As many of you have noticed, the blog has gone back in time to catch up on posts from our (very awesome, wanna go back NOW) Disney trip. As such, I skipped over quite a few events that would normally warrant a blog post. I don’t want to spend another month re-capping, so below is a one paragraph, catch-all summary of the things that were, January 2009. As is fitting for anything dealing with time travel, I shall start with Lost…
Lost is back on! Desmond’s baby named Charlie, the others speak Latin, woohoo! B* made me a cake with a Dharma logo. It was delicious…disappeared very quickly, did Ben turn the wheel, shift cake through time? Obama officially president, yay! Didn’t care about inauguration until the day it was on, then was sad I couldn’t watch live and had to work instead. Re-org’d at work into new group but otherwise similar. Got one estimate for the pipe burst repairs from the guy(s) who did our basement, liked their work, but the painting estimate alone was higher than was to paint whole basement. Something smells funny in Denmark, yo. Business name is of the form, [name] the [job]er…which led to Joe-the-plumber, bob-the-builder joking between DH and I. DH has been working odd hours at his second job. Very stressful. Ran Survivor at Mensa AGOG. Had to scramble to get to the minimum ten to play, but once we got there, it was AWESOME. Everyone had bonzer good time. Yay. Knee has been hurting alot lately. Also, period has been irregular. (Not related.) WTF is up with me? Wish knee would stop hurting. But yet, I will be going skiing on Saturday, yay! And knee can just suck on that, thank you very much. Pancake continues to be adorable kitteh. Races me up the stairs. I almost won last night, but only because he let me have a 5 step head start. Thought L4D was an evil time suck, but then Mr. Moo introduced me to Braid, which now is on my bedroom xbox (not mytsukata gamertag). Damn you, Mr. Moo! Got special L4D achievement last night for blowing the witch’s head off, Cr0wnd! Sweet. So cold outside. But weather Saturday promises to be ski-awesome. Found giant and strange fruit at the store, called Pomelo, is huge and we could kill a small child with it, but we won’t. Instead, will eat. Also got some honey tangerines. Enjoying finding and trying out new fruits. Finished second term of class, am 12.5% done with MBA. Group project ended much better than it started. Next term, taking two classes: Effective Leadership *coughbullshitcough* and Negotiations & Conflict Management (win win win). Hoping negotiations will make me awesome at negotiation such that I can help Mensa with hotel negotiation stuff. Will speak quietly so they have to lean in, then will change meeting location suddenly without notice…then will threaten to kill their daughter. Oh and how did Frogurt’s shirt fit Sawyer? Nonsense.
First Lostie to catch the embedded (very subtle) clue in the style of Lost gets something nifty, though I’m not sure what. Adoration? That’s nifty, right?
This year’s WeeM was pretty good. The addition of my parents was fun. I think they had a good time, especially being my TSA Agent assistants at the costume contest. I regained an appreciation for Agricola and renewed my hatred of Caylus. I did not get sloshed, for once. I did meet a few new people, so that was cool.
I owe thanks to rmjwell for pointing me to last night’s ep. I’d gone to bed early and missed it. Also, my dear husband has me on political overload right now and probably will have me overloaded until the election. Thus, I’ve been minimizing my exposure to political stuff so as to not want to throw things at my dear husband when he does his nightly political braindump.
Fortunately, you can watch the entire episode for free at TheDailyShow.com. That’s exactly what I did while I ate my brunch of chicken noodle soup and Goldfish crackers. The best bits were the numerous instances of Republicans at the RNC completely reversing their positions on topics such as teen pregnancy, double standards for female candidates, and the validity of a small town governor’s experience. If there’s anything that The Daily Show does well, it’s that kind of bit. I know they must have a horde of interns reviewing footage to get those perfect contrasting clips, and I’m happy for it. I hope the mainstream* media picks up the banner.
I had my first ever honest-to-goodness hangover today. Generally, I can drink as much as I like, and at worst, I’ll have a mild headache in the morning. However, after last night’s Pretentious Drinking at WeeM, I woke up in the middle of the night wired and sick feeling. After I finally got back to sleep, I woke up this morning feeling nauseous. I ended up throwing up at a very inconvenient time…in that I was busy at another end, if you know what I mean. I cleaned up the hotel room, and I discovered how I’m not chewing my food very well. But, at any rate, having a hangover sucks. I have chills and achy joints. I managed to eat at last when I landed in NJ this evening, but otherwise, I hadn’t eaten at all…it just never felt like it’d stay.
Oh, and yes, you did read that right…I flew while sick. Totally not pleasant…but at least I got upgraded to first class (status rocks), so I had plenty of room and quick access to a bathroom. I ended up sleeping through most of the flight.
Even though I’m not feeling so hot today, I had a really good time at WeeM. It’s gotten to where Scott & I spend more time helping make things happen than we do just enjoying the con. You’d think that’d be a bad thing, but it isn’t. I played *lots* of werewolf, with a great guy running it. Scott also MC’d the costume contest, with me helping a bit, and people loved our patter onstage, so that was cool.
I’m the vendor coordinator for my local Mensa group’s annual convention. Our con (called an “RG” or “Regional Gathering”) draws 500+ Mensans to the Sheraton Chicago Northwest in Arlington Heights, IL. It is the largest regional convention in US Mensa.
You can get more information about the convention here. If you happen to have a craft, service, or product that you’d like to sell to the group (or know someone who does), please feel free to get in touch with me, and I can provide you with all the details.
If you want to be interviewed:
1. Leave me a comment to that effect.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
And Greg’s questions to me:
1. Have you taken legal means to be just “JC,” or do you rely on people respecting your privacy about it?
This depends on your definition of legal means. I guess the answer is definitely yes at this point. I got married. A name change comes free of charge with a marriage. However, if you’d asked me a year ago, it’d have been more questionable. I never got a court order, and my birth certificate still shows (showed?) my birth name. A court order often also allows you to request a modified birth certificate, and that’s really what most people consider a legal name change. That’s not what I did. I did another process. I had originally investigated and planned for the court order method. I waited until 2000 (instead of late ‘96 when I turned 18) because a court order requires a court visit, which is easiest when you aren’t out of state at college most of the year. Also, the court process in most states requires a significant amount of in-state paperwork first. For example, in Illinois, you have to run an ad in a local newspaper for six weeks that declares your intent to change your name. You also have to file some paperwork before and after the ad is run. I’ll also say that the process varies by state, and it’s incredibly difficult to do in South Carolina, medium difficulty in Illinois, and not at all difficult in California. Given this, I also wanted to hold off given that it was likely I’d be moving to an easier state than SC after college. However, once I did the research again in 2000, I found out that you can change your name to an initialization or an accepted shortened form (e.g., Billy instead of William) with the Social Security office without going through the typical court order process for a name change. All you have to do is offer up an identity document showing the old name (such as your birth certificate) and an identity document showing your new name. Normally, the latter is hard to get until you either get a court order or have already gotten the Social Security change, but in Illinois, the DMV will print just about any name you want on your driver’s license. Yay for IL!
2. How was your adjustment moving from SC and New Orleans to Illinois?
It was actually pretty much fine. Thanks to the internet, I met people pretty easily. That’s how I found the Illinois Board Stiffs, aka the Thursday night gaming group at the Plus. I also joined Mensa not long after moving to IL, which helped me meet people…and got me started doing rallies, which helped me meet more people (including my husband eventually). Weather-wise, I was fortunate enough to end up in a job that allowed me to work from home as much as I needed to during that first year. The first few snowy days, I stayed home. I got forced to drive in the snow on a day that it snowed while I was at work; I hadn’t realized how stupid it was to stay at the office when many others were leaving at midday to avoid driving in the weather. My normal 15 minute commute took an hour, but it was also extremely fun and rewarding. After that, I didn’t fear the little snows, and I felt like a pro at predicting the right time to leave to avoid the major snows. I also gradually established a full winter wardrobe and subsequently discovered that I love coats and sweaters!
3. Because it applies so well, I’m going to steal wholesale Mark’s question to me: What are the most and least positive aspects of your current parental setup?
The most positive aspect is that I don’t have to worry about any of my parents living alone. Especially as I get older, I’m very very happy that they have each other still. The least positive aspect is that I worry about their individual and collective happiness. That may seem in contrast with the previous statement, but it’s not. It’s easy to sacrifice personal happiness for safety, security, or any one of a myriad of things, and it’s hard for me to tell from the outside (and also as The Kid) whether there’s true happiness on all fronts. I can’t imagine the situation would persist if there weren’t. Nonetheless, I’m not sure that I, for my own selfish reasons, would change things if I could (see first statement of this paragraph).
The medium positive aspect, and quite honestly the most frequently occurring aspect, is having to explain the situation to others and dealing with the subsequent reactions (which have been sometimes positive and sometimes negative). I don’t really care if people disapprove, but it’s just so damn hard to explain, and I also get really sick of people giving me incredulous looks and/or acting like I just said my parents live in a tree and speak the language of squirrels. It also sucks that it’s very hard to find people to talk to when I am having my own personal emotional troubles over it. It’s so unusual that there’s not a support group for it, and quite frankly, even people who are accepting don’t really understand, and I end up spending a fair amount of time just explaining…to the point that I just don’t bother.
4. What would you have done if engineering wasn’t your thing?
Easy…law school. I’ve been “almost there” so many times anyways, and believe me, if I was having trouble finding work or I was seeing myself have problems with my current job, I’d be in law school in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t mind making a career out of writing or editing either, but I like money, and writing/editing isn’t a solid moneymaker for most. I loved every single one of my English Dept. classes in college. I took so many elective English courses that I was almost a double major; I just refused to take the 100-level boring basic courses that would have finished me out. Instead, I took 400 and 600 level courses on fun topics like Women’s Literature through the 18th Century, a whole semester on Milton, 3 semesters of Shakespeare, Modern Irish Literature…it was awesome. Those classes were my refuge after a long day of programming and number crunching in my core curriculum, and I got straight A’s in them, too.
5. You and Scott seem to be very much into each others’ hobbies. What does he like that you have no interest in, and vice versa? (skip the vice-versa bit if you’d rather not draw him into it; i’m not interviewing him, after all…)
He likes politics. During the election, he wouldn’t let me change the TV off of CNN. During Katrina and the aftermath, it was CNN all the time. If there’s any major political event, the TV is on CNN. Drives me nuts. I have a much more peripheral interest in that sort of thing. I’m far more into blogging and writing than he is, as is made very obvious when you look at his LJ. There’s also degrees of shared interest. For example, he’s into the advantage gambling to the point where I consider it his second job. I’m into it more for fun that happens to be profitable, or simply as a thing to do with him. I had a phase where I was equally into it, but that has dissipated. I do miss video poker though. It was something you could get lost in, like a meditation. I like going to see movies on opening weekend; he prefers renting DVDs. I read much more voraciously than he does. I love to shop, and he doesn’t…but that works out well for us because I shop for him, which relieves me from feeling shopping-guilt and relieves him from the burden of shopping.
There’s also things where we may share an interest for awhile and then one or both of us fade away from it. Rallying and Orienteering come to mind. It is true that if one of us stops doing something, the other generally follows or at least becomes far less active in whatever the thing is. Scott stopped doing orienteering after I lost interest in it, and I stopped doing rallying after Scott lost interest in it.
In my day to day websurfing, I often come across this ad masquerading as a puzzle:
I can’t get to the source site from work, and I’m not interested enough to bother when I’m at home (nor do I read the news sites that have this ad when I’m at home). The question bothers me on a number of levels. Are they asking me to make the fish swim to the right? Which direction is right? My right or the fish’s right? Or, are they asking me to make the fish swim correctly? If so, I’m not sure I know what’s wrong with how the fish is swimming now. Maybe it’s because its fins are too big for its body? Or because its fins are inflexible wood instead of cartilage? I’m not sure I can fix that by moving three matchsticks, no matter how smart I am. Really, is the fish swimming if it has no effective motion? What about currents? Where’s this body of water in which the fish is swimming such that I can point it to the right side? Do I need to give the fish moral guidance to keep it from the wrong side?
You may think I’m being a smartass, but this is the fatal flaw of IQ tests: vague wording. I remember when I tested to get into Mensa, and I took the “fill in the blanks” test that was not multiple choice, I was frustrated as all get out because of questions like this. With multiple choice, the problem is slightly mitigated because you have a limited range of choices. So long as the question writer doesn’t allow two possibly correct answers into the pool, the question can be valid. If you open it up to any answer though, you need to be a heckuva lot more specific.
Let’s assume for the moment that the purpose of the question is to institute some change in the direction of the fish’s pointy part (or the “nose” of the fish…if I could edit the diagram easily, I’d mark it). By moving three matchsticks, I can make it point toward the top of this page, albeit in a squashed form. That would be a ninety degree rotation in the clockwise direction, and could be considered a right turn from the fish’s perspective. Likewise, by moving three matchsticks, I can make it point to the right side of the page (to “swim right” from my perspective). That’s two different answers that can be reached from this problem, and the wording is ambiguous such that either could be what the writer considers correct.
I hate that kind of thing. I used to write requirements for a living. Written requirements have the same fatal flaw as IQ tests. I was good at my job writing requirements because I tend to be able to see this kind of ambiguity inherently, and I correct it when I see it…as opposed to a fair amount of people who write it as they think it without thinking about how someone else might read it.
Nowadays, I read requirements written about as crappily as this problem for a living, and then I enforce those crappily written requirements on others with a wink and a nod at how crappy they are. If I try to fix them, I get criticized (on behalf of my company) for being the only vendor to not understand the requirements that are CLEARLY saying something that they’re not. Nevermind that every other vendor is non-English speaking and that they are very likely just guessing…or claiming English ignorance to ask the question instead of asking for a clarification of the requirement…or designing to the test plan instead of designing to the requirements (likely).
I get so bothered when I see this ad that I want to throw something at the screen.
Yes, I’m working on finding another job. I could have another job at any moment. My current one just won’t let me go. :: sigh ::
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Oh and how did Frogurt’s shirt fit Sawyer? Nonsense.
