Okay, this year’s custom Christmas mix is ready. There’s a longer playlist in Winamp at work, of course, but here’s what will be playing in my car from now until probably New Year’s. Christmas mixes are always a little atypical for me. I don’t tend to listen to a lot of jazz on a regular basis (not because I don’t like it, but because there are other things I like better)–but thanks to Tim’s corrupting influence my Christmas playlist is packed with it. This mix is mostly an even spread between pop and jazz (with a few other things thrown in), but leans toward the jazz side. You can probably tell what my favourite carols are…

Carol of the Bells (Andy Williams)
Ave Maria (Andrea Bocelli)
Run Rudolph Run (Bryan Adams)
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Chick Corea Elektric Band)
Pie Jesu (Charlotte Church)
Ave Maria (Chris Cornell w/ Eleven)
Carol of the Bells (David Benoit)
Silent Night (Special EFX)
Winter Wonderland (Eurythmics)
What Child is This (Vince Guaraldi Trio)
Santa Claus is Coming to Town (Frank Sinatra and Cyndi Lauper)
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (some unknown GRP Records artist)
Silent Night duet (Over the Rhine)
Carol of the Bells (Steven Curtis Chapman)
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (The Pretenders)
What Child is This (Vanessa Williams)
Greensleeves (Vince Guaraldi Trio)
O Holy Night (John Denver)
Oiche Chiun/Silent Night (Enya)
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (Over the Rhine)

And no… No Mannheim Steamroller. They’re good enough, but I wanted a Christmas CD without them for once. Maybe I’ll make another CD that’s just Mannheim Steamroller or something. (Maybe not.) I will undoubtedly hear plenty of their work this season, since Tim’s surely got a fair amount on his iPod, which goes with us whenever we go anywhere in his car.

I did think–just very very briefly–about doing an entire CD that was just Ave Maria, or maybe just Carol of the Bells. But even I would get tired of that quickly, I think.

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Okay, yesterday when I made my resolution to start cutting out caffeine again, I was relatively awake. Right now is the real test–I’m sort of sleepy, and a Pepsi or a mug of coffee would reeeeeally help. So far so good. I have some herbal tea, and I’ve got breakfast–hopefully between the two I can distract my brain and/or mouth from the Pepsi thing.

(I’m editing to add on to this because I don’t want to clutter things up with a zillion posts from the same day.)

And today there was another letter to the editor in our paper bemoaning Target’s decision to not allow solicitation (which coincidentally happens to include the Salvation Army bell ringers) at their stores. Sigh.

Once again, people–this decision means nothing in Bloomington. Why not? Because our Target is in the mall, with an entrance that opens onto Center Court. Halfway across Center Court, not twenty feet from the Target entrance, is a Salvation Army kettle. If you feel so strongly about putting your money in the kettle at Target instead of at K-Mart or Kroger or Marsh, go through Center Court! Geez.

Don’t get me wrong. If you want to boycott them on principle, be my guest. But for crying out loud at least bitch about the situation in general instead of making it all local and stuff–because there really isn’t a “situation” locally!

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(Yes, two posts in… probably as many hours. I’m not trying to make up for the days and days during which I haven’t posted, honest!)

I’m trying to decide whether I should do New Year’s resolutions this year or not. Well, next year. You know–here in roughly a month. There are a couple of things which I need to do, and a couple of things I want to do… But can I stick with them?

First, there’s the caffeine. I’ve actually decided to try to start this one early. I need to get back off of it. I’ve decided that the triple latte I had on Black Friday was my last coffee, and the Pepsi I had this morning was my last caffinated soda. I have some green tea that I don’t feel like giving away, so I’ll keep drinking that… But that (and chocolate, which hardly counts) will be my only source of caffeine. And once it’s gone, it’s gone; all tea I purchase from here on out must be decaf.

Then there’s the writing. I may have failed at NaNoWriMo, but it still reminded me that I like writing, and I enjoy it. I want to make some kind of resolution about writing something every day–whether it’s fiction, essay, even poetry… I haven’t decided whether “about my day” blog entries count or not, whether I’ll have a minimum or not… Well, any specifics really. But I want to get back to writing again. I’ve been gone too long.

And… the exercise. For those of you following the drama from my “workout” posts–well, I quit. Any time I had a workout that centered on lower body strength, I could count on having a good workout, challenging but not impossible. Cardio and flexibility both varied from time to time, but usually weren’t too bad. Upper body strength and core body strength workouts with Yourself!Fitness, though, have invariably left me at the very least very frustrated, and at worst sitting on the floor in front of the TV bawling. I just can’t do it. I have, like, no abs. I can manage crunches, if I don’t have to do too many at a time, but nothing more intense. I cannot do pushups of anything resembling the traditional kind, not even the girlie ones. (I have since found out that this is not unusual, as there are a number of factors which mean that women usually can’t lift that much of their body weight. Thank you muchly to Eyebrows for cluing me in–that really did help me feel better.) The program does not seem to understand this. The last time I tried to get it to decrease the difficulty of my workout so that I could follow along, it told me the workout was already at the easiest level possible. That was just the last straw; I had a rather spectacular breakdown at it and found myself completely unmotivated to continue at all.

Anyway. The point of all that is, I’m not really exercising anymore. Sure, I’m doing some walking, but it’s not really all that much, especially since my job doesn’t involve a lot of going back and forth to the lab right now and the weather is getting crappy. (Plus, the lab isn’t as far away as it used to be–I used to rack up a good 600 steps getting there, but now it’s across the hall.) So I need to get back into it somehow. The flexibility workouts with Yourself!Fitness were OK enough to make me feel OK about pursuing the idea of trying yoga… Sure, I can’t do most of the stuff as shown, but I can at least get partway there, and it’s the sort of thing I’d be OK with “making progress” on instead of just doing. I’m thinking it might be something good to try.

So that gives me three New Year’s resolutions. Can I stick to them? Do I dare try to make a commitment here? I dunno. Lately it feels like I’m incapable of seeing things through (see here), so I’m hesitant about trying things like this. But maybe it would be a good idea. I don’t know.

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Well, here it is. Thanksgiving has passed; it’s officially the Christmas season. And for once I’m actually prepared for it.

Friday we did something I’ve always sworn I would never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, do. We did the Black Friday early morning shopping thing. Actually, though, it wasn’t that bad. First we went to Bed Bath and Beyond, and we thought for a minute that we had misremembered what time they were opening–there was no one else there. They were indeed open; everyone else was just down the street at Wal-Mart, or up the road at Kohl’s, I think. After grabbing a triple latte (at Starbucks, unfortunately–if there are any local coffee shops on that side of town, I don’t know where they are) and some breakfast, we hopped down to Sam’s Club, which was similarly empty. Then across town to the mall, which is what I was really dreading… But even that wasn’t so bad, really. It was busy, but no more so than I would expect on the average weekend afternoon. We hit one snag when we went to Barnes and Noble–it was perhaps the only store in town that didn’t open early, so we had to kill half an hour until 9am rolled around. That was really the worst part of it, though. Well, that and discovering we maybe could have skipped it anyway because they no longer sell Republic of Tea, which was half the reason we went there. But we still needed to pick up some Godiva, so that wasn’t too bad. (Yeah, I know. Why would we buy books at a bookstore? *G*)

We’ve also got our decorations, such as they are, mostly up. I put away the dragons on top of our bookcase and replaced them with assorted Christmas stuff. We also put the little porcelain kiddie nativity set (complete with Precious Moments angel) on top of the wine rack and wound some white Christmas lights around it. I hung the little stocking that came with some Godiva at some point on the pantry door. It may have to move; it’s just low enough to be within batting range of the cats’ paws if they stand on their hind legs and lean against the pantry. We put up the wreath on the door, although I’d kind of like to get a real one instead of the fake one we’ve got now. We’re going to hang mistletoe in the entryway… And of course there’s the tree. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve had it up (there was no place for it in the old house), so we had to remember how to put it together–and we had to deodorize it before we decorated it! (A bit of vinegar, a lot of distilled water, and about 10 drops of pine essential oil in a spray bottle did this quite well. I’d say maybe one part vinegar to three or four parts water?)

We also got all those presents we bought on Friday wrapped, which was an accomplishment in and of itself. Whew. And thanks to the four-day weekend, we managed to do all this, go to Tim’s aunt and uncle’s for Thanksgiving, visit my parents on the way back, go over to Columbus to see my family on Saturday, do the grocery shopping when we got back from that, and still have time to relax yesterday!

(Of course, going back to work after a long weekend sucks. But it was nice while it lasted.)

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New browser wins over net surfers

IE’s market share has now dropped below 90%. Woohoo! Yeah, it’s a baby step, but it’s a step.

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I love Evanescence. Absolutely freaking love them. (And, dammit, I just remembered I forgot to put Origin on my Christmas list. Oh, well. It’s something you can probably only find on eBay, and it looks like some of those copies are getting a little pricey to be asking for as gifts anyway.) At any rate, when I heard they were coming out with a concert DVD (I didn’t even know there was a CD to go with it at the time) I was really, really excited. I’d missed being able to see them for a variety of reasons when they went through Indianapolis, so I was excited to finally be able to see a good sample of their live performance. Tim went out and got the CD/DVD combo yesterday.

We listened to the CD first, in the car on the way home from his office… And, well… yeah. It was a little disappointing. The major thing we noticed right off the bat was that the sound tech who put this together really needs to be sent back to sound tech school. (Tim was arguing for “needs to be shot”, but on reflection I think I’d be willing to grant the guy (?) another chance.) For one thing, you can hear the crowd almost the entire time. We didn’t buy this to listen to the crowd, you know? For another, instead of taking direct feeds from the microphones and instruments (you know, the stuff that would have been coming out of the speakers), someone seems to have set up a mic elsewhere to record the concert. The bass is the only instrument that sounds all right on a regular basis; the guitars, to some extent the drums, the piano and even Amy Lee’s voice sound like we’re listening to someone’s bootleg recording–which would be fine if that were actually the case, but this is supposed to be a professional recording. Most of the instruments don’t bug me that much, truthfully, but it’s a horrible thing to do to Lee’s voice. Most annoying of all, though, the crowd can be singing throughout the portion of “My Immortal” where it’s just Amy Lee and the piano (which is to say most of it); the band drowns them out when it comes in, but that’s quite a ways into the song. That really, really annoyed both Tim and I. I mean, a few lines here or there when invited? Sure. Otherwise, let’s skip recording the crowd sing-along, please. I didn’t pay good money for this disc to listen to the crowd, whether they’re singing or screaming.

Ah, and I almost forgot. One more song-specific gripe… “Bring Me to Life” is great (if you ignore the crowd), but I wasn’t impressed with whoever they got to do the male parts. He’s fine in the beginning, when all he’s doing is “Wake me up” and “Can’t wake up” and “Save me”. As the song progresses, though, he gets worse. On his final lines (“I’ve been living a lie/There’s nothing inside”), he completely loses the whole singing thing and is just sort of growling–it’s not attractive at all.

Later in the evening, we popped in the DVD, hoping that maybe the audio would be better or at least we would get more tracks or, failing all else, the special features would be worth it.

Well… yeah. *sigh* The CD audio had been taken directly from the concert on the DVD, so it was the same. The visuals were also really annoying; they seemed to be trying to make a music video out of the concert, with all kinds of weird angles and multiple cuts really fast and negative images and slo-mo… It’s like, hey, I wanted to watch a concert, you know? Also, unless we were missing a section of the concert menu somewhere, it seemed to consist of the songs from the CD. And no more. I found that a little weird; I mean, part (though not all) of the point of having the DVD as well as the CD is to have extra songs, since so much more will fit on a DVD. Quite aside from that, this is also when we realized that with only a couple of exceptions, the live material on both discs is pretty much… Well, it’s Fallen, done live. That was disappointing, too. I understand that they were touring to support that album, but… They’ve done other stuff which some of us are familiar with and really really like too. Couldn’t there have been at least a couple of tracks from Origin? Or maybe more new material? Possibly even a song or two reaching aaaaaall the way back to the original self-titled CD or Sound Asleep. (Do we have to pretend like the material they released when they were a local phenomenon and had to make do with selling CDs at their club shows doesn’t exist or something?)

So we watched a couple of songs and then went to the bonus features. I had been looking forward to some interviews, maybe some “history of the band” stuff, something like that, but quickly discovered that the bonus material (aside from the music videos) seemed to consist of random bis of backstage footage here and there. That’s fine for the Bloopers section–which I have to admit was hilarious–and the non-bloopers were entertaining for a little bit, but they got old quickly. I wanted more content and less randomness.

Don’t get me wrong here. It’s not all bad–it’s not even really bad in the first place. The music videos are great; I don’t watch the music channels that much anymore, so it was great to finally be able to see these on something larger than the tiny RealPlayer window on their Web site. The menus are really cool. Also, supposedly there’s an Easter egg somewhere on the DVD; I haven’t found it yet and so can’t comment. And the CD does contain a studio track (“Missing”) which I hadn’t previously heard. (“Previously unreleased” is misleading, though, since it turns out it was on the “Bring Me to Life” single…) Overall, though, I’m finding this a bit of a disappointing experience. I’ll probably pick a few tracks from the CD to stick on my playlist–probably some where the crowd isn’t so noticable–and I’m sure we’ll watch the videos several times over. This isn’t one that’s going to get worn out from excessive viewing/listening, though.

They’re reportedly working on their next album now; I guess I’ll just go back to looking forward to that.

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Okay. So I have been sort of wary of the new movie Alexander. I dunno, it looks neat, but… I mean, Angelina Jolie is supposed to be playing Colin Farrell’s mother. Now, think about that for a second. She’s actually not even a year older than he is. I’m not sure how much interest I have in a movie that’s going to try to pull that.

Then I saw the photos of Val Kilmer (playing Farrell’s father) in makeup and I thought, “Well… Okay. This might work.” Granted that he’s significantly older anyway, but still. I thought maybe they would apply makeup to Jolie, to make her look older too.

This photo quickly disabused me of that notion. They’ve tried to make Farrell look younger there, I think, but even in “youngish Alexander” mode, he actually looks OLDER than Jolie. In my opinion. That’s not generally the case in most of the shots IMDb has posted–they mostly just look the same age, or she looks just slightly older–but… That shot just really got me. She seriously looks about fifteen or something there.

On the other hand, interestingly enough, if you look through the gallery you’ll see Alexander go from a young boy to–well, Colin Farrell, but Jolie’s character pretty much stays the same throughout. Maybe she’s got some sort of magic spell keeping her young or something… You can never tell what the writers will feel necessary to throw in.

Weird.

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(Link to story from IndyStar.com about Target saying no to the Salvation Army removed because the page is no longer available, sorry.)

Apparently, Target’s policy requires them to decline requests by the Salvation Army to station bell-ringers outside of Target stores. Some people are taking this very hard and accusing Target of being really nasty people. Frankly, while I admit it seems a little tiny bit Grinchly, I think people are making too much of it. They’re just enforcing a policy consistently; they’re not singling out the Salvation Army for this treatment. I’m not sure why the public is picking up on this one charity.

Some arguments about it I overheard at the office:

Why do they have to be consistent?
I have to admit to having stared gape-mouthed at the person who said this. If you’re not consistent, why the hell do you have a policy? I mean, a policy is not “do this if you feel like it”, it’s “this is the way we do things, period”. If you start making all kinds of exceptions to the policy, people will never know which policies you really mean and which are flexible according to your whim. The policies become useless. If you’re going to question it, question why they have the policy in the first place. (Which might be a question for Sara B., who works at Target.)

Target may still donate to the Salvation Army, but they’re denying their customers the opportunity to do the same.
Oh, please. How many bell-ringers do you walk past every single day during the Christmas season? So there’s not one at Target. There’s one at K-Mart, there’s one at Kroger, there’s one at Marsh, there’s one at–well, just pick a store. In fact, in Bloomington, I’d place good odds on there being one in Center Court at the mall. Which makes this whole thing almost funny, because that’s where the mall-side entrance to our Target is. And, I mean, really–if you’re so set on supporting the Salvation Army, you don’t have to do it via a bell-ringer. Take it down to their building yourself. Buy from their thrift store. Mail it in. Target is not depriving you of anything by denying the Salvation Army the priviledge of ringing bells outside their store.

Target’s policy prohibits solicitors. These people aren’t soliciting!
Uh, yes they are. They’re soliciting donations, aren’t they? Even if they never ask you for anything, even if they just stand there and ring their bell and say thank you when you donate… They’re soliciting donations just by standing there with their bell and their kettle. I haven’t seen the policy itself, of course (I might have to ask Sara B. about the exact wording), but as I’ve heard it, it seems that the Salvation Army more than falls under the policy in question.

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I’m just so happy I have to brag a little. At work, my project is just about wrapped up. We’re in testing now… So this week, we had some of the people who will actually be using this software come in and try it out. One of them just handed me a copy of the memo my boss’ boss’ boss will be getting from him about their findings, and it calls the software “a high quality product that I eagerly await.” (Not only that, the only problems they found were three cosmetic issues regarding how things were worded–no actual functional problems at all.)

I need to borrow Mari’s dancing banana to properly express myself here, I think.

It’s just… I mean, I know that John and Tom have been telling me all along I’m doing a good job, but somehow it just makes me feel extra-fuzzy inside when something that I made, programmed from the ground up with only old (and sometimes defective) C code to guide me, gets that kind of praise from people who are not only from total strangers but also going to be using it.

Yay me!

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(Link to CNN article about the events described below removed because the page is no longer available, sorry.)

You know, I had a wonderful rant prepared about how it’s just a homecoming week event and whatever. Then I read the article again and realized I’d flown off the handle about entirely the wrong thing. There wasn’t even a proposed cross-dressing day. There was a “TWIRP” day. Think Sadie Hawkins dance, but all day. And no dancing.

And someone objected because somehow this promotes cross-dressing.

I’m trying to make the connection here, but I’m failing. How did we get from “girl takes on traditional male role in the relationship by holding doors and paying for sodas” to “boys wearing dresses”?

And… Sodas? What is this, the 1950s? “Hey, Janie, do ya wanna go down to the soda fountain and get a malt after school tomorrow?” “Oh, gee whiz, Jimmy, that would be swell! I’ll ask my folks if I can!”

Then again, we’re also talking about an event that pretty much comes out and says girls have to have a specially declared day to be equal partners in their relationships rather than sitting back and letting their boyfriend do everything for them, so–maybe this town has timewarped back to the 50s. Which, actually, would sort of explain the connection between “girl paying for sodas” and “guy wearing a dress”, I guess. If they expect the kids to fall into those traditional roles, I suppose giving the girl the right to hold open doors and pay for sodas would force the guy into a feminine role, which might theoretically have a teensy chance of leading him to consider wearing a dress.

Okay, yeah, that’s still not really a logical connection.

Of course, the real question is why this applies to the elementary schools at all. In the first place, I had been under the impression that homecoming week events of this sort were pretty well confined to high schools. In the second place, if you were planning a homecoming week special-day event and wanted to include elementary students, wouldn’t you plan something that they could participate in? This is an event kind of aimed at students who are of a reasonable age to date. What four and nine year olds are going to be dating, anyway? What use do they have for this sort of day? Do the four year olds even begin to understand the concept yet?

And no, I haven’t gotten into whether I find cross-dressing objectionable or not. Which I don’t, for the record; actually, I find it quite interesting that most of the guys I’ve seen in drag have looked better as women than most women do. Anyway. The acceptability of the act itself isn’t the primary issue I see in this particular case. To get to that issue, you first have to get through the issue of how the hell we got to cross-dressing from this TWIRP day concept in the first place, and that is what’s annoying me right now.

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