01/16/04: irony

An example of irony: I've been working on building my site's Disaster Recovery Plan for almost a month. I saved the latest copy locally to my laptop so I could take it home and work on it, but I decided at the last moment last night that I wouldn't bring my laptop home but instead keep it locked down at my desk. This morning, I could not retreive said document because my laptop was under 2" of water due to a water pipe break directly over my team's work area, which also was draining under the wall into our adjacent server room. Ceiling drywall was collapsing, things were going bzzzzt, people were shaking their heads and giggling in disbelief.  :-)

Sing it!  
"Drywall keeps fallin' on my heaaaad..."

Anyway.

Tonight I'm looking forward to a quiet night in; it's too darn cold to go out. I think I'm gonna bake some pumpkin bread, eat a cinnamon roll I bought at Einstein's which looked entirely too good, hook up my new scanner and flat panel monitor and then dive into one of the 1000 books I've started reading.

(Oh, I finished reading Shopgirl. The book is so brutally honest and so eloquently written. It's simply heartbreaking, but very warm at the same time.   Man, I love Steve Martin.)

I think I'll continue with Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck). I was given this book as a parting gift from Pete over 10 years ago (good God), and I started to read it back then but wound up getting distracted by the other stuff I had going on. I tucked it into a hatbox along with the other paraphanalia we had accrued together-- letters, photos, travelogues, goofy random nouns, emails (printed on my dot-matrix printer!), gifts.   I do this after important relationships end... there's comfort in keeping these things, but there's safety in keeping them out of view. Anyhoo, I stumbled upon this particular hatbox the last time I was at my parents' place and for no good reason I started going through it. It's amazing what you forget in 10 years: little details, bigger details, feelings, basic mindset stuff. So while digging through this box I found the book and started leafing through it-- it had a Canadian five-dollar bill as the bookmark which was stuck somewhere in chapter 2. I brought it back to Delaware and put it in my ol' reading nook, and since then I've re-read chapters one and two; tonight's the night to start in on the rest.

Speaking of road trips, Rob and I were planning a big road trip this summer and I was gonna start saving my vacation time so I could take 2 or 3 weeks off in June or July. Last month I pretty much abandoned the idea of going on the trip, but the more I think of it, the more I really want to go. I kicked around the idea of going with some other folks instead, but (no offense to said other folks) there aren't many people I could spend 3 weeks in a car with who'd want to see the screwball stuff I'd want to see... so I'm considering going alone. I know tons of people who go on road trips by themselves, and I think with a cellular 'net connection and a digital camera it could be a very cool thing to journal the whole schmegege.

In other news, have fun stuff planned for this weekend. Tomorrow day I'm getting new glasses, in the late afternoon I'm swinging by Emily and Margaret's housewarming party and then I'm meeting the gang at Casablanca for Moroccan food (thanks Kathy-B for setting it up). Sunday I've got a concert to sing at the Cathedral for MLK Day; the music is gonna be awesome. My gaaahd, I love singing under Dr. Roland-- he rocks the house.

OK, it's 7pm and I've now compensated for my extra-long lunch today as Keith and I got lost trying to find UPS and wound up touring northern Delaware (good thing it's a small state-- you can do that sort of thing on your lunch hour).

Oh yeah, and one more thing:

I took the Geek Test (one of many) and it was determined I'm 61% geek, which, it appears, is as geeky as Jodie Foster was in Contact. OK, I've been called much, much worse. :-)

You are 61% geek
You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you'll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you're a technical geek, you'll be able to afford it, too. If you're not a technical geek, you're geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don't date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You'll constantly try to out-geek the other.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com