Listening to: Christmas, Christmas, Christmas!!!
Reading: Jewels of the Sun Nora Roberts
Weather:
Trivia: Why are cats' tongues so rough?
A cat's tongue is actually a very sophisticated cleaning device, in addition to its other functions. It is covered with tiny, hooklike, backward-pointing extensions called papillae, something like one half of a velcro connector. When it cleans its fur by licking with its tongue, a cat is pulling these hooks through the fur. As the hooks pass through, they pick up dirt and skin flakes, and more importantly, any fleas, flea eggs, or other skin parasites that might be present. The cat swallows these along with any loose hair, and they are killed by the strong acid in the cat's stomach. The cat's tongue is also important for eating, of course. In nature, cats use their rough tongues as efficient tools for scraping the flesh
from the bones of their animal prey.
Cool word: licentious (lie-SENN-shuss) - Having little or no moral restraint, especially with regard to sex. "A notorious spinster, Meg would wander about town during her free time, accusing people of either being overly licentious or of living a libertine lifestyle."
Miserable Drive, stress advice
Today was the full day conference/workshop in Boston that was for web design and start up. Now, normally I don’t drive into Boston, I take the subway, but not knowing exactly where I was going (I had a general idea) I decided that I’d rather drive. I told Kim I’d pick her up on the way and we’d go in together.
Big mistake.
First problem: monsoon season came to Boston. I woke to driving rain, and reports of traffic tie-ups everywhere. Swell. But being a hardy New Englander, I was undaunted. It was only rain after all, not a blizzard.
Next problem: I’m on my way out the door and Kim calls to tell me that she’s sick and isn’t going to go. This bums me out. She’s the only other person signed up for this conference that I know well, and we were going to hang together. But if you’re sick, you’re sick.
So I forge ahead myself.
Now because I no longer had to pick up Kim, I changed the route I was going to drive, as I could hop on the Mass Pike really close to home. Big mistake. It took almost fifteen minutes just to get from the tollbooth to the highway.
This was pretty much the way it was almost all the way into Boston. What is it about rain that makes people forget how to drive? It’s RAIN for God’s sake, not ice, not snow, just WATER!
So a twenty-minute drive took an hour and fifteen minutes. Anal person that I am, I had allowed enough time so I had about ten minutes to spare. I was less than thrilled to discover that it was going to cost me fifteen bucks to part until 4pm. No, school does not reimburse for that.
The conference itself was much like any thoer conference I’ve been to. Some sessions were worthwhile, some were a snore.
I learned some new stuff. Now all it takes is finding time to try it out and see if I can do what they showed me.
Of course I was supposed to be looking at this in terms of school, but I kept thinking of this site instead. I have a few problems (like the non-working graphics in Netscape) that I’ve yet to solve. They didn’t have any suggestions either.
I’ll just keep on trying.
I do know that I want to change some of the stuff here, but I’ve known that for a while. I just don’t know what it is that I want to change things to.
During parts of the workshops/lectures my attention would wander and I wasn’t at all interested in what they were saying. So much of their focus was on the business world and they’d go off on tangents that were on no interest to me, and much of which I didn’t understand.
Some of the people from my own system were nice, but one was a real drip. He’s the principal of one of the schools and he was so full of himself. I got the feeling that he felt it was beneath him to be hanging out with the teaching staff.
I’m not sure if this is really what he’s like, or if my judgement of him has been colored by the fast that he was more or less railroaded out of the town that I live in. The parents hated him and tried for six years to get rid of him. I was working in summer school when he was hired by my system and the summer school administrators came running to find me to be sure it wasn’t my building that he would be taking over.
he wandered through these sessions. He was in and out and didn’t seem to stay for any one session all the way through- and each was only an hour long. It seemed as if every time I looked out the door, he was in the hall, which says a lot about how often I was looking out the door.
We all went to lunch together at Legal Seafood, which is a great restaurant, but very pricey and wasn’t something I was counting on having to pay for. I really didn’t much care about eating lunch with these people either. But I was afraid of being politically incorrect.
I left at about four, fearing that the drive home would be as bad as the commute in had been. It wasn’t, although I go myself twisted around trying to get out of the hotel and had to figure out how to get back to the entrance of the Pike. Somehow I managed to do it, even though I doubt that I’d be able to do it again. For some reason I am blessed with a good sense of direction.
It only took about forty-five minutes to get home, which was really decent.
Trhat gave me a chance to run in and check the mail and e-mail before I left to meet the girls for dinner.
We were meeting at an Inn that is supposed to be haunted. We were going to eat there and then go to see Loretta LaRoche at a local high school.
I kept telling the ghost that I believe and asking him to show himself, but no luck. I was really disappointed. The service was slow, the food was mediocre. I doubt if we’ll ever bother to go back there again. It was a drag race to get to the high school in time for the start of the lecture.
If you don’t know who Loretta LaRoche is, she has a website. She is a howl. She looks at the stupid things we all do every day, and twists them in such a way that the humor becomes evident. She’s right. Life is too short to get crazed over some of the things that we let get to us.
I’m going to try to remember some of that when work and the chorus start getting to me.
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