Mishaps and other haps

Yesterday was a half-holiday (Good Friday) at my workplace, so at 11:25 on the nose I was speeding down the parking ramp.

By the way, the scoring system is 500 pts. for regular employees, 1000 pts. for temp workers, 10000 for execs.

After some failed shopping attempts that left an extra $100 or so in my pocket (this is failing?!), I went home and accepted the 200 or so events PhysOrg had sent to my Google Calendar during the day. Fun summer coming up!

When Phys was finished with work, we went out to lunch. An hour or an hour and a half after we got back, I was suddenly so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I went upstairs and napped for two or three hours.

I played a little WoW later in the evening, but went back to bed before long and got a full night’s sleep. So I feel back up to normal energy levels today … but where is all of this tired coming from? Does staying up late a few nights really kick my ass when I am up at 6 every morning? Maybe …

My heart is still pounding.

I heard a loud, large, destructive sound coming toward me and couldn’t see outside, so I thought it was a tornado.

Thought I was too late to get out of the way.

Scrambled downstairs, remembered people, threw open PhysOrg’s door, shouted “BASEMENT!”

Then they said it was hail and laughed at my degree of panic.

I laughed with relief as I collapsed and somehow didn’t pass out.

Got back upstairs, posted my panic on Officer Chat, remembered Mlitiagrl was down the hall, too, and I had not pounded on her door in my panicked state. Doh!

EDIT: It took an hour or so for me to completely calm down. Was a good excuse to stay up late and watch The Client while the boys played Oblivion.

Heading to bed soon. Glad I only have to work until 11:25 tomorrow.

A recent OOTS strip referenced phrenology! W00T!

EDIT: One of my mentors in grad school had a styrofoam model of the head with the areas that corresponded to various phrenological “traits” labeled. He would bring the model into his History of Social Science class on the day he lectured about phrenology.

Now people are using DNA tests to determine their geographical ancestry more precisely.

I’m not sure how I feel about it being used to apply as a minority for college or a scholarship if you are 95% caucasian. That seems like abuse of the system and not what affirmative action was intended for.

On the other hand, it seems like a really useful tool if you don’t have decent family records of your ancestry, or if you suspect that details of the past relating to your family tree have been hidden or purposefully manipulated.

It does revive the much-debated question of what “race” is, too. Obviously in the United States, race currently amounts to a skin-tone marker.

Also revives the question of the extent of genetic racial differences, which has been hotly-debated ever since … well, ever since Mendel’s work was rediscovered.

It dawned on me twice in the past 12 hours– once last night and again in the shower this morning.

Those nights of coming home early, hanging out, crashing, gaming and playing computer games? I have a feeling that in about a month, there is going to be a disruption in this comfortably lax schedule.

Between house shopping, moving, people being out of town at different times, and having visitors in town for a few weeks, it’s going to be a busy summer. In addition, there will be more scheduled events on the weekends and likely more things we want to do in general on the weekends.

Certain things *have* to be done. We have to figure out where we are living next year. That ball will start rolling on May 1st and we had better try to get as much done on that project as quickly as possible, while people are in town and there is not too much else going on.

Did I do anything this weekend? Oh, yes. I played WoW. A lot of WoW.

I was a little burned out by Sunday night and very tired from staying up late Friday and Saturday nights and sleeping odd hours during the weekend. I went to bed a little early last night and slept for about eight hours (at the right time), which helped tremendously.

Not too long ago, our guild picked up its hundredth member. We’re up to 103 or 105 now, I think. In terms of actual players, this amounts to thirty-something individuals, I’m guessing.

So the guild is not huge by any means, but we have started to build an awesome community of people online to roleplay, run dungeons, and quest with. Suggestions have already been made that we find a time to set up an in-person “guild meeting” sometime in the distant future, if we can pull that off

I have never really established much of a connection with anyone I have met online before (besides the one Canadian writer guy who used to send me lots of rambling, Garrison Keillor-esque prose that probably would have been a lot funnier to me if I was Canadian). So it’s kind of neat to have a network of people that we “see” at least a few times a week and run around doing virtual things with. That being said, I know at least 1/3-1/2 of our guild in person, so that makes me a lot more comfortable with this community than I would be in any other kind of online group.

All this being said, the weather is warming up and I’d like to start spending more time out and about in the evenings and on the weekend. If I had a laptop, I’d just go downtown this summer, hang out at the Union Terrace or at a cafe table on State Street, and play WoW.

I forget exactly how it started, but sometime at home last night, PhysOrg and I got into a conversation about religion and philosophy that continued as we were driving to dinner, as we were ordering, and as we were eating dinner– probably much to the dismay of the people we were sitting next to at Red Robin.

Oh, I guess it started as a good-natured discussion of Catholicism, Christianity, Heaven and Hell that led into a discussion of which individuals supposedly reside in the Mouth of Satan, with Judas being one of three Mouth residents. PhysOrg thought it was a reference from Dante’s Inferno, but when Hitler was mentioned as another of the three, I doubted that was the case, unless it was Dante a la Nostradamus. With a little bit of Internet poking, he discovered that the threesome is Judas, Hitler, and Stalin, but I’m not sure we ever figured out what the reference was (with its strong 20th C. bent, I am guessing some kind of post-WWII propaganda, but I don’t know whether to guess church-sanctioned or not).

Anyway, it should make a lot of people feel better to know that Stalin and Hitler are getting theirs, but I expressed some concern that Judas should be included in this group. He comes off awfully bad in the Christian texts, but really he only betrayed one man and according to the same stories, his actions resulted in the salvation of mankind, so should he really get sent to Maximum Hell along with two 20th C. mass murderers?

AS IF SOMEONE OUT THERE WAS WONDERING THE SAME THING … and … JUST IN TIME FOR EASTER … today the NY Times published a couple of articles today about Gnosticism and the Gospel of Judas that has recently been found and translated. Very interesting stuff.

I noticed that there was a problem with my old blog style tonight, so I changed it. It’s probably some kind of temporary LJ issue that will be resolved in a couple of days, but it looked kind of weird so I picked something that looked a little less weird.

I am totally ready to drop– very tired, but in a decent mood tonight.

Also, I heard back about our department schedule issue today. I will be able to leave work at 4 PM five days a week now. Yay! It’s a small concession considering what has happened this week, but it’s something.

Thanks to everyone for taking my mind off things last night.

PhysOrg and I baked and ate a pizza and played Teqnoq and Minni for a while. Singularity and Inle showed up and we played Arkham Horror. We rocked out to the Voodoo Organist and Metallica. Mlitiagrl took some time out from studying and came to visit.

Apparently no one else in my department slept last night, or they woke up in the middle of the night needing migraine medication.

Despite drinking half a pot of coffee, when I fell asleep, I slept like a baby.

This morning my energy bar tasted like ass. Or like chemicals.

So I replaced it with an energy bar that tasted like peanut butter.

Yeah, I am fairly picky about what those things have in them, as well as what they taste like. Essentially, I don’t want them to taste like what they have in them.

The Clif bars are failing miserably in the taste department. I am disappointed. Powerbar Harvest is doing pretty well, but I’m mostly fond of the Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip variety. Odwalla bars (again, the peanut butter flavor) are also quite acceptable, but they are harder to find and I’m not always willing to make a special trip for them.

I like the super-nutrition type energy bars for breakfast (usually around 11 AM, since I am not hungry earlier in the day), but I would be willing to go for something less fortified/chemical if I could find bars that I like that do not have ingredients that I dislike (high fructose corn syrup, for one– I totally read labels).