serinde

My knee was getting markedly better, so I thought I would walk to the river today, and not push things by attempting to run. And I was happily traipsing along until the block between First and York, where there was the now-familiar *twinge* followed by the even-more-familiar stabbity pain somewhere behind my kneecap. Which does not come on every step, oh no, that would be too simple and perhaps avoidable; no. It hits randomly every third to tenth step, or longer, and doesn't seem to have any direct correspondence to exactly how I am stepping.

It's been indicated to me that I have control-freak issues. My reactions to the vagaries of my body suggest that perhaps this is accurate. But: is it too much to ask that the stupid thing work as advertised ?

Running yesterday caused me some knee grief, but a night's sleep and an icepack did it some good. What has not assisted is standing for two hours solid to hand-hold the kiddies (by which I mean the Orientation people, not the freshmen) through fall semester registration, because CUNY is now doing it differently blah blah blah. What's even more vexing is that the wide-eyed newcomers have no idea that two of us are only here to help with accounts issues, and cannot help them with their grave and woeful concerns about whether to take Math 101 or Psych 101. Or what number to put in the circa-1972 interface to indicate same.

Also, the exact timing meant that I missed my train by about three minutes, leading to an hour's bounteous delights kicking around 34th St., where it is entirely impossible to find a quiet drink on a Thursday night. Feh.

Just back from the emergency room. Steve was having chest pains, but of a different kind than his hiatal hernia, the usual culprit in these adventures. He has not in fact had a heart attack; OTOH, his blood pressure was registering at 175 over 105. OTTH, the kindly doctor noted that usually people are horrendously stressed by the time they're getting their BP taken at the emergency room, so it should not necessarily be taken as a sign of imminent doom. In sum, possible causes for the mystery pain include: high blood pressure; a new flavor of gastrointestinal fun; or he's pulled a chest muscle of some kind. He will be calling his regular doctor tomorrow to get checked out.

Let the record show that Mr. Mage, aged 13, with his single tooth and his long history of health woes (some of it tolerably recent), is healthy and cheery enough to be obsessively chasing shadows every evening that someone moves in front of a light source. (And he's eating enough to be getting a wee potbelly again.)

This is not an inconsiderable blessing.

The place that I would most want to go dancing is the kind of place that would play Oingo Boingo.

Srsly. Bite me in 3-D.

Situation: There is a thrice-yearly meeting, which consists of $OVERBOSS, as CIO, telling a varied audience consisting of interested parties in the administration, the faculty, and a couple of student representatives what we're spending the student technology fee on. This makes sense.

My attendance is, in theory, relevant for two reasons: 1) because the student workers I will be managing are almost entirely paid out of said monies, and 2) because the hat that's glommed onto me for Managing IT Stuff That Relates To Students means that I should be the primary liaison between Us and Them for just about everything related to these funds. However, what I actually got to do there is take minutes; which is particularly redundant, since my officemate Financials Girl also takes minutes, and always has. This was also true for the last one I attended, in November.

(I was not invited to the February iteration. However, $OVERBOSS thought I actually was there, and had taken minutes. I should point out that I wasn't invited to today's, either: on Thursday he asked if I was coming to the meeting, and I said "what meeting?" "Oh, you should definitely come." Well, okay, whatever.)

The meeting began inauspiciously with The Faculty Gadfly--someone who has a certain amount of understanding & study of technology, and is not at all afraid to share it as publicly as possible (faggot hackers: assume Thor)--commenting that the last meeting's minutes can hardly be said to be "minutes" at all, since they did not accurately reflect what was said, and who said it, and what discussion occurred about it. $OVERBOSS responded by burbling on about how "the people taking the minutes can't always keep up" and "don't always know who's saying things". This, when Financials Girl and I are sitting there on either side, laptops open, busily typing away, so it's not as if there's some question of who he could possibly mean by this obfuscation of names. Why, thanks so much for the public show of support! Thanks so much for saying to the Provost, the Registrar, the Head of Student Services, and various faculty that we, who are likely to have to deal with them in sundry other transactions, can't even handle taking notes! (And completely regardless of the fact that, on my part, I wasn't even at the meeting in question; and that he had rewritten the whole thing, so it may not have been her fault either.)

I'm going to take this to $ACTUAL_BOSS in our weekly meeting, and strongly represent my sense of insult. I probably should take it to $OVERBOSS directly, but I rather expect it'd go in one ear & out the other.

Am packing books at the moment. I've just packed Dad's Tolkien box set, and for some reason that makes everything seem much more real and much less theoretical.

(It's this edition, which I had a devil time finding an image of. Apparently it's some kind of rarity now; who knew? But I certainly love it best of all, even though I do quite like the Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith illustrations found in more recent editions.)

Just for reference, when we last moved house, we had 40+ boxes of books between us (and a lot more have been acquired since). I'm going to keep under ten, and ideally under seven, for going forward. So far I have two of sewing and medieval-reference, and two of Other Books. Of course, I haven't started on my graphic novels yet; but they weren't in the original 40-box tally, either, SO THERE.

Edit: Oh, and a box of RPG books, chiefly Champions. Though the D&D stuff has not begun to be divided (if it even matters, since it's mostly 3.0 and 3.5 edition, and 4th is coming out next month) (not to mention a lot of it is Forgotten Realms sourcebooks gotten for a now-defunct campaign, and neither of us is hugely interested in that particular setting).

We're still having a Memorial Day weekend party: it will be Saturday, though, instead of Sunday per usual (since other parties are partying on Sunday). The usual 2pm - Last Dog Is Hanged. Expect email anon, but this is just to mark your calendars.

The pool is only about 63 degrees, so I expect only a few of us crazy types will jump in, but there it is.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In their lust to prove there's no God, atheists
often invoke the existence of suffering. "What kind of deity," one asked
me, "allows a child in Darfur to starve to death after seeing soldiers kill his
mommy?" While I don't claim to have the authoritative answer to that
accusation, I think it's worthwhile to consider the possibility that suffering
is a gift God gives us in order to prod our evolution. On a personal level,
your longing to escape your suffering is a primal force in making you
smarter. On a collective level, nothing refines and ennobles us more than
our passion to keep others from suffering. For every dead child in Darfur,
100 people in other places on the planet have responded with a radical
commitment to create a world in which future Darfurs won't happen.
These are worthy ideas for you to meditate on in the coming weeks. You
will have a tremendous capacity to convert your old wounds, as well as
the old wounds of others, into brilliant opportunities.