June 13, 2001 — That's what they say when we're together

I've been a fan of Tiffany's classic, "I think we're alone now," for quite some time. I finally found my collection of forty-fives and 7" records in my room today, and after some Nena and Genesis, Tiffany was on the menu. I have made the unwise decision of putting on the non-"I think we're alone now" side of my Tiffany record, and I am suffering for it.

I couldn't listen to the b-side all the way through. I've since returned to "I think we're alone now." Things are looking up.

I worked from home today. Working from home is nice because it allows me to wake up at noon and to take bike rides when my arms are bothering me. I don't get to be part of the St. Philip's Elementary School reunion that is the OC Transpo bus ride home at night, but I'm able to deal with this.

I was also able to catch up on all of my correspondence today, so if you've ever sent me a letter asking for stickers and you don't receive them within a couple of weeks (and if you haven't received them yet), I am now completely caught up, so it looks like I never received your letter. (Emails don't count, by the way -- emailing for stickers is lame since it means you put very, very little effort into the exchange. At least send me a postcard or something. One person sent me US stamps, and even though I can't use US stamps, I was more than happy to send him stickers. I guess I can always save them until July to send letters from Kentucky with...)

It was extremely warm out today, and I'm told the humidity was quite high. It was the first day this summer that my parents turned on our tiny, wall-mount air conditioner in the living room. We didn't have an air conditioner until last year when our above-ground swimming pool was torn down, and I didn't think we should bother with the air conditioner at all: There's something about using nothing but fans that feels like it's building character with every summer day that passes. But I represented the minority. Of one. And so came the air conditioner.

The effects of the air conditioner in the living room downstairs don't reach my room, though, so I'm able to wallow in the character-building heat that I'm so fond of. It gets a bit painful with two computers running (last summer I had to bring up a fan to point directly at my iMac on some days), but I maintain that this is still better than winter.

I was thinking of adding a reference to hair shirts in that last paragraph, but I decided that it was too obscure a reference. (Hair shirts are worn as penance in some religions, and are made of coarse hair meant to irritate the skin.) Whenever my parents decided that I was doing something to highlight my own suffering in a matter, they would tell me to take off my hair shirt. After my parents explained to me what a hair shirt is, and after I realized that it was a fairly accurate analogy, I stormed off to my room to fume. Which seemed like an excellent reaction at the time.

And in news not related to hair shirts or the weather, I'm going to be redesigning the main antigreg page over the next few days. Matt has made a new drawing that I'll probably end up using (even though I haven't seen it yet), and I'm going to make it into more of a scrolling design. As much as the scroll-free design was interesting to me for awhile, there are other things that I'd like to add to the main page that I haven't been able to add with it designed the way that it is. I also want to overhaul the code behind all of my journals and to make a single archive of all my journals (combining the 100 or so original journals that still are ugly and blue and in [insert shudder here] frames with everything since August, 2000), but that will take days and days of work and no one but me will notice, so that can wait.

This journal seems more like filler than anything else. To a warm bed and a dream-filled sleep, then.