The weekend spirals down.

Sunday: We woke up pretty late, but not so late that we couldn't slow down for a decent breakfast before heading out to Costco for our monthly grocery supplies. Kouryou-chan was rather rambunctious the whole time, obviously bored out of her mind, but we tried to make it as quick as possible before heading home and doing the divvying of the meats and other freezer items.

It was also tygereclipse's moving-out day. I helped her load her bed onto the roof of the car and then tied it down while she babied her orchids into the back seats and her laundry and food into the hatchback. It was very sad; I'm gonna miss her, she always smelled good, and was such fun around the house. On the other hand, the chaos and confusion she sometimes leaves in her wake... she'll have to work on that. We stopped by some department store to get her sheets and blankets, and then I drove her to her new place. Her roomates trooped out to help her move her stuff and in a matter of minutes the car was clean and her apartment cluttered. I hope she's happier there.

Monday: Omaha's Filing Day. Omaha had made, as one of her resolutions, to get all of her filing done and timely. So after dropping Kouryou-chan off at school, we stopped by the office supply joint for folders, the post office to drop off some after-Christmas packages, and then home, where we re-arranged the office, used up a few of the storage bins shastaw had given us (thank you so much!), and then I got out of Omaha's way so she could start.

I went out to run some errands like buying cat food and getting caught up on some reading, stopping by Wonderworld. I picked up one comic to keep up-to-date on my reading, and spent a few moments talking to the proprietor. 2004 apparently was a crappy year for many comic retailers; even WotC's retail closures didn't help his bottom line at all. I love Wonderworld; here's hoping 2005 will be a better year for everybody.

I picked up Kouryou-chan from school and took her to the park. One other girl was there with her elder sister, and she and Kouryou-chan played off each other perfectly, making ad-hoc foot races the order of the day. I was exhausted and frozen when we finally made it home, around 4pm (and sundown). I made dinner, French onion soup with a baguette and Gruyere cheese... wow, yummy. (Small modifications to the recipe: for the onions, use half Walla-Wallas, half red onions. Add 1/4 tsp pepper with the salt and sugar. The 30 minute simmer time is a minimum; ideally, it should be more like 2 hours. You can cube the bread for easier distribution. Add 1/2 cup Parmesean to the Gruyere if you like. Use the broiler! Just baking it is lame.)

Then I took Kouryou-chan out to Kidopolis where again she met up with another girl her age and they proceeded to tear the place up. It was another opportunity for Omaha to get more filing done.

After we got home, Omaha put Kouryou-chan to bed and I cleaned up the kitchen, taking out the trash and the compost. The counters are cleaned, the floors swept, all is good. And I'm off to bed.

FSTOAPAI

Although it's a common component of all guidelines at the state level, the Federal Department of Justice has issued rape aftermath guidelines that omit any mention of emergency contraception.

And in equal outrage, an editorial in the Illinois Leader comments on the tsunami by saying Where's your Goddess now?.

And, via Wonkette, you have Honoring our troops is what the inaugural ball is all about. Uh-huh. Read it. You'd giggle if it weren't so, well, weird.

(FSTOAPAI: Find Something That Outrages And Point At It.)

On making resolutions

Now that the new year is here and we've all had a while to come up with ours. I was thinking about what Alain de Botton said in a recent article about resolutions: that they pit something that is unfamiliar and unnatural, but held to a higher ideal, against that part of us that is familiar and natural but, to us, unattractive. Resolutions are about inner change against resistance, about holding off our natural inclination to be self-indulgent, narcissistic, and lazy in search of some more sublime and rewarding experience later.

So why resolve, in public? Because public resolutions are more useful than private ones. The potential for shame exists, even if it is hardly ever realized as everyone else is failing in their resolutions as well and so, in our age where we lack the will to judge our fellow man, the rewarding value of shame, at least to the community, goes untapped. Still, there's something to be said for announcing one's resolutions in public, and so I shall do so, and see what comes of it.

One thing I'm going to do about the resolutions is simple: I'm going to make them concrete. I'm going to associate them with numbers. I'm going to make some of them measurable. Here goes.

• I resolve to post an average of 4000 words per month in stories. This doesn't seem like a lot; don't I write 4000 words a week? Well, yes, but a lot of that is revision, and I want to put some energy into something other than web work.
• I resolve to write at least 100 words a day, even on weekends.
• I resolve to ride my bicycle at least 50 hours this year. Again, not a lot, but more than last year.
• I resolve to finish the last 30 lessons of Speak and Learn Japanese
• I resolve to learn 500 Kanji using the Reading Japanese series from Yale Linguistics.
• I resolve to spend 1 hour and 40 minutes every week drawing.
• I resolve to create and use 43 folders.
• I resolve to create a to-do list every day, and to keep my monthly schedule well in-sync with Omaha's.
• I resolve to include all of my children's scheduled school events on my calendar, even if I am unable to attend them.
• I resolve to do a weekly gather on Friday, at home, and figure out where I'm going in the following week.
• I resolve to create a Projects folder and to keep one short story, one novel, and one software project in there, and to not move them until they're done, dammit.

[Life Hack] Organizing on the horizon

As odd as it sounds, I rarely have any idea of what I'm doing on a week-by-week basis. You would think that the week would be the ideal unit of measure against which to target one's own progress, but I rarely have any idea what I want to accomplish within that seven-day period. I know I have long-term goals, and I have immediate actions that get me to those goals, but there's an intermediate step I'm missing. Merlin has, of course, leant his opinion to the matter, but I'm still not sure what it is I'm doing with this. I don't have the instincts to say, "Okay, by Friday I'll have X done" and know that I can actually make it that far. Most of my work is creative and a real insight to how effective I'll be even as I push the boundaries of what's possible with software and web dev is sometimes very elusive.

It hurts my brain, it does!

So, last night, as I said, I took Kouryou-chan out to Kidopolis to let her run around and let off some steam. I was a bit creeped out when I found her and another girl on the back gym, and Kouryou-chan was teaching the other girl how to "duck and cover." "When the atomic bomb goes off, you do this!" Kouryou-chan said, then immediately fell against the padded wall in the classic duck-and-cover pose, hands over the back of her neck.

That's what I get for showing her the classic civil defense film. Once upon a time, necessary viewing for all kids her age, repeatedly, but not anymore. She doesn't even know what "the atomic bomb" is. I wonder how many kids do these days?

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Excellent news! The complete text of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is now on-line. Even better, when I installed MIT-Scheme on Gentoo, it saw that I had "apache" in my list of standard tools and installed the Wizard Book (as SICP is better known) under the HTML documentation tree stock. Sweet!

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And hot on the heels of my resolution to start learning Kanji, I've been given the assignment of internationalizing my programs at work for the Japanese market. Today, I've already had to use what little Kanji I know to make up names for files and folders on the filesystem. Since my Kanji vocabulary is limited, the three folders I have are "my folder," "forestry," and "Thursday." I'm sure things will get better. But at least I have an excuse to practice two things at once.