sabine | Updatery (Reply)

In a somewhat bulleted as my attention span is rivaling that of an average chipmunk.

Many thanks to suibhne_geilt for pointing out the MapMyRun site. It pulls in the Google map for an area, then you can plot points on it to figure out how far you go on a run. I've mapped out a new walking route for Rain and me to try out this afternoon. Glee!
I am a slacker friend, else I would have posted many happy birthday wishes for revrb yesterday. Mea culpa, my friend. Maybe next year I'll get to blame you being in China for the belatedness of my good tidings?
My mom, the wonder accountant, managed to get Downwood and me a full order of magnitude more back on our taxes than we'd guessed! Also, though I didn't have my 1099 in my hand, I was only off by $0.59 in my estimate of how much interest I'd accumulated in 2006. Booyah.
We drove down to my parents' place on Saturday, hit Mom's office for tax preparation and drinks and snacks with her coworkers, went to church, watched the NCAA wrestling championships (not quite as pretty as 300, but I'd forgotten how much fun watching wrestling is), and chilled out.
Sunday we hiked around Lake Geode and took Rain along. She had a ball tromping through the leaves and seeing critters skittering around. After lunch, Downwood and I headed back to Madison, laden with much dead deer. Mmm...venison...
The trip back was exceptionally exciting. Downwood had to slam on the brakes to not rear-end the person ahead of us on the interstate who had just done the same thing. When he did this, Rain flew forward and smacked her head on the windshield and her chest into the console. I gathered all 70 lb of greyhound into my lap, though her tush was kind of perched on the soda bottles in between our seats. We took the very next exit and spent some time walking around to make sure that no one was hurt. Very luckily, the only casualty was one of the air vents on the dash that got a little cracked - everyone else was fine.
Yesterday morning, Downwood had a 7 am dentist appointment and I had meeting at 7:50 at work. I said, "Don't lock the door" as I took Rain out at 6:50. I got back into the house at 8 when our landlord people showed up with the keys (our neighbors are nice and called the pager for me since I had neither keys nor cellphone). That inauspicious start combined poorly with the stomach ooginess that started sometime Sunday night, so I took half a sick day and then worked from home for the afternoon.
Today work has been busy. I completed my part on a couple of projects, have met my goals well in advance of my expectations, figured out some tricky bits of code, and have generally had a productive day. I'm kind of proud of all that I've accomplished thus far. My list of things to do has actually shrunk for once and it's not because I went through and did all the easy things!
Tonight, Ms vlammers is coming to my house. She'll be spending the next couple of days looking for grad student housing in the Mad-town area so that she can start at the UW Real Soon Now. Glee!
I decided that I'm going to take another intro belly dance course to make sure that I've mastered the basics. I've had seven/eight years to drill wrong movements into myself, so trying to make that up in six weeks isn't going to work so well. I'm very excited about the upcoming course, though I already know I'm going to be missing at least one or two of the eight weeks. This makes me sad, as I dearly love dancing.
My sewing/craft room needs cleaning. I can't exactly see the floor in there anymore. It might be time for me to throw out my various notebooks and class manuals from undergrad and grad school. Since I have no idea when or in what field I'll be returning to academia, it doesn't make much sense to keep this much paper around.
Actually, my house in general needs to be cleaned. In lieu of any house elves showing up, I should probably start work on that soon. I might wait until after my back isn't trying to secede from the rest of my body, though. That sounds like a better plan. Yay for chiropractors and giant bottles of Advil!