Today’s class was largely uneventful, but informative. I’m pretty sure, after having a brief lesson in how it works in class today, that I will take the actual CSS class when it’s offered in August. Now that I have a pretty good handle on HTML, CSS would be an extremely valuable skill to pick up, particularly in conjunction with the XML skills I’ll be picking up next month.
My lunch was pretty boring, as I was stuck in a busy and crowded cafeteria by myself, eating my default HQ lunch of pizza.
It’s my default lunch, as they always have pizza available, and typically I don’t like any of the actual meals they have available. Yesterday I had gotten something other than pizza (some kind of pasta dish) and had been extremely disappointed, so today I opted not to be adventurous.
After I finished eating I went outside, found a table that wasn’t too wet after the brief shower we’d had, and sat down to read for the rest of my lunch hour.
It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.
After that it was back to class for the rest of the afternoon.
One of the women in the class was just a brick.
Not physically, but mentally. She kept screwing up the simplest exercises, and just demonstrated and overall lack of competence. It annoys me when I encounter people like that in training classes. I mean, like me (and most professionals in NoVA), these people work for a technology company, so it’s confusing, and a little disheartening, when my fellow employees seem utterly baffled by even the most basic aspects of technology.
I don’t care what your function is, when you work for a company like mine in any capacity, you should have a greater level of expertise than simply being able to point and click (and at the very least, you should have that much expertise).
What’s really scary is that this woman is probably a project manager or something.
On my way home I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things, as it had been my intention to try a couple of the recipes I’ve picked up from watching Giada “Crazy (but hot) Italian Chick” de Laurentis on “Everyday Italian.”
Today I was going to try a simple pasta dish, and tomorrow I was going to make a slightly more complicated pasta dish (An Italian cooking show with pasta recipes? What are the odds?).
However, once I got home and had put everything away and begun getting my workspace ready to prepare the meal, I finally thought to turn my cell phone back on, at which point, much to my surprise, I found that I had two voicemail messages.
The first was Kathleen, hoping to catch me as I left class in order to while away her drive home by talking to me, which she would have, if I’d had my phone turned on.
The second was also Kathleen, this time telling me that she and Brian were somewhere in Ashburn waiting for an Indian restaurant to open and that I could meet them there if I wanted.
As this message had only come in a few minutes earlier, and the restaurant still wasn’t open, I figured I’d scrap my plans for cooking and meet them. Based on her message, I wasn’t sure where she was, so I tried calling her back and got her voicemail.
I tried calling Brian, but got some weird message that indicated that he was out of range, so I then tried figuring out what shopping plaza she was talking about when explaining where the restaurant was.
I couldn’t track it down, so I tried her again, and once again got voicemail. I tried Brian again and this time got a hold of him. When he described the plaza, I figured out where they were, so I was on my way.
Along the way, though, I got a bit less sure about where he’d said they were, and decided that it was someplace other than where I thought. I went there and found that it wasn’t the place and decided that it was, in fact, where I’d originally thought it was, and eventually I made it there.
I haven’t eaten much Indian food, so it took me a while to decide on what to get. Ultimately I went with “Butter Chicken.” It was very good, but I’m not certain how butter factored into it.
When we left, Brian was going to swing by my apartment to pick something up, though he wasn’t really sure of how to get there. While this was a part of Ashburn I seldom have occasion to spend time in (Ashburn is pretty well spread out), I did know how to get home from there…or so I thought.
Basically, Kathleen had told me that one road could take me almost all of the way home, so, rather than taking the reverse of the route that had brought me there, I decided to try to take this other route, which I eventually discovered wasn’t an option due to construction, so I turned around and went back the way I’d come.
In the meantime, apparently, Brian had gotten lost, and Kathleen, who was driving her own car, decided that it would be easier for her to just swing by my place than to try to figure out where Brian was and explain to him how to get to my place from there.
Of course, thanks to the delay in my own trip home, Kathleen ended up waiting for me outside my building for several minutes wondering if perhaps Brian and I were lost in the same place…
This morning I’d woken up, rolled over, saw that it was only 6:48, said, “Screw that,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
After what seemed like only a few seconds I found myself saying, “Dammit Sarah,” as my alarm clock began playing the Sarah McLachlan CD.
It’s not the first time I’ve found myself getting annoyed at Sarah for waking me up, though I’m accustomed to having it happen several hours earlier in the day.
A few days ago she really annoyed me by waking me up from an interesting, but extremely odd, dream. There was a certain irony involved in the fact that Sarah had woken me from the dream, considering that it was her that I had been dreaming about.
As mentioned, it was a very strange dream.
It started out in 1989 at Houghton High School, where Judas Priest was putting on a concert to promote unity between Houghton and Hancock.
For non-Yoopers, which is to say most of the population of the world, Houghton and Hancock are two “cities” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan separated by a canal, but connected by a bridge that spans the canal.
There is a certain amount of rivalry between the two, but I really don’t think that the level of acrimony is so high that an iconic British heavy metal band would need to perform a concert for the purposes of bringing them together in the spirit of brotherhood.
Still, it was quite a performance.
Not that I knew this personally. Not being from Houghton or Hancock, I wasn’t allowed to attend the concert, which, despite being organized in the spirit of unity between the two cities nevertheless fostered an attitude of exclusivity and isolationism when it came to people from other places.
However, the performance had recently been released on DVD, and as my dream shifted its focus I found that I had only been watching the DVD and was not actually at the concert, and, in fact, I was back home in Michigan going for a walk with my parents and telling them about one particularly compelling segment of the concert video I had seen in which lead singer Rob Halford led the Houghton-Hancock audience in a sing-along to one of Priest’s many classics.
(While at this point it should be obvious, I will mention that my mind, particularly the subconscious portion of it, is a very strange place.)
As my parents and I were walking alongside the road in this place that was very much like home in terms of the basic layout, though it seemed to have been on a much larger scale, stretching on for miles and miles beyond its actual real-world limits, a car pulled up.
Specifically, it was my car, or rather, my old car, one that I haven’t even seen in years (A 1989 Mazda MX-6, for those of you who are curious. Hmm…odd that “1989” keeps figuring into this dream.), let alone owned, though in the dream, despite the fact that it was, apparently, taking place in the present, and I wasn’t driving it, I still owned it.
The person driving it was none other than Sarah herself, though I have no idea how she had gotten my car, who, after pulling in front of us and coming to a quick stop, rolled the window down and beckoned me to get in.
I say “beckoned” because that’s what she did. There was a definite air of seduction about the way she summoned me. So it was a beckoning.
Sometimes I’m an idiot even in my dreams, and so I stood there, motionless, not certain what my next move should be(!) until finaly my mother shoved me toward the car and said, “What are you waiting for? I thought you loved her.”
I nodded that this was true, but, and I think understandably so, under the circumstances, I was a bit nervous, though nervous or not, I wasn’t enough of an idiot to pass this up.
And so, on trembling legs, I began walking toward the car, Sarah smilingly seductively all the while, and as I watched her I found myself feeling rather like a Christian about to step into the arena with the lions…but in a good way.
She began to sing as I opened the door and got in, and that’s when I realized that the singing was coming from outside of my dream, and I found myself more annoyed at Sarah than I’d ever been on any other morning.
I was even more annoyed than I had been at her when I found that she’d changed the words to her song “World on Fire” and added vocals from Robbie Robertson for a version of the song that’s included on the soundtrack to that Steven Spielberg show on TNT,“Into the West.”
I suppose that it’s her song to do with what she will, but I’m especially fond of the regular version of it, so it bothered me to hear it modified.
I haven’t actually watched the show, despite the fact that my beloved Rachael Leigh Cook is featured in it. Mmmm…Rachael Leigh Cook….
The apartment next to mine is a “showcase” apartment, which means that it remains unoccupied so that the leasing office can show it to prospective tenants.
Last week I overheard the Property Manager showing the apartment to someone, so I took a look out the peephole to see if she was showing the apartment to a cute chick. She wasn’t; it was, as usual, a guy.
Still, I did note that the Property Manager (Who is herself fairly cute, if oddly monochromatic. Her hair, skin, and eyes are all the same shade of light brown, as she apparently spends the whole year visiting a tanning salon. The overall effect is that she looks sort of like a sepia-tone photograph.) pointed up to indicate the apartment above mine and said, “That would be the actual apartment you’d be moving in to.”
So it seemed that the “Human Wrecking Ball” and her yipping little dog would soon be leaving.
That was confirmed just a little while ago when I was hauling my garbage out and a moving truck pulled up in front of my building, and when I looked up on my way back from the dumpster I could see a bunch of boxes piled up by the window in the apartment above mine.
Hopefully whoever takes her place won’t have an annoying dog and won’t shake the whole damn building whenever he or she walks.
On the topic of my apartment complex, I got a letter the other day informing me that if I renew my lease I will have to provide proof of renter’s insurance.
That’s actually a good thing, I guess, and getting renter’s insurance is one of those things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, so this will finally give me the impetus to do it…assuming I renew my lease here.
In any case, it’s almost time for “The Inside,” so I think that will do it for this entry.
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