Interesting…

Beautiful weather and I’m stuck sitting in a classroom for eight hours a day. This in itself is what makes Bridge the Gap an evil, evil program. Spring break and I’ll spend more time in a class room in two days than I normally spend in a week. All the while the sun is shining for almost the first time this year and I want nothing more than to get outside.

Today after Geoff picked me up, I insisted that we had to spend the remaining hour of sunlight outside. Somewhere, anywhere. So he drove us down to the dam end of Riverfront Park and we walked out to the overlook, watching the water spill over the top of the dam while Geoffrey explained the purpose of this to me.

After a while, one of the park rangers came down with some people offering a tour of the fish ladder. Ok, sure, why not? He takes us around to the gated off area and lets us walk down the fish ladder. You can see under the grate where the fish can climb up a foot of water and then take a break in the protected areas. He also shows us the window all the fish swim by so that the local biologist can count them (and also how the window is marked off in boxes so no fish stories will result from the counting…”I saw a fish this big…”).

“This is where the catfish wait,” our guide tells us, pointing to one step in the ladder, “and gobble up the shad as they pass. And behind you, that rock is where the snakes sit with their heads out of water while they feast. And of course there are gulls and herons and other birds that feed off the fish trying to come up the dam.”

Geoffrey and I walk past the NO FISHING sign at the end of the dam.

“So basically, every animal in the park except humans can fish here. Feast off the fish buffet as the fish are neatly channeled through for the eating pleasure of the snapping turtles, the snakes, the bigger fish, the birds and whatever other hungry fish-eating wildlife there might be.” Geoffrey agrees and then starts explaining how hydro-electric dams work. I’m still trying to decide whether the fish ladder is an improvement for the fish or not. Maybe they can get higher up in the river, but the odds are pretty bad.

For the last several weekends, Geoffrey and I headed down to his farm so that he could plow. This really is exactly like it sounds. Farm. Tractor. Middle of nowhere. Lots of trucks. Bumpy dirt roads with no streetlamps and huge potholes.

The first weekend we were down there, I spent all day relaxing and reading and generally enjoying myself. When Geoffrey came in that evening, I was ready to go do something fun.

“There’s nothing to do around here.” Geoffrey’s tired and his hands are scratched from cutting things.
“No, surely, lets go get ice cream!” Everywhere has ice cream, right?
“There’s nowhere to get ice cream here. But lets go. I’ll show you what there is to do here.” He washes his hands, puts on a clean (plaid) shirt and we get in the truck.

After about ten minutes of driving (field on one side, woods on the other – turn – field on other side, woods beyond) we come to a small bar on the lake.

“This is it.” Geoffrey pulls up and we watch as drunk young men stumble off their pontoon boats and into the bar. “This is what people do around here on the weekend.” We drive around some more and then go home.

The next weekend we’re headed back down, almost to the house, when Geoffrey spots some lights out in one of his fields. He throws the truck into reverse, backs up and shines his lights out into the field until the car that’s at the other end pulls out and drives towards us. Geoff circles around and catches them.

“What are you doing in my field?” Geoff calls out the window. In the other little station wagon are two women.
“We were looking at the mud puddle back there. I was hoping it had dried up, but its still there.” There is some debate and hostility until Geoff has established that these are his fields and the woman has established that she does live in the area and wasn’t getting into trouble.

“So that’s what people do here on the weekend for fun, huh? Look at mud puddles.” I find this somewhat amusing.
“Oh, she was probably just trying to find a way to spy on her husband,” Geoff’s mom tells me.

Apparently her husband lives in the woods. Has lived there for years. Has a nice little camp set up back there. All the neighbors know about it. And she just wanted to know if the mud puddle had cleared off the path so she could go spy on him.

So, if you live in the middle of a farm in the middle of absolutely nowhere, for weekend amusement you and your friend go spy on your husband that lives in the woods. Huh. Well, my husband doesn’t live in the woods (except occasionally when he and the guys go hiking) and I hope that it stays that way. So I’m going to have to keep looking for what I want to do on those farm weekend nights.

One of the few things Geoffrey and I agree about musically is that Rebecca Loebe is a really amazing singer. She’s my college buddy’s sister. I’d heard her play once in undergrad and once again two years ago when she came through, crashed on my futon and insisted Geoffrey and I would make a good couple. Last night, she came through town again and it was a treat to hear her sing live some of the songs I’d only heard on her new CD. When I mentioned to C- and J- that she was coming through town, they made sure their weekend plans included listening to her sing.

Now I could go into at this point my opinion of the venue (which the whole group agreed didn’t really let her sound her best) or the girl that went after her or even her rendition of Kanye West’s Stronger which was excellent. But I’ve an awful head cold, so I’ll just stick with saying we saw Rebecca, her music gets better every time I’ve seen her play and everyone should check her out. Now, where is the sudafed?

I know why people blog about food. It’s a daily source of inspiration.

Tonight I made tacos. But I forgot the taco seasoning. That was fine because I like bland food, but Geoffrey had to flavor his with hot sauce.

Also, people blog about food because its safe.

Tonight I made tacos but almost burnt the house down in the process. The oven started to burn and when I opened it, smoke billowed out and set off the smoke alarm. Geoffrey ran in the kitchen to find me cowering in a corner with my hands over my ears, unable to see from the smoke in my eyes and had to wave a dish rag at the fire alarm to cut it off. Once I could see again, I started to worry that the fire department would soon show up to mock me as they did four years ago when an accidentally burnt steak set off the fire alarm. My ever-practical engineer husband assured me that because of different requirements in the fire code, this fire alarm was not wired to immediately summon the burnt-steak-mocking firemen. I guess their wives never had to learn how to cook the hard way.

Finally, people blog about food because everyone is interested in food…

Did you hear that, J-, I made tacos! Normally, J-, C- and I end up at Tuesday Taco night, but since J- is in the middle of the bar exam (which he will pass so that I can have his books) we held off tonight in plans of bar-completion celebration tomorrow. But I had tacos anyways. Nah nah nah nah nah nah.

Yes, there is lots of inspiration in food.

Last year for valentine’s – since everything was already booked – I decided to cook Geoff supper. So I sent him to the grocery store with explicit instructions to bring home bread and cheese and flowers. So off he goes and I get down to the business of cooking.

About thirty minutes later, he shows back up and dumps his goods on the counter; white bread, good cheese and three kinds of flours – wheat, self-rising and pastry. He was very pleased with himself.

This valentine’s I decided to ask for something different as it took me forever to finish up all that flour. So I asked him for a sweet letter. Fairly straightforward, right?

I wake up to find a pink note on my desk, sitting on some wax paper, wet. The content of the note was certainly sweet, I must admit, but the note ended by suggesting that I taste it.

“What did you do to this?” I ask, sniffing it.
“I made you a sweet note,” he looks very pleased with himself. I lick it. Sure enough, it tastes sweet. Sigh.

“Next year, I’m going to ask you for diamonds…oh wait, never mind, that’s too easy for you…”

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It’s still snowing. Three inches and counting. Nothing compared to what they’re having up north, of course, but for South Carolina, its pretty awesome. Well, now that Geoff is home from work safe and sound without getting into a car wreak, its awesome.

The last time we had this much snow I was in high school. I went outside diligently to play in it and spent all afternoon gathering up every single bit of snow in our front yard to make a snowman – which I proudly put in the dead center of our driveway. When dad came home from work, I ran outside to make him drive around the snowman.

The pictures of snowmen have started to appear on facebook – its good so many people are enjoying the snow! I kinda wish it had snowed a different weekend, one where I didn’t have a lot of fun things planned, but hey, its the once-a-decade snow storm. I plan to enjoy!! Weather, would you mind snowing again Monday so school and work will be canceled?

Apparently, about a month ago, Geoff got a virus on his computer. It disabled his antivirus and happily went about inviting in its buddies. But otherwise, it was unobtrusive. Until Tuesday night when his computer completely died.

“What’s it doing now,” I was trying to figure out what was happening, he was driving me insane by looking over my shoulder and making me explain everything I was doing.
“This is generally referred to as the blue screen of death,” I reply, “I just know you have a backup somewhere, right? Just in case I have to wipe it?”
“I did, but I lost it.” Typical.

I turn back to regard the blue screen. This was going to be a fight, then. Loosing five years worth of code and data was not an option. So I couldn’t take the easy way out and wipe it.

I pull the harddrive out of the laptop and connect it to my desktop (which by some fluke of luck uses Serial ATA to connect my RAID harddrives), disable RAID and boot up. I can now access and clean Geoff’s harddrive using my desktop. All while my data is safely disconnected.

Two days and countless hours of various antivirus scans later, not to mention the viruses rather valiant attempts at invading my machine, the computers are both clean. Tonight I will have to drag him to the store to buy a portable harddrive to make regular backups.

“I had this happen to me after I completed my masters,” he tells me.
“And what did you do then without me to rescue you?”
“Oh, I had to send it off to get the data recovered – cost me about $800.”

When will people learn to backup? Even if you don’t get a virus, harddrives periodically wear out. They have movable parts that grow old and break. Or a lightening strike can totally fry your system. Or your malicious younger sibling can sit down and delete your files while you aren’t looking.

Businesses (or at least those with tech savvy people) back up regularly, on a schedule, including a remote backup (in some cases, this means the manager takes the tape backup to her house). Why haven’t individuals learned to do the same? Its as easy as burning a CD or copying to a portable harddrive. There are even programs that do it for you automatically.

In my now 8+ years of doing tech support I’ve run across two types: the ones who back up their data almost obsessively to the point that they spend almost too much time and energy on it and those that don’t bother to back up at all. Oh, and those that have macs and so assume that nothing bad at all could happen to their computer ever. Which is just great. But my experience also shows that if your computer is going to crash (which they all eventually do), it will probably do so the night before your paper is due.

“So where is Geoffrey this weekend?” I’m out eating with some of my parent’s friends.
“Hiking.” It’s true.
“Ah, that’s what Gov. Sanford said!” Laughter.

But no, he came home last night dirty with the sniffles from spending the weekend in the mountains in below-freezing conditions.

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I was in the produce section of the grocery store yesterday loading my cart up with apples and bananas and strawberries and other yummy foods when a very large old man with crooked teeth and a wicked grin walks over to me.

“You’re eating far too healthy there,” he tells me.
“Ah, don’t worry,” I reply, “I plan to dip it all in chocolate and cheese.” I’m planning on having fondue for the evening.
“Good to hear there’s a little sin with all that health food,” he replies. He wanders off and I go back to my shopping. About a minute later he comes back over.
“Dark chocolate,” he tells me, winking, “that would make it healthy.”

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The circus is in town. I had managed to stay oblivious to the newspaper ads and tune out the radio ads, but the circus struck me full force when I walked by the Colosseum on my way to school. The entire building was vibrating to the beat of music I could not hear. I hurried away, worried that the building was about to explode from its outward vibration. I hope that really old concrete Colosseum engineering still holds up to modern sound production.

I like to sell my used textbooks on Amazon as I can generally get a better price for the book this way rather than selling them back to the bookstore at a loss. Once the book sells, I then take the book to the post office, buy an envelope and ship the book media mail to its new home. Amazon allows you a shipping allowance which roughly covers the cost. Today, however, things didn’t quite work out.

I took the book to the post office in between my classes, got the envelope, wrote the address on it and put the book and packing slip inside.

Me: I’d like to ship this media mail please, its a book.
Post Office: I saw a letter inside the book.
Me: Yes, that’s a packing slip.
Post Office: That’s correspondence, I can’t ship it media mail.
Me: No, its a packing slip. It tells me where to ship the book to and what book it is.
Post Office: I can only ship it media mail if its just a book.
Me: ….seriously?

The post office refused to ship the book media mail. Flat refused. So no more putting packing slips in with the book. But I’m mailing used textbooks, aren’t the notes written in the book correspondence? What if I shipped a book of letters? Does the post office really have an issue if I ship a book to a friend with a sticky on the front that says “Enjoy!”?

How dare I ship a packing slip with a book!

It was an absolutely beautiful day at the beach…until I decided I wanted to take a kite out to fly. I had been walking along the beach earlier, watching all the people and all the dogs and all the kite surfers.

The people all have these sticks with ball holders on the end which they can use to launch the balls long distances with little effort. The dogs seemed to enjoy this improvement on the average human’s throwing distance and raced past each other in attempts to catch their balls mid-bounce. Of course, sometimes, they got sidetracked seeing a different ball going the other direction and would turn around and chase it, leaving their owner a long way to walk to recover a ball that has either washed out a few feet into the surf (cold) or been confiscated by another dog (icky). Then the dogs and their owners would be involved in a repeated and slightly awkward conversation about getting the right ball back to the right owner.

I was especially inspired by the kite surfers. The wind was kicking and the weather radio was calling for 8-11ft seas but the sky was as clear and blue and the sun as bright and warm as anyone could wish. They were jumping and splashing and having a blast, safely protected from the cold temperatures by their wetsuits (it is January). I wanted to try. Geoffrey has said I can – we’re hoping to move somewhere we can live on the water – and then kite surfing could be my afternoon exercise. Maybe I need to learn how, first.

But inspired by the sun and the wind and the kite boarders, I went back to the beach house and picked up a kite we’d brought back from China for Geoffrey’s mother. Then, after untangling some cord and making a new tail for the kite, we trouped back out to the beach, ready to try out the kite. By the time we hit the boardwalk one house over, it was raining.

We managed to get the kite in the air, though it almost immediately lost its tail. While Geoffrey and I ran with the kite and threw the kite into the rain, Geoff’s sister amused herself by “flying” the tail of the kite. Five minutes later, soaked through by rain and freezing cold due to lack of sunshine, we trouped back home, defeated.

The kite was put down in the garage, sandy shoes were taken off, wet jeans and jackets thrown into the washing machine and we made it back upstairs.

“Back so soon?” Geoff’s mom motions to the window. The rain clouds have cleared away and the sun is once again shining brightly. One brief blow of weather to drag our kite through the sand and remind us not to give up right away. After all, the sun will come out eventually.

Some strange thing is starting to occur among many of my friends. First they all got married, then they all had babies. Now, they’re all blogging about cooking. While I know from marketing classes and work experience that “mommy-bloggers” are a force of interest in the marketing world (because if you pay them to rate your product, this somehow has more weight than paying, say, an expert in the field). But now I’m watching this start to occur among my friends. Every evening, about this time, they all post what they are cooking. It makes me hungry. So I either drag Geoffrey out to eat or make pasta.

But tonight I am actually cooking. Not for my loving husband and small child (because, much to my mother’s disappointment, I still don’t have one or more of those) but for some friends who are coming over to eat. And by cook, I mean, of course, that I have bought all the food and it is lined up neatly on the counter waiting for Geoffrey to get home and do something with it.

I did make tacos the other day that I’m assured were better than the ones you get Tuesdays at the Whig.

So, as far as what I’m Geoffrey is cooking for tonight…oh no, nevermind, it would not quite fit the balanced mealplan, healthy cooking mommy-bloggers.

Originally posted on 9/22/08 as a diversion from studying Management…
—–
Two years ago…

He’s still walking next to me. How am I supposed to change from heels into walking shoes if he’s still talking to me? I apparently have a subconscious desire to impress this boy who has rambled on about digital cameras, his garage apartment, his dog and a bunch of engineering stuff for a while now and appears to have decided to follow me to work. Oh well, four blocks in heels won’t kill me, will it? But why is he walking me to work? I say something about cookies to keep the conversation going. I like cookies. And I’m on solid footing talking about cookies. I’m not so sure about all this water-flow-modeling stuff. Cookies are a nice, safe subject. This guy is scary smart. Best to talk about cookies.

I keep thinking he’ll finish whatever he’s going to say, but it looks like he’s going to walk me all the way to the door of the office. Which means he’s probably going to ask me on a date. I feel all middle school. Except that won’t do. I like Geoff, I really do, but I can’t go on a date with him. It’s a shame, if he doesn’t ask, then we can go on being friends. But I’m scared if he does ask, and I have to say no, then will he stop talking to me? I don’t want that. I’d better show some interest in water-flow-modeling…

Sure enough, out it comes. He’s going to visit some friends this weekend, but has some free time Saturday morning and would love to see the zoo if I’d like to come. This isn’t fair, I love the zoo. I love running around and taking a zillion pictures of all the animals. But I can’t, I say, I agreed to go shopping with Mallory Saturday. It does sound like fun, though, and I do hope he checks it out some time. I smile sweetly and disappear in the door and make a mad dash to my boss’s office.

“You will never believe, I just got asked on a date to the zoo by an engineer!” I’m obviously flustered. Which is why, a year later, when I tell my boss I’m now dating the engineer, she remembers the event very well and doesn’t seem the least bit surprised.

Saturday, September 20, 2008, 4:15 pm

“Are you ready to go?” Geoffrey now, because I love saying his full name, looks ever so good in his suit and I can”t help but grin at him. “We’re going to get bar-be-que!” He loves bbq. Me, not quite as much as he does. But I’m determined not to spoil anything and smile at him. I think he believes he’s pulling one over on me. So we get in the car and chat all the way over to West Columbia where he suddenly swerves into the zoo. Click, this should be interesting. I had some suspicions, but his silly grin now is a confirmation. I start to get nervous.

He buys us tickets and we wander around the botanical gardens trying to point out elephant ears and roses. He’s talking about engineering some water-flow-carp-pool thing. I’m beginning to wonder if my wedges are going to get caught in some of the thicker sand. We wander through all the little paths that in the spring would be impassable due to flowers and now, in late summer, are just green and you can read all the tags and inspect the leaf shape without the colorful flower to distract you.

Finally we settle down in a brick gazebo on a bench, Geoffrey sitting next to me while I look at the sky, the plants, anything I can see to distract myself from just looking over at him and grinning. From the sneak peaks I’ve seen of him, he”s grinning at me something fierce. It takes him three tries to get through the lead in, but finally he manages.

“So, I was going to bring you here to get to know you better,” he has been refusing to take me to the zoo since I first turned him down two years ago.

“I’d guess you know me fairly well by now,” I reply. I’m grinning at him, ignoring the hand fidgeting with something in his pocket.

“Well, I just have one more question…” he puts a small velvet box in my lap.

blog up – now, to integrate? always changing things around.

Geoff’s idea, doing a blog about the boat. Probably because its something he’s interested in. We’ll see how far I get tonight, anyways.  Big image on the homepage was taken by another couple while we were on honeymoon, so that’s us sailing. Little images will probably go. Still playing around with all that in Illustrator. Thought I would have it done before the blog went live. Ah well.