So I heard that someone’s published a version of Pride and Prejudice – from Darcy’s point of view. Which could be interesting, I suppose, but supposedly the thing is a series of three books (or four, I’ve forgotten, but at least three…).
Now, how on earth could there be three books worth of story there? Unless there’s pages of angsty internal dialog or something.
Maybe I’ll wait for someone else to read it and see if it’s recommended before I consider reading it.
Hmmm… my NY resolution was to eat more salad specifically and to eat more salad in general. The problem is,
Now I’m Hungry All The Time.
OK, not literally all the time. There’s a space of a couple of hours after a meal when I’m not hungry. Or an hour. Or thirty minutes, at least. But I had lunch with my students at Wiess today, ate a huge salad, a bunch of raw fingerfood (tomatos, carrots, cucumber slices), and a bunch of grilled chicken that probably amounted to 4 or 5 ounces, and an orange. It’s 2 PM and I’m hungry again. Dinner won’t be until 9-ish as I’m in late clinic tonight. Sigh.
Oh, well, at least I make a point of stashing animal crackers and peanut butter in my desk. Dip their little heads in the extra-crunchy, then chomp them right off. Such a noble end for the little beasties.
Hmmm… am realizing that the times when I’m most struck by amusing thoughts to post on my LJ are times when I’m not near a computer. Hard to write about life when you’re living it.
So will see if I can remember some of those ideas and start some threads.
Mom gave me a sweatshirt for Christmas, says “for a balanced life, you need a cat who ignores you”.
So I put on my sweatshirt this afternoon and ever since, the cat has clung to me, snuggling in my lap and doing her best to pay as much attention to me as possible.
What – she doesn’t want me to have a balanced life?
I am ridiculously pleased with various simple technologies that make it easier to do the mundane everyday stuff. Like kitchen implements, which I’m helplessly addicted to despite the fact that I rarely cook.
So I ordered a couple of items for drying clothes that aren’t supposed to go in the dryer. For too long I’ve been mucking around with trying to hand one item at a time over the only towel rack that drips directly into the tub; wait for it to stop dripping, then shift it to some other rack and hang another one…
Ordered two items: one, a frame you can lay sweaters flat on to dry (here), which hangs over the shower curtain rod. The other, a rack that braces itself so it’ll sit over the tub without falling (here). Neither cost a ton of money, and both work just fine. Now I can just wash all the sweaters at once, hang them, and get on with life…
Sometime you have to acknowledge the trivial pleasures in life, ’cause there’s a lot more of those than the large-scale ones…
Well, after a frantic day of packing and trying to wrap up Friday’s work before 2 PM when we were due to leave for the airport (which included a meeing in which one of my most promising job prospects fell apart in front of my eyes when the relevant department learned their 2006 budget would be cut by 15% – boo), we then cooled our heels in the airport for a few extra hours until the Atlanta weather cleared up enough to let people fly there. As a result we dragged in late and slept not long enough.
Not long enough, that is, for the Saturday we had today. Started with a breakfast date at 8, followed by heading to my nephews’ basketball game immediately after. My oldest nephew, the hyperactive one who tugs my heartstrings because everyone’s yelling at him all the time, managed to be the star of the game, which I think will be great for his self-confidence. Apparently he hadn’t even scored all season, then today he managed to grab a rebound and get it in the basket (of course his parents and grandmother missed it because they were busy chatting). This gave him a surge of confidence that led to a couple more baskets and success on 1 of 2 freethrows, which made him the top scorer in a game that ended at an amazing 22 to 24 score. Those baskets are really high up when you’re 8 years old…
So this was just the start of the day … more relatives came rolling in, we grabbed lunch and took public transpo downtown, walked a half-mile in freezing weather to spend three hours running madly through the Atlanta Aquarium, which is very cool. Very cool. Did I mention it is cool? I got given the particular fun of chasing after the hyperactive nephew, mostly because it meant he could actually have fun without people yelling at him all the time, and thus didn’t sit down even for a moment the whole time. Then the walk back to the train, in weather that had gotten even colder as the sun set, with the nephew who still wanted to race to every stoplight (hey, kid, didn’t you just play 4 quarters of basketball and then run around the aquarium for three hours? Why aren’t you sacked out asleep like your brothers?) and I chased after him, which means I got a pretty decent cardio workout in…
We all staggered out for dinner at one of those salad/pasta/potato/soup/pizza/bread/dessert bar places, adding a full stomach to my list of reasons to be somnolent, then staggered back home again. So not it’s 10:30 PM, which is 9:30 my time, and I feel like I’m ready to sleep for a week.
Boy, I bet this suppresses Keith’s desire to have kids for a while…
Cool stuff: I’ve been getting to know my aunt’s husband a bit better and am more and more impressed with him. She’s had a tough life in many ways and it really pleases me that she has ended up with such a great guy. Each seems happiest when the other is around. He’s the owner of an auto shop, and a former racecar driver, which means he knows all kinds of stuff about things I know very little about, and he’s amazingly modest about both his auto expertise and his driving skills. He and my aunt are as cute together as a pair of teenagers. It warms my heart.
Well, time to sleep now. Or canoodle a bit…
continues the discussion about food in an interesting direction: “More and more my inner voice has been telling me that the answers to my weight issues lie in being vegan.”
While the following thoughts may not apply to the above quote at all, it reminded me of something I see often in others and in myself:
It’s hard to mentally separate choices about the maintenance of the machine that is our bodies, from choices about our spiritual and ethical paths. This is unfortunate, because those things should be perfectly distinct. For example, there’s plenty of ways to eat badly as a vegan; there are also healthy diet choices for us meat-eaters. Why is it important to recognize that the issues are unrelated?
One reason that’s important is because of the guilt factor. I am prone to feel guilty about my imperfections. If I’ve not been exercising and I’ve been eating badly, I feel guilty that I’m ignoring my body’s needs. But, if I add on the guilt that I’m somehow flawed at a higher spiritual level just because I like fried food and ice cream, I think the emotional burden would cripple me from making any forward progress whatsoever.
A second issue is that of accurate expectations. (I’m having trouble expressing this concisely). If you adopt a behavior change in expectation that something will change, and you don’t see that change, it’s easy to abandon that new behavior. Which is a problem, if there were other reasons (ethical, spiritual) why you chose the behavior.
So, analyzing such thoughts to sort out the true associations from the false ones helps me avoid guilt and avoid disappointment in the long run. Not sure what the point of all this is, except that trying to express this in writing has helped me see more clearly how to live my own life more peacefully…
Over the years I’ve bemoaned the lack of an electronic calendar that meets my needs. I still looking for the ideal product. Really, I’m hoping those gmail people will assemble a calendar to interface with mail, or that the Firefox/Mozilla calendar project will produce something with all the features I want. I have found some products that improve (but don’t totally fix) the use of the Outlook calendar, but better would be:
General:
Views: I should be able to see day and week views that show detailed appointments, as well as a month view with appointment listings. A list view that shows several months worth of upcoming stuff would also be cool.
Color-coding: the calendar views should allow me to set color codes for various items – color cues could be used for location, nature of appointment (work, personal, etc), multiple user information,
etc.
Communication: It’d be great if it interacted with my gmail account that I use for work. Perhaps a gmail plug-in that creates buttons: “Add appointment to calendar” and “add task to calendar” would do the trick.
Online/offline: I’d like the primary calendar to be offline; I’d like each of several machines (with various OS’s) to automatically sync with it for the times I work offline.
Compatibility: needs to be able to work with multiple OS platforms – I use both Windows and Mac and want to be free to expand to Linux as well.
Appointments:
People: it would be good if you could identify people involved, especially if it automatically grabbed contact info for those people for further conversation about the meeting.
Transporation: It would be good if you could put estimated transportation time to/from the meeting in a way that was clearly shown on the display – have the meeting shown and a little greyed out space on either side for transit time that is clearly not part of the meeting but clearly has to be kept free on the schedule.
Recursion: repeating appointments with various options for type of recursion and duration of recursion is a must. It should be possible to edit one of a series or all of a series.
Tasks:
(here’s where I’m most demanding and dissatisfied with current products)
Basics: the task list should be visible while looking at the actual calendar view as well. A given task should be associated with info about estimated time to complete, amount complete, amount assigned (see below), due dates, dependencies (see below), importance, recurrence.
Assignment to times: I should be able to assign a task to a particular time block on the calendar. The calendar should reflect this as an appointment (time not avail) but should also update the time estimates – e.g. this task is projected to take 2 hours. You’ve completed 30 minutes, and have assigned one hour for future work, leaving 30 minutes of unassigned to-do. This assignment function should not screw up with recurring tasks – I should be able to assign appropriate times to do this week’s task, and then have next week’s iteration of the task appear with the original time estimate showing as neither completed or assigned.
Gantt view – it would be cool to be able to view the to-do list as a scheduled workflow like a gantt view, where you ordered your to-do list in a way that showed dependencies. This view should take into account the time on your schedule that’s unavailable because of appointments. An internal logic that actually laid out the work schedule for you would be really cool.
If a product exists that offers all this, I haven’t found it (would love to hear about it). Otherwise, from my fingers to google’s ears!
has been talking recently about healthy eating. This is a topic I muse on often, since I don’t do it all that well myself and I’m supposed to be able to guide other people in the subject.
My primary problem, and that of many of the people I talk to, is that I don’t have lots of free time and only enjoy cooking sometimes.
An additional problem is that I cook for my sweetie as well, and he’s prone to want to eat the junk I shouldn’t be eating. In principle he wants to eat well; in practice he instinctively chooses the junk food. So if we order chinese, I suggest chicken with veggies and he counter-proposes something that involves bits of deep-fried meat slathered in high-sugar sauce.
There’s actually a lot of decent convenience diet food out there, fr’ex healthy choice, south beach, and weight watchers frozen dinners. But, like , I am not willing to think about weight loss right now. There’s a real need for “quick food” (frozen dinners and the like) which is low-sugar, low-fat, rich in protein and complex carbs, and not reduced-calorie.
I did just work out, which is a step in the right direction.
So I seem to be spending as much time browsing other peoples’ journals as doing anything with my own. Obviously there’s spiffy stuff I can do; offered to give me a tour but (1) we haven’t found time to yet, and (2) I have a predilection for trying to figure things out on my own.
So today’s achievement is finding a page style I like and figuring out how to link to peoples’ usernames on my own post.
Perhaps people can suggest other skills they find useful or entertaining? I find self-education is more effective when there’s a goal to be achieved.
Scrappy Blog 