Visit the kelpforest....

Tired. Seems like I've had one deadline after another lately. Not getting enough sleep. And it's my own fault. I read someone's feelings about procrastination recently (scroll down to Procrastination, or The Mobility Impaired Brain), which I really identified with - actually, I'd read it quite a while ago and only recently found it again. And I was probably continuing to procrastinate reading the damn thing. Anyway...

Sitting in the airport in San Francisco. My plane was supposed to leave in 20 minutes ago and has been delayed for another 40 - I'm going to LAX and a plane going to Dallas is still parked at the gate. I drank two $8 glasses of Merlot in an airport seafood place to celebrate being done with my bit of the Council meeting; I noticed on the menu there, the swordfish was going for the same price as a chicken breast was in the hotel. GODS, was that place pricey. I bought my breakfast in the gift shop (which was about a third the size of my bedroom), and at least the coffee in my room was decent.

I always wonder in airports. There's a family of five travelling somewhere, with their pile of carryons, and each kid seems to have their own Nintendo DS. My family could never afford to fly anywhere, and still, I really only travel by air for work. We've still never visited John's relatives in Michigan - although a large part of that is that, not only could we not afford without saving for a long while, John really doesn't have any desire to, not having been back there since leaving at 15.

............

Blah. I've been trying to get back to this post for a week; despite having several days off, I never accomplished anything more on it. Batteries on laptop went out and it was time to board the plane, finally. Somehow, I scored a first class seat, which was nice although not that much different. I got to drink my cranberry juice out of a glass cup instead of plastic, and my tray table was actually smaller. I suppose it would make more of a difference on a longer flight. Gareth was a little disappointed I didn't bring back pictures from the air, but I didn't have a window seat.

I was hoping I could get together with my old college roomie while at this meeting, but sadly, 'twas not to be. Ah well, maybe another time. The Council meets in Foster City, also in the Bay Area, in September, I think. She left me the best phone message, though. I'll have to save that one! Yes, I should return it.

I apologize I haven't been posting anything of much interest lately (if I ever do). Getting ready for Halloween and my boss's retirement barbecue has just made me feel exhausted lately, even though I was not even doing a fraction of the work (the committee let me off the hook a bit because I'm the only one with school age little kids). I think I may be working under some low level depression at the moment as well, whether because of being sad for things happening to other people or the time of year, or I'm just a Type D personality (according to the quiz there I am - or is it just my Aspergian traits?). The anniversary of my mom's birth and death have once again passed and I'm feeling a little guilty I haven't commemorated it more, other than a phone call between my brother and I. I meant to post something to momlessdaughter recently; I haven't even looked in there in some time. Plus other things I feel guilty about. I can take steps to remedy some of those though, and I shall do that as soon as I get home.

( ...and a quiz, because it has a pretty picture... )

Crap, I need new headphones at work. Neil Finn is all scratchy in my right ear. I just took apart the ear piece and one of the wires looks like it needs soldering.

AL told me two weeks ago about Shakespeare by the Sea - Merry Wives of Windsor at the Sunken Gardens of the Westminster Civic Center, and darned if I kept forgetting about it the minute I got home. It's tonight at 7:00 pm and how can we pass up something free?! I called John about it the second somebody reminded me (again!), and surprisingly, he's up for it as long as the kids behave. Sounds like fun!

Westminster isn't actually "By the Sea;" it's a ways inland. I think it's the name of the series, which plays in several different parks in the area that may or may not be close to the beach. One of them is Point Fermin Park in San Pedro - it does actually overlook the ocean.

VT tell me all the sardine otoliths through June have been aged, entered and edited, so it's now my turn to clean up the key fields and run the reports for use in the next biomass assessment by the NMFS bunch. Whee!

This is a nice broad green lawn around my office building. It's the only office building on the street, surrounded by the Navy golf course, a softball field and strawberry fields on our side of the street (and beyond that, the National Guard Air Base) and a residential neighborhood on the other. People like to walk their dogs on the lawn around the building. There's actually a new dog park next to the softball field, but that would mean walking around the fence that seperates that park from our building and down a hundred yards or so of dirt road to get to it. So people still run their dogs on our lawn, resulting in the occasional land mine.

The management purchased signs and placed them in strategic locations around the building. They say, "Please clean up after your pet." One of them was placed under one of the sycamore trees.

It's now so covered with birdshit, it's almost unreadable.

This is how much of a math cripple I am.

When reading the symbols for "greater than" or "less than," I often have to stop and look at which number the symbol is pointing to, before I can say it out loud, because when I first learned it, it was "the arrow always points to the smallest number."

Okay, then, back to work. Get some coffee, read some otoliths.....

Long weekends are still too short.

Finally hit the Franklin/Covey store at lunch yesterday to get new planner pages. I am disappointed to find they no longer carry the Cranium or Shoebox versions; their licenses expired, apparently. I like the funny ones, but now I'm limited to Dilbert and The New Yorker. While I like both of them, they're both really aimed more at typical business people. I decided on the second one, but now that I've got it installed, I wish I'd gone for Dilbert. The pages are a monochrome blue and white, and while it does have cartoons, they're all shades of gray.

I did grab a package of glitter gel pens to liven things up, and the salesperson waskind enough to give me a discount because he thought the green and the blue were drying out, but now they seem to work fine. I thought one of them was purple, but it seems to be hot pink instead. Oh well, seems I am cursed to never have a purple one. Anytime I've gotten one, it's been dried out, lost by my kids, or had the cap lost, and therefore a very short life. In any case, I've declared this pack off limits, a statement which Avalon vehemently disagreed with. Quite the little drama princess.

I think I'm developing a pen addiction. I love colored pens, nice pens, and anything that looks like it would feel neat to write with, and I'm always trying sneak one in whenever I buy something. I am dangerous to myself (or at least my paycheck) in an office supply store, and I'm often found drooling over the Levenger catalog. I don't own a fountain pen, but I covet one.

What was I talking about? I suppose I should start using this planner thing the way it's meant to be used; however, I am rebelling against listing all my household chores as well as work stuff in it. It just feels too anal retentive to me...

I'm amazed. Star 98.7 80's Saturday is actually playing a Boingo song that is NOT Dead Man's Party! Hell hath frozen over. Especially considering the month. But Richard Blade works for them now, and maybe he has just a little more eclectic taste.

I was watching Justice League Unlimited and there appeared two new superheroes I was unfamiliar with, Hawk and Dove, who appear to be brothers, maybe. I wondered out to runsamuck why the bigger, more aggressive guy had the higher pitched voice. He replied, "More Spandex in his tights?"

I'm sorry. Megas XLR just makes me sit and giggle. I'm easily amused, but I love the parody of mecha anime. I keep hearing Lieutenant Worf's voice playing various evil aliens, although you'd think he'd rate more than playing the underlings. And then the recurring baddies get completely destroyed... by a Slurpee. Inadvertently. Hee. And even though they're still showing new episodes, I am dying for The Venture Brothers come out on DVD. "What kind of a jackass leaves all the doors unlocked? I'm not flushing! Let them feel the wrath of the Monarch!" I don't think CN has ever shown something that's been that pixelated and bleeped before; I wonder if any other stuff is cut out? I noticed in the credits one of them was based on an original story by Ben Edlund, Tick creator, and indeed some of these remind a lot of the Tick. Especially all the villains, and the head of the Think Tank (wonderfully poking fun at The Fantastic Four) rubberily bouncing around, challenging Brock to come at him. Race Bannon has even showed up, although he died messily, shortly into it.

Gareth just came up and told me, "Avalon is drowning her misery in peanut butter spoons." Sure enough, the three year old, though not at all miserable, is carrying around the peanut butter jar and a spoon. She has been playing with Angus's washable markers, which tend to get all over her hands. Then she wipes her face and between the green and the blue, she looks a bit like those t-shirts that used to make fun of a certain televangelist's wife - I Ran Into Tammy Faye At the Mall....(splat!)

Make spaghetti -I swear I'm the only person in my family who likes to wind the pasta up on my fork; everyone else has to have it cut up. Where the fun in that? The kids are fascinated by the cooking process and I have to lecture them about staying away from hot stuff on the stove, pointing out the scars on my neck and my scalp, that I got when I was younger than they are. Now the radio is playing The Church - Under the Milky Way. That was popular when I was an exchange student in Brisbane, and brings back some memories of concerts at the Expo and taking the bus along the river from Uni to downtown - for some holiday, the local radio station advertised a river parade and Quantas would have "Jumbos" over the river - everyone thought they meant low flying jets, and it turned out to be a pair of elephants wearing Quantas banners on a barge.

( ...a minor Wolf's Rain spoiler, if you haven't been watching it... )

( ...and a Harry Potter spoiler query, although I'm sure everyone who cares knows by know... )