3 February 1998: A Time to Say "No"

Tuesday, 3 February 1998:

A Time to Say "No"

As I sit here, Newton has gone into panic-mode, running around the apartment and making random merping sounds. A typical nightly occurrence for high-strung cats, I suspect!

Today was my day to say "no" at work. I finally had a day I could earmark to work on a project I wanted to work on, and that I'd been pulled off of several times in the last two weeks to work on substantially un-fun projects. So when people came up to ask me if I could work on something for them, I told them no, not today. Since what I was working on nominally had to be finished by the end of the day, I figured that if my work was going to be turned over to someone else, then logically the other work could instead be turned over to someone else.

So I finally got to spend the day doing something I actually wanted to do. It was nice.

Karen and I went to dinner tonight, and then went to the coffee shop to chat and read. She's taking a statistics class (sitting in, really) and wanted to catch up on the reading. For my part, I finished reading the Java book I was working on, and perhaps this weekend I'll see about writing something. I want to put my Boston Red Sox minor league baseball page in a Java applet to provide the user with nice analytical tools which are a little too complex for HTML to handle the way I want.

Earlier in the day I went to lunch with Tracy, a friend at work (who finds bugs in my code; that's her job!). We chatted about work and about the gathering she and Karen and several other people had for a formerly-local SF fan who was in town visiting. Privately I reflected that I've largely departed from that group, other than overseeing the SF3 web site and contributing to the local APA. As I've mused here before, I don't really feel connected to many of the people in that group - despite being in it for nearly two years - so I've decided to target my participation to the elements that I know I enjoy.

Oh, and I also go to the monthly book discussions. The directly-SF-related aspects are the ones I really enjoy; unfortunately, they seem to be increasingly marginalized in fandom, as far as I can tell.

TNT finished re-running the first season of Babylon 5 tonight. I'd forgotten just how much was packed into "Chrysalis", the season finale. The series had really gotten going by this point, and would pick up the pace over the next two years before stumbling hard in season four when it came time to resolve things.

I'm still working on my B5 page. It'll be a while; I have a lot to write.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)