October 2007 Archives

Not a soul tonight as far as trick-or-treaters go! That's rather depressing. Back when I lived in Wallingford we would get a few kids and some dumb frat boys, but it was at least a semi-traditional Halloween (although in Buffalo half of the time it was 30 and snowing, so that's a bit different), then of course on the boat we never got anyone at the door since the gate was locked. Here there are a few kids on the street and I left the porch light on, but nada.

Oh well, if anyone wants a few Milky Ways come on by -- no costume required!

Anyway, in case anyone thought I was joking about NaNoWriMo in the previous post, the adventure officially starts in about two hours, although I think I'll wait until morning. I've been kicking an idea around in my head for the past few years, so it'll be interesting to see how it actually turns out. If you're writing, say hi to Sevenless! We'll see how this goes while also assembling my defense talk, preparing to move house, look for a job, etc, etc, etc.

I found quite a bit of video from the foster kittens back in mid-summer. Here's a snippet, which took me way longer to prepare than anticipated, but now that I remember how to work with video on a computer maybe I can do some more in the future...

With the KEXP pledge drive fast approaching and my thesis work done for the moment, it was time to catch up on all (or at least some of) the great new music that's come out recently, so I cleaned house at Sonic Boom. Unfortunately I apparently missed their free 10th anniversary compilation CD, but that just means I need to go there more frequently in the future.

The guy behind the counter commented that I looked like I was on a mission as I walked in the door and within two minutes had five CDs in my hand. It's remarkable what making a list will do for your memory!

Anyway, I obviously haven't even reviewed most of the previous CDs that I purchased but add some more to the queue...

New stuff:

• Band Of Horses - Cease To Begin


• Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals


• Tom Brosseau - Cavalier


• Iron and Wine - The Shepherd's Dog


• Beirut - The Flying Club Cup


• REM - Live (believe it or not, their first official live release)

And a pair of used albums:

• Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway


• The Innocence Mission - Birds of My Neighborhood

Obviously a few of these were purchased based on prior knowledge of the band (BoH, TB, Beirut, REM) but the others were more based off of hearing one or two things off of each, so it will be interesting to see how they all play out (no pun intended.)

As of 5 pm PDT today the first submission of the thesis is officially DONE. The entire thing has been converted into a massive 103 page, 29 MB PDF document, ready to be distributed to my committee tomorrow.

Final tally: approximately 22,000 words, eighteen figures, 163 references, 78 cups of coffee, 60 cups of tea, and one rhinovirus.

So now that my warm-up is out of the way, who's up for NaNoWriMo next week?

Um, yeah.

Oh, and it's apparently going to be sunny and nearly 75 today.

Direct link (by way of Kristin, who is probably very jealous she doesn't get to enjoy this daily wake-up call anymore.)

Strange how that seems to always happen around this time of year.

No pictures this week since my poor laptop is currently grinding out some thesis figures, but instead here are the just-minted links to the Petfinder pages for the current foster cats, which have a few photos and nice write-ups courtesy of yours truly.

Dulcie (the former Docee)

Carmela (the former Putz)

Adopt them this week and I'll even throw in a litter box, extra litter, some food and some toys!

Amazon's Top 100 most registered-for Wedding items, as retrieved this morning.

As the blog I found this mentioned on comments, it's nice to see people thinking a bit more creatively with wedding requests now, although there's still a ton of waste and items requested that get virtually no use because people think that they have to ask for stuff, rather than considering more esoteric things like this, or even better, donations in their name.

It's not always so much "do we want it" as "do we need it?" At least the Wii should get some people in better physical shape...

Apparently the 'g' key on my laptop has decided to only work about a third of the time.

Luckily 'oole.com' isn't anything too horrifying, other than not being the search engine I was attempting to load.

All 'g's in this entry were courtesy of cut-and-paste. Good thing I sent in my second thesis draft this morning while it was still behaving!

Delia napping (or at least trying to) - Nov 14, 2004 (click image to enlarge)

Sleep:
Friday night: 0 hours (thank you six cups of coffee...)
Saturday afternoon: 2 hours.
Saturday night: 4 hours.
Sunday night: 3 hours.
Monday night: 6 hours.
Tuesday night: 5 hours.

On the bright side, I've got 3/4ths of my revisions done, although the remaining quarter is by far the most difficult part.

...not that all (or even most of) that awake time was devoted to thesis work, mind you.

Just saw the name of this group on Facebook:
"If I were an enzyme i would be DNA helicase so i could unzip your genes"

Reminded me of a few other classics:
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate"

And as a Drosophilist, one of my favorites...
"Time's fun when you're having flies"