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Sunday, March 31, 2002

 
11:23 PM: [#] [0]

terrilynn had an easter egg hunt! the goal was to find the "golden egg," so you first looked for your "name egg" which had a clue in it, then found other people with the same color of name egg, pieced your clues together, and found the egg. fortunately, chelsea was on my team, and we won! a minor miracle considering it took me forever to find my name egg. the prize was 2 silver half-dollars for each team member. then we ate a very nice dinner (see nibbles), and then i went out to the school to talk to andrew.

chelsea showed me her new laptop; it has all the cd controls accessible when the screen is closed, and it runs the cd when the laptop is technically off! i want one of those!

jennifer called my home phone this afternoon, so i didn't get her message until it was too late. since we both have tomorrow off (cesar chavez day!), she thought it would be a good ikea day. i also think i'd like to create some bricks -- on my way to terrilynn's i thought a "spring" brick would have been a nice gift.

leg cramps this evening are making it difficult to keep typing. :( i'm out on the patio on my papasan chair. it's a little chilly & foggy.

 
10:58 AM: [#] [0]

the lilacs are blooming! big gorgeous purple clusters which smell like heaven. i would have voted the lilac the least likely to make a come back, but the new leaves don't even look like they're coming in curled, which gived me great hope. wheee! :D

i have one phenomenal tulip, but i had to pull one and the other looks like it's being eaten by bugs & hasn't bloomed yet. the wildflowers are stunning, too, though i think i put too many in with the iris & i'm thinking about taking them out to make sure the iris blooms. the lavendar is thriving, though i still have to do aphid inspection. grrr. the hibiscus is recovering, which also surprises me. its flowers are small, but it's trying oh-so-hard.

the poet's jasmine, on the other hand, really isn't going to make it, i fear. i never did end up transplanting it into a better pot, and the "take everything off the porch rail" directive was the final straw. i pruned it vigorously and it has a few buds which just won't open, unlike its brethern in the rest of the complex which are totally proliferate. and i think i should just give up on the rosemary tree i lost at christmas. it's so very pathetic, with one lonely limb sprouting a few needles of rosemary.

still unknown: the gardenia, the alstromeria, the hyacinth, the star jasmine, the freesia, the african daisies.

Saturday, March 30, 2002

 
10:41 PM: [#] [0]

chelsea called me this morning to ask some questions about the laptop she just bought, and i could actually answer them. terrilynn invited me over tomorrow for an easter egg hunt. jennifer said she might call.

after the ants, the calligraphy workshops & the cats conference, i have finally begun cleaning up. i have stuff scattered all over the place. i guess the upshot is that i had to sort through and organize all the stuff that had been previosuly in my cabinets & drawers. the only thing i haven't done is to really unpack; i don't really see the point since i'm just going to pack again to see michael friday.

it's hard for me to calligraph when i don't have my stuff in order. i tried hanging some of my completed pastepaper w/ the abstract painted paper, but i don't have enough room. so my options are to start another line or to hang them vertically -- i'd like to hang them vertically, thematically, but i need clips with clips on both sides. i think ikea carries them, but there's no way i'm going to someplace like ikea by myself. i might never come back out. :)

i saw "living out loud" tonight (one of jennifer-upstairs-neighbor's videos). it was okay; slow but vaguely charming.

Friday, March 29, 2002

 
10:12 PM: [#] [0]

it was soooo nice to sleep today! woke up at 8:30 and thought, "fuck this; i'm sleeping till 11" and rolled over.

i actually did think i was going to go into work this afternoon but then i remembered i was scheduled to do my taxes. it actually turned out well that calstateteach sent me my check in 2001 rather than 2002, like i asked, because the 2001 prius credit reduced my taxes by $2000 -- so instead of paying $2700 in federal taxes, i paid $713. but california (californa!) doesn't have a similar deduction/credit, so i paid $577 in state taxes, for a total tax burden of ~$1300. sounds like a lot, but i had reserved ~$4,000 for my extra cst work. whoo-hoo! my prius rocks!

in celebration, i got an artbin & some more brushes.

Thursday, March 28, 2002

 
9:59 PM: [#] [0]

i am amazingly tired. geh. get through tomorrow & i get a 3-day weekend.

went to the chancellor's office today to talk about webct, and i'm so disappointed. appalled, even. i want so much to like webct, to defend them, and they're not making it easy. after learning that "ease of use" just means that the csus aren't implementing webct correctly; and that we'll triple the price of the license even though it's not much different; and that webct doesn't need any new customers because they have such a "large market share," i really had to keep myself from screaming. the blackboard people were so much more genial and admitted when they made mistakes. i can totally see why people are flocking to them.

the good thing about the meeting was that i learned the grass is not, in fact, greener on the other side, so i feel better about making the decision to wait until a clear leader emerges. it would just be trading pain for pain. and after the presentations, i feel good about our processes and "best practices."

teresa said she didn't realize i could give such a good presentation. i was finally able to tell teresa that i -missed- the part of my job where i get to tell important people what i think; she says i'm in an awkward place, but i don't know if anything can/will be done. i decided to broach it more formally w/ her & chuck at my performance evaluation next month.

still trying to find a name for my shadow blog.

Monday, March 25, 2002

 
3:54 AM: [#] [0]

and miles to go before i sleep....

a surprisingly fun time yesterday, considering i woke at an obscenely early hour to get to the school & do some work, only to find that they took the network down! on purpose! but hadn't bothered to tell anyone! arrrghhhh! so there's new calligraphy scans available (anne; joe; the "a" i made for baby ainsling), since i had to do -something- until i picked jenn up.

we stopped in bakersfield for lunch & i don't know what they put in the water there, but we got -way- giggly! it is, of course, hard to explain now -- something to do with the phillipines, meatloaf (the singer), souvenir pennies, and "mr. fingers."

chuck & will & adra stayed at the hotel (so far, no roomate has shown up for me. yay!), so jay, pete, jenn & i went to play pool. god, i suck at pool. :) lots of videogame & foosball involved, too, though, and i don't suck at foosball. we got incredibly lost trying to get back to the hotel, but we eventually made it, and jay would not appreciate it if i wrote how we got back.

i think the presentation tomorrow (technically today!) will go well. *knocks wood* now whether i can stay awake, that's a different thing altogether.....

Saturday, March 23, 2002

 
11:49 PM: [#] [0]

okay, i went shopping. shopping! got glittery girl things that are likely to languish in my closet unless i pull them out for halloween. otoh, that's why jennifer came with me, to make me try things i ordinarily wouldn't have.

i still have to pack and finish reviewing the presentations. bwah ha ha ha! what the heck am i going to do for 6 hours in a car w/ chuck, will & jennifer?

 
5:37 PM: [#] [0]

i slept through my alarm! i missed the first half of the color workshop. :( we did pastepaper today; two of mine came out pretty okay. heavy on reds. the montessori school rocks! had a nice drive back through rancho santa fe.

 
3:20 AM: [#] [0]

now i'm going home. really.

 
3:10 AM: [#] [0]

argh! forgot to backup nemo onto the archos. came back.

 
2:45 AM: [#] [0]

going home. didn't work on soc309sm, but did get my status report done.

Friday, March 22, 2002

 
9:56 PM: [#] [0]

my todo list isn't getting any shorter & i'm here at 10 p.m. finally (!) blogging. thanks, cindy! (who still may not know i exist less than an hour away from her). a weirdness flash: cindy is also the reason i learned email in 1994, when she went to rit.

my brain is all fuzzy and i ought to work on soc309sm before i go home. my second color workshop is bright & early tomorrow morning and then jenn says she'll take me shopping. she's awfully excited ("i get to teach you the whole culture of clothes, gretchin!").

nemo decided to go a little wonky. first he crashed, then went into that weird "i'm greyscale! no, i'm 640x480! no, i'm greyscale!" loop that i don't get at all. :( i also think mike messed with the firewall settings again; i'll need to get him to punch holes for web & ftp (why didn't i think of this -before- i left for cats? i don't know.) i'll set a full backup on the archos before i leave.