wombat_socho

I was expecting my blood sugar to go down somewhat, six hours after I ate lunch, but it's just a hair down into the orange zone at 199 and I have the horrible feeling that tomorrow when I get to work there's going to be a little sandwich baggie on my desk with all the meds I was supposed to take this morning and didn't.

( Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again... )
Well, enough with the pity party.Time to go to bed without dinner, since I apparently need it like another hole in my head. Futons, shelving, single-vision sunglasses and overdue library books can wait for tomorrow.

Well, I'm feeling a little better this morning, and a hot shower should bring me up to fully functional - at least as far as work goes. Blood sugar is a little high this morning, but I was expecting that. It'll drop off by lunchtime.

I'm a little puzzled by my schedule for the summer term. The three-credit adolescent psych class (which I'm the only person signed up for so far) apparently is only two weeks/eight hours long and runs from May 8 to May 15. The two-credit social studies methods class, on the other hand, starts at the end of June and runs through early August, with one Saturday session on CONvergence weekend and another at the end of July (obviously the former is right out), which is just bizarre - since when is the two-credit class supposed to go on for six weeks as opposed to the three-credit class? You'd think it would be the other way around.

Well, I'll worry about it later - it's time to hit the shower and go catch a bus.

Yes, I know that's not how the refrain to that song by Lynch Mob goes, but until I actually bought the CD I didn't know, so thpppbbbt.

Renewed my Reader's Advantage card at Barnes & Noble today in the process of acquiring this year's edition of Baseball Prospectus, which this year has given up on splitting the teams by league; this will make it much easier to find players, and that is a Good Thing. Since the draft for my Yahoo! fantasy league is at 9:30 tomorrow morning, I'll probably be up until about midnight poring over it, the Sporting News Fantasy Baseball Manager's Advisor (or whatever the hell it's called this year) and the projections in the STATS Major League Handbook. That will leave me all afternoon tomorrow to do laundry, work on the assessment assignments which are being punted in favor of baseball, and then maybe motor on over to Muppet Labs for the party windelina and Monte are throwing.

Sunday afternoon I'm going to thrash redmartel at Russo-Polish War, or maybe not, since there looks to be all kinds of randomness in the game system. We might even squeeze in a game of Freikorps, which is really the logical follow-on to a Russian victory in the 1921 war, since it posits a Communist revolution in Germany following a Soviet conquest of Poland, but that's up to my host.

Sometime during the weekend, a haircut and some shopping. I've registered for my summer classes (Adolescent Psych for the first time and Social Studies Methods - again) so the leftovers from my student loan should trickle down to me by the end of the month. Onward and upwards.

Came home with every intention of eating dinner and pitching into assessment homework. One pizza and a half-kilo of broccoli later, pwnd by fatigue and apathy. Maybe I'm coming down with something. Again. Bah. I think I'll get a full night's sleep and try again tomorrow.

It's just an ungodly slow day at work, enough to make me wish I'd called in sick so I could have stayed home and worked on all the assessment stuff I need to turn in over the next week. Since I didn't, I'm sitting here in my cube waiting for the work to dribble in, and thinking I should have taken some time this weekend to work on the quiz, the test questions, and other stuff coming due. So far I have two A's for the term and have pulled my GPA up to 2.53, but I really need to nail down the assessment class.

One thing I forgot to mention about the weekend was that it started poorly. On the way out to meet with Kendra and Mark for the post-convention hotel meeting, I got pulled over by a Minneapolis policeman and informed that my tabs were expired. That was an unpleasant surprise, since I just replaced them last fall, and when he ran my license he discovered that the tabs had been purchased but were missing. So I get to buy some replacement tabs and drop by the Violations Bureau to have the ticket quashed, once I get paid on Friday. What a pain. This isn't the first time this has happened, but I haven't lived in Phillips for a few years so I wasn't expecting it.

Speaking of the assessment class, I get to leave for it in 20 minutes. Wish me luck staying awake in it.

Never did do laundry yesterday, but I did take jamestrainor out to lunch at the New Century. We agreed not to talk about the current unpleasantness between phoenixalpha and their mother since it was something neither one of us could really do anything constructive about, which meant we could spend the time talking about more pleasant things like AD, 4chan, and stuff like that. After that I went home, stuck my legs in the cuff for an hour and rapidly became bored with Civicrack...433 had left a voice mail message for me inviting me to throw a team together at the last minute for the MISFITS Trivia Contest, and failing that to just show up for the entertainment. Which I did, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. Saw most of the CO\Nnvergence people I knew there, either working as contest staff or in the audience; talked briefly with qob, 433 and others in between breaks. I was pretty croggled by the contest - it required a depth of SF knowledge I definitely don't have, and I don't think my reflexes are good enough any more to get me through the Jeopardy round if a team had been relying on me. Well, maybe next year we'll see - apparently they had trouble scraping up eight teams for the competition.

Afterwards I tagged along to the Uptown Diner with petsnakereggie, moneygod, chebutykin, cajones,michaellee, frozendragon, weasel_king, and jklumpp as well as Kelvin; much SMOFfing ensued along with tasty food (hash browns a little underdone, but not intolerably so) and more Dr. Who information than you could shake a stick at, which gave me a chance to eat instead of talk. ^^ As a late-night option, the Uptown Diner is definitely worth choosing over Perkins or Denny's, fond as I am of the latter.

All this late-night fun meant that I didn't get home until almost 2 PM what with a stop for gas, which magically turned into 3 since it's that damn time of the year again, and once more I was awake and lost the time. Grrr. On the other hand, I did catch the Root of All Evil and even joined the Evil Club, pledging $6.66/month for the next 12 months and receiving a Helmet CD as a premium. Yay! On the gripping hand, I forgot to bring in my laundry bag and detergent in from the truck, not that it mattered since I rejected the early wakeup and slept through until 1330 or so. I do need to go out and pick up some medications, and will probably put off laundry until Tuesday since I do have clean shirts for work.

Finished Beowulf's Children Friday and Jack Vance's Galactic Effectuator yesterday.

Such great plans for today, laid waste by inertia or other people having family stuff to deal with...but the laundry is my own fault, and that's all there is to say about that. I got up at 9 AM with plenty of time to deal with it, but just kind of hung out in front of the computer as the minutes dripped away.

Well, I'll be meeting up with jamestrainor for lunch today, partially so's I can get his watch back to him; it wound up in the AD lost and found and has been sitting on my counter beeping at me for the last few days. After that, I dunno...maybe I'll go to the Trivia Contest, maybe not. Lord knows I could stand to hang around the apartment and do some cleaning.

A few random notes on things not previously covered...

I've had a few people ask me if I miss being Chairman yet, and they always seem surprised when I say no, which I think says a lot more about their ignorance of the real nature of the job than it does about me, really. Like most volunteer leadership jobs, it's like herding cats, and that's really stressful. I won't miss that. I also won't miss being the backup for just about every department when it comes to purchasing and publications and the dozens of other things I've been covering these last three years. I also won't miss having to tell people they aren't cutting it, though we've been blessed with so many good people that that particular issue hasn't come up much these last few years. It's going to be a relief just handling registration next year, unless stuckintraffik wants me to do the Vice Chairman thing for a year while we look for his potential successor. I'm not bucking for the job, mind you. VC is a lot like the Chairman's position except without the rock star moments at Opening & Closing ceremonies, and as I said, I'm happy not to be the chairman any more.

Finally managed to get the Lee Wiley off the Carbon and replace her with some Meat Loaf, Johnny Cash and Janet Jackson. I love Wiley's voice, but her songs make me uneasy...there's an undertone of bitter mockery to them, and I have enough sad songs on the Carbon already, thanks.

Next on tonight's agenda is doing the dishes and bagging up some of the garbage around here. They'll be coming through tomorrow and Saturday looking for a leak in the hot water system, and I'd like the place to be not so much of a sty as it is.

I also need to stop whining about my legs. Yes, they're screwed up and they hurt, but everybody who reads this LJ is well aware of how squamous, rugose and oozy they are by now; no point in hammering it into the ground.

Currently reading: Beowulf's Children by Barnes, Niven and Pournelle.

I tell people that the only thing amicable about my divorce was the lack of lawyers, which isn't how it began, but it's certainly the way it ended.

I tell people that I bent over backwards to avoid saying anything bad about my wife to the kids after she moved out, because I didn't want to play that game.
( Family drama follows )

Yeah, I don't believe in karma (which is a subject for an entirely different post) but it leaves me without the means to interpret what happened today...maybe a fortuitous tilting of the Luck Plane? Well, Praise "Bob", then, and pass the mid-March blizzards.

I slept in this morning and didn't get up until 9, which was bad since I'm supposed to be at work by 8:30, but it all worked out since by the time I hit the road around 10, most of the other drivers had already made it to work/decided to stay home/wound up in the ditch. Thus I cruised up 35W in low-lock at a respectable 40 mph and got to work by 1030. My annual review meeting ensued. While my supervisor had a few bones to pick with me about neatness, timeliness and excessive socializing with the Controller's secretary, the review was generally adequate and I walked off with a raise slightly over 3%. Yay!

After that, I checked with the college and sure enough, all classes had been cancelled. The poor secretary sounded like she'd anwered that question a few hundred times already by the time I called. Lunch followed that, and when I was done stuffing my face I pitched into the 40+ upload files that had accumulated since 4 PM Friday. It was a good thing I had help from the other two people in the section, who normally do GL research and miscellaneous clerical scutwork for the Bank Accounting side of the department, because about 1230 the controller decided to let everyone go at 3:30. This too worked to my advantage since my boss agreed to let me work until 5:30 instead to make up the lost time from this morning. Roll that in with the short lunch I took, and I'm out of here in ten minutes!

For your consideration today:
Ann Althouse and her commenters rip an article on gender stereotypes in the IT world;

Johnny Rotten explains why the Sex Pistols' touring days are over, and Tom Wolfe talks about W, literature, and the Zeitgeist, also via Althouse.

Cobb and Reverend Sensing have hung up the keyboard to attend to more important matters. I'm going to miss both of them, although One Hand Clapping slipped to my B-list of blogs a while ago due to the increasing number of breaks.

If the war is going so badly, why are recruiting and retention up? (Via Instapundit.)

Finally, the definitive illustration of why "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus".