November 2003

• Thank you for Earl. I can not imagine my life without him. Without him, my life would not be complete.
• Thank you for showing me my spiritual path, and accompanying me on my journey down it. It may not be the road taken by most people, but it is a journey full of love, joy and life.
• Thank you for giving me a most wonderful Thanksgiving Day. Cherished memories were made with family and friends, and the feasts were wonderful.
• I am thankful for the joy our cat Tom brings into our life.
• I am thankful for a beautiful, safe and harmonious home, supportive family and friends, a wonderful job.
• Thank you for my health and well-being.
• And finally, thank you for helping me find the love and happiness in the world. Thank you for showing me how to shun negativity and helping me perfect my ability to do so.

We were lied to.

Come to find out, the unupdated abstract for the new house has been sitting on someone’s desk for the past three weeks. Since it’s sitting on someone’s desk, it hasn’t been updated. It hasn’t been touched.

Whoops!

This is not good, especially since our mortgage commitment runs out on December 1 and with a short next week, this could be a problem.

After much screaming, hollaring, swearing and jumping up and down (I think we may have banged the phone on the counter a couple of times as well, bad habit), we received a call from our lawyer. The wise word of the law. We’ll close before December 1st come hell or high water.

I’m betting on hell.

So, Earl and I are probably going to be celebrating Thanksgiving in the back of a U-Haul. Lovely. Once the closing of the house is complete, I’ll give the name of the fine real estate company we’ve been using so you can avoid them at all costs.

Payback is a bitch.

On a cheerier note, I spit on Bill Gates’ fine piece of software and wiped Windows completely from my machine. FreeBSD is humming along nicely. I just feeling like I’m downloading new software through molasses.

I had a wonderful dream last night that involved working for C.J. Cregg on “The West Wing”. Allison Janney (at least as C.J. Cregg) turned out to be quite a lovely woman. I was her assistant in my dream, typing away. Come to think of it, Ms. Janney has come across as a wonderful woman in the interviews and such I’ve seen her in. Put her with Amy Brenneman in my “attractive women” listing. They’re both people I’d like to do lunch with. I think I obsess about television way too much. And speaking of cool women (or television?), I see that Kathy from Survivor 4 is going to be on “Survivor 8: All Stars”. I think I may just have to watch that version of Survivor just to see her. I always thought she rocked.

I’ve been feeling remarkably cheery these days, though the waiting on the closing of the house has been a small little nag in the back of my mind. I must be concentrating too hard at work or something… people keep asking me “what’s wrong?” “You o.k.?” I guess I’m a little too intense about my job. I’m still feeling very productive – I like to get what needs to be done, done, so I don’t have to worry about it!

… as if that will ever happen. At least that what it seems like. Earl called the transaction handler today to find out what is taking so long with the closing date. She has no idea, she’ll call the seller’s (the enemy’s?) attorney. No, they’re not the enemy, but I am starting to feel that way. Am I still antsy? Way past that… now I’m RAW.

Work is plodding along nicely, I can’t believe that it’s Thursday night already. We just tried to watch Will and Grace, but the latest belch from the sun fried DirecTV for half the show. Judging by the half of W&G that we did see, we didn’t miss much at all. Apparently the producers are signing up special guest stars to make complete asses of them because Dylan Mc-needs-a-shave from The Practice truly made an idiot of himself tonight, per the script provided. Earl and I have said that we weren’t going to watch the show anymore but we had a few brain cells that needed killing off anyways.

I guess it’s cheaper than doing drugs.

Speaking of television… I am LOVING Judging Amy this season. I still find Amy Brenneman totally hot (stop snickering, I really do!) and I really am enjoying the show. It was nice to see Dan Futterman on the show again, even though it was for one episode. The show is interesting and I look forward to it every week.

And back to NBC… what the heck is going on with The West Wing? There’s the drugs we aren’t doing… the director’s doing them! The characters on that show have all traded in their personalities for a cranky one, the cinemetography SUCKS and the show has been dumbed down way beyond belief. The President went AWOL this week. Yeah, right. And Air Force One did a loop over the Hudson River last week.

But back to Mondays. I must admit that I was looking forward to going to work today. As I’ve mentioned before, I *love* this time of year and 2003 is no exception. I was mildly productive and had a good attitude about it to boot. I felt good throughout the day… perhaps a little tired, but not all draggy and crabby because it was Monday.

Yesterday we went to my father’s side of the family’s (follow that?) holiday party. Yes, I know it was only November 2, but, my grandfather and his wife leave for Florida about this time every year, and they throw a Thanksgiving/Christmas party first weekend in November for all families involved. It was great seeing everyone and I think a good time was had by all. I was able to talk geek with my cousin Nathan… he’s going to school to be an IT Administrator type, and he seems to know his stuff. I was able to talk FreeBSD with him, which is a nice change of pace. It’s funny, because Nathan and I used to chat over modems back in 1984 or 1985 when I had a VIC-20 and he had a TRS-80 of some sort. We dialed in long distance to the GEnie service so that we could chat back and forth, even though we lived about 10 miles apart. I bet my folks loved that phone bill.

Speaking of FreeBSD, I’ve made great strides on learning this new (to me) operating system and I must say that I am quite pleased. It seems much more cohesive than Linux. One thing that I like is that I am being forced to build my software from the ground up, whereas Linux throws everything but the kitchen sink into an install and tries to follow the “it just works” scenario, but doesn’t quite live up to the bar set by an iMac. FreeBSD, on the other hand, requires that you read, study, chat with other users and keep your wits about you to get it working, but once you do, it’s working the way *you* want it to. I like that.

We are awaiting one final piece of paper before we can close on the house – the abstract on the new house. I’ve given up waiting and am plotting ways to torment our lawyer’s paralegal. Earl has discouraged me from doing this and has taken matters into his own hands.

On a final note, my beard is progressing along nicely, though I had to give into a bit of a mustache trim because Earl said I wasn’t getting any unless I did. I do have my priorities.