Eclipse said she is one of maybe ten people who gets the name “Globe of Blogs” and the font used on their front page. So now I’m insanely curious! I did notice that they have gotten the topic browser established, and it looks really good.

Can you believe it took me all day to come up with answers to my own questions? It’s been a funny kind of day, though, and I haven’t had time to sit down and think - which, after all, is why I like the Weekly Wrapup. Mariann has given the Wrapup its own site now, complete with pingable Movable Type; I’ve gone through and pinged all of the archives.

1. Do you enjoy traveling? What is it about going on a journey that you enjoy or dislike?
I adore traveling. I like the sense of adventure - even if it’s somewhere I’ve been a dozen times before - and just the act of preparing and then carrying out plans to go somewhere.
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Well, now this sucks a whole damn lot. I’ve been wanting to meet my friend Blacklite for more than a year, and we’ll be gone while he’s in town. I have been very close to him in the past (we’ve grown apart a bit recently), and he knows some very personal things about me. But he’s leaving Seattle on a bus on the 19th and arriving on the 23rd, then leaving on the 27th. We are leaving early in the morning on the 22nd to drive up to Montréal, and coming home on the 28th. Argh! I’m a lot more disappointed than I’m letting on. He says he will try to come again soon, but…it’s just really frustrating. I already had a bad afternoon, so this is almost more than I can handle right now. Dammit.

And because I am feeling like shit, I am trying to decide whether or not to cancel the plans to see tonight’s midnight showing of Ziggy Stardust with Bastian. I really want to go - I think it would be fun - but I’m so short on sleep and I’m cranky and life just plain sucks.

I’ve just come across a site I can tell will be useful in the future: Filename Extensions. The site lists - across three pages, in small print - extensions and what program they belong to, or what the file type is. This is definitely going to come in handy more than once.

I had another accident of timing yesterday. While waiting for R to come down from his office and meet me for lunch, I saw somebody I’ve known since at least middle school if not longer. He came flying out of R’s building and I saw his face very briefly, but I was pretty sure I knew who it was so I called his name tentatively. He turned, and it took a second before he recognized me but then he figured it out. It turns out he’s been working summers there for years; I’ve been working in my building for almost two years. Next week he’s leaving town to go back to college, so it really was a happy little accident that I saw him.

The 2000 Days question du jour made me want to cry. Have you ever had any dreams/nightmares that, like, totally freaked you out?
Oh my goodness. What on earth did you have that “like” in there for? I could understand saying out loud, but whatever possessed you to actually type it? (And no, I have not had dreams that freaked me out.)

I think tonight went pretty well. The usual fuckup at the CVS pharmacy was made less painful by the fact that I found an EasyBraid there for just $2.50 - I’ve seen a similar tool on TV for something like $20. I was starving while waiting in line, though, and when we got home I was torn between having dinner and playing with my new toy. Peri and devorah got here shortly after I finished eating, and they had pesto pasta and then we all had some homemade key lime pie because Peri’s birthday was yesterday. devorah had to leave so she wouldn’t fall asleep on the drive home, so the three of us chatted until Rea and Trism arrived. I gave Peri eir birthday present - a plush toy leafy seadragon from the South Carolina Aquarium - and then a while later e shared a game called Tropico with us; it looks like fun but I definitely don’t have the computer muscle for it.

For some reason my sidebar did today the same thing it did about a month ago; I managed to fix it again but I still haven’t determined why it does that. And now I have to sign off, because it’s time to write a review of dyke porn! (I did one last night too; if I get permission from the publisher I will provide links or a copy of the text.)

I have actually gotten a few things accomplished today. I did some tweaking of my templates - you can actually see the BlogSnob and Blogger Code links in the Sage Simplicity design now. I have also gotten some real job-type work done. I’m sort of thinking that having a whole huge PDA setup will be too much - I’d be duplicating everything so I may leave it at one PDA-usable, flat page and then maybe make a skin that might get Bobby-approved.

I’m tired of people I know dying or having someone close to them die. (I might write more on this when I get home tonight, but we are going to have houseguests so it might have to wait untill tomorrow.)

Oh, now this is too funny. I found the Misfit Abilities quiz (it’s called the Misfit Talent quiz in a few places on the site) through my mother, and my main result hit the nail smack-dab on the head.

Primary ability: Coercer
Coercers are by far, the most powerful Misfit, possessing the ability not only to read other peoples minds, but to affect them as well. While Coercers can sometimes tend to be stubborn, they will sacrifice anything for the happiness of a friend.

Now I know the description is dopey - actually, I get the feeling “Misfit” is some SF/F reference or something, the other two quizzes on this site are “which fictional character are you?” quizzes - but I definitely fit the coercer part. It feels kind of strange to admit that - it’s not something I’m proud of, and I hate it every time I do it…but manipulating others is how I always get by, and I know it. The second result wasn’t very accurate:

Secondary ability: Empath
Empaths posess the ability to feel the emotions of others. They are gentle people, who encourage and nurture others. They percieve the world with their hearts and not with their minds. Empaths make great friends because they understand people.

I used to think I was an empath like Deanna Troi, and I pretended I had built up a mental brick wall so I couldn’t sense other people. (I know, I know! What can I say? I was an only child.) But that’s as close as I ever got to being an empath; I’m usually way too self-absorbed.

I wasn’t surprised to see that robozilla had flagged a lot of the links in the McDaniel College category. The school is struggling to get its website updated, and I can tell some of it has been subjected to a search-and-replace to get rid of most references to “Western Maryland College.” I was able to find the new locations for nearly all of the flagged sites, so it’s mostly fixed now.

While I was looking at the site, I came across the page for McDaniel’s Deaf Education program. That was what I had planned to finish before I had to drop out; it makes me kind of nostalgic and wistful to read about it. I don’t remember having seen that on the WMC site before. They even have an ASL immersion dorm now, I would have loved to stay there; there was an article about it in the Baltimore Sun last December, but the link is no longer valid and you have to pay for the full article from the archives.

My friend R just called me to ask if I wanted to go to lunch, he’s very excited about some distance learning program offered from a community college in one of the Carolinas. He indicated that you can go through the full interpreter training course online - I suspect he’s going to talk about the program at Central Piedmont Community College, which I had e-mailed him about a week or two ago. He sounded thrilled to have discovered this…I’ll be amused if it’s the same program.

I always read my daily Bloglet e-mail all the way through, and for the sites that just mention an update I click the link and read those too. I usually forget or don’t get time to read everything else; I’m still trying to find a decent, portable newsreader so I can just grab RSS feeds and read those. But anyway, it’s funny how information jumps from person to person. Christine’s full entries appear near the top of my Bloglet e-mail, so I found out about Wil Wheaton’s being cut from Nemesis from her, rather than from Mariann, whose Bloglet post just tells me that she’s updated, and it appears further down in the e-mail itself. (I’m not sure what the ordering scheme is, maybe ID?) I did, however, see Mariann’s awesome blog design to-do list, which has lots of good ideas.