Thursday random

...because I put in a 15 hour day yesterday, between class and evening meetings. Also, the high humidity all of a sudden (dewpoints in the 60s, where a couple weeks ago I was having to run a humidifier so I didn't get nosebleeds from the dryness, are really tough to adapt to. FWIW: dewpoints in the 60s are a normal feature of midsummer here. I am not looking forward to this summer if it's already this hot and humid.)

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The new "Real Simple" had a long article on "Where has our free time gone?" The useless thing about the article, for me, was that it presupposed everyone reading was married and was a mom. I admit a lot of my free time goes to hanging out online (then again, I probably wouldn't socialize if it weren't for my Invisible Friends in the Internet Box). But also, some of it goes to volunteer work. I've tried to dial back and have gone into saying-no-mode, but still, I know that's where a lot of my time goes. (And we will not speak of housework. Suffice it to say that my house will not be cleaned before I leave on this break). And I don't have that much free time to begin with; when you arrive at work at 7 am and are not free from work* (some days) until 7 pm, there's just not a lot of time left. Especially if you go to bed at 9 so you can haul your sorry backside out of bed at 4:30 am for a workout...

(*I may not be at school, but I'm grading/writing exams/reading stuff)

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Sat down this morning in my five-minute news-watching break, turned on the local news, hoping I would get weather (when you have limited news-watching time, it's kind of like roulette: "Am I going to get lucky and see a story that's actually relevant to me?") Nope. They were showing Blagojevich doing his...you wouldn't call it perp walk, would you, after the guy's been convicted? His convict walk? To prison. Gaaaaaaaaaah. What an attention whore. (Sorry for the harsh language, but there you are). It bugs me that he seems to be getting the rockstar treatment because he's just a petty corrupt politician. His corruption wasn't even all that INTERESTING, IMHO.

It frustrates me to see people getting the rockstar treatment who are notorious rather than notable. And to think of the thousands of people who do helpful, useful, good things in this world, and no one apparently gives a darn.

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I don't know how long this will say up, but Nyan cat is celebrating St. Patrick's Day.

(I guess I feel the need to share my thoughts on St. Patrick's Day. I'm "nominally" Irish - in that that's probably the greatest percentage of my heritage. (My dad's side is half Irish, and I have a small amount (like 1/16) from my mom's side. However, we never really did much of the ethnic-family stuff. Some years for St. Patrick's Day my mom did make corned beef (which I frankly do not care for) and cabbage and Irish soda bread (and some years she did roast lamb, which I like very much). But other than that we didn't celebrate it much.... I will admit I look with considerable dismay on the stereotype that the holiday's become here in the U.S.: it's a day to drink lots of beer, mainly. And to trot out the stereotype of the drunk Irishman, which annoys me - if that were done with some other groups, can you imagine the response? St. Patrick's Day has become like Frat Party Day (which I suppose in some twisted way makes sense, seeing as it's Spring Break* for many college students.

One thing I do remember from childhood St. Patrick's Days that makes me smile now - several years when I was in grade school, someone (Maybe from food services? I don't know) would come around to the classrooms and hand out green bagels. Yeah, green - made that way with food dye. They came from the Lender's company. (Wikipedia tells me that it's a marketing thing Murray Lender - the son of one of the founders - invented). They came wrapped in a cellophane wrapper (kind of like pastries in vending machines are). I remember one big thing about it - on the wrapper, it said, "Shalom and Erin go Bragh."

It makes me smile now because I never thought that was odd - or that green bagels for St. Patrick's Day was odd - as a kid. But now that I think of the phrases on the wrapper, it is a little odd: Shalom** means, most closely, "Peace" or "Wholeness" or "May you be well" (it's often used as a greeting or farewell, also, among Hebrew speakers or people who are Jewish). And "Erin go Bragh" most commonly translates as "Ireland Forever." So not exactly the same things. But I guess I can appreciate the spirit of the whole thing.)

(*And I never did the "typical" Spring Break thing - I wasn't at all fond of crowds, I didn't drink, and the thought of being crammed somewhere with hundreds or thousands of my peers was distinctly unappealing. I usually visited family over Spring Break.)

(**There's a car around here, I often see it parked near campus, that has a bumper sticker that says "Shalom, Y'all" and then has (I presume) the same written in Hebrew below the English. It makes me smile every time I see it.)

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I have to pack for Spring Break tonight. I can't quite believe it's time for it. I really need the break. (And I hope nothing else comes up to prevent me from doing laundry/packing tonight. If I HAD to I could pack the clothes dirty and wash them when I got up to my parents', but I'd rather not).

I'm going to take the Jaywalker socks I'm working on, and the pattern and yarn for the Little Ice Age socks and finally start them. And Ropes and Picots, I think - I'd like to make a good dent in the right front of that. Other than that, I don't know. I pulled out my copy of Teeny Tiny Mochimochi and a few balls of yarn for making some of the things (most of the patterns are for fingering weight, but like any toy, you can do them of a different weight - I kind of want to do the Easter Bunny out of some chunky pastel dot-print I have, so I have a bigger bunny that I can put on my mantel when I do the Easter decorating). And I might take the Plinky and Plunky pattern - I found some brown-with-sparkles yarn that should work for it.

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Oh, there are more "flavors" of Nyan cat than the St. Patrick's Day one! There's a 'classic Jackson 5' cat where the theme is modified to sound a bit like "I Want You Back." I find that wonderful. (They also have a "Star sheep" and several others....they NEED to do a Nyan Rainbow Dash). There's also a Balloon Cat that has considerably less frantic music, if the typical Nyan Cat music bugs you.