Work(ing Title)

I managed to squeak by with minimal fanfare this year, and now I can just get on with being 26. So far the year has been excellent, with a pleasing if torturous dream topping off a pleasant night’s sleep, and a day of work that can thus far be described as productive. This afternoon will see a handful more text posts for Vista Week on 10, as well as some research into work-related travel in the coming months.

Eric has a tradition of making birthday resolutions as opposed to New Year’s ones, and I’m going to sample his kung-fu this year.

– I’m going to get much more aggressive about publishing my photos I take in a timely manner (as I hope to make photography one of my work responsibilities). I’ve been treating my Flickr photostream as more of a bucket than a stream, and that’s just not right. The increased output should help breath life into this humble blog once the ReDesign gets done.

– Also on the docket is to adhere my monthly life to some financial planning. Cha-Ching may help with this second goal, but for the moment one Excel spreadsheet is going to track my expenditures.

– My last idea comes from a quote by an unidentified friend of Supermarathoner Dean Karnazes:

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!”

This mantra should allow me some sufficiently reckless decisions (yipee).

Thank you to those who threw me some love yesterday. It is geniunely warming to see people reach out and show they’re thinking of me. I would’ve loved to share the day with each of you (some more than others), and hopefully you’ll all be able to make it to the as-yet-unnanounced 2007 Party Against.

This morning I’m calling on all six of you (ok ok, three of you) to help me choose a pair of spectacles. I need a style counsel and the best I’ve got is you lot, so don’t go letting me down.

While I don’t often wear glasses, my ability to resolve things from a long distance seems to have become more impaired in the past few years. I have no doubt that all of this time spent porn hunting working has done a number on my old blues, so now you’ll be seeing the bespectacled me quite a bit more often.

As you can probably tell, the tortoise-shelled frames are winning in my own personal election. This is probably because I would rest better in the knowledge that a hideous, harmless, friend-to-girl-and-boy like a tortoise was slaughtered in order to make me appear more intelligent.

Please do click the ‘comment’ link at the bottom of this post and chime in. I love hearing from anybody, and I don’t ever entirely trust myself with decisions of taste - remember when I laid out that girl in grade six?

One final note: keep in mind you can click on any of these photos to be taken to the appropriate Flickr page. From there you should be able to click the little ‘All Sizes’ button to go into full pore-counting mode.

Now show how much you care about our troops and vote!

A prince of Los Altos died in Iraq on Wednesday. I can’t claim to have known Will, though I knew his older brother Jon. I saw Jon for the first time in ages on at the Pat’s this past New Years Eve, and it was fantastic to hear how his life had progressed. He lives in Portland now, and I was very much looking forward to riding down to visit with him.

Now though, I honestly can’t imagine how to speak with him. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to try and talk about Will with him, or whether I should just hide from the pain I feel for him and not address his loss. My best wishes go out to the Siguas, as I can only hope that we can scrape some of the grief off of their plates.

Thanks for being around Will, “Maybe we’ll meet again someday…when the fighting stops.”

i stalked you tonight. I’ve spent more time on Facebook in the last two hours than I probably ever have before. I watched Armageddon, which has this part in the finale where I cry every time, so that probably wasn’t the smartest thing. Oh and the whole evening has been lubricated courtesy of my boss’s holiday gift of the ingredients necessary to make a Buzz Aldrin, which hits like a stray heat-shield tile on re-entry.

I’ll go back to the gym tomorrow which should help take my mind off of you, but our conversation this weekend didn’t do me any favours. I can’t stop thinking too far into the future, so hopefully I can focus on work and exercise to steal away my attention. This is the dark side of my geekiness; it’s far too easy to keep an eye on you even when we’re far away.

Next month I’m going to Hawaii for an off-schedule birthday celebration for grandpa, concluding with me spending my birthday on a flight back from Hawaii to Washington. Hopefully that’ll pass with a minimum of celebration as I’m not interested in a whole pile of focus on my own life.

If we can each distract ourselves with our day-to-day lives, then hopefully that will pass the time quickly and we can come out the other end of this in the right way. That’s the only hope that keeps me from sleeping all day, because at this point I can’t wait to be a year or more into the future.

I wore my favorite pair of undies today. They’re impossibly comfortable and flattering at the same time. However getting dressed at the gym tonight I was struck by a serious issue.

While my initial thought was to throw out all of my old collection (I can’t in good consience donate used underwear), I worry about losing this special experience. If all of my undies are like this don’t I then run the risk of losing this special feeling of wearing my ‘favourite pair’ once every month or so?

So the question then becomes do I attempt greatness by investing in a fleet of excellent undies, or do I simply allow this pair to maintain its superstar status?