I run (and walk)! In EPCOT!

More details later, but for now…here’s some pictures of me going zoom! Or, click here for all of the pictures from this trip.

Registered and Ready to Run!

New Year’s Weekend

Games played yesterday:

• Time’s Up
• L4D2 (XBox 360)
• Wasabi!
• Hare & Tortoise
• Mall of Horror
• ebay (electronic game)
• Smallworld

Smallworld continues to be a favorite, though I still think of it as Vinci Lite. Pillars would have hit the table, but we didn’t want to play it six player. Through The Ages continues to be a tough one to get played, mainly because of the steep learning curve and long playtime. We had a really good group, with a nice mix of gamers and non-gamers. We also had a ton of delicious alcoholic beverages, thanks to our bartender, B*. The five of us that were staying the night got quite snockered. We set up the second XBox for L4D2 so that three of us could play online at once. That was really fun. It’s nice to play L4D2 with people I know instead of just random strangers.

For the rest of the weekend, I’m doing some random home projects.

A Winter Day At Work

Today was a beautiful winter day. This post on the Enjoy Illinois Blog caught my attention early in the day and got me investigating cross-country skiing (you know, because regular skiing isn’t exhausting enough for me ). So, that put me in a winter mood. I decided to take a long lunch break to run an errand out in McHenry, IL (about a half hour from my office or home). While I am working today (and tomorrow!), there’s so few people here that I can really work at my own schedule, which I LOVE. I got spoiled to having my own schedule for the 5 years or so I worked prior to this most recent job, and having a manager who believes in having you in the office from 8am to 6pm and knowing exactly where you are when you aren’t is really grating on me. I mean, seriously, this is the most monitoring I’ve ever had, and this is the most senior I’ve been…how ironic is that? At any rate, having a return to my previous self-management has been a welcome change.

From 1pm to 3pm, I went out and got to enjoy a surprisingly warm day (I should note…warm in this context = 29 degrees, which means that I don’t really have to put on a coat to run from office to car or car to shopping). There was a light dusting of snow in progress. It wasn’t floaty, fluffy snow…more like a smattering of frozen raindrops that are too light to be hail. Still, it was nice. Driving to McHenry was lovely, because most of what is between here and there is farmland (horse farms, corn farms, etc.). I drove past a large lake that had lots of ice-fishing huts. You know, I want to walk out on a frozen lake at some point. I’ve never done that..and the ones that are thick enough for trucks and fishing huts are my best bet for safety.

After my errand was done (returns/exchanges at what is now my closest available Lane Bryant…I swear, I love their bras and pants, but between the outrageous prices, arbitrary coupons/sales, and the fact that they’re at least 30 minutes away from me, I’ve taken most of my business to online shops…the only reason LB gets any business from me now is because they do at least have in-store returns for online purchases), I grabbed lunch from Steak & Shake during their 2-4pm happy hour promotion…1/2 price shakes and beverages! I had a peppermint chocolate chip shake that I could only finish half of, but it was delicious.

As for now, I’m still at work, but I’m headed out soon. I’m hoping the car wash will still be open, as Victory needs some attention.

End of Decade Lists

None of these lists are in any particular order. I limited myself to ten items in each category. Sometimes there are less, because I didn’t have more than I’d mentioned.

Best TV shows of the decade:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer – It was an amazing show. The last season suffered, in my opinion, but the show itself was just so enjoyable in almost every episode.
• Rome – I’ve never mourned the limited run of a show as much I mourned this one. It was compelling and entertaining, with a complex cast and great historic context.
• Survivor – It shocks me that this isn’t on more lists. Survivor defined the past decade of television, like it or not. It introduced the reality genre as being viable for prime-time network viewing.
• West Wing – It helped us survive the Dubya years. Honestly, I think Obama could thank Sorkin for his presidency, as this show set up a tight base of people who believed strongly that Washington could change things for the better.
• Lost – This is another game-changer, like Survivor. We’re awash with compelling sci-fi on network TV, and we have Lost to thank for it.
• The Daily Show – Another one that helped us survive the Dubya years. It remains my primary source of news.
• Freaks and Geeks – It was short-lived, and that may have saved it. It might have sucked given time. It was a rich re-telling of growing up as an outsider that resonated on a basic level, and, thanks to it, we have Jason Segel. I saw this on DVD, and I mourned the end of the series, much as I did with Rome.
• Arrested Development – Another short-lived but awesome show that had so many fast-paced and off-kilter jokes that you could barely keep up without a DVR to pause and replay.
• Mad Men – It’s simply stunning visually, and I truly care about each character. Even the “bad guys” are lovable in some odd way.
• The Amazing Race – It’s travel porn. My “I want to go to there” list gets longer every time I watch.

Best Movies of the Decade:

• Gladiator
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Kill Bill
• Wall-E
• Up
• O Brother Where Art Thou?
• Lord of the Rings
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Brokeback Mountain

Favorite products:

• Kindle
• Diet Coke with Lime
• Emerald Cocoa Roast Almonds
• Kapoosh Knife Holder, Woodgrain Finish
• KitchenArt Pro Series Salt/Pepper Dispenser/Shaker, Champagne Satin Finish
• Copco Cold Beverage Mug
• Nautica Bed Gear Sets

Awesome things that have happened to me in the past decade:

• Graduated from Tulane (thanks, Mommylady, for the reminder!)
• Paid off my student loans well ahead of schedule
• Moved to IL, got my first apartment
• Started this blog
• Mourned for the loss of several people, but most notably amanojaku, and both my grandpas
• Met and married my dear husband
• Met and became friends with B*, the Moos, and the Twos and a host of others after moving to IL
• Started working for my current employer and celebrated ten years of doing so
• Became a gamer
• Bought my first car, and bought my second without any financing
• Love(d) and was/am loved by two cats
• Donated often to charities and causes I believe in

Anything I missed?

Still not hungry

In the past 36 hours, I have eaten:
* 3 marshmallow peeps (chocolate reindeer)
* 1 southern chicken sandwich from McDonald’s
* 4 holiday cookies

And that’s it. Work has been so hectic that I’ve barely had time to pee, much less eat…and then I had to run to class last night (hence managing to grab a sandwich from McD’s, which did make me a little late to class), which meant that by the time I got home, it was really too late to eat. This morning, I skipped breakfast because of a presentation that needed polishing ASAP…and spent the whole damn day working on that same presentation at the expense of everything else that needed to get done.

Oh, by the way, I still have work to do. I’m just taking a break while some things I need are being assembled. And I’ve ordered a pizza.

In other news, for those who don’t watch the twitter feed, my dear husband did it again. I guess we’re going to the Dominican Republic in Feb. Here’s where we’re staying: http://foxyurl.com/N3J

Snow! For the blowing!

This past weekend, in anticipation of the zOMGWTFSNOWYQ!!!!FIRST WINTER STORMIZATION!!!!, we bought a Craftsman 250cc 28″ Two-stage Snowblower. Today was my first chance to use it, on the 2-4 inches of wet slimy snow that had accumulated on the driveway and walk, plus the six inches at the foot of our driveway (snowplow leavings).

So, filling the snowblower up with gas, reading the manual for how to turn it on, making sure I knew how to work the controls, and then clearing the driveway, end of the driveway, walkway, and plow accumulation area in front of our mailbox took me about thirty minutes. For comparison, doing that would normally take me and DH, working together, around 1-2 hours, depending on how good of a job we wanted to do…and the snowblower did a MUCH better job than we did. It was also fun to zoom around behind the snowblower (it’s powered, so it drives itself), though turning it is kind of a PITA and requires some muscling. Despite the snowblower, I still got very warm inside my long down coat and ended up shedding my hat and gloves to keep from sweating too much and thus getting colder.

So, I’m buzzing up and down the driveway at midnight, all happily snowblowing. I even took some time to do detail work here and there, but stopped short of really detailing the end of the driveway. I only had one “Ack! Jane, stop this crazy thing!!! Oh yeah, I just let go to stop,” moment, and no damage was done.

I drove it back up into the garage and went to park it…at which point I realized I had no idea how to turn it off. So then I had to fumble for the manual (which I’d put away while the engine was warming up) while it sat there humming away to find out how to turn it off properly. I mean, I could just yank the safety key, but I suspected that there was supposed to be some other things done first. I was right, too…you’re supposed to turn down the choke before you yank the key.

Overall, snowblowing was a fun experience. Normally, on snowy days, DH manages the snowplow end of the driveway, while I manage the light accumulation on the driveway and the walk, and apply salt as needed. I think I’m going to make him change jobs with me.

Oh!! And I’ve decided the snowblower needs a name. Any fun ideas?

Las Vegas, St. Louis, & Home

First, a Vegas round-up:

DH and Ms. Moo did very well in the HTA semi-finals, but not good enough to advance. Their googlers, me and Mr. Moo, did an excellent job…we tracked down all sorts of fun clues for them.

We stayed at Planet Hollywood at first, which was awesome, because I’d never stayed there. (DH and the Moos had flown out earlier in the week than I did.) It was also convenient for us because that’s where the HTA race was starting from. Below is the view from our room at Planet Hollywood. The room itself was unremarkable. It was decorated with memorabilia from the movie Volcano (somewhat ironic since I’d just blogged about Dante’s Peak). The buildings in progress are the MGM City Center.

On Saturday, we moved into a room at the Palazzo, which is technically a separate casino from the Venetian, though it feels like an extension of the Venetian. This was another hotel that was new to me, and our room was definitely deserving of photography:

We had an amazing view of the Wynn golf course. In the picture above, you can also see the convention center in the upper left. The convention being hosted was for amusement park ride attraction creators and operators.

DH had recently achieved Seven Stars status with Harrah’s, which has many benefits. One of the benefits is a giant comp for a “celebration dinner”. So, on Saturday night, we had our celebration dinner at Bradley Ogden at Caesar’s, with the Moos. We had decided to go somewhere nice but not necessarily opulent, because we wanted to be able to drink our way through our comp. The restaurant was excellent. I definitely recommend it. They have an amazing (seasonal) drink menu of fun ‘tinis. Toward the end of our evening, we still hadn’t used up our comp, so we all got fancy desserts and drinks. I decided to try one of the latest trends: ice wine. It was delicious, like biting into a fresh and perfectly sweet grape. But, it’s definitely a wine that you want to have in small doses as it’s sweeter than any wine I’ve ever had before.

After that, we saw Peepshow at Planet Hollywood as a group. DH, who has seen this show many times, told us that we had the second string cast and seemed to be missing a character, but we probably wouldn’t have noticed. The show had cute music and dance numbers, with plenty of opportunities to see flesh.

We went clubbing afterwards, to take advantage of another Seven Stars benefit: front of line access. That was AWESOME. This was Saturday night, mind you, and on a fight night, so the lines were insane. One club we went to had to have had at least a hundred people in line, as well as separate “VIP” lines and “single women” lines. DH flashed his card to a bouncer, and our group got escorted into the club directly…no waiting, no line. Awesome. One guy in line tried to like flirt with me to get me to take him in with me. Ha.

But, the bad part was that the clubs were really crowded, and I’m getting old, I guess. I just wasn’t enjoying it much. I saw a fistfight nearly break out between two guys, which kind of freaked me out. And, I felt like these clubs just aren’t that fun. They make you pay for bottle service if you want to be able to sit down anywhere, and the dance floor is totally minimized to make room for more bottle service areas. When there was a dance floor, it was packed, so you could barely move without running into people. But, cutting through lines was so much fun that we did it three times.

The Moos went home the next day. We hung out in Vegas for one more day. We ended up not doing much of note. I had a cupcake from a bakery in the Palazzo, and we had lunch at the Grand Luxe Cafe one day, which meant I got to have duo creme brulee (one dish of chocolate creme brulee, one dish of vanilla creme brulee…and sorry, I’m not looking up the ascii for an accent aigu). Then, we flew to St. Louis, where we were picked up from the airport in a sweet limo. We had an awesome suite at the casino there.

We also visited the St. Louis arch and the City Museum. The arch is really cool. To get up to the top, you have to crawl inside these little tiny pods. They ascend you up to the top of the arch, INSIDE the arch! They’ve been in the arch since when it was originally built…they were invented just for the St. Louis arch! The doors to get inside the pod are only four feet tall, and the pods can seat five people at most. Fortunately, it was not very crowded on a rainy Wednesday, so we got a pod to ourselves.

(Click the thumbnail to view all pictures from St. Louis.)

The City Museum is a museum that is more like a giant playground. You just kind of wander around and play with things. DH went on a slide that was ten stories tall (it was a spiral slide so you wouldn’t go too fast) and lots of slides that were 1-2 stories tall. I did not go on any slides, but I did play in the ball pit. The museum also has a big outdoor area that you can climb through, but it was closed because of the rain.

That night, we flew home. That’s when I started feeling sick. It turned out that I had a flu, and DH caught it about two days later. I ended up working at home through Thanksgiving mostly. We’ve been watching lots of movies with RiffTrax, including Twilight and Star Trek.

More pictures from our trip: Vegas-2009-11, StLouis-2009-11

Keep Out

Slate.com’s Culture Gabfest had a discussion about a DOE project regarding how to tell people/life/whatever 10,000 years from now that our nuclear waste is still very dangerous and should be avoided, as it will be dangerous for at least that long. The topic came up thanks to this article on Slate by Juliet Lapidos. But, for what it’s worth, the topic has been on several sites, including an equally informative article over at Salon.com.

The problem we’re facing is that we don’t know who these people (if they are people) will be, much less the language they will speak. A skull and crossbones is used for poison in the US, but it’s also a symbol of pirates (and could mean nearby treasure) and a symbol of the Day of the Dead (a Hispanic/Catholic celebration of ancestors). Think about how much language and symbolism has changed in the past few hundred years, much less the past thousand. Shakespeare was being positively scandalous when he coined euphemisms like the “the beast with two backs”, but even a simple word like fuck would not have been understood a mere thousand years ago, whereas most people could probably reason out the euphemism. This having been said, do you go with flowery euphemisms about sickening, wasting, rotting death?

The amazing part of this is that it goes to belief far more than science. What will our distant descendants fear? What will convince them to stay away? The most frequent idea is to build some kind of landscape feature (imaginative titles abound: Landscape of Thorns, Menacing Earthworks, Forbidding Blocks) and include text in every known language saying, essentially, you will die horribly if you dig this up.

Sound familiar? The Egyptians built pyramids with similarly morbid warnings: your ancestors will suffer, your flesh will rot, and our gods will strike you down. The pyramids were vast stone structures elaborately crafted to keep people out. That method didn’t work for Egypt; we can’t think it will work for us. The problem was that, by the time we found the pyramids, our entire belief structure had changed. We had the powers of science, and a whole new kind of god was on the rise, one that generally forgave and protected instead of striking. We had no reason to believe what the Egyptians had written.

I don’t have an answer to the problem, but it makes me wonder. What if Stonehenge isn’t some monument to an ancient god or time? What if it’s a marker for a dirty area that has now become clean with time? What if it was a disease-ridden zone, but our evolution allowed us immunity?

And that having been the case, will our 10,000-years-hence descendants be immune to radiation? Will this be a moot point?

Dante’s Peak

Okay, no one expects this movie to be the height of cinematic excellence, but it’s just cracking me up tonight:

• The USGS rep cautioning against putting the town on alert…well, of course, he dies later, because that’s what happens to wrong people in movies. But the whole idea that two people die in a hot spring and the town isn’t *already* on alert due to the news and media talking it up? ::eyeroll:: I mean, two people dying in a lake that suddenly became acid would surely warrant a blip or two on CNN, much less the state and Seattle (nearest urban area) news. And I’d credit a lack of news coverage in “ye olden days”, but the scene at the end of the rescue from the mine shaft is lit with at least twenty flash bulbs….so the two deaths in acidic hot springs didn’t warrant a blip, but the rescue of a USGS worker and a family that was idiotic enough to be still on the mountain does?
• Pierce Brosnan is so stoically British as they’re evacuating from Grandma Ruth’s house. “Rachel, Ruth, we really must go,” he says calmly as a fire erupts over one wall.
• The idiot kid who goes up the mountain for Grandma…has he not heard of a phone? And I can’t imagine that his mom had the town pull out and review evacuation plans but didn’t actually tell her kids a plan just in case…and the plan surely doesn’t involve driving up the mountain. Then again, this is a parent who simply tells her kids that the mine shaft “isn’t safe”, not grounding the kid for going in there and not telling him the reason why it’s not a good idea.
• Grandma Ruth wades through an acid lake to pull the family to safety…but the sad part is that if the adults were doing what Pierce Brosnan’s character did, wrapping their arms in fabric and rowing together, Grandma’s sacrifice wouldn’t have been necessary.
• Ridiculous dog rescue scene…but of course, we had to save the family dog. Grandma can be left to die on the mountain, but we have to risk the truck to save the family dog.
• Speaking of Grandma’s death, the special effects guys couldn’t manage to make her wounds look real in any sense of the word. The kids’ scrapes later on look far worse than Ruth’s legs from the wading through acid, and yet we get this super-dramatized scene where she just can’t go on.
• Pierce’s arm is supposedly visibly broken…we have a scene where he points a flashlight at a bone protrusion…but he still uses that arm to push himself up a half scene later, without even a mild moan of pain. Maybe shock has set in?
• We’ve got a really crappy national guard that a) crosses the town bridge when there’s clearly a giant mass of logs coming right at it and b) doesn’t tether the clearly ill-equipped minivan to one of the Hummers? Hell, I can’t imagine a National Guard that wouldn’t simply tell the USGS crew to abandon the minivan and get in the damn Hummer.