As predicted, something came up to prevent us from going camping. Marjorie remembered she has a book club meeting on Sunday at noon. Oh well. This way, we're less likely to contract West Nile virus, since there are only about half as many mosquitos in our house as there are outside.

SURVEY SAYS

The Friday Five: (found at fridayfive.org)

1. What is your biggest pet peeve? Why? Hmm. I hate it when people tailgate, and I don't know if this counts as a "pet peeve" but when some strange man leers at me, or has the nerve to make some comment to me it pisses me off beyond belief.

2. What irritating habits do you have? I sometimes (often) respond to what people are saying before they've finished talking. I'm too impulsive, I get excited, what can I say? I'm also an annoying car passenger. Driving scares me, so I tend to be the overly anxious passenger. (sorry Mark).

3. Have you tried to change the irritating habits or just let them be? I've definitely tried to work on my irritating habits, particularly trying to not interrupt people, and trying to be a better listener.

4. What grosses you out more than anything else? Why? I have a pretty high tolerance for disgusting things, I work with special needs kids so this is a must. However, any other person's body fluids coming into contact with any part of me tops the list, for fairly obvious reasons.

5. What one thing can you never see yourself doing that other people do? I don't know. There are lots of gross things I don't do, but truthfully I'm sure I have my fair share of irritating and nasty habits. I'd love to say I'll never pick my nose while driving my car, but we all know that's not true ;^)

We're going to try to camp this weekend up the road a spell, along the border of Georgia and South Carolina. Now, camping to us typically means a hotel without cable TV. We've almost gone real camping together on several occasions in the past, but something in our collective subconcious has always managed to find an excuse not to. Whether it was cowardice or deep-seated wisdom remains to be seen.

It is probably worth noting that the place we're going, Tallulah Gorge, was where Deliverance was filmed.

By the way, the archives over to the left appear to be fixed, so you can now browse this blog back to the berry beginning.

I have vowed to myself that if we end up in Singapore or Hong Kong, I'm going to learn to speak Chinese. Now, I got by in school pretty good by figuring out shortcuts to learning -- for instance, you can get by in physics pretty well just by learning to plug values into equations and grinding out the results. Learning a language can be frustrating to me because there aren't many shortcuts to learning short of sheer rote memorization. And now I just found this page, which has some daunting statistics about the language. Most depressing: "A Chinese child learns about 2,000 characters by the time he is ten, but it takes two or three times as many to be able to read a newspaper or novel." Yikes.

Still, I'm going to try. I can't decide whether to shoot for Cantonese (spoken by residents of Hong Kong and most Chinese in the US) or Mandarin (considered the lingua franca and spoken by two thirds of the Chinese population). There are several other dialects, spoken by tens of millions, that I'm not going to touch. Coming from the US, it's hard to fathom how a country can get by with that much disparity.

Of course, if we end up in Australia, I'll be able to speak to the natives pretty well, thanks to those Fosters commercials.

While on the subject, one thing we found hilarious while in Singapore last year was the signs that were up everywhere hawking the government-sponsored Speak Good English Movement. Note that that does not say the "Speak English Well Movement". There doesn't seem to be any of the widespread guffawing and derision there that I would expect from such a mistake, so they apparently have a long way to go.

She's like L.A., she has style but no culture...

I feel the blog is becoming too personal, and not anecdotal enough. blah blah blog. Anyway. This is a poem I wrote years and years ago when I was filled with angst.

For Sherrianne and Sputnik:
Where are you, my friend
who's flown off like that dog in space
and left me with the pedestrians
to solve this puzzle on my own.
I would have come to comfort you,
if I'd known, if they'd told me.
Instead I struggle with your memory,
knowing, not knowing, that the lack of oxygen is killing you.

NO! NO! NO!
I was just looking at the application form for immigrating to Australia, trying to straighten out the paperwork and get the process started and I realized that we both need to have our job skills assessed by the Australian powers that be.This means we need to tack on another 3 months (at least) to the all ready excruciatingly long migration process (9-12months)!!! AHH!!!! This is sooooo hard. I'm so ready to go, ANYWHERE. I've all ready quit my job (and gone back, sort of, I'm not working yet, supposed to happen this week, but...), we've sold a lot of our furniture, we've all ready got some of our stuff packed and boxes are spread all over the house, and we may not be going anywhere for 12 months!!! I know in the grand scheme of things this does not qualify as a "real" problem; we both have jobs, we have family and friends that care about us, we have jobs and money, but still it's a test of patience. It's like being at the start of a race, ready to run, with numerous false starts that exhaust you and deteriorate your confidence. Maybe I'm being overdramatic.

REUNITED
Yesterday rocked. My friend Alison came into Atlanta for a brief visit home (she lives in Portland, OR). We spent the whole day running around, getting coffee, going to the High Museum to see the Jacob Lawrence exhibit, it was great. I'm pretty fortunate to have a lot of social acquaintances here, people we see at parties and go out to bars with, but most of my best friends live in other cities now. It was soooo great to visit with one of my best friends, and be able to say anything without fear of being judged or misunderstood. Alison mentioned the idea of planning a "reunion" vacation every year, this sounds like a fantastic idea to me-the last time I had all my best friends together in one place was at our wedding, and it was fantastic. So, maybe Hawaii in May 2003?

Bummer
I've been downloading MP3s for a while now, and it always bothered me how often you find that they're inconsistently labelled or contain wrong information. I'd been working on a piece of software that does a sort of mass fix-up on MP3 files, and would also rename the file itself in a consistent manner. Now I find that someone has already made a product that does almost exactly what I was hoping for. Mine would still be better in some ways, so I may still continue, but it's taken the wind out of my sails a little bit...

Prediction
In five years every new car will come equipped with multiple cameras. Not so that the authorities can watch you, but so that you can watch the authorities and other drivers. The cameras would record what's ahead and behind and to the sides of you, and possibly even inside the car. For instance, a cow orker just got pulled over for rolling through a stop sign, despite the fact that his car rocked back when he stopped (he says). Imagine if he had it all on film, including the interaction with the officer; he would have saved himself a ticket. (Mi amigo Mike also just had an encounter I'd love to see footage of.) It would also be useful for absolving yourself of guilt in accidents, and for recording break-ins and vandalism. There's at least a dozen times in my life I can think of where this would have been great. Digital cameras are cheap, and are what makes it all now feasible -- you'd only have to store the last five minutes or so of what was happening around you.

GROUNDED
We both made it home safely. Whew. I become rather paranoid when Mark flies without me (as if somehow my presence will protect him).
Both trips went rather well. Being in Fayetteville is such an odd, bittersweet, experience now. I have so many memories attached to every street, every landmark. It's a shame I didn't look up any old college friends who might still be there, but I didn't feel I had enough time, and I was there to see my niece.
Mark seemed to have a great visit with his folks. His mother very sweetly started a scrapbook for our wedding pictures and paraphernalia, which is something I had planned on doing, but hadn't gotten around to yet. The cover is a watercolor she painted of the location of our wedding ceremony. Really a very nice sentiment.

Back from Florida. I guess I'll have to come to terms with the fact that every flight into or out of Orlando will be filled with screaming kids. It was a good visit though.


From the utterly useless trivia file: Found out this weekend that my godmother (who I haven't seen in decades) used to date Michael Landon. How far from Kevin Bacon does that put me?

Nature boy
Started the day off feeding manatees off my parent's dock. Manatees will come up when they hear water from a hose, for a drink of fresh water. The situation looks something like this. There were three of them -- two big ones and a baby. They wouldn't come up while I was standing there holding the hose, though, like in past visits; I guess it's a good thing that they're more scared of humans. Still, any day where you feed a manatee is a good day in my book.

Then we took a brief sail on my parents' sailboat. I asked my dad, "Do you ever have dolphins follow you out here?" "Sure," he said. Just then I spotted one over his shoulder, and a minute later, it was beside the boat checking us out.

We ran out of wind, and had to go back in under power. On the way back in there were four more dolphins, which were kicking up big waves as they chased fish. Other wildlife spotted today: two ospreys, many cormorants, many pelicans, many seagulls, some least terns, a great blue heron, and some smaller heron.

Checking in from Cocoa Beach
Down to see the parental units. Was hoping to see my new nephew, but their whole family is sick, so they won't be making the drive up from Ft. Lauderdale. 'Scool, though -- still nice to be here.

For dinner, my parents invited over some friends of theirs who have traveled the world by sailboat. They met when he sailed into Fiji; he's American, she's Australian. In fact, she was working for the Australian embassy when they met -- so it was very nice to meet them! They brought along pictures of their boating adventure which started in Australia, and went through Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East. It was a nice reminder of why we're going to move! My wanderlust is back with a vengeance.

ONE WAY OKAY
Mark and I made it safely to our destinations. He's in Florida. I'm in Arkansas. It's strange to be back here. The University of Arkansas @ Fayetteville is where I got my undergraduate degree. I haven't been here in ten years, but it's still pretty much the same, more stripmalls, a few more buildings on campus, but pretty much the same. I'm glad I left when I did, but I still have strong feelings of nostaglia for this place. Driving around this morning, every street is associated with a different memory. College was so much fun, atleast undergrad was, grad school kinda sucked.
I'm enjoying visiting with my neice. Katie's a cutie, and a pretty easy going baby, but still 24 hour baby exposure solidifies my confidence that Mark and I made the right decision (not having any).