Howdy, all! Tell us what's on your mind today.

Good morning all!!!

Due to the massive winter storm that swept across the midwest yesterday, I am currently held up inside my house...

Wrapped up in a warm blanket, sitting next to my fireplace with a cup of mocha - heavy on the chocolate - watching LNC and attempting to do a little writing.

Tentatively I don't have to go in to work until 10:00, but there's a possiblity that they may close the office (I'm keeping my fingers crossed). If I could stay home today by my fire and snow outside on the ground (and writing on my story) it would be the perfect Friday.

How is everyone else's Friday going?

-- MR

Sounds blissful, DJ - I'll cross my fingers the office stays closed.

We have a lovely, crisp, bright day, after three solid weeks of howling gales and lashing rain (I thought we were going to be lucky to wake up still having a roof, last night). There's some kind of strange phenomenum going on outside. I think it's called daylight. I've seen so little of it lately, I've forgotten what it looks like.

Had a lazy day, so far. Rediscovered an old TV show called Ultraviolet, that I hadn't seen in years. Watched all six episodes back to back, which was a lot of fun. Then added the DVD to my wish list to remind me to buy it at some point.

Now, going to have a (very) late lunch and then get on with some housework.

LabRat

Well, let's see . . .

It's unseasonably warm here in Maryland today, and I won't get out of work until it's dark. I hate that part.

When I get home, I'm going to start doing the re-writing of PPKM4 so that I can post it later this weekend.

Then, I'm going to watch Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut--again--this time with the commentary on, before I go to sleep.

Tomorrow, I'm going running with my sister around one of the "fitness trails" they have downtown. (I've been trying to lose weight lately, but all I've done is gain 40 pounds that I didn't have in high school.)

Then, I think I should clean my room, but that's an iffy thing. I also still have to give out those gift bags from church to people.

Sunday is church from 9-Noon, then after that I'll pretty much be free to write, read, or whatever.

Hooray for weekends.

MetroRhodes, so you get your "break" today? I got mine yesterday. I'm right in the middle of the DFW metroplex and although it wasn't much, we had ice, sleet and snow yesterday. Actually, the ground is still covered with some snow, although I'm pretty sure it will go away by the end of the day.

I think it's interesting to see the reactions of the communities in different regions of the country. I lived for a year in Ohio, and there, when it snowed, most of the time the schools were still open and businesses kept going. It's normal. Here, if we have a light snow storm, that's it. Schools have to close, nobody can drive (and those who do get into accidents because they have absolutely no idea how to react to icy conditions), it's chaos.

I remember listening yesterday to the Weather Channel and hear them saying that it was possible Chicago would have 8 to 12 inches of snow. We barely had one inch. Ever since I came to Texas (2002), I've noticed that we have an average of one day of snow/ice/sleet per year, which probably explains the "panic" factor. We're NEVER ready.

Today, I have to go to work, as usual. And I'm late.

malu

I agree - It is very interesting how differently different regions react to winter weather.

Poor Sue was complaining to me yesterday that she never gets a snow day because up where she lives, there is a lot of snow - it's just normal and people go on about their day.

But down south, it's a different story. Where I live, we get more freezing rain and sleet than we do actual snow. And it seems, even after years of knowing this, that our road crews just don't know how to deal with it. They don't start early enough and don't do nearly enough. Plus, it seems people forget how to drive in bad weather from winter to winter and have to relearn all over again. You have the overly-cautious people who don't want to drive over 5 mph and then you have the idiots who think they can drive the same speed (often exceeding the speed limit) that they would normally drive

-- MR

I am sitting at work... home alone so to speak. My big boss is out with kidney stones, my other boss hasn't come in yet (work started 40 minutes ago), my receptionist is out with family problems I am assuming (she yelled at her husband all day yesterday over the phone), and the only other person who works in my dept hasn't come in yet since she only works half days.

Luckily it is slow so I am doing nothing but relaxing and reading the message boards. No big plans for the weekend either except to cross stitch some and maybe play some Final Fantasy 12.

On another note, I just bought my plane tickets to go home to Alabama for Christmas to see my family. I hate flying though. Actually hate isn't the word... terrified is more like it. *sigh* But it is the only way I can get home so I will have to deal.

Sounds great, DJ. I wish everything closed down for snow around here but I'm in one of those places where it's just business as usual. -14F and we just got 10 inches of snow. Hopeing the forecast is wrong in predicting another 10 tonight but since it's currently snowing I tend to believe it.

Well I don't get much of a weekend this week. Our house is up for sale so we all have to be out of it for the next 4 days for showings. We're staying with my parents and will hopefully have our place sold by Monday. *crosses fingers*

Have a great weekend, all!

Jackie

We've got freezing rain up here... oh joy! I'd take several inches of snow over freezing rain any day. (I still shudder when I remember the ice storm we had a few years ago...)

I'm in a very weird mood today. I'm on this real incredible high from having finished my 50,000 words in time (for NaNoWriMo) -- but... I've learned earlier this week that my Christmas bonus this year will come in the form of a severance pay (The Terminator came through the office, I guess. *lol*) and this is my first day back since then so I feel really weird being here...

The only thing that's not so bad is that right now, nobody knows. So no one is feeling sorry for me yet - I'd flip out having to last 3 weeks with people looking at me like I need to be spared or something. eeep!

Well... Lunch over, gotta go back to documenting all these things that I do cause I'm the only person left who knows anything about them...

I hope you guys have a great week-end!!

Ultraviolet was a great show - wish I'd known someone was after it, I had an extra set of the DVDs and sold it on ebay just a couple of weeks ago. But it's pretty easy to find - www.play.com have it for £9.99, and it's often cheaper on ebay.

Weirdly, on my wish list, Amazon says it's £9.89. When I click on the item, the actual product page lists it as £14.97.

All of which is a bit away from the £6.47 it was listed at earlier in the day, when I added it to my wish list!

Boy, you really have to watch Amazon these days.

I never thought of checking Ebay, but will do! Thanks, Marcus.

LabRat

I saw this for the first time last night. Wow. Very different. I'd heard a few things about it, but was still impressed how they were able to make a full movie out of it by splicing in a few Richard Lester scenes. I liked the revelation scene a lot, more than I did the one that made it into the official movie version. And it's cool that it was never filmed originally, so they used the original screen test that was given to Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. Awesome! I'd definitely recommend seeing this for anyone who liked the official Superman II.

I haven't seen it yet with the commentary. I don't usually watch the commentaries, but in this case, I think it'll be fascinating.

Well, thanks to the lovely snow (I think we got about 6-8": thank God for great, friendly neighbors who helped me shovel out my driveway), I'm stuck at home. We were supposed to fly out to NY for my Gma's funeral, but the flights kept getting cancelled. 9 hrs, 3 airlines, 4 itineraries later, I'm at Dad's looking forward to a 4am wakeup alarm so we can try it all over again tomorrow!! Talk about spending quality family time in an airport! (Very thankful for the nice Northwest lady who felt sorry for us and gave us a free pass to the executive lounge which we promptly moved into and took over!)

Other than that my Friday is going great!

Jo

It's a pretty boring day here.

It's warm, though, a striking 13°F! Believe me, when you've spent the last month or so in 20-30 below that's nearly shorts and t-shirt weather! But I've been in my dorm room all day, going between watching LnC, Superman Returns, and VH1 "I Love the 90s".

I'm also staring blankly at my latest fanfic and not getting any writing, homework, or studying for finals done.

Quiet day here, as Fridays tend to be--classes only go till 1:20, and half the dorm empties out by the afternoon/evening, as most of 'em live around here. I took a nap this afternoon and didn't get all the homework done I was going to, but Sunday is coming along and I'll get plenty done then.

It's been flurrying half the day, melting into slush the other half, dismal and dreary, and I'm very glad I'm in a warm dorm and don't have to go out into the cold and wet for anything.

I'm currently fiddling with Photoshop, flipping through tabs on my browser, listening to gorgeous choral music, enjoying a quiet Friday evening.

So far my weekend has been a lot busier than usual.

Yesterday at work I had to begin training a new person, and by the end of the day I was dead on my feet. All the things that come naturally to you when you have done a job for a long time have to be explained, and I never realized how exhausting that can be.

After work I went to my mother's for dinner and a business meeting and spent the night. My 14 year old brother woke me up this morning by telling the black lab to jump on me, which she did with gusto. But he wanted to go to IHOP for french toast, so I guess that was a good enough reason. After breakfast, he and I and the dog had a massive tickle fight on my mother's new bed.

Then I went to my 11 year old brother's flag football game in the rain - they lost - and then to a Mexican restaurant for lunch and then home. Whew! I haven't had this much activity within 24 hours in weeks.

Yesterday my husband went to find the new ornament for our Christmas tree. It's something we do every year, and we try to choose something that has some significance related to the year. Look what he chose. He said it was in honor of my new obsession!

Well, I got the new chapter posted last night, got the outline written for as much of the rest of the story as I could think of, and watched MOST of the Donner cut with the commentary before 2am, when I just HAD to go to sleep.

Then this morning, my sister and I went "running" (actually we jogged, then I had to walk for a while) for a bit, and when we got home, I finished the movie with the commentary and read season 6, episode 11 before coming back to the boards again.

And here I am. I'm debating on possibly typing up chapter five, reading episode 12, or taking a shower. I'll probably do all three in some sort of order, but I don't know which.

Being the trainee can be plenty exhausting too. It's amazing how much harder it is to talk about a job than to do it!

As far as snow days, we never have 'em.

Amazon themselves aren't selling it at that price, but it's on the "new and used" link at £6.96 from a company called Quality DVDs Direct - personally I'd be cautious because they only have a 91% approval rating, so one customer in ten is unhappy with their service. Remember that if you use those links you get charged for postage on a per item basis, not on the total order value, and don't get free delivery on a large order, so it's not necessarily going to save you much money. www.play.com don't charge for postage, so £9.99 is their total price.

Oh, I've used new and used before, so I'm aware that sellers try to make the head of the list and get their item first by putting it on at a low price, then whacking on a hugely inflated postage rate at the end. The sneaky little beggers.

This problem doesn't seem related to that though. For example, I now have a novel on my wish list. On the product page, it's listed as £3.70. That's Amazon's price - or at least there's nothing to indicate that it's not. No mention of any third party there.

Below that, new and used is listed as starting from £0.01. The price on the wish list is £1.59. So, unless they've plucked a new and used price haphazardly from somewhere on the new and used list, there doesn't seem to be a connection there.

If it's being sold by another third party, apart from new and used, then Amazon isn't saying so on the product page. Which seems rather underhand to me. And where the wish list price is coming from is a complete mystery as it seems to have no connection at all to any prices listed on the product page.

Other items I've recently added to my wish list show the same price discrepency between the price Amazon has listed on the product page as their price and the price on the wish list. So it's a mystery where they're getting it from. Although, not complaining too much as the wish list price is invariably much cheaper than the product page.

Got Ultraviolet on Ebay, btw! For £8. It could have been much less - there was a copy there for £4 - but that was a Buy Now and I couldn't be bothered waiting for the other auctions to end, so I paid the little bit of premium for convenience.

ETA: I've just noticed that on the product page for that novel, in the top right corner of the screen, there's a box which states 'Usually dispatched within 11 to 13 days. Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk' - so there's definitely no third party involvement in this one.

LabRat

Hm, all this snow talk!

I think it snowed once when I lived on the Gulf Coast. Maybe twice? We're talking like an inch, and the whole county SHUT DOWN. But it sounds a lot more interesting than the 'hurricane breaks' as we so deemed them in college. Those I'm still not away from on the east coast, but did we all notice the end of hurricane season passed without a hitch! But it's really ok. I don't have clothes for cold weather. I'm not even sure I know what clothes *look* like for cold weather. I was perfectly happy just getting lost in the MoMA and the museum gift shops. And it turns out the city that never sleeps finally went to bed on my way to the airport at 4something am this morning.

JD

Omigosh it's Sunday evening already

Over the last day or so, I've been sporadically cleaning my room.

Yesterday afternoon, I cleaned all of the CDs off of my floor and alphabetized them into ONE CD holder (I have 96). Then, I made sure that they had all been ripped onto my external hard drive and that I'd entered them into my CD database.

After that, I made sure my movie database was up-to-date.

I still have a couple of things to put away in the room, and I've got to rearrange my closet too.

Then comes the big project: sorting out which of my >550 books I do and don't want to keep, putting them in boxes sorted by quality of the book itself, and then having a yardsale. After that, I'm going to catalogue all the rest of the books into my book database.

Yes, I am a total geek.

Darcy, you sound just like me!

BTW, you should check out librarything.com for your books if you haven't already. Now I wish there was something similar for movies.

I've got two weeks break coming up over Christmas / New Year, and I'm planning to do my book rearranging then - I've got a couple of hundred feet of shelves and room for about 4000 books if I pack things tight, but every so often I need to cut down the herd a little, and I'm about two years behind on doing it, so there are a lot of books piled on the floor etc. Made a start in August by giving a couple of hundred video tapes to a charity shop, which let me recover some space for books, but that's just the tip of the iceberg and I need to get rid of a lot more.

Well, I finished cleaning. And I added an extra step in there--I catalogued/organized my cassette tapes too. And made my CD database my Music database.

Marcus, I am SO jealous of your 4000 book space! In order to get that much space for my books, I'd have to build shelves on the walls (because I still live with my family--parents and siblings, that is--and it's the only room I'm allowed to change for my own use), and I don't have the carpentry know-how, or the motivation to take the collage off of my wall of all my mementos/pictures/awards/etc.

I've only got 3 bookshelves.

First, there's the two four-foot shelves which I got two Christmases ago and stacked one on top of the other. The top four feet is mostly my binders full of music books/sheet music, Harry Potter hard backs, and various other books (such as scripture), plus my bicycle helmet and some other odds and ends.

The bottom one is full of books--mostly paper-back--stacked horizontally, two deep and three across.

My other shelf is one of only two pieces remaining of an old bedroom set my mother got when she was a teenager. It's 8 feet tall. The top shelf is all of the books I own by Orson Scott Card (my favorite author), a book of word games, and one of my Dungeons & Dragons manuals.

The next shelf down is a bunch of books that are either hardback, or larger than your average paperback, stacked horizontally from the largest at the bottom to the smallest at the top. They're stacked three across, and one deep.

The next two shelves are mostly paperbacks (I also have the rest of my D&D manuals, plus some art how-to books, shelved the regular way) stacked horizontally, THREE deep, and FOUR across.

Then, there's a cabinet at the bottom with doors on it. Inside, I have 5-7 binders of "The Secrets of the Universe."

In front of both shelves is my electronic keyboard, so I'll have to be REALLY careful when I go through and sort all those books.

I started collecting SF books when I was twelve or so and have been short of space ever since. The previous occupants of this flat had two 5 ft alcoves with shelving and thought that was a lot - when I moved in I added ten shelving units lining the walls of my office, and another two sets of shelves in my bedroom. Since then I've tucked another set of shelves onto a dead-end landing outside my bedroom, more in the bedroom, a row of cookbooks etc. on top of the fridge, and so forth. After this the next step would be to rip out some old water tanks which are no longer used from the loft space, and put book shelves in the space that would free, but we had squirrels get in there a couple of years ago so I've decided not to risk it - which means I'll have to start giving books away. It's not a problem - there's a lot of stuff I've bought just to have something to read at lunch time, many of which will never be read again - but I need to find time and willpower to do it.

To keep track of book collections on a Mac I use Bookpedia and DVDpedia. Readerware is another one, that works with Macs, Windows and linux. Both of them can use cuecat barcode readers and you can enter the books and DVDs that way.

I just use a home-made MSAcess database--more customizable that way, and I can justify spending hours cataloguing my books by hand. :p

Not to mention, it's been so long since I've seen some of them, I need to go through them and actually LOOK at the titles and stuff to remember if I've read them or not.

Almost friday again!

Thank goodness! I ran out of things to fill up the hours at work at 9:30 this morning, finished the book I was reading at lunch, and didn't feel like writing so I've just been listening to my MP3 player for the last two hours!