faith
I was watching the news a moment ago, and the commentators were speaking about how important faith is to the Republican Iowa caucus process. It struck me then that they were confusing faith with religion, which is something that seems commonplace in America these days. People refer to their faith as though it can only exist in a relationship between humanity and the divine; as though that is the only faith that matters. But to me, in this existence, it seems far more important to keep faith with humanity, with each other, with the individual people in our lives who are counting on us to live up to the social covenant of the civilization we occupy... not to lie or cheat or steal, to measure up to the common expectations of decency to our fellow man. Is the reason the politicians talk so much about their faith in the divine because they've broken faith with their constituents, and the faith in the divine that they profess is so unprovable that they feel they can't be held accountable for it? Just an offhand thought for these times... but it seems to me that before we can judge people on their religious faith, we should look at how well they keep faith with their fellow man, as that is likely to be a truer guide to their true faith in whatever divinity's path they claim to follow, than any words said to lull the minds and win the hearts of the political constituency.

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dream
odd dream last night, sort of ghostbusters in a cross-country train trip... wreaking havoc in the dining car. alarm woke me before it got too far, though.

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dream
had an odd dream saturday night... i was out with friends, browsing in a book store, and picked up a book (first in a three part series) about the Mobile Suit Gundam anime series. Some of the lines in the introductory spiel that I remember:

"Early anime was aimed at a target audience of children (mostly boys) in the 5 to 10 year old range. Since the objective and profitability of the shows was in the lines of toys accompanying them, the main goal of the producers was to find the maximum number of dramatic poses for 50' tall giant robots that they could possible cram into a half hour television show... The first Gundam series broke all these rules by having complex characters not readily classified into good and evil, and made a serious attempt to honor the laws of physics governing orbital bodies. One unanticipated side effect was the series' appeal to a much broader fan base, including middle and high school age students"

There was also a diagram of the earth-moon lagrange points, as it applied to the Gundam series, with suborbital notations for major events' locations relative to these points as it applied to the series as a whole.

I'm really not sure I want to know where my subconscious is coming up with this stuff...

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off dream
an odd dream last night, my left nipple ring was torn out and i was debating whether to replace it or not at a D20 game session. bloody mess it made, too, ruined my second favorite shirt...

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left my cell at home...not a fun week
Been one of those weeks... crisis after crisis at work, long days, aching/weary when I get home. Put my cell phone to charge and forgot to take it off this morning. Coming down with a cold, I suspect, sinuses clogged and throat raw. Here's hoping tomorrow gets better...

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joyous yule
joyous yule to you all (or the seasonal holiday of your choice)...

tired Monday morning. shoveling in my driveway from 6:30 to 7:30, followed by hot shower and change to get into work for urgent meeting on an issue that's gotten 2 Vice presidents involved already, not fun at all. feeling more than a little detached, think a slight lack of sleep lately the culprit. definitely cold out, managed a bit of freezer burn on my legs while shoveling the snow... but at least i got everything done i needed to.

Current Mood: exhausted

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not a good morning. couldn't find cell phone charger last night so my cell phone is completely dead, set up my new alarm and accidentally swapped AM and PM so overslept a half hour and had to pull a mad dash out the door, then got in to work to find a message waiting for me from my boss's boss. giving blood tonight and expecting a mess there, just the way today is going.

Current Mood: blah

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random flashback to a college night discussion...
Frost T.
A snowman barely alive....
(OK, not alive at all, and mostly melted...)

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.
We have the technology.
We can make him better than before.
Better. Stronger. Faster.
(Well, OK, probably not faster....)

We can create the world's first bionic snowman....

(cue 6 Million Dollar Man music...)

Current Mood: amused

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another odd dream
strange dream this morning, episode of the old star trek. kirk was pretending to be an alien giving a motivational speech to some rear echelon army guys during world war II. "you wouldn't understand me if we weren't talking over the radio, most of my species language involves tentacle-wriggling and such" one of the lines, and "what you do or don't do won't matter to me, it will be decades before I even reach your planet, but it will matter tremendously to the men, women, and children that rely on you doing what's right, and even more, it will matter to your own sense of worth."

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bizarre dreams
don't know if it was an after-effect of the drowned rat syndrome from yesterday, but had a very odd dream last night. was part of 'helper' squad escorting 4 chefs to various judges rooms for cooking contest judging. 1st judge oriental women, competition went ok, though all 4 did poorly. 2nd judge rock star had three of four chefs (all the women) stripping in whole or in part in competition with his girlfriend to get the rock star (axel rose, if it matters) to vote for themselves. last one before i woke up wound up being a catfight as movie star's two pet kittens escaped and starting attacking the chefs when they tried same tactics on him and his girlfriend as on the rock star.


just reporting on it as it happens... now off for drowned rat part 2. (parking for the harvest faire in pouring rain...)

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seeming a bit off...
very odd thoughts... feels like i've been almost drunk the 24 hours or so without any alcohol intake at all (unless someone spiked the fresh gallon of OJ from the supermarket somehow). Strange thoughts and ideas radiating away from whatever I notice and observe without reason.
What if Sleeping Beauty (you know the story right? princess cursed to die as she reaches her 16th birthday, a 'good faerie' modifies the curse so she only falls into an enchanted sleep from which only her prince can rescue her, at least in the disney version, I haven't researched the original).. anyway, what if sleeping beauty was actually the daughter of a king and a succubus, and no-one knew if the human or demon side would dominate once she reached maturity? Then the evil faerie's actions make a bit more sense... would you be willing to take the chance on wakening the sleeper then? I can wake the body, but not knowing who would occupy it makes me reluctant to take the chance... I can just picture a gaming scene, with a party of adventurers helping the prince win his way to his sleeping bride, and only discovering at the last minute the true nature of the curse and the quandary.

Current Mood: drunk

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one of those weeks...
Seems to be my week for breaking things. Last night confirmed my home internet is broken (line issue, I'm getting a service technician out Monday afternoon to investigate and repair). Got into work this morning to find that I'd completely destroyed our test configuration files thanks to a timing issue and an omission in the software I'd written that didn't take that into account, and another set of code I'm resposible for had taken down our inhouse testing environment (that last bit not really my fault... someone else launched the initial load utility when there wasn't enough space on the file server to receive everything, so once the machine ran out of space, boom.)

Hopefully nothing else breaks...

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"Your father IS the king of Spain!"

"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great... you have no power over me!"

I think those quotes pretty much sum up today.

Current Mood: artistic

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thin and watery broccoli cheddar soup is still better than no soup at all, and in combination with the atrium fountain and a warm cup of tea, soothing to the soul. lunch break was greatly appreciated today.

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What Keyboard Key Are You?

You Are "delete"

Some people might try to say you're standoffish and aloof. You prefer to think of yourself as a person of few words. You like to live simply, speak simply, and act simply. It's all about editing. No wonder you're the first person your friends call when they need a mess cleaned up!

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at work lunch break
At work now, nominally on my lunch break... feeling exhausted and worn out, tired. Going to be a difficult weekend I fear, too much still to do and loose ends hanging around.

Current Mood: exhausted

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busy week
insane week here; three crisis in other groups, one of which spilled over into ours, as well as two crisis in the stuff we have to deal with normally that all needed urgent attention from me (plus another pair that other people were/are working on). My voice gave out Monday night, couldn't talk above a whisper until late yesterday but its almost back to normal now.. as for the crisis, one is as resolved as I can make it (other groups taking over from here with what I gave them for help and utility programming), one is being further researched but seems to be resolved (one group's changes to the hourglass cursor logic caused our routine to take an extra half hour to complete!), and the project that hit crisis status has progressed enough to no longer be a crisis (we're within 10% of schedule so we're back off the radar). More meetings (both non-productive and productive) and messages flying back and forth than I can shake a stick at, I'm just feeling frazzled and hoping for a quiet weekend (or at least as quiet as I can manage, given that I'm taking my grandmother to Easter dinner at my sister's... family get-together, and her 6 kids (plus my grandmother's deafness) make for a noisy event.

Current Mood: drained

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i just report them...
odd dream last night. backstory seemed to be zombie apocalypse, only a bright boy figured out how to make them not require brains to survive, and retain a darkly twisted version of their original personalities. They'd become the new priviledged minority (everyone wanted to hire workers who don't need sleep or rest, and didn't consume coffee etc... on the job, even if they did smell bad sometimes). I was being told by my current boss, and boss from two reorganizations back, (both zombies) to take over a project another current coworker (also a zombie) had been responsible for when the masks came off and the original strain zombies came out. I fled from them, wound up in a junior college lecture hall where a school guard who hated zombies still had his shotgun and a spare for me... we held off the zombies (I took pleasure in eliminating my zombie bosses) for a while before my gun misfired and exploded, and his ran out of ammunition. he got swarmed under, I picked a lock on an access door and fled, crawling into the heating ducts. Observed the zombie command center which was in the registrar's office, coordinating waves of zombie attacks around the country, and watched as the last known non-zombie defenders were swarmed under. when the zombies manning the office left to chow down on the bodies outside, i crept out of the ducts and started going thru their plans, trying to find places where survivors could have fled to... woke up at that point.

not going to try to make sense of it, just reporting it as I dreamt it.

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its been an interesting two days at work... i'm getting dragged into a turf war between 4 directors and their two vice presidents over an issue tracing back to concerns I voiced 5 years ago that were never addressed and are now a hot topic. My boss is telling me don't talk to person A or B but talk to person C, then person C forwards me questions from A and B that he needs answers to that I'm not supposed to reply to (that I find out after I've replied, since C is the person I should be talking with...). Person D then jumps in with their own spin, shooting down A B and my own boss all at once... and all of them trying to get me to say/commit to their idea on "the way things should be".

(For the record, person A is the one whose ideas for "the way things should be" I agree with and who is essentially championing what I argued for 5 years ago, but that same individual vehemently opposed it at that time and is now stuck with responsibility for cleaning up the short term mess as a result. Under the project time constraints we've got now for my piece of it I don't know if my original solution will work out, and the solution my boss wants is certainly faster to implement, so... plus my boss is afraid if we agree with or help person A at all we'll wind up stuck with responsibility for cleaning up his mess when he made the bad design call 5 years ago)

stressful two days... TGIF, extremely.

Current Mood: stressed

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i have decided that, for the moment at least, winter sucks. ache from neck to fingertips from shoveling, cold and tired... and tomorrow another day with more shovelling possibly required. cooking general tso chicken (frozen dinner, not from scratch) as i write this, so hot food soon will be filling my cold belly.

Current Mood: cold

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