Reasons to Be Cheerful...

There are many things I'm excited about right now, and since I seem to have some serious monkey-mind happening, I think I'll just make a list and forget about such niceties as, say, coherent sentences and the like.

1. I wish I knew xml, html, and sql. I'm going to have to do something about it.
2. I have to start Branching Out for the third time--arggg.
3. I am SO EXCITED about driving to Bar Harbor with Karen next weekend for her little brother's wedding.
4. One of the funniest memories I have of her little brother is him banging on the bass notes of their family's piano while Karen and I valiently tried to get through "Asa's Death" for piano 4 hands.
5. I just finished reading Buddha of Suburbia (loved it), Never Let Me Go (loved it), and In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (loved it).
6. I think that since I just finished 3 books I should get to buy more
7. I just downloaded the COOLEST SOFTWARE EVER: Delicious Library. If you're a Mac user and book lover, click here NOW: Delicious Monster
8. I'm getting Tiger next week :)
9. When I started scanning the bar-codes of the books into Delicious Library, I began to feel like the miller's daughter who had to spin straw into gold...I cannot quite explain how many books there are in this apartment. They are e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e, and double-shelved, to boot.
10. I don't know whether I should be blogging, scanning books, knitting, editing the six children's math books that are due on Wednesday, taking a bubble bath, or getting out of this chair to have a glass of port
11. I've been thinking of moving the saltwaterchronicles content over to my knitting blog...because the knitting blogs I like the best tend to have non-knitting content in them, too.
12. I would like to customize this blog template...which brings me back to item #1 on this list about learning HTML...
13. I just decided I'm going for the port.

More later.

Random "Red Dwarf" Thought

Just a random thought: it seems that one of the few places you can see "Red Dwarf" on PBS in the States is in South Dakota...all I can think of is the generation of children in Sioux Falls who will grow up with their sense of humor warped the way Karen's and mine were by watching British TV programs on PBS in Boston....

Catching Up

I'm not sure how I managed to miss "Red Dwarf"--or even what posessed me to add it to my Netflix list (the blurb might have compared it to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy...). I've watched the first four episodes in the first series so far; the show is bizarre and hilarious--and it most definitely owes a debt to Douglas Adams with witty writing, characters like the existentially depressed toaster, and the Lister-as-god plot line (one of my favorite bits from HHGtG is the book title Well, That About Wraps it Up for God...or something to that extent). I have a two episode at a time limit, though--more than that just starts to hurt my brain (which really isn't all that difficult these days).

Life has been crazed for the past two weeks between travel (in Newburyport with Jennie and Karen then back to Boston for work for a day) and intensive QA mode at work for an upcoming db release...and intensive QA means that all my other work goes on hold...ready to spring up, all at once, the week after the release. I've also managed to get sick/get allergies which is always a fun thing to add to the mix of work/life stress. Don't even ask when the last time I went to a yoga class was.

On the positive side, the chenile baby blanket I'm working on is almost done and will require very little finishing, and I've started making up characters for a story. That's more than I usually can do creatively in the spring time, so that's good. I'd just really really really like some vacation time to re-charge and re-balance. Or maybe there is no such thing as "re-balancing"...maybe there's just figuring out how to let go/move on/deal. Who knows. Okay...more thoughts later...