Month: December 2006

  • The First Sentence Meme

    Now’s as good a time as any for a silly meme, seeing as how I haven’t done one in a little while, and also seeing as how I seem to be all out of posting inspiration. Call it the post-BloPoMo slump. Call it Eloise for all I care, really. Anyway, here goes:

    Post the first sentence from the first entry of each month this year.

    JAN: “I set myself a modest goal, three hundred sixty five days or so ago, of posting entries on at least 95% of the days of the calendar year and getting the overall site posting rate up into the upper 60 percent range (at the time it was at about 63%).” (Remember when I accomplished my personal goals? Ah, those were the days.)

    FEB: “I didn’t set out to spend a week avoiding my writing duties.” (Thus begins one of the most-commented-upon posts of my entire journal, in which I detail my experience with an IM spammer.)

    MAR: “I went to several minutes’ work to create this little monstrosity for a comment on a LiveJournal entry, so by golly I’m going to inflict it on I mean, share it with my adoring fans.” (I filked, sort of. This is back before I lost my job and, thus, any desire to create much of anything.)

    APR: “Twice in the last twelve hours I’ve called the (polite, efficient, helpful) Dedicated Hosting support techs at Infinity Internet (our new hosts!) to reboot this webserver.” (It took moving to yet another server, several months later, to make the worst of our website problems go away.)

    MAY: “To Whom It May Concern: Perhaps your company or similar organization requires someone of considerable skill with computer technology.” (The “please hire me!” posting. I was sliding rapidly toward complete despair at this point.)

    JUN: “Because Lil’ did it, and because I haven’t posted in a while, and because well, meh.” (It was a meme post. Go figure.)

    JUL: “No more “unenjoyment” for this little grey duck!” (This may be the happiest post in my entire year.)

    AUG: “If you catch the killer, red-handed even, and it’s a hot day in late July, and you gun him down (you’ll figure out how to make it look like self defense later) does that make it a summer-y execution?” (As George Carlin once quipped, “These are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools.” Yes, I think of stuff like this all the time. You’d see more of it here if I could remember any of it long enough to get to a computer…)

    SEP: “Via collision detection, I bring you the results of my recent fiddling about with the Official Seal Generator.” (It’s a fun toy, what can I say?)

    OCT: “I flaked, oh yes indeed, on the real-life update thing.” (Understatement of the decade.)

    NOV: “Wait, what? It’s November already?” (One exclamation, one sentence. So what?)

    DEC: “So, after a solid 30 days’ posting, I decided to take a few days off.” (The first sentence in the previous post, no less. Heh.)

    And because I adore you people, I’ll crank out another posting later on today. Who rocks the Casbah, baby? (Speaking of which: Do people actually have problems with that line from The Clash’s most famous song? Because, you know, I keep hearing an idiotic commercial on the radio, and, huh? If you think they’re singing about a catbox, you need professional help.)

  • Thus ends my brief vacation.

    So, after a solid 30 days’ posting, I decided to take a few days off. Did you miss me?

    Of course you did.

    I’d say that the highlight of my weekend was the trip on the Mt. Hood Railroad, complete with “murder mystery.” Kyla and I joined The Roomie and His Girlfriend at the company holiday dinner party, way out in the frozen and windy Columbia River Gorge. We drank (cocoa and Martinelli’s for me) and ate (prime rib… very, very good prime rib) and were entertained by the swaying motion of the train as it crawled ever-so-slowly up the hill and back again, as well as by the amateur theatre troupe hired to amuse and mindboggle the passengers. If I’d been paying the least bit of attention, I’d have guessed “whodunnit.” Alas, I didn’t really care, as I was having more fun keeping company with friends and coworkers. We all had a pretty good time; it was deucedly cold, though!

    On Sunday, we went shopping and quickly spent my Christmas bonus (note: about twice as big of one as I ever received from my former employers!) on about 1/3 practical stuff (clothing), 1/3 toys for me, and 1/3… well, you’ll find out in a few weeks. Neener.

    Today was just another normal day at the office for me, and if I’m lucky the week will follow suit…