as if you needed more proof

that things are calming down a little at work (albeit temporarily) here are two more random things:

- spam (from liz, who i regularly exchange funny spam with) that said:

We live in a century of improbable technologies such as self-cooled beer, artificial retinas of the eye, full automated factories.

made me start wondering about this self-cooling beer. was it real? and turns out, it will be very soon.

- announcement involving a guy called knish, leading to a google image search for gluten-free knish, for which the only search result is this.

ok back to bug researching. :)

typo of the day

"The most important part is the presence of the scrollbards"

scrollbards! wandering around the streets of england, looking for someone to buy their carefully scribed collection of words. we should all be so lucky to have the presence of scrollbards.

and in a retroactive typo of the day, a recent favorite is butto. as in:

"Please use the code below or create a similar butto:"

o butto, how i love thee. you have butto-d your way into my heart.

word to the wise

in case you didn't know this, when a last-minute multi-person project comes up at work, don't say 'you can give me the nasty one'. because then you will end up working all night and into the weekend.

here's hoping i'll be off the internets by mid-afternoon...

this is unreal

i don't know how this happened:

You Are 0% Homophobic

You're open minded, tolerant, and accepting. And you're not homophobic in the least :-)

Are You Homophobic?

speaking of unreal, min and i went for a VERY last minute trip up to oregon over the weekend! i like spontaneity but normally our unexpected outings occur within a 50 mile radius and only last a few hours. being a last minute idea, we didn't leave until about 330pm saturday. due to traffic and weather we didn't arrive to salem (where my parents/sister live) until around 430am. good thing my family tends to sleep in.

we had a great time visiting with them - playing games, talking, having grilled cheese and marionberry cobbler. we also ended up going to our beloved rose's, which closed in the 90's (much to our dismay) but reopened a few years ago. yay! sadly the food wasn't quite as magical as it used to be but it was still damn tasty.

oh! and i had the best. coffee. ever. holy crap. so rich so creamy so tasty so why can't they have some down here??? wah!!

per wen's suggestion that a visit might be helpful in addressing these feelings of wanting to move: great idea. now i want to move even MORE. apart from enjoying being with my family - which meant a lot - i loved revisiting my past. here's where i did blah, there's the HS i graduated from, etc. it was fun. and while i think california, esp the bay area here, is beautiful in many many ways, i fell totally in love with oregon again. also i never realized how much parts of it - esp between salem and eugene - looks like middle tennessee. which yes, i sometimes wax nostalgic for (altho not for its summers).

because of all this we left late coming home, too, and didn't get back until 4am. so with that plus fighting off a cold, my ass is dragging. time to apply more toffee crack.

just kidding!

thanks to everyone who sent the good vibes ... the surgery got cancelled at the last minute. they'll be rescheduling soon, and i'm far too annoyed to go into the why now, but needless to say this was not cool.

anyway - we'll keep all that vibery on retainer for later... thanks again. =)

speaking of roots...

no, this is not a post about a television miniseries or levar burton, altho i mildly enjoyed his eyebrow skills while he was on STNG.

the roots i speak of today are in the mouth, which is the root of much pain, at present, for min. long story short, as a side effect of her life-saving surgery last year, her teeth are in an accelerated state of decay. it's gotten worse in the last few months in particular, to such a point that now extensive extractions are required. due to last year's surgery, she can't undergo these extractions at a normal dentist, but requires an oral surgeon.

the *only* good part to all this is that the necessity of this is due to a medical condition, so our blue cross, instead of delta dental, should cover it. much better payout!

and i say should cover because we didn't get the luxury of preauthorizing...we'd planned to wait it out, but in the last week min's pain has been off the charts - fractured teeth will do that - and so here we are with last minute (scheduled yesterday!) surgery.

so, anyone reading in the next day or so, please keep her in your thoughts. she's due for a pretty rough ride, considering the rest of her medical situation, and would welcome all the good vibery there is out there.

and now that i'm completely bleary-eyed from yet another crazy week at work plus the dental wackies, i'm going to bed. nighty night, internet. =)

rooted

lately i have been completely overwhelmed with a desire to return home. and by home, i mean oregon.

most of the time when someone asks me where i'm from, i say 'the west coast', because we moved around a lot. if pressed, i'll say oregon because i was born there, and have lived there the most (probably a third of my life).

within the last year, my parents, sister and her clan have all returned to the sweet, misty green of oregon. for a lot of that time, my parents were in a bad way (shitty situation with my uncle, then living out of a hotel for the last few months) but finally the heavens (in this case, government) blessed them with some low income housing. i haven't blogged about their situation much, because it was rather depressing and there wasn't much i could do about it, but they have a place to call their own now, and the relief i feel, it is great.

my sister and her two lovely boys moved to oregon in november. they had a rocky start too, but have settled a little more quickly. they're situated enough to get camera phones and send me some nice pics. :-D

now my parents have always - gently - pushed me to live closer to them. for many years they lived in one of the Hottest, Driest, Blandest Places On Earth (phoenix), so it was really easy to say no. my sister also lived there, but never asked me to move, probably because she hated it too. scorpions? not really a selling point.

now they're all up in oregon, and getting pretty cozy. apparently it's so nice (as if i didn't know oregon was nice) that really, can't i just move up there? apply to jobs up that way? my sister was practically pleading with me a week or so ago, and since she has NEVER done anything like that, it just about killed me. my chest ached for wanting to be there with all of them. because she just missed me. and i miss all of them.

the part that really hits me as funny is that there is no drama surrounding this. nobody needs rescuing (and of course, that's good!), but i'd swear someone activated some kinda homing beacon or something, because the drive to pack up and leave is insane. the good(?) news is that the insanity has spread to min -- without my really saying anything -- so at least we're both infected. it'll be interesting to see where this leads…

ps. no i am not just writing this because i've had a hard day/couple of weeks.
pps. yes i've had a hard day/couple of weeks. :-p