17 February 1998: A Mind of One's Own

Tuesday, 17 February 1998:

A Mind of One's Own

Work has been going considerably better this week. First of all, I seem to have all of my "peripheral tasks" under control, shuffling off all the distractions yesterday without much trouble. These are mostly things that I need to do, but which keep me away from what I really want to be doing (programming something interesting).

Second, what I'm programming lately is somewhat interesting, even if it is basically a bug fix. (Actually, it's more a workaround for a flaky element of Visual Basic. This week's joke: Wintel machines consist of one-third games, one-third viruses, and one-third that doesn't work.) It's turning out to be a little more complicated than I'd envisioned, but I'm trying to do an especially good job on it and I still think my time estimate (finish by end-of-day tomorrow) should be correct.

I've sort of been frittering away the evenings this week. Actually, I'd earmarked tonight to watch and dupe two episodes of Babylon 5, but it turns out there wasn't one yesterday, as TNT aired Back To The Future instead. Tonight they aired "The Coming of Shadows", which is one of the best episodes of the whole series. It's an episode with a lot going on, from a lot of different angles, but it all holds together very well, with one really painfully tragic scene to watch.

On eBay I bid on some 1960s issues of Justice League of America that I want. If I win the bids, I should get some comic books I've really wanted for a while (and will surely buy eventually) at very nice prices. What a great hobby!

Right now I'm reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, subtitled "Instructions on Writing and Life". I've only really just begun, though. It was a Christmas gift from my sister.

I haven't really talked about my sister Katy here, have I? Well, she's about four-and-a-half years younger than me. Thanks to her, my family has a nice example of genetics, as my parents and I all have dark hair and brown eyes, and she has blonde hair and blue eyes (and pale skin).

We never really got along when we were younger. Largely my fault, I suspect. I handled her arrival in the family pretty well, but I think that once she grew up enough to have her own mind and wants and opinions (this would have been when she was four or five, I guess) then we just couldn't get along. We fought pretty badly. We didn't really start getting along regularly until she was in college, or maybe even out of college!

She recently finished a Master's degree in library science and is now working in the archives of a prestigious university somewhere in the United States. When she was young she went by "Katie", but now it's "Katy". She has a young cat named Eartha, who I've only seen as a kitten. A rambunctious thing, from what she says. I know Katy reads a lot, and I seem to have her pegged as far as Christmas and birthday gifts go; her musical tastes tend to be late-80s/early 90s alternative, and a variety of female folk/rock singers (Joni Mitchell and Michelle Shocked, for instance). She's a lot easier to buy for than either of my parents!

I don't really know what she does in her spare time. We don't write a whole lot, even thought she's on-line. We get along, but we don't have a lot of common ground to maintain a close relationship, it seems. But I think she's happy to have a paying job and to have moved out of the Boston area, to be on her own, basically.

Which certainly is something we have in common.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)