webcowgirl

I nearly got one, too, Dubrovnik for (pound sign)133. But I had breakfast and it went up 30 quid by the time I came back. BAH.

Crap, I meant to say "Oh yeah, don't forget my unbirthday party June 20th" but I should probably wait and post that when I'm actually in a good mood.

Kinda down today. Feel like keeping up this blog is a waste of time - I could just go back to putting things up on my old Greymatter site if I want to diary, but my content contributions here don't seem to be building community - the huge effort I made to get things online while I was gone didn't really generate any response. Maybe Twitter for ambient awareness, Facebook for keeping up with people far away, Wordpress for art writing, and Greymatter to keep an online diary is the way to go. My LJ use seems to be dying off pretty naturally - I'm having to remind myself to use it these days.

It's gray outside and I've got lots of cleaning to do, then later some grocery shopping (we had breakfast without bacon or sausage today, so sad!) and maybe a visit to the dosa shop. And I need to do the budget for the month. Ooo baby.

I would sure like to hear from Tripadelic about that resume. I need to be done with my job, really.

This week seems like it's going to be all about holding patterns. At work, I'm holding waiting for some more work to come in from my team. In the meantime, I've volunteered to help another team. This means I spent the morning waiting for them to get their deployment together. When they deployed, I got right on my work, then had to wait for an image file to be mailed to me that supposedly was in the original work request so that I could verified it matched what was deployed. Now I'm waiting to hear if the bug I found is something they're going to fix.

In the meantime, I've been popping over to my theater blog to keep editing a post on cheap restaurants near Covent Garden (or the West End or whereever you're going to the theater in this town) that I've been working on in my head for about a year now. Oddly, it's the anniversary of my most popular post ever, "12 best ways to get cheap theatre tickets in London." 2399 people have viewed that post (as of 5 minutes ago) and it just keeps rolling. I hope it enjoys its new friend. I've still got a lot to add to it to make it look right and to add in all of the restaurants I want to talk about - I figure it will be two more weeks before it's really done (or "done done" as we say in Agile-speak).

I'm also in a holding pattern with what I'm doing this week. I only have solid plans for Tuesday, when wechsler and I are going to see "Les Sept Doigt du Main," aka Traces, a circus performance. I'm also interested in seeing "Eonnagata," "A View from the Bridge," "The Pitman Painters," and "War Horse," but only if I can get cheap seats. We'll see if I actually do anything this week (besides see Salome at the BFI this Saturday and Beginning Reformer Pilates on Wednesday).

And I'm in a holding patter waiting for payday. Four more days ...

Today six other people and I gave a presentation to a bunch of our fellow managers that I call "Mother Goose and the Our Company Name Here Fairytales." In this we presented three stories, told panto style, showing how we had come up with solutions for actual problems people in our group were facing. First was "Cinderella," in our case the ugly step sisters versus Buttons (representing a bullying episode): the "fairy God manager" came by and split up the mean girls and told "Buttons" that he'd be best working on helping himself.

Second was "Beauty and the Beast." Our Beast was a person a year away from retirement who was making the department a depressing place to work because of her attitude. "Beauty" came by and saw the inner nature of the beast: a bored woman who'd probably enjoy being given some challenges and a bit more respect for her seniority. We'll see if our guess in any way matches up to reality.

The final act was "Snow White and the Four Dwarves," who in this case didn't "tidy the cottage, make their beds, or get their status reports turned in on time." Snow White originally couldn't see the dwarves ("Look behind you!" we shouted) and, when confronted, they all denied they weren't doing what they were supposed to ("Oh no we don't!" they said. "Oh yes you do!" she replied). Snow White was going to give them all clearer deadlines and reward the team with "a trip to the castle for a fancy dinner" if they made all of their targets. "Watch out for poisoned apples!" I warned them as the presentation ended. (I played Mother Goose.)

This was really the silliest thing I've done in months and months, and I was paid to do it as part of my managerial training. Thank God I was working with a group of silly , bored, and unchallenged people who were looking to find a way to make this rather dreary afternoon a bit fun and were fully lacking in any sense of shame. We rocked the house and people loved it. I just can't imagine Americans doing anything like this. It was all recorded on people's camera phones; if it makes it on YouTube I'll be sure to let you all know.

I ended the day in a good mood and ran up to Islington to meet shadowdaddy and my uncle. We went to the Almeida to see In a Dark Dark House (which was pretty good but not brilliant like Fat Pig), then came home and discovered my theater blog has hit a new high - 313 hits today! I guess that means I have to feed the monkey and get tonight's show written up soon - must keep the visitors flowing!

So, last night, while other friends of mine were busy drinking and showing off their Halloween duds, I was laying on a blanket in front of the fireplace with shadowdadddy, desperately trying to warm up, and reading him an article from the New York Times magazine. This is rather funny in many ways, in part because it was an article about "digital intimacy" and yet I was actually "sharing" it in the oldest way of all ... by reading it out loud.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this article, which explained how the kind of immersive awareness of what people are up that Twitter (and LJ) allow helps create extensions of real social networks and improve possibilities of face time with people. It called this "ambient awareness," and I really buy into it. It also mentioned how when you get really tied into people this way that you become aware of their little ups and downs much like you would from body language, or little things like the way they sigh or extremely subtle tone of voice or phrasing differences.

The upshot of this all is that I got a Twitter account today. I think I already get this "ambient awareness" off of Livejournal a lot, but I'd like to be able to send little messages off of my cellphone without making it a big production, and Twitter is set up to do this. I'm not going to do the LJ twitter feed, though, because it doesn't seem to really do it for me, but hopefully before the day's gone I'll have it set up to feed to Facebook (ack, I'm buying into all of this digital claptrap, aren't I!).

Anyway, the fact this happened while reading OUT LOUD an article, while I was SITTING IN FRONT OF THE FIREPLACE with my sweetie does not escape me at all. In fact, it makes me happy - so happy that I think I'll celebrate this digital age by taking a trip to Richmond park today to look for deer in the autumn mist.

There is NOTHING like opening the freaking first page of a project and finding a bug immediately. This is actually a bit of a bad sign.

PS: I am checking stats for my theater review website. I am a pig.

Despite being sick as a dog, I had a good time in Paris.

The shocking thing is how very NICE the people were. I've really become used to surly service at restaurants, but people seemed genuinely caring and sweet. The hotel proprietress was just very kind in dealing with me being ill. And the woman on the Metro who tore off a page of her paper so I could read about the Iowa primaries - how great was that? I think I ate too much (although after the cold hit I lightened way, way up) and I walked more than I should of given my health. Today's trip to the Bois du Boulogne was a wash, as even if I had been healthy the cold and rain, um, "dampened the mood" must have been created from days like this, really. All I could think of was sitting somewhere warm and dry and not doing anything until the train came. We pretty much succeeded at that during the rest of the afternoon, though there was tea buying.

Anyway, no going out for me after I made it home today. Thank you to wechsler for coming over and making food for all of us. I really appreciated it, even if you couldn't tell from looking at me sitting there half-asleep at the dinner table.

That said, I've really been crazed for the crack journal tonight - almost three hours of reading to catch up (and make the appropriate comments). I did remember to change my user picture. And there was YouTube - I watched "My Posse's on Broadway" (which I had NEVER heard before - the video shows what are now "classic" shots of Broadway on Capitol Hill - whoda thunk it?) after reading about the Taco Bell there closing, and thewronghands killed a lot of time with her posts about a Ninja TV game show, with winners - and a competition for girl ninjas! Lord, then there was the sick and wrong thing panzerwalt posted ... all proof that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

PS: Tomorrow will mostly be about getting over my cold and I'm not making any other plans.

Be advised I'm too lazy to do this back to anyone. Some of my icons and what they mean and why I use them. (This one's my I'm Addicted To The Internet icon, not that you care.)

( action figure, Mano Poderosa, Tiara, potato mountain, ponies cufflink, Tiger monkey )