|
|
boy have I been busy |
4/24/2000: I came in late today because I had to go to the City Building (over at 400 S. Vine) to ask about building my porch. Good news is, I apparently don't need a variance. Woo hoo. Other stuff... this weekend was incredibly busy, I weeded the garden, staffed the living wage table for Earth Day at the IDF (and had some amazing burritos and made a card while there), stocked up on all sorts of spices & seeds at the Food Coop which I then used to make some Indian lentil experiments (which are today's lunch), and made flyers for May Day. I also finally got around to shoveling those leaves of my driveway, well, they are now totally composted right there, so I moved 'em off to other more compost-friendly locations like under the lilac bush and in the actual compost heap. And, I got a flat of vinca to give the ground covering process a little help (it's progressing, but more plants would definitely help it along).
4/21/2000: Yeah, I really left at 10:20 PM. I dunno, I sort of got into hacking on some drivers for a library I'm doing for work, so stayed to finish a section rather than interrupt myself and then have to recall just what in the heck I was doing come Monday.
I should be updating the page again, I'd just been halfway busy and halfway just unexplainedly not in a good writing feel, so sorta slacked.
Good news: The tree in front of my house (the some sorta maple) is getting leaves. I was really worried because other sugar maples (this one looks just like a sugar maple, but is some other hybrid, not sure what) had flowers and leaves already and this thing was barely budding. Several trees I loved around town that did indeed die, that's how they went - just never budded, and so I was worried my tree wasn't going to make it, and it's gotten to such the nice size, too! But it seems things will be all right.
Those who called and left messages on the machine, I will call. I left the old grey piece of paper with people's numbers on it in my desk at work and then kept forgetting to bring it home. You'd think I'd keep phone numbers somewhere better than on a grey piece of paper (actually the cover from the program for "His Man Matti" at the Station Theatre from way back) but you'd be wrong. Seems that when I attempt to write things in a more "proper" place I promptly forget about that place and find myself looking for the old junky scrap of whatever it was originally written on anyway.
4/12/2000: It is 32 F this morning and sunny, due to warm up to 55 F.
Quote of the Day: "We do not provide press accreditation to public access TV, community radio, nor student or academic publications to attend our meetings." by IMF official William Murray, denying press access to the upcoming IMF meetings to reporters from Madison radio station WORT. So much for open access, huh? The reporters from WORT faxed in their credentials well before the deadline. As for WORT, it was established in December 1975, employs 6 full time staff and over 200 volunteers, has served as a training ground for many radio professionals, and received various proclamations and awards from the governor of Wisconsin. It's not exactly your fly by night high school lab. However, neither is it corporate owned, which is likely the real problem. Heaven forbid we have some dissent or actual questions asked.
Speaking of corporate ownership of the media, you might like to take a look at just who owns what as posted by the Columbia Journalism Review. Of course, they only license the airwaves, we the public own them and it's high time we start demanding our rightful access back. Low power radio is a good start.
4/7/2000: It is 49 F and gonna storm like crazy today. Already the sky is grey and heavy and the wind is going. Supposedly the severe storms will be hitting us around 4:30 PM but it looks like the regular ones are going to start any minute now. I had plans for tonight, too... after work I wanted to go to the Leal School Rummage Sale (that's the elementary school 3 blocks from my house) and then at 8PM I am going to see the wondrous Paul Kotheimer play the guitar at the Caffe Paradiso. I might also be having dinner before that with people and then hang with Paul after. Sad part is all the stormage is likely to turn to snow sometime after midnight and leave an inch or so (which will melt off, with tomorrow's high around 40 F, but still). Good part is the garden desperately needs rain.
My new glasses are done already - apparently it's only the FunkyLenses that need to get sent to Indy, the regular glasses are done here in town. I'll probably be picking them up tomorrow, though I suppose I might get motivated to do it later today, depending on workload.
4/5/2000: It is 36 F and brightly sunny today. Nippy, but one of those days where it warms up incredibly by the afternoon - it's supposed to hit 67 F. Of course that means I'll be carrying some clothes home... Today I don't have to CLAM and have no meetings, so finally I can sit out on a warm day and enjoy the sunset being after 7:30 and really feeling it.
About two weeks ago now I finally got an actual plane ticket to Tokyo, Japan and then also some kinda two weeks all JR lines train pass. Makes me idly wonder if people still call it "kokutetsu" now that it's been more than 15 years since it was privatized? Hmm. It's still rather hard for me to believe that I will actually be going there, not to LA, or to SF, but actually to the source. In some ways it feels a bit like time travel.
This weekend is Mom's Day Weekend at UIUC which means that there is the Mom's Day Flower Show. Cool thing about the Flower Show is that after it's over, they have all sorts of flowers in pots that they buried in the dirt inside the Stock Pavilion for the various yard exhibits that they then sell at serious discount. That's where I got my ground cover last year, and I'm hoping to get more stuff again this year.
4/4/2000: It is 35 F and partly cloudy this morning. Here I'd thought double pants days were over, but no. It's windy too, which is the main coldness problem, and it was snowing a bit on the walk in, even. Supposedly the low tonight will be down in the 20s F but then by tomorrow afternoon it should get back up to a much happier springlike 65 F (of course that means I'll need to wear tons of stuff in the morning and carry it home later, but...)
Sunday (April 2) was the time change day. I didn't really get to enjoy it fully, seeing as I was in meetings (for CLAM and GirlZone) the entire day, but now I'm loving it. It's really great to leave work at 5:30 and still have a whole two hours of light left. It's supposed to get warm again tomorrow though and so I'll probably go sit somewhere after work tomorrow (packing a dinner as well as lunch) and just sit and watch people wandering by...
This past Saturday (April 1) was the teach-in at the School about the IMF and the World Bank. It went really well, lots of information was discussed and presented, about the kinds of loans those institutions offer and to who, what structural adjustment is, how interest rates and currency values and employment and all those things are related, etc.
It's nice to be finished with all that tons and tons and tons of reading. Now I'm getting back into reading more about garden plans (notably, shady plants) and also studying Vietnamese. I got someone to read the pronunciation exercises out of the front of a dictionary I got a long time ago, and this is wonderful. I can sit and listen to it and I think I'm getting the hang of it. At the moment one thing that makes reading slow is that there are both diacritical marks (little marks that make different letters entirely, so say, "a" and "a^" (a with a little hat on it) are two totally different letters) and then there's tone marks so that syllables can be any one of six tones, and those are little markings too. Looking at a syllable really fast sometimes it's hard for me to quickly distinguish which is which, so I'll think the tail on an o (which makes a schwa noise) is a rising tone mark on a plain o instead. But, it's coming along. I'm happy. All those secrets finally revealed.
Peeve: my new glasses. My soon to be old new glasses, that is. I got a new pair of glasses oh, last Monday, put them on, and wow, I could see clearly. However, if I turned my head even slightly to the left or right, I saw horrible fringing effects, where things on the left went blue and things on the right went orange (and no, I didn't get the glasses from UIUC). I said this right at the office when I picked the glasses up, but was told "well, yeah, you just need to get used to it." Not entirely convinced, I left the shop, and sure enough, I didn't get used to it at all. If anything, things were worse outside. Finally I took the glasses off and reverted to my old pair - I'd rather have slightly blurry vision at a distance than to see this wacky color shifting all the time. The glasses were essentially behaving as prisms. Once at home, I compared the old and new glasses. I'd gotten some sort of new "polycarbonate" material lenses, as those were supposed to be somehow better. The lenses were markedly thinner than my old garden-variety plastic pair of specs, and the Eye Guy had said my vision hadn't gotten a whole lot worse in five years, so the only thing that seemed really different was the material. I began to suspect that, and so I took the glasses back in and asked for a new pair in plastic yesterday. Turns out that they'll do a remake one time for free. Returning to the office, I mentioned to the boss about the glasses problem and as soon as I'd finished saying "I got some polycarbonate glasses last week..." she jumped in with "and you're seeing halos everywhere? Yeah, those are bad." So, I'm confident now that the new glasses will indeed fix my problem.
Other stuff coming up... On April 29th I am going to give a GirlZone workshop all about how the web works and hopefully get them making their own home pages on the CLAM server. We need more people just talking about their own non-commercial life stuff, with different views. The web ain't just for shopping.