I caught the 7:55 bus today instead of the 8:25. I was surprised to find my office door locked, as Rhonda is always in before me. Turned out she was on vacation today.
I spent some time this morning preparing for a 1:00 meeting with Dana from the Operations team.
I took the city bus to Cameron Village, where I turned in my James Baldwin book and picked up Made to Stick at the library. I also got in the request queue for Anna Karenina, after looking for it on the shelves with the librarian, as “the system” said there was supposed to be a copy there.
I had lunch at the Carolina Bakery, also at Cameron Village, where I used a $2.00 off coupon for their Turkey Berry Salad, which was most delicious.
I walked back to the office from there.
My 1:00 meeting that I’d prepared for went well. We worked on some of the content Dana’s team is moving into our Drupal-managed organizational web site.
An hour after that, I met with my boss and her boss to start looking at a potential communications plan that we’ll have to put together if a project this is in progress gets final approval.
When I returned to my office, Ed, one of the super guys who supports our workstations, had left a note on my keyboard that said, “Dual Monitors! Hot Rod!” While I was gone he’d hooked up another big-screen monitor to my system as to double my screen real estate. Woohoo!
If you’ve never seen this kind of hook-up, what it allows you to do is to drag a window, for instance, from the left screen right across the “gap” onto the right screen, so that you can place some of your open windows out of the way for less-frequently needed viewing.
My boss and I both loved today’s wordsmith.org’s word of the day—the serious procrastinator!
perendinate
(puh-REN-di-nayt) 
verb tr. : To put off until the day after tomorrow.
verb intr.: To stay at a college for an extended time.
From Latin perendinare (to defer until the day after tomorrow), from perendie (on the day after tomorrow), from die (day).
The word procrastinate is from Latin cras (tomorrow). So when you procrastinate, literally speaking, you are putting something off till tomorrow. Mark Twain once said, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” In other words, why procrastinate when you can perendinate?
“In Peterhouse the Master and Fellows might now allow a stranger to perendinate for more than a fortnight unless they were certified of his moral character and of his ability and willingness to do the College some notable service.”
Thomas Alfred Walker; Peterhouse; Hutchinson & Co.; 1906.
In their youth both Herder and Schiller intended to study as surgeons, but Destiny said: “No, there are deeper wounds than those of the body, — heal the deeper!” and they wrote. -Jean Paul Richter, writer (1763-1825)
This reminded me of the series of words: ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimate, and preantepenultimate. Love them!
People started joining my NCSU Study Circles Ning today, which was pretty exciting.
I finished up a long, tedious, overdue note to a colleague about a review my team did of a web site about a week-and-a-half ago. It felt good to finally get that out of my queue.
An “outbound buscapde” today involved a person with an explosive combination of traits—loud, angry, limited-worldview, and knows-they’re-right-about-everything.
She was sitting in the back of the bus talking to her girlfriend. I was sitting way up front, and I enjoyed watching the bus driver looking into the rearview mirror occasionally, giggling, and at times, shaking her head at the outrageous stuff coming out of the girl’s mouth from the back. Some sound bites included:
- It’s the old ones you got to look out for. The young ones, you can just suck them.
- You pregnant, girl. You know you are.
- I’d like to kill my baby daddy. [Nervous laughter from other girl.] You think I’m kidding. I ain’t. I’d like to kill my baby daddy.
- Girl, that who you can’t trust! You think you can trust your family and your close friends. I’m telling you right now girl, that who you can’t trust. I know.
Tonight I got to K-Mart within minutes of closing, at about 8:55. They used to close at 10:00. I desperately needed some Low Dose Adult Aspirin, and I was going to try and get two prescriptions filled while I was there.
I was shocked to find the pharmacy still open, and the pharmacist was super nice. It turned out they had tried to call me to tell me that my one prescription—the one I needed the most—was ready, but since I disconnected my home phone they weren’t able to reach me.
The good news was that my refill was ready-to-go. I put refilling the other one on hold, as I still have a several left, and it was so close to closing.