personal

Thursday and then some

Frankly, I find it a little difficult to believe that today is still Thursday. Every calendar I’ve consulted seems convinced that Friday isn’t until tomorrow, but that seems altogether unlikely to me. The day was significantly long enough that I’m sure it must have rolled over into the next while I was sitting in my cubicle at work. Because honestly, the alternative, that I still have to go to work tomorrow morning too, seems wholly unfair.

I guess I should just be glad today’s desk calendar page didn’t have anything about unbaptized babies doomed to roam the earth in the ominous honking of geese.

It was a pretty average, if somewhat too long, day overall, with not a whole lot to differentiate it from any other day this week. Frankly, I’m just looking forward to the weekend, the first in a couple of weeks I won’t have to spend traveling anywhere. I’ve been hoping this weekend I’d finally get the chance to mail out all the subscriber and contributor issues of Kaleidotrope, but a number of factors have been conspiring against that — mostly all that recent travel — and I don’t think I’ll have everything in hand, plus the time it will take at the post office, until next weekend. Rest assured, though, the issue is done and will be mailed out in April. It’s maybe not hugely impressive that I’ve never missed an issue — and with two more planned for this year, we’ll see if that lasts — but I take a little pride in it. The whole thing has been a learning experience for me, and I like to think that each issue is a little better than the one before it. The current issue is 80 pages long, which doesn’t just border on but actually has a work visa into ridiculous, but it’s good stuff.

And that’s really it. Instead of going to the post office this Saturday, I think I’ll be taking my car in for its yearly inspection. But otherwise, I’m just planning on enjoying a relatively lazy weekend.

Of course, I first need to get through tomorrow. Are we sure today wasn’t Friday?

Gabriel’s hounds

Today felt kind of weird, if only because of the weather, which even now at ten o’clock at night is still in the high sixties. (That’s, what, around 20 degrees Celsius?) It was nearly 90 this afternoon (32°C), which is just crazy for the first week of April. Kind of makes all those “there’s no such thing as global warming because we had a snowy winter” claims seem even more ridiculous in retrospect, huh?

The day got off to a weirdly inauspicious start, too, with today’s bit of “forgotten English” from my desk calendar. Today’s phrase was “Gabriel’s hounds,” describing wild geese

…from the noise they make when flying, and from the legend that they are the souls of unbaptized children doomed to wander until the Day of Judgment.

Cheery, no? These geese are, apparently, “supposed to foretell death or misfortune to all who hear their sound.” So says 1880’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and if you can’t trust 1880’s Gentleman’s Magazine, who can you trust?

I didn’t hear any geese, so I guess that’s something, though I did have the feeling all day like I wasn’t supposed to be in the office, like it was a vacation day I’d somehow forgotten to take. I actually managed to get a little work done, but I was very glad when five o’clock rolled around and I could head home. I know I just got back from San Jose, and from a weekend in Maryland, but I feel like I need to take an honest-to-goodness vacation, especially while I can still afford to do so. I’m getting a little serious again about looking for an apartment or condo of my own to buy…even if the prospect of monthly mortgage payments at least twice what I paid in rent in Pennsylvania for a place half the size doesn’t exactly thrill me. So while I have the time and the money, I should probably do something with it, especially since it seems increasingly less likely that Capfest 2010 is going to happen.

Maybe someplace where it won’t be so hot over the summer. If it’s 90 degrees now, imagine what it will be like in July or August!

April Fifth

It was back to work for me this morning, and all the excitement that that entails. On the train ride into Manhattan, I discovered in my jacket pocket a receipt I was missing last week from my trip to San Jose, so I was able to include it in my expense report, which I finally submitted to accounts payable. It was only about sixteen bucks, from my Friday-night dinner at a local Mexican restaurant, but the company reimburses all personal meals while traveling, so it’s silly not to put in for it.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. I liked, though didn’t love, the book, and I’m definitely going to have more to say about it, hopefully soon. I say that often about the books I read and less often follow through, but I think I can tie this, at least tangentially, to some of the other novels I’ve been reading lately. I think I may read Joe Hill’s Horns next.

Also meanwhile, I bought an iPad, with some unexpected and very generous birthday money that came my way. I went with the Wi-Fi and 3G version, which isn’t scheduled to ship until the end of April, but this afternoon FedEx tried to deliver the dock I bought at the same time. (I also bought a carrying case, and I’m thinking maybe I should have paid a few dollars more and gone with the keyboard dock instead.) Delivery required a signature, so I drove over to pick it up. The woman behind the counter asked both me and the customer in front of me if we were getting iPads, since both of our deliveries were from Appel. She hadn’t seen any come in, she said, and she was just curious what they looked like. I don’t know if she was expecting either of us to pop open the boxes and give her a guided tour, but the woman in front of me was just getting a laptop, and the dock Apple sent me is distinctly unimpressive. I’m looking forward to receiving the actual device.

And really, that’s about it. Our dog came back from the kennel today, and I went back to work. It promises to be a pretty ordinary week.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone!

I spent the weekend in Maryland, having Easter at my sister’s place. That’s Chloe, her new dog, in the photo up above. My parents and I drove there Saturday morning, after we left our dog at the vet, and we met up for dinner at a restaurant in Bethesda with a group of extended family — namely, my sister and her husband, his sister and her husband, their mother and an uncle, and one of my and my sister’s aunts and uncles. It was a big group, but it was a good meal, and the weather was just wonderful all weekend long.

This morning, we checked out of the hotel — yeah, this was my second weekend in a row living out of a hotel — and had brunch at my sister’s house. It was a lot of fun, even if Chloe decided to act a lot more skittish than yesterday and actually growl at me for most of the morning. My sister seemed to think maybe it was my beard, but it’s not like I didn’t have it on Saturday. (Then again, it is getting a little bushy, and even I’m a little scared of it sometimes.)

We left a little around noon, and I did a lot of reading in the car. We had dinner at a local diner on the way home — shrimp scampi over rice for me — and came home. We’ll pick the dog up from the kennel tomorrow, after his (gulp) bath.

Other than that, the weekend was pretty boring. Hope you had a lovely Easter, or Passover, or Sunday, or whatever.