Tangled Up in Blue
(16-25 January 2005)

25 January 2005
-24 hours later, the internet is BACK!  It went down for about 20 minutes & when it was back, it was ALL the way back!  This is extremely exciting, as I'm sure you can tell.  You could've told even better had you been here when I started dancing about the room.
-My love for the Emeryville Public Market continues to grow.  To think that I went there with Tucker & Barrett in 1997!  Ah, life has its crazy way of foreshadowing.
-I really shouldn't have cracked a joke about breaking my nose today.

24 January 2005
-Two & a half hours of my life that I'll never get back have been spent dealing with 2 online & 1 phone-line technician from SBC.  The conclusion, after 2.5 hours of making me reconnect, disconnect, & alter wires, & feel like I was the problem, was that there is actually a server problem on SBC's end!  I felt very vindicated that the SBC tech, after trying to blame me, finally came back & admitted that the exact server I was connected to was having slowness issues & accordingly was causing my problem.  But they still got my 2.5 hours.  Shucks.  What a pyrrhic victory.
-He walked in, bursting almost, & knew that they had been talking about him.  They had all been discussing this or that, & he had caught them.  So they tried to explain, but it didn't wash, failed to ring true, & he turned away in amused shame.  He had passed the point of even understanding what it was that they pointed at.  Like three prongs removed from the wall, he slumped off to the corner.

23 January 2005
Happy Birthday to Geoff Dean
-A long, sloggy, but perfectly reasonable day at work.  It was amusing talking to the co-workers about how Sundays are just shot as days & what a strange dynamic that is when dealing with the rest of the world.  At the same time, it's a little less than half of my work-week knocked out in one day, so I can't complain.

22 January 2005
-Double-feature today!  Saw both "The Assassination of Richard Nixon" & "In Good Company" with Em.  Both were great, &Very different moods from both, but both quite enjoyable... the former a little more humorous than I might have guessed & the latter a little more serious.  Ultimately, I'm left wondering why I always relate to psychos in movies.  Well, at least right up till the point where they start killing people.
-My productivity this week (yes, this is partially just an excuse) was hampered by our internet line timing out every 15-30 seconds, causing profuse slowness in the connection.  Many programs that are internet based will kick out altogether (such as online poker), while others just wallow.  Trying to get help on it, but the tech support mostly just asks if I'm an idiot or not & then moves on, not believing that my power cord is actually plugged in.

21 January 2005
-Took down $36 in the live poker night, a pretty solid haul, though Cameron dented my winnings when we were heads-up at the end.  At one point we had 11 people on one table, which was definitely a record for the California shindigs.  Once again, it seemed like everyone had a great time, but it's always sweeter to pocket some cash.  I benefited from a couple of nasty out-draws this week, which was a nice change from last week as well.

20 January 2005
-So the East Coast Tour is on!  In the month I turn 25, I'll be rolling through Beantown, NYC, Baltimore, & perhaps DC.  Along the way, the plan is to hit both the NYU & BU tourneys, as well as hang out with folks from all walks of life from the life I lived in college.  Call it the Quarter-Century Express.  If you're in the area, please let me know & we'll get together!  The trip is from 2-13 February, just a couple weeks away now!

19 January 2005
-I am all about the Damien Rice song "Older Chests".  There are other good ones on that album (Em got it for me for Christmas), but I'll take that track any time.
-I hate being flaky.
-Hey!  It's my day off from working on the line!
-Feeling very bleh.  It's not a surprise, but it's the way it tends to be.  Just anti-social & without energy.  But I'll pull through.

18 January 2005
-Yesterday was a stellar day at work.  It was like someone switched out our kids for a pack of great & motivated folks.  Very exciting to work on such a day; it changes the whole matrix.
-Today... not so much.  A swirling surreal day, at a different house with very different kids.  But one who is leaving in just under 2 weeks was my primary duty tonight & as I told one of the regular staff there, I feel like the last couple weeks are when we have to make our closing argument to the kids.  I wonder if I gave a compelling PMR... somehow I doubt it.

17 January 2005
Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day
-So I found some websites on the fabled Pancake Bunny.  For the uninformed, Pancake Bunny (a common appellation for him, though his real name is apparently Oolong) is a rabbit known for his ability to balance things (mostly food) atop his tiny lapin head.  A good introductory website to this world-famous lagamorph is this one, wherein you can find several introductory pictures... though the third one down is perhaps the most famous & the one that introduced me to the charms of this beast.  For those of you scoring at home in 4H land, Oolong is (was, actually... he apparently died in 2003) a Dutch breed rabbit, like Cadbury from my childhood.  If only Cadbury had been as patient as this kindly rabbit!
-Ah, that's depressing news.  Not exactly anything I didn't know before, but 16 is the loneliest number.  Or maybe 30.
-Some days, I just want to punt.

16 January 2005
-Ah, the early morning Sunday wrestling with whether I can face another day of it!
-This was far & away the longest 15-hour shift.  Every time I examined the clock, without fail, it was 2 hours or so earlier than it should've been.  As the day grew later & I factored in the 2 hours I was ahead, it was still 2 hours earlier than it should've been.  It wasn't a terribly hard day, just long long long.

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