Hard not to feel loved when you become the inspiration for a Friday rap.
I'm currently reading a book called "backpacker" by Emily Barr about a girl who backpacks through Vietnam, Loas, Thailand, Singapore.....It's the perfect chicktion before our journey.

My friend Matt occasionally will send out a "Friday rap" to all his friends on email. Today we were the subject. The last line is a reference to the fact that we go out for chicken wings most every Sunday. Dig dis:

G-raj sale money trying to lighten the load,
Marky Mark and Marj-ry bouts to hit the road,
Goin on a trip but who knows how long,
Tiki bar pint slammin wit the Viet Cong,
Safe and injected with the ant-e-dote,
Yellow fever ain't the flava with the bags in tote,
Extra supa happy meal, burger made of dog,
Sunday night spicy, bufflo wing? no bufflo frog.

Last day at work -- for who knows how long. Woop! There's going to be a lot of water under the bridge before I can really start enjoying my time off though. Every day for the next two weeks is mapped out. It's no fun being this regimented.

Stuff is gradually disappearing from our house, into boxes, or the hands of friends, or the garbage can. Possessions are a burden, but so is the lack of them.

TWO WEEKS TO GO I'm working daily to check things off on the "to do" list. Traveller's checks have been purchased, prescriptions for Malaria prophylaxis filled, charity truck scheduled to come and pick up all the items we don't sell at the yard sale, flyers put up around the neighborhood advertising the yard sale. Every day there's a list of tasks I try to take care of so we'll be ready to leave. In spite of all this activity though, it still doesn't seem real. I suppose the reality of going won't hit me until we get on the plane.

This is interesting. I actually used to work with the guy, before he switched over to this latest project. He's a smart man, and doesn't seem to be as nefarious as Safire is painting him to be, but who knows. His latest initiative does sound frightening.

I'm a little irked at Hotmail right now; for the past week or so, I keep getting

You have made too many unsuccessful sign-in attempts with an incorrect password

messages whenever I try to log in. It takes me five or six tries to get through. Wonder if someone's trying to hack my password or something? I'd complain but Microsoft won't let you complain unless you sign up for their Passport service. Serves me right for getting into bed with them this far. Too late to switch to some other mail service now; too many people know my Hotmail address...

Not for the faint of heart. Please remember, he had plastic surgery to look this good.

I'm hopping on the band wagon and copying Mike's googlism. Here's the edited version of the Marjorie seach
Googlism for "Marjorie".

marjorie is born
marjorie is the author of the book the divine right of capital
marjorie is one of mistaken identity
marjorie is an astute observer of people and behavior
marjorie is a gifted artist
marjorie is having a midlife crisis
marjorie is placed within the boundaries of her home
marjorie is also a contributing reporter for the show
marjorie is often on the road giving demonstrations
marjorie is her mother
marjorie is a hopi field nurse
marjorie is part of london zoo’s history herself
marjorie is listed as appearing
marjorie is on pages 1
marjorie is out enjoying her garden
marjorie is on her way back to the ocean
marjorie is one of our best tour guides
marjorie is sitting at her desk at home
marjorie is content to do what she thinks he wants
marjorie is a profoundly loving and compassionate healer
marjorie is recovering from a mental crisis
marjorie is going to stay at your house until march 27
marjorie is a successful motivational speaker
marjorie is not volunteering at the peace and environment resource centre
marjorie is almost like a jewish phyllis
marjorie is founder and chief executive of sane
marjorie is
marjorie is reluctant to tell her friend to leave
marjorie is pleasant to be with
marjorie is not catholic
marjorie is responsible for making sure all parties are medically screened and the results forwarded to the doctors offices before any procedures are done
marjorie is also illustrating children's books and greeting cards
marjorie is already encouraging him to call her "mum" ;by day three they're rolling around in bed together
marjorie is a fearless driver
marjorie is a regular moderator on diabetes station
marjorie is the well
marjorie is a mess
marjorie is returning home from work and stops at a corner store
marjorie is certainly no stranger to difficult circumstances
marjorie is extremely well read
marjorie is the instigator of everything
marjorie is already a cartoon
marjorie is suffering from a severe case of midlife angst
marjorie is the co
marjorie is available for bookings in clubs
marjorie is a brilliant lady with a keen sense of curiosity and the tenacity to plow through details that would send anyone else running
marjorie is restless
marjorie is now
marjorie is very proud to be returning to the bus after a north american tour
marjorie is a member of the huronia rose society

Some stores are really dangerous too. They should be required to have warning labels on the doors "WARNING! You will not be able to leave this store without spending at least 2X's what you planned". Target's one of those, and so's The Container Store. The Container Store is particularly dangerous when you're moving/going on a trip, and you're not allowed to buy anything else. The Container Store is also the only store I know of that is equally appealing to both men and women; the perfect combination of aesthetic appeal and functionality.
The yard sale is on for Saturday, I'm off to flyer the neighborhood, as the local paper wants $70!!! for an ad (who would pay that?).

Movies are dangerous. Compare and contrast this and this. The obvious solution is to ban all movies, because stupid people will try to imitate them!

Son of a...! I just got mail from Mellon Investor Services, asking if I can confirm that I am the Mark S that was living at a certain residence in Orlando, ten years ago. It's in reference to assets on this one share of stock I own in a company that I received as a gift, that was paying dividends of something like $0.34 a year. They can't find my address anymore. The sinister thing is that I looked this Mellon company up, and they're a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, a company that compiles databases about people, a la J. Edgar Hoover, and sells them. Quite a racket they have going as middleman spies. I'll have to contact the company I have the stock in directly.

Just for fun, I'm taking a trip down geek memory lane.

Some time in the late 70's, my dad bought a KIM 1. It had a whopping 1K of ram and you had to store your programs on a cassette tape. It had a hexadecimal keypad (seen here on the lower right) for inputting your programs in machine code and six red LEDs as the only display. All the circuitry was exposed. Despite the limitations, I was hooked immediately. I remember punching in machine code to play Hunt the Wumpus. (And, amazingly, chess. Some guy wrote a chess program that fit in 1K.)

In '79 or '80, our school got a TRS-80, which I pretty much took over. I still get a little lump in my throat looking at the old pictures. I still remember playing some of these games, especially Defense Command.

Another fond memory of this time was connecting my dad's dumb terminal to a university computer to play Adventure. Due to the partially disassembled state of the modem, I remember there was an alligator clip we had to attach to a screw when we heard the carrier signal.

Around '82-'83, my dad started bringing home an HP-85 from work. Wow, what fun. It could draw lines for graphics instead of just blocks like the TRS-80. It had a little thermal printer built in, like you see on cash registers.

Shortly thereafter, my dad and I played a ping-pong match with high stakes. If I won, he'd buy a TRS-80 Color Computer for the house. If he won, I'd have to get a job and pay for half. Did he let me win? I'll never know, but he came home with the computer a few days later. Sixteen K of RAM! Color! And a screen as big as whatever TV you plugged it into. What a joy. (I remember a friend of my dad's had one with 32K of RAM. 32K! How could anyone possibly ever use that much? As a point of reference, my new laptop has over 16,000 times as much.)

That was the computer I really learned to program on. My brother and I wrote really good knock-off of Activision's Atari 2600 game Kaboom! in assembly language. I remember we had to shorten our variable names just to be able to load the whole thing into the editor, so I guess I started to realize that maybe 16K wasn't so much.

Thanks for indulging me...

It's the little things that make me happy! Eggnog Lattes are back at Starbucks. Yummy.

Ah, the joys of the last week at work. In tech sectors, the last week of work always means one thing: writing up documentation. To top it all, someone or something deleted some earlier documentation I had already done, so now it has to be redone. If there's one thing worse than documenting, it's redocumenting.

And this stuff will never be read, either. It's tempting to put in such descriptions as, "The purpose of this page is to display a tasty recipe for gazpacho" or "The inclusion of this field is a vivid demonstration of why management needs to start cracking down on three martini lunches". No one would ever know.

For the record we also saw a little green heron and several osprey. And here's a shot of one of the manatees that came up to my parent's dock. None of the ones we saw had any propeller scars, which is an atypical but welcome sight.

Some other highlights:

Seeing my new nephew Bryce (or Cooper, depending on which parent you ask). Bryce is very big and gurgly and interactive with his environment for such a young age. What a cutie.

Finally bonding a little with my niece Chaeli, who's four. Growing up in the sticks of northern Florida as she is, she must hear a lot of southern drawls; she apparently thinks I "tawk funny". Her mom (my sister Danielle) has picked up a drawl too!

Food, and lots of it. I always turn into a pig when I visit my parents.

Chasing manatees in a little dinghy, with Marjorie, who's a little dinghy herself, ha ha. *Ouch* Ooh, that's going to bruise.

Roadkill spotting. We saw raccoons, armadillos, an alligator, and a wild boar. In Atlanta we only get squirrels, cats, and dogs.

Thanks, family! You all are the best!

BACK FROM FLORIDA
I definitely married the right man. Not only is he wonderful, but his family really couldn't be nicer too. We went to Florida yesterday (returning late today) to visit Mark's family one last time before we leave, and in spite of the Red Tide, which contributed to dreadful air quality, we had a fantastic time. His parents, grandmother, and siblings have really been incredibly supportive of us and our desire to see the world, which is not something I want to take for granted. I occasionally hear stories about scary in-laws from friends of mine, and I'm so glad that neither I nor Mark can relate. We both really like our in-laws.
I really enjoyed visiting Florida too. We saw manatees today off the dock at Mark's parents house and several jumping mullets (fish, not hair), and later driving around I saw a kingfisher, and several cormorants. Yesterday a large blue heron landed in front of the window, and last night, when hit with a middle-of-the-night panic attack of the "what are we doing! we're going to be jobless and homeless in three weeks!" variety, I went out and sat on the dock to watch the waves and stare at the never-ending expanse of stars and sky and, in-spite of Red Tide air quality which left me with a sore throat this morning, I felt calmed and centered by all the beauty of the natural surroundings. Florida really is a beautiful state, in spite of all the over-development, strip-malls, and Jeb Bush.