Here is the Friday Five for today, which is about relaxing - something I am trying to do right now, but not having much success with because there’s too much to think about.

1. What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?
I like to geek to relax. It’s not usually much good for unwinding, though, so I try to read when it’s time to go to sleep - that doesn’t always work either. Sometimes I leave the TV on and fall asleep in front of it, but that doesn’t happen much anymore now that my girlfriend’s not traveling for work all the time.
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I finally got permission to approve mozzie images for ODP! This is something I’ve been offering to do for a couple of years now. I’m also probably one of the more qualified individuals to do it, as I’ve been creating mozzie images for years, too. I’d offered and offered, then finally applied for the category through the usual channels. Only one editor can approve or reject such applications, and I was rejected because they had things “under control.” There were less than 100 unreviewed at that point, and a couple of days ago I noticed there were more than 200 unreviewed. I’d been continuing to offer to help, e-mailing staff, and I’d gotten the verbal okay from the two other category editors (who don’t have authorization to grant access to the category) to join them there. I finally sent e-mail directly to the senior staff guy, carefully explaining my qualifications and interest, and he immediately replied saying he’d granted me access. Well shucks, I should have done that ages ago! I’m looking forward to working on that project.

This morning was almost a disaster. I was back at the same government agency I’ve been going to for the past few days, and I got there at 8:45 so I would have time to make it through security before the staff meeting started at 9:00. The security officer called up to the interpreter coordinator’s office a few times and never got through; she finally thought to call somebody else around 9:15 and I was taken up to the right place. The actual interpreting was just awful - the four hearing people used a bunch of acronyms and jumped around from topic to topic and didn’t mention what the topic was; they just said “oh, you remember that thing” and I was left stuck. Then when the deaf woman had a comment, I wasn’t able to understand her - she tried a couple of times, gave up, and said she’d use her voice…which wasn’t very understandable. She augmented it with signing and I was able to fill in some of the gaps for the hearing people, but I felt absolutely terrible (she even noticed that and commented that “she’s not comfortable,” but I don’t think anybody else understood that part). She looked confused a lot of the time with only occasional flashes of understanding, and I was sure I was done for. But she offered to show me the way out of the building, and on the way to the elevators and on the ride down, she said I had been just fine and not to worry about it - she knows they switch topics and get confusing and it’s really hard to keep up with them. I was relieved and thanked her, then got on the metro.

I arrived at New Carrollton more than half an hour early, so I went into the Amtrak waiting area and bought a cup of tea, then called A and my handler at the agency. I eventually went upstairs to the bus bays, only to realize I had spent my bus fare (exactly the right amount) on my tea. I ran back downstairs, bought a magazine, and made it back upstairs in time to catch the bus.

The bus ride took about 20 minutes, I guess; I got to the school at about 11:50 or so. I signed in and settled myself in the library, since my destination was a room upstairs in the library. I had been there maybe about ten minutes when my cell phone rang, and my handler was asking if I’d found the place okay. I said I had, I was waiting in the library, and it was realized that he’d given me 12:45 but I was supposed to be there at 12:00. I went up to the room and got the assignments, then headed off to interpret. The first two classes were for the same boy, who looked rather bored the whole time. His second class was mostly busywork, so even I got bored. I got to eat in the faculty lounge for lunch (I remember that in elementary school I always wanted to know what was in there - the answer turns out to be a refrigerator, a microwave, and a soda machine), and then I went to interpret a Keyboarding class for two girls. One had a cochlear implant and the other picked up her head when the teacher called her name while checking attendance, so they may have had some hearing; it didn’t matter anyway because that class was all busywork too. The two of them chattered and joked a little bit between themselves, and one of them did her work by copying and pasting the words that had to get repeated a zillion times. It’s not my place to call her on that, so I just stayed quiet and stifled a giggle. The last class was drama, and the girl there was actually attentive and, to an extent, interactive. They started with some bizarre exercise in a circle, and I stood beside the deaf girl. The people in the middle kept coming up to me to try to make me “it” but I just shook my head because I wasn’t in the game! She didn’t need any interpreting for that part, which was good because it would have been hard. But that was nothing like the onstage work: they worked on scenes in groups of two, and the students in the audience kept shouting out suggestions to the pair of students onstage. I couldn’t understand the audience’s clamoring and I couldn’t hear the actors, so I fumbled around a bit but I think I did pretty well. Sadly the room wasn’t air-conditioned and had no windows, so moving around so much (a natural part of interpreting, especially something that intensive) made me really warm! After the lessons were over the teacher let the students chat for five minutes until the bell rang, and the deaf girl was able to talk with her friends just fine. I tried to stay near her, and at one point when she was talking about a party and a friend mentioned paintball, she shot a glance over at me because the word was out of context and unfamiliar. I fingerspelled it, she grinned, and went on.

I hadn’t looked at the schedule for the bus trip back, but fortunately I made it back to the stop (it was all the way across the parking lot, the equivalent of a few city blocks) in time. Unfortunately, I figured I’d stay on until we got to Deanwood on the orange line…not realizing that meant a 75-minute trip. I should have gotten off at Greenbelt after 20 minutes, but that was on the green line and I didn’t want to change trains. I finally looked at the schedule and was shocked to see it was such a long trip, so I got off at the College Park station after about an hour on the bus.

Tomorrow - yes, I’m working on the weekend, such is the nature of this job - I’m due back at that hospital in Baltimore at 8am. I was told to go to the fifth floor of the Shock Trauma unit; the client is a woman who was hit by a car. I have no idea what to expect…she’s been there a few days, but will she be conscious? Will she understand me? Will I understand her? Will there be room for me to sit, or will it be a cramped space with lots of machines, like I heard the ICU is? Is Shock Trauma more or less serious than the ICU - where do you start, and which one do they move you to when you’ve stabilized? Does she have family, and will they be there? I didn’t really want to work on the weekend, but I desperately need the hours - it’s 8am to 6pm tomorrow, and 6am to 6pm Sunday.

Now this is way cool. I’m probably going to end up using this when I eventually get off my duff and do some real site design. ColorMatch gives you three sliders (RGB, of course) and lets you pick a color you like. As you move the sliders, it displays a matching palette of six colors that will work with the one you chose.

It turns out that Blog Hot or Not now lets you browse sites by keyword (Globe of Blogs has a similar feature, but it’s a directory tree). Only two of us have used the keyword “deaf” but several other people have used “washington dc” which gives a neat way to browse through local blogs. Anyway, I only just now figured it out. Haven’t figured out what’s wrong with my Clix listing yet, though.
My Current Score:

Hmm, Organica. Interesting. Kind of a Daypop thing? Or maybe more like Blogdex? Still checking. Haven’t figured out LinkHype yet either, but it looks like it has the potential to be good if all the junk gets weeded out.

Whee, I’m on the nominees list twice for the Bloggys, not that I’ll get anything. Check out the lists for Best Design and Blog of the Month. (I think I nominated myself for both. Ha. I won’t win, anyway.)

I want to be smart and have insights and have people respect my opinion. Even though I’m working as an interpreter now, I’m deathly afraid of the certification exams. The figures on passing grades for the RID exams are frighteningly low, and even though I qualify for the NAD’s non-certified Novice II ranking, the Generalist certificate seems pretty far out of my grasp. R has been saying he’s so proud of me for doing this, he’s never seen me smiling so much, etc. I just feel funny and disorganized. I want a long time to sit down and do all the stuff I need to. Today felt really weird because I literally had nothing to do - there was no way for me to go home, and I had no assignments…so I was completely free, but I felt like there was something I should be doing.

Oh, I was bad and spent almost $10 on magazines today. I don’t have that kind of money! I picked up the current issues of Paddler and World of Puzzles. I’ve been doing a little bit of work on ODP in the time I’ve been sitting here, but I still feel unfulfilled. I’ve even been catching up on the blogs of friends and I still feel like something’s missing. Sigh.

I ended up not having any work today. No deaf people showed up at the first job so I sat there for an hour, and when I got to the second one they said “oh, we canceled, I guess nobody told you.” I figured I could go home, but A wasn’t there so I wouldn’t have had any way to get picked up. I had lunch with R instead and made my way over to Gallaudet. So far I have been to the bookstore - which is usually closed by the time I get here, it seems to have pretty limited hours - and saw plenty I’d like to buy, but nothing I could afford.

I went over to the library and looked around in the Deaf Stacks a bit. I ended up checking out David Alan Stewart’s Sign Language Interpreting: Its Art and Science and Sharon Neumann Solow’s
Sign Language Interpreting: A Basic Resource Book, but to my disappointment they didn’t have So You Want to Be an Interpreter, the current bible for interpreting students. I’ve already read R’s copy of Interpreting: An Introduction, which is very useful but also more than ten years old. The more recent book is $50, so I’d hoped to take a look at it before shelling out that much money…the library catalog said there was one on the shelves, but I looked all over the interpreting sections and didn’t find it. (There was also supposed to be one in the non-circulating Reference stacks, but I couldn’t find those either and didn’t bother asking this time around.)

I now find myself in the computer lab, at an actual carrell rather than out in the exposed public section. I’m going through my e-mail and doing things like that; I suppose I should also write to the agency and let them know what went on with the hospital patient last week. Or is it too late for that? I’m not sure what else I want to do while I’m here. I might e-mail my instructor but I don’t know what about - I just had the idea to e-mail him. As usual I have no idea what to do for the next three hours.

I didn’t have any work yesterday or today, but tomorrow I’m doing two government jobs, both related to Hispanic Heritage Month. The first is from 10-11, and the second from 11:30 to 1:30. After that I figure I’ll just stay in the city, because it would be a pain to get picked up and then dropped off again for class at night. That will give me time to fiddle around at Gallaudet for a while, and maybe see a couple of people for lunch. Thursday, I’m going with another interpreter to Haines Point to interpret for a team-building day for a government agency; that’s about a four-hour job. I think I might have a regular school job coming up next week, which might be a semi-permanent thing: Monday through Thursday, I think six hours per day, part with elementary kids and part with high school kids. We’ll see if that materializes.

As far as I’m concerned, OS wars are - or should be - a thing of the past. Telling somebody “oh don’t you know? Windoze suxx!” is not going to make them switch away from Windows. (Using a term like Windoze is itself pretty silly.) Here’s a conversation I had about them.
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Right now I’m cooking a frozen lasagna dinner in the microwave. The instructions say they were developed using a 1000-watt microwave, and ours is 950 watts so it’s reasonable to expect the numbers will be accurate; usually we have to cook things for less than the time printed on the box. The directions for the lasagna said to cook it on high for four minutes and then on medium for five. There’s no instructions for in between, it’s just turning down the cook level. Because I’m no good at determining what something should actually cook for, I follow the instructions exactly. This means I cook it for four minutes, then go back and cook it for five. My parents have (or had) an awesome microwave that did this for you. You pressed “COOK 1″ and programmed in four minutes, then pressed “COOK 2″ and programmed five minutes at half-power. If you needed to do something in between (stir, whatever) you could press “PAUSE” and it would let you know when it was time to stir, then you just pressed “START” and it kept going for part two. I wish I had a microwave that did this - why don’t they all have that now? It was a good feature, why was it only on that one years ago?