Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Five years ago on this date, Ed and I got married. At the reception, the room was full of would-be funny people (surprise) who kept asking “So, how’s married life?” The best answer I could come up with at the time was “One big party, so far.” After the party ended, I spent about three months just reveling in not having to plan a wedding any longer. Five years down an occasionally-bumpy road, married life is great. And I’m still reveling in not having to plan a wedding any longer.

Hope your Halloween is as good as mine.

After a particularly intense workout yesterday, I was sitting in front of my locker trying to do some yoga breathing in order to get my heart rate down a bit. One of the gym’s employees looked at me, obviously quite concerned, and asked if I was OK. I smiled and told her to just let the heart attack kill me, in what I thought was a fairly obviously joking tone of voice. I was wrong–she was ready to go get a defibrilator. I assured her that no, really, I was fine, and it wasn’t necessary. I tend to get very red in the face, as I’m mushroom-pale. She said “It’s not that–you just looked so serious!”

Apparently, serious is a very bad look for me. I should probably give it up.

This week, Ginger asks

Have you ever played in a game that has challenged you in some way? What was the challenge? Do you think you lived up to it? How did it affect other games you play/have played?

Good one.

The Grand Ellipse was a challenge for a couple of reasons. First, I’d never run a play-by-email game before. That was mitigated by the fact that the players were competing (mostly) so there wasn’t as much coordination as I’d expect in a team-oriented game. The other reason was that the game seemed to be “always on.” Instead of a set time and place, I’d find myself reacting to emails–or more often, email chains–at the drop of a hat. Oddly enough, I think it that tended to increase the anticipation and tension, rather than allay it. Keeping that up for weeks on end was definitely the biggest challenge.

I’ve had to step up my hours at the lab lately, and as a result, my normally haphazard housecleaning has become downright hazardous. Things aren’t likely to slack off ever until well into January, and that’s an optimistic estimate. It’s been driving me crazy, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do anything about it. (I don’t know how my dad can expect me to put in all kinds of unpaid hours at a moment’s notice for his business and expect me to produce his grandchildren at the same time. Frankly, I’d rather not do either, but I’ve chosen the one that’s easier to live with. But I am not going to open that can of worms until I finish the worms I already have.)

Serendipitously enough, a friend of a friend is relocating here, and interested in picking up some income until she can find a job. I’ve met her, I like her, and I am completely assured of her competence and reliability. And I am told that she was pratically ready to crawl through the phone line to come over and clean my house. Nobody should be that excited to clean my house, especially given what I’ll be able to afford to pay her. (Reasonable, although not as generous as I’d like to be. Circumstances do not permit.)

So, in the midst of everything hitting the fan, I didn’t get to write about how cool Doug’s one-shot game was on Friday night. How cool was it? Let me recount the ways…

I knew the game was going to rock when Doug started describing the available characters. I simply had to have the practical-joking, drug-addicted, megalomaniacal, ex-Navy bomb-delivery dolphin. (Apparently, Doug and I are very sympatico on the topic of “Johnny Mnemonic”–the short story, not the movie.) The gay ex-Navy Seal (not the marine mammal) was the only other character that interested me, and that was a distant second. The Navy had named the dolphin Nietzsche, although she didn’t answer to it. (”How were they supposed to know you were female?” “They should’ve asked Jung.”) When else was I going to get the chance to call the other characters “speciesists,” and say things like “I’m sentient–I need a lawyer,” “How the monkeys ended up with the opposable thumbs is beyond me,” and my personal favorite, “I have a cousin who works at Sea World. Maybe he can get you tickets.”

The premise of the game was that the characters were all part of a top-notch civillian underwater salvage company (”We go deeper and longer”). The game started out with a (player character) Suit arriving via speedboat at the job site just as we were setting up. Being the practical joker that I am, I decided to have the dolphin pretend that she’d been run over by the speedboat. Doug, $DEITY bless him, let me go with it. The other players quickly got into the act, with the new-to-the-operation, PETA-member marine biologist throwing a hissy fit, the doctor hitting golf balls at me off the deck of the ship to “test the dolphin’s reflexes,” and the Suit immediately emailing headquarters’ legal department to absolve herself and the company of all liability.

That more or less set the tone for the evening.

We did manage to surprise the heck out of Doug by negotiating a solution without a single PC getting hurt, let alone killed. The sole casualty from our group was an underwater robot. (Not sentient, and therefore not in need of legal representation.) He, in return, left us with one of his trademark always-leave-’em-wanting-more endings. I’m not giving that up in case Doug ever decides to re-use the game, but I will say that at one crucial point near the end, several of the other players looked at me and said (player-to-player) “When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes.” Well, what do you think a megalomaniac is going to say?

So, today, I have a new list of things I never wanted to have to find out.

1) Who do we call, besides a lawyer, when Ed’s employer bounces his paycheck?

2) What the hell did our bank do with the entire contents of Ed’s account?

3) How am I going to give a good interview tomorrow morning given everything that’s going on?

and a two-parter

4a) Given the way things are going, what’s going to happen tomorrow, and b) how much tequila am I going to need to cope with whatever it is?

I thought I was going to have a big family Thanksgiving at my house this year. I had friends coming in from both near and far, and more cousins than I can count. After traveling to other states for the past two years, it was going to be my turn to stay home and cook. I was really looking forward to it–getting the house in shape, lots of baking, and getting to see my extended family.

Or not.

My brother and his girlfriend can’t make it out from Oregon. Friends from afar had to change their plans. The husband of my cousin who just had twins just got a new job, which is great for them, but they can’t travel all the way here from Boston, and are going to her parents’ house in upstate New York instead. So, that means my aunt’s family and my grandmother in upstate New York won’t be here either. And because upstate New York is where my grandmother and the new babies will be, my uncle’s family from Illinois will be going there instead of here. Meanwhile, for various reasons, there’s no way that Ed and I could manage to go to upstate New York this year, even if we didn’t have our local guests–which include my parents, and who knows if they’ll decide to go east, too? I wouldn’t want them to miss out on the big family Thanksgiving; given how much I want to be there, it would be pretty damn petty of me to hold them back. I’m not angry at anyone; I’m just disappointed. Very disappointed.

At this point I’m ready to call the whole thing off, order pizza, and watch football all day. Which would be Ed’s idea of a perfect Thanksgiving anyway, and that’s no small consideration.

Dorothea is taking some eminently undeserved heat for teaching hand markup instead of Dreamweaver. She contends that “Dreamweaver skills become obsolete as fast as any other single-program skills.” I’m not going to argue that point, as she’s right. The value in hand markup is like the value in knowing how to change the oil in your car. You may not want to do it yourself all the time, but you understand the process and expected results.

That said, single-program skills are useful, in that once you understand the use and functionality of the single program in question, it’s easier to learn similar and related programs, not to mention the acquisition of peripheral knowledge related to, but not specific to, the program. And there is that pesky job-market angle to consider–eventually, most of us are going to have to take that into consideration. Just to remove markup from the debate, let’s talk about Photoshop for a moment. I started learning Photoshop 4 or 5 years ago. In the process, I learned an awful lot about digital imaging and image editing in general, a smidge about digital cameras, and a good deal about scanning, which are not Photoshop-specific bits of information, but are very useful when one’s goal is to end up with a spectacular digital image. Furthermore, because I understand what Photoshop is intended to do and how it does it, I can go into another photo-editing program and learn my way around fairly quickly. I also have a head start on Illustrator, because even though the programs are intended to produce different kinds of graphics, they use some similar tools and techniques.

Going back to markup–personally, I like Dreamweaver, especially in comparison to say, FrontPage. I enjoy using it, and I like the results that I get. However, I know that I wouldn’t get nearly so much use out of Dreamweaver (or troubleshoot my markup as easily) if I didn’t understand what was going on behind the scenes. So, nuts-and-bolts knowledge is indeed valuable. However, there’s nothing wrong with learning automated tools to make the process easier. Personally, I think one is better off acquiring the nuts-and-bolts knowledge first, if one intends to be more than a casual user. It saves un-learning bad habits later.

And I shouldn’t have to say this, but–there’s no excuse for rudeness, especially to someone who is donating her time, effort, and knowledge for your benefit.

I’m having a geek moment, as I finally figured out how to do something so sensible that it boggles me.

My current job involves a lot of validation technical writing. This means lots of documents that share the same information. I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could make MS Word refer to text in Document A in all the other documents, instead of copying and pasting again into every other document every time Document A gets updated?” And I have found a way to do it. I’m so excited that I just had to share it with everyone. (And six months from now, I’ll have it written down somewhere.)

1. Open Document A
2. Select and copy the text
3. Open Other Document
4. Edit > Paste Special
5. Select Format (I’m using RTF in my Word documents)
6. Select the Paste Link radio button
7. Click OK

Viva single sourcing! And thanks to Mel, who loaned me the how-to book.

Enough complaining about life, the universe, and everything. I wish I could remember where I found this recipe, but I suppose the important thing is that I did find it.

Open one bag of your favorite prepped salad greens. Add dried cranberries, toasted almonds or pecans, and crumbled blue cheese. Dress lightly with balsamic vinegar.

There you go–five ingredients including the dressing, and all you have to do is open packages. Much, much easier than pie. Even easier than my former favorite salad, as you can see…

Open one bag of your favorite prepped salad greens. Add fresh blueberries, thinly sliced green onions, hazelnuts or almonds. Drain one small can of mandarin orange slices, reserving the juice. Add the orange slices to the salad. Add some rice vinegar, salt, pepper, and whatever herbs are handy to the reserved orange juice and shake well, then drizzle over salad. For a main dish, I like to add cold cooked shrimp or chicken. (I prefer shrimp.)