June 2006 Archives

Quick, basic update. I got my sad, sorry excuse for hair buzzed this weekend. The way I see it, trading pathetic for ugly is a step up :D Whew. What a trip. The ongoing head-acne situation has got me a little self-conscious, but I'm hoping for clearing now that I don't need to hair-spray a nice fluffy combover into place :P

The book manuscript submission is 3 days away. I got to bed at 5 am this morning. Another 3 nights like that, and barring a cardiac arrest or something, I'll be looking forward to some sleepy time. At night. omigosh!

A commercial came on TV earlier tonight. It was working hard to build a shrine around the M*A*S*H movie by droning on about Radar coming straight off broadway from playing Charlie Brown, and so & so who wrote the lyrics to the theme song, and how it was the first movie to use the 'F-word'... And Harrison turns to Amanda and says, "I think they mean 'Flushie' ".

Woohoo! That's mah boy.

Giselle and a friend of hers found a centipede under a rock in the front yard today. It seems that their description of the event has got Harrison spooked. We've been pretty fortunate that the kids haven't had much in the way of nightmares and general fear of the closet and under-the-bed monsters. But the centipede story had him hanging out with us tonight while we watched our stories. Up until the Flushie thing. Then it was like a great big song & dance number and the kids both ran off down the hall.

I had a dream last night where I was watching a narrow pyroclastic flow roll down the slope of a distant volcano. Then the perspective changed, and it turned into a little spatter cone volcano that had managed to emerge through the floor of the bedroom. I couldn't make sense out of the fact that nothing had caught fire, particularly when it made it's way up through the crawl space. It broke down into a discussion with the neighbors about whether volcanic activity was covered in the homeowner's insurance. Fresh volcanoes have to break ground somewhere I guess.

Not that I need an excuse to not post anything here during any given three month period, since that's pretty much my habit anyway...but it's been getting worse than usual, right?

To put it as ambiguously as possible, the mechanics at the office lately are like...like the springtime breakup of Arctic pack ice. Everything is shifting and morphing around you (with loud scary noises). And there are all these Eskimos racing around willy-nilly, and every now and then a sled team goes sloshing into a frigid crevice somewhere. Of course off in the distance, there's the odd Polar Bear stranded on a seabound ice floe. And then you've also got the weird Ice Age 2 neanderthal squirrels running around trying to rescue their collective nuts. And over there, on the absolute wrong hemisphere of the earth, you've got Robert Scott eating his horses.

But what's new.

The other thing is, I'm also on a 3 week countdown to final manuscript submission for an astronomy related book I'm co-authoring with 4 other folks. It's been getting really stressful to say the least. Six months ago when I was writing my first drafts, it was all breezy and carefree. But now in the end stretch, I'm glued to this computer every spare minute trying to edit sentence after sentence to be as clear, fluid and understandable as possible. It's not like the Hee-Haw garbage I churn out here, it's semi-technical, so I can't screw around as much. :'( It's one thing to write passionately about something, but molding it for wide audience and shaving the chingers off of it is hard work. I'm looking forward to the end result, and maybe I'll reminisce more about it later, but I'm pretty much wiped out for now.

Also, next hair cut appointment, I'm getting buzzed. :D