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Wednesday, September 29, 2004
A Hill of Beans
A co-worker returned from a Hawaiian vacation bearing the requisite office gifts of Kona coffee beans and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. This combination and a sinus-y headache that usually responds well to caffeine and sugar triggered in me an intense craving for chocolate-covered espresso beans. I knew just where to go; the mall across the street from the office has a mom-and-pop gourmet coffee place that is one of the few stores left in the mall that has been there at least since I moved to the area in 1987. I beelined over there mid-morningish. It wasn't until I was walking out of the place with a small bag of chocolatey beans in hand that I realized to get to the mom-and-pop coffee place I had walked right past a Starbucks.
Score one for the little guy.
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
5:34 PM
To BeBop or not to BeBop
When my brother and sister-in-law announced they were expecting their first baby -- and also the first baby on this side of the family since my brother himself was one -- they asked us all what we wanted to be called. My response was "my name is Sandra, what's wrong with that?" The subject came up again when I talked to my brother shortly after Sophie's birth. I mentioned that the coolest nickname I ever heard belonged to a girl in my 7th-grade class whose name was Walitha but went by "BeBop". However, I allowed, I doubted I could carry off a name like that. When I walked into the hospital room to meet Sophie a few days later, my sister-in-law said "Wake up, Sophie, your Aunt BeBop is here!"
That may have been revenge on my brother's part. When we were kids he used to say he'd like my kids (if any) to call him "Uncle Stinky". When he married Jo he became an instant uncle to 5-year-old twin girls. After the ceremony I told him he could now be Uncle Stinky if he wanted. His eyes lit up and he went right over to the girls and said "I'm your Uncle Stinky!" When we were talking about it last week he said it was cute to have them call him that when they were five but now that they're 13, not so much.
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
9:19 PM
Tuesday's Child
Happy birth day to Sophie Leslie Hull! She arrived this morning weighing in at seven pounds and change, 20 inches long, healthy. According to her newly-minted Grandma Hull, she has "cute little thighs". She has the same initials as her Aunt Sandra Lee, whose thighs are neither little nor cute.
Pardon a little auntly pride. This is the first baby in the immediate family since Sophie's daddy was a baby.
I'm road-tripping to Cleveland this weekend for a site inspection.
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
11:04 PM
No-GoDaddy
Trust GoDaddy to rain on my parade. I finally found inspiration to update the template here and spent a few hours tweaking same. When I arrived at an arrangement that pleased me, I attempted to publish it via Blogger to my web host, Go Daddy, just like I've done for the past 2 1/2 years. What do I get for my trouble? "Error: Connection Refused". None of the other blogs I have that post to my GoDaddy domains worked either. Same error. The one that points to a different host published just fine.
Sigh. All dressed up and no place to post.
Luckily, I remembered some space I have that came with my DSL account and so I hurriedly transferred Warped Woofing there, the better to show off the new design. (You like?) Only problem is I can't get the archives to update. It's way late now, I'll worry about it in the morning. In any event, it's temporary.
Meanwhile, DO NOT ADJUST YOUR BOOKMARKS! I fully expect GoDaddy to dislodge whatever stick it has up its corporate ass and allow me to once again post to the space that I pay them for from wherever I damn well please.
Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
11:48 PM
Is the lady of the big house at home?
A History Channel special on prisons brought to my attention a work program wherein inmates make telemarketing calls. The phone numbers and personal information of their callees are not known to them, supervisors from the contracting telemarking company close any sales, but I still shuddered as I watched and listened to one inmate do his spiel into his headset. Close your eyes and he could have been anyone anywhere making a sales call, not a denim-clad inmate with armed guards patrolling the perimeter.
What bugs me about this is that if the idea is to help these inmates become more useful members of society, why train them to be something as useless as a telemarketer?
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
8:56 PM
Vanity Fare
My personalized license plates finally arrived yesterday. It was fun trying out different phrases that fit the size and decency requirements, not to mention... me. The winner?
This is my first time around with non-off-the-rack tags. My motivation was indeed vanity but not of the type you might suspect. DC and environs are known for its transient population. This fall marks my 17th year here, making me something of an old-timer, even though in the eyes of some I'm still a newcomer. In Virginia you can keep a license plate as long as you want, and as long as you pay the fees of course. You still see Bicentennial plates occasionally. My first set of tags here was the old 3-letter, 3-number style, long since replaced by 3 letters, 4 numbers to accommodate more vehicles and more residents who come and go with the election results. Additionally, decorative plates have been introduced, making selecting a license plate on a par with picking out a check design. In 1993 I gave up the plain-Jane 3/3 plates that nonetheless said "I've been here a while" for a "scenic" plate, just because. At least I got a low numbered plate so that 11 years later they carried the same "longtime resident" status as their predecessor plates had.
But since I was not trading in the old car yet, the new car needed new plates. A randomly assigned number would scream "newcomer!" hence the workaround of getting a personalized plate. Heh, heh. A newcomer acquaintance of mine has remarked that she has never seen so many vanity plates in one place as she has here so I'm not the only one to have this thought, it seems.
Day one with the new tags and I feel self-conscious behind the wheel, as if my name and address were on the tags. In time that feeling will go away, I'm sure. Also, times being what they are, I fear that in spite of its English double-entendre, the French phrase might inspire some freedom-fry advocate to express his/her disdain with their keys on the lovely blue paint that inspired the plates in the first place. In that eventuality I'd be very blue indeed.
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
11:01 PM
Whoopsie Daisy
I swear I didn't do this on purpose. Yesterday when teaching a Dreamweaver class where the dummy database-driven pages we created advertised the wares of a fictitious florist, I announced to my (thankfully small) class that we would now test the search behavior we had just set up by searching for a subset of the list of flowers we had built previously, by typing in the first letter only. Out of my mouth before my brain could stop it: "Let's look for the D flowers."
They seemed cool with my unintentionally racy gaffe, but should any of my students have a change of heart, report my potty-mouthed ass and get me fired, kindly omit flowers and send me cash.
this piece woven by Sandra Hull @
11:15 PM