me, a nerd? Archives | Page 2 of 3

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Friday, September 16, 2005

oh dear

Here is a short list of websites aimed at children where I (an adult in full possession of my faculties, last time I checked) can waste an inordinate amount of time without even trying*:

• Cyberchase (from PBS) rhythm patterns: JINGLY JANGLY CRACK is what this is. Not that I would know, never having tried crack, but with this -- game? not only do I find myself spending "just a few more minutes" trying to perfect an interesting rhythm -- I go around humming said rhythms all day long. Just what I need, something more to make people think I'm crazy.
  
• elouai Game Makers. Like paper dolls (and dollhouses), without the cleanup, or the little tabs that never stayed where they were supposed to.
  
• Crazy Libs. I've talked about these on here often. (Rinkworks also provides, for your amusement, Book-A-Minute, Movie-A-Minute, Computer Stupidities, and The Dialectizer, which enables you to translate text into jive, cockney, Swedish Chef, Redneck, and an assortment of other well-known dialects of English. Also it enables you to spew beverages onto your monitor, if you're nerdy like me. These sites, however, aren't necessarily aimed at kids, and hence they do not get their own list tags.)
  
• USA Geography Web Games, which I originally bookmarked for school use, but guess who spent days mousing and arrowing until she could get above 90% on level 9 (Cartographer), which -- you might think you know US geography, and you probably do, but if you need a little dose in humility, see how many tries it takes you before you can resize and rotate each state before putting it in its proper spot on a map WITH NO BORDER OUTLINES.
  

*The author of this website will not be held responsible for dusty houses, unfinished laundry, full inboxes, or actual job loss incurred as a result of time spent on the featured websites. Reader is responsible for formulating his/her own excuses for said lapses of responsibility.

Friday, June 24, 2005

so what you're saying is...

I saw this placard in the window at the lab* yesterday:

It's amazing that at no point during the production of that logo did anyone realize/point out/care that what they are actually saying is: YOU MAY NOT CREATE A ZONE WHERE HATE AND VIOLENCE ARE FORBIDDEN. sigh.

This reminds me of the sign that stood in front of our local high school for maybe six years (including at least one year when I attended, maybe two). I dearly wish I'd taken a photograph of it. It proclaimed the school to be a SUBSTANCE-FREE ZONE in very large, commanding, black type (above a series of circle-and-slash images of a cigarette, a martini glass, and a marijuana leaf). Telling, I thought.

*where my husband (the one who crashes when he eats half a piece of cake) had to do a three-hour glucose screen, involving basically consuming a cup of syrup, for those who don't know. It was a good thing the lab had an examining table where he could sleep.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

a date

Tonight T whisked us all off on a date.

Yes, the whole family, it wasn't THAT kind of date, it was just a nice surprise evening. He'd known that I wanted to go take sunset pictures at a lake where we camp sometimes, and see the dam with the water as high as it has been (I AM SO GEEKILY EASY TO AMUSE. So sue me). So he loaded us all into the car, took us out for fast food, and then started driving. We had so much fun. In case I've never told you, I have the best husband in the world. Just so you know.

There are sunset pictures in the photo blog, but here are a couple of family ones.

LT and C. LT is carrying my tripod. That's not a purse. :)

The family. Except me. (In case you're wondering, T is smiling. Really. And he wonders why people sometimes find him intimidating.)

Sunday, April 10, 2005

bye-bye, Snickers (and Special Dark and big bowls of Rocky Road and...)

T has hypoglycemia, specifically reactive hypoglycemia, or if you want to get really technical, he has "nonhypoglycemic hypoglycemia", since when he goes in for a 3-hour glucose screen, even though he's very nearly comatose about fifteen minutes after the glucose hits his system and he stays that way for the entire three hours, nothing shows up in his bloodwork. For quite some time, maybe two or three years, he's noticed that if he eats sweets, especially on an empty stomach, he gets a) very tired, sometimes to the point of literally HAVING to go to sleep b) a thudding headache in his temples and c) extremely irritable. Nowadays if he even eats, say, not-sugared but not-whole-grain breakfast cereal, he is in bad shape. Yesterday he had cake with lunch and spent the afternoon unconscious on the couch, and the rest of the weekend was not a whole heck of a lot better for him. When all this mess surrounding my medical issues is all cleared up, he's going to see a new doctor; meanwhile, since his symptoms match reactive hypoglycemia exactly, we're going to assume this is what he has and act accordingly, and see if all symptoms clear up.

Which, frankly, is not going to be a whole lot of fun.

Well, there is that aspect that's kind of fun, wherein I get to be all methodical and make lists of possible foods to eat and create SIX MEALS A DAY from them. But let's face it, a man who can ordinarily eat nearly an entire single batch of waffles in one sitting is not going to like having one-inch cubes of cheese become a regular part of his diet. My favorite teenaged-boys-eating-horror-story is: when T was in high school and then in the Navy, he would frequently buy a pound of sharp cheddar cheese and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was a meal. Or he and a friend would go buy a dozen donuts. Each. For breakfast. He doesn't do that anymore, of course, but still, it's a big step from where he is to where he'll be from now on: looking at a dinner plate with, for example, two six-inch whole-wheat tortillas holding a total of two ounces of meat and some vegetables. But hey, lettuce is a free food! As is celery! So he should be really happy about those, at least. I mean, come on. Lettuce and celery! Who needs cheesecake when you have those?

I'll sign off with two pictures. This evening at almost exactly five o'clock the whole family started in at the same time with the "I'm HUNGRY" thing, looking at me as if they expected me to pull a roast turkey and all the trimmings out of thin air or some such thing. I told them I'd make dinner but first I asked them if, just to humor me, they could do an actual baby-birds-in-the-nest imitation, to send me into a kitchen with a smile. And they did.

And then here's a picture of me, coloring with C. Did you know that Crayola manufactures a crayon called "purple mountain's majesty"? Anyone who can tell me why that made me send a tersely-worded email to Crayola gets a free signed first edition of my first book: The Essential Guide to Grammar Snobbery.

That's just the working title, of course.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

me, nerdy? wha?

Thanks to Google and an initial curiosity about SI prefixes brought on by a math lesson on the metric system with my son, here is what I just spent the last half-hour figuring out when I should have been typing:

earth: 5.9742 × 10^24 kilograms
one yoctoearth = 5.9742 kg = 5974.2 grams = 13.2 lb

world's oceans: 328 million cubic miles of water.
1 mile = 1.6 x 10^3 m = 1.6 x 10^5 cm
1 cubic mile = (1.6 x 10^5cm)^3 = 4.096 x 10^15cm^3 = 4.096 x 10^15 ml
oceans = (3.28 x 10^8) x (4.096 x 10^15) ml = 1.343488 x 10^24 ml
one yoctoocean = 1.343488 ml

1 mole of carbon = 6.022 x 10^23 atoms = 1.2011 x 10^1 g
1.99452 x 10^-21 g = 1 atom carbon
1.99452 x 10^-24 kg = 1 atom carbon
1 smallish cat: 1.99452 kg
1 yoctocat = 1 atom carbon

[atom of carbon]:cat::[13-lb bowling ball]:earth::[amt. of Tabasco on my omelet]:oceans

So pointless. And I'm not entirely sure all the math is correct, although I think it is. And yet... so much fun.

Also, I typed the following sentence in somebody's comments earlier today:

For movies, I just FTP them to the free webspace that I have from my ISP, and then link them from my blog.

Your average twelve-year-old, let alone your average blog-addicted housewife, could tell you exactly what that sentence means today. Yet when that twelve-year-old was born, the sentence would have been pure Greek to just about anybody. Interesting.
--------

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Ware the Ides of March

I love when March 15th is on a Sunday, because then when I see my high-school English teacher at church I can walk up to him and say that.

Me a geek? wha?

My head is so stuffed up. In every other way I am almost completely done being sick, so I'm grateful that this is all I'm dealing with, but wow. I am going around mouth-breathing like, well, a mouth-breather, and my ears feel like they need to pop, and I can't taste anything. NOT EVEN CHOCOLATE. I have Tim Tams that someone (bless you bless you you are my hero bless you) sent me from Australia, and while I ate, um, quite a few yesterday, I'm saving the rest until this head congestion passes, so as not to waste them. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is HARD. Have YOU ever had a package of genuine Tim-Tam goodness sitting on your counter and walked past it without taking one? It hurts. Oh, the pain.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

such sticks in the mud as we are

I grew up in a household where we didn't have a lot of money and generally our houses were small, but gas was relatively cheap, and so one of our favorite ways to enjoy ourselves was to just go rambling in the car. We were a spontaneous bunch and we'd take off on a weekend trip to the Bay Area to visit my mom's sister's family with very little more than a phone call to say we were on the way. So I have this gene, strengthened by my upbringing, which makes me want to be spontaneous. Often.

However, T is different. His nature and nurture push him in the other direction. He is a big planner, and sudden changes in plans stress him out A LOT, even if the change is for the better. This means that in the past ten years my spontaneity has been squelched to the point where we have gone beyond not-spontaneous and into the realm where even fun things we've had planned for months don't happen.

OK, now I'm being unfair. We're not so bad as that, and a lot of our fun plans do come to pass. But the thing is, there's this really really high tide this weekend, see? It's a proxigean spring tide (there's your vocabulary word of the day), where the earth is close to the sun and it's a new moon and so the high tide gets really high and the low tide gets really low. This happens every few years or so, for a couple of months in a row. And ever since the summer I've wanted to drive to Morro Bay for the proxigean tide and see the ocean come clear up across the beach to the dunes. Sounds silly but I'm silly in general so that's OK, right? But now the weekend has actually arrived, and T has a really unpleasant cold so he's exhausted, and we just bought this 1969 Dart and he wants to stay home and play with it, and plus we spent seven hours in the car(s) yesterday as well as seven hours in the car the previous Friday, and blah blah blah no Morro Bay trip blah.

Grr.

I could go by myself, but honestly, I would be so lonely for ten hours in the car and all night in a hotel room (but oh! the reading! it almost sways me...) that even the tide thingie wouldn't make it worthwhile, I don't think. Oh well, there's another identical tide next month. So what if it's a Monday, and the chances of T being allowed to take a day or two off work to go over there with me are laughable, and the weather's good this weekend but who knows what it will be in 29 days, and so on and so forth. I can still pin my hopes to that. And I can also (this is the really fun part) milk my disappointment for all its worth, and imply to T that because we're not spending money on my long-planned Morro Bay trip, I have the right to buy more Christmas lights and put them up, and the right to renew my gold Diaryland membership, and to go out to dinner instead of cooking, and to also hold this over his head and use it as a bargaining chip for months to come. Oh, it takes practice to be the kind of wife I am, and after ten years, I'm beginning to really get good at it.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

still alive, but barely

My hands are still attached, although they're also still quite sore. I finished that insane job -- which basically involved me being glued to the keyboard from 3:30 on Friday afternoon until 4:30 Monday morning, minus about eight hours for sleeping and three hours for church on Sunday morning (not because i am especially holy or legalistic, but because I had nursery duty and had weaseled out of that toooo many times). It also involved the following:

• A total role reversal in our marriage. I was the one who had to work no matter what, to the detriment of my sleep schedule, and T was the one who had to deal with the kids and the meals and all that. Except he didn't have to do laundry or dishes. Which is related to the following:


• a dismaying mess to deal with when I emerged from proofreading early Monday afternoon.


• a lingering tendency to attempt to use the keyboard shortcuts that go along with my transcribing program


• a dream wherein my husband was talking to me and I couldn't type fast enough to keep up, and my hands were actually going CTRL-ALT-U in my sleep, to try to get him to pause. (see above re: shortcuts)


• Christmas shopping money, yay!


• un-be-LIEV-able hand soreness. They're still a little sore, especially between my pinky/ring finger knuckles on my left hand. Which has to do with my lazy shifting habits, i.e., I only use the left shift/ctrl/alt trio. Ever.


• a state of exhaustion so profound that I think it was very like being extremely drunk. This hit at about 3:30 Monday morning. I couldn't walk straight. I couldn't type straight. My words were slurred, my vision was blurred. I did not, however, call any ex-boyfriends, nor did I get sick or think things were inordinately funny.


• three whole days that went by without me reading a book AT ALL. I think this is some sort of record. In a bad way. I meant to bring one to church to read in the nursery, but I forgot.


• a lingering aversion to the computer, which explains why I am only just now starting to catch up on my journal reading, etc.


• a whole new understanding for:
  • businessmen
  • cell phone networks
  • digital imaging
  • nerdiness
  (I was transcribing sessions from a mobile digital imaging seminar)


• A conviction that if I am ever asked to do this again (which is a distinct possibility), I will insist (or, knowing me, tentatively suggest) that I be given the material, say, a little further ahead of the deadline. Because sleep is nice.

After all that, I swore up and down that Monday night would see me asleep before midnight (which is, these days, quite an early bedtime for me). I was in bed at 12:01, ready to collapse into oblivion, when I remembered (and this is the story of my life, this happens all the time) that T needed rolls made for his Thanksgiving luncheon on Tuesday. He needed specific sort of rolls that he'd been promising the guys for weeks. And I had been given plenty of advance warning, and I should have made them Monday afternoon. Instead I was up till 2:30, and I could have cried, except I spent the rising and baking times catching up on my reading. (The Other Side Of The Story, by Marian Keyes. I really liked it; I think it might be her best one yet. It's not as riotously funny as her previous books, but it did for the publishing/agenting/authoring industry what Rachel's Holiday did for addiction -- that is to say, let me into a world I'd had no real clue about before. I recommend it.)


Last night, however, I was asleep at 11:20. Which was two hours later than I had meant to be asleep, but I was finishing my book, just because I could.


And now I have to get back into regular life. The laundry is backed up, like always; I have to make two or three pies for Thanksgiving at my in-laws' tomorrow; I think I am actually going to brave the early-morning post-Thanksgiving sale at the fabric store, to get materials to make C a dress for Christmas. Which basically means that I have gone around the bend once and for all.

Friday, November 19, 2004

YIKES

WHAT HAVE I DONE???

A friend of mine very generously recommended to a friend of hers that he hire me to do some transcription work. Cool beans, I love this work-at-home kind of stuff, especially when we've racked up like $150 in medical bills etc. in the last month, and Christmas is coming. The guy said he had six sessions from a seminar thingybob for me to transcribe, at an hour apiece. When a person gets moving along really well transcribing, it takes about three times the amount of time in the recording to do the work. So, eighteen hours of work, at a decent rate of pay, done by Monday, it's an adventure! Which pays! right?

Except he has ELEVEN sessions to be done Monday. Not so much an adventure anymore. More of a hands-falling-off wishing-for-death caffeine-mainlining carpal tunnel marathon. Which still, heck, pays well, right? So goodbye, cruel world; this is my last foray into recreational computer use until I come out on The Other Side. Hands intact or not.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

a website after my own heart

I love this website. That is all for today. Thank you.

Unless of course someone wants to buy me the book. (Control yourself, Rachel; you're drooling.)

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