Daily Life: Anticipating A Timeless Weekend

It has been a very good week, all in all. It has been quiet and productive and now the day is spinning slowly down. I came into work early this morning, precisely so I could leave in the middle of the afternoon and start the weekend a little early. I just wrapped up my last formal meeting of the day and I am now spending the time cleaning up those odds and ends of bureaucratic life that are always necessary. They are as pointless to rail against as the weather - like the rain, like the sun, they just are. You learn to adapt to them or they make your days miserable.

It is my three day weekend and I haven't quite decided what I am going to do. I am mulling over a run up to Sacramento (about a two hour plus drive) to see a Maxfield Parrish exhibit that opened up today at the Crocker Art Museum. If I do I think I will probably spend the night up there and drop over to the Indian casino at Cache Creek and make a donation to the local tribe. I downloaded a little video poker game to my iPhone a couple of weeks ago and it has been a constant source of amusement in those quiet moments of the day that fall in between other things and has made me want to go spend some time sitting in front of a real video poker machine.

I am contemplating dinner but I haven't decided which direction I am going to go. I was thinking about going out, over to Thea Mediterranean or one of the other restaurants in Santana Row, but then my brain started swinging toward opening the apartment up wide and ordering a pizza. I have Yojimbo on DVR and I have been waiting for a window to watch it and tonight might be the perfect evening.

On the technical front I may have finally figured out what has been causing my connectivity problems at home. The personal laptop was acting up over a couple of days this last week, with intermittent connectivity problems. I was blaming my personal laptop so last night I fired up my personal desktop, which I rarely use except for big things, and that sent me in the direction of a bad router configuration. So I fired up my monitoring tools and my network monitoring tool couldn't pick up my wireless router (even though the other tools said it was up and running properly) so I purged the router, restarted it, and reconfigured it and as of last night - it was working like a charm, so I suspect it was a corrupted configuration file somewhere along the line. Of course, sometimes, with all computer equipment , you just have to reboot everything.

I am nearly to the end of "Spook Country" and it has been excellent - William Gibson at his finest. (He has written a couple of works that just did not impress me. "Virtual Light" was basically a movie treatment and way too Hollywood and "Idoru" was basically incoherent.) I see Clive Cussler has a new one coming out for the summer markets, so I am looking forward to that. My step-dad Bill turned me on Cussler a couple of years back, so I enjoy reading him.

I'm enjoying going into the weekend with all my options open, with nothing outside of a load of laundry or two that has to be done. I could be really lazy and bag the laundry and drop it off at the cleaners, but I happened to enjoy the Zen aspects of doing laundry. That timeless sense you get when you are doing an essentially simple task and can concentrate on the task itself. I think it is going to be a Zen weekend, just going with the flow.

Daily Life: Wednesday Morning Rambling Thoughts

I had a strange evening last night. The winds were very high, strong gusts that rattled windows and shook the building, and it put me in a strange mood. It wasn't a good mood or a bad mood - it was just "a mood". Edgy might be the right word, though I am not sure.

I had a pleasant enough evening. I got home from work and had dinner (garlic mashed potatoes and a spicy beef dish that I do), followed by a bowl of ice cream. I tried reading but wasn't into the material, so I set that aside. I came online for a while, checked a few sites, peeked into chat, watched for about ten minutes and decided I just wasn't into it. I watched some History channel but couldn't get into it. I washed some dishes. I cleaned the bathroom.

It wasn't until later in the evening that I started to settle out - about the time the wind died which is why I am blaming the wind. From there, I enjoyed a telephone call that included ruminations on love - no conclusions, just thoughts and observations.

Then, I watched "Fringe" (excellent TV by the way if you are not a Fringe fan), and curled up and read another chapter in William Gibson's "Spook Country". I've read two chapters in Spook Country so far and I am "trembling at the gate". I want to find a quiet day and devour the whole book in one setting, but I am pacing myself so it will last at least a couple of days.

I love William Gibson's writing - I don't always enjoy his novels, for plot reasons, but he is a very talented writer. I mentioned previously that his "Mona Lisa Overdrive" is one of my favorite novels, and I also have a very dog eared copy of "Neuromancer", which I have read multiple times.

I slept pretty well last night, waking at sunrise from a strange little dream. I dreamt that I was in a store and back in one of the corners I found a small stack of little metallic helicopters. I bought one as a gift for a child, thinking that it was an unusual gift because that particular company actually never made that particular helicopter. I have no idea what the significance of that is, other then I may have been channeling the news about the potential discontinuation of the Presidential helicopter and the withdrawal from bid of the CSAR-X helicopter as the new administration re-draws their defense spending priorities. All in all a strange little dream though.

So, the office is quiet this morning and I am anticipating a productive day. I'm contemplating taking a little leave this afternoon and maybe heading out to see a movie in mid-afternoon. I haven't done that in a while and if today is quiet like yesterday was it may turn out to be a perfect day for it.