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The Snook and I just got done watching his favorite movie, Tombstone, on television. Wanting to know the truth about the events in the film, I turned to the Internet. Wow, they really white-washed some stuff! Apparently most of the Earp boys’ wives were reputed to be prostitutes, and it’s not even certain that Wyatt was married to his before he left her for the actress. Are you a big fan of the movie? You should take this guy’s Tombstone Purity Test. The Snook only managed to score a paltry 80. (It’s pretty difficult unless you’ve actually been there.) I myself got, like, two.

John found a fantastic essay that questions the importance of teamworking skills. Personally – and this might be the wrong thing to say considering I’m currently looking for work – I hate working in teams. It all goes back to being the smart kid in elementary school. I’d get stuck with all the anti-social losers that the teacher felt would benefit from my leadership. Instead I ended up doing all the work myself just so we wouldn’t fail. Eventually I discovered that I just work better alone. Even when I played sports, I played singles tennis, where my success or failure was entirely up to me. It’s just easier to get things done when you’re the only person responsible for it.

That said, I have of course had to work on teams in my career and the experiences were not all bad. The best cases were when everyone had a clearly defined role. I’d rather be the only HTMLer and have to do twice as much work than have to pair up with somebody else and go through the business of deciding who does what, what format to do it in, correcting their mistakes, etc. To me, specialization is the key to a good team. The only problem is that most I.T. companies fall into the mistakes mentioned in this article. They use “teamwork skills” as a convenient way to pressure people into working 60-hour weeks. If a project (or team) was getting behind, the solution was always to throw more people at it, rather than look at the ways the structure was already messed up. Most “successful” team projects only happened because two or three individuals pulled an all-nighter fixing what everyone else had screwed up.

Snookums and I have been debating this type of thing for awhile now. We lived with a Project Manager who felt that it was the duty of the better team members to handhold the others through the project. Our argument was always that companies may want this, but they never budget for the extra time. When a project is high priority on a tight deadline, mentoring goes out the window. And when it comes right down to it, I trust myself in those situations better than I trust anybody else.

Which Buffy villain are you? I’m Anyanka (Anya), which I think fits pretty well.

Your job was purely to grant revenge on men by their angry female lovers. Unfortunately you’re mortal now, and also in love. You’re getting the hang of being human, but you’ve still got some rather strange habits that give away your old, evil nature.

Translation: You were an angry, bitter, man-hatin’ girl before, but now you’ve got a schmoopy and you’re happier than ever and you try not to mess it up. (Link courtesy of anon.)

Ooh, boy, that was fun! I just spent ten minutes nominating people for the Anti-Bloggies. Oh, not you, of course! Just my enemies. Heh heh. Which reminds me, those of you involved in the Great Blogger Code war of January might want to, you know, nominate somebody for “Biggest jerk”. It does a body good.

1. Have you ever had braces? Any other teeth trauma?
Nope. My dentist suggested I could get braces in junior high, but I rejected that plan because it might affect my trumpet playing. That’s right. Like I’m some sort of professional trumpet player now or something.

2. Ever broken any bones?
Nope. I fall down a lot though, so it’s pretty amazing. And I do have a dodgy ankle. I twisted the hell out of it in a tennis match back in high school and it’s been weak ever since. (That’s the one that gave when I spectacularly wiped out in Australia last year.)

3. Ever had stitches?
Nope. Gosh I’m boring! My sister’s had lots though. Once she hit her head on the fender of the car and cut it open. And then in our high school Powder Puff game, she slipped on the first play and cracked heads with some other girl and had to get stitches all down her forehead. (Sorry to broadcast your stories, Sis, but I’ve got nothin’ here.)

4. What are the stories behind some of your [physical] scars?
I’ve got a tiny chicken pox scar on my nose. I’ve got a whitish blobby scar on my left thigh where I once burnt myself with melted plastic. (I was burning straws with a lighter and a bit dripped off. Don’t play with fire, kids.) I’ve got a faint, thin scar on my right thigh from falling off my bike in college. (Very embarrassing.) And lastly, I’ve got a scar on my navel from a very ill-advised piercing incident a couple years ago.

5. How do you plan to spend your weekend?
Actually I have no plans. Zero plans. How boring is that?

It’s Groundhog Day here already! Unfortunately it’s not celebrated in Australia (and I don’t think they have any native groundhogs here anyway), so I can’t really tell you if he’s seen his shadow or not. I guess I’ll have to leave that up to Punxsutawney Phil. Interestingly, one of my roommates when I studied in London lived in Pennsylvania and her uncle was part of the “Brotherhood of the Groundhog” or something. He’s one of the guys in top hats and frock coats who pull the poor bugger out of his cage every year. I regret never having made the pilgrimage from ND.

You guys are the best. It’s the morning and life goes on. I’m gonna get back on this weblogging horse and try not to wallow. If even my sister – as confirmed an atheist as anybody I know – believes my great-grampa is in a better place, then he is. She also reminded me of one of my favorite memories of him: watching him on a videotape, up in his native Kentucky mountains, casually reach over the kill a Copperhead snake with his cane without breaking a stride. He was a cool guy.

Sometimes people e-mail me and ask about living so far from home. I tell them that for the most part, it’s not too difficult. I talk to my family on the phone. We e-mail. We instant message. Often family gossip reaches me over here before it reaches my sister in Indiana. I tell myself that I have about the same level of contact with them as I did in college. I make-believe that the distance doesn’t matter. But every now and then, things happen that emphasize just how far away I am.

My great-grampa died last night. I’ve been a terrible granddaughter. I didn’t visit him at the nursing home when I was last there. He never got to meet Rodd. And now all I can remember is going to his house when I was little, and sitting on his knee and eating circus peanuts and listening to his stories. And this weekend my whole family will meet to lay him to rest… and I won’t be there. I won’t get to comfort them, and they won’t be here to comfort me. It’s a lonely feeling.

Papaw and I were never that close… but I never realized how far apart we were either.

New Poll: How good are you behind the wheel? Are you Luke Duke or Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane?

(Funny sidenote: One of my roommates in college thought for her entire childhood that his name was “Rosco Pico Train”. I swear. I’ve never laughed harder in my life.)

Queen Elizabeth was late for the first engagement of her Golden Jubilee (that’s fifty years on the throne, Yanks) because her car got stuck behind a student driver. Hee!

I don’t think Americans realize how lucky they have it with the driving situation. When I turned fifteen, I got my learner’s permit and signed up to take Driver’s Ed at my school during the summer. I got an A on the exams (a monkey could) and survived several hours of driving and observation. As a result, when I turned sixteen and headed to the BMV I was able to completely skip the driving portion of the test. What’s the point of this? Other than the fact that I still can’t parallel park in a space smaller than thirty feet, in order to get an Australian driver’s license I have to taken both the written and driving exam. How in the world am I going to be able to pass that? I’m a country girl. Any stoplight with more than three cars constitutes major traffic for me. There’s no way I’m gonna pass the test if I have to do it in Sydney…