Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

More roses today. I enjoy playing with light.

The Patriots had it too easy this season and it didn’t prepare them for the intensity this game. It was a great game, both teams played amazingly - but the Giants deserved the win. I loved the last few minutes of the 4th quarter: lots of action and suspense. I also loved how the first 2 possessions led to scores which in turn led us to assume we’d be watching a high-scoring game. Just fun football. Hurray!

I am coming to the conclusion that I’m just not going to get a Winter this year. I’m not exactly happy about this. It feels surreal to be in January and February without any cold temperatures or snow. I could never move any farther south than I am now apparently. My internal calendar is getting all messed up as it is!

I have eaten an enormous amount of food that is not at all good for me this weekend. I feel like I need to eat raw vegetables for days to try to make it up to my body. The belated birthday dinner was fabulous despite food karma making my steak rather dramariffic. I also have an extremely soft spot for pomegranate martinis. The extra time it took to get me a proper steak involved sipping an extra martini. Oh well… Today there were munchies and junk food for the Superbowl. And it’s Girl Scout cookie time so there are Tagalongs (er… peanut butter patties) lurking in the kitchen already with clever plans laid to acquire more. I think it’s time to unfold the treadmill and get myself back on it.

I guess my plan is to feed my body raw vegetables and Girl Scout cookies this week. While on the treadmill…

Not a bad plan, really…

tags: exercise, food, football, giants, girl scout cookies, patriots, photographs, roses, sports, superbowl, sweetheart roses, weather, winter

In the spirit of Spring, the weather has been wild this week. Today and yesterday have been very blustery days and chilly. I love it. I should get decent sunglasses. My eyes were watering from the wind and brightness at the beginning of my walk. Today maybe I’ll remember sunglasses.

So it’s been about a month since I started walking regularly. I’m walking for a half hour 5 times a week now and it’s a very good thing. I’m no longer getting that bizarre spacey feeling after every walk. I am having some really great other beneficial effects. I feel like I have muscles in my legs again! I can actually feel them when I’m walking now. My body has come to the realization, “Oh she’s actually going to stick to this. I guess we’d better get conditioned for it.” I’m still trying not to over-do it but my back (and its general malaise of aches and pains) appears to be doing better with the exercise. These are all big “well duh” items, I know, but they’re still exciting.

I went to bed reeeeeealy early last night, 9:30. I watched a bit of tv then rolled over and was asleep shortly after 11. This morning I could not get out of bed probably due to the wonderful warm quality of my blankets versus the chilly quality of the rest of the house. I’m very much looking forward to a relaxing weekend of sleeping in.

tags: exercise, flowers, forsythia, sleep, spring, walking, weather, wind

Happy Friday! I’ve had a crazy week. Luckily it gets to end with a calm Friday! Work has been busy, culminating in a big meeting and presentation yesterday. I didn’t have to give the presentations but I did prep them so I have to say the meeting was dull. I was saved when the meeting ended an hour early. That rocked. I also appear to have a stable assignment through August or so. It’s nice to know that I’m still useful to my boss too. I’m still having fun and feeling productive, always a feature.

I started collecting silly World of Warcraft videos on their own page. I’m still trying to find a couple that I really liked but haven’t seen in a while. Feel free to toddle over there and make suggestions. Some of them are particularly WoW-geeky others will amuse anyone. Yes, I am that flavor of geek. But some of these are really great!

Last weekend’s to-do list went well enough. Home Depot run, indoor gardening, grocery shopping, some office cleaning and some correspondence happened. I tried to mail my novel outline to my other computer but failed… so I kind of touched it! As an added bonus, I got through a ton of laundry. Outdoor gardening has to happen this weekend though. I need to prune some shrubbery before it’s too late. So this weekend the same list applies and we’ll see if I can finish it off. I really want to make space for the scanner so I can order it and start playing! (And get the box of prints and slides off the futon couch in my office!) And maybe I’ll even tweak things so I can post photos without having to align them all to the left.

Walking is still proving to be very good for me. I will in fact continue doing it. Of course, I keep seeing the Little White Dog Mafia when I go out. I think they’re stalking me! I have a little first generation iPod shuffle I take walking with me. Intellectually, I know that the songs are played in a relatively random order, but in my heart I think my iPod is trying to please me. Songs like “One Night in Bangkok” and “Rock me, Amadeus” come up a lot in the shuffle. Really fun walking songs! What I find particularly good about walking is that I don’t obsess over work while I’m doing it. I’m more often looking for nifty things to photograph (like the flowers I’m posting today) or just letting my mind wander. It’s really quite meditative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all those good things people say about exercise and walking are true.

The weather is still kind of crazy but pleasant. I admit that after one stupidly warm day I changed my gym membership from cancelled to frozen. If I don’t successfully shift my schedule to walk in the cooler parts of the day, I may reactivate it. I may eventually feel the need to go back to the gym and do actual training. We’ll see. I’m not counting my chickens or anything, just not cancelling the lease on the hen house. I hate the heat. A lot.

I hope this Friday Flower Fabulousness has entertained you! There’s a lot of yellow out there now. The magnolia trees are starting to bloom. The tulips should come along in another week. The cherry trees are starting to look like they’re contemplating spring while the dogwoods are preparing a little more seriously. There will be lots more flower pictures coming soon!

tags: croci, crocuses, daffodils, exercise, flowers, irises, spring, weather, weekend, world of warcraft

It’s just the sort of gray morning that makes me want to curl up in my happy oversized chair and read all day.

My to do list for this weekend is kind of fun:

1. Home Depot run for gardening supplies
2. Optional Ikea run for … Ikea stuff and a belated b-day present
3. Grocery shopping
4. Indoor gardening - transplanting houseplants and such
5. Outdoor gardening - pruning stuff
6. Rearranging my desk to try to make room for the cat, the computers and the scanner… and maybe devote an entire cubby to work stuff
7. Bake grapenut bread or some other such tastiness
8. Write letters to various people I owe letters to and generally catch up on correspondence
9. Touch my novel outline

If I get half of these done, I’ll call it a win.

Speaking of 4, I made it out walking 4 times this week! Go me! Today’s walk turned into a walk in the rain kind of quickly so I cut it a few blocks short. I got home slightly damp but none the worse for wear. The problem with gray days like this is that the light is perfect for photography (at least how I like the light to be) but the danger of getting caught in the rain with an expensive camera is very real. I made the right choice by not taking my camera out today but there are daffodils desperate to be photographed! But, circling back to walking, exercise has been good for me the past 2 weeks. All those things that we know intellectually about the effects of exercise? Turns out they’re actually true! Hopefully I’ll keep it up!

In the interest of providing some sort of content, borrowed or otherwise… what do you think of this new take on Apple’s 1984 ad?

tags: 1984, apple, apple ad, exercise, politics, random, to do list

Look what survived the snow and ice of the weekend! I took my camera with me out on my walk yesterday. I ended up taking about 10 minutes longer on my walk but I had fun seeking out little crocuses and irises. The tiny irises in the darker picture are just too cute. I’m impressed too - I expected the wee little flowers to be a lot worse for wear after weathering a long, icy, nasty storm. Apparently I should have more faith in the power of adorable early Spring flowers!

The snow is indeed melting again. Quite a bit disappeared yesterday and routed itself to our basement. (Go, go sump pump power! Go, go further procrastinating doing laundry!)

I went through with my plan and cancelled my gym membership. Of course, due to their clever terms of cancellation I end up having the membership through May anyway. Oh well. It doesn’t actually change anything at all! I will be free of my membership soon enough. If the weather gets really nasty this spring, I guess I could go to the gym, but the whole reason I’m cancelling is that I never did get in the groove of going to this gym. (It’s not convenient, close or otherwise conducive to handiness.)

I took today off walking though. I don’t want to over-do it in the beginning and I still feel pretty good today. Tomorrow I’ll be back out at lunchtime though. It’s a great way to break up the day and clear my head in general.

Okay, I also took today off from exercising because all of a sudden I was slammed with work. I got through most of what I needed to get done today but I still have a pretty serious to-do list for tomorrow. Oh, plus breaking the news to the business sponsor of my project that we’re delayed AGAIN due to the project we’re dependent on taking far longer than anticipated to get out the door. I think there was a lack of planning somewhere along the way though not on my part… we’ll see if the business sponsor is okay with the delay. It would not be unreasonable to send us back to the drawing board at this point. Of course, if she did that she’d have to send us back with more money. No one likes doing that! And we’d have already blown the budget if we’d gone with any of our other options. I think our current plan is great and will result in a great tool and build an awesome project management community. I just need the system to get migrated so I can get my ball rolling!
Now I’m clearly rambling because work isn’t all that interesting excepting the pace of it today. Despite feeling pretty good today I’m also feeling pretty tired this evening. I was “on” all day (a feature, given the aforementioned work) and now I seem to be crashing a bit. Perhaps an early dinner and silliness are in order.

Baseball season starts soon. Easter and Passover are both creeping up in appropriately slippered feet. (Easter in bunny slippers of course!) Only 2-3 months more to wait for the iPhone. Flowers survived the snow. Spring just might be on its way.

tags: crocus, exercise, iris, photographs, photography, seasons, signs of spring, snow, spring, winter, work

So I’ve been quiet lately mostly because Civ IV has eaten my life. I won a diplomatic victory last night! (I was going to be about 5 turns short of a space victory too!) As usual I’m behind the times and only started playing Civ IV recently. I didn’t like Civ III at all so it took me quite a while to become interested in trying a new Civ again. (Civ II is still my favorite!)

It snowed the end of last week. Well, it kinda snowed. First it rained, then it iced up and turned to sleet and freezing rain, then it might have snowed a while, then it went back to freezing rain. The accumulation was dense, icy and a pain to shovel again. Think “packed powder” from snow making at ski resorts. Little tiny ice cubes! The temperature started to rise yesterday and likely today will be my last day with significant white on the ground. Of course, the folks at the church across the street are still trying to clear out one of the doorways to the rectory and finish their sidewalks.

Since snow is melting again, there’s water in the basement. Yippee!

I need to cancel my gym membership. I’ve gone out walking more times in the past 2 weeks than I’ve successfully made it to this gym in a month. So, out with the gym, in with the walkies. Of course, walking means I get to observe additional idiocy. Two public service announcements to the folks in my neighborhood:

1. Putting ice-melt pellets down on 3 inches of packed freezing rain and snow does not constitute clearing the sidewalk. And this is not the kind of snow that is going to be “worn away” by hundreds of high school students walking to school.
2. Just because it’s snowy and icy does not mean that you do not need to clean up after your dog.

So shape up before I get my clue-bat out.
My open tabs are getting kind of unruly, so here they are:

• Captain America is dead: Zach over at nosheep has the Colbert coverage.
• The MadMusicArchive: Crazy Dr. Demento tunes!
• Copper plating and etching Altoids Tins: Fun with chemicals with beautiful results.
• Polish lace-makers find a new market: Thongs. (I know you’re going to click now.)
• Digital infrared photography: I may have figured out what I’m going to do with my old digital camera. The sample images are really pretty and infrared photography is fascinating in general.
• For the math geeks who read my blog, a bit of a romantic tune, snagged from gillianic tendencies:

Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)

Perhaps I should have warned you how geeky the song was?

tags: civ iv, entertainment, exercise, games, open tabs, random, snow, snow removal, walking, weather

• Part the First: Bald eagle at the Philadelphia Zoo

The zoo has a pair of bald eagles who like to pose for the camera however last time I visited only one came out to strut about. I should take pictures of their claws as well. They are impressively powerful birds. Majestic? Not so much. But definitely powerful carnivores who are not to be messed with.

• Part the Second: In which I take a quick walk and don’t get rained on

I took a quick walk at lunch today - about 2 miles in 35 minutes or so. I enjoyed it despite the cold, gray, damp weather that was actively threatening rain. However, this afternoon I feel incredibly mellow and spacey. It’s been a while since I had such an exercise high. Once upon a time I lived in Vancouver and would go jogging in the morning along the Seawall. I ended up giving it up because the post-exercise high made me a danger to myself and others during my morning commute. I would be in such bliss that I simply wouldn’t care about traffic or potentially getting in an accident or anything. I considered this to be, generally, a bad state of mind to be in while driving, even in Vancouver. Thank goodness Vancouver has some of the most polite drivers on the planet otherwise I might not have lived through my morning jogging phase!

So I sit here all mellow, drinking my water, and wonder what I can do to counter act this annoying yet blissful state. I am vaguely useless … well, at least I think I am. Tomorrow morning I’ll look at the presentation I whipped up after lunch and see if it’s any good. Perhaps I shouldn’t have skipped making tea for lunch. At any rate, we’ll see if this is just a one-time relapse of mellow-spaceyness or if it persists. I think I’ll really like lunchtime walks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely little high, just not a very productive one!

• Part the Third: In which I send a quick little e-mail and make a lot of folks happy

Communication is easy. I don’t know why more people don’t do it. Once my project was approved I sent a quick update to a group of potential users who had helped out with a questionnaire and providing their input. You’d think they’d never been updated before! Half of the group responded gleefully, grateful to have received the update and enthusiastic to do more. Each of the respondents mentioned that most often whenever they provide feedback it seems to go into a blackhole. I admit that I updated them specifically because I hoped they would volunteer to help more with the project but I didn’t expect quite the response I got. Even if I hadn’t wanted to leverage them for other work, I would have sent them a thank you note with the news of the project. That seems just simple common courtesy. Their feedback was incredibly useful in supporting the proposal I wanted to put forward. They responded quickly and on short notice.

My my mission shouldn’t be to become Wiki Queen but to instead ensure that no one feels their feedback is going into a blackhole in the future! (Of course, my master plan for this includes a wiki…)

tags: bald eagles, communication, eagles, exercise, philadelphia zoo, technology, vancouver, walking, wiki, zoo