Productive

I barely budged from the computer all weekend, except for some forays into other things that needed doing around the house.

Friday night, after dashing off a quick SWAPA'zine after work, I had a nice dinner in the East Bay with Beth and Catie. We went to Tammada Thai Cuisine on DeCoto; it's about a one-block walk from the Union City BART station, which makes it very convenient as a meeting point between EastBaysians and SouthBayers. (The restaurant may be slightly hard to find if you don't know where it is: it's nestled in right next to a huge garish Home Town Buffet.) And the food's pretty good, as I'd found last time I went there. Their "medium"-spicy tom ka gai was quite spicy on Friday, but the other "medium"-spicy dish we ordered seemed pretty mild to me; still, it was all fairly tasty. B&C let me take the leftovers home; I wasn't thinking about the fact that I already had about three or four meals' worth of leftovers in my fridge. But at least it meant I didn't need to think about what to eat for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday morning I received the news that Pam had successfully given birth in the middle of the night. Yay! Everyone concerned was happy and healthy when last I heard. Later in the day, heard from Kam, who has successfully arrived in Mexico, where she'll be practicing her Spanish and hanging out with firefighters for a while.

Saturday I really did sit in front of the computer pretty much all day. Among other things, I finally converted Mary Anne's 1998 and 1999 diary entries to the database format (and noticed that 1999 was a remarkably eventful and turbulent year for her); the only remaining entries in the old static-HTML format are the 1996 and 1997 (and December 1995) ones. I'll convert the rest some day; been meaning to do this for a couple years now.

This morning I finally finished converting my new website to use a database instead of a static table; more on that in next entry.

This evening, after some editing and a brief foray into journals (I had forgotten to call various Seattleites to find out how they were doing after the huge storm of the past few days had knocked out power in much of the state), I had a sudden burst of productivity. Did dishes and laundry for the first time in about three weeks. (Various guests had done my dishes more recently than that, but somehow just about every plate, bowl, cup, and piece of silverware in the house had managed to get dirty.) Made significant progress on my performance self-review for work, only a week late. Made some further progress on dealing with my father's books; I think if I clear out the non-books from the bookshelves in my room, I may be able to fit all the remaining books on the shelves.

Also got started on my year-end donations. More on that soon.

Oh, and I cleaned up some of the diatomaceous earth that we'd spread around various parts of the kitchen for ant control. I've been feeding the ants Terro for a little over two weeks now, and they're still loving it; on the plus side, it does seem to keep them occupied enough that they don't wander around the rest of the kitchen. Still, I should probably block up their entrance or something.

I think that's about all. One more quick entry (or maybe two) and then I'd better go finish the editing I've been putting off all weekend.

Oh, yeah: happy now-slightly-belated birthday, Jacob! And, tomorrow (now today), happy birthday, Bhadrika!

2 Responses to “Productive”

  1. jacob

    Thanks! It was a good day. Jill gave me a lovely socket wrench set.

    You didn’t mention another most welcome manifestation of your productivity burst — lots of new comments on this journal. Great to see.

    reply
  2. Bhadrika

    Jed,

    I just wanted to let you know you are part of a wildly synchronistic period for me. Friday the kids and I were watching new arrivals from Netflix — Monster House (a rather good pre-adolescent computer animated movie), which of course involved some skeletal remains. Then a disc of Xena, which included an episode called “Them Bones, Them Bones” and included a Xena-style fight between two skeletons. And then the first disc of the new series, Bones (David Boreanes (sp?) as an FBI agent working with a forensic anthropologist).

    In the pilot of Bones, a key bit of evidence was traces of diatomaceous earth embedded in the remains. They really liked this term (along with “forensic anthropologist” — they repeated both whenever the opportunty arose). Then the next day I was at work and a coworker and I were surfing the net and I was showing her our favorite hatchery site and talking about our future plans to raise chickens. I clicked a tab for additional supplies they sell, and found that they sell bags of diatomaceous earth (for grit for the chicken’s gizzards, I’d guess). I commented on the coincidence of running into the term twice in two days, then turned to catch up on your journal. And here it is again, diatomaceous earth. For ants, huh?

    I couldn’t tell whether the gods were sending me a sign to keep playing on the computer, or to get off and go back to work. It was scary.

    Bh

    reply

Join the Conversation