To Sound Out Loudly
My typing hands are reaching puberty, but their lack of skill is kinda Alzheimerey. The more I type, the worse I get. My fingers slack off because the feel of the high impact plastic keys is so familiar and boring, and goddammit they ain’t gonna perform unless it’s a challenge. Most recently, they’ve totally given up on the ‘c’ in .com. Every domain name I type ends up with the sanskrity .om ending, instead. What is required, I think, is a more exciting keyboard. Astroturf. Deep pile. Something like that.
I’m free! Ish. I passed my A exam last week and spent the next four days slacking off down and out and about and around in Manhattan, with G. It was glorious. Of course now all my attention is getting redirected onto the spoilheaps of real work, which got neglected during the exam prep process.
But my evenings have returned. Instead of wandering through the back through the rain into lab after dinner I can do less useful activities, like tidying my room, and amending my tax return, and watching stuff on the internet. Like Primer (which is Netflixable, digital kids), one of the best science fiction films I had never heard of. It combines the most accurate depiction of what doing science is like (except for the slightly too snazzy dressing and groomedness), with the mental loop-the-loops of Mulholland Drive. It also cost less than $7000 to film.
You know it’s gotta be fantastic when the plot is explained like this:
Lots of thumbs up! Except if they are hitting the spacebar.
More soon…
My Favorite Keywords – Feb/Mar 2009 Edition
Here are my favorite google keywords that landed people on this site over the last two months:
- absenteeism at honda
- arse licking
- bad analogy
- does saint saens have an umlaut?
- crotch stomp picture
- convert to thong
- classical?classical? why
- can you get hypnotized by listening to classical music?
- varucca sock
- not all passacaglias should be miserable
- how to convert a stereo wire to a monster
Wait, what?
PS – Yeah, I know, I haven’t been posting… I’m more stressed than a structural column in Dubai at the moment.
Timefilling
Things this week which I’ve been doing instead of writing to you:
- Moving everything in our lab about 45 feet to the south.
- Getting the horribly cracked windscreen on my car replaced
- Searching for (and finding, thank god) accommodation for next year
- Starting my very delayed, and three week long, PhD A exam.
- Trying to get American Express to give me an extended warranty , so that I can get my freshly dead laptop battery replaced for less than $80.
TOO MUCH STUFF! Both the blogging and >100bpm exercising have suffered due to all those aboves. It’s not good. It’s so easy to give up on stuff like that when you are stressed out. The most challenging free-time activities are the ones which are first in the line of sacrifice. When you are extra busy all day it is easier to not go to the gym than to not spend an hour watching Netflix.
But it is most important to exercise when you least feel like doing it.
Oh crap, I have to run back to lab (yeah, it’s midnight) and shut everything down nicely before the building power beats me to it.
Re-Group-Ing
Yo dudes. I’m taking a bit of a breather from blogging this week — things are pretty hectic. I’ll be back in form in a few days.
Reperations
I’ve had an interesting weekend.
Last Friday, after an hour of driving — a quarter of the way to JFK ,to pick up G from a 16 hour flight — the hood of my car flew open. This was while driving at just a bit over 65mph. Luckily (sorta) it happened on a stretch of road which was fairly straight and fairly not trafficy. After successfully stopping and exiting and standing and examining the damage, I found (in increasing order of severity):
- The left windshield spritzer hose thingy was ripped off
- The windshield had approximately 2,547 cracks all the hell over it.
- The hood had popped out in the wrong direction and wouldn’t close without colliding with the top of the engine block.
Thankfully a friendly policemen (who was trapping speeders half a k up the road) reversed over and helped hold onto the hood while we pushed it back out in the right direction. He said that I could get away with driving the car with the cracked windshield, as long as I didn’t go over about 55mph, and didn’t drive at night. That way I could avoid paying for a tow.
So back home again I went. Stuck my shattered car back in the driveway, called up a friend to give me a lift to the local airport, jumped in a rental car, and headed off to JFK again.
I totally got major points for that…