the world is your acorn

There’s two men in my backyard playing in a big pile of dirt that they had delivered yesterday. It’s unclear what they are doing, as our landlord didn’t think it was necessary to let us know this was all happening. Good thing most of our blinds were down when I got out of the shower this morning. Sitting around in my robe for the next hour, however, is out. Hopefully the big pile of dirt will somehow solve our basement flooding problem. Or the deep holes in our backyard that The Little Red Haired Girl almost broke her ankle in. Or the lawn-less-ness of the yard. I have a sinking feeling, however, that it’ll just end up on the bottom of folks’ shoes and then, eventually, on our kitchen floor.

I’m done being negative for the day now.

I swear I spend lots of time at the end of last week trying to get work done so that I wouldn’t still be reading for class on the day of. But here I am, trying to finish the last 15 pages of this not-very-dense article, 6 hours before class starts. Granted that is tons of time, but still. I think there is this mechanism in me that knows how much I have to do ahead of time so I don’t end up getting screwed, but it just won’t allow me to ever get ahead. How do I get that thing turned off or removed?

Just got back from the first rugby practice of the year. I didn’t really want to go, since I’m pretty much swamped with work this week, but I’m glad I did. I feel good physically and am ready to do a good solid hour or so of work now before bed. I’m fairly certain I’m going to fall out of bed and shatter tomorrow morning, but right now I feel great. I just wish I could remember how good it feels to get exercise and just make myself do it all the time. Oh well. Right now I’m stuffing my face with summer sausage and cheese to try and get some protein in my body. yum.

Last night The Kindergarten Teacher showed us this cool website, NameVoyager, which lets you type in a name and shows a graph of how poopular the name was over time. Predictably, mine had a huge spike right around when Disney’s “Aladdin” came out. It’s also cool because as you type in letters the graph responds, showing all the plots for any possible name given the letters you’ve typed so far.

It was interesting that, as we looked at it last night, we tacitly agreed that it is “cooler” to be named something unpopular at the time, and we checked out each of our names and congratulated each other if, when we were born, our names were very unpopular.

Anyway, a really fun site.

Well, our friends just left after a fun Chinese New Year dinner at our place. The Little Red Haired Girl and I made some of our favorite Chinese dishes, along with a couple of new things. On Saturday I spent the afternoon making wontons, and today I fried them for apps. We also did pot stickers, salt and pepper shrimp, cucumber salad, and bean sprouts for apps. Dinner was noodles (which we pretended were longevity noodles), bok choy, duck (which we bought pre-roasted and was not as good as we’d hoped), and pan-fried noodles with beef stir fry. Of course we had some new years cake and tea for dessert.

Overall, I think dinner was pretty successful. I still need to figure out how to make more things ahead of time so I’m not in the kitchen most of the time people are over, but it still worked out ok. We had a lot of fun, and most of the things we made turned out really well. And The Little Red Haired Girl is getting really good at helping out and making some things on her own without much help from me. I wanted to take pictures of some of the food for the blog, but I forgot. Oh well, maybe next time.

Anyway, happy year of the dog, everyone!

This is clearly some kind of Japanese dark art, but I’m a convert anyway. Been practicing all afternoon. From lifehacker, again.

via lifehacker:

OneLook Reverse Dictionary allows you to type in a definition to find a particular word you’re looking for. It’s somewhat better than a thesaurus, and seems like it will definitely come in use when I’m writing papers.

woah. I just watched the end of the tennesse kentucky women’s game (tivoed from last night). woah. my heart is still beating out of control. i didn’t see enough of the game to comment, so i won’t. but woah.

I spend a lot of time on the internet. That means that I get a lot of free content to keep my mind busy. I read blogs, I read news, I listen to podcasts. I also get a lot of free productivity* tools, websites, software. So, I think that this year I will start giving back. It’s certainly about time, right? I figure, if I announce my intentions publicly, I will be more likely to follow through. I don’t have an exact plan of action yet, but I’d like to be able to leave at least something in folks’ tip jars or send them something from their amazon wishlists, if they have one. I’ll probably have to spread it out, or I’ll be broke pretty quickly. But after this initial catch-up period, I think I’ll have a schedule for when I contribute to each site. Afterall, I’ve cut down dramatically on magazine and cable subscriptions, and I don’t buy nearly as much electronics junk anymore.

Unfortunately, if you are one of my lj buddies, then this doesn’t apply to you, because I consider you friends, and thus take you for granted.

*Productivity being all relative, of course. I have become quite efficient with procrastinating on the internet because of various free tools found on the internet.

One of the reasons I love the Nashville LJ Community is posts like this one, from :

So we enlisted the help of the Truth & Reconciliation Project, a Nashville non-profit that offers energy audits. They came here yesterday morning and spent several hours inspecting our house — venturing into the crawl space, climbing into the attic, and everything in between — and sat down with us for half an hour or so to discuss their findings and answer our questions. That discussion was just a bonus, really, because they’ll be providing us with a written report in a few days. But they gave us the verbal break-down of what constituted an energy emergency — as in, non-obvious big gaping holes in the house such that we might as well leave all the windows and doors open — and what was merely really, really bad.

They ask for a $50-$150 donation, sliding scale, and they’re very friendly and professional. It’s clear they’re doing this out of a genuine desire to improve energy efficiency and help decrease natural resource consumption. No profit-oriented motives, and ya gotta respect that.

People in that community, much like the bloggers at Nashville is Talking always have lots of great info and things to think about.