Enemy of Entropy

Well, that’s what it felt like. Poor Sam had to take time off from work, because it was Pain Doc Day. The pain doctor is off in the wilds of Cobb County, because that’s where we lived when I started seeing a pain doctor, and it’s darn near impossible to get a reference to a new one (much less trust that a new one will, in fact, keep writing prescriptions for the meds that actually work). Then we headed to Big Warehouse Store to get the RXs filled, and also hit the bank and the post office because they’re just so much fun! And then it was time to go see the friendly therapist lady.

Happily, we were able to game off and on during the day, which made the whole business far more pleasant than it would have been otherwise. And we picked up a great big bag of fat-lady clothes from a nice freecycler! Some of them are so cool the girl is eying them covetously, so I need to be sure they go to my room and don’t wander off to hers.

While we were gone, though, a sweet fairy girl washed our quilt and comforter! Sam put fresh sheets on the bed, so I’ll be crawling into a nice, clean bed next to a freshly-showered, cuddly man soon. That part of the day, I’m looking forward to!

(Continue Reading …)

I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).

The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:

• Fibrant Living - health, living with a disability, podcasts
• Academy Caritas - homeschooling, education, college
• House Fireheart - polyamory, particularly my and Sam’s approach to it
• Heartsong Handicrafts - home of my original needlework patterns, and soon to be home for the rest of my stitching information
• Cyberstalked! - internet safety and privacy issues
• Cynthia Armistead - my professional portfolio, where I put the geeky stuff
• Enemy of Entropy - here, of course, where I put general stuff, book reviews, and the like.

Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.

We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

This post is almost as random as my reading has been today. I’m sparing you excerpts from the fiction and school reading, at least!

After reading this article, Dealing With the Jerk at Work, I find myself wanting to read Robert I. Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. We’ve had a “no asshole rule” here at home ever since Sam and I blended our families in 1998, and it makes for a very pleasant environment. I’m in total agreement with the author that “jerks should be treated as incompetent employees.” Getting along with your coworkers is an important part of every person’s job.

Huh? Chris Bogan reports that Facebook showed him boobies. I know they’re ad-supported, but hello, that’s the clue phone ringing! Maybe they didn’t realize that they’re supposed to be classier than MySpace? That really didn’t seem to be a hard thing to accomplish, considering the rampant trashiness on that other site.

A brilliant school in Pennsylvania has suspended two students for the horrific offense of making an anti-drug-use public service announcement. Be careful with those dangerous Smarties, guys!

I bet you didn’t learn this in school, either. According to John Stossel, the first Thanksgiving wouldn’t have occurred at all if the Puritans hadn’t given up on their initial Socialist practices in favor of a plan wherein each family farmed its own plot of corn. I’m not sure that referring to the “tragedy of the commons” is apt, but it is an interesting bit of information.

Also from ABC comes a story about the grandmothers who hold the Guinness records for the world’s longest nails and the world’s smallest waist. Turn off your images if you’re easily squicked before going to the article, though. That woman’s nails are truly disgusting (and apparently, the Guinness folks agree with me). The waist thing just looks photoshopped to me, as my brain chooses not to process it as reality.

Do blondes make men dumber? According to scientists studying the “bimbo delusion,” that is the case.

There it is. I take no responsibility for what you do with it.

Let us give thanks for chaos and logos
and implicate order;
for dark matter, bright galaxies,
and nonlocal connections; for crystals and continents;
for Lucy’s skull and Mary Leakey’s
footprints in volcanic ash; for Thales’ water,
Heraclitus’ fire, and Pythagorean forms; for the
Indian zero, algebra, and algorithms; for the
oscillations of the Yin and the Yang; for
acupuncture, Su Sung’s astronomical clock, and
Huang Tao P’i’s textile technology; for Arabic
alchemists on the Old Silk Road and Ibn Sina’s
Canon of Medicine; for Euclid and Newton and "God
playing dice"; for Kepler’s snowflake and Kekule’s
dream; for Mendel’s monastery peas and the genetic
Tetragrammaton on the spiral staircase of life;
for fractals, ferns and fall foliage; for
caterpillars and cocoons; for the infant’s first cry;
for Pachebel’s canon; for stained glass windows,
Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, and the Galileo
probe; for the World Wide Web to help us become
conscious of cosmic interconnectedness; but most
of all, let us give thanks for the twin passions
which make us fully human–the yearning to
transcend the boundaries of time and space by
learning and by loving.

Invocation, by Ingrid Shafer
For the opening of the Oklahoma Academy of Science on 7 November 1997

A friend emailed the piece to me several years ago. I wanted to link to it, but couldn’t find a copy of it on the web, so I made one (with Dr. Shafer’s permission, of course). Today seems a good time to move it from the old version of my site into WordPress.