Category: general

It occurred to me, as I was driving back from Wal-Mart feeling a little dizzy and in danger of falling asleep at any moment, that I’m kind of an all-or-nothing person.

On days when I “get stuff done”, I tend to do a lot. Overdo it, my friends would say. And that might be true…but it makes up for the other days, the days when I don’t seem to do anything.

I have always had trouble pacing myself. It shows in the procrastination-fueled all-nighters that characterized my college career. It shows in the way I started to run up a huge flight of stairs when I felt a renewed burst of energy during the hike through the temples on Hieizan, to which Todd and Jason each yelled his own version of, “Don’t go so fast, you’ll wear yourself out!” It shows in my cleaning habits, which are simply: when it starts to really annoy me, I scrub the hell out of it. (Don’t be fooled by the cleanliness in these apartment photos. Sure, the place looks tidy. But it wasn’t clean.)

I’m not sure if this is something I can change, or if it’s just a part of who I am. But I think it does help to explain why I can’t seem to meet my long-term goals.

To meet a goal, you have to work at it bit by bit. My most successful projects have been things I accomplished in one sitting, or at most a couple of days. Everyone always says that if you really want to accomplish a long term goal, you have to work a little bit at it every day. Every time I’ve tried to start a habit of doing that, with anything–be it exercise, or Japanese study, or writing a stupid novel–I’ve ultimately failed.

I’m starting to wonder, though, if I couldn’t just change that to a weekly thing. Surely I can find a day every week to work a little on a long-term goal. And having seven days to do something takes a lot of the pressure off.

Of course, I might end up putting it all off until the very last day of the week…but at least then I could have six days to recover until the next time ;P

I’ve kept myself pretty busy today. I got up at around 11 and immediately took my shower and performed my chore of cleaning the bathroom, exactly the way Cheryl does it. Hopefully I did it right ;P

After that I went to the Canal for some biking. There are pictures, but Sean’s on a raid so I’ll have to upload them later. There’s also a really interesting story, but I don’t feel like writing it right now :P

Suffice it to say that I rode all the way to Sibley Mill, cutting across the bridge at the green shed to stay on the Canal Trail and then going over the bridge at the Mill and heading back along Bartram Trail/the trail alongside the train tracks. In all, I rode 11.4 miles, and my odometer says it took me an hour and six minutes. It was actually longer than that, because I stopped many times for pictures and to relax. I’ll get into details when I have the pictures uploaded.

My car decided to stall and then not start again in the parking lot, and not in a very convenient spot–I was at the bottom of the lot, turning to head up a lane, and I was going uphill. Cars had to maneuver a little to get around me, and I couldn’t see a good place to roll the car to if it came to that. Fortunately, after I let the car sit for a few minutes it started again, and I was able to come home.

Gary was at the house when I arrived, and Steve was also over visiting. I asked Steve if I could put all the boxes we brought back from Kentucky in his spare room, and he said sure, so I set about doing that, starting with the stuff that was still in my car from my previous trip to Kentucky. While I worked, Cheryl, Reid, and Gary headed out, apparently to play pool. (They’re still gone.)

It seemed like forever before I was finished with the majority of the boxes, and I was very tired. I’d lifted the box of dishes out of the SUV and put it in the garage before, but today I couldn’t even get it off the ground. I guess all the biking wore me out. I asked Steve to help me…and he put the box on Reid’s hand truck. (Duh!)

After that I took another shower, because I was really sweaty. Then I made “lunch”, which at 5 pm was really more like dinner.

I have a few more things to do today. First I need to go to Wal-Mart and get supplies: TP, soap, bread, milk, etc. Then I need to do my second chore, which is dusting the guest bedroom (the room we currently live in). After that I should be good to go for Chris’ party, which starts at 10. I’m planning to not dress like a hobo for the event. We’ll see how successful I am.

In any case, I hope I can stay awake for everything!

I’ve been working on a website for the past two days, and it is really coming together. It’s purdy! The design is all CSS, which rules, but since the different browsers render CSS differently, I’ve had lots of fun testing in IE, Firefox, and Opera. (No idea how it will look in Safari…are there any other browsers I should know about?)

In any case, I’ve learned a lot about CSS in these two days, and hopefully I can use that information on future personal projects.

Have you seen this?

According to Reuters,

…Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he would pay for university.

Here’s a screencap of what part of the site looks like right now:

That’s pretty nuts! And also pretty awesome.

I just realized that I lost all my old logs, from before February of this year, because I had downloaded them and deleted them off my server to save space. ;P But anyway, I set up analog to run some regular reports, and here’s what it spat out for the past few months:

month:	reqs:	pages:
Sep 2005	5237	950
Oct 2005	184709	48887
Nov 2005	178097	35336
Dec 2005	165351	36316

0.47% of the requests were from Mom’s IP address, meaning either Mom herself, or AJ at work. I’m not sure what AJ’s IP is at home. A huge number, something like 3 or 4%, came from my own IP. Obviously I refresh my blog too much…but that still means I’m getting a fair number of other visitors.

Here are some interesting Google searches that led people to my posts:

19: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=racist+quiz
19: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tibetan+personality+test
16: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=postcard+virus&btnG=Google+Search
12: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=unseen+japan
11: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sabembermoff&btnG=Google+Search
11: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tibetan+personality+test&btnG=Google+Search

Sabembermoff!

People have come to my site 20 times via Derik (thanks man!). 22 people were linked to me from Dawn (thankies!). 23 people found me due to my self-linking in the Sushicam comments (yee!). Magazine Man has sent me 25 visitors (danke!). The Cynical Traveller steered 36 surfers in my direction (gracias dude!). Japundit is responsible for 62 visits (doumo!). Various image searches, based in several countries including the UK, Japan, and Italy, have scraped my filez. Google’s Blogsearch has apparently resulted in 72 clicks, and I also seem to have come up in AOL Search and on ask.com (???).

My greatest referrer is myself, though :> People seem to click to other pages on my blog from individual posts quite a lot (I do it myself frequently). The post that led to the most internal clicks was this one, naturally, with a grand total of 46,597. I don’t think those people stuck around very long, though.

Starting today I’m working full time at 2go-Box doing web design. I’m not sure how long the work will last, but I’m making good money, and it’s very nice to get out of the house during the day.

Today went pretty well, actually; I like the design I came up with, and it should only need some tweaking and maybe the addition of some nice stock photos before it’ll be ready to go. Then, of course, it’ll be a matter of porting content over and building some web forms. Whee.

David made it to town safely; I saw him and Brooke last night at Fresh Market. It was my first time ever going there. I have to say that I like the place. It’s got rather ambient lighting–when I first pulled up, I wondered if it was closed. They’ve got fresh meat and vegetables and a huge array of candy and spices and bottled stuff. It’s just a neat place. They also do sushi, which I’ll have to try sometime.

Topix.net sent me a story from the Onion today. :D

Public Outraged As Price Of Fast-Depleting, Non-Renewable Resource Skyrockets

“America means having a right to cheap gas without having to say please,” said Augusta, GA resident George Rizner, idling in his Hummer H2 in a protest near the Georgia State Capitol. “What are we supposed to do, walk?” Rizner then did doughnuts in a nearby parking ramp until his vehicle stalled.

Well, I suppose the story does have Augusta in it!

Can I go back to Kentucky now?

Today and yesterday have been something of a whirlwind.

I got up at around 8:30 yesterday morning. (I seemed to be able to get up a lot earlier than usual while I was in Kentucky, probably because I was eager to do the things I had to do every day.) I read my webcomics and news and blogs and things, and then got ready for Uncle Jeff’s visit. He and Mavis came by at around 10, and AJ and Faye brought Connor and Logan over and we all visited, except Sean, who hadn’t been sleeping well the past few days and needed to get some extra rest for the drive.

Connor and Mavis and I played with his ESPN Sportscenter game for awhile, then played I Spy until finally it was time for Jeff and Mavis to leave. After they headed out I told Sean it was time to get up…but he was still very tired, so I decided to let him sleep. We’d packed up all the stuff from Aunt Carol and all the Christmas presents the night before, so really all that was left was to grab our clothes and toiletries and hit the road. I decided to visit Grandma by myself and then come back so Sean and I could leave. This gave Sean plenty of sleeping time, and he felt much better because of it.

At Grandma’s, I was pleased to find that Gabrielle and her three boys were visiting. It was actually Joshua’s birthday, so we sang to him and ate some cake. I hadn’t seen Gabrielle in quite a while, so we sat at Grandma’s table and talked for a long time. Uncle Steve came by and hung out as well.

Finally at around 3 I headed back to Mom and Dad’s. Sean was up and in the shower by that time, so I set about packing up all the clothes and my computer. We hit the road at around 5:30.

Dad had suggested that we go south on 27 and cut across on 80 to get to 75, so we tried that. We actually ended up cutting across on 151 (or something like that) because there was a sign that said “to 75″…but that ended up being a 25 mile drive. Sean calculated that this way was actually longer than going north to Lexington and then turning around and going south again, but I don’t know if I believe that. Regardless, it destroys fuel efficiency to be starting and stopping that much, so we probably won’t do it again. It was pretty neat, though, to see the Christmas lights in Lancaster and the small towns along the way.

The ride was long, as usual. I faded in and out; having been up since the morning, I was rather tired. We stopped at Steak ‘n Shake for dinner, both of us getting a double cheeseburger combo with an eggnog shake. Sean had bacon on his burger. It was sooo delicious…but I think I ate too fast, as I felt a little nauseated as we continued the drive.

After that we only had to stop once more a little ways outside Atlanta to get something to drink before finishing the drive. It was around midnight, and I went into the gas station to get the drinks, and this other customer was totally flirting with me. I didn’t realize this at first. He said something about “I hope you have a lovely holiday,” and I said, “You too!” in a pleased voice because I thought that was a nice thing for someone to say, and then as he was leaving he said something I didn’t quite catch, so I said, “Good night!” and he said, “You won’t tell me your name?”

Then I knew he was flirting. So I smiled at him, waved my rings, and said, “I’m married,” which has been my typical getting-hit-on response.

After we made it home, we dragged most of our regular luggage into the house and fell into bed, leaving the boxes for this morning. We had to get up at 10 so we could unpack the SUV and get it back over to National/Alamo at the airport. Fortunately, we had no problem doing this. We then went to Sean’s car to get the rest of his things out of it, and I took some pictures of the damage.

After that we had lunch at Arby’s and ran a few more errands, and now finally we’re back at the house relaxing (and doing laundry).

I had a great time on the trip to Kentucky :) Actually, I wish I was still there…

But we’re home now, and I’ve got things to do, and David’s visiting, and there’s a party coming up, and life goes on.

Tonight Sean and I went out to eat at Nagasaki Inn on Redding Road. They have hibachi tables and regular tables, and a huge menu. We were going to have hibachi until we saw the prices; we decided if we were going to spend that much we might as well have sushi.

I had way too much food miso soup; salad with ginger dressing; Maguro Yamakake, raw tuna in a paste of mountain yam (the tuna was excellent and the yam was gloopy and almost tasteless, resulting in a very interesting and somewhat refreshing sensation); katsudon; a piece each of unagi and salmon nigiri; and hot tea. Sean had miso soup, a shrimp tempura appetizer, two Philly rolls, a roll with shrimp and crab meat covered in roe, and a coke.

After all that incredibly delicious food, I wanted some red bean ice cream to soothe my palate. Imagine my surprise when a parfait/sundae concoction arrived: red bean ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, cashews, raisins, and chocolate-dipped pretzels. Boy oh boy was it good. Sean loved it too.

We stopped by Hibari Market next door briefly before dinner, and I picked up two packages of Golden Curry, as I can never seem to find it in Augusta. (I think the only place that carried it was Winn-Dixie, which of course is gone now.)

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	High
Envy:	Medium
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Very Low

I don’t know about that pride bit :>

Because…why not. (via Miss Em)

Four jobs you’ve had in your life

1. Sheet Music Salesperson: This was the second job I ever had, after my week and a half stint at Wal-Mart. I had a strong work ethic and was able to snag a 10 cent raise after a month or so, bringing my salary up from a pathetic $5.15/hr to a whole $5.25. Go me! This job was interrupted by cancer. I’d been working there maybe a month or two before I got sick, and then I was out for several months, and I finally came back for a month when I got well, but then I got the next job:
2. Stereo Compiler: This is the most interesting one, except that it’s boring–you trace maps in three dimensions from aerial photography. I had it figured out in a month and was one of the fastest workers after that, but I got so bored! This was also my second highest paying job to date.
3. Night Desk Clerk: I’m sorry to say that this is still my favorite job. I sat around playing on the Internet all night in the UK dorms and got paid for it. (More, I might add, than I got selling sheet music.)
4. Data Entry/Receptionist/Page Designer/Dispatcher/Shipping Coordinator/Product and Service Researcher/Web Designer/Email Newsletter Designer/Copywriter and Editor/Customer Service Representative: So yeah, I did a lot at that restaurant delivery service. You can see why I have trouble characterizing the position. Usually I just go with “Administrative Assistant”. In any case, I was bored less in this job than any other.

Four movies you could watch over and over
Coming to America, The Wedding Singer, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (actually it’s been many years since I saw this movie, but I know I would watch it over and over if I could), and The Fifth Element. Basically if a movie has a lot of substance, it takes me awhile before I can watch it again. But simple, well-done stories are infinitely rewatchable. For me these are mainly comedies, romantic comedies, and action flicks.

Four places you’ve lived
Err…I haven’t lived in four places, unless you count those three weeks in Yatsushiro, Japan ;P The other places are Nicholasville, Kentucky, Huntsville, Alabama, and Augusta, Georgia.

Four TV shows you love to watch
Kyou Kara Maou!, Smallville, Friends, and lately Hana Yori Dango live action, though I’m afraid it might be over at just 9 episodes :/ (I’ll know soon enough…)

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation
Chicago (when I was a kid), Disney World (junior year of high school), Japan (2003), and Boston (2004).

Four Websites You Visit Daily
Bloglines, to read all my subscriptions (see Blogroll)
MSN.com, because it’s my homepage
General Protection Fault, because it updates daily unlike many of the webcomics I read; this does not mean I like it better, however (right now I’m obsessed with Girl Genius)

Four of Your Favorite Foods
Unagidon, hamburgers, General Tso’s chicken, Christmas cookies

Four places you’d rather be
Well, right now I’m at my parents’ house, and I don’t really want to be anywhere else. But in general, I’d rather be: in my own house; anywhere in Japan; in college; anywhere in the world on vacation.

Man, I’m in the mood to answer more questions! Ah well :)

I made a cute little gingerbread man yesterday:

And today I decorated the living room and dining room and got them ready for presents and dinner.

Christmas is so much fun :) I love how nice the living room and dining room look. The pictures don’t really do them justice.

I’m hoping to take some family portrait-style photos this time around. Sean’s wearing a nice outfit he got from his parents for Christmas. Now it will just be a matter of getting everyone to stand in approximately the same place for a few minutes…!

Yesterday Mom cut out and baked the pieces to a gingerbread house, and we put it together and did a little decorating with Manda and Connor.

However, all was not quite right with the gingerbread, and today, when Mom and I put the roof on…

As I said to Uncle Steve on the phone, “Yeah, I guess it’ll fall apart and we’ll have to eat it. Darn!”

We got here at around 3:30 this morning, safe and sound. The Plymouth Torrent we rented handles well and rides comfortably, though it would have been nice to have better shocks (or something) during the more bumpy parts of the trip. I-75 was (as always) under construction, but the biggest delay we had was a huge backup on I-20 not too far from Augusta; Sean guessed that a tractor trailer had rolled, but we never actually saw what had caused the slowdown.

Before we left I made lunch out of last night’s Christmas dinner leftovers: roast beef sandwiches from the roast, potato pancakes from the mashed potatoes, and peas on the side (which Sean didn’t eat). It was pretty good. For dinner we stopped at a Taco Bell just on the north side of Atlanta, and I tried the spicy chicken burritos and the fiesta potatoes. They were delicious!

We filled up at Sean’s default truck stop, a huge BP at the Ooltewah exit in Tennessee, and had our last bathroom break of the trip. Then we rode for about four and a half more hours, until finally we made it to Lexington.

Coming in to Nicholasville, Sean was as surprised as I was last time to see the ginormous Lowe’s that has opened up on 165. “That’s terrible,” he said. Convenient for Mom, though, I suppose :>

Everyone was, as expected, asleep when we got here. We dragged in our things and got settled (I like to have everything just so), and finally fell into bed.

This morning I got up at around 10. I spent the morning in my new pajamas (a Christmas present from Cheryl and Reid), finishing wrapping my cookie-presents for everyone and putting them under the tree, then cleaning up the kitchen for Mom. AJ came over to get some work done and then went to run errands, and I finally took my shower and got dressed.

Grandma and Uncle Steve are coming by later to visit, though they said they wouldn’t stay for dinner. I have cookies for both of them; their cards, unfortunately, are in the mail, and I have no idea when they will arrive. (Probably next Tuesday ;P) Tonight we’re having Uncle Steve’s chili, cornbread, and chips.

Christmas gift exchange with the brothers and their families will be tomorrow, and tomorrow will also be the big family dinner. We’re having turkey and beef roast, whipped potatoes, sausage balls, corn casserole, broccoli casserole, cheesecake, etc. All the girls are bringing a dish or two. (Obviously, I’m making the corn casserole…)

Christmas Day, everyone will spend Christmas at their own homes (and Santa will visit Connor and Logan).

On the 26th, I should be seeing my Uncle Jeff and his girlfriend Mavis, who now live in South Carolina. I haven’t met Mavis yet, so that will be nice. (Their card is also in the mail!)

And on the 27th, we’ll be driving home. Back to the grind. :>

Merry Christmas :)