July 3-9, 2001 — And this week...

If I don't get a haircut tonight, I'll have to wait until my parents return from Toronto on Sunday.

As I wrote that last sentence, I had a bizarre and extremely paranoid feeling that maybe, just maybe, my computer was loudly reading out everything that I was typing as I typed it, and that I couldn't hear it because my CD player was playing. So I took out one earphone to check. I think we're alright.

So yes. It is now Thursday, and my list of things that I had hoped to get accomplished on Tuesday is overwhelmingly lacking in check marks. While I'm quite proud of my successful airport run that got my sister out of the province (successful in that it didn't involve me hitting any inanimate objects during my drive into unknown territory), the stress (of, y'know, driving and stuff) tired me right out. So haircuts weren't on the agenda. And Future Shop was sold out of the "New Waterford Girl" DVD, too. And I went to sleep without adding a single line of code to the program that I'm working on.

And that was Tuesday.

Wednesday, I went to work. I fixed a freshly broken program that I'd written last year, and, after work, I found the DVD I'd been searching for.

When I returned home from work last night, the power was out. I was hungry and desperate to check my email. Mostly the latter. So I lay on the couch, cursing my reliance on electricity and reading the newspaper in the dimness of whatever sunlight managed to seep in through the clouds. I tried to avoid the articles on Mordecai Richler. If I ignore death, maybe it will go away. Or so goes the theory. I think I'll try to reread The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, though.

The power eventually came back on. I was much relieved, and I dropped what I was doing and did my best to waste the rest of the night away in front of a computer screen.

Meanwhile, my parents have been busy reminding me at every opportunity of all the things that I will need to take care of while they're gone this weekend. I think they have visions of dead (or, at a bare minimum, emaciated) pets welcoming them home, the pets having suffered through a weekend without food as I sit and stare at a monitor in my room.

...

I wrote everything up to now on Thursday. Now it's Monday. My hair is still too long and the family pets are still too alive and allergenic. I spent a lot of time in front of the computer, and I watched a lot of movies. A waste of a weekend, but then, you were expecting that, weren't you?

I still haven't finished the program that will help me get my new journal design online. I showed it to Andrew, and he seemed to think that it was an improvement. And it is, in most browsers. In other browsers, it looks quite plain. But it loads just fine, and my theory is that if you're not using a recent browser, you're used to things looking terrible (if they even load at all), so a simple page of text won't upset anyone.

It's starting to look like I'll be reasonably busy in the fall. Busy enough that I won't have to get a part-time job or dig into my savings -- I should make enough money on a couple little contracts to at least sustain myself. God bless medical journals (and their citations and references, more specifically). And now that I'm part of team Double Naut, there might be some work to be done there.

As far as houses go, Amy and Jeff have been hard at work tracking down a place for us to live in Toronto. I have no idea what Andrew, Johnston, and I would have done if we were living on our own. The house of the moment is located in the High Park area, and Jeff is looking at it tonight. It will be nice to live in Toronto again, I think. Or it will be nice not to live in Richmond again, anyway...

I was reading about the SXSW Web site contest the other day. I dream of having one of my sites nominated and taking a road trip to Austin, Texas.

If only.

...

Hmm. I wrote that second part at work. Now I'm at home. It's 6:11 pm. It's still Monday. I'm ready to go to sleep, and I'm ready for bed already. I have a headache and I can't think straight. But if I don't post this, it will have been over a week since my last entry, which is pretty sad.

Sleep...