Title: Your ecclesiastic skin
Hearing: Ian snoring on the company couch; Melissa Etheridge, Breakdown
Seeing: Weird TCP/IP problems on one of our servers; a Web postcard from
Cynthia
One Down, Several Hundred More To Go:
So my art buddy from Tech wrote me an e-mail yesterday, after several months of us losing touch with each other. It was great to hear from her. Carolyn is one of those people who always makes you smile, even on your worst days. She and I bopped around the art department when I was an upperclassman and she was new to the whole college thing. We went to meetings of The Fellowship together, back in those heady days of my youth when church and I still got along. I helped her pick out good professors and avoid bad ones and she gave me ideas for new art projects. She's now hanging out in a particularly humid part of the country teaching elementary school art, which is what she wanted to do, so I'm happy for her.
Naturally, after relaying her news, she wanted to know what was up with me. Heh. This is the part of catching up with old friends that I always dread. "What's your life been like lately, Joy," they burble innocently, expecting the usual answer: husband, house, career, dog, kids, car. My life hasn't exactly been standardized lately. Ah, well. Things go on; incessantly, at times.
I wrote her back an e-mail hedging about my impending divorce and the reasons for it, with the promise to Tell All if she promised not to judge. She promised, so I sent her the URL for my coming out story. This should be interesting.
Normally at times like this, I get nervous and my stomach starts competing in the Summer Olympics, gymnastics category. After coming out to my parents, though, I've toughened up some. My only worry these days is trying to explain the concept of having a girlfriend while still being married. I guess I'm afraid I'll be called a slut, or worse; it's happened before. It's hard to explain, must less justify.
Then again, why do I need to justify my decisions to anyone? I guess I don't; it's my life to live, and noone else's. Still, though.
Fly, Bird, Fly!:
The T-bird is misbehaving. Of course, it only does this the week I lend Ian my car because he only has one hand for driving; the Bird takes serious effort to muscle around town. No power steering in the beast, doncha know. I was driving home for lunch and to take a shower, having spent the night on the office couch last night due to apathy, and the damn thing started billowing white smoke through the dashboard vents. Eyuch. Fortunately, it was three blocks from home. I nursed it back to the apartment complex and left it alone. I didn't go back to work for fear it would explode or break down or something in the middle of the construction zone on the Boulder Turnpike and leave me totally stranded. Ian came by and picked me up a little while ago to take me into the office so I could fix some funky errors with the Piece of Shit Backup System.
Our poor NT girl has been screwing with the POSBS for the better part of a month, trying to coax it into talking to the Unix servers. So far, it is crossing its arms, poking its lip out, and stubbornly refusing to play nice with the other children. She's convinced it's on my end; I'm not so sure. A couple of the Unix servers are, however, not starting the POSBS rc script upon boot-up. Since the script is rather brain-dead and doesn't tell you if it failed to start the service, it's hard to tell unless you're paying close attention to the logs and process table. I'm going to wrestle the damn thing into submission if it's the last thing I do, if for no other reason than the poor NT girl looks like she's having heart palpitations every time the backup server can't see the Unix boxes.
-- marcie.