The Future of the Blog

You know…  This  is hardly the first time I’ve been accused of being outside the mainstream.  It may, however, be one of the first times I’ve ever felt terribly surprised at the accusation.  Blogging isn’t mainstream?  It’s even made appearances on CSI (Miami)–how much more mainstream do you get than prime-time network TV?

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Hrm.

Tim and I watched Serenity with Russ and Jen a while ago. It was a wonderful, wonderful movie. I’d never seen Firefly, but the movie totally made sense to me anyway–and made me want to see the series.

Then yesterday I read Television Without Pity‘s recap of the movie. It was really, really interesting. Most of the recaps on this site are downright snarky; that’s the whole point of the site, after all. This one wasn’t in the least. It examined the various elements of the film, revealed layers of meaning I hadn’t considered, and just… Wow, you know?

This inspired me again to want to watch the series. We do conveniently have a copy of the DVDs, for the moment… But unfortunately there’s just not been time. So I’ve started to read recaps instead. They’re easier to fit in–a page here, a page there.

I find myself in an odd position here. Because… What I didn’t necessarily realize before was that the movie occurs a few months after the end of the series. As such, it’s essentially the final installment–and that means I just spoiled a lot for myself by watching it first. There’s all this mystery about River, and about the Reavers… And… It’s not a mystery to me. I know exactly what the Reavers are already. I know about River, where she’s been and roughly what she’s been through and what’s up with her. It’s a little bit of a disappointment.

Of course, what I’ve read so far in general is a bit of a disappointment–it doesn’t seem to be living up to the movie. But then I’m only a couple of episodes in, so I’m not writing it off yet. The movie didn’t come out of nowhere; there must be more in there. And I can think of several series that I would never have gotten into if I hadn’t stuck with it for more than the first couple of episodes. And, of course, these are just recaps; I must see it for myself before I make any final decisions.

But based on this, I do have to belatedly advise that anyone who’s not seen either, but wants to see both, should watch the series first.

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Yesterday was a pretty damned good day. We finally paid off the loan on our older car (the second loan we’ve had secured by it–this one was used for debt consolidation). We paid off one of our credit cards that’s been haunting us for a while. And…

I had to buy a new belt, because the old one is too big. That’s not the good part. The good part is that I realized the pants I needed it for were the ones that I almost returned this time last year because they were too small. I got lazy and forgot to do it, and then when I started dieting they became my “skinny pants”.

They’re practically falling off my hips now.

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I think I’ll probably be moving to a WordPress blog on my own Web space soon. Tim is going to install it for me tonight, and of course I have to play with it a bit before opening it up. I’ll keep y’all posted.

This is something I’ve been meaning to look into, and when Tim brought up WordPress out of the blue tonight, it was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Oh, also? Tim may be starting his own blog. Whee!

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Got bored again. Changed the template again. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. The image you’re getting bits and pieces of here is Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone at Arles; the full painting can be viewed by clicking here. (This is apparently a rather green scan of it; other scans I ran into trying to find this one were sometimes more blue. In some cases very vibrantly so.)

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Mummies found just yards from Tutankhamun’s tomb

Which if you ask me is actually a pretty poor headline for such an exciting story. In 1922, KV62, the famous tomb of Tutankhamun, was uncovered in the Valley of the Kings. Archaeologists have thought that the valley was done after that, all the tombs found. This week, they proved themselves wrong. Just a few feet from Tutankhamun’s tomb, they found another with five sarcophagi in it, hidden under a pile of workers’ huts. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found in a similar manner, so perhaps the secret to having your tomb survive for millenia intact is to be sure workers’ huts are constructed over the entrance…

My imagination barely knows where to go with this. What it’s like to be the first people inside that tomb since the 18th dynasty (1550-1307 BC)? What it’s like to be the first person in 84 years to find a tomb? What it’s like to find something you thought was impossible? What circumstances gave rise to the apparent haste of the burial? Who’s buried there? (The story indicated probably not a king, but otherwise we’re not sure, I guess.) And are we going to see a repeat of the alleged “curse of Tut’s tomb” where everyone associated with the discovery dies in strange ways (allegedly)?

Most of the articles I’m seeing are kind of assuming that you know when the 18th dynasty was relative to anything else. Having had not a clue myself, I thought I’d look it up for those of you who are in the same boat. It’s actually the same dynasty Tutankhamun was from, which also features such highlights as female pharaoh Hatshepsut, the construction of the palace at Thebes, and Akhenaten’s attempt to introduce Egypt to monotheism. Which I guess makes sense, what with being so close to Tutankhamun’s tomb.

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Got a new computer at work today. I’ve been spending the day building the software and such back up to where I need it. It’s not cutting edge or anything, just a cheapie Dell Dimension, but woah. I hadn’t realized how awfully slow my PC had been. Nor had I really thought about the fact that it was, you know, five years old.

The old machine: Purchased in 2001. Systemax, aka TigerDirect special. Athlon 850MHz (maybe 800?). 256MB of RAM (two 128MB DIMMs); motherboard will take up to 768 (in three 256MB DIMMs). 20GB hard drive, plus a 40GB Seagate drive I added later for data. Windows takes roughly 15 minutes to boot completely.

The new machine: Arrived yesterday. Dell Dimension 3100. Pentium 4 2.8GHz. 1GB of RAM. 80GB hard drive plus the Seagate if I choose to use it. Windows boots up in, oh, about 60 seconds. Maybe less.

Whee!

This change was sparked by the discovery that my poor little Systemax didn’t meet the minimum system requirements for a program I needed to run to, you know, do my job. I needed at least 256MB more of RAM; my boss wanted to just get three sticks and max out the system. Thing is, the RAM that would work on my Systemax was so old that it was actually only a very small amount more to get a cheapie Dell (no monitor). So between that and the fact that my processor was borderline at best… New computer! Yay!

Software still takes forever to install, though, especially big packages like Office 2003 and the programming software I use. So I’ve been doing a lot of waiting today. Of course, this was only partly because of file copying and application installation… I also had to uninstall a bunch of crap that Dell puts on their system. Including McAffee, since we use Symantec–that was a pain in the ass because even when I thought I’d closed it and turned it off as much as I could, Windows kept insisting it was running. But I perservered and got it wiped away eventually! Unlike Quickbooks, which I uninstalled, but apparently not thoroughly enough to keep it from coming up asking for its disk when I reboot. *sigh*

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A quick search of my blog reveals that I haven’t posted this yet. I can’t believe I haven’t. It’s the best oatmeal recipe ever. Comes from Alton Brown.

Ingredients:
4 cups water
1 cup cream
1 cup steel-cut oats
handful (1/4c? 1/3c?) dried fruit of your choice

Instructions: Throw everything in the crockpot on low overnight. Makes about 5 one-cup servings. Reheats very well.

Notes: First off, the cream. If you’re concerned about fat, half-and-half or whole milk still works relatively well. 2% milk is borderline. Don’t use anything less than 2%, though–the oatmeal will turn out kind of watery instead of nice and creamy.

Second, the fruit. I highly recommend cherries, raisins or cranberries for this. Chopped apricots also seem to work pretty well. However, I’ve found that apples and pineapple are just disgusting in this recipe. Their texture after soaking in hot liquid overnight leaves something to be desired. I think it generally works better with small round fruits (see: cherries and raisins; blueberries, etc. would probably do well too).

There you go. A fine, healthy breakfast that’s at least as easy to make as instant oatmeal and tastes a thousand times better. (And may actually be somewhat healthier, being as steel-cut oats are processed far less than instant oats and won’t have any of the additives that some commercial instant brands have.) Clean-up might be a little messier, but if you refill the crockpot with water after dishing out the oatmeal and let it sit for a few hours on low, most of the gunk will come off of the sides and you’ll just have to scrub off a couple of small isolated spots.

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Anyone over the age of about 30 might want to skip this entry, because in all likelihood it’s just going to make you roll your eyes and go “pffft” at me.

Thursday is my twenty-sixth birthday. As I approach the big 2-6, I don’t have any terribly profound thoughts, but I do find myself beginning to face facts. Namely–I’m aging.

Not “old”, mind you. Old is a state of mind, and I don’t know many people who actually strike me as “old”. I don’t think I’m getting “old”. But my body isn’t as young as it used to be, and for the first time in my life, I’m starting to actually notice that.

The first clue was the weight gain, the fact that my metabolism won’t allow me to eat nothing but chocolate bars and soda anymore without gaining weight. After a while I also started to lose the ability to stay up late at night. Other signs and signals crept up on me. For one, I now get hangovers–I can’t remember when they started, but I know that when I first started drinking, I almost never had them. (This contributed in part to my decision not to get drunk anymore.) And they’re not just physical, they’re emotional too; I get really weepy the day after I’ve had too much. Sometimes, according to Tim, it only takes a couple of drinks to make me moody the day after, even though I don’t actually get drunk on that amount of alcohol. I’ve also realized that my body no longer likes it when I deviate from a schedule, especially my food schedule. And my skin doesn’t balance itself out the way it used to; this winter I’ve had a really horrible case of dry skin, not to mention the flaky scalp and eyebrows. Yes, my eyebrows are flaking. Also, my joints are actually popping when I do yoga. Or sometimes when I just move wrong.

To top it all off, a couple of months ago a caffeine-filled day (in an attempt to stay up late) made me absolutely tweaky, to the point that I was almost afraid I’d OD or something. How much did I have? A cup of tea in the morning, a Coke in the afternoon, another cup of tea late afternoon, and a few small cups of tea with dinner. Five years ago I could have swung that no problem.

Really, if I had to sum it up, I think I would say that my body has become more responsive to various stimuli. Which sounds a little odd, because it sounds like an improvement, whereas all the effects seem pretty damned annoying. But it’s true. I’m becoming more responsive to changes in sleep pattern, diet, dehydration, alcohol intake, ambient humidity, caffeine, hormones, etc., etc. Which means that it’s easier to really screw myself up. This is taking some getting used to. I have to make a conscious effort to eat what and when I need to on the weekends; I tend to forget and just eat whenever something that sounds good comes to hand. Ditto water–I have to be sure I get enough of it, or bad things start happening. Again, weekends are the biggest problem here. Sleep? My body takes care of that for me–generally around 10-11pm, I conk out. The list goes on and on and on.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. It’s a little unsettling. I think it’s hard to appreciate the feeling of “growing older” until you start experiencing it yourself. It’s hard to understand that this will happen at some point, that you will have to make changes to accomodate your body’s changing state. But is it a bad kind of unsettling, or just a kind of “huh, didn’t expect that” kind of unsettling?

In the end I don’t think it is a bad thing. It’s just something that’s there, and I have to learn to deal with because–let’s face it, it’s not going away! *G* I don’t think it bothers me as much as it bothers some people. It’s just something I’m going to have to be aware of and ajust to.

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I got a follow-up letter from State Sen. Simpson yesterday. It seems that she and someone else did propose the bill I’d been objecting to which (if passed) would have given legal backing to the ESRB ratings on video games. However, the bill did not receive a hearing. So at least for now, Indiana will have none of this unconstitutional, impractical video game rating enforcing. I’m somewhat pleased.

Of course, we’ve also got several bills on the table that I’m not happy with, but I take my small victories where I can get them.

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