I shall go mad…MAD, I tell you!
October 20, 2007 — 6:52 am
Comments: 14
Wish us luck
October 19, 2007 — 11:50 am
Comments: 16
I seldom feel fresh
The packing should be more or less done by the time I get here. I was thinking my contribution would be cleaning the house afterwards, but Uncle B has hired a cleaning service to sweep through after we’re gone.
So I guess it’s just “look beautiful and make cups of tea” then.
October 18, 2007 — 6:47 am
Comments: 48
That’s right! It’s LOLstoats!
Huh. Whaddya know? You can actually hear it when people delete your bookmark!
October 17, 2007 — 7:28 am
Comments: 24
Whee!
Okay, folks, this is it. I mean, it’s not it it…it’s Stage One of Operation Weasel Move. This is where we move the London house to the new house on the coast. The new, ancient house on the coast. But more about that when I get back.
For I shall be unplugged! The house won’t be broadbanded for another month. I hope to get a chance to check mail occasionally, but that’s about it. This’ll be the longest I go without the Internet since there was an Internet.
I’ll probably go out of my skin.
But don’t despair, minions. Through the miracle of the WordPress check-is-in-the-mail post-dating system, I’ve queued up an entry for every day I’m away. Yes, including weekends! It’ll be like Hanukkah in October!
See you in a few, if nobody drops a refrigerator on me.
October 16, 2007 — 6:09 am
Comments: 54
aaaaaahhhhhhhhh
HOLY FUCKING SHIT! That’s the most horrible place I’ve ever been, like, EVER! My worst nightmare! It’s one thing to go the home office to catch a meeting or deliver a package, it’s another to go walk into the giant cubicle farm hell upstairs knowing there’s a box with your name on it.
Ha! Kidding! THEY DON’T PUT NAMES ON CUBICLES. Just numbers. Say hello to T-95.
I’m at the end of the row, in the main corridor, across from the two busiest meeting rooms on the second floor. My partitions only come up to adam’s apple height, so people going by stop and rest their chins on my wall and say stupid stuff to me. My workday is going to be an endless succession of disembodied chattering heads.
I worked out a long time ago that none of my co-workers are psychic. You know how I know this? Because a psychic would see past the bland look on my face and hear me mentally screaming, “if you don’t SHUT THE FUCK UP with that droning, stupid story about your stupid dog or your stupid kid or whatever stupid morsel of your stupid life you’re inflicting on me in slow motion, I’m going to leap the six feet between us and poke your stupid eyes out with this exceedingly sharp #2 pencil I’ve been ramming in the electric sharpener for the last five minutes!”
My cube furniture is so new, the stink of fresh plastic makes me blink. I’m down to two monitors, and there is no arrangement that makes either of them invisible from every angle. Best I can do, the lower left corner of the monitor on my right seems to be pretty well hidden from view. I’m going to play South Parks in a little window there, with an emphasis on the ones with the most swear words.
With headphones. Huge, conspicuous headphones. Thanks for the headphones, Uncle B. And so much, much more…
October 12, 2007 — 6:35 pm
Comments: 62
I coulda swore it was Thursday
October 5, 2007 — 11:58 pm
Comments: 24
Russian? Anyone?
This was on the back door of an otherwise plain white work van I saw on the commute home tonight. Anyone?
Yeah, I know. Lame post, but I’ve goofed off all day and I hesitate to break a perfect record. It was a cinch the stapler post would dominate the blog all week, anyhow.
Uncle Badger says I deserve you guys. Sometimes, it almost sounds like it’s not a compliment.
— 5:04 pm
Comments: 43
People come and go so quickly here
This blog has become one of my favorite daily reads. So I shall show my gratitude by swiping his stuff.
Like this map. The one up top there. Guess what the dots mean. No, guess. Seriously, I’m not typing anything else until you do.
Wrong! It’s a list of all 160 cities in 1900 that had a population greater than 25,000.
Holy smokes! Can you believe it? Granted, some of those cities had a lot more than 25,000 citizens. The top twenty ranged from New York City, at 3,437,202 to Providence, RI at 175,597. (Poor little Rhode Island. Providence has slid to 124th with a current population of approximately 176,862. We’re leaking people!).
It’s so easy to forget that Superpower America is a 20th Century invention. Before that, we were a few happy rubes with cowshit on our boots. One of my favorite displays at the Smithsonian was in the Castle: they preserved intact the 1876 centennial exhibition, showing all our proudest accomplishments at the end of the Victorian era. Tennessee’s entire display is a coon skin and some pieces of wood. With bark on.
Somehow, that map links up in my head with this datum what I also nicked: as of 2006, service industries accounted for 42% of the world’s employment in 2006, agriculture 36.1%. Listen up — we got more peeps driving desks than driving ploughs!
He says (and I agree) that this is a huge milestone: the point at which the majority of our species is no longer in the business of grubbing up food.
Why do these two ideas go together? I…hmm. Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.
Get me! I’m an optimist!
October 4, 2007 — 6:07 pm
Comments: 19
Bidet Week continues at sweasel.com
Hey, this graphical thingie came in handy quicker than expected.
Yes, it’s a year today since I first posted on WordPress. I paid them $15 for the ability to edit my stylesheet, and that expired yesterday. I don’t know if that simply means I can’t edit the CSS any more, or if they’ll actively remove the changes I made and revert it to a default template.
For those who don’t know from stylesheets, CSS controls everything about the look of a site: font size and style, number of columns, color scheme…the lot. If they blow up my customizations, it’s going to get real ugly. So far nothing’s changed.
Anyhoo! I started the original site as a distraction before a trip to the UK. I’m a pretty good traveler, but I worry excessively beforehand. Nothing like a big wet sloppy pile of HTML to occupy the brain.
Several months later, in the face of no demand whatsoever and dismal traffic, I bought the domain sweasel.com. And the rest, as they say, is footnote.
I’ve learned a lot in the past year. I’ve learned that leaving a Plymouth Belvedere in a pit for fifty years is a Very Bad Idea. I’ve learned that boobies drive traffic but cats kill it. I’ve learned that I’m a girl.
No, wait…you learned that. I pretty much knew it already.
But mostly, I’ve learned to pull posts out of my ass. One every weekday. Sometimes in the wee hours, when I could barely focus or summon the will to touch-type and just flailed away with my elbows. Sometimes at work, because let’s face it: I’m salaried. Sometimes in that brief, frantic period between the evening commute and the moment the vodka hits my frontal lobes and I start hanging all over you, blubbering about what wunnerful, wunnerful people you are and what a lucky, lucky girl I am and heylissen thur playn Our Song.
Together, we’ve written booger haiku and and poems about Peanut Lady Fuck. We’ve swapped recipes and old family stories and supernumery nipples. We’ve shared and, I’d like to think, grown together just a little.
So here’s to the next twelve months of sweasel.com!
Or not. Whatever.
October 1, 2007 — 12:39 pm
Comments: 30