About damn time, really.

The old site was brown and more brown, combined with a ginormous font file resulting in some terrible behavior.

I shall say no more. Those dark times are past.

I’ve been working on the redesign for a while, and I hate that it took so long, but I’m pretty happy with the results. Still kept the dark feel, but moved away from the monochrome look.

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Greg-the-cat was fascinated by the tinsel on the hat.

His parents flew in from Scottsdale, Arizona on Thursday, as his father’s birfday was Saturday. Party time! We ate ridiculous amounts of local food, enjoyed local truffles, and generally had a local-resident-as-tour-guide time, aside from the fact that outdoor activities were off-limits due to the cold. It was an emotionally complicated visit, but I’m glad for it. Greg and I both came away with a tangled mixture of mourning and resolve. Can resolve be tangled?

Anyway, Deana and I decided to keep his birfday on Monday simple, since it’d be in the evening after work. I threw together a little dinner of spaghetti squash and pan-fried chicken tossed with soft goat cheese and olive oil (as much as one can “toss” melting goat cheese). I served up a Spier chenin blanc with it, and I think everything turned out well.

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My office is in my bedroom, where this occurs all day:

Truly adorable.

SkiFree was such an integral part of my childhood gaming experience that I couldn’t resist an offer to go skiing for a weekend at Sugar Mountain in Boone, NC. Greg, Deana, Meg, and I stayed in sleepy Blowing Rock (awesome food!) in a cozy little inn/motel.

Unfortunately, I was sick. Quite sick. Snotting and coughing and sneezing. All the classics.

When we arrived at Sugar Mountain on Saturday morning, I was feeling distinctly unathletic. A cold plus asthma generally makes for chill time. Deana was like, “No, no. Skiing isn’t really athletic. You’ll be fine.”

Okay, then!

As I watched people stomp around on their skis, I also got increasingly worried for my shoulder. My pain had generally been at a workable, low level for the month before, but all that poking and pushing with the ski-sticks (technical term!) could present a shoulder endurance problem. By the time we were filling out forms, I’d talked myself out of skiing, but was totally up for tubing.

The ladies (and Greg, although he backed off), made such a fuss about me not participating that I caved and shelled out the moola for skiing. I got fitted for all the shoes and such–the skis were much shorter than I expected–and we hobbled outside.

Greg and I? Never skied before.

Greg? Decided that instead of worrying about lessons, we’d try experimentation first.

By the time experimentation was over, I was sitting over on the deck crying and Greg was limping with a bad knee. We never left the bunny slope.

That was January 21, and my shoulder really hasn’t stopped hurting again since then.

So what happened? Keep reading >>

Don’t ask where I’ve been. It’s been dark and full of things like strangely proud “humble views”, polka dots and stripes, mock objects, skiing, the IRS, gradients, and a strange dampness.

Still not sure where the dampness is from.

Getting back into the swing of things, have some links!

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I’ve been struggling for a while to quantify something I’m taking issue with lately, and I finally think I hit the nail on the head.

Imagine, if you will, that you work with someone in a standard American corporate environment. Let’s call her Jane. (Jane’s a good, strong name. Speaks to her background.)

Now, you totally get that Jane’s probably a good person outside your work environment (yeah, sure), but at work, she’s a total loser. Can’t do her job, whines all the time, and really just gets in the way of progress. You’re there to get a job done, and Jane’s clearly just killing time and collecting a paycheck.

She’s absolutely worthless, and then has the gall to dislike you for being good at your job. Not your fault she sucks and you had to fix her mistakes.

I’ve seen this scenario played out a hundred different ways, and am not immune to it myself. Keep reading >>

On a whim this Saturday, my running partner and I decided to take razors to our heads and finish what we started when we cut our hair down short. The result was genu-wine baldness.

My biggest fear in shaving bald was razor bumps–with curly/kinky hair, that’s kinda the way it goes. It wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be; a few bumps and some discomfort, but nothing to write home about. I used a single-bladed disposable razor instead of a double-bladed, which I think helped.

Being hairless itself, though? Strange. My scalp was strangely rubbery-feeling and very high-friction. It was also a very striking look–far more so than my normal super-short look. Just skin, all the way back.

The shaving itself was too much work for it to be a regular occurrence. Deana and I pipelined our shaving (since we started with clippers), and the whole shebang took about 45 minutes. And I’d have to do close to that much work weekly. Meh. I think I will experiment with shorter looks (guard-free on the clippers, for instance), but nothing that requires shaving foam.

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