My new favorite make a bad day a good thing: Moolattes at Dairy Queen. Doesn't that just roll off your tongue? Full of ice cream goodness with just the right amount of icy crunchiness and, of course, coffee.

Why I will no longer leave the house with a pony tail and no makeup (except for jogging)

I rolled out of bed this morning, late, and did the typical "I'm going to be cleaning the house and gardening today" hair pulled back in a ponytail, quick face wash. Before buckling down to work, I had to run out to return some library books and do a few errands. While I was backing out of the driveway, I noticed that my bangs were standing straight up in the air. Since my contact with the public was going to be limited, I mushed them down the best I could and continued on my way. At Walgreen's, I was studying the frozen pizza selection when I noticed a young man standing a little further down the refrigerator cases, staring at me out of the corner of his eye. I assumed he was staring at my bangs, so I mushed them down again, grabbed a pizza and smiled. He sidled over to me and asked, "So what high school do you go to?" I almost dropped the pizza. I mean, come on! It's been 20 years since I was in high school, 20 years exactly. He saw my face and said, "Oh, you're in college, aren't you?" I didn't know whether to be flattered, to be offended or to recommend he consult an eye specialist.

I spent the afternoon in the shelter computer lab playing Big Brother, again. I'd removed the filtering by word part of the internet filtering software because people were complaining about how slow the browsing was. I figured everyone using the lab knew by now that most prohibited (porn, adult, and gambling) sites were blocked (and the list of blocked sites on the software's block list was always growing) so no one would spend much time searching for ways to get around it. I was wrong. I haven't decided whether to enable word filtering again, so, in the meantime, I sent a large number of updates to the blocked list. I also have another, longer list of sites to check because they are in other languages or their content is unclear from their URL. I have to admit that although most of the sites were simply and unsubtly named, some of the URL's were very original and pushed the limits I've seen on character length. All of this is the price I'm paying for working for a nonprofit with no money budgeted for a computer lab. I shouldn't complain too much, though, because 99% of the browsing was completely innocent and I hadn't checked the logs since mid-May.

My favorite line from Song for Alan De Niro by Tony at Geneva Convention

"Frothy & out of print in the way most best girls are"

For the past couple of days, Alan has been slowly sucking people into playing The Kingdom of Loathing which he was introduced to at the dessert function at Wiscon by Susan.

Back in May the World Wildlife Fund reported on a mother bear and her cubs that were stranded on an artic island when the ice receded before she emerged from her den. The really chilling part of the article was the speculation that this was a sign of global warming. Woo hoo, politicians, Kyoto Protocol?! WWF reported this month that the stranded mother and cubs are doing fine.

Too good not to share. Terry Jones on torture via Bill Shunn's newsgroup sff.people.wpshunn. (I would have just linked it but don't know how to do that for newsgroups.)

How can I put this in words? This is one of the stories Alan told me tonight about his day. He came home early to put his foot up and recover from driving rush hour traffic with a sprained right ankle. Tora is our oldest cat. Although he's mellowed over the years, he has no manners and tends to bite. I think this is because he was socialized by a large, neutured male dog - nothing I did ever had any effect on him - and equates biting with showing affection. Anyways, Alan was sitting on the couch with the coffee table just six inches away from the couch. He'd finished his Jimmy John's sandwich and the wrapper was on the coffee table. Tora somehow bridged the gap between the couch and the coffee table, just lying down with his medium sized 9 pound body. Tora was just a couple inches from the sandwich wrapper and was stretching out trying to do his usual snatch and run. Alan, somewhat awestruck at his position, said he looked like a turtle. Then Alan poked him to get him away from the sandwich wrapper and the cat freaked out. He stood on the couch next to Alan for a long time just looking at him and Alan thought he was going to bite his arm off. Alan said it was like the cat was thinking, "You f*ked my perfect position up and now I'm going to kill you."

This weekend was interesting. We were supposed to be up at my parent's cabin celebrating Father's Day but we ended up spending most of the time stuck at home. Friday night, we discovered half the floor of the basement was wet from a leak in the hot water heater. It could have been a lot worse. The basement isn't finished and most of the stuff we have stored on the wet side was up on tables and chairs. So, little damage but lots of dusty, wet, cobwebby mess and, of course, the expense of replacing the water heater. Saturday afternoon, Alan sprained his ankle playing basketball. He spent a good part of today sitting in urgent care and now is hobbling around as little as possible. I rented a couple of movies and we pretty much stayed put this evening. Anybody have any advice on hot water heaters?

Via Haddayr

How to make a Kristin

Ingredients: 1 part mercy 1 part crazyiness 5 parts empathy

Method: Layer ingredientes in a shot glass. Serve with a slice of lovability and a pinch of salt. Yum!

Username:

Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com

Given a choice, I'd rather have a little more craziness and a little less empathy.

Change is good. I'm not sure about the clashing pictures but, although it was an accident, the contrast between the text background and the blue is kind of nice. Not very Zen, though.

Things that make me happy (tonight)

Driving home tonight from work, I stopped at the light at Franklin and Stevens. In the lane next to me were two bikers. They were real bikers, with tatoo covered bodies and wide handle-barred bikes, not just your evening/weekend yuppie biker types. One of them was helmetless and the other was wearing one of those old fashioned helmets that look a bowl, so I could see their faces. While we waited, a little girl crossed the street with her mom, she was probably about five or six years old, and she stopped for a moment in front of the guys and gave them a wave and the biggest, sweetest smile I'd seen in ages. Their immediate reaction was grins, just as big as hers, and two waves back.

David Sedaris on Fresh Air

The season finale of The Shield. I know that this last one is a little disturbing to list as something that makes me happy, but I've become a fan of the show. Vic is my favorite anti-hero, half the time I'm rooting for him and the other half I'm rooting against him.

Animal and human intelligence and memory have been side interests of mine for a while now. Today's LA Times profiles a German border collie with a remarkable vocabulary.

Just in case you missed it, our local weekly paper, City Pages, had a great interview/roundtable discussion with an assortment of Minnesota-based, female, science fiction/fantasy writers, including Wiscon guest of honor, Eleanor Arnason.

We're home safe from Wiscon and the drive was pretty good except for a half hour delay due to road repairs. Alan and I found the elusive Twilight Zone Dairy Queen/truck stop that Barth and I stumbled into on the way back from Clarion in 1998. Although its clientele wasn't nearly as strange as that first time and the flies were missing, Alan did immediately say, "I bet this is that Dairy Queen you guys found." It must move into and out of our plane of existence on a four year rotation. For just one small example of the weirdness, there is the fact that you can see the line at the counter while sitting in the womens restroom stall because all the doors don't close properly.

What can I say about Wiscon? Even when I overload myself with volunteering, etc. like I did this time, it's still the highlight of the year. I'll do a short con report tomorrow when I'm not so sleep deprived. We did indeed prove that science fiction readers and writers can and will do karaoke. Now, I need to get back to basketball and then bed.

The cumulative effects of lack of sleep or why Alan found me crying after watching five minutes of White Fang last night

So, I stayed up until 3:30 Monday night putting the finishing touches on the next Rabid Transit. (The task was made so much harder by the fact that QuarkExpress 4.1 does not have imposition capabilities and I'm much too broke right now to lay out $200 for a stupid extension that can do it. Am I wrong or shouldn't it be included in an already expensive software package?) The work itself wasn't too bad, this chapbook is the best one yet, contents-wise, with artwork, a comic and great stories, and I had fun putting it together. That night I didn't go to bed early because of a certain basketball game. The only good thing was that I was so tired by the end of the game that the Timberwolves trade mark end-of-the-last-quarter slip didn't get me nearly as riled up as it normally would. Wednesday, well, Wednesday is a complete blur but I made it through with a couple cans of caffeinated pop, despite the fact I'm officially off caffeine. It was a long day as I've been getting ready for a two week vacation starting this weekend. Thursday, I had to be in early, and then went that night with 18 kids and assorted staff from our transitional housing program to the MOA for a really cool scavenger hunt. By the end of the night, even the kids were tired. Friday was a ten hour day as I scrambled to get things done. I left work around 9:30 in time to catch most of the last half of the basketball game. Which left me at about 10:30 on the couch fighting tears because White Fang's mother had just died right in front of him, and he was all alone in the world. (No, it did not have anything to do with the Wolves' loss - that was just a coincidence.)

Okay, while we're ahead by ten points, I need to post about my fabulous, extra, belated birthday present from Alan that arrived yesterday. My Rather Good punk kittens t-shirt. I wanted so much to wear it today to work but I'm in the process of applying to return to upper management again (no direct services purely administration) and I wasn't sure a kitty playing a guitar was proper attire in these circumstances. Alan said he thought about getting me the Viking kitty "I am mighty" t-shirt but thought the punk kitty was more appropriate. We speculated that the "I am mighty" one might actually have been better in these circumstances. Dang, now we're down to a three point lead. I hate this!

Last night one of the guys in the shelter asked our computer lab volunteer for some help applying for unemployment benefits. The unemployment office told him that the benefits are processed fastest with the online application, second fastest with the telephone application and slowest with the regular hand done form. It seems that the online application can only be filled out between 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday closed on holidays. The telephone application hours are something like 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Our shelter doesn't open until 6 p.m. and closes at 7 a.m. The computer lab isn't open in the morning. He thought he'd probably need some help using the computer so we arranged for him to come in today during the shelter office hours.

The website tells you that you need the following information: your Social Security Number, your employer's official name and address, and the name of your union, if applicable. Luckily, he had the application and had filled most of it out a head of time so he knew he needed more information than what they had listed. I got him set up at a computer and had to sneak away to meet with someone else. When I came back to check on him, he'd gotten about three pages of the application entered into the computer and was a little hung up because the dates of employment weren't being accepted. He just needed to enter the date 04/04/2004 instead of 04/04/04 before he could move to the next page and the end of the application. He hit the button and with the new page we got a message that read something like the following, "If it has been more than twenty minutes since you started this form, it has timed out and you need to go back to the front page and start again."

Now, the volunteer and I were already wondering about the limited hours for online applications, especially since you'd hope that someone would be busy job hunting during business hours. Whoever heard of an online application with time restrictions? It seemed obvious that they were trying to make it hard to apply for benefits. The difference in application processing times certainly favors people with access to technology. The twenty minute timeout on the application is completely unreasonable considering the amount of detail required on the form (and not listed on the first page.) If I'd just lost my job after working there for ten months and had spent the past couple of hours first completing the written application and then stuggling to complete the online form, only to find that I had to start over again, I would have lost it. Needless to say, he didn't. He took it pretty calmly. One of the shelter staff was going to do the typing for him as he tried it a second time.

I forgot to mention that I've been cruising through Scott Westerfeld's Succession novels, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. Yes, the last thing in the world I need after staying up until after midnight watching basketball is to be up another two hours reading, but that's what I've been doing. Calling them space opera doesn't really do them justice, but they're the best of the space faring science fiction books that I've read in a really long time. Scott still shows his masterful extrapolation but these books have a completely different feel to them than his earlier, also excellent novels. I have a link to his website thanks to Justine but it doesn't have anything on it right now. Maybe he's too busy writing. We'll all have to bug him about it at Wiscon.

My sleep schedule has gotten totally thrown off by these late night West Coast basketball games. Tomorrow night's game starts at a saner 8:30 p.m. Central Time. The last two games have allowed me to get a lot of the corrections to the next Rabid Transit edition, Petting Zoo, done, at least before the tense last quarters. Not much else going on in this household this week. It's been nice to be exhausted by something as benign as a close basketball game after the last few weeks.

Alan and I slept in this morning a bit after a late night at the Timberwolves game. Exhausting but awesome game. My poor Howl Towel was almost wrung to pieces. I'm headed over to my parent's house to celebrate the day with Mom but also to brainstorm some non-Mother's Day activities to do with Dad when he gets back from Wisconsin. Today will be pretty hard on him.

Anyways, happy Mother's Day to all the new mothers out there and to all mothers in general. What would we do without you?