He's going... he's really going.

About three weeks ago, Dad finally told Dave he wanted him to move out. Dave made a comment to the effect of, "You don't appreciate the work I do around here." Dad was about to say something, then Dave said, "Fine. I'll leave." And we hadn't seen him since.

This morning, Dave arrived with some friends, and began moving stuff out of the house, into his van.

Two thoughts:

1. Wow.
2. About four years too late.

I'm going to ask Dad if he'll make sure he has Dave's keys and garage door opener once he's removed all his stuff.

Success!

Not a Closet Nazi

To the mystery blog commenter (whose submission to the previous post has been deleted per his request):

Many thanks for your detective work. Though this template is already being used by Kallese, I plan on tweaking the colours to be sufficiently distinguishable from hers. Someday.

/me sips her vodka and wonders how he missed her secondary Strangelove reference....

Ah, yes, Steve and Rex. I'll give them your best.

Unfortunately for the mystery blog commenter, it seems that he is not so much a mystery, even with his post deleted.

Call for help

As you may have noticed from recent posts, I've been having a bit of a font problem whenever I blockquote something.

<blockquote>This is an example of something I might blockquote.</blockquote>

which then displays as:

This is an example of something I might blockquote.

So that was fine, but notice now this text. See how it's bigger than the text I entered above the blockquote? It's driving me nuts, frankly. And the good folks at Blogger can't figure it out, either. I e-mailed them, and this was their official response (three days later):

Thanks for writing in. Currently, Blogger Support does not support general CSS & HTML questions. Please see our Blogger Help article for details:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=115&topic=22

This problem may also be a problem specific to the Blogger template. Our engineers will look further into this problem and resolve it if it is a problem with Blogger.

I tried changing the font size after the blockquote to "2" (whatever that corresponds to), and the font itself is just about right, but the spacing between the lines is smaller, so it's not really a solution, as far as I'm concerned.

So if anyone out there can help me figure out what the problem is, I will be terribly grateful.
Thank you and goodnight.

A better picture

Thanks to Fetafetish on BigDaikon for providing me with a bit of information about Yokota and the surrounding area. The following is taken from a JET guide book of some sort, written by other ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers).

Both towns are very beautiful with rich environments, clean water, delicious Nita rice and kind people. Yokota is a rural farming area with this being its main industry. It's famous for manufacturing abacus and about 70% of Japan's abacus are made here. The tallest mountain in Shimane is a 10 min drive down the road. Except for winter, almost anytime of the year is a good time to sit in the backyard with a cooler of beer and a BBQ going. In the wintertime, there's skiing. If you don't have a car, it can be inconvenient to get around. Both towns have outdoor swimming pools, Nita holds a mountain bike race in the spring, and there are ski resorts and many onsens nearby. The Shimane Design School is in Yokota and offers classes to the community such as pottery, jewelry design, furniture making, and computer gaphics. There is a museum for the Tatara Iron making method, a metal-working technique used in making swords. There is a taiko drumming group that gives classes. In Aug there will be several festivals in the area. There is a Karaoke place but no dance clubs or anything like that. There are two grocery stores in town. There is a Juntendo store which is like a Home Hardware store (very helpful). There are one or two convenence stores but maybe only one that is 24 hours.

Yokota also has a train station. Woo!

Hard-knock life

I am now the proud owner of a new digital camera. (Note that I paid roughly 80USD less than the estimated retail price... or I will have, once I receive my rebate, and I got a free extra 64MB memory card, in addition to the 16MB one that comes with the camera. Good things happen when you stumble in on the beginning of a 4-hour sale at CompUSA.)

I'm also seriously considering a new notebook computer, which has a built-in 6-in-1 memory card reader. I now have two xD-Picture Cards for my camera, so I wrote to the computer company to ask if this type of memory will work in their reader. The owner (it's a small company) wrote back: "I have never heard of memory media by that name. I wonder if it is really SD memory, but with an Olympus twist."

So I check the back of the package containing the 64MB card to see if it offers any new information.

Compact and durable, the Olympus xD-Picture Card is the ultimate reusable digital media ... offering compatibility with any manufacturer's xD-compatible device... (emphasis mine).

Thoroughly unhelpful.

Talking about this with the Shambly Hermit earlier, I remembered a similar feeling of frustration I had at Best Buy. I wanted to upgrade the operating system (Windows ME) on Mom's old/my new desktop, so I was checking out the Windows XP versions, trying to decide if XP Pro was worth the extra $100. An employee came by. "Can I help you with anything?"
"Yeah, what's the extra hundred dollars for?" I asked, gesturing toward the XP Pro box.
"Well," he said, "This is XP Home, and this is XP Pro."
Not to be deterred, I said, "I know that. I'm just wondering what the real differences are."
He picked up the Pro box. "Well, it says here..." he proceeded to read. I was really hoping for a human interpretation to the back-of-the-box information, but it seems that day I was out of luck.

Commissioned Googlebomb

Hobvias Sudoneighm

My partners in crime: oook, striatic, Shambly Hermit.

Edit: And Meer, too!

Litmus test

A coupla links from Stewart's blog:
Dear Overhaulin
Dear Maury

In short, both of these links point to (a blog which points to) blogs which, for one reason or another, have been mistaken for TV show websites, and have been deluged by comments, mostly from people who want to contact the shows. Most of the remaining comments are from people sadly shaking their heads, or taking pot shots at the misinformed.
From "Waitak," who posted a comment on the Maury entry:

I've just read through this thread. Honestly, I find it more heartbreaking than funny. The desperation in these posts is stunning. It's true that the people writing to "MUARY" don't understand that this is Ryan's blog (kudos to you Ryan for being relatively even-handed in your responses).

Stupid and uneducated people aren't the same, though. True 'nuf - lots of people don't know how to spell, lots of people don't "get" the Web, let alone the Internet, and lots of people get themselves into all SORTS of awful situations.

But to my mind, this is more about one culture (prospereous, educated, Internet-savvy) suddenly staring through a window into the soul of another (poor, mostly uneducated). It's hard to miss the insights that the responses give into BOTH of them. Lots of us have treated this thread as a sort of litmus test for intelligence. Maybe it's a litmus test for other things as well, like compassion and kindness.

Shimane-ken!

Got another nice fat manila envelope in the mail today from the good folks at the NY Consulate. Seems I'll be going to the prefecture (like a state or province) of Shimane, and more specifically to the town of Yokota.

There's more than one Yokota in Japan, just as there's more than one Springfield in the US; here's the one where I'll be.

I've already started a thread on BigDaikon, so if anyone there has some information about the area, you, my faithful blog readers, will know about it when I do.

This looks like the town's official webpage, but unfortunately for me it's all in Japanese, and most of the links on the homepage are gifs, not text, so Babel Fish can't translate them. What Babel Fish can translate, however, is the population of the town:

• 7,895 people
• 4,109 women
• 3,786 men
• 2,364 households

Yep, it's small.

Je suis Nono, le petit robot...

We've been singing little snippets of the Ulysse 31 theme song in Vacuum Energy HQ for several months now (mostly just the first couple bars: "Uuuuu-lysse, Uuu-lyyyyyysse!"), and I finally decided to dig up the mp3 again. It's got the makings of a classic, even in French. (Especially in French.)

Credits:
MP3: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/simonin/Ulysse31/ (I think the little pop-up says something about two downloads per person per day.)
Lyrics (en français): http://www.topkool.com/comicsbdmangas/oav-ulysse31.htm (Scroll toward the bottom.)
Intro video (in English): http://www.sfxb.co.uk/animated/ulysses31.html (A bit of nostalgia for those of you who remember watching it as kids; I think I'd just turned one year old.)

Incidentally, while I was double-checking my French on Babel Fish just a moment ago, I discovered that it leaves instances of "c'est" untranslated, from the French to English. While not a major inconvenience for myself, I find it a bit diappointing, since "c'est" (roughly translated: "this is") is used frequently in the French language, and easy enough to translate.


Late Night with Conan O'Brien recently aired a segment on Stargate. Recently, as in last Thursday. I watched Conan Wednesday night, and Friday night, but for some reason I decided I had something better to do Thursday night.
But no worries: it airs again on NBC this Friday at 4am. I've set my alarm (on my cell phone) to wake up at 3:50am. Watch me, I'm so gonna do it.

By popular demand

It seems a shame that Blogger released new templates just after I'd gone through all the trouble of figuring out the last one and tweaking it. Now I have a new (far more complicated) template to tweak.

And I'm far from finished. I'll get the old stuff back in the sidebar, fix any overly large photos so that they display properly, and figure out how to implement the in-Blogger comment feature. Don't worry: all the old comments have been saved in text files, and I will provide links to them at the end of the posts in which they were made (see the previous post).

Overall, though, I see this as an improvement. I mean, it isn't really anything I couldn't do by myself if I were really, really good at designing webpages; but I'm not, so this is a change for the better.

Projectile Snot!

Why am I still awake at this hour when I could be in a NyQuil-induced sleep?
Tucker's supposed to be coming home sometime tonight.
Sometime... tonight...
Crap.
I just called him.
"Hey, what's up?" he answered.
"Hey. Where are you?"
"At Justin and Ange's house."
"You're still in Pennsylvania?"
"Yeah, I told you I was coming home tomorrow."
"I know, but Dad told me you were coming home tonight."
"I said I was coming home tomorrow!"
"I know! But I just stayed up late for no reason. Okay, I'll see you tomorrow."
"Okay. Bye."

This morning (yesterday morning? Thursday morning), when I sat up in bed, two drops of water flew out of my nose, travelled two feet, and landed on the floor past the foot of my bed. I've been blowing my nose constantly all day, the fever has not abated, and now I lose some sleep due to a miscommunication between my dad and my brother. Sigh... Wasn't the first time, certainly won't be the last.

But hey, I got a Christmas present:


(And a rare SM sighting!)

Old Comments (1)

KO!

PC Repair

I'm not yet clear on what the point is,
but it sure is fun.

Oh dear...

More fun with eBay.

This is a serious offering of service.

Decrease your Erdös number.
(Yet Another Link that Will Be Dead in One Month)

<--Even more photos

Wrigley's Cherry Chill Eclipse gum sucks. It tastes like cherry menthol cough drops.
It doesn't evoke feelings of sexy kissableness, it evokes feelings of head cold.

Yeah, that's hardly worth blogging, but I've got nothing else.

Oh, but Elisa reminded me that Darren is 24; now that I recall, I think he's a couple of months younger than I. The difference in age between he and Becky is less than that between John and me, so Okay.

More photos!

From left to right, Cal, Stewart, and George, Ludicorp developers.

Hurrah for camera phones.

Emily is silly.

Last night (and this morning) was our Sunday school group's Late Night party. We started on campus and went to the Chi Alpha meeting, then headed over to the church and played silly games and sang karaoke and ate junk food. Darren, a fellow whom I've seen at church a few times, was there. I first met him at the progressive dinner in December. Good looking, funny, just enough charm--I was mildly interested; it's not often I find a Christian man with these qualities. So when I saw him again last night, I took notice. Played a game of pool, Becky and me vs. Darren and Caleb, which we won cos Caleb called the wrong pocket when he sunk the 8-ball.
Maybe twenty of us went to Denny's at 2:30am, and Becky, Elisa, and I rode there in Darren's '86 Porche (with Elisa and me packed tightly into the back seats). We had a good time at Denny's, too. Darren laughed my jokes (well, most of them), I laughed at his, and I was realizing that I had to be careful not to develop a crush on him. He offered to drive the three of us home, even though he doesn't live near any of us. I noticed that, from time to time, he would ask Becky a direct question, initiating conversation with her, where he wasn't doing that with anyone else. Perhaps he's just being friendly, I thought, since Elisa and I were doing a fair amount of talking with little prompting. Though Becky isn't shy, she's more reserved than Elisa, and not given to wisecracking the way I can be. Besides, I thought, he's a year or two older than me; surely he's not interested in a freshman.
We dropped Becky off first, up at Day Hall. When we pulled up in front of the entrance, she started to get out, and Darren said, "Wait, hang on," jumped out of his door, and ran around to open her door for her. "Oh, that's so sweet!" Elisa said. I was a bit suspicious. He walked her a few steps toward the front door, and they stopped. Elisa and I watched them intently. Becky had her cell phone out. "Is he giving her his phone number?" Elisa wondered.
"I think so," I said in resignation.
A couple more seconds passed. "He's totally giving her his number!"
He got back in the car and we pulled away. After a moment he said, "I just gave her my phone number. What do you guys think?"
I think I managed a "Wow." My brain was a bit scrambled at this point, so I happily let Elisa do the talking. "She's a really great person."
"Yeah? She seems really nice. You hardly meet anyone like that anymore."
"She's a little young."
"How young?"
Both of us answered: "She's a freshman."
"Oh. Well that's not so bad."
Darren and Elisa chatted a bit longer about Becky, since Elisa knows her better than I do. It took me a good two minutes before I was feeling myself again. We dropped Elisa off on South Campus, and then made toward my place. "I was pretty nervous," he said. "I really had to dig up my courage."
I told him about Waled, the Muslim physics grad student who'd bared his heart to me a few years ago. I'd felt so bad for him, as he was telling me what he thought about me and how he wanted to get to know me better, because I could almost taste his nervousness, and I knew I was going to turn him down. But in spite of myself, I wished Darren the best.

So it'll take a day or two to shake him out of my head. If I'd simply found out that he had a girlfriend, it probably wouldn't take me so long--current girlfriends are predictable. The way this morning's events transpired was unexpected.
Alors....

Old Comments (3)

Heroes in a Half Shell

I wore my lucky green ninja turtle shirt today. It's not really a Ninja Turtle shirt; it's a Crayola green T-shirt with, what, canary yellow? collar and sleeve cuffs, and terribly comfortable. When I showed it to Grammy, she said, "Oh. It's just like the Ninja Turtles." I was surprised she had any recollection of that cartoon. "Yes! It is very much like the Ninja Turtles."

I did as I was told and called PromptCare at 9am this morning. And at quarter past noon I walked out with my completed Certificate of Health. I promptly went to Subway and got lunch, then mailed the certificate to the Consulate General. <sigh of relief>
Dr. Catney talked me into getting the chest X-ray, even though it would cost extra. He sent me over to the Imaging Center where I signed in and waited, working on my diagramless crossword puzzle (confound it!). My name was called, and who was calling it but Sandy Thompson... er, Kimber. I hadn't known she worked there. So she got some information from me, mostly about billing (No, I have no insurance. Yes, I'm paying for this up front). Then I got to wait again (and actually snuck a peak at the crossword puzzle's hint: the first word starts in the fifteenth column!) until a radiologist called me to have the X-ray taken. I thought I would have to lie down, but actually I just stood up in front of some... thing, inside of which the plates were located, with the X-ray machine positioned behind me. Very quick. The only thing I don't understand is that it costs $85 for a set of chest X-rays, and then an additional fee is charged for a radiologist to read the film. The first requires the second, since I am not medically qualified to read my own films--so why not combine the charges? Silliness, I tell you, pure silliness.

So I had a real chest X-ray, and a real urinalysis, but most everything else they could only ask me. It probably would've been better to see Dr. Koshy, since she was our family physician for a few years, but since that wasn't possible Dr. Catney made the best of it. He read down the check-off list on the form. "Are you diabetic?" No. "Do you have heart disease?" No. "Do you have a history of psychosis?" No. "No psychosis?" Laughing, No. He's a good-natured fellow. I mentioned the vertigo, and told him I wasn't on any medication; he apparently didn't think enough of it to mention it on the form. Their measuring stick had broken off of their scale, so they took me at my word when I said I'm 5'7. That's not so far from the truth, which is closer to 5'6½ with my shoes off.
When everything was done, Dr. Catney handed me the certificate. "Look it over, make sure I didn't miss anything." I was reading down the page when he said, "Oh, I remember what I forgot. What colour is your shirt?"
"Green..." and then I remembered the colour-blind test. Woo! Passed with flying, um, colours.
Which reminds me: Amazingly, when the nurse had me read the eyesight chart, I was able to read the 20/15 line with my right eye and the 20/13 line with my left (glasses on). I've had these glasses since my senior year of high school, and keep intending to get new ones. It seems rather incredible that all this time I've been complaining about my better-than-average vision.
Of course with the glasses off I can barely make out the giant E at the top of the screen.

Again with the earwax. For years Dr. Koshy had told me, in her lovely Indian accent, "You have very clean ears, Emily!" (though certainly through no action of my own). But the last time I saw her, a few years ago, she made no comment about the condition of my ears. When I went to the Student Health Center in November 2002, the nurse who checked my ears said they had some wax build up. And today the good doctor told me that I should have my ears cleaned; he recommended a one-to-one hydrogen peroxide and water solution. I tried it tonight, but I have no idea if I did it right. I used Dad's OTC eardrops first, then used the rubber syringe to squirt the warm solution in, but I think all I accomplished was getting myself wet. We shall see.

Old Comments (2)

supersmart zombies resist disqualefication

I think a thunderstorm is in the works.
I lurvs thunderstorms.

I have a confession to make, Mom. I didn't take your advice: I waited until yesterday to start looking for a doctor or clinic or somebody who could give me a physical exam. (No comments from the Peanut Gallery.) Syracuse Community Health Center said I could make an appointment for mid-May (and that was at their walk-in facility!); the SU Student Health Center doesn't take folks who aren't currently registered students; Dr. Koshy is out of town till May 2nd or 3rd, and the doctor who is taking her patients during this time can't see me on such short notice; Community General Hospital refers patients to doctors, but only if those patients are looking for a primary-care physician, a set of which I am not a member. Needless to say, I was in a small panic about meeting this Friday's deadline.
I called the JET Program office to ask if I needed to have the forms in their hands by the 23rd, or if it was enough to have them postmarked by then, and I explained my difficulty in completing the Certificate of Health on time. The woman I spoke with told me that I could send the forms and the passport photos ahead of the Certificate of Health, the latter of which needs to be in by May 3rd at the very latest. And the former can be sent first-class--no need to spend more for express mail. So that gives me some time. And this afternoon I found my way to the Crouse Prompt Care Center, where their walk-in exam really is walk-in. Unfortunately, there was no doctor present today, only nurse practitioners. The nurse I spoke with checked and said the doctor will be in tomorrow, but told me to call first thing in the morning just to make sure. So yay.

Oh, and the passport photos? Yuck. The guy who took my picture at Campus Copies stood one meter away from me, then counted to three before he took the first photo. I was anticipating the flash (because my photosensitivity is somewhat psychosomatic in nature), and I turned out all squinty, despite my best efforts to avoid just that. In the second photo my eyes were squinty and red. I looked less squinty in the third photo cos he took the picture without counting to three, but I looked stoned, and I imagine that can't be a good way to look when confronted by immigration officers. So after I and the photo guy looked at the digital copies of each picture, we decided that the second one was not so bad as the first. But now I wonder: my eyes look like little slits of blue ringed with red. Joe said, "You look like you have a head cold." Well I do, but I don't look that bad... do I?


Grammy and I got to talking while we were waiting in the Seattle airport for our flight back home. "Dad said you have family living in Sweden?" I said.
Yes, it turns out, her father emigrated from Sweden, and her mother from the British West Indies, where her family had moved from Britain. They each moved to Brooklyn, where her father worked in a shipyard and her mother worked keeping house for a doctor and his wife. They both attended the Baptist church there, which is how they met. After they married, they bought some land on Long Island where he built a bungalow. All five of their children were born there. They later built a two-story house next to the bungalow, and sold the latter.
Grammy herself met my grandfather when they were studying at SUNY Cortland--he was a senior and she a sophomore. She left school when he graduated and they moved to Iowa where he got his master's in education. That's where Jimmy and Peter were born (which explains why Peter's passport lists Iowa as his place of birth--even Dad was surprised; I'm telling you, my family doesn't talk much). They moved back to New York, where Dad, Jonathan, and Beth were born. The rest I've written elsewhere.
And here I'd been thinking that my family tree went back several generations before it could trace anyone outside of the US. Turns out my great-grandparents were immigrants. And now Grammy is a great-grandmother herself. She still has her mother's wedding photo--I'll have to ask if she can dig that up from somewhere.

Speaking of grandparents, my cousin Stephen's daughter Autumn (or was it Amy's daughter Katie?) ran up to my Uncle Jimmy at the wedding. "Hi, Grandpa!" she greeted him.
"Hi, Grandpa," I chuckled.
Dad and Jimmy laughed, too. "Yeah, about that," Dad said to me, "don't make me a grandfather just yet. I'm not ready to be that old."
Sure thing, Dad. I'm not ready to be that old, either.


"There goes identity theory. Zombies ate its brain." (from Plurp)
I haven't read it all. I don't know that I ever will.

Old Comments (2)