(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense 
Oso tired. Not a good idea, in retrospect, to come home from a midnight showing of Spiderman 2 to play "just a few more turns" of the Civ III game I had up. Yep, I'm the smart one. Smart, tired one.
Goddamn, why does no one tell me when my shit is broken? And in other news, the fact that I can't find the right text file to edit to control Windows the way I want to is PISSING ME THE FUCK OFF.
Phear my l33t anal retentive skillz. I have now finished the grand update of my ripped albums directory, complete with files being named properly and WinXP giving me album art in the master view. And I felt like including my background a little bit in there, well, because I felt like it and no real other reason. More productivity today, including finally sorting out my cat pictures from the total mess they were in... into a slightly less total mess. And I got my money back on alarm clocks and found one that I think will work once I figure out where I can buy it. If every weekend was like this, I think I'd be a much happier person. Admittedly, I've been so mindlessly focused on getting stuff done that I've had nary a deep thought go through my head. But really, considering how much of my "deep thought" time is devoted to worrying or being depressed, perhaps I shouldn't mind.
What a spectacularly productive day! I'm feeling just beside myself. Admittedly, I slept in too late, but post-getting-up, I got so many things done that I've been meaning to get done for a while that I can't quite believe it was me. Let's ignore the fact that getting things done, this iteration, entailed spending lots of money, which coincidentally nearly always makes me feel better than I do before I spend money. Anyway, clothes, random shit, and music (Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin II, Morrissey's new album, and the Swordfish soundtrack) obtained... good haul = good day. Not to mention that I ran so much better today than I normally do; my lungs were actually cooperating with me and Jeff for once. AND I finished renaming all of my ripped MP3s to my solidified standard name format (the only thing that remains is to finish changing the details shown in Explorer, woohoo). I love getting shit done... I should do it more often.
Happy KMFDM day! Not that the day started out very happy; my very favorite way to start off the morning is with an argument with Jim. Boo. He did do the single most gratifying thing he could have done, however, which was go to work while I was in the shower (him being late was at the essence of the argument) and leave me an apologetic note on my desk. I'd just been thinking in the shower how I was still mad at him and wasn't looking forward to continuing being mad at him all day, and *poof* (snapping fingers) like that he came up with pretty much the one thing he could do to make me not mad. One might think that the boy had learned something over the past four years. Heh.
OMFG. I have wanted to go to a KMFDM show since I was like 18, and I can now scratch that off my list of Things to Do... I am so happy I'm about to explode (hooray endorphins from rocking the fuck out for a couple hours). Randomly seeing Darrick there after so many years, and having Kevin show up... icing, yes, but the true glory was that they played the song I really really wanted to hear live because it's my favorite goddamn KMFDM song in the world, even if it's not as "kickass" as the others, as the kids say these days (the song was, by the way, Leid und Elend).
(rocking out)
Didn't look for a job... but I did do three loads of laundry, two hours of work, finally organize and put away my CDs, and put away dishes. That has to count for something.
KMFDM Friday and work off tomorrow because I've already done too much this week. Maybe I'll look for a part-time job with all my hima.
(groan) If we're going to keep this morning thing up, I think I need to invest in something like bananas that I can eat before we go. I have a feeling that about halfway around Greenlake, I'm gonna want to die.
Well, so far as morning activities go, running sure as hell beats Japanese. We're even contemplating doing it again. I'd forgotten how nice it was to wake up early and get something done in the mornings; back in, oh, sophomore year, I used to get up at 9 am even though my first class wasn't until 11:30 and I'd drink tea, read, or watch TV... It's 8:30 am, I've been up for two hours and I spent 45 minutes of that around Greenlake, and I feel surprisingly awesome. The fool isn't picking me up to go to school until 10:30, so I believe that I shall now play computer games (I'd read, but I don't feel like getting up from my comfy chair to get a book, heh).
I'm wrung out. Long day, exhausting meeting, six episodes of Dead Like Me, and it's late. If I was to produce anything, it would have been produced hours ago. Except for this fragment, which meandered through my mind as I brushed my teeth:
I feel in some way rather like a perpetual host to traveling cats. I pick them up, take them in, and love them until they're ready to move on. Work on them for a little while, provide all the support they need... I'd liken it to kids, but the parallel would be gross, trust me.
And in final news, I want to go to the KMFDM show on Friday really really badly. Really. Brandon offered me a ride today; I've not asked Jim yet if he wants to go, even though it's on Friday... I'm rather worried he won't want to and then I'll feel weird about going without him. Blah.
Jeff and I are going to experiment with running in the morning and I'm poorer than I've ever been in the history of being independent from my parents' money (since I was 18). BLAH.
This time last year I was just getting into my first couple days of work. This time this year, I'm mad at myself for not going to bed at midnight when I need to be up sooner than I'd like. There's not really anything significant about that juxtaposition; it just occured to me in my tiredness.
I spent a while this afternoon indulging my burgeoning interest in gardening. When I moved in, the boys had totally ignored the space on the side of the house set aside for a garden; it wasn't until I walked out there one day and exclaimed "chives!" excitedly that they even noticed the space at all... we now have strawberries, tomatoes, bell peppers, the aforementioned chives, basil, thyme, mint, sage, oregano, and cilantro growing back there. It's been an ongoing experiment—the onions failed immediately, for example, I've determined that four strawberry plants are just not worth the effort, and we're just trying out marigolds as bug repellent from today. I never got to play with gardens growing up, other than occasionally snicking chives out of the stand of them we had at my old house, so I'm finding it inordinately fun and interesting to try this whole make-things-grow thing (the best is that we've had fresh herbs for a couple months now... I can't wait for the tomatoes to start producing, probably in about a month).
A month or so ago I had a whim to buy some flowers and ended up randomly putting them in front of the trees in front of the house. I'd only gotten a few, and so they looked totally lonely and forlorn, but they didn't die (much to my surprise, honestly). They stopped flowering almost immediately, except for one champion petunia of awesomeness, but with the heat and the sun this week, they're all showing their faces happily. Two weeks ago I bought more to fill in part of the erstaz flower bed, and repeated doing so today. We've got something that looks partially respectable now, although pretty distinctly amateurish. Not to mention super heavy on petunias (they've proven to me that they'll grow even with ME taking care of them). I've been only getting annuals, so I figure I'll play around with putting things next to each other this year, and be able to start again, more experienced, next spring.
I'm kinda half-hoping that Nate's mom, a gardening superfreak, will come by sometime in the next week or two so I could show her what I'm doing (the half part coming from the fact that she's kind of scary and caustic, and I'm not entirely sure I'd want to listen to her mock my choices). In the meantime, the boys have no appreciation for what I'm doing, but my mom oohs every time she comes by and damnit, I feel accomplished. And I got up at 8 this morning and went for a morning run with Jeff... I'm playing weird "normal person" today, I suppose.
Minor (who am I kidding... not minor) Craig-induced panic tonight. Am I actually unchangable? Is my paradigm really so far off from that which is used so as to be hopelessly unusable?? I want to say no, or that my "different" nature is but a symptom of my (cue oft-used but little-believed) "awesomeness," but I fear it's well beyond that into a hinderance. Not even an interesting one, to boot.
ARGH. The worst thing about living with boys is that they make messes that don't bother them so they don't clean them up. Sure, if you clean them up, they say "oh, thanks, that was getting really gross, huh..." but god FORBID that they actually do it themgoddamnselves.
Cat to the doctor today, and Jim tomorrow... despite the sun, I'm more than a little gloomy.
Aw, fuck it. I've claimed the next few days off work; I hereby say that it's okay that I've been madly working on CSS stuff for the last... uh... well, there was some episodes of Stargate in there for breaks, but it's been a while. I need to remember write stuff before I get to the end of my chain. AKA when the 2-3 am pumpkin time of sleepiness hits.
I need to stop this staying-up-until-the-last-possible-minute thing. Sure, I'm about 90x more productive between the hours of midnight and 3 am than I am at any other time, but that doesn't mean I should be staying up this late to do stuff. My poor EYES.
I was too exhausted at 5 am this morning to elaborate, but now that I'm a bit more coherent, I want to do my part to make sure that my two resources for my trial and travails yesterday get properly thanked with a Google boost (hehe). Anyway, here's Jeff Croft's blog ENTRY on using PHP to use variables in CSS, and a forum discussing the same thing. The only stroke of my own genius was (well, beyond figuring out how to phrase what I was trying to do, heh) remembering that I could use linktarget?variable to pass a variable to an included stylesheet which could then access $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] to get the value of the variable. Which considering that in the end all of my problems came down to scope, was the major breakthrough of the 1 am. Yay.
I was sad to confirm a niggling suspicion that I've had for a year or two now: despite all my other trappines of geekdom, I simply can't stand arcades. There's not a damn game I'm good at, they're loud and the flashing lights disorient me, and I just can't seem to have a good time no matter what I do. Blah. For all that it was nice, as always, to see all of Jim's work friends tonight (Tom and Rob and Tobias, hooray... not to disrespect A-dawg and Kevin and Kathy and Bill and Jean and Terry the Intern... heh), I just couldn't seem to enjoy myself once we moved to Jillian's from The Outback. It was really rather a depressing realization; I think I'd rather hoped that being buzzed would make it a less awful experience... but no. Sigh.
In the spirit of going to bed before it gets TOO much more light out... much stuff done, Web-wise, Jim-birthday-wise, seeing-Troy wise. It's 4:48 am right now, but if you're savvy and know Web stuff as well as how horrid the code maintaining things here used to be... check out the source here, or on laeren/ proper, or on /music/. It's much nicer now (scrubbing eyes). Probably breaks someone's browser, tho.
In the spirit of not staying up until 5 am today, I'm going to crawl in bed and read a book. Happy birthday to my honey, and goodnight.
The paper is done, and I have thus completed the last of my tasks for spring quarter 2004 (at least so far as school goes, but whatever). I don't quite know what to do... write? Watch TV? Read? Finish up dinking with my computer? Play games? Go to bed? Naw. For the next little bit, I think it'll be all about me, and a couple of things I like to call "webcomics that I've not been caught up on since I came back from Japan." Awwwwwwwwww, yaaaahhhhh, BABY!
Oh, look at that. The sun's coming up. I love it when it does that.
Jim going to the ER rather cut off my working on my paper this afternoon (oversleeping made me fail at the task in the morning). He's (probably) fine, thank goodness, but the fact that this paper still isn't done is sad and ridiculous. But once he was alright, there was no way I wasn't going to go roleplaying tonight... My priorities are somewhat incorrect, but still. It's time for bed so that I will get up early and FINISH IT FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
Jesus, I must have been crawled by something and BIG. My unique hits/day have jumped from ~600 to ~1300, wtf. Anyway, paper is still undone, mostly because dinner took forever. I will get up early and finish it before my meeting tomorrow, GODDAMNIT, and then it will be DONE.
Hrm, I take that back. It looks as if someone (Comcast) has redefined how they report their proxies to be more granular. Interesting.
A great deal of drama later, Atsuko is fully born as a WinXP machine, albeit with some installing yet to go. Suffice to say that I've dealt with more than my fair share of blue screens in the last day or so, AND SHOULDN'T BE HAVING TO INSTALL ANYTHING ANYWAY $*(#&$(@#. Grumble. And now I have to get to work... finally... on a paper.
Sigh.
Two thoughts through my head in the last few minutes have been reduced to one: "HAH! He'd TOTALLY date me!" And then the one that was submerged pushes its way to the top of the bobbing of my mind as the Chemical Brothers ramp up... "I require... MUSIC!"
Hooray.
Power UP! Atsuko lives (pretty black 1.7 GHz machine), Yoshiko has become a Unix machine (although her brains are still in Atsuko at the moment), and sayonara, adios, was wonderful to know you to Chiyo: I hereby retire your number. Your PII 333 soul served me well for many years, even when you had more MB of RAM than you had MHz of processor... your stalwartness shall be missed. And meanwhile, I can actually run a... can it be... REAL WINDOW MANAGER?!? Heh.
And now, I leave you with Engrish: "I can speak `Can I have a beer?` in 7 different langurages!" The homepage gets you even more. Bigger than my head!!
But really, such a shame to be doing the falling-into-bed-exhausted-at-4-am thing on a day where I had wonderful things to say about Fool and Nate? Sigh.
When my gaze fell on the page, I could not remember how I got there. I stared at it blankly, wondering what link I could have possibly followed to arrive in that location. The title mocked my understanding: Finite Monkeys.
I don't get nearly enough interesting spam. Or spam that is nearly interesting enough.
Who says I produce non sequiters effortlessly in my sleeplessness? I'll beat them down.
3:30 am bleariness... But at least in 12 hours, I'll be two more things down. Guh.
It's late and 1 out of 5 tasks are completed for the quarter. I'd been a good little blogger (I hate that word) for a while... well, better than I was for a bit... so cut me some finals slack! As much fun as the two-hours-of-sleep plan is (I hear it's great for weight loss!!), I think I really should be doing more of the snoozing thing. Now.