets, I'm quite happy to also root for the Yankees as long as they're not playing against the Mets. So last night's game, which I caught starting in the 7th inning, was quite a thrill.

Derek Jeter has been quoted as saying "I believe we've got some ghosts in this Stadium that help us out. There's some magic in this place." Maybe he's right and maybe he's not. Maybe all it takes is believing that when the s**t hits the fan, you will be able to pull something out of the hat and turn a bad game around. Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's the ghost of Babe Ruth or not that helps you win the game. The Red Sox have gone down to defeat again and their World Series drought - whether it's the "curse of the Bambino" or not - continues another year.

I hope the Yanks have enough time to rest up before game 1 against the Marlins. My call: Yankees in 6.

In a way it's comforting to know that according to this article in USA Today, I'm not alone in what's happened to my career. To make a long story short, about a year ago I started wortking for Aerosoles, a fairly well-known women's shoe company, in an entry level management position. Today, as I prepare to begin work as a store manager at one of the company's 80+ stores, I find that "survival jobs" are, well, the latest trend.

In a lot of ways, I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm on salary, have health benefits for myself and my husband, and have been promoted into management in this job. I have developed strong sales skills - something I never thought I was good at - and I like what I sell. And with this promotion, I have control over my own schedule, which is a good feeling. I still won't be able to take Saturdays off except on special occasions, but at least I can decide when my days off are.

That said, I'm still a Vassar graduate with a 15 year career in marketing who's taken almost a $50,000 pay cut to sell shoes for a living. And this is definitely not what I moved to the Bay Area for. The day a former co-worker wandered into my store (I hadn't seen her since getting laid off from Critical Path a couple years ago) and I found out she'd just gotten back from 18 months in France and was running her own consulting company was not a happy day for me.

That's the door to door length of my daily commute now. 56 miles each way. I've just this week been promoted at work; given a salary bump, a better title, and more responsibility. All of this is good but the catch is ... the long commute.

Fortunately, it's a reverse commute. I live in San Francisco and the job is over the Golden Gate Bridge, up Highway 101, in the fringes of wine country - a town called Santa Rosa. Unless you live in the North Bay you probably never heard of it. If there's no traffic on the road,and I break the speed limits on the smoother stretches of 101 (Southern Marin is pretty curvy and you can't really drive it too fast), I can go door to door in an hour, more or less. On a recent Sunday afternoon, though, the trip took 2 hours thanks to a few backup-causing accidents and heavy traffic coming back to the city from wine country.

To help manage the drive time, I've signed up for a monthly subscription from Audible.com. Each month, I can download one audio book from their website and burn it to CD. This month I'm listening to Al Franken's great rebuttal to the Republican media machine, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". Even in the unabridged version, it will only last me about 2 weeks, so I'll have to rely on the radio and my CD collection to fend off boredom the rest of the month.

I'm seriously considering buying an iPod and an FM broadcast kit so that I can listen to the 6 GB or so of MP3s sitting on my hard drive through my car stereo system. Doing so would also allow me to download my Audible.com books to the iPod instead of having to burn them to CD.

So if you have suggestions for things I can safely do in my car to while away the time, let me know!

In the last 48 hours, the temperature has dropped about 30 degrees, the winds have picked up, and the first rain in months is forecast to arrive tomorrow. In short, welcome to the rainy season. The weather won't be this nice again for several months.

The other infalliable sign that the warm weather has taken a hike? My nails are breaking, my lips are chapping like crazy and I have to apply hand lotion several times a day to keep my cuticles from drying out and cracking all over the place.

"Lagniappe" is a word I first heard in New Orleans which I'm told more or less means "unexpected gift". The lagniappe of my new commute is that my Saturn, which has consistantly delivered 30 highway MPG and 20-25 MPG in city driving, has somehow shot up to better than 35 MPG recently. I guess the intense highway time makes her happy. Either that, or someone at Jiffy Lube screwed up and put some pixie dust into her chassis at the last oil change.

I also gifted myself this week with a brand-new 20GB iPod and car kit. I'm still learning all the ins and outs of the thing, so I'll save a full rundown for another blog post. But so far I'm enjoying it.

One of the things I have to do at my job involves once a month going through all the shoes, socks, and shoe care stuff that for whatever reason can't be sold. So tonight as I was sorting out those that have to be trashed from those that get sent off to be fixed up and resold, I came to a realization. Life is too short to not like your socks.

Now, you might reasonably think that a grown woman would have figured that out at some earlier point in her life. But if I buy socks and then later decide I don't like them, they stay in my sock drawer and get worn when I run out of the socks that I like. It's probably some misplaced notion of thriftiness I inherited from my Depression-surviving grandparents. At any rate, I was wearing a pair today while I was sorting out the shoes, and decided to try on a pair. They fit weirdly, and I realized that my socks were twisted all around. Then I realized that I hated those socks, always had, and didn't really want to be wearing them. And finally, the realization that despite the fact that I feel that I'd be throwing money away by getting rid of socks that were still wearable, life is too short too wear socks you hate.

There's a lot of stress in my life right now. I recently started a new job, I had 2 people quit on me with no notice on Friday, and I'm probably not going to have a day off until Thanksgiving. I need to be kind to myself to get through that. I might as well include my sock drawer. I suppose the other lesson might be, I should be more selective about what goes into my sock drawer if I know they're not going to get thrown out until they wear out.

Anyway, when I got home, I tossed the offending pair into the garbage can. I felt weird throwing them out, but you know what? I won't miss them once the trash goes out.

Fall isn't much of a season in the Bay Area. Indian Summer takes up most of September and October. That leaves November before the winter rainy season kicks in. That leaves November.

It's been cold and crisp these last few days, with the scent of smoke from fireplaces filling the air in the evenings. Autumn was always one of my favorite times back home in New York, and these kinds of days remind me strongly of home. Now that I work in Santa Rosa, I get to see more greenery as I drive to and fro. The trees here don't change colors as dramatically as they do in New York and Connecticut - most of the trees are just yellowish brown - but a few patches of bright red can be found. A field of grapevines near Petaluma has turned bright yellow. I've dug out my wool sweaters and a scarf, although the gloves and down jacket aren't likely to be needed.

The gas fireplace in our last apartment wasn't quite as good as the real thing, but it would be nice to curl up near any kind of fireplace on days like these. Instead, I make do with one of the cats. Tina and Tommy compete for lap space on cold days. They like the warmth too.

It would be nice if I could look forward to some snowy days to come, but I'll have to drive to Tahoe for that sort of thing. Instead, we get the incongruous sight of palm trees with holiday lights on them. There aren't a lot of palm trees this far north, but there are a few, and it always throws me off a bit to see them.

"Black Friday" is fast approaching, and with it, the twin horrors of extended holiday hours and holiday music. I don't really mind the odd work hours, especially since I get to set the schedules now, but I utterly loathe the overproduced pabulum that passes for holiday music which the home office decrees we should play in the store. Christmas isn't my holiday, but I wouldn't be too upset if I had to listen to some good classical arrangements of carols, or classics like 'The Nutcracker Suite'.

Ah well. I just keep reminding myself, it's only for a couple of weeks, and then I can burn the damn CDs. Until next year.

The sucky thing about working in retail is that if your family is more than a few hour's drive away, you won't see them for the holidays. Since mine is some 2400 miles away, this year we're borrowing a family from my friend Katie in Berkeley. Not that Katie & her family are bad people - they're warmhearted folks that are a lot of fun to spend time with. But it's still not quite the same as being with your own family.

When I was still living back East, most years we would head down to Washington DC to be with my aunt & her family. I've always liked the DC/NoVA area and Scott and I have several times considered moving there. My uncle would do most of the cooking with a little help from my aunt & my mom. We generally stayed in the McLean area and didn't go into DC itself, instead doing homey stuff like taking their dog for a walk, watching my cousins' soccer games, and enjoying the slightly warmer than NYC weather.

It's silly and maybe a bit snobby, but one of the things I miss is a tradition my family inaugurated about 10 years ago. We found that Beaujolais Nouveau goes quite nicely with turkey, so my folks would pick up several bottles of the stuff for us to enjoy on Thanksgiving. It was fun and made the day a bit more special to taste that year's vintage and see how the different brands compared.

Yes, I know I can buy Beaujolais Nouveau here. It's not the same.

At any rate, I have a lot to be thankful for - health, family, friends, pets, and employment - so a little homesickness isn't such a big deal in the grand scheme. Maybe next year we'll be in NY again.

So last night shortly after I pulled onto highway 101 to head home I was hit by another car, spun across the highway and off the side of the road. The other driver said she was swerving to avoid something and didn't notice there was someone on her other side. It probably looked pretty wild - 2 cars spinning across 3 lanes of traffic hitting each other as they spun. Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised the rest of the drivers on the road managed to get out of our way.

It all happened very fast and my main impression as we spun was mostly of blurring shapes in my window with me gripping the wheel and wondering what was going to happen next. She ended up down the embankment and I ended up half on the shoulder and half in the slow lane, facing into oncoming traffic. I'm not certain but I think I was hit twice and spun 510 degrees while heading off the road. At any rate, I was not hurt (albeit very shaken - I could barely stand for a few minutes because my knees were weak). My poor Saturn is another story. The polymer panels on the back left door and above the left rear tire are both badly busted. There's a big dent on the left edge of the back bumper, and most troubling to me, the left rear tire is on an angle instead of perpendicular. I'm told this means the strut is bent. I figure that's why I did not end up in the ditch like the girl who hit me.

The car is not drivable and was towed to a nearby body shop. The back of the envelope estimate I got last night is quite close to the Blue Book value of the car so at this point it's about even odds whether or not Allstate will repair my baby or write her off. The repair guy assures me she will be fixed, not totaled, but I want to be prepared for either possibility. I also tend not to believe anything that anybody in the automotive field tells me until I get outside confirmation. I know that not every auto mechanic is dishonest, but as a woman with a limited knowledge of automobiles, I also know I can get taken advantage of if I'm not careful.

Prior to this the worst accident I've been in was a fender bender about 18 years ago, so I don't have a big pool of experience to draw on for how to react. I was pretty calm overall. Shaken definitely but not angry. Maybe because nobody was hurt and the girl who hit me was so obviously upset and apologetic about it. Maybe it'll hit me later. We'll see.

I did get a little upset when the tow truck driver told me that there was no place to rent a car in Santa Rosa and he'd be happy to drop me off at the 24 hour Denny's so I'd have a place to wait while I figured out how to get home. Visions of being stranded at Denny's, 50+ miles from home and not a change of clothes or even a toothbrush with me, were kind of scary. Fortunately the body shop that took my car has a loaner car - a 10 year old Honda with 120000 miles on it and a roof so low my head brushes against it when I'm sitting at the wheel. Beggars can't be choosers, so I took it and got home only about an hour later than normal.

I hope the car is repairable. I am really fond of my Saturn and losing her would make me very sad. I should know more in a day or so after Allstate gets a person up there to look at the car.

I scored 105.5. I think something must be wrong with me.

For those who've been wondering, the car situation is still - almost 2 weeks later - in limbo. Allstate has gotten a firm estimate from the body shop - $5,600. They're supposed to finally send a human being out to take a look at my car and assess the estimate sometime this week, as well as check to see if it's too close to their "threshold" for writing the car off. I'm getting a bit tired of waiting but there hasn't been much I've been able to do to speed the process along, other than call Allstate every other day to check on the progress of the claim.

I've also been having problems with my web host - the site has not been accessable much the past few days. If it keeps up I'll have to start looking for a new hosting company.

I've got a few blog posts in my head that I have to make time to type out - my "Lord Of The Rings" review, the long-overdue review of my iPod, and a couple others. With the holiday season almost over, my work schedule will shortly lighten up and I'll be able to post more regularly. Or so goes the plan. We'll see what reality brings.

For friends and family back east: No, we weren't anywhere near the big earthquakes in CA today. Scott felt his office building shake a bit, but I didn't feel them at all and didn't in fact even know they had happened until I got home late tonight.

Did you know Jell-O could freeze? I didn't. When I went to take some of the batch I'd made a couple days ago out of the refrigerator tonight, though, I found that one of the cups had frozen up. Guess it's time to adjust the coolness setting in the fridge.

I let it defrost a bit then vigorously stirred it to break up the frozen bits. Frozen Jell-O tastes OK. A bit crunchy.

I've been a bit down the past few days and, not wanting to turn this blog into something overly self-absorbed (if that's possible in a personal blog) or negative, I've refrained from posting. I'm feeling a bit better tonight.

I had to give one of my staff members a 30 day review today and had been quite nervous about it. I've had so many bad managers in the past that now that I myself am in a manager's shoes, I want to make sure I do a better job of managing than what I had to cope with. It helps that the employee in question is overall doing a good job, but I was still somewhat nervous about getting it right. I wanted to hit just the right tone - positive, but still wanting to call attention to some areas that needed improvement. I'm reasonably sure I did. She seemed happy after we were done and things went smoothly the rest of the day at work, if that's anything to judge by.

Business has picked up post-Xmas, which is also a reason for feeling more cheerful. It's no fun to be bored at work. Plus, I've taken the holiday music CDs and packed them away until next year. I wanted to break them into little pieces and then toss the bits into the garbage, but decided that might be overkill.

Lest it pass unnoticed, Dec 28th was Scott's and my 7th wedding anniversary. In previous years, when our schedules and finances permitted, we would try to get away somewhere to celebrate our anniversary, but that wasn't possible this year. We had a nice day anyway. We went to a favorite diner for brunch, did some shopping, and came home. Scott cooked us a nice dinner, and we watched Duty, one of the new Horatio Hornblower DVDs. One of the plot points in Duty is Hornblower's marriage, but that was just a happenstance of timing.

Aficionados of the original C.S. Forester series may find the additions to the plot confusing and/or annoying. Or as Scott might put it, I have a really bad habit of yelling at the TV when the plot deviates from what I expect based on the book. Nevertheless, overall the A&E version of the Hornblower series is a lot of fun. Its strength in casting goes a long way towards alleviating the weaknesses of the plot and the production values. Ioan Gruffudd (Hornblower), Paul McGann (Lt Bush), and Robert Lindsay (Sir Edward Pellew) are my favorites, but the other actors are all quite good as well.

One aspect of C.S. Forester's Hornblower books that's extremely hard to dramatize is Hornblower's internal life. In modern parlance, Hornblower struggled with depression and poor self esteem, which only his extreme self-discipline and willpower kept under control. It's not easy to put that on screen, and the A&E series generally doesn't try to do so - which is, I suspect, part of the reason for so many plot additions.

Anyway, I'm re-reading Hornblower and The Hotspur.

And so 2003 winds to a close. We'll spend New Year's Eve at a local comedy club, which should be fun. We hadn't planned it that way, but a friend has tickets she can't use and it'll be a nice change of pace. Some of the better New Year's Eve's we've spent in the past few years have been up at Lake Tahoe, but again, time and $$ took that off the table for this year.

I can't say I'm sad to see 2003 go. It was a better year than 2002, but not a stellar one. Financially, we're ending the year in better shape than when it started, but we've got a lot of catching up to do after the fiscal chaos of the past couple of years, and it'll be a while yet before there's light at the end of that tunnel. Our families are healthy and thriving, which is good, but America as a whole is still a mess, the war in Iraq is a sinkhole, and the outlook for the future could be better.

One bright spot: in 2004 America will elect a new President. My heartfelt wish is that we Americans get our collective butts in gear and send President Bush back to Texas where he belongs. In 19 days, the Democratic primary season starts with the Iowa caucuses. It's an exciting time. It's no secret I'm for Howard Dean, but even if some other Democrat is the nominee, I intend to do my part to make sure whoever gets the nomination can beat Bush.

Happy New Year, everyone! Please be safe if you're going out tonight.

It took almost a month, mostly consumed by Allstate's inability to get off their butts, but I picked up my newly repaired SL2 from the body shop today!

New side panels, new front and rear bumper, new strut & wheel, G-d know what else... and of course had to pay my deductible (ouch) ... but she's MINE again!!!

I told the body shop to give me an alignment report and they did, but frankly I don't know what to look for on it. I have the paper on file though just in case.

What a relief. Driving that icky Honda loaner car was really a drag.

We're going to Rome in April!

I've got a blooming orchid!

We don't generally keep plants in the house, because the cats tend to munch on them. However, last year I was given an orchid as a gift. I stuck it in the kitchen window, watered it every couple of days, and wondered if it would ever do anything after the blooms it came with finally withered and fell off. At one point a few months ago, I was inspired to prune the plant a bit, and that must have been a good idea, because after I did so it started to put out new shoots. As you can see, they've culminated in several nice blossoms, with buds showing promise of more to come.

This is what it looks like in its usual spot:

It definitely brightens up the kitchen, and so far the cats have left it alone. Now I need to figure out how to transplant orchids - this one has really started to outgrow the pot it came in.

I had an extremely pleasant surprise on Friday morning. I'd taken 5 days off work -- 'use it or lose it' vacation time was about to run out -- and waiting for me when I got to the store my frst day back was a blooming plant in a basket, with a card signed by all my staff to welcome me back.

I was extremely moved by the gesture -- it's not like I was gone that long nor has anything especially unusual happened. I have a good crew that seems happy with me (and vice versa), so it's not like them doing something nice for me was all that out of character. But I'm not exactly the princess of self-esteem, though, so it was a complete surprise that they would think to do something so nice for me.

It's also kind of funny that I should be given a plant right after I blogged about my orchid. I'm reasonably sure none of them reads my blog, so it's probably just coincidence. Now I have to figure out how to keep the new addition to the house from being chewed on by the cats. Tommy has already taken some preliminary nibbles.

Very interesting article in today's SFGate.com. In a nutshell, here's the issue:

Wal-Mart could save Bay Area grocery shoppers as a whole $382 million to $1.13 billion per year -- roughly 5 to 13 percent of their expected annual spending on groceries -- if the growth forecasts hold true, the report says.

On the flip side, the average Bay Area grocery-store employee can expect to lose $21,000 from his or her current annual wage-and-benefits package of $42,552 per year, the report warns.

From where I sit, this just seems like another example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Granted, downward pressure on the wages in one segment of the employment market does not translate to downward pressure across the board, but it's indicative of a theme in corporate beliefs these days.

As I've said in these pages before, this ongoing downward pressure in wages and tendency towards outsourcing jobs is one that I consider hugely dangerous to America as a whole. We are sacrificing our future for short-term profits. Because when everyone is making less than $30K a year, who is going to buy all these goods and services?

It's also a good argument for taking your destiny into your own hands, via self-employment and/or starting your own business. If you can.

It's been a few years since my own business venture failed, and I still bear the scars. The biggest one being a loss of confidence that I really can do what I set out to do. That's been ameliorated somewhat over the last year or so by my discovery that I am pretty good at this retail stuff, but it's not entirely gone either. And my credit's still screwed.

I've always said that despite the scars, I'd want to do it again some day. And I still believe that. But I haven't given a lot of thought to how I'm going to make that happen. It's a little late for New Year's resolutions, but perhaps that should be mine for 2004 - to start thinking seriously about what I'm going to do about my career. With the economy and Bay Area job market so screwed, I've basically been in a reactive, not proactive mode. I don't know if the economy has changed all that much, but I'm getting tired of letting the current take me where it will. I need to start doing more of my own choosing, not what others choose for me.

As of today I don't have that evil 112-mile roundtrip commute to contend with anymore! I'm back working in Corte Madera, managing my old store there.

One of those things about the work world is how hard work is generally rewarded by -- more hard work. I worked hard to turn Santa Rosa into a well-organized store with good quality selling numbers. Now, I get to do the same thing all over again in Corte Madera.

It's going to be a challenge, since the store has been understaffed for months and is in need of some fixing up. And unlike the placid Santa Rosa store, there's more customers and longer hours, so it will be tougher to get staffed up and things back on an even keel. I've been pretty nervous the past couple of days & didn't sleep well last night.

Today went alright though. The first customer of the day bought two handbags and the second, 4 pairs of shoes. I take that as a good sign.

I got rear-ended by a hit and run driver in a white truck last night as I was coming home from work. The driver didn't even stop, so I have no license plate or insurance info to give to Allsate. Fortunately I did find a witness who's willing to give her story, so that's better than nothing.

This time, I also got a little hurt myself as well. Really slammed my head but good against the headrest -- got a bump on the back of the head, lots of soft tissue soreness, aches, and tenderness. Not quite enough to make me want to go to the doctor but enough to be uncomfortable, especially at work.

This is the second fucking time in 3 months I've had major auto damage to my poor Saturn. I am NOT happy. The whole trunk, rear bumper, and left rear panel are hosed. Several thousand dollars, easily. And what Allstate is going to say with this one coming so soon after $5,000 worth of repairs the last time, i don't know.

I took a taxi to work this AM and got a friend to give me a ride home. Tomorrow early I have to get the car to a body shop and see about a rental. There is bus service from SF to Marin, but it's a real pain in the ass - two busses and the light rail, to be exact.

Bleh. I am SO not a happy camper tonight.

My parents came out here to San Francisco to spend 2 days with me as a pre-birthday celebration. We managed to squeeze in 5 wineries, 2 museums, 3 good restaurant meals, Shabbat dinner at home, and a nice long walk through the more nautical parts of Fisherman's Wharf. Not bad for 2 days, especially considering Dad had a cold.

Scott and I aren't the neatest people on the planet at the best of times, and with both of us having been busier than usual recently, the house was, to put it mildly, a mess when my folks came over. I'm sure my parents were pretty shocked. The few times they've been to our place in the past, it's been scrubbed thoroughly beforehand. At least the litterbox was clean.

And although I remembered to get fresh candles for Shabbat, I totally spaced on getting a challah. I felt very guilty about it, but at least the food and the wine were good. Scott did an excellent flank steak with potatoes and spinach, with chocolate mousse for dessert.

My actual birthday is tomorrow, and I'll be working the closing shift, so any festivities will be minimal. I may treat myself to a chocolate muffin for breakfast though. Mom pointed out last night that I missed being a February 29th baby by only 14 hours. All things considered, I'm just as glad to be a March baby instead.

Anyway, only 2 years until I hit the big 4-0. That's pretty scary.

My blog has been going for about 6 months now, and I'm still enjoying the process. Keeping a more or less public diary is an interesting challenge. There's things I've been meaning to blog about for months (such as my thoughts on my ipod), and then there's the things that I feel are too personal to write about in a forum that is, thanks to Google, more or less permanently archived. Then there's the issue of making time at all to post - with no Net access from work, I can only post at home, and I'm frequently too tired to take the 30-60 minutes it takes me to compose my thoughts, gather references (if necessary) and put together a spell-checked, more or less thoughtful post. And then, there's the things I know I want to write about, but somehow when I actually sit down to blog, I fin myself posting about a completely different topic.

Today, for example, I'd been meaning to either finish off my review of William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" or rant a bit about Nordstrom's unique egotism when it comes to hiring. But instead, this post is about something else.

I've noticed some interesting results from my webstats page. The little review I posted on The Davinci Code - one of the first posts to my blog, in fact - has generated the vast majority of traffic to the site. For example, in the month of February 2003, it generated more than 80% of my overall traffic, which comprises between 40-50 unique visits to the site per day. Not bad for an unadvertised personal blog that scarcely a handful of friends link to.

I'm somewhat amused by this, because IMO the review is not particularly thorough or insightful. But for whatever reason, it's gotten into the search engines and people are reading it. I've considered going back and expanding on it, knowing that it's getting so much traffic, but have decided to leave it be for now.

Some other phrases that pop up regularly in the Search Strings report: "schroedinger's cat", "lagniappes", and "donald rumsfeld vietnam". Most depressing search string: "jews are bad" - although the silver lining is that if someone is really looking for proof that jews are bad, my site isn't going to help them. And most offbeat: "are there trees that don't change colors" - now how did that string get someone to my blog?

I'd post a link to the webstats page itself but I 'd need to change the robots.txt file first, to make sure the search engines don't go nuts on all the links within the stats pages. And I have to get ready for work now - my blogging time for the day is done.

Just finished a 7 day stretch of work, no thanks to the gal who quit without giving notice. I get one day off, then 6 more days of work. Repeat for the next three weeks or until I finish staffing up the store, whichever comes first.

What I want to do tomorrow: get a pedicure, go clothes shopping, have a nice dinner somewhere.

What I'll probably end up doing: laundry, grocery shopping, clean the house, catch up on some paperwork.

I need a vacation!

The flowers that bloom in the spring,
Tra la,
Breathe promise of merry sunshine.
As we merrily dance and we sing,
Tra la,
We welcome the hope that they bring,
Tra la,
Of a summer of roses and wine.

(The Mikado, Act II)

The cherry blossoms are starting to bud at work this week. The sun has been shining for the past several days, and it's starting to feel like Spring in California.

Unfortunately, things continue to be screwed up at work. The ongoing understaffing issue has moved well into the realm of the bizarre. The most recent hire started Saturday. On Sunday, she was in a car accident and is now in the hospital. I don't have all the details but it sounds like she'll be fine eventually. For now, though, she's out of commission, and no idea when or if she's going to be coming back to work. And I'm still significantly understaffed.

What I can't figure out is, if the job market is so tough these days, why is it so hard to hire people to sell shoes? For months now, this store has suffered through a string of people who either quit within a week, are incompetent, and/or have attitude issues. The stress of having to deal with the lack of staff caused my predecessor to resign, and after only 3 weeks it's starting to get to me, too.

Despite the fact that I am not normally a superstitious person, I am starting to think something is beyond the normal range of wrong about the string of bad luck we've been having. I need to get the store feng shui'ed or something - anything to change the current vibe and help us get a full staff onboard.

At least we have the pretty cherry blossoms to admire, and the sweet smell of Spring in the air.

Since 2/29 I've had exactly one day off, and as of last night I don't have another day off on the schedule, thanks to my backup taking an emergency leave of absence. I am TIRED and really, really stressed out. I'm not a robot. I need time off, to recharge my batteries, be with my husband, and take care of mundane things like laundry, never mind trying to have a life.

I have no intention of putting up with this level of stress for much longer. The main thing that's kept me from screaming louder about the situation is my vacation, scheduled to commence on 3/31. If I have to, I'll grit my teeth and slog through until then, but once I'm back from Rome, things need to change, and quickly.

A drone at the corporate HR department told me that since I am an exempt employee, there is no limit to how many hours I can be made to work nor how few days off I can have. Frankly I'm not sure that's really legal, but I haven't had time to find out what the situation really is.

Anyway, I'll try to keep blogging regularly but if I post less frequently, now you know why.

On the good news front, my car is back from the shop again. Here's hoping I've used up my accident quota for the next 20 years or so.

I'm 38 years old.

When I look in the mirror, I sometimes remember being in my painting class in college and trying to do a self-portrait. It was not one of my more successful works. I could never get my own face right - the angles eluded me somehow.

When I look in the mirror, I don't see myself as having changed all that much from that 20 year old struggling with paint and brushes. The lines on my forehead are a bit more defined, but otherwise I don't think I look all that different. The hair is longer than it was then, and it's bottle-auburn shot through with bits of grey, not blonde. But the face is the same.

I wonder, will I still look in the mirror when I'm 70 and be able to see that same girl?

This month has really sucked, as far as work goes. But things are (dare I say it?) getting better. One of my staffers from the Santa Rosa store agreed to start working in Corte Madra with me and today was her first day.

What a relief it is to have her there! It's amazing how much more smoothly things run with the addition of just one more person in the store. I can go buy supplies for the store or take lunch without worrying and rushing back as soon as possible, becasue if there's a wave of customers when I'm out, there's two people to handle it, not just one. Things stay more organized and get done faster because there's that extra pair of hands. And there's someone else who can help me with the load of managament tasks I've had to do alone for the past 6 weeks.

Better still, on Wednesday we head out for Italy! There's a lot to get done between now and then, but I've been trying to stay organized and plan as much as possible, so we don't get tripped up by last minute issues. We need to pick up a few odds and ends for the trip, and I need to get laundry done, but overall we're pretty much ready.

The one thing I regret is that I've been so damn busy I have not had much time to review the "Living Language" Italian CDs I ordered. I hate being an ignorant tourist who can't speak the language of the place she's visiting but we'll have to wing it with the phrasebook.

In short, I'm starting to feel like I'm coming out of the tunnel I've been plowing through since taking over the Corte Madera store. Long may it last!

For 7 years, a very nice cappuchino machine has been sitting unopened on our shelves. It was a wedding gift we registered for (thanks Dexter!), but for one reason or another we never got around to using it. Today, with the memory of the excellent coffee of Rome fresh in our heads, I finally cracked it open.

Success! Perfect espresso and froth. Using our friend Ben's excellent Costa Rican coffee didn't hurt.

Now I'm going to drink it and read some headlines while it's still hot.

Trying to grind a half-pound of coffee in the Cuisinart because your coffee grinder won't hold that much = a good way to waste time and coffee.

I've been pretty down recently, so everything is looking like I'm seeing it through shades of gray. Still, I'm more than a little saddened by the current Doonesbury strip sequence, in which longtime character B.D. (who was shipped off to Iraq last year) has been gravely wounded. And for the first time (perhaps ever) in the strip, B.D. is seen without his helmet.

Maybe Doonesbury is just cynically exploiting the war to prop up his ratings (although I doubt that). Most likely, he's trying to dramatize this difficult issue by bringing it "home" to the Doonesbury family.

The strips (three so far) are gripping and immediate. B.D. has just been wounded and is fighting for his life. Doonesbury deliberately lets all the voice bubbles in the strips float loose, not tied to any one character, to emphasize the disorientation and chaos of the event. A nice touch. The only thing missing is any sign of blood -- but I suppose that might be too graphic.

At any rate, whether it's because I'm depressed or because they're good (or both) these strips have gotten to me. They're worth a look, even if you're not a Doonesbury fan.

To top it off, Senator Chuck Hagel goes onto CNN to say it might be time to reinstate the draft. "If we've got a generational war then all of us should take some responsibility for this country if it is a nation at war," is how he put it.

And another 10 American troops have died in Iraq since my last post here.

Time to lighten things up a bit. Coming this weekend: Iron Chef America.

Batali, Puck, Flay ... and NO William Shatner. The TiVo is already programmed. This should be fun.

Lately I've fallen into what I consider a bad habit. Each morning around 5:00 AM, I wake up and can't get back to sleep. Unfortunately, that's about 2 hours earlier than I'd like to be waking up, so I'm not getting enough sleep.

I suspect it's stress related and hope that it will soon pass, but right now it's annoying. Being tired adds to stress, and that's the last thing I need this week.

Wish it were a more upbeat one.

I blew a 3rd interview today. After some 2 hours of talk, the interviewer gently told me I was not the right candidate for the position and was kind enough to tell me why. The fact that I was going up against 2 internal candidates for the job was one factor. The other (and more telling) one was that I was so obviously burned out and unhappy that he couldn't be sure whether I really wanted to work for his company or if I just wanted to get away from where I was now.

And he was right.

Being tired and burned out is one thing. But if it's impacting my ability to not only do my current job, but to get other jobs, I need to get out now.

I'm giving notice tomorrow.

Tonight, I'm going to have a big glass of wine and try to not feel sorry for myself.

A nice Tuesday morning in May and it's been alomst a week since I've blogged.

In my head there's parts of a post about the godawful mess that is the reports of prison abuses in Iraq at the hand of Americans but I am too drained & disgusted to put the whole thing together into coherence.

Today I am off. Tomorrow & Friday are my last two days at Aerosoles. I'm going out on a high note. The store just finished a second month in a row where it posted double-digit increases in sales over last year. If I weren't so tired & burned out, I'd be really happy about that. But mostly I'm numb.

Current plan is to take a little time - something between an week and a month - to chill out and get my head back together. I can't stay off work forever, so I'll need to get a job again by sometime in June. As yet undecided is whether I'm going to look for a placeholder job to tide me over until I go back to school, or a 'real' job. I have to say, the though of just pulling coffee at Starbucks for a while has some appeal. After all the stress I've been going through, not having much responsibility for a while is more alluring than it used to be.

Forgot to plug in the cappuchino maker & then spent 10 minutes wondering why my coffee wasn't brewed yet. This is only the second time in 18 months that I've had 2 days off, in a row, at home. So no wonder I'm a bit discombobulated.

It's looking like a nice day out there. It's probably a nice day back East too - I tried to call Mom & got her answering machine. No idea what she & Dad are doing but I hope they're having fun. I'll try again closer to dinnertime.

I got a nice surprise on my last work paycheck - 9 days of vacation pay. I didn't think I had quite that much vacation built up, but I did. With airfares so low, I am thinking hard about taking a week of R&R back East.

Spent a lovely weekend more or less offline with my parents at their summer home CT. Today, I helped them move their sailboat from its winter home in Mamaroneck, NY to its summer slip in Rowayton, CT.

It took about 7 hours, because although there was a reasonable amount of wind, it was blowing from the wrong direction and we had to beat all over Long Island Sound to get where we were going. I hadn't been on a boat in more than 4 years and was a bit nervous that I'd be no help, but to my pleasure discovered that I can still stand a trick at the wheel and trim a sail, although I had to think a lot harder about whether what I was doing was right than I used to.

The last hour was a little stressful, as we started sailing right towards a fairly powerful thunderstorm. It was a warm day, and I had some spare dry clothes with me, so getting wet wasn't that big a deal, but the frequent bolts of lighting were a little scary to watch when you're out on the water with a really tall metal mast inviting the lightening to come pay a visit. I saw one particularly brilliant lighting strike hit a flagpole right on the edge of the shore. That got me nervous. However, the lighting decided to steer clear of our boat and we made it back to shore drenched but otherwise unharmed.

Tomorrow, I get together with a few more family members in NYC and Tuesday I'm back in SF.

Have had the blahs the last day or so, maybe I'm a bit blogged out. Here's a bit of good news to those of us with multi-TiVo households:

TiVo has cut their monthly rates for the 2nd through 5th TiVo in the household. That's $72 less I have to pay them.

My feeling?

It's been years since I regularly read the Village Voice, but there's a recent article that makes a point I've been saying for some time now. In looking at the last few years of my career, I've had to say, "I guessed wrong when I chose a career doing technology marketing. I thought the sector wouldn't fall as hard as it did, or even if it did fall, I had enough connections and a good enough resume to keep employed." I guessed wrong and paid the price. And now the Voice is looking at this same issue:

Choosing a career path is a high-stakes gamble on where the jobs are likely to be two or four years down the road. Guess wrong and you could end up at a dead-end retail or fast-food job, slowly climbing out of a deep, dank hole of debt. Guess right, and you'll enter a job market that offers less security than ever.

I'm older than the people the author highlights as examples, but he has profiled my life too, down to the choices I made when my career crumbled and I needed to take a job - any job - to keep it together. I try hard not to wallow in self-pity over what happened. I certainly don't think the world owes me a career. But it's damn hard to build a life when the career choices you make go so swiftly from right to wrong.

Here's a look at the future:

May marked the nation's third straight month of job growth, but the long-range view is mixed. For the best handicapping, you want the job market equivalent of a Las Vegas line-maker, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. Every couple of years officials there release the mother of all occupational outlooks, the 10-year employment projections. The most recent one, published in February, projected 21.3 million net new jobs through 2012. Construction jobs should keep growing (expect to see a million more by 2012). The strongest service-sector bets are in education, health care, and state and local government. The single best choice may be to join the ranks of registered nurses (623,000 new jobs).

But here's the depressing news: Of the top 10 occupations with the rosiest projections, seven are by and large poorly paid McJobs: retail (596,000 new jobs by 2012), customer service (460,000), food preparation (454,000), cashiers (454,000), janitors (414,000), waiters and waitresses (367,000), and nursing aides (343,000). And the BLS admits its numbers don't distinguish between full-time jobs with benefits and part-time or temp work. In other words, there will be plenty of jobs, but far fewer careers.

I have been giving a lot of thought recently to going back to school and finally getting a Master's degree. According to this, I should be looking at nursing school if I want some career stability and even then, who knows what will happen 5 years from now.

My Depression-era grandparents would probably tell me that work is not meant to be something you like, so go to nursing school. But I have no interest whatsoever in doing it. Perhaps I'm like one of the out of work buggy whip makers who were unable to let go of the career they used to have - except that technology and marketing are neither of them going away. Hence my thought that what I really need is an MBA. Of course, getting one would mean even more debt and more time off the job market. A scary thought given our financial situation. But is staying still even an option anymore?

Tip of the hat to Whoviating for the link.

Light blogging right now - I 'discovered' the online game City of Heroes (no thanks to Scott) and have been playing it like crazy these past few days.

If you play and are on the Liberty server, look for either Shopaholic or DanielJackson & tell me "hi!".

If none of the above makes any sense to you, I should be back to normal by the end of the weekend.

I had set TiVo to record 4 hours of CSPAN convention coverage ... but the channel didn't change correctly and I got 4 hours of crap instead. I'm annoyed. I have little interest in the convention other than to hear some of the better Democrats doing their thing in front of a microphone, and missing those speeches ticked me off. Particularly Clinton's, as he's arguably one of the best political speakers of this generation.

Plus my cat Tina knocked a cup of coffee all over my desk while trying to climb onto my lap. I sacrified my t-shirt to save my digital camera from getting soaked. What a mess.

Bleh. I hope the rest of the week is better.

As in computers. The hard drive Scott gave me to put into my rebuilt computer rolled over and died tonight. So tomorrow I have to go buy a new hard drive and start the tedious process of reinstalling my whole system AGAIN. 2 more days down the drain.

I think I sucessfully saved my most recent data before the drive completely died, but I won't know for sure until I reinstall. At worst, I lost 2 weeks of work and emails, plus a few odds and ends like the 4 new iTunes I bought last week.

I am so very not happy right now.

We're please to announce that a new kitten has come to join the household - meet our new baby GIMLI:

As a volunteer, you see literally hundreds of kittens at the SPCA during kitten season. Some stick in your heart more than others, and for whatever reason Gimli caught at mine. After seeing him go without a home for 2+ months, Scott and I decided ours was the right home for him. We brought him home today.

Gimli is an active, high-energy kitty, currently about 5 months old. He was very much in need of space to run around and play in, and being locked up with so little play room was taking a toll on him. He also had a really nasty cold for several weeks which didn't help his adoption chances. Despite it all, though, he purrs like a jackhammer the minute anyone picks him up. I had thought that when the time came for a new kitten we'd probably get a tortie, but nope! Our boy is almost entirely black except for a patch of white on his belly and the tips of his paws.

Gimli (yes, named after the Dwarf in Lord of the Rings) was the name he was assigned at the shelter. After calling him that for 2 months, I can't think of him as anything other than Gimli, so we're going to keep it. It might not have been the name we would have chosen but it's good enough.

The resident kitties are still trying to decide what to make of the newcomer. More pix are posted in the Gallery.

More to follow as he settles in, I'm sure.

Blogging has been more irregular this past week.

Comment spam has been getting worse and worse, and fighting it has been siphoning off blogging time (I may not be able to wait for MT 3.1 to come out after all). New kitten to love and play with. Plus, I'm having a little of a crisis in confidence - it feels like anything I want to talk about, other bloggers have already addressed, and said it better than I could myself.

I guess you could say I'm in a bit of a rut. Hopefully I'll pull out soon.

I realized this morning that yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my blog's existence. Some 260 posts later, here I am, still blogging away.

In looking through my Technorati links and SiteMeter referrals, I've noted that over time I've gotten listed in a handful other people's blogrolls. That's of course gratifying to my ego, but when I see myself listed as being a "Progressive" blog it also makes me feel a little like I'm there under false pretenses. With my recent increase in spare time and the heating up of the political front, I've posted a lot about politics, but Fiat Lux was not meant to be a political blog as such. And I do not consider myself a "Progressive" - which seems to be the label people adopt when they believe the Democrats aren't sufficiently to the left.

When Howard Dean said, "I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" that had a lot of resonance for me. I'm a 3rd generation Democrat and proud of it. That said, I also voted for Giuliani and Pataki when I lived in New York City. I felt they were the better candidates for the job at the time. I'd vote for a Republican again if I honestly felt that s/he was the better candidate and more closely matched my policy beliefs. The way things are today, I don't think that's very likely though.

America, in my mind, is a grand social experiment. We've tried for 200+ years to build a better society, one that is a standard of success for the rest of the world. Problem is we're human and we don't always get things right. The industrial revolution brought some dramatic changes to the role of labor in people's lives. I think a lot of the social programs that have been introduced during the 20th century were various attempts - some more or less successful - to try to bring some balance to the equations that had been changed but the new modes of work. Some have been more successful than others; and of course the world is still changing. We may never get it right - but we cannot stop trying.

In short, I consider myself a firm Democrat and more centrist than far left, although others may not see me that way. And Fiat Lux is a blog that talks a lot about politics, but is not confined to it.

Happy anniversary, Fiat Lux! Let's see what the next year will bring.

Well, after dithering for almost but not quite too long, I took the plunge and did several things to get myself on-track for getting my MBA today. I sent in my transcript request to Vassar, got signed up at UC Berkeley for the remedial math, statistics, and accounting classes I need to take, got one of my two letters of recommendation lined up, and started my GMAT prep work. Tomorrow I go over to Berkeley campus to spend an insane amount of $ on the textbooks I need.

I've been stressing out quite a lot about this course of action, but it's a relief to actually make the commitment and be doing something again instead of wallowing in uncertainty. Now I just need to figure out how to get some math to actually stick in my brain. It's never been my strong suit. And then of course I have to persuade some fine institution to accept my application.....

Classes start tonight for my b-school prerequisite courses. First up, Accounting. My initial feeling is that this will be the easiest of the classes I have to take because it's the least hard-math of the three, but we shall see.

I still need to go buy some graph paper and possibly a calculator for Statistics. I'm debating whether I should find a software version to install on my Tungsten C or just buy a standalone. Also still trying to find out exactly what the calculator needs to do so I get the right one.

My GMAT prep is coming along reasonably well. The Kaplan CD and the ETS dowloadable prep package are both very helpful. As expected I need to brush up on my math, but the score for my initial practice test was not as horrible as I feared it would be. Since I'm not gunning for the top-tier schools, I'll be thrilled if I pull a 650 on the actual GMAT, and a 600 would be acceptable. If by some weird miracle I do better than 650 I may revise my plan and try for UC Berkeley or even - gasp - Columbia, but that's pretty unlikely.

One thing I've noticed is that the actual math per se is not always my problem. I've gotten questions wrong several times because I'm not parsing the question correctly. The more I practice, and focus, the better I should get at that.

May this new year be a sweet one for us all.

I haven't posted in a couple of days... the holiday, a general feeling of malaise, and bad news from a friend have all got me off my game. But mostly, it's a feeling of impotence. I confess to the creeping feeling Kerry is not running a good campaign and that Bush is going to win in November. So why does it matter that I record what's going on?

I've been thinking more and more lately that if you aspire to have a blog which does something beyond recording the antics of your kids or how you repainted your living room, you ultimately need the belief that what you say matters. And right now I don't feel like anything I can say or do will actually have an impact on the world at large. The Bushies are going to do whatever the hell they want to do and I can't stop them. I can't persuade the Kerry campaign to get off its ass and start being more aggressive. The people who find their way to this blog are already likely Kerry voters. And I'm not timely, eloquent or well-connected enough to offer any unique insights into the world at large.

I'm not stopping blogging, but I think I'll be dialing it down for a bit until I find a way to believe that what I say is actually going to make any kind of difference. Call it ego, but I don't want to have just another mundane personal blog that nobody reads except my husband and my sister. I would like to think that I have something to say that at least a few people who don't actually know me are going to enjoy hearing. But maybe I don't.

The autumn equinox is today, marking the official end of summer. Not that we here in San Francisco notice it, because the weather is at its best right about now. Sometime in November it will get a little cooler and rain a lot until March or so. Then it warms up a bit and the rain goes away, and we're back to normal again.

To someone who grew up with Northeast winters, it feels like there are no seasonal differences out here. I don't really miss those days when the wind-chill factor approached zero, but like the old song says, autumn in New York was a beautiful thing. I miss the days when Central Park looked like a big patchwork blanket of fall colors and there was a crisp freshness to the wind that you never had in summer. I hated how early the sun went down, but there were the holiday lights to cheer you up - walking through New York in December was always a joy. The real slog was January through April, when all you had to look forward to was spring and spring always seemed too far off.

Of course, there's a lot to be said for never needing a down jacket and being able to wear flip-flops and a t-shirt in March. And Lake Tahoe is only 4 hours away if I want cold and snow. Perhaps this year I'll be able to scrape the bucks together for a ski weekend, I haven't seen snow in two years. A girl can dream.

Yom Kippur. Catch you on the flip side.

My husband Skawt has been doing some work with Movable Type at work and is getting more interested in blogging. I've set him up as an author here at Fiat Lux. So if the tone of a post should sound a little different from usual, check the author -- it's probably Skawt!

Welcome aboard, honey.

It has rained twice in the last few days -- looks like the winter rainy season is starting a little early this year. It's time to pack up the summer stuff and break out the sweaters.

Also, 10 years ago today Scott and I went out on our first date. Dinner and a movie -- "Ed Wood" of all things. To commemorate the occasion, he surprised me with 2 dozen roses.

I've got a really wonderful guy.

I started a new job yesterday. A p/t gig. And remembered again how stressful that can be. I hate watching everyone around you merrily doing their thing, while you feel like a jerk because you can't even find a piece of paper without having to ask for help.

I know the only cure is to buchke down, learn what I need to learn, and soon enough i'll be merrily doing my thing too, but it's still no fun.

The training it pretty in-depth though. More on that later, as I have to get ready for Day 2.

Scott and I are flying to NYC today to spend a week eating, cooking, and spending time with family and friends. I'll have net access but posting will undoubtedly be light until we return.

Have a happy holiday, all!

We're back home after a nice trip to see friends and family. I'm trying to fight off a cold but have been unsuccessful for the last few days, hence the dearth of posting.

Have been working some EARLY mornings lately. I'm tired. There's not much that screws up your personal sleep-wake cycle like having to wake up at 3:00AM to go to work one day, at 6:00AM the next day, and then 2 days later back to 3:00AM.

Despite the tiredness, I'm actually enjoying this gig. I wouldn't want to be a barista for the rest of my life but for now it's fun.

Still, it's hard to blog when you get home and you're too tired to think.

When you bring a pet into your home, it's a form of Faustian bargain. Pets bring a lot of joy into a life - but their own lifespans are relatively short. You know the day will come when you have to say goodbye to your much-loved friend, and that day is always much too soon. Today was the day I had to say goodbye to my sweet companion of the last 17+ years, my cat Tina.

Tina came into my life in the summer of 1987 via the North Shore Animal League. This is a not very good scan of her then.

Over the years she lived in Poughkeepsie, New York, and San Francisco, and despite preferring people to other animals she managed to live with 7 different cats and (briefly) one puppy. When Scott came on the scene, she took to him immediately and when I wasn't around was more than happy to hang out with him (or just about anyone else). But through it all, her favorite person was me and her favorite place to be was on or near my lap.

Despite a diagnosis of progressive renal disease 3 years ago, Tina remained an active and happy cat until these last few weeks, when her disease progressed rapidly. This week, her kidneys finally shut down and she stopped eating. Scott and I knew we had one last vet visit to make. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but seeing her in pain was worse.

There's a lot more I could say about Tina - stories from happier times - and perhaps one day I will, but for now I am just too sad. There are three other kitties in our home, and I love each one dearly, but Tina was my first pet and has a special place in my heart. I miss her very much.

Fortune's wheel is not without a sense of timing. On checking the mail on our way back from the SF SPCA's clinic yesterday, I found my acceptance letter from USF. I'll be starting my MBA program in about 6 weeks.

I spent 9 hours dealing with a shorthanded staff and a lot of short-tempered customers today. It's not the first Xmas Eve I've worked but it was definitely the toughest. The line was practially out the door all day and holiday spirit was in very short supply.

I'm home now and looking forward to a day off. Then I wade back into the breech on Dec 26th. At least I have a fat paycheck coming my way for all the extra hours I'm putting in this pay period.

I'm way too tired to be merry. And even though this is not my holiday, I miss my family. I miss snow (not that NYC had a white Xmas all that often but at least there was a chance). And I miss New York.

On the bright side, I have Scott & the kitties all happy to have me home, and tomorrow we're going to cook up some kickass food with some friends. Should be fun.

Today is Scott's and my 8th wedding anniversary. We exchanged cards and cooked up some nice steaks for dinner, but don't really have the time or money to do much else to note the occasion. Hopefully by the time our 10th anniversary rolls around we'll be in a position to celebrate in higher style -- like maybe a vacation.

What matters most, though, is that we're still together and happy. The rest is icing on the cake.

Over the past few days I've been mentally composing bits of a typical "the year that was" look back on Scott's and my past year. The usual thing - mention a few personal highlights and low notes, maybe make a few political comments, and close with something upbeat about the coming year. But frankly I just don't feel enthusiastic about pulling it together into a full blog post. It's not the worst year we've been through, but it was far from the year I hoped it would be. And I've already blogged most of the major high and low notes anyway.

2005 will bring a real change - I start my MBA program at USF in the 3rd week of January. It's been more than 15 years since I was last a full-time student, and as the day gets nearer I find that I am more than a little nervous about the whole thing.

I'm not such a mature adult that I don't still have the same kinds of anxieties I had those many years ago when I last started at a new school -- Will I do well? Will people like me? What should I major in? And there are new anxieties I didn't have back in my college days -- Have I made the right decision? Can we really afford for me to be more or less non-income producing for so long? Will I be able to get a better career out of this endeavor, even at my age?

I'm better able to handle anxiety now that I used to be -- I've had a lot of practice at it -- but these are the things that occupy my mind as 2004 rolls to a close. What 2005 will bring I don't know. I'm eager to find out, though.

After spending the past sveral weeks trying to decide what laptop to buy, hunting around for a good deal, and then trying to bring myself to actually spend the money, I went ahead tonight and ordered a new Dell Inspiron laptop for school.

it's a good thing that I have a hard time spending money on myself. Dell has a habit of changing their prices every week, and by waiting two weeks I cut about $50 off the final price of the system, plus got a bit better bang for my buck by way of a slightly larger screen.

Here's the configuration I ordered:

Dell Inspiron 1150
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.80GHz
15-in XGA screem
Windows XP Pro
512 Mb RAM
40GB HD
8x DVD-ROM
Built-in wifi, modem, and network cards
Extended cell battery
1 year warranty

And all for under $1,000.

Given the limited budget I had to work with, I think I got pretty good bang for my buck. The tradeoff I'll be making is this laptop is no lightweight; it will weigh in at close to 8 pounds. Still, I'm pretty psyched.

Yesterday was my first day of classes at USF. I've spent part of this morning sorting through all the handouts I got yesterday and trying to get a handle on exactly how much time getting all my homework done is going to take.

I'm taking four courses this semester; two "quant" courses (Decision Modeling/Data Analysis and Accounting) and two "soft" courses (Leadership Dynamics and Management Communications). The 'soft' courses will be slightly easier in that I am a little more comfortable writing papers than I am crunching numbers, but either way it's going to be a lot of work.

I've already got a paper due Tuesday and about 8 chapters of preliminary material to read through, and two classes have yet to meet this week. I've committed to working 3 days a week, which leaves me the other 4 to go to my classes and get all my work done. I should be able to manage, but it's going to be pretty exhausting.

One of the things USF pushes hard is diversity and the study group I'm in for my Leadership class is pretty darn diverse. Of the five members, one is fresh off the airplane from India, another is from Thailand, and a third is from the heartland of Indiana. Then there's me, the Jewish gal from NYC, and another girl who has lived in a number of different parts of the US. It should be interesting to see how we all work together.

On the not so bright side, I noticed that one of my professors takes what seemed to me to be gratuitous swipes at evolution/Darwin in his course notes. As much as I like to ignore the fact, I am indeed attending a Jesuit school, and I need to remember that at least some religiosity is to be expected. Hopefully I'll be able to go on ignoring it most of the time.

I have to work tonight and am not going to be able to watch any of the Super Bowl. Is "bummed out" too dated a phrase to use anymore?

I am settling more into a regular routine now, three weeks into school. Classes four days a week, work the other three. Which means I don't really have any days off, but some days are lighter than others.

And some are more stressful. I've been at Starbucks three months now. I'm pretty comfortable doing the job most of the time, but the stress level has not significantly abated and I don't think it's going to. The store is quite high-volume - we can get as many as 100 customers an hour - and there's the usual mix of personalities and staff drama to cope with. It can get hectic but it's really not all that bad.

No, the real stress comes from being located in a less than pristine part of town (Market Street, not too far from the Tenderloin). On a daily if not hourly basis, we have to deal with people who come in and try to steal anything they can lay their hands on -- from our tip jar to bags of whole coffee beans -- to drunks who fall asleep in the cafe and piss all over themselves and our chairs, to my personal least-favorite: junkies who shoot up in the bathroom and leave blood splatters all over the place. Sometimes they'll leave a used syringe as a parting gift. This last is particularly unpleasant, because since you don't know what kind of diseases the junkie might have, we have to lock down the bathroom until we can do a major disinfecting scrubdown.

I'm a lifelong city-dweller, so being annoyed by homeless people is hardly new to me, but I have to say that the homeless we have to deal with here do seem to be more distressing than the ones I dealt with in New York. Granted I never worked in a Starbucks when I was in New York, so maybe I was just oblivious to it there. I don't know. But as much as I enjoy slinging coffee, I would definitely be happier if I could do it someplace where I did not have to deal with junkies, people who piss themselves, and petty thieves all the time.

Plus I have a quiz tomorrow and I hope I'm going to do well on it. It's been a long, long time since I've had to study for this kind of test and I hope I'm retaining the right information from the readings assigned.

I have some notes sitting around for a blog entry I was planning on posting on March 11, three and a half years after 9/11, but today's news is upsetting enough that I'll blog about the topic now instead.

Here's the notes I'd started on:

Sitting in a room in the library on campus, looking out a glass window at the hills of San Francisco, and listening to some Sara McLaughlin sharply brought to mind a moment from the last vacation I took before 9/11; a few days at a ritzy spa in Arizona with my mother & sister. The moment I am thinking of was towards the end of the trip. I had had a massage and was sitting in the quiet room of the spa, enjoying some tea and looking out another glass wall at a storm coming in over the mountains. I was relaxed, and at peace. And I'm feeling pretty good today, but it occurred to me as I sit here that in a very real way, I have never felt that good ever since 9/11. With three and a half years passed since that terrible day, I am starting to wonder if I ever will feel the same way again.

I'm not as bad as I was the first few months afterwards. The horror, the pain, the feeling that my world was ripped out by the roots -- they do not grip me the way they did. I've had to work to get to that point. As with other subjects that I know will depress and upset me, I go out of my way to not awaken the pain. It's a reasonably successful technique - whole days can go by without me thinking of that morning. And then I do, and the pain and fear and sorrow come back.

I'm unsure whether trying not to think about things that upset me is the best possible coping tactic, frankly. But it does get me through the days and allows me to function as a reasonably normal person, most of the time.

Today was one of those days when my coping skills failed me. The thought that maybe there really was enough information out there, that there was enough to warn people; that maybe, just maybe, this madness could have been averted makes me feel like hell.

I don't have any new cute cat pictures, so today I'll share the random contents of my iTunes Party Shuffle:

Sunday ..... "Sunday in the Park with George"
Talking Back To The Night ..... Steve Winwood
Bomday Dreams ..... "Bombay Dreams" (London Cast)
Fallen (Radio Edit) ..... Sarah McLachlan
Big-Eyed Fish ..... Dave Matthews Band
Meet Virginia ..... Train
Live To Tell ..... Madonna
All This Time ..... Sting
Something Happened On The Way To Heaven ..... Phil Collins
Somewhere Down The Crazy River ..... Robbie Robertson

I really need to start listening to more newer artists but I don't have the time or more important the money to start buying a lot of stuff in the hopes I'll like some of it.

UPDATE: If you like cat blogging, Atrios has a particlarly nice shot of his gray cat this week.

With a quiz and a paper due today, and a test tomorrow, I don't have much time to enjoy it though.

Got a jury duty summons today. And oh how convenient -- it's scheduled to start the Monday of my Spring Break. So much for either resting up and/or working some extra shifts that week.

Another weekend day, another early morning shift. I came home around noon to a beautiful surprise -- Spring has snuck into San Francisco when I wasn't looking. It's sunny, there's a hint of warmth in the air, the tang of the sea is noticable, and the fog hasn't set in -- a perfect day. I got off MUNI a few blocks before my stop, it was such nice walking weather, and enjoyed it all. Living all the way out by the beach is often inconvenient, but today is the kind of day that makes it worthwhile.

I showered off the smell of coffee when I got home and sat down to realize that I either need to trim my blogroll or be more consistant about reading it, because the pileup of posts waiting for me on Bloglines is way too much to work through. It makes me feel frustrated; there's so many good bloggers out there, with so much to say, and I'm too tired to keep up with it all, much less try to find something interesting, original, and throughtful to say here on my own blog.

There's a lot of terrible things going on in the world. I know I ought to be saying and/or doing more about some of them. But today, I just want to enjoy the spring air and spend some quality time with Scott and the kitties.

Been listening to a lot of random plays this week. Here's the current Next 10:

Letter Song - The Secret Garden
American Tune - Simon & Garfunkel, The Concert in Central Park
Pastoral Symphony - George Frideric Handel, Messiah
Love Me Tender - Amy Grant
Pump up the Jam - Technotronic
The Lion Sleeps Tonight - They Might Be Giants
Philadelphia Freedom - Elton John
Book Of Days - Enya
Fate & Finale, Act I - Kismet
Koyaanisqatsi - Philip Glass

One of the benefits to growing up in New York City -- I was actually at the above-mentioned concert in Central Park, with a bunch of friends from high school. We ate fried chicken and generally had a great time. My biggest regret was that I didn't have $15 on me to buy a concert t-shirt; for years afterward I stared with envy at the friend who did get the t-shirt every time he wore it.

Sorry for the lack of new posts. I have a midterm Tuesday and another one Wednesday.

It was a year ago this week that Scott and I were in Rome. Even though we're Jewish, I'm more than a little envious of my sister, who's currently living in Rome. She gets a more or less front-row seat for all the Papal festivities.

It's fascinating to watch one of the world's oldest and largest institutions change hands. She'll probably find it more of an inconvenience than anything else (stores closing, streets being shut down, even larger than normal throngs of tourists, etc) but we'll see.

We're off to NYC this afternoon to celebrate Passover with the families, so blogging will be light until Tuesday. In honor of the trip, and because Kevin Drum is catblogging Rome, here's a nameless kitty from the Palatine Hill in Rome:

Ciao!

I hate sleeping on fold-out couch beds. They all suck. I haven't had a good night's sleep since I left SF. Fortunately, we go back to SF and my oh so comfy plush-pillow-top bed tomorrow.

There's stuff going on but I'm too tired to comment coherently. Just wanted to check in.

That last post was Post #500, according to my Activity Log. Wow.

So as it happens, Scott and I were on the United flight diverted to Chicago today. In fact, the guy pulled off the plane was in the seat right next to Scott.

Long story short, it was much ado about nothing. We weren't scared at all; the guy was obviously big into holistic/Chinese medicines, but he didn't make us nervous at all. It seemed more like a big misunderstanding than anything else. I hope DHS doesn't treat the guy too harshly.

We've been in Chicago for about 2 hours, waiting for them to get everything sorted out. I have to reboard now. Will post more when we get to SF.

I slept 9+ hours in my blessedly comfortable bed last night after a very long day... and am still pooped. I might even take a nap before class tonight. I have a few things bookmarked over the course of the trip that I'd like to comment on but I'm too tired.

Following up to yesterday, we got interviewed by the local ABC affiliate as we were collecting our bags at baggage claim & made the nightly news. You can see the report here if you really want to (but it's an 8+MB download, be warned).

Sorry about the continued silence. I'm catching up from the trip & still pretty tired.

I still can't seem to find anything I want to blog about. This is probably related to the fact that 1) I'm in the pre-finals end of semeter rush and 2) I have no idea what I am going to do this summer. I was really hoping I'd be able to land a job that was a little more useful to my long-term career plans than making Frappuccinos at Starbucks all summer but nothing has panned out.

In short, I'm tired, I'm overworked, and I'm bummed about my lack of a decent summer job. It's hard to find stuff to blog about when I'm in a mood like that. Bear with me.

I just submitted my last paper for the Spring 05 semester. I'm done with classes until September!

Woohoo!

I'm in another quiet cycle. It's one of those times when there's not much that is moving me to post; although, of course, the usual litany of news, scandals, neo-fascist outrages, etc are still merrily chugging along.

If past history is a guide, I'll feel more like blogging in a few more days.

So this lovely Saturday, Scott and I headed down to the KRON-4 studios by invitation, there to meet up with about 100 or so of our fellow Bay Area Bloggers. Apparently KRON is trying to get a handle on this 'new' (at least to them) medium of communication and community.

There were snacks, free t-shirts, and a few short speeches by KRON staff about how great it was that we were there and what great things KRON would like to do to support the local blogger community, but the main focus was for bloggers to network with each other.

Anil Dash from SixApart was there, as was Craig from CraigsList, and Chris Nolan of Politics From Left To Right (one of my blogrolled sites). I also saw some of the local blog-related businesses represented, if the Technorati, Blogger, and Feedster t-shirts some folks were wearing was evidence. There were a bunch of local food bloggers and a broad range of other folks, from gay bloggers to photobloggers. I even ran into a former co-worker from Critical Path.

It was fun, but I found the event very stressful and ended up getting very snippy at Scott. I realized why on the drive home. Watching the food bloggers chat with each other and Chris, Anil, and Craig comfortably schmoozing, I felt like I'd felt all through high school -- I was sitting on the sidelines watching the cool kids all interact effortlessly while I struggled to make friends at all.

Despite making great gains over the years against my innate shyness, it is really hard for me to network, especially in a room full of people I don't know. Opening my mouth to talk to a new person is a big effort, and when the other person is someone who I perceive to be more accomplished than me, I'm often too intimidated to say anything at all. I get frustrated that I feel this way, which today led to me being short with the one person in the room that I could talk to without feeling scared.

Anyway, despite it all, I did get to tell someone whose work I enjoy that I like her blog, so that's a small victory. Maybe next time I'll be brave enough to tell Craig "thank you" for Craigslist.

UPDATE: KRON's coverage of the event is online now.

On the way home from the KRON event yesterday, Scott and I stopped off at a Cingular store and finally got around to unifying our cell phone accounts into one family plan, which ought to save us about $50 a month.

Of course, we offset these savings by going for the saleswoman's offer of "buy one, get one free" on the oh-so-cool Motorola V3 Razor. So now we have a new 2 year Cingular contract and his-and-hers Razors, and I finally have a phone with a camera in it.

I've wanted to try photoblogging for a while but didn't have the tools to make it happen. It's not that hard to pull photos off my Sony digital camera onto my PC and then upload to the blog, but it's not something I can do on the go. After poking around the net last night looking for moblogging apps, I found that Flickr has a tool that integrates with an existing Movable Type blog, and signed up. The post below shows that it works, although I have to figure out how to streamline the formatting a bit.

I could, of course, set up a full moblog here on the website; I found at least 2 freeware packages that would allow me to do it. But I'd need to set up a new MYSQL database on the web server and that would mean paying my web host some extra $. Plus it would mean some hours dusting off my old code skills to try to integrate that blog with this one. If Flickr starts to suck I might do that, but for now I'll go the free, no coding required route.

So, expect to see some photoblogging along with the usual stuff in the future.

A pal back East is waiting to find out whether he's getting laid off tomorrow. I'm keeping a good thought for him tonight.

For a number of reasons, mostly related to Scott being job hunting and us looking at moving apartments, I'm feeling very stuck in limbo right now. And it's not a lot of fun. So since I can't do much of anything related to my own work until Scott's job hunt concludes, I made some changes in my fall plans instead.

I registered for fall classes back in April, but last week, as the deadline for fall registration wound down, I switched from an Ethics class to one on Manegerial Accounting. I figured that given how difficult I find memorizing all the details of accounting rules, it would be better to get all my accounting course requirements out of the way while I still retained some of what I've learned in the last 2 semesters.

They're both required courses, so it's really just a matter of what order I take them in. I may not know where we'll be living this fall, but at least I feel like I have one thing under control and well-planned.

Oh, my friend did not get laid off. And more foster pix will be coming soon.

Not that you're going to care unless you're into yacht racing, but my father won his class in the 2005 Around Long Island race this year, Division 1. Go Dad!

One year ago today we brought Gimi home from the SPCA.

Gimi when we brought him home:

Gimi now:

What can I say? He's a great big goofy cat. He loves people and other animals. I sleep better when he's cuddled up next to me; his big old purr is very soothing. He's not much of a lap cat, but I suspect in a couple more years he will be. In short, I'm so glad we brought him home.

Oh, and next Monday, my fall semester starts. It's been a long and overall not very thrilling summer, I'll be glad to get back to school.

Last semester, I had to drop close to $600 on textbooks, which seemed a bit excessive. Imagine my surprise when checking the required books for my courses this semester: I found only 2 books on the list. Buying both used on Amazon cut my textbook bill to less than $200. I was so sure that was a mistake that I went over to the campus bookstore yesterday to see if perhaps the online list was wrong. But no, only two textbooks.

One professor has not submitted a book list to the store, so he may hit us with a big list the first day of class. Even so, it's nice to not have to drop that much cash on books this semester.

I've sent in all my paperwork, written a tuition check, and gotten a nice new notebook for classes. I even bought a cute new shirt yesterday. And the weather here seems to be changing over towards September-in-San Francisco - our eternal summer fogbank seems to be lightening up.

Summer is winding down. I'm ready.

A friend in NY used that phrase the other day and it's very apt. I'm on cusp right now. Waiting to see what Rita will do, waiting to see if we can get to Miami for a cousin's wedding this weekend (I unwisely chose to be changing planes in DFW right about the time Rita is supposed to be making landfall & who knows how backed up the DFW airport will be with rerouted HOU flights), and waiting to see what will happen when we get back.

Scott is (fingers crossed!) starting a new job next week, we're probably going to be moving to a new place outside the city.... in short, there's a lot going on. On a personal level, most of it is good, but for the nation, not so much.

At any rate, blogging will probably be light the next several days.

We're home. Miami was hot as hell but it was great to see the family. I have a huge pile of catching up to do, yet we were only gone for three days!

And another year rolls round.

May this one be better than the last and bring peace, happiness, and fulfilment to all.

Fever & throat yukkiness.

The fever has broken and I'm feeling back to normal. Which is a good thing, because we're low on groceries and I have a midterm Wednesday.

Have an easy fast!

And posting is likely to be very sporatic for the next week. I have a midterm in Macroeconomics coming up soon, and Econ is a subject I'm finding somewhat of a challenge to get a handle on. Plus, in a case of lousy confluence of timing, we're about to move to a new apartment. In other words, there won't be much time for blogging.

However, I'm sure I'll indulge in some schadenfreude should Fitzgerald come down with a cartload of indictments.

Sign lease tomorrow, take midterm Wednesday, move Thursday. What a week.

Am feeling very stressed out, and am responding to the stress by feeling tired all the time.

At least we got the portable dishwasher sold. One less thing to deal with.

It's been three years since our last apartment move, and I'd forgotten exactly how stressful and exhausting moving can be. Since we had plenty of advance notice, I'd dutifully tried to prepare for the move by throwing useless crap out, hauling two full carloads of old clothes, books, computer parts, etc down to Goodwill, and generally trying to get things sorted, organized, and pared down. But then the movers arrive. They take all your stuff and put it in boxes. Then they take everything you own, pile it up in your new living room, and leave. You're left there with a huge pile of boxes, trying to put your life back together again. And you find yourself wondering, "Where the hell did all this stuff come from?"

I was originally going to make an analogy of moving as a tidal wave sweeping through your life, but in light of the various major natural disasters the past 12 months, and the fact that our tidal wave is a wave of stuff those people no longer have, it seemed a bit insensititve. Despite all my complaining, this is a much nicer apartment than the last one we were in. That's a positive change.

Things generally went according to plan except that Comcast totally screwed up. We'd made an appointment for them to come to the new place the afternoon of moving day to get us set up with cable and Internet service, but somehow that changed to them coming to the place we were moving out of, just as we were preparing to leave. It took two phone calls and several customer service escalations, one threat to cancel everything and switch to DishTV and DSL, and a lot of other back and forth, to get the botched appointment rescheduled for Friday afternoon. They'd wanted to reschedule us for Tuesday, and that just wasn't going to happen. We could certainly have waited a few more days for TV, but not having Internet access for that long was a horror devoutly to be avoided.

Having no TV or Internet access while the Libby indictments were coming down was disappointing. I got to listen to most of the Fitzgerald press conference on the radio, but that was it. Comcast showed up a few hours later, but I didn't get the PC set up until late last night. So I missed the huge wave of spin, analysis, speculation, etc the blogosphere generated in my absence. And I still have a lot of work to get done, so I expect to miss most of the next wave, too. Just about everyone is running with the story. I'd link to some of the best bits on other blogs but I'm too tired. I have other stuff to deal with right now.

I want a functioning kitchen so I can make myself a morning cup of coffee. I want to get all the boxes off my tables so I can eat a meal somewhere other than on the floor (although the new carpeting here is nice). I've still got another 20 or more boxes to unpack. I need to go buy some new lamps, because there's no overhead lighting fixtures in most of the rooms and carrying the one lamp we do own around from room to room is a pain. I have a heaping pile of laundry to do, and I need to figure out where in San Mateo I can get a roll of quarters. And none of that is going to get done if I sit on my butt blogging.

By the way, the kitties didn't enjoy the move much but are starting to settle in. I'd post some pix but I can't find the cable connecting my camera to the computer. Maybe Sunday.

Busy week; exam tomorrow, case study & presentation Wednesday, another exam next week, other projects due on the horizon.

In the meantime, Digby's got a few good ones -- taking on habeas corpus, Wal-Mart and Target, not to mention the lies of GW Bush.

Plus of course all the usual suspects in the blogroll.

And if you're a cat person, head on over to NTodd's place; one of his kitties is dying & I think he'd appreciate some well-wishers.

One of the straps tore off my school knapsack today. Considering how heavy my laptop is, I'm not too surprised; it was bound to happen sooner or later. But I'm bummed because it was my PalmSource knapsack, and it'll be a long time before I see nice schwag like that again.

You never know what you're going to find in a morning's click through a chain of links. Today's unexpected find was Vassar Blogs.

Looking at the list of fellow Vassar bloggers, I realized I vaguely remember a guy named Taegan in my class, but until today I had no clue he was THE Taegan Goddard of Political Wire.

The list is highly skewed to the Class of 2000 and younger, but it's still a neat little resource for us Vassar folk. I hope the list continues to grow.

This will be the first holiday season since 2001 that I'm NOT working retail. For that, among many other things, I am extremely thankful.

I'm not so thankful for the Economics exam that I have in a few hours, though. More later.

UPDATE: Exam over. Typos in blog post corrected. Time to relax & enjoy myself for a hour or so. After that, I need to start cooking for tomorrow!

Well, we've been here a month already and the place is still not fully set up. But the living dining room are fit to be shown. So here's a partial tour of the place (click through to Flickr for full sized pix if you really care).

Half of the living / dining room.

The other half. Tommy's up on the table, wondering where all the yummy food we had yesterday went to.

This room's 4th wall is all window & sliding doors, taking you out onto our terace. The terrace itself only has a bike and a storage crate on it currently, but here's the view looking more or less west:

And looking east, you see this:

There's little things about the place that I'm not thrilled with, like how small the kitchen is and the lack of water pressure in some faucets, but overall we're quite happy here.

As I was adding the photos for the blog post below to Flickr today, I realized I was bumping up against some of the limits on my free account. So I've upgraded to a Flickr Pro account. For less than $25 a year, it's quite the bargain.

Now I have to decide if I'll move everything that's currently in the on-site Gallery over to Flickr. The main issue would be having to retype all the photo titles and descriptions; with a few hundred pix involved, that would be quite a drag.

I did put some shots online that never made it into the current gallery, like the photos of my trip to Utah in 2002.

and finals (fortunately only 2 of them) next week. Light blogging forecast until Wednesday.

Not enough sleep due to some questionable takeout food for dinner is makin me bleary today. So instead of more on the latest Bush shenanigans, here's a cute quiz I found today: The Where You Should Live Test

Here's how I did.

Rowhouse 'Hood You scored 29 out of 40 on urban-rural and 25 out of 40 land intensity.

People know you as: The Bohemian Gentrifier Quote: "That crack house just needed a little paint." Your score indicates that you are a city-dweller of the old-school. You like a dense, finely grained neighborhood with restaurants, churches and brothels all on the same block. Although you've never spoken to him personally, you know that guy Eddie down the street is a pimp and you're sure to tell your lame suburban friends about him at every opportunity, just to freak them out. The bad news is that as more and more people like you move into your neighborhood it gradually becomes less cool and more expensive. Enjoy things while you can, because in 5 years you're going to have to move to the next 'hood uptown. Examples of places you should live: Baltimore, Philadelphia All Categories Secluded Hideaway / Farm or Ranch / Small Town / Little City / Suburb / Streetcar Suburb / Rowhouse 'Hood / Downtown Loft

Still not sleeping very well & feeling generally uninspired today.

I finally got a good night's sleep and am feeing a bit better today, but still not feeling very bloggy.

Part of this, I know, is directly related to the fact that I had a job interview Tuesday and almost the first thing out of the hiring manager's mouth as the interview started was, "I've read your blog".

That was the first time I'd encountered that phrase in an interview. It seems to me that when someone starts an interview off like that, the person in question probably has some ideas already set about you, and that has the potential to be either very good or very bad. Luckily for me, it was good, and I have already accepted a verbal job offer from the company (hard copy is being FedExed). It's only an internship, but it's also the first non-survival job I've gotten since 2002, and I'm very pleased about the whole thing.

It's also making me think really hard about this blog and what I can "safely" say here.

Despite the economic recovery of the last several years, this is still a tight job market, and doubly so for people like me who are, in essence, re-entering the workforce. I worry that personal details could be used against me in hiring decisions. A casual Google search on my name will bring this blog up in short order. I have to assume that anything I say here will be read, and potentially used in a hiring decision.

I don't really care if an employer knows what my politics are. If someone felt so strongly about my opinions on world events that they felt they couldn't hire me, well, I probably wouldn't have been happy working for that person anyway. I'm concerned about the personal stuff though. And thus we go full-circle to this week.

As mentioned, I've not been feeling very well this week. But if I start to blog about why, I find myself thinking, is this something I really want an employer to know? It's none of their business. And so the blog post doesn't get written.

Feeling that I have to self-censor in order to be employable is no fun. Now, maybe I'm being paranoid. After all, I got the job. But that's how I'm feeling.

And yes, I know there's a ton of other stuff I could be blogging about right now. Sorry, but I'm not feeling very inspired. Cruise my blogroll; the usual suspects are all kicking ass and taking names. If past history is a guide, I should be feeling more bloggy in a day or two.

Nine years ago tonight, Scott and I stood under a chuppah, surrounded by the people most important to us, and were married. Here's a not-very-good photo of that event (one of these days I'll scan & upload some better ones...)

Happy anniversary, honey. I love you more than words can easily express. But then, I think you already know that.

Here's hoping 2006 is better in all ways than 2005.

Peace, happiness, health and joy to you all.

So Scott and I had a quiet New Year's at home. We cooked up a yummy dinner (grilled wild salmon and pasta with asparagus and a lemon cream sauce), watched "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and various add-ons from the DVD, and then flipped the TV on at midnight to watch a rebroadcast of the ball dropping in NYC.

At which point I got incredibly homesick, and started crying when Sinatra's "New York, New York" came on. This morning I'm still sad. There's something in the air that makes me wish I were tramping the streets of the West Village, heading off for brunch in a noisy diner, and then just out for a walk, maybe clutching a carton of coffee to keep my hands warm.

We only got home to NY once in 2005, and I think that has something to do with why I'm feeling so homesick today. I need a city fix.

It comes down to reality
And it�s fine with me, �cause I�ve let it slide,
Don�t care if it�s Chinatown or up on Riverside,
I don�t have any reasons,
I�ve left them all behind
I�m in a New York state of mind.

I know all too well the tradeoffs involved in living in New York. Tiny apartments, everything is expensive, noise, dirt, and stress. Right now I could care less. I want to go home.

I was planning on catching a cheap flight sometime this month before classes start, but with the internship starting Wednesday that's not in the books anymore. Well, Passover's not that far off....

Today was the first day at my new internship, which is why nothing's been posted here. I'm home and fed, and Bloglines tells me I have 132 unread posts waiting for me in my RSS feeder. I wonder if I'll get through them all before I get too sleepy to finish?

I won't be talking about the internship here much, if at all, but I will say in passing that anyone who says that switching from Windows to Mac is easy is kidding themselves. I have been given a G3 as my workstation and the lack of either a right-click or a scroll wheel on that horribly non-ergonomic joke of a Mac mouse is no fun at all.

- My office is exactly 33.5 miles from my home.

- Twinning's "Vanilla Chai" tea tastes totally, completely gross.

- Cactus, on the other hand, isn't bad. It reminds me of a green bean, only a little chewier and a bit more flavorful.

So today was Day #4 at the internship. I've spent most of my time so far working solo, putting together a strategy document for marketing one aspect of the newest version of the product. I submitted the completed memo to my supervisor, and had a few hours of down time while I waited for him to read & respond to it.

Since I'm still new at the job, I didn't really know what the protocol was -- should I ask for more work, start working on a project I'd mentioned in the first paper, or wait for feedback on my first work product? My supervisor was in and out of meetings and I didn't want to bother him. Unsure, I fell back on self-reliance. I did some research, read over some internal documents, and started jotting notes and ideas for other possible projects.

This worked for a couple of hours. But after lunch, I started to feel worried. The other intern, who started the day after I did, was working busily away on two different projects, talking to people, asking questions. I was sitting there, working by myself, and feeling a bit isolated. Dark thoughts descended. I started wondering whether maybe, despite what I'd been told when I was hired, they didn't really plan on keeping both of us? Perhaps this first week was some sort of weeding out process to see which of us was the better hire and the other one would be quietly let go? Was my lack of new tasks some sort of signal? Had I blown it already? For two more hours, I alternated between paranoia and telling myself I was being an idiot.

These last 4 years have been pretty rough in a lot of ways, but I didn't realize how deep the scars had gone until today. Once upon a time, I trusted what managers told me and would have welcomed a few hours of slack time. Now, I'm both more cynical and more insecure.

Finally, just as I was starting to think that maybe I ought to wash out my coffee mug (the one personal item I've brought to the office) and make sure it was clean, dry, and ready to go in case today really was my last day, an email from my supervisor popped into my mailbox, telling me what a great job I had done and would I present my ideas to the rest of the marketing staff in 30 minutes.

I had to read the e-mail twice before the relief set in.

Hopefully I won't let my insecurities get the better of me next time.

Sorry I've been silent these past couple of days. No new photos for cat blogging, and I don't have much to say on what's going on in Washington.

I'm also realizing, now that Scott and I are, for the first time in several years, both on a weekday work schedule, how much that impacts your ability to get things done. Instead of my being able to run errands on weekday off hours, leaving the weekends for more enjoyable things, we have to cram the to-do list into those hours when everyone else is trying to get through their to-do list as well. It's a bit of an adjustment.

Yesterday, for example, we went up to San Francisco for an event at the SPCA. After that, we decided to run a couple of errands. For example, I have a low-value Best Buy gift card I wanted to use, and there's one a block away from the SPCA. So we go, and have some fun wandering around and looking at various stuff. We made fun of the insanely expensive TVs, looked at some speaker systems for the iPod, and checked out the software and DVDs. Eventually I made a selection and we headed for the cash register. At which point we discovered 15 to 20 people were on line ahead of us.

"Forget it," I said. "I'm not waiting on that line just for this." And we left.

This isn't meant to be some sage observation about business, because I'm not sure what the point here is. Is is that Best Buy is not doing so well and thus is trying to skimp on cashiers or that Best Buy is doing really well even in the post-Xmas slow times? I don't have the data to come to a conclusion either way.

At any rate, the computer game I've been thinking about buying remained unbought, and we moved on to Costco.

Just saying....

I have an old text file knocking around on my drive with a collection of quotes that I found interesting. Here's an apt one, although unfortunately I did not save the name ofthe person who wrote it:

It is a great mystery of late-stage capitalism that, in a marketplace of hypothetically unlimited choices, consumers should all want the same things.

Despite my having hung onto this quote, I actually think that the opposite is true. Everyone wants different things. Retail stores, however, try to persuade us
that we all want the same things. Especially the larger ones. Stores, that is.

Case in point: there's a few things I've needed to buy for the apartment. Nothing particularly wild or unusual: More clothes hangers. A new sugar bowl to replace the one I broke. A couple of baking pans to replace ones that have rusted out. In short, standard household items. Here in the SF Bay Area, with stores of all sorts in every direction, getting this stuff should be a matter of a couple hours, tops.

But it's not. Take the sugar bowl I broke a few months ago � an inexpensive bowl from a very mainstream Mikasa china pattern. I've been looking for a new one for months now. I've come to the conclusion that I can't get a replacement for it unless I either spend a lot of money or special-order one off the Internet. I've tried looking in a number of stores for an alternative, and it's amazing how few sugar bowls stores are selling. Teapots, coffee mugs, even full tea sets are all over the place, in both big chain stores and small Mom & Pop shops, but nobody sells sugar bowls. Hell, I'd settle for a 2-piece 'cream and sugar' set, but even those are hard to find. What are stores selling instead? 4 and 5 piece 'completer' sets that cost a bunch more money. Well, screw that. I don't want to buy 3 or 4 pieces of china that I neither want nor need in order to get the one piece I do need.

Target, of all places, actually had three different sugar bowls available for sale yesterday. Unfortunately Target's offerings were: 1 really ugly option, 1 flimsy-looking option, and 1 option that was neither flimsy nor ugly, but it totally and completely did not match anything else in my kitchen. So I didn't buy it.

Now, maybe I'm just being picky here. Sugar bowls are not exactly a daily essential, maybe I shouldn't expect to find lots of options. I should probably just give up on my sugar bowl quest and either store my sugar in a plastic container or special-order the Mikasa piece and be done with it.

But why is it so hard to buy clothes hangers? A significant % of my hangers are the cheapo wire ones that you get from the dry cleaners, and that's fine, but since we don't dry-clean much stuff these days, we need to actually buy hangers. All I want is some simple plastic hangers for the new shirts we got for Scott's new job. What do I see in the stores? Expensive high-end padded and/or wooden hangers, funky suit/skirt hangers, "5 in 1" hangers for space saving � these are all over the place. But standard plastic hangers, you're lucky if a store
carries one kind.

Again, I'm sure if I hunted around on the Internet I could find some specialty web shop that would be happy to sell me exactly what I wanted, in any color. Call me a Luddite if you like, but I don't want to buy clothes hangers on the Internet. I want to drive to a store, buy them, take them home, and put them in my closet.

And don't get me started on how few choices I had when trying to replace our rusted-out 8x8 and 9x9 baking pans.

Now, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just really, really picky and don't know it. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, or am just being cheap. But what I feel is not picky, nor cheap, but manipulated. I feel like I'm being driven willy-nilly to buy products that have features I don't want or cost a lot more than I want to pay, because those products create a higher profit for the retailer.

So much for late-stage capitalism.

Apropos of my last post bemoaning how hard it is to find stuff when I shop, I actually did find some chairs and a table for the terrace when I was out on Tuesday.
It's a bit too cold to sit outside right now, but once Spring comes this ought to be a nice place to drink a cup of coffee in the mornings. If I can get the wifi to work out there, even better.

This Saturday, last January, was new student orientation at school. Looking back, I notice I was pretty heavily poli-blogging in January of 05; I didn't even mention school until after the first week of classes. Considering how nervous I was about going back to school, I'm surprised I didn't say more about it.

I'm looking forward to the start of classes & seeing my friends again. I'm a bit nervous about how well the internship & school will mix; in particular, the 4 hour night class in San Francisco after a full day's work in San Jose is going to be a major drag. I do have the option to drop that course and take it over the summer instead, but I'm not going to make any decisions until after week 1 is over & I have a better sense for how demanding my other courses will be.

Ok, today is officially the "Day of One-Word Post Titles".

Heading up to school for the first day of classes soon. You'd think, this being my third semester and all, that I would not be so nervous at the start of the semester anymore. You'd be wrong.

I click into Bloglines to try to catch up on what I've missed in 24 hours of downtime and found a whopping 163 posts unread in the various blogs on my blogroll.

Who has time to read all that? I have errands to run!

Too much to say, not enough time to say it. Not feeling like doing hit and run blogging either. Bleh.

I'm feeling pretty grumpy this morning. Home 'net access is down AGAIN -- this is the third time since 2006 began and I'm really starting to wonder why we didn't just get DSL. We brought our modem over to the Comcast office and got a new one, which was supposed to solve the problem, but it didn't. Comcast said that they have to schedule another service call, and oh by the way, we'll have to pay for the service call. Um, I think not. We're using 100% company-supplied equipment and Comcast did the installation and set-up themselves less than 6 months ago. Any problems we're having are not caused by us, and we should not have to pay for the service call.

Plus, Scott didn't get me anything for Valentine's Day, which is also making me feel grumpy. I'm not a high-maintenance kind of girl. I don't expect expensive gifts or even flowers (although they're always nice). I would have been happy with just a card. But not getting anything kind of rankles.

And yes I know, V-Day is a totally artificial holiday, I have a wonderful husband who loves me very much and shows it on a regular basis, yadda yadda. I know all of that. That does not change how I feel. If I can find the time to pick out a card for him, he should be able to do it too.

I'm on campus now and need to get some stuff done before classes start. I have the iPod cranked and hopefully that will help improve my mood.

So a Comcast tech showed up before 8:00AM and fixed our Internet connection. As suspected, it was NOT anything we did. Some hardware downstairs needed to be changed, and the splitter here was also a problem. Those have both been changed out for 'better' equipment. We'll see if that's the end of it; at this point I don't really trust anything that a Comcast tech tells me.

So now we get to wait and see if it goes out again or not. This time we're hedging our bets and have placed an order for DSL from our old DSL provider. We won't be able to get the 6MB download speeds that Comcast promises, but I'll settle for slower downloads if the damn thing just stays up and connected 24/7.

The home access outage has put me wildly behind on a number of things but I will try to get back up to speed in the next 24 hours.

Seriously, I'd (almost) rather be doing my Finance homework than shopping for a new digital camera.

It shouldn't be that hard. I have a very nice SLR camera I use for what little high-end photography I do, so the digicam is just for day to day snapshots. I don't have a long list of "must have" features. I have a reasonable budget. There's a ton of cameras out there to choose from.

But that's the problem. Even narrowing down the options to just two or three manufacturers, I still have dozens of cameras to choose from. And narrowing it down beyond that gets really tough. Every camera has a huge list of features, all with plusses and minuses. Every camera has both positive and negative reviews. But how to decide? Should I really care that a cover 'seems flimsy' or that a few people complain about blurry photos? How do I know if these people are being too nit-picky or pointing out real issues?

And the online guides are not all that helpful. Take Digital Photography Review, which several people pointed me to for guidance. There's a very long list of features you can use to search their listings, but if you don't narrow your choices down enough, the site only gives you the first 10 options back as a result. You don't know if that's the first 10 of 12 or 120, so you don't know if those 10 cameras are a representative sample or not. And a lot of those choices, I either don't know or don't care about the option in question. What the heck is 'white balance override', and why should I care about uncompressed format types? Beats me. In short, if I cared more about high-end digital photography, it would probably be very useful, but for a hobbyist like me it was too much.

CNET's search was more useful for my needs, but still tended to produce too many results for me to effectively deal with. A list of 125 possibilities is just too much for me to deal with. I don't want to have to spend hours on this. I just want a list of 12 or so good options so I can pick the one that I like best.

Scott's trying to be helpful and searched out two options for me to look at, one Sony, one Canon. It's a help, but I'm still feeling paralyzed by all the choices I have. As much as I want a better digital camera, it's actively stressing me out trying to pick one. I suppose I could go to the nearest store that sells digital cameras and simply buy one rather than over-analyzing the situaiton, and I might end up doing just that if I can't get my head around all the information.

It shouldn't be this hard.

Or am I making it too hard?

We've dumped Comcast for Internet connectivity and gone back to DSL. It's not as fast, but 4 multi-day outages in less than 2 months is just way too much downtime.

Between work and school I'm finding myself more and more squeezed for blog time these days, and the semester is only going to heat up more over the next several weeks. I want to try to keep to a minimum of a post a day but it's getting really hard to do even that some days. I've also cut the blogroll down a bit to help reduce my read time.

There's a nasty storm blowing through the Bay Area today. At first the reports had it that the worst impact would be up by Napa, where flooding is always a problem with heavy rains. But no, instead we got nailed with a bunch of power outages, including one Chez Lux.

As I was driving back home from work I saw some flashes of lightning and hear reports of a few small outages, but didn't think much of it until I pulled off Highway 92 onto El Camino Real and BLAM! out went the power. I was passing by a Safeway at the time -- one moment it was all lit up, the next moment nothing but a few emergency lights. A bit shocking, but also kind of neat to watch. You don't get a front-row seat to the show like that very often. It seemed to be a fairly localized outage, because everything was still lit up as I pulled up to my intersection, but as I was waiting to make the left turn onto my street, POOF! More blackness. Not quite so cool; we have plenty of candles & energy bars in the emergency kit (plus a propane grill), but I really wasn't in the mood for trying to make a hot meal under the circumstances.

Instead, I drove a few more blocks until I found a parking space, called Scott, and found an open restaurant for a bite of dinner. The lights were still out when I got home, so I changed into jeans, grabbed a flashlight and my laptop, and moseyed over to Starbucks for some coffee, electricity, and Internet access.

It's not quite the evening I thought I was going to have, but it could have been a lot worse.

My sister called from Italy, my parents called from somewhere in the Carribean, and I got e-mails from a bunch of friends. I had sushi for lunch, Scott took me out to a great dinner, and even the weather was nice.

There's two presents waiting for me in the apartment manager's office, and I'll pick them up tomorrow.

The older I get, the less I like my birthday, but this one was pretty damn nice. The only thing that would have made it better would have been more of my friends and family here with me.

Oh, and here's a link to a nice story about cats.

As I puttered around the kitchen this morning, making coffee and putting dishes away, I was oblivious to the fact that I'd used up the last of the milk yesterday and not replaced it.

When the time came to put milk into my coffee, I was mightily annoyed with myself -- both for not having gone out to get more milk and for having conveniently fogotten the whole issue until it was time to have my morning cup.

Grrrr. No coffee is not how I wanted to start my day.

UPDATE: Decided to try Americano-style and added some hot water to the cup, plus a little extra sugar. Not bad, although given a choice I'd prefer milk. Scott later wandered in and pointed out that I could have added a packet of hot chocolate; I'd forgotten all about that option as well.

Sitting at my desk with a nice hot cup of coffee and a pile of paper; TurboTax is installing as I type. Let's see how long it takes to slog through this year's taxes.

I have a headache already. I woke up with it, and three Advil haven't completely erased it. This is not going to be fun.

At least the rains are gone for now and it's a pretty day outside my window.

How's your Saturday?

Update 11:45 AM: First pass through is finished. I need to dig up originating info about 2 stocks we acquired through company spinoffs/mergers but other than that it's looking good. Yay me!

It was another gloomy, stormy day today, but for a short period this afternoon we were treated to a really impressive rainbow right by the office. Several co-workers gathered to oooh and aah over the show; I grabbed a bunch of photos.

It's tough to get decent quality shots when you can't open the windows, most of the ones I took have reflection issues. This is the best of the bunch.

Was up late last night thanks to a lack of available laundry machines. Who knew Monday was such a popular night to wash your clothes?

The Bush press conference was starting as my alarm clock went off. Since I have a clock radio set to a local newsradio station, I got to hear That Man lying and chucking and stumbling through his anwers first thing in the AM. Not how I wanted to wake up. Until I hit the Snooze button, that is.

Did I miss anything?

I don't think so.

Had a Finance midterm today and also had to give a 20 minute team presentation in Ethics afterwards. Fun fun. Both went OK, although a couple of those Finance questions were a bit rough.

This is where I'll be all day tomorrow. Should be fun except for having to be out the door earlier than usual.

I missed dinner, it's after 10, and I can't decide if I want to sleep or eat.

Will probably be offline most of tomorrow too.

Many years ago, the very first gift Scott bought me was a new video card for my woefully underpowered x386 box. This showed up for me today. Ah, geeks in love....

I'm really bad at buying things for myself, especially the more expensive stuff. My current video card is about 2 years old, and I have been puttering along with its limitations because, well, it works, and new cards are expensive. We're doing better these days now that I'm working again, but still, more often than not the "oh, we don't have any money" fears linger and inhibit my buying behavior.

Flashback: Some years ago, I went out one Saturday with my grandmother to shop for kitchen curtains to replace ones that after many years of service and laundering were starting to look a little ratty. We went to several stores, but Grandma ended up not buying any new ones because everything was either too ugly or too expensive. We went home without any because she couldn't bring herself to pay "too much" for new curtains, even though she could well afford them.

Grandma came to this country quite poor and then weathered the Depression, so her frugality is understandable. But here I am, years later, doing much the same thing. Is it learned behavior from my family, a sign of ageing, or or did the years Scott and I spend struggling financially change my behavior in similar ways?

As I was waking up this morning, I hear on the radio that 25 of the last 31 days have been rainy ones here in the Bay Area. We're fractions of an inch from being the wettest March on record.

I wonder if that's why I've been feeling so draggy, tired, and generally uninspired recently.

UPDATE: SFGate has more.

Since my last post on the issue of how freaking much it has rained here in the Bay Area, it's rained pretty much every day since. If this is what Seattle is like (I wouldn't know, on my one trip to Seattle back in 2000, the weather was perfect the entire time), you can keep it.

I'm sick of it. I'm tired and cranky and generally unmotivated.

Some of this could be just regular second-half-of-the-semester workload issues combined with the job, but the weather definitely isn't helping my mood any.

I know, my blogging quantity and quality have both really slipped the past few weeks. The semester has entered its busy zone, the unending rain has had me down, and we're going home for Passover, which has added to the chore list considerably.

I'll try to get two or three decent ones up before we leave for New York, though.

... he's a big fan of classic horror flicks.

Comcast Corp. and Sony Corp will launch a horror films on-demand cable, Internet and wireless network on Halloween this year, an executive at the top U.S. cable operator said on Sunday.

Movies for the yet-to-be named network, which will debut on October 31 and expand Comcast's programing lineup, come from more than a thousand horror titles in the Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer libraries.

Me ... not so much. That's OK though. One thing we've learned over the years together is that although we have a lot in common, some things we're never going to get the other person to like.

He's still getting mileage out of the time I got him to sit through The Piano. And I can counter with having had to sit through Species.

At least we agree that Big Trouble in Little China kicks ass!

Usually I try to get at least something on the blog when I travel but this was a particularly activity-packed 4 days in New York and I barely got online at all while we were there.

One of my favorite ways to describe New York to people who've never been there is that it's just like anyplace else, only much more so. Coming home again after a year away reminded me how true that is.

One of the things you tend to forget about NYC after you've been away for a while is the sheer sensory overload of the city. The noise, the activity level, the sights, even the smells come at you nonstop the moment you set foot outside your door. It's very intense. And you either love it or hate it.

I still love it. And miss it.

Some pix, and a cute anecdote about one of our nieces, coming soon.

While half of Columbia (or so it seemed) was hitting my blog today, I was out at PacBell / SBC / AT&T Park watching my Mets kick the Giants' butts. It was a great game. Perfect weather, good seats (Thanks Brendan!), and exciting play. I'm hoarse, sunburned, and exhausted, but I had a great time.

Unfortunately Bonds hit his 711th home run in his first at-bat (the bottom of the 9th) to tie the game, but even that turned out OK because his 2nd at-bat was a pop fly out to end the game.

After seeing Bonds in action, I've come to think that Aaron's record may be safe after all. Bonds' mobility is shot. He'll be lucky to make it through this year, and unless he leaves the Giants and becomes a DH somewhere else, I don't see how he'll be able to play through to another 45 home runs. He can barely take the field.

And in the "It takes all kinds to make a world" department, here's a guy who was sitting nearby in the stands:

I'm here, just running quiet due to the last week of classes & a ton of stuff due.

I took my Finance final tonight. The Spring semester is officially over!

I should be back to a more normal blogging schedule shortly. I know I've missed a lot of topics I wanted to post about but just didn't have time or energy. Some topics I'll just have to let slide, but others will be forthcoming.

Finals are over, all papers and projects have been completed. Only five more classes stand between me and my MBA. Yay!

To celebrate completing my 3rd semester of school, I'm using the gift certificate my sister kindly got me for my birthday and having a Day of Beauty at a really nice SF spa. Four treatments plus lunch. It's been years since I was at a spa, I'm looking forward to it.

After that, I'll be heading off to the school's official graduation party. It will be fun, but also a little sad. Quite a few of my closest friends in the program are graduting this semester, and I'll miss them. Some will be staying nearby, so staying in touch won't be that hard, but others are heading back to their home countries, and that's not quite so easy.

Tonight, though, is about having fun and celebrating what we've achieved. I'll be sad tomorrow.

Now that the spring semester is over, my thoughts are turning to my summer plans. I'm taking 2 classes this summer, one of which is a 'study tour' -- two weeks in Barcelona, to be spent with a professor from chool and 10 other classmates, visiting Spanish businesses and learning more about doing business in Europe. I'm excited; this will be my first vist to Spain.

After a lot of struggle and shopping arund, I even managed to get a decent fare to Europe. This, though, got my spirits down a bit.

Rough Summer Is on the Way for Air Travel

Planes are expected to be packed fuller than at anytime since World War II, when the airlines helped transport troops. Fares are rising. Service frills are disappearing.

[snip]

With airlines generally not expanding and traffic rising, is "fully loaded" the new normal in a business that for decades flew planes at 60 to 70 percent capacity? The ability to compare fares easily on the Internet has driven down ticket costs but also helped airlines to sell the very last seat.

[snip]

"The thing that's starting to bother travelers more than anything else is the comfort factor, not the fare factor," said Kevin Maguire, the in-house travel manager for Applied Materials, a technology company based in Santa Clara, Calif. "The airlines, federal government, general public need to sit down collectively and find a way to get the transportation system back in order," he said. "I've never seen it this bad."

Oh joy.

I've done what I can to try to ensure a comfortable trip. I cashed in all my built-up AA miles and am flying First class SFO - NYC (woohoo!). Then I switch to Air France for the international leg. That flight will be in the cattle car section, though. SeatGuru says Air France has been reconfiguring some of their planes, but whether that's for the better or worse is unknown.

This trip will also mark the longest time Scott and I will have spent apart in more than a decade. I hope it's not too lonely without him.

Tonight was the second class meeting for my Social Entrepreneurship course. We had four guest speakers from the Digital Vision Program over at Stanford come by to talk to us -- three were program fellows and the 4th was a staff member.

We got to hear about each person's project and plans, how they arrived at their decisions to start social ventures, and the challenges they were facing. It was fascinating. And the thing that struck me the most was how optimistic they all were. You have to have a pretty high degree of self-confidence in order to commit to doing a startup, but this was a different kind of optimism -- these people felt that they could not only start a successful venture, but also that what they were doing would make a real difference in the world's problems. By the end of class, the room had a distinct buzz as people swapped business cards, ideas, and networking plans.

I left class feeling really great, and am hoping that the rest of the course will be as inspiring and informative as tonight was.

Apparently the new music meme is to post your iTunes list of "most played" rather than a randomized list or the list of things you consider your favorites. So here's what my home PC thinks are my most-played tunes:

1) Let's Get It Started - Black Eyed Peas
2) Where Is the Love? - Black Eyed Peas & Justin Timberlake
3) Pavement Cracks - Annie Lennox
4) Desperado - Eagles
5) In the Shadows - The Rasmus
6) Shape of My Heart - Backstreet Boys
7) Get Up Stand Up - Bob Marley
8) Banu Hoshch Legaresh - Subliminal
9) Vertigo - U2
10) Peaceful Easy Feeling - Eagles
11) Sky Blue - Peter Gabriel
12) If I Had a Hammer - Peter, Paul & Mary
13) Send Your Love (Dave Aude Remix) - Sting
14) The Journey Home - Bombay Dreams (London Cast)
15) Chimes of Freedom (live) - Bruce Springsteen

I'm a bit embarrassed by having not one, but two, Justin Timberlake appearences on the list. As for the rest, I'm not really surprised by the rest of the artists (although what The Rasmus is doing there I'm not sure). I'd have though different tracks would be on the list, though.

When we moved to San Mateo, one of the things we liked about this apartment complex is the fact that out back, there's a pool and a hot tub for the residents. Today it was finally warm enough for us to pull out the bathing suits and go down to the pool for a dip.

Mmmmmm. Hanging out in the hot tub under a sunny sky - and without having to go to some pricey resort. That's California living. And to think, we spent 5+ years ensconced in the Fog Belt, where you need a jacket 11 months out of the year.

Yes, global warming may well trash the earth within our lifetimes, but it's nice to enjoy a bit of the good life before it does.

An old friend from high school and his lovely wife have started a travel blog. Given their upcoming travel plans, it should develop into a good read.

Welcome!

1) It's hot as heck, and our A/C isn't working. I'm too drained to go anywhere cooler & get work done.

2) The MT-Blacklist spam filter I rely on to make managing comment spam seems to be kaput. No response from the hosting company as to why.

The final project for one of my summer courses is due this week. Today, I need to put the pedal to the metal and turn the notes, ideas, and pieces of data I've been collecting into something a lot more organized.

What do I do instead? Decide that today is the perfect day to throw out old bags and scrub down the tea kettle.

Back when I was an undergraduate, inevitable my dorm room would be the cleanest right around finals, because when it came to crunch time, cleaning looked a lot better than studying.

All these years later, I'm still using the same techniques to avoid getting my schoolwork done. Some things don't change. Although these days, I can now add to my work avoidance by not only avoiding the work, but also blogging about the fact that I should be doing schoolwork but I'm not.

With that said, now I really am going to go get something done. I promise. Just as soon as I finish brewing the pot of tea made in the newly-cleaned kettle.

Less than 3 hours and I'll be in the air.

I have a new travel blog set up for tourist blogging here although right now all that's there is a placeholder post.

Whether I will actually have time to blog much I don't know. This trip feels like a huge leap into the unknown right now; I'm just going to have to see what happens once I get there.

In other words, consider this fair warning: there may not be much new here until the 23rd. Or maybe there'll be a new post later today. There's only one way to find out.

And with that, I need to hit the showers and toss a last few odds and ends into my suitcase. Ciao!

Greetings from Barcelona. I'm running around like mad and generally having a good time.

With all that's going on here, frankly I wasn't really focusing on exactly how badly things are going over in the Middle East. Then Dad forwarded an update e-mail from the cousins in Haifa and it started to sink in that this isn't just another crisis. With the news that shells have started to fall in Haifa, all I can do is to hope some sanity prevails before more people get killed.

Doves of Peace, looking out over Barcelona.

Let us all keep a thought for peace tonight.

And jetlagged, and very happy to be with Scott & the kitties again.

I had a great time in Barcelona. About half my photos are already on Flickr. I have more photos still to upload, and I want to add some commentary to the travel blog.

I read a fascinating book on the flight home that I want to talk about, and that will find its way online fairly soon. Plus other stuff.

However, it's hot as hell in San Mateo and we have at best spotty A/C, so what I can't get done in the cooler hours will have to wait.

No, really. It might help my blogging.

I wrote three different blog entries in my head today while doing various things, but since I wasn't in front of my computer at the time, none of them made it onto my blog. And now, as I sit in the living room watching CSPAN and waiting for the Lieberman / Lamont primary results to come in, I can't really summon the enthusiasm to type out the posts I'd composed in my head.

Some ... person ... decided that completely breaking my driver's side mirror would be a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon, so tomorrow morning at 7:30AM I get to go to the dealership and have a new mirror put in.

No note from the [expletive deleted] person who did it, of course, and the cost is lower than my deductible, so it's all on me. Very annoying. I had some plans for that $300 or so this is going to cost me.

On the bright side, I am glad that I could get an appointment so quickly, and that I don't really have to drive anywhere today. I feel naked driving without being able to use that mirror.

6:00AM: Wake up with massive, somewhat irrational stress-out related to school. Be completely unable to fall back asleep. Eventually get up and decide to mess around on computer until I relax enough to back to sleep.

7:00AM: Realize I'm still wide awake but am feeling chilly, put on sweats.

8:00AM: Finally sleepy, but hubby's alarm clock is about to go off. Decide the hell with sleep and make strong coffee.

I spent most of Labor Day doing something I rarely do anymore -- reading fiction. I plowed through the last 2 of the original Dune books (God Emperor and Heretics). Even for me, that's a fast pace, but I did read both of them about 10 years ago, so I went a bit more quickly than I would have with something totally new.

We're leaving for a quick trip to New York very early on Thursday, so things will be a bit hectic this week.

We're heading to NYC early tomorrow AM & will be there through the weekend.

I will have net access but don't expect to be blogging much.

Ciao!

Five Years.

When something really horrible happens to you, it can warp your sense of time. You feel caught in your agony like a fly in amber; it's as if the intensity of your pain will never end. And although nothing is completely the same again, sooner or later, the pain begins to release its grip on you, and slowly time begins to move in a more normal manner. Then one day, you realize that weeks, months, even years have gone by since the horrible event.

And here we are, five years after 9/11.

I've been doing my damnedest to avoid most of the media hoopla leading up to this day. I don't need to watch the images again, hear the stories of grief and pain retold. It's all inside me still. The rawest edges of the horror and sorrow and shock have been worn smooth over time, but even so, all I need to do is close my eyes and it's all still there.

For those of us for whom New York City was not a series of iconic images on their TV screen or an occasional travel destination, but rather their home, 9/11 can be an intensely personal pain. Those hijackers tore a gaping hole out of my life. My memories of the World Trade Center span not just special events like the dinner with my family at Windows on the World the night of my 18th birthday and drinks with my friend Diana and the rest of her wedding party on her bachelorette weekend in NY, but also hundreds of morning and evening commutes, lunches, trips to the FedEx dropoff in the lobby, visits to friends in their offices. Not to mention that for 10 years, the towers were the first thing I'd see coming out the front door of my old Soho apartment. That those towers no longer exist is something I still haven't fully come to terms with.

Terrorists cannot steal my memories, but they destroyed the tangible reminder of those memories. It's a small loss compared to so much else that was destroyed that day, but it's a real loss nonetheless.

And then there's Kath.

She was only 40 when she went to work that brilliant September morning. And she never came home. AA Flight 11 slammed right into her office on the 97th floor of One World Trade; we'll never know for sure, but I'm told her desk was on the opposite side of the building from the impact point and it's possible that she never even knew what hit her. I pray that that is the truth, because thinking that she might have been standing there at a window, watching the plane heading right for her, is just too painful.

For the first year or so after 9/11, not a day went by that I didn't think of Kath. And to be honest, five years out, I don't think about her every single day anymore. But even so, in a way, I feel that I'm living for both of us. That sounds a little odd, and it's not exactly what I mean, but I do feel a connection and an obligation. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that I feel a responsibility to use this time that I have, which she did not get, in a way that honors her.

We never know what day will be our last. We never know what goodbye will be the final one. And yet, all too often, we waste our precious time. We waste our days at jobs that bore us, we don't stay in touch with the people who matter to us, we think, 'There's always tomorrow'. But sometimes, there isn't. There's only a sunny morning, and an airplane flying low over New York City, and the ending of all our dreams.

UPDATE: Read Keith Olbermann.

As if it has't been obvious, I've been in a quiet phase in recent days. This semester is more demanding than last one, which has been cutting down on my free time, but I'm also feeling somewhat stressed out right now, which tends to reduce my desire to blog as well. However, I got tagged by Left Off Colfax over ther weekend and I need to download iTunes 7.0, so I'll be working on those projects this AM & try to get a post up a bit later.

I don't know where I left my brain, but it certainly wasn't working all that well this morning. As I cruised down Highway 280 heading towards work, I noticed that the gas was bouncing off empty. I mean, REALLY bouncing off empty - the trip odometer was showing more than 350 miles, and I ought to refuel right around 300. And the nearest gas station was about 5 miles away.

I wasn't too happy by the time I got to the station, but at least I still had some gas left in the tank. I got to work almost a half-hour late and my brain still hadn't kicked into gear.

Mmmm. Coffee.

It's been a dismally grey and chilly weekend. Looks like summer is really over. The days are noticably shorter, and I'm putting the sandals away until next Spring.

Grey is how I'm feeling this chilly October night.

Hope you have an easy fast!

This morning I got an e-mail reminder that I need to pay for another 12 months of web hosting at Powweb. In other words, I need to get off my butt and get serious about what I want to do with the site and my hosting.

I wrote this summer about the difficulties I had with Powweb's support team after their site migration broke a key script on my website. At the time, I decided not to move, since I was paid-up until October and didn't want to waste my money by leaving sooner. That's a classic case of using a sunk cost for decision making, which is one of those thing you're really not supposed to do, but I did it anyway.

So the way I see it, I have three choices.

First off, I could call it a day and shutter Fiat Lux. There's a part of me that's thinking, "Why bother? You're not blogging as much as you used to, your posts are getting more banal, and your readership is off -- do you really need to be doing this whole website thing at all?" In which case, I would take the site down, get an email-only hosting plan somewhere (probably Tucows, since that's where I have the domain registered), and that would be that.

Next choice, status quo. Although I'm definitely not blogging like I was six months ago, I don't particularly want to ditch this blog altogether. And although I'm still somewhat irked at Powweb's recent crappy service, I really don't have all that much to complain about when you look at the total scope of the last three years of hosting with them. Especially when you factor in how little the cost is. So perhaps I should suck it up, pay for the next year of service, and continue on as is.

The third path would be to find a new web host. If I did that, I'd probably want to take advantage of the switch to make some other changes to the blog -- like a new template, or an upgrade to MovableType 3.x or maybe even give WordPress a try. After three years, Fiat Lux is overdue for a redesign. However, the problem there is the timing. October is a very busy month for me; I have a product launch at work and accounting midterm next week, plus various other stuff for school going on as well. Also, I really ought to be spending my free time on starting up the post-graduation job hunt, not playing with my personal website.

So, there you have it. Three options. All have pluses and minuses. And I have just 18 days to decide before I have to either put down some cash or shut down the site. Less than that if I go with option three, because I'd have to allocate time for coding and testing before throwing the switch to the new site.

The only option that's not on the table is moving to one of the free blogging services. Why? Two reasons. One, because I'll still have to pay to have my domain e-mail hosted somewhere, so if I decide to keep blogging, I might as well get a full web hosting plan and run my own site. Two, because I can. I'm not much of a geek compared to most of the folks here in Silicon Valley, but I am just enough of one that I'd rather run my own website than use someone else's service.

Oh, and bonus reason three: because as someone whose career has a technology / marketing focus, I find it helpful to stay hands-on with at least some aspects of Internet technology. One of the gripes you hear about marketing people in the tech world is that they can be clueless and unrealistic when it comes to their expectations of technology. Being clued-in to even the basics helps stave that off.

I don't get as many visitors as I used to, but those of you who still stop by here, what do you think? Have you faced a similar choice, and if so, what did you choose?

As I walked in the door from school tonight, my phone rang. One of my classmates was calling; another classmate had been hit by a car (not fatally, thank god), and did I know the name of her boyfriend so the boyfriend could be called?

I didn't. In fact, I didn't even know she had a boyfriend, and I feel really lousy about that right now. We're in two classes together and even in a working group for one of the classes; you'd think I'd have learned something as basic as her relationship status halfway into the semester. What kind of self-involved person does that make me?

The other thing that really makes me feel bad is I drove right by the accident scene tonight, and I didn't know it was her. As I drove past campus heading home, I noticed that there was a fire truck, an ambulance, and a police car all clustered round a car in the street, plus a lot of students standing around. But I didn't stop to ask what had happened. I just wanted to get home after a long day.

I really wish now that I had stopped.

Bleh.

Yay.

Despite the fact that it's open to anybody, I was always too intimidated to actually do anything to Wikipedia.

Recently, however, we created a wiki for a project at work and I was put in charge of managing it. It's a technical documentation wiki, so my primary task is to try to bring some structure to what the tech staff puts in there, plus trying to figure out how our users will eventually want to use the site and adding a bit of marketing spin to the front page. At any rate, now that I've actually been using a wiki, I finally felt comfortable enough to actually touch Wikipedia.

To start out, I removed a factually inaccurate statement from one article, and then corrected a spelling error in another. Not very thrilling contributions, to be sure, but at least I'm not intimidated anymore.

Actually, if I ever get the time at work, I think it would abe a good idea to rewrite Wikipedia's entry on my employer. That, however, presents an intersting question. Is it considered appropriate for a company to substantially re-write their own entry? If you remained consistant to the Wikipedia standards of accuracy and neutrality I don't see why it would be so bad, but then, I'm still pretty new to wikiland.

Haven't done this in a while. Here's the first 10 in my random shuffle today:

Come Around - Marc Broussard
O Marie - Daniel Lanois
Bombay Awakes - Bombay Dreams (London Cast)
Hand Me Down - Matchbox 20
Whoomp! (There It Is) - Tag Team
Higher Love - Steve Winwood
Money Changes Everything - Cyndi Lauper
Boadicea - Enya
Color and Light - Sunday in the Park with George
Sky Blue - Peter Gabriel

And now, off to campus for a long day of slogging through Managerial Accounting problems.

California's autumns are extremely gentle, but wven out here, there's signs that the rainly winter season will be around soon ehough:

1) My cuticles are shot to hell (thank you, super-low humidity)
2) Daylight Savings Time is coming to an end this weekend

Today was one of the last commutes I'll have in daylight for the next several months. One of the things I hate most about winter is the short days. Especially since the auto accident a couple of years ago, driving at night is not high on my list of things I enjoy.

On the plus side, I have a baby shower and a Halloween party to go to this weekend. The gift ias already bought, and I have a costume all set for the party. Yay me!

I've been a little sinus-y and headache-y today, and am hoping that a cold is not on its way. Depite feeling draggy, Scott and I went out to do a couple of errands to complete the winterization of his bike today.

While we were out, we stopped by the local Tower Records, which was festooned with "going out of business" signs. CDs were all 25% off and DVDs 20% off -- not the greatest of discounts, but what the heck. We walked out with 4 DVDs and 4 CDs. I probably would have bought more if it weren't for the sticker shock. Last time I was buying CDs they were generally $16. Just about everything I looked at in the bins was $21.

Tower Records was a big part of my CD buying life before we moved to San Francisco. Living within walking distance of a branch will do that to you. Once we got to SF, I tended to do my buying via Amazon. And by and large that was just fine,. But the thing you lose by not going to a store to do your buying is the serendipity of discovery. Online stores try very hard to come up with good algorythms for "you may also be interested in..." sections on a web page, but it's not the same by a long shot. Those things are good for reminding you to buy batteries and a travel charger after you pick out a piece of electronics, but not so good for the more random connections that result in your walking out with 3 Star Wars DVDs as well as a copy of "Good Night and Good Luck".

With Tower going down for the count, there's even less chance I'll be doing much of that random browsing in the future. And that's a shame.

Local music critic Jim Harrington has a similar response to Tower's immanent demise.

I took some cold meds before I sat down to write this and they seem to be starting to kick in. With any luck I'll be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the AM.

I took this shot Saturday night, shortly before 7:00PM.

Right now, it's 5:26 PM and fully dark out.

This sucks.

OK, I now know what trinket I want as a graduation present.

Apple is now selling their iPod Nano RED Special Edition in an 8 GB version.

Mmmm. Shiny red nano-y goodness.

Actually, it wasnt all that strange., but the fact that I can actually remember any of it several hours after I woke is a little unusual.

The dream:

I was sitting in a Starbucks in a new town. Perhaps I was having a conversation with someone, or perhaps I had just finished the conversation. And then, I turned around and asked the barista behind the counter for a job application.

It doesn't take a professional headshrinker to guess that I'm processing some anxiety about my upcoming graduation. I started the path to my MBA in the expectation that it would help me get back onto the career track I was jerked off of back in 2002. But expectations are one thing. Finally, the time is coming where I find out whether that was a good decision or not, and I'm scared.

Small wonder I'm dreaming about running back to the security of Starbucks, even if in the light of day, it's obvious that doing so would be a massive waste of my tuition. You don't need an MBA to pull shots and wash out the steamed milk pitchers.

Sorry I've gone dark. Scott had a health issue come up and I've been focused on dealing with it more than anything else right now.

He's going to need surgery, which will probably take place in December, but assuming all goes well with that he should recover completely.

So now I have something else to be thankful for tomorrow.

I don't hit the malls on the day after Thanksgiving. After having put in a few years in retail during the hoilday season, any small amount of joy I might have taken in the hype, the sales, and the "official" start of the holiday season got ground out of me.

Plus, it's really getting crazy out there in shopping-land. Last night, as we drove home from dinner, I saw a line of people already waiting outside the CompUSA in San Mateo. There's something seriously wrong with you if you feel the need to stand outside in the cold all Thanksgiving night just so that you can buy some discounted electronics at a sale the next morning. What's next, taking the whole family to stand on line all Thanksgiving day and eating your turkey in a pup tent in the parking lot, just so you can be first in line?

Pure insanity, as far as I am concerned.

However, I'm not a hardcore Buy Nothing Day person, either. I did venture out to Trader Joe's to buy a gallon of milk and some crackers late this afternoon.

Spending all day on his feet Thursday was really pushing it for Scott, so we're been staying very close to home since then. I've been playing with the new coffeemaker I bought off of woot.com, am finally caught up on all my back episodes of Studio 60, and Scott's been wresting with an installation of Vista on his computer.

I've urged him to put up a post here detailing some of the challenges he ran into and how he solved them, so that once Google gets it, other people will be able to find some solutions. Perhaps he will.

We need to venture out at some point for a few supplies, and we might even get to a movie later on. Thrilling, I know. I need to start posting something more interesting here.

Perhaps the reason so many people end up either shuttering their blogs or becoming part of group efforts is the simple fact that there are times when daily blogging is just too hard. Lately, I've had to really force myself to blog, and both the quality and quantity of posts here has been declining, as I'm sure my few remaining readers have noticed.

It's not that there's nothing going on, either in the world or in my own personal life. The problem is, most of what's going on in my own life I'm finding it hard to write about -- for example, Scott's health issues are his, not mine, and it's not really my place to talk about them here. Another big issue is that I don't know what's going to happen with my internship after I graduate. I'm so stressed out that it's a conversation that I just don't want to have with my boss, yet it's one that I really need to have: knowing whether I still have a job, and if it is a part-time or full-time gig, and at what rate of pay, is not unimportant information! I have 2 challenging finals standing between me and graduation, and my parents are coming to visit on Thursday which means I need to clean the hell out of my house. And I have no clue what I am going to wear for Graduation under the cap and gown. (Please no dirty jokes)

Dealing with all of that has pushed my ability or desire to pay attention to the rest of the stuff that is going on in the world to the back burner. All in all, I'm feeling overwhelmed, and the more overwhelmed I feel, the less I feel like blogging. It would be nice to have a few co-bloggers to fall back on in times like this. But for better or for worse, Fiat Lux is a solo effort, so as I go, so goes the blog.

This isn't a "Goodbye Cruel World" post. I'm not shutting down for good. But I suspect that light blogging will be the rule of the day for the next few weeks.

That was not a fun final.

I teared up a little at the end, though, because that was officially it.

I'm done.

Unless something goes badly awry, I'm getting my diploma on Friday.

There's a lot more I could say, and I probably will soon enough, but right now I'm beat. I'm going to cuddle with the kitties & go to sleep early.

On Friday afternoon, the final class of 2006 robed up, walked across the stage to the applause of our families, and got our diploma holders.
Afterwards, we had a yummy dinner down at Boulevard, and then hightailed it up to the Sonoma Mission Inn for a round of winery visits, some more great food, a little relaxation, and some precious time with Scott and my parents.
I'm very tired, but I had a fantastic weekend.
Dad shot a brief video of me, which I need to upload somewhere. It's very short (13 seconds) and not all that thrilling but still, I'm glad he took it.

UPDATE 12/18: OK, I tried to put the video on GooTube. Let's see if it worked.

In the last 24 hours, I've noticed something new for the holidays -- I've gotten three SMS messages from various friends wishing me a Merry Xmas. Either my friends have gotten younger or SMS is getting more mainstream; not sure which.

We're having an extremely quiet weekend at home. Even though we don't celebrate Chirstmas, over the years I find that most of the time, we end up spending the day with either family or friends. After all, there's no much else you can do. Pretty much everything is closed. So being totally on our own for Xmas is a little unusual, and kind of lonely. It doesn't much feel like a holiday.

However. with Scott on a restricted diet until January, it didn't seem like a good idea to try to inflict his dietary limitations on any of our friends. So yesterday Scott roasted up a turkey (omitting his usual butter enrichment) & we had a nice dinner of turkey, gravy, potatos, and asparagus -- all made with as little fat as possible. It was pretty tasty, too. We'll be working our way through the leftovers today, and I'm going to make stock out of the carcas.

If the local movie theater is open and playing something worth seeing, maybe we'll walk on down & see a show. If not, I've got DVDs to watch, and a big pile of leftover turkey to eat.

So things are quiet around here, but that's not necessarily bad. It's been a really crazy month. Some rest and time to recharge is a good thing.

Today worked out very well. It was nice and warm this morning, so I braved the Hillsdale Mall for an hour or so. There were lines at both Macy's and the Gap, but all in all it was a pretty painless experience, and I got what I was looking for without too much stress. About an hour after I got home, the rain started to fall, making me feel very good about my sense of timing.

My other project for the day was making a batch of stock from the turkey carcass and the collection of chicken wing tips that's been gathering in our freezer since the last time I made stock. We had so much base, I ended up making two pots' worth. The house smelled wonderful as the pots simmered away.

As I was straining out the flotsam, I found myself channeling my long-since-deceased grandmother. Grandma Bernice, an immigrant child of the Depression, didn't let much go to waste on a chicken. She would even crack chicken bones in her teeth to suck out the marrow. So as I ladled out bones, mirepoix, and chunks of turkey flesh, I found myself setting the larger pieces aside in a little dish -- after all, why throw out perfectly good meat?

Of course, after simmering in the stock pot for 3 hours, the meat was dry and flavorless, which I discovered after it had cooled off. If Scott weren't on his diet, I could have goosed the turkey up with some cheese and turned it into a casserole, but that's out for a few more weeks. So into the bin it went. Still, I had a hard time forcing myself to throw it away, and even now, I feel a little guilty for wasting all that meat.

Which is ridiculous, because the turkey wasn't wasted at all. I have at least a gallon of yummy stock cooling in a water bath right now, and that stock will go into making a bunch of great dinners in days to come.

Yep, it's our 10th wedding anniversary.

In this day & age, a decade of marriage is quite an achievement. And marriage is not always easy. But the rough spots are completely outweighed by the day to day joys of getting to live my life with my best friend and dearest love.

How are we celebrating? Wii Bowling, to start. A nice piece of ahi is sitting in the fridge, and we'll have that for dinner. After that, maybe some more Wii, or maybe a movie. In short, a quiet date night at home.

In January, after Scott's surgery is past, we'll go out for the really nice dinner at a restaurant, and hopefully sometime a bit later this spring, we'll get away for a mini-vacation to properly celebrate 10 years of wedlock.

But even a comfortable night home with my honey is just fine by me.

I love you, Scott. As long as we're together, that's all that matters.

Here's to the next few decades.

I ran across a group on Flickr called "What's In Your Bag" and decided to play along.

This being the last day of 2006, and in keeping with the "out with the old, in with the new" theme of New Year's, here is a shot of everything that was in my day to day handbag today.

I didn't realize that big a pile of receipts and shopping lists had accumulated in there. They have since been tossed into the trash bin. So much for the old!

I'll figure out the new later. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions.

Scott's surgery was yesterday & went fine. He is home from the hospital and resting more or less comfortably. He'll be home all week, and phone calls are welcome.

I suppose it would be ungrateful of me to complain much about the experience, since the staff at Kaiser were all very nice and helpful, but it seems to me that hospitals in general are sucky places for people to actually get better.

So much noise, light, activity -- and the practice of sticking multiple patients in the same room means that even when you're being left alone, someone is coming in to check on your neighbor. The first room Scott was put into was so small that there was barely room to squeeze a chair in next to the bed -- the only reason I could was that Scott was in the corner next to a sink, so I was able to wiggle a chair into that small alcove. His neighbor on the other side of the curtain didn't even have that much extra space. And the third guy in the room had a very noisy case of pneumonia; you could literally hear him snoring 30 feet down the hall. After a few hours of that, and some words with the head nurse, Scott was moved into a larger, quieter room, but even so he didn't get much sleep.

I know there's reasons why hospitals are set up that way -- and aside from trying to cram too many people into a too-small room, I'm sure there are good reasons for just about all of it. But it does seem to me that the whole calculus is off somehow, and is designed more to make things eaiser on the hospital staff than on the patient. Shouldn't allowing patients to experience restful, healing sleep be a part of the equation?

All complaining aside, I am grateful that he got good care and that he's back home where he belongs, sleeping in our bed with Tommy cuddled up next to him.

Life is slowly getting back to normal chez lux, but I've managed to fall out of the blogging habit in the interim. I feel some lingering guilt for not posting daily, but I also don't feel that I have much to say right now.

If past experience is a reliable guide, my blogging frequency tends to go up almost immediately after I make a post like this. We'll see what happens.

I had a somewhat rocky weekend, so in an effort to wrap up Sunday on a good note, I pulled out a movie that's virtually guaranteed to make me feel better by the time it ends:

Big Trouble In Little China.

What's your guilty pleasure?

Because sometimes, you need to crank up the tunes really loud to get you over the hump.

While There's A Candle Burning - Steve Winwood
Honey Bun - Mandy Patinkin
Walking Down Your Street - Bangles
Bomday Dreams - Bombay Dreams - London Cast
Mandolin Rain - Bruce Hornsby And The Range
Chimes of Freedom (live) - Bruce Springsteen
Gloria - U2
Warrior - Matisyahu
Hold What You've Got - Carly Simon
ndependent Woman - Destiny's Child

I wasn't too sanguine about our ability to find an affordable, non-jetBlue flight home for Passover, but with a little help from Fare Compare, we scored non-stop, round-trip tickets for $200 less than I thought we were going to have to pay.

The flight out is a little full, and it gets us into Newark a little later that I would prefer. We also haven't flown Continental in years, so that should be a nice change of pace.

Insomnia sucks.

That is all.

We're home.

Jet lag kicked me in the butt all week and I've gotten less than 6 hours sleep a night since leaving San Mateo. I swear, going to NYC messes me up worse than going to Europe does, despite the much greater time difference.

In addition, there was a time when I liked flying, but these days, flying has all the glamor of a Greyhound Bus ride and I hate it. I still like the "being somewhere else" part of travel as much as always, but I can't say how much I wish we had better options for getting there.

I'm going to try to fight off going to sleep for a couple more hours so that I don't wake up at 3:00AM, but I'm not really coherent enough to blog on anything else right now.

We're home.

Jet lag kicked me in the butt all week and I've gotten less than 6 hours sleep a night since leaving San Mateo. I swear, going to NYC messes me up worse than going to Europe does, despite the much greater time difference.

In addition, there was a time when I liked flying, but these days, flying has all the glamor of a Greyhound Bus ride and I hate it. I still like the "being somewhere else" part of travel as much as always, but I can't say how much I wish we had better options for getting there.

I'm going to try to fight off going to sleep for a couple more hours so that I don't wake up at 3:00AM, but I'm not really coherent enough to blog on anything else right now.

I've been meaning to blog about my commute for a long time. I drive 33 miles each way to my current gig, and frankly that's too far. About the only times I really enjoy my commute are sunny mornings like today, because when the weather is nice, the ride along the upper part of Highway 280 is really lovely. (Highway 280, if you're not familiar with the SF Bay Area, is an interstate that connects San Francisco and San Jose. It's more or less the neglected step-child of Highway 101, a north-south artery that runs all the way down to Los Angeles.)

At any rate, if you must commute, Highway 280 is a good commute to have, especially the part before you hit the more urbanized South Bay. Lots of green rolling hills, fields, even some cows as you pass near Stanford. This wiki link helps show what I mean but that's far from the prettiest scenery you pass on the stretch from San Mateo down to Cupertino. Still, it's a long commute, and even on a good, no-traffic day I'm in the car for 45 minutes each way. On a Friday night, it can take well over an hour to get home. And for a minimum of 4 months each the year (more if I work late a lot), I'm driving home after sundown, which means all I see is tail lights, not hills and trees.

What finally got me to write about the commute was this piece on commuting in the New Yorker. This is me:

Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods.

And here's the corollary:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told [the author of the article]. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

...

The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

Not that I'm all that into soccer, churches, or bar-hopping (anymore) but those are just examples to illustrate the point. True, you can chat on your cellphone while you're in the car, but that is not very safe, and not much of a substitute for real social activities anyway. For example, I can't count the number of events I've passed on because they start in San Francisco at 6PM, which would mean having to leave work by 4:30 at the latest in order to get there on time.

If you'd told me 10 years ago what my daily commute would be like today, I would have laughed at you and called you a fool. Funny how things change. Many of the changes in my life since then have been for the better, but this one .... well, not so much.

On a purely personal note, this sucks:

This weekend will be the last time riders can rent horses from Claremont Riding Academy to take on Central Park's bridal path.

The academy is the oldest continuously operated stable in the country but decreasing ridership and increasing development on the Upper West Side is forcing it to close.

That business has been in my mother's family for many decades. It's sad, sad news that the end has come.

UPDATE 4/24 The news that Claremont is closing is mostly a NY story, but Pravda, of all places, has picked it up too.

I'm still pretty bummed about the news. I know everything comes to an end eventually, and that 100+ years is a really great run, but that's cold comfort.

One of the rituals of spring, when I was growing up, was putting all the outdoor furniture back out onto the terrace at my grandparents' summer home. In a time when central air was much less common than it is today, being able to relax outdoors, shaded by trees and a cool afternoon breeze, was an important part of keeping cool.

Forget Memorial Day -- the day we hauled the glass-topped table and its matching (and uncomfortable) metal chairs, the more comfortable blue plastic chairs and recliners, and the little side tables for holding drinks and snacks out from the basement, around the yard, and up onto the terrace, then cleaned it all off and arranged it into the familiar pattern, was the day the "season" really began.

I live in an apartment now, a long way from that Connecticut house which now belongs to my parents. But some things don't change. Today I took a sponge and some Windex and cleaned off my terrace furniture in preparation for the warmer months to come.

Tonight, I'll sit outdoors and drink a glass of wine. Life's good when the days are long.

This was the scene in San Mateo this morning, on my way to work. $3.45 a gallon for regular gas.

I could drive a mile or two out of my way and save about a nickel a gallon, but for where I live, this is an average-priced station, neither top nor bottom of the pack.

In short, it's now costing me $7 a day in gas alone, just to drive to work.

I think I might have hit my change point when it comes to gas prices.

UPDATE 5/2 It's gone up a couple of cents more since I posted this.

I've researched mass transit options, but CalTrain + biking the 3 miles from the CalTrain San Jose station would be $11.50 a day and roughly double my current commute time. Plus there's no shower in the office, so if I broke a sweat on the ride to work I'd be gross and yukky all day.

*sigh* This stinks.

One bit of good news is that my boss seems to be open to the idea of me working from home at least part of the time.

A right rear tire blowout on Highway 280 while on one's way to work does not generally bode well for the rest of the day. I'm Ok, but as you can see, the tire is complete toast. Great.

Being a gal who doesn't know much about cars, I call the "car guy" brother-in-law while I wait for AAA to show up, and check with him what I should expect to pay for a new tire. He tells me. So far so good.

I get nervous when the AAA tow truck driver tells me, "I know just the place where you can get that fixed." I'm thinking to myself, "Yeah right. How much does this place pay you to steer business their way?"

In short, I'm expecting to be massively ripped off. Instead, I get taken to a little home in the wall place on a side street off Stevens Creek in Cupertino.

Imperial Automotive isn't much to look at. Two bays, two mechanics, lots of stuff lying around, the owner up front, and a bunch of old imports waiting to be worked on. But looks are not everything. The guys there rotated the best of the remaining tires onto my back wheels and set me up with a new set of front tires with no wait time, and for $40 less than the brother-in-law said I'd probably have to pay for the work. They also, and for no charge, reattached a plastic guard thingie on the underside of my car that had gotten knocked loose by the tow truck guy.

While they were at it, they checked my brake pads and suggested that the next time I get an oil change I might want to have the pads replaced. I was so surprised that they weren't trying to push me into having the work done right then and there, I almost forgot to thank them.

I got to work a few hours late, and a little worn out from the stress, but all in all it turned out to be an OK morning.

As I was cruising around the San Francisco bay this past week, something came to mind: it's possible that these sights, or the 1941 version of them, were the last my great-uncle Arthur saw of America, before he died over the Pacific in WW2.

During the war, San Francisco was a major naval base, and Angel Island was a major embarkation point for men going out to fight the war in the Pacific. So it's possible that Arthur sailed out through the beautiful Golden Gate that long-ago day, never to return.

He has a grave in the Punchbowl military cemetery on Oahu, instead. We visited it when I was a child, on our one family trip to Hawaii. But he's not there; he was MIA and presumed dead, with the rest of his crew. Whether he was shot down by the Japanese or was a victim of mechanical failure, we'll never know.

I keep a small book that I found in a used bookstore in my top desk drawer. It's a small, dull brown volume titled "Prayer Book for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States" that dates to 1941. It wasn't his, but I keep it to honor his memory.

I've been tagged by Sarah. So while I wait for a bunch of podcasts to download, I might as well work on my list:

Start with 7 random facts/habits about yourself.

1. My iPod Nano is red because I love the color, although the fact that some money also went to a good cause does not displease me.

2. A 7" GUND brown teddy bear lives on my desk, next to the pen cup and a basket of paper clips. I bought that bear they year I spent my summer vacation working in a summer stock theater on Long Beach Island, NJ.

3. I grew up in a 'dog family'. They don't understand how I ended up with so many cats.

4. My very first Internet e-mail address ended in @aol.com. I'm so ashamed.

5. I have a weird allergy. I'm allergic to nuts -- but NOT to peanuts.

6. I've been following the Casey Serin saga for months.

7. I hate vacuuming. Despise it. I don't mind anything else when it comes to keeping my house clean, but that is a chore I go out of my way to avoid doing. I've been thinking that maybe I'd like it more if I went out and bought a really high-end, extra-powerful vacuum instead of the old, small, and slightly underpowered vacuum I currently have, but I'm hesitant to drop a bunch of money on something I dislike so much.

Then choose another 7 people to get tagged and list their names. People who are tagged have to write their 7 things on their blog. Don't forget to leave them a comment to tell them they have been tagged and to read your blog.

OK then. I tag Dragoncaller, Sour Duck, Below The Crowd, Seamus, Bisky, Rudi, and (if he's still paying attention to the Internet) Steve.

I suddenly realized I haven't blogged in a few days. Sorry about that. Everything's fine, I've just been a bit overloaded.

On Memorial Day, I finally got around to joining a local health club, and now I'm trying to figure out how to work regular exercise into my day to day routine. The club membership came with three free "starter" sessions with a personal trainer, which were more than a little intimidating, but at least now I have a nice workout plan all mapped out for me. Problem is, it takes me almost 90 minutes to get through the whole thing, plus changing clothes & shower time -- that's a 2-hour block of time for each session. Trying to fit that into my current schedule, especially on work days, has been a little disruptive.

I'm hoping that once I get more settled into a routine and comfortable with how to use all the damn machines, then I'll be able to get it closer to an hour than 90 minutes, but for now it's a real pain. Even if I leave work by 5:30, I'm not home and ready for dinner until well after 8PM. Since you're not supposed to eat for at least 3 hours before going to sleep, the only way I can eat dinner at all is because I'm a night owl who stays up for the Daily Show & the Colbert Report. On the flip side, trying to get a 90-minute workout done in the mornings would mean hitting the gym before 7AM; and I am not at all good about getting out of bed that early.

I've never been much for health clubs before, so hopefully I'll find a way to make this work for me. Ideally I'd like to get to the club 4 out of 7 days a week, which I think is a goal that's both reasonable, and likely to actually produce some results over time. But if I can't get the workout down to about 60 minutes, I suspect I'll have to do the bulk of my exercise on the weekends, which means less results over time.

I have no illusions that I'll be able to turn myself into a muscled-out fitness goddess; I find working out far too boring for that. Getting into better general shape and turning a few pounds of fat into muscle would be nice, though.

Haven't done one of these in a while:

I Want To Come Over - Melissa Etheridge
Tenth Avenue Freeze Out - Bruce Springsteen
Indestructible - Matisyahu
Desperado - Eagles
Everybody Wants To Rule The World - Tears For Fears
Mercy Street - Peter Gabriel
A Bit of Earth - The Secret Garden (Original Broadway Cast)
I Feel Fine - The Beatles
Church Of The Poison Mind - Culture Club
Complicated (The Matrix Mix) - Avril Lavigne

As a reminder, The Rules: Open iTunes or your iPod. Load up your entire library. Put it in "random" mode. Write down the first ten tracks that come up--and no fair putting in ones you think will make you look cool, or omitting ones that make you look like a total dork.

So around lunchtime yesterday, Scott IMed me with some Big News: a co-worker of his was looking to unload two tickets to The Police concert at Oakland Coliseum. Did we want to go?

HELL YES!

The Police broke up before I started going to concerts, so I always assumed I'd never have the chance to see them live. Then, when they announced their "30th Anniversary tour" I figured there'd be no way I'd manage to snag tickets. Instead, the tickets came to us. Nice how that worked out.

I didn't have time to do much planning, and cameras weren't allowed anyway, so this is the best I could do for a photo:

I'd never been to a stadium concert before, and the sheer size of the venue was definitely a drawback. But other than that -- and the absolutely horribly bad opening act -- we had a fantastic time. Wikipedia has a full set list, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Despite Stewart Copeland's grousing, the band sounded very tight and polished to me. There were one or two moments when I thought I caught a bobble as the band transitioned into the next song, but other than that, they played extremely well for just short of two hours, including encores. Sting had to work fairly hard to get the audience energy up (I think this is where the stadium size was an issue) but the last 40 minutes or so was a big rock-out.

In short, if you get a chance to catch the tour, do so. It's worth it.

Learning something new.

Now that grad school is past and life has settled down into something approximating normal, I've been waning to add some new things to the mix. This weekend, it's a class in making lampwork beads.

I don't think I'll kick my career to the curb and become a full-time glassmaker like Sarah did -- my beads are seriously ugly -- but this definitely is a lot of fun.

If this keeps up I might need to add a "Beads" category.

I'm off to work. I'm taking a camera and plan to swing by an Apple store at lunchtime to check out the party. I may or may not post photos, depending on if I get any good ones.

UPDATE 3:25PM: I did get a couple of photos, including one of Steve Wozniak himself camping a line like the rest of us mere mortals. @Flickr.

I did a push-up today.

That may not sound like much to the more physically-fit of you who read this, but let me assure you, for me, that was a big deal. It was the first full push-up I've done since my high school gym class days.

I've never been a big fan of working out, frankly. It always seemed like a boring, sweaty chore more than anything else, and since I was lucky enough to be naturally on the thin side, I never really bothered with it.

Until this year, when Scott started biking regularly, and dropped 25 pounds. I took a look at myself in the mirror, and realized that I wasn't the same skinny thing that I used to be. And so, after much procrastination, over Memorial Day weekend I finally joined a health club.

I did it right and have been seeing a trainer once a week, as well as working out on my own, with a mix of cardio and weight training. And I'm starting to see some progress. I have to work harder to get my heart rate up on the treadmill. I'm using a higher weight setting on some of the machines. And tonight, I did a push-up. Maybe in another week or two, I'll be doing several of them.

It's a small step, but I did it. And I feel good.

Had a rough day. Scott took a spill off his bike en route to work, so we spent a few hours in Kaiser Hell getting him checked out. All's well now, but it was a long and draining day.

So, as I was cleaning out my overloaded e-mail in-box tonight, I found this jewel that Jason sent to me a few days ago.

Too funny!

I was in Girona. *sigh*

A New York Times article on the millionaires of Silicon Valley is garnering mostly negative feedback today. And it's easy to see why. It's hard to have sympathy for people like this:

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” [Gary] Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar

I can't say I'm all that sympathetic to people who got themselves onto a money treadmill and now feel that they can't get off it. You always have a choice, and if you think you don't, it's because you're not looking in the right places for options. If your role models are the folks with a net worth of $50 million, then yeah, you're a schlub for only having $5 million. Perhaps you might try spending a little time with people whose net worth is only $500 thousand instead? Is that too demeaning for you? Those people, after all, can't afford a nanny for the toddlers and new Acuras for the teenagers. They might even -- dare I say it? -- rent their homes and join the Y instead of a country club.

Is that too much like "admitting defeat"?

Cry me a freaking river.

Here's where I come from on this: I went to a very exclusive private school when I was growing up, and my family was on the lower end of the income spectrum for the school. Kids didn't have ipods and multi-function cellphones and $200 Gucci sunglasses back then, but some things were the same; many of my classmates had brand-new cars, designer jeans, shopping sprees at Bloomingdales, and spring break skiing trips to Aspen. I didn't. I'd like to say that it didn't matter, but that would be a lie. Of course you're going to feel bad if some people in your peer group have stuff you don't. What's important is how you deal with it.

If you're lucky, you take away the lesson that 'stuff' doesn't necessarily make you happy, that somebody is always going to have more stuff than you, and to be happy with the stuff you do have. If you're less lucky, you walk away with the ambition to get all that stuff, and then some, when it comes time for you to raise your own kids. And thus, a new generation of overworked treadmill-walkers is born.

Any accusations of sour grapes aside, there's also a business lesson to be drawn here. I was interested to see that one of the subjects of the article earned much of her wealth from being an early member of the team at Handspring (and later a senior staffer at Palm). One wonders if that company's ever-increasing inability to deliver products that people wanted might be linked to their own staff's disconnection from what life for "normal" people is like.

Insomnia and a massive blog spam attack are not the most promising start to the week.

Just saying.....

In a little more than a week from now, this humble blog will celebrate its 4th anniversary. But that's not what this post is about.

I was actually blogging all the way back in 1996, although back then, it was called an "online diary". I thought that I'd lost those web pages forever, but I finally got the Wayback Machine to cough them up (I'd forgotten the correct URL, silly me).

So, if you're curious, you can see what I had to say all the way back in February 1996, and intermittently the rest of that year. Nothing momentous at all, really, but I'm pleased about it. And I've downloaded a copy of the file, so that I won't lose it again.

Scott and I were supposed to be taking a week's vacation back East this week. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. I posted some of the headlines in Twitter over the weekend, but if you're not a Twitter fan, here's the long and the short of it:

On Friday afternoon we were told that what we though was a mild-to-moderate shoulder injury Scott suffered while out on a bike ride was, in fact, a lot more severe than that -- basically, the accident broke both the left ball joint and shoulder blade in several places -- and surgery was required to put Scott's shoulder back together.

He went under the knife first thing Saturday and is now home recovering. The vacation has been canceled. Long-term, Scott will be just fine, and everything could be much, much worse -- which I'm infinitely grateful for -- but I am also bummed about the lost vacation. We don't travel home anywhere nearly as often as I would like.

There's a lot of interesting things going on out there in the world to blog about, but I'm not feeling very bloggy right now. Please feel free to peruse my blogroll for a list of folks doing a much better job of this blogging thing than I am.

Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.

I've averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).

I've had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.

I've had days where I couldn't wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I've though about shutting it down entirely.

I've learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing -- SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links -- that I use in my professional work.

I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I'm more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.

Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it's best when it's not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.

I closed my first post like this:

What next? Who knows. But I think that I'd like to blog the journey.

And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let's see what happens.

Scott, after all this time, has got himself a blog.

After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we've got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home! :)

I'm waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.

Last night's colorful, hazy sunset:

And a cat on my desk chair:

Scott and I headed up to San Francisco today to catch the Ghiradelli Square Chocolate Festival. We had a great time, and tasted a lot of yummy chocolate goodies.

We also got to make the acquaintance of a very friendly bird (a Cockatoo, I think) who was visiting the festival with her keeper. She stepped right onto Scott's good arm and allowed herself to be petted and photographed:

I've been going by 'Fiat Lux' online for 4+ years now, but I think it might be time for a change.

I'm getting very tired of being called 'Fiat' by people, for one thing. I'm a person, not a car. Yet for whatever reason, people fixate on the first part of a name when creating a nickname, not the second half.

As I've said before, I'm also getting very tired of having my comments on Wordpress blogs filtered into the bit-bucket because whoever runs the Akismet spam filters decided that the phrase 'Fiat Lux' is spam.

So what are my options?

I've been using 'rslux' as my blog handle on Wordpress blogs recently (it's also my Twitter handle), so that's one option. It's not terribly catchy, though, and it incorporates my middle initial, which I don't usually use, so it has the potential to be confusing.

I could also start using my real name more. It's not my first choice either, because frankly it makes me feel unsafe. Being female and having an easily Google-able name makes me gun-shy of putting my full name online more than I need to, although I'll be the first to admit that any information any stalker could ever want or need about me is already available online, one way or another. Plus, if I were that concerned about my privacy, I would have picked some other domain name for my blog.

There's also an argument in favor of using my full name -- doing so is better for my own personal branding. But as Kathy Sierra saw, that's a very two-edged sword. I'm just not sure I want to go there.

I suppose I could split the difference of all the options and switch to using 'Lux'.

There's one other issue to consider -- there are some blogs where I've been a regular commenter under my current handle. I either have to keep my current handle, or risk losing my identity and credibility on those sites.

What do you think?

A lot of things from our younger days can be disappointing when you revisit them as an adult. I used to love Yodels cakes (aka HoHos, if you're not in the Northeast), for example -- the cake, the filling, the crunch of the chocolate coating as you bit into it -- but they taste like crap to me today. At any rate, I'm here to report that there's at least one thing that I still love as much today as I did when I was 15:

Swedish Fish

Oh how I love them. (Except maybe the green ones. I eat them first because I like them the least. )

I love Swedish Fish so much that I rarely buy them, because I know all too well that I'll eat the whole damn bag in one sitting unless I exert a LOT of willpower.

I had some today. I'm trying to be good and not gobble the entire bag of them, but it is not easy.