Week Flown By

Every year I have a number of ambitions for my holiday week off, and every year the week flies by with a saddening lack of progress on my part in many areas.

This year the biggest loser has been my plan to redesign my Web site and journal: Come up with new graphics, new (and probably simpler) HTML templates, re-write some scripts in Ruby, etc. On that point I've so far got bupkis to show, as I didn't even launch Fireworks to start working on the graphics this week. Aargh. (I did open Fireworks to create a "2005" year image for my current look, though, so at least you shouldn't be seeing an unloaded image symbol up there.)

Other projects have fared a little better: My desk at home is clean. I've done some writing. I'm getting my financial data and files in order for 2005. (Boy, Excel really sucks for the things I want to do with my financial records. Maybe I'll switch to FileMaker.)

Most horrifyingly, having gotten frustrated with my lack of endurance when playing frisbee, I've started jogging again. This says a lot because I find jogging to be mind-numbingly boring, and even listening to music or the radio as I jog doesn't help. But, the one time in the last five years that I made significant progress at losing weight was back when I was jogging. (I was also lifting weights as well, so we'll see whether that makes a difference.) Mostly I'd just like to improve my endurance, though.

Debbi has been jogging with me on the weekends, and we've been driving over to the Stevens Creek Trail in the mornings for the endeavor, which has been pleasant.

To be fair (sorta), I did buy Sim City 4 last Sunday. But really it hasn't sucked up a lot of my time. Mostly it's kept me up too late a few nights, but I also was setting alarms so I didn't sleep until noon. This new Sim City is pretty good, although it looks like there may never be one as big a step forward as the original game or Sim City 2000. (Sim City 3000 seemed nearly indistinguishable from 2000 when I played it.) Sim City 4 adds the ability to have trade between cities in a region, although the controls for managing a region are kind of lame. I also wish it had the ability to randomly generate terrain for a region, since the terrain editor is okay but difficult to use beyond the bounds of a single city. Still, it should keep me entertained off and on for a few months.

After "lazy", the word for the week has been "rain", followed by the words "and lots of it". Drizzle, steady rain, mist, everything but torrential downpours. It's actually been alternating with sunshine, so there's been some variety. But it's been wet. I haven't been driving around the Bay Area much (other than lunch with Debbi on Tuesday and a short foray into SF afterwards), so I don't know how crazy the traffic has been due to the weather. Ultimate was cancelled on Wednesday, and likely will be cancelled on Monday, too.

Wednesday my friend Karen drove down from the east bay for dinner. We tried a new Indian restaurant downtown which was pretty good but not as good as my favorite local Indian restaurant. (I observed that this is like not being as rich as Donald Trump.) We caught up on gossip (mostly from her end) and generally had a nice visit.

While doing other things, I watched my DVD of The Return of the King. I still feel that Fellowship was the best of the trilogy, with a steady downhill slide from there. But it's still a fun movie.

And last night we went over to our friends Mark & Yvette's house for a New Year's party. Mark has been having a "drunken Scrabble party" for a few years now, but this is the first one I've attended. I think Mark didn't get nearly drunk enough, since he didn't dominate the evening as I've heard he usually does when he has a bottle of champaign in him! Yvette also made an 80s-retro theme for the evening, which several people participated in. I didn't really look much different in the 80s than I do now - other than being thinner and less gray - so I just went as I was. Everyone had a really good time, though. No complaints!

One way in which I did look different is that I wore glasses in the 80s, brown horn-rims. And, in fact, I still have almost identical glasses. It doesn't matter much since I wear them about four days a year, and wear contact lenses the rest of the time. However, I finally went out on Monday and ordered (from Costco) some new glasses with frames for the new millennium. I found frames I liked almost instantly, and the whole process was pretty painless. I'll pick them up this week or next, when they're ready.

You know, by and large I have fond memories of the 1980s. However, I generally could not stand 80s culture. I hated (most of) the popular music, hated Reagan and Bush and their politics, hated Star Trek: The Next Generation, don't have many good memories of the films of the era... it seems in retrospect like a dark time. Give me the 70s or the 90s any day.

Logged on this morning to find the surprising news that Spies.com will soon be decommissioned. This will result in a fair amount of churn and busy-work for me this month. I never have gotten around to getting my own domain, so I will have to retarget my e-mail and my Web page to wherever I end up going (and I likely will buy in to Ceej's plan for a new site). In any event, if you suddenly find my e-mail bouncing and my Web site down, that's the reason. Hopefully I will be able to announce a new plan before that.

Otherwise, check out my LiveJournal for updates until everything gets moved to its new home.

Hopefully it will not be too painful. Also, I think I will finally get a domain name. So there may end up being two moves, depending on how on-the-ball I am. I'll try to keep in touch.

No New Year's resolutions for me. I have plenty of projects and things I need to make progress on and finish off. My biggest goal is to submit at least one and hopefully two or three short stories to the SF magazines this year. Get the ball rolling. I am, after all, not getting any younger.

All-in-all 2004 was a pretty good year for me. Some points of frustrating, but also some wonderful times, and I ended the year feeling pretty happy about where I've ended up, and pretty confident in myself both at work and at home. And you can't really ask much fairer than that.