Entries this day: Crud Dream.1 Dream fred rob

Crud

1:36am CST Monday 27 November 2000

I feel like crud. Icky poo gross sick sore throat snotty bluchy. My snot is not green or gross; I don't think I have a virus therefore, and Wende suggests that my throat is sore due to excessive drainage. Ach bluch yuck.

It's been decided about the dollars. Wende said she ultimately couldn't feel good about mixing business with friendship, and therefore chooses not to open an account with Jason. She expressed her decision amidst lots of supressed tears because she knew how passionately I feel otherwise. I want to open the account with Jason exactly because he is my friend.

I delved into my feelings and expressed this is Wende:

I really want to make a big change in my life, something like going back to school and -*!greatly!*- increasing the use of my right hand brain creativity, intuition, art, philosophy... as opposed to my huge focus on left hand analytical programming, coding, computers computers computers.

I feel scared to leave my job, which is so flexible and comfortable, in search of a higher paying job so I can afford to go to school, which I don't even really know if that's what I want to do or what.

I had fantasies that Jason may be able to magically grow the money at fantastic rate so that we could *afford* to do what we want- go to Australia in February, go to Costa Rica for our honeymoon, go to Europe in 2003, etc etc, and allow me to go to school and to begin to do what I am drawn to do.

Like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, I explained, I feel like I'm not doing the right thing in my life. But I'm not sure what the right thing is, and I'm scared to go for it, whatever it is.

On Thursday evening, while talking with dad's friend Jennifer, when she put my birthdate into the astrological chart thing, she mentioned offhandedly, "you need to get past the money thing."

Me, in mock defensive tone of voice, "what money thing? what are you talking about?????"

She had never previously met me; I hadn't told her anything about my current situation at all. Interesting that that comment fell out of the chart.

- - -

All the stuff above I dumped to Wende, and I'll add this while I'm at it:

I'm sick of the investment club; I have no passion for doing all the research necessary *and* doing all the treasurer stuff. I have just now gotten all the numbers in our software to match all the numbers of the account in our brokerage, a process that has taken months of work. I think I would not mind doing either the treasurer stuff or the individual research, but not both.

I want to document all the stuff I do each month so that the next person to be treasurer won't be lost in the whirlpool of numbers. There is documentation, but I just want to produce a step by step list that is specific to our exact situation so someone can follow it easily.

- - -

This mirrors what I'm thinking about work. I have created a new tool, a whole new genre of survey creation architecture, which should drop the survey creation process from 2 weeks to 3 days. If I write one more tool, the 3 days can be dropped to 3 or 4 hours. I want to write that one more tool and then seriously document the shit out of the whole thing and graduate myself away from full time at work.

- - -

But to do what? what? what? I don't know.

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Dream.1

1:29am CST Monday 27 November 2000

(dream)

Looping self modifying morphing code with boundless endless self calling functions using itself as its own parameters in a countless variations of every possible schedule of Thanksgiving schedules that could be written.

and I was debugging it in my mind without running the code, and certainly without a debugger.

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Dream

7:07am CST Monday 27 November 2000

(dream)

I was on UH campus as if near the Quad, but the tennis courts were a playground and field for an elementary school. A young girl was walking on the school grounds and selling girl scout cookies. Her approach was "You don't want to buy any girl scout cookies do you?" Sigh "I didn't think so. Please?"

And I told her no and she walked past, but then I turned around, "Hey, cookie girl."

She came back and I sat down on the grass with her. "When I heard you selling the cookies, you were using all negative words like "wouldn't and didn't and don't" I think you could sell more cookies if you used positive words like "love and great and happy!"

She sat in silence for a bit and I asked what she was thinking.

She confided in me that her dad was an excellent salesman in some ways, but she loathed him and didn't want to be like him. I listened attentively and then a security guard drove up from the elementary school grounds. He said she had to be back on school grounds and not here on the college propery. He indicated that the property line ran right *here* insted of right there, so I moved over 10 feet to be on the elementary school property. I asked him to let the girl continue talking to me if she wanted to, and only if she wanted to. I overheard him say to her, "he wants to talk to you some more," and I was mad that he didn't giver her the choice, and I woke up.

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fred

11:00am CST Monday 27 November 2000

Today I sent Fred's unicycle to him via US Mail. I took the large white box (30 x 24 x 12 inches) to my local post office and asked how much it would cost. About $28 to have it arrive in 3 days and have $100 worth of insurance on it.

"Can I just get that many stamps?"

"I can sell you as many stamps as you want, but you'll have to put them all on."

"Great!"

She gave me eight books of ten 33 cent stamps each and some 20 cent stamps and two 5 cent stamps and one 2 cent stamp. Perfect. I moved the box to the end of the counter and started putting them on the box. I basically put them all together in one corner of the box, and had just enough room to write Fred's address and my return address on it with a black magic marker and then I wrote a big letter to him on the back of the box, something like this:

g
Happy ho ho ho and all that stuff. This box should take a lot less time for you to open than last year, and I'll give you zero guesses as to what's inside. I look forward to rolling around town on our fly rides cause we're cool like that.
G
PS take a picture of the postage if you can.

Wende had encouraged me to take a picture of the postage if I was able to get it all as stamps, but I forgot to bring my camera. Oh well.

This whole project (including waiting in line before I even got the stamps) took about an hour. It was worth it for my brother.

I arrived at work at 11am, just as they were finishing the hour long weekly staff meeting.

DOH!!!!!!!!!!!

"There he is!" exclaimed Karla.

She said it wasn't that big of a deal, but they were just worried about me.

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rob

8:59pm CST Monday 27 November 2000

I'm still feeling bluchy, but not as bad as this morning. I left I-group early tonight and talked to Wende some about our Australia trip plans. I'm almost not looking forward to the trip - it's not like we're "Going to Australia"... but more like we're "going to Irene's wedding" and trying to coordinate also how to see Bryn, but the wedding is in Melbourne, while Bryn is in Brisbane and it's a $186 flight each between the cities.

Plus we're not getting that many days off to go. Ack bluck.

It will all work out. It will all work out.

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