Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Rainy Morning

We’ve been having a shortage of rain this winter – not quite a drought, but enough that the papers have started writing about it.

Well, after showers yesterday, it rained in earnest last night. Which is pretty much how I think of California: Nice during the day, rain at night. At least, that was the pattern back when I first moved here: The rain was tailing off when my alarm went off, and it was sunny by noon.

Hopefully we’ll get plenty of rain in February and March. It will help stave off the cold temperatures, if nothing else!

Uninspired

Clearly I haven’t felt like writing much lately – I didn’t realize until my little post on Tuesday that I didn’t update all weekend! Bad journaller!

Actually, I mentioned last week that I got sick the night of my birthday. Debbi was a day or two behind me and was flattened by it for several days. After running some errands on Saturday (such as having lunch at Shebele) and having dinner with friends, Debbi decided to just take Sunday off and hang out at home.

By contrast, I joined Subrata and company for some Magic. I had a much better draft than last time, putting together a fairly good Blue/White deck with some crafty creatures in it. I think I split the six games I played (though it helped that one game I got the optimal draw and Subrata got the pessimal draw).

It’s a little frightening to be getting into Magic again. 🙂

We’re both feeling better this week, but we’ve had a pretty laid-back week nonetheless. Gaming and comics last night, and frisbee in a little over an hour.

Hopefully I can get back to posting meatier entries sometime soon.

The Creeping Crud

Last night Debbi took me out for dinner at Don Giovanni’s, for a yummy meal. Unfortunately, as we were sitting there I said, “I think I’m coming down with something.” “Something” laid me low and we went to bed before 9:30. Overnight I developed a sore throat, too.

Usually when I get sick it happens just on a day when I really can’t take a day off from work for some reason or other. This time, happily, is different, so I’m home sick today. I slept nearly 12 hours, so I really needed it, and I’m just curled up on the couch this morning.

The cold snap seems to have broken last night, with some rain moving in, but it’s still pretty chilly out. My illness probably makes me a little more sensitive to it. But, I’ve just made some tea, and I’m getting a rotation of cats lying with me on the couch, so it’ll be okay.

I’m hoping I feel better by tonight.

Thirty-Eight

If it’s January 16, then I must be another year older! I turn 38 today, which is probably more amazing to only my parents than it is to me!

20 years ago I was mid-way through my senior year of high school. 16 years ago today the US launched Operation Desert Storm, thus making me profoundly worried that we’d institute a draft and I’d end up in the armed forces (it’s hard to imagine a career with which I’d be less well matched). 8 years ago I was more-or-less on the path to coming to California to work at Apple. Did I expect to still be there 8 years later? I probably didn’t think about it that way at the time.

This year seems to be off to a good start: I’ve been feeling generally upbeat and in an unusually silly range of moods (even for me). I must be feeling pretty comfortable with where my life is these days, and what I’m doing with it. You can’t put a price tag on that!

A Little Party

Saturday night I threw my almost-annual birthday party (which means every few years I don’t have the energy and I don’t throw one). I get later and later each year with sending out invitations, and this year I didn’t send them until last Monday. This means a lot of people already have plans, but on the other hand the holidays leave me not too movitated to plan until after New Year’s.

Anyway, we had a small group this year, but it was a lot of fun anyway. Debbi and I spent most of Saturday shopping and cleaning the house. As usual, I bought cakes from The Prolific Oven.

The crowd this year included:

  • Me and Debbi
  • Josh
  • Susan and Subrata
  • Chad
  • James

(Several people didn’t view the Evite I sent out, making me wonder if it ended up in their junk mailboxes. Oh, well!)

Josh showed up first, and handed me a bag and said “This isn’t exactly a present for you…”, and I looked inside and it was a pair of cat toys: One a catnip sock and the other a cigar-sized potent catnip toy. We put the sock on the living room floor, and all the cats took turns licking it, grabbing it, rat-kicking it, and dragging it around. It’s their new favorite toy! They’re surprisingly egalitarian about it, taking turns with playing with it. Even Jefferson, who is not the most active cat in the world, enjoys rolling around with it! (It interacts well with the cat tunnel Mom gave us, as it gives them a target when running through the tunnel.)_

We haven’t left the cigar out much yet, since we don’t want to overload their poor little brains without supervision!

Chad gave me a Thumb Thing, which actually looks like it will be really useful for reading my mass market paperbacks.

We had a fun evening chatting, and then playing Apples to Apples, which Debbi gave me for Christmas. There’s a game that’s guaranteed to get a lot of laughs during a party!

I gave James one of my copies of Jack McDevitt’s novel A Talent for War, which is one of my favorite books. I own several copies because it had not been reprinted until last year, so I had horded a couple of the paperbacks. Even that was rendered kind of moot when I happened on a copy of the U.K. hardcover edition (geek geek). But I was happy to give it to him, especially since he’d already read and enjoyed its nominal sequels, Polaris and Seeker, and Talent is much better than either of those!

The cake always goes over well, but this year we decided – through happenstance, really, since drove past it while prepping for the party – to get ice cream from Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream – and it went over amazingly well. Several people got that “I’ll have to go check them out” gleam in their eye while eating the ice cream (which was just plain ol’ chocolate chip!), and Debbi gave me a hard time for only buying one quart for the party (she’d been pushing for two quarts). So that ought to push a little more business their way. CJ and David introduced me to Rick’s back when I first moved here, and then I forgot where it was until I passed it a few years later.

The fringe benefit of throwing a party is that now our house is cleaner than it’s been in months!

I really, really need to try to throw a party or two this year during the warmer months. Especially since several of my best friends (including Subrata) are allergic to cats, so being able to congregate on the patio would let them stay longer.

But as always it was a lot of fun to have this one, and it was worth all the effort!

Getting My Scone Fix

Debbi’s actually the one who’s been all about scones these past few years, ever since Costco had some orange cranberry scones she really liked. Sadly, they only had them for a few months, and we’ve never seen them since.

However, she bought some scone mix from Iveta Gourmet (just down the freeway in Santa Cruz), and we both like their scones a lot. Debbi is actually quite amused at just how much I like them! (I especially like the chocolate chip scones!)

We just received a large order from them yesterday, and we’re going to try one each of their biscuit and muffin mixes. But right now (as in, “we’re baking some right now”) we’re all about the scones!

Resolved

I don’t often make New Year’s resolutions, but it is a convenient time to try to think of things I can do to make my life better. It’s not so much that it’s a new year, but that I’ve just spent over a week on vacation and hopefully I have a little more energy to effect some changes.

My resolution this year can be summed up as “Eat less and write more.”

Or, as I put it to one fellow, my resolutions are means-based rather than ends-based.

Eat less: It’s not like my doctor didn’t tell me four years ago to eat less, and that trying to lose weight is through exercise is difficult because it’s very easy to stop exercising. My only success at losing weight through exercise is when I was working out a lot (4-5 times a week, for many months), and it comes back pretty easily when you stop. So, it’s time to try the other approach.

Write more: While it’s tempting to try to become a professional blogger like J.D., the fact is that I know I’m mainly writing for myself, and that my journal is just not compelling enough to bring in the sort of traffic that J.D. gets. So what I really mean here is to write more fiction. While I know I’m not at this point up to committing to the sort of regular writing that Deathless Pose [sic] demands, it would be nice to get to the point where I would be up to it.

And having finished writing this non-fictional (I hope) post, it’s time for lunch. How’s that for irony?