And just like that, my lifelong dream of marrying Prince William is gone. *shudder*

Antarctic ozone hole is closing. Hooray! The sun down here in Oz can be pretty powerful. At least if I’m still around in fifty years, I won’t have to worry about it so much! 🙂

It’s been a head-down-busy kind of day, and I expect tomorrow will be the same. Bloggage will resume soon.

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”
Wine class was really great tonight. Our topic was fortified wines (port, sherry, etc.) which I wasn’t really looking forward to, but I learned a lot and got to try a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise… including amontillado! I also tried some vintage port that was older than I am (27 years old!). I think the tawny port was my favorite. There were these jerks in the corner who talked all the way through the class though. I’m like, what kind of asshole pays $250 for a class and then doesn’t pay attention? And I’m the youngest person in there! I thought grown-ups would behave better.

New Jersey has become the first state in the U.S. to regulate G-Forces on roller coasters. Of course, the law is just pointless election-year pandering, given that it would set the limit at 5.6 G’s and no ride in the country even tops 5.0. Even Cedar Point’s Millennium Force – the tallest, steepest, fastest coaster in North America – is well within those limits. I love roller coasters and the bigger issue to me is the relative smoothness of the ride. We rode the Millennium last year and I thought it was great. No problems whatsoever. The wooden ones though… They shake and rattle me so much I have neck pain afterwards. I’ll take more G’s and a smoother ride any day.

My dad’s wife Cindy sent some pictures from the trip they all took to Cedar Point a few weeks ago. Here’s my new little stepbrother Colfax in the stocks on the Frontier Trail. Isn’t he a cutie? He’s just started kindergarten. It’s kinda weird that I’m all grown-up and stuff, yet here my dad is doing it all over again. He sounds like he’s loving it though!

Wow. I want a Harry Potter house scarf. They look pretty sweet. I’m almost wondering if I shouldn’t just make my own, though, instead of ordering one (especially since the knitter sounds like she has a pretty big backlog). And I’m sure my sister would love one for Christmas. Can any of you more experienced knitters tell me if looks like a difficult project for a beginner?

OUTRAGE. This morning I was checking my Roald Dahl site statistics and noticed that I’m suffering from some bandwidth theft. Several jerks on various messageboards have linked directly to large images without asking me. Wait, let’s be clear here. They didn’t make a link like this. They created an HTML image tag that referenced an image on my server. In other words, every time another jerk viewed the message board, I had to pay for them to download the image. According to my server logs, I’ve had an extra 2000 hits this month alone from image thieves. My problem isn’t them claiming my work as their own so much (though that’s what nearly all of them are doing); it’s more that my work is being used to add value to another site and I’m being forced to pay for the privilege! But fine, whatever. I can configure my server to block them. The REAL PROBLEM however, is…

THE SNOOK THINKS IT’S OKAY. He thinks it’s perfectly reasonable that since I put something out on the Internet, other people should be able to use it however they want. I agree, as long as I’m not paying for it. He claims that since I don’t pay by the megabyte for bandwidth, I can’t claim that they’re stealing any money from me. I counter with the fact that once I breach my bandwidth cap, I will be, so it’s the same difference. And irrespective of the “theft” issue, I just find it completely rude. The argument went on for some time. It climaxed with:

Me: “Okay, so you’re posting to Slashdot and there’s this image you’ve found to illustrate your argument, so you just embed it directly from the source?”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “That’s it. What if it was my site? YOU’D SLASHDOT ME? We’re breaking up.”

It’s a gorgeous day out today, but it’s pretty chilly here in the house.

Later: An uneasy truce has been called. I think we’ve got an unspoken agreement to disagree.

Notre Dame defeats #6 Michigan. Holy crap. They haven’t beaten a top ten team since they last beat Michigan in the first game of my senior year (1998). Now that was a game. Michigan had won the national championship the year before and we were itching to take them down. I remember about mid-way through the fourth quarter, when it was pretty clear we were going to win, my friend Brian announced to all of us in the stands, “I’ll see you guys on the fifty yard line.” We win, we storm the field, people are taking pictures, students run out the tunnel and play in the fountain… I’m not a big gung-ho sports fan by nature, but that was one of the most exciting days of my life. It was high drama and it was real. And they just did it again! How amazing would it have been to be there? Ahh, homesickness, my old friend.

Friday Five:

1. What was/is your favorite subject in school? Why?
Depends. I’d probably say English or Drama, because they came easiest to me and I always liked readin’ the books and watchin’ the plays. Math and Science were harder for me, yet (truth be told) I think I got more out of them. It’s hard to say since I went to such a small school. There weren’t enough resources to cater to everybody, so they took sorta a “lowest common denominator” approach. At the high end of the bell curve, I often found myself bored and frustrated.

2. Who was your favorite teacher? Why?
Mr. “Mont” Arnold, my AP Calculus teacher, was pretty cool. He was always trying to find new ways to interest us in a subject that (both we and he knew) most of us would never use again. He recommended sci-fi books to me and gave me extra credit for programming my TI-85. He was funny and he never talked down to any of us. We voted him to be our Commencement Speaker and he confounded all of our parents with a 15-minute speech on chaos theory. Pretty cool.

3. What is your favorite memory of school?
Pretty much all of my senior year of high school. I was the valedictorian, the #1 tennis player, the female lead in the musical; I went to the State Speech Meet and won third place in my event. I got into Notre Dame. I dumped junior year’s alterna-teen boyfriend in favor of someone a bit more fun and normal. (Granted, a bit of a doof, but no regrets there.) That was a charmed year.

4. What was your favorite recess game?
Up until about fifth grade, I was one of those girls who jumped rope every single recess. We had these great long jumpropes with purple and white plastic beads. Our most frequent game was “School”, where for each grade you had to do a certain stunt to progress. “Kindergarten” you just had to run through; “1st grade” was one jump; “2nd grade” was two jumps on one foot or something… That was fun. When I got a little bit older is wasn’t cool to jump rope anymore. You were supposed to do dangerous things. The fad was for someone to swing really high while another person ran under them from one side of the swingset to the other. You had to time your run just right and follow them as they came down past you. I gave up on that one on the fateful day Charity Martin miscalculated and buried her thick skull full speed into the middle of the swinger’s (i.e. my) lower back. I couldn’t breathe for fully a minute. After that, I think I mainly stood around with my friends and tried to act above recess.

5. What did you hate most about school?
Ugh. Lots. First of all, I absolutely hated riding the bus. It seems statistically impossible, but every bus route I ever had was filled with the county’s worst mouth-breathers and social deviants. The day I got my license was like being released from bondage. I also hated gym. I wasn’t terribly unfit; in fact I was sorta towards the high end of the normal, non-super-athlete girls. But I was uncoordinated and self-conscious which made it torture. I won’t even begin to describe the horrors of seventh grade gym with its units on gymnastics and square dancing. *repress, repress*