24 July 2002

It wasn't getting up at 5:15, actually. That wasn't the problem at all. Usually I get up about an hour after that, so after an initial shock at the alarm, the timing was not a problem. It was having to drive back from the airport looking directly into the rising sun. Ughhhhh. So now I'm a bit of a zombie. I'm playing Tori Amos albums and trying to recover my head.

(Mark had to fly to Denver for the day, on business. We'll pick him up tonight.)

You know what the problem with this house is? The problem with this house is that it doesn't have detailed information about vacuum tubes in it. Anybody have any source ideas for me? We have books on field theory, and we have books on nand-gate level computing design. And we have the level of detail I'm looking for when it comes to transistors. JFETs, MOSFETs, whatever. We got all that. But nobody seems to want to talk about vacuum tubes. Sad.

(Back when Scott and I were dating, we were both in Omaha for the summer, living with our respective parents. But my parents had gone somewhere, I forget where, and I had really bad cramps. I called Scott up nearly in tears: "The problem with this house," I sniffled, "is that it doesn't have any chocolate in it." And bless him, he managed to say, "Do you want me to bring you some chocolate?" and hang up the phone before he started laughing at me. In retrospect, now that I'm not submerged in pain and freaky hormones, I can see that it was a pretty pathetic phone call. And every once in awhile when I'm feeling particularly forlorn about something silly, my brain jumps in with "The problem with this house....")

(He sat and picked the dark ones out of the bag of Miniatures for me, too. Major points on that one.)

You wouldn't believe the quality of radio commercials you can get in the 5:00 a.m. hour. Grapes. They have a jingle for grapes. Also, there was a dentist talking about how you'd take a pill and barely even remember you'd been in his office. Let me assure you that we were not so tired that we let that one go by. But there were more other cars on the road than I'd thought, so I'm not sure why the radio stations couldn't get better commercials.

Well. So. I don't know, people. I'm boring lately. I read Dumas, I write the book, I clean stuff, I ogle my birthday presents, I angst about the newspaper. I angst about living here. This morning I figured out that my countdown to moving is at about 58 weeks. I don't think I should have thought of it in those terms. Those are not happy terms. Fifty-eight is a big nasty number. Yucky.

Happy thoughts, happy thoughts...oh, hey, Scott is now Scientist One. (The Scott who goes with Michelle.) That's his new job title. Scientist One. Either that or he was really drunk when I talked to him last night and totally making things up. But I'm willing to bet on Scientist One. I think it's really cool to have a friend who is Scientist One, professionally. Not that it would be so bad to have a friend who was Scientist One on an amateur basis. Or a friend who was Scientist Two. But this is better than those, I think.

Hey. Maybe somebody can become Scientist Two and they can go around wrecking labs with some lunatic feline on rainy days. That would be kind of cool. I would even volunteer for the job, but it would be hard to coordinate schedules with them on the East Coast and all.

Also, he doesn't have to work for the Pope any more, which is all for the best for everybody, I think.

Maybe it's also best for everybody if I don't try to think happy thoughts with zombie-brain. I don't think lab-wrecking former Papal employees are going to supplant raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens any time soon.

(Is there anybody who really likes the whiskers best, on a kitten? I would have bet on the nose or the ears or the paws or maybe the rough little kitty tongue. But I'm not a cat person, in practice (allergies), so I'm perhaps not the person to ask.)

(I was just thinking that I was doing well not letting Dumas influence my writing style terribly much -- although I'm only 400 pages in, so maybe you should ask me after another 400 -- when I realized that long parenthetical digressions are, in some ways, very much like Dumas. He tends not to use parentheses, but digression, oh yes. And I don't mind that at all. He does it well.)

Right then. I think I should pretend to be productive now.