year in review 2 Comments

2004: Year In Review

This year has been one of a few large upgrades for myself and Aaron. Not a whole lot happened, but what did was pretty major.

In March, we bought our house. This necessitated a move from Bowling Green (where I worked at the time) to Toledo (much closer to where Aaron works).

In May, we adopted Mei. May was also our one-year wedding anniversary.

In June, I took a new job within Sky Bank, closer to home. In fact, it’s practically across the street from where Aaron works. I didn’t get a raise or anything, but working ten minutes from home instead of 35 was enough of an upgrade for me. That extra 20 minutes of Aaron-time made things so much better, as did the drastic reduction in petrol usage.

The summer of 2004 was the first time I’d performed with a drum & bugle corps since 1997, when I “aged out” of Junior corps. I joined up with the LakeShoremen Senior Drum & Bugle Corps, and drove my ass up to Michigan every other weekend to march in various parades. It had its good points and its bad points, but I still plan to march again in 2005.

On September 1st, I officially launched dianaschnuth.net, complete with Movable Type and CSS layout. September was also our one-year anniversary of being on Atkins.

Sometime in the Fall—September or October, I forget which—Mom and Gary bought a house and moved down to Fort Worth TX. Before they managed to actually close on the house, and while they were living with Gary’s folks, Gary’s German Shorthair Pointer, Joshua, died. The dog going didn’t really affect me, but it really affected Gary, of course. Their moving affected me a bit, though, as it isn’t quite as simple and straightforward to go and visit my family now.

Apart from that… I can’t really think of any other life-shaping events that happened during 2004. No new cars (that was December 2002), no new kids (that’s not until… well, whenever it happens), no deaths (that was 2003). I’m sure someone will remind me of something, though.

geekspeak

Go Firefox Go!

Fellow Firefox users: I have a belated Christmas present for you!

BoingBoing has posted an article telling us how to speed up your web browsing experience. I’ve implemented it, and it seems to work.

However, there is a caveat detailed on adot’s notblog—apparently, this could potentially cause problems with certain servers, and won’t appreciably speed up your load time unless you have an appropriate combination of bandwidth and processing power.

So, remember what you did, in case you need to undo it later. But for now, it’s pretty sweet.

the ongoing saga of my job

Getting Props

So, for the past week or two at work, I?ve been hunting down information on a particular account so I could complete a request that was sent to our department. I spoke with half a dozen departments to locate the file I needed, and no one knew where it was. Finally, I got an e-mail yesterday that said that the file I needed was MIA, so I had to jump through even more procedural hoops to complete this request I had sitting on my desk. I ended up getting special permission to bend the rules for this particular request, since the documentation I needed just wasn?t available.

I remember thinking, ?Damn, I should totally get a Gotcha! Card for this.?

Surprisingly enough, I just did. It?s good to know that my efforts aren?t going completely unnoticed.

randomness 1 Comment

Damn These Dreams

I had a dream last night that I found out my husband was sleeping with someone else while I was away from the house. In the dream, it was someone I knew, but not in real life. I don?t remember how I found out, but I remember feeling like I?d been punched in the stomach. (That was a regular occurrence when I was little, so I know how it feels.) I was ready to forgive him, though, except for one thing:

?So, what do you say?? I asked him in the dream, referring to what they did during the act itself. ?Do you tell her you love her?? He said he did.

That was even worse than being cheated on physically. The idea that he could not just make love to someone else, but actually *love* someone else hit me the worst in my dream.

Don?t worry, Aaron, I know it was just a weird dream, and that you wouldn?t actually do anything like that… It was still disturbing, though.

reviews

Just A Geek

Before I begin my review of Wil Wheaton’s latest book, I’d like to take a moment to point out one thing.

I think that I’ve figured out the difference between us simple plebes and the blogging elite of the Blogosphere™. They don’t necessarily have something wittier, funnier, stranger, or generally more worthy to post—well, OK, maybe they do. The point I wanted to make, though, is that when the rest of us post, it’s almost stream-of-consciousness. At best, it’s a first draft. You can’t make me believe that when Dooce or Wil or any other well-known blogger posts, that they haven’t at least read and edited once before they hit that Save button. Sure, I skim for spelling and grammatical errors and other indignities, but I don’t draft my blog entries like I once drafted ENG 112 syntheses.

And maybe I should.

Now, for the review…

Just A GeekMy husband bought me Wil Wheaton’s latest book, Just A Geek, as a Christmas present.

I read it yesterday.

OK, I exaggerate. I read one chapter at the laundromat Sunday, the end of the appendices at work today, and the rest I read yesterday. It was that engaging.
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