| 2 posts in 2 weeks! |
[Feb. 21st, 2007|10:55 pm] |
Freaky!
The meme:
1. grab the nearest book.
2. open the book to page 23.
3. find the fifth sentence.
4. post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! i know you were thinking about it! just pick up whatever is closest.
Here's mine - straight from my bed. (Next to my computer are a bunch of glass reference books that are heavy on pictures, light on text):
A fourth - Ivan Serov - blew his brains out in 1963. KGB historians of the post-Stalin era tended to take refuge from the blood-stained reality of their Stalinist past and homicidal former chairmen by returning to an earlier, most mythical, Leninist golden age of revolutionary purity.
The KGB traced its origins to the foundation on December 20, 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, of the Cheka, the first Soviet security and intelligence Agency.
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It's the The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who copied thousands of files - some later purged - and then brought them to the west when he defected.
It's a really interesting book. Stalin especially, squandered a lot of opportunities to totally own the West because he was always convinced there was some hidden motive or plan or disinformation campaign behind the information he got. He always second guessed what he got, and when he got information about how the West was vulnerable, he would think it was a trap.
They seem to have had a much better intelligence aparatus, but they were continually stymied by their leaders interpreting the data through their own filters. |
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| Yeesh! |
[Feb. 14th, 2007|09:37 am] |
The storm has finally passed us here in Rampant Suburbia, and I ended up with 3 inches of snow and 1 inch of ice over it. My garage door, my front door, and the sliding door near the kitchen have all been iced shut. Luckily, I have one more sliding door that was slightly more protected from the thundericestorm, and I was able to exit there, cut through the patio, through the gate, and around my house.
I'm not a small girl, and I walked on top of the white expanse for most of the trip around the house. That's how thick and strong the ice is.
It took me 30 minutes to unice my front door, and dig a path to the street. People, I live in a townhouse. We're talking 10-12 feet. First you break through the ice, then you shovel the heavy heavy snow. I chipped the ice off 1/2 my car, but it is still parked in an icy snowbank and will take another stretch of times to dig out, much less remove the ice and snow mound on the front half of my car. I also have to dig a path from my walkway to the driveway.
The road by work is now cleared to 2 slushy lanes, but I'm still going to hold off until noon to go to work I think. That's assuming the HOA's plow comes through soon. Once I dig myself out, I still have to be able to get out my neighborhood. |
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| MEmage, try 2 |
[Jan. 9th, 2006|12:02 pm] |
Since Robin tagged me...
(OK. Sorry about the size, but as soon I try to put this into a cut tag, the formatting goes horribly awry and is unreadable, and it won't let me fix it, hence the 3 deleted versions of this)
What were you doing 10 years ago?
Let's see: I quit my job to finish my master's paper to graduate to move home with my parents to find a job, eventually moving to Northern Virginia, going corporate, and starting my career. During 1996, I fell down an icy set of metal stairs, bought julen.net (an overhaul of which is in progress and should be revealed later this week).
Five snacks I enjoy:
1. Oranges and Clementines
2. My mom's cheese sausage balls
3. Very sharp cheddar cheese
4. Macadamia nuts
5. Pomegranites
p
Five songs to which I know all the lyrics
I'm categorizing these as songs I could sing if someone tricked me to try out for American Idol
1. Frankie and Johnny (in about 20 different configurations, no less)
2. Think
3. River (the Joni Mitchell song)
4. Angry All the Time
5. Single Girl, Married Girl
Five things I would do if I were a millionaire:
1. Invest most of it for my retirement
2. Put down hardwood floors throughout my house
3. Take my mom to Norway
4. Do a road trip around America, stopping in at my scattered friends and relatives as touchpoints.
5. Create an education fund for my extended family - I'd pay for grad school, for college, for cooking classes, whatever people wanted to learn more about.
Five bad habits:
1. I tend to wallow in things/get in a rut/ not embrace change as I should
2. I bite my nails at times of great stress (or when one breaks, which is very often).
3. I keep things close to my chest
4. I'm a closet pessimist, and a public optimist, and that's a weird-ass combination.
5. I procrastinate things
Five things I like doing:
1. Making things
2. Reading
3. Kicking butt in my fantasy football league
4. Going to auctions
5. Going to Museums of all types
Five things I would never wear, buy or get new again:
Never? Hrm. I'm never buying
1. Another pair of stilleto heels. The one was more than enough
2. Glittery pink leg warmers again
3. Scarves (I can make lovelier ones)
4. That s'mores maker appliance, which takes all of the texture out of the s'more making experience.
5. Anything from anoyone over the age of 18 who comes to my house and tries to sell me stuff.
Five favorite toys (at the moment):
1. My Ipod aka Scratchy II
2. My Tivo
3. A piece of yarn tied off to do string figures
4. My new bamboo knitting needles
5. My bathtub.
Select five people to tag
I'm tagging Sister Havana, Fuzzy, LFS, Baf, and Harriet_Spy |
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[Sep. 8th, 2005|09:56 am] |
i • d • i • o • syn • cra • sy
1. A structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.
2. A physiological or temperamental peculiarity.
3. An unusual individual reaction to food or a drug.
List five of your own idiosyncrasies and then tag five friends to do the same.
(except I can't since this has aleady been dropped in the lap of most of my friends list)
1. I can only purposefully go to sleep if I'm lying on my stomach. If I lie on my side or my back, my body refuses to switch over to sleep mode. All the tricks to induce sleep when I'm sprawled face down do not work when I'm in any other position. I have to be exhausted (and sitting or standing up) to fall asleep against my will.
2. The bathroom stall thing has been covered well elsewhere (it is highly annoying when there are 4 empty stalls not next to mine, and people still zip into the stall next to mine) - but our stallsare are also made of cheapish stainless steel, and any contact with skin can leave a mark there that will last for days or weeks. You can see where people hold the door as they enter the stall, you can see the thumb marks for where people pull out the seat guards, you can see if some brushed the back of their finger against the wall or door to hang a purse or lean a wallet.
I am compelled to purposefully create pictures and pictographs on the stall walls because I find the indicators of other people using the stalls to be a little creepy. It started with moose ears, and now I'm working on replicating the UI of one of our products).
3. Two sides of the same coin: I find it very difficult to just watch TV. I need to be doing something - ranging from knitting or being crafty, doing puzzles of all sorts, being on-line, to even reading (I'm looking forward to Sunday afternoons with a good book, the football games on, and my computer hooked up and constantly updating me on my fantasy league games) ! On the flip side: If the TV isn't on, the stereo is. I feel more comfortable with a soundtrack to my life. If I'm at home and I don't have guests, I'll pop my ipod in or turn on the radio (assuming there's a good station). It's on all night, and is still playing when I get up. I'm currently resisting a shower radio.
I can fall asleep without noise, but I always liked visiting my grandparents as a child and hearing my grandfather fall asleep listening to the radio in their room. I'd strain to hear the baseball games or late night talk radio (I wish I'd known what I was hearing when I was little), and it just felt like a little magic in the night; when I'd be at home, I could tune the radio on the weekends to super stations in far off exotic locations like ... Kokomo. The station signals would bounce off the mountains and impell themselves to places 2-3 states away. That was a different kind of magic.
4. I need to have several projects going at once. I need to be obsessed with at least one. Right now I have:
- Experience Project: To read the entire Nero Wolfe ouevre (well, just the Rex Stout stuff - none of this subsequent add-on stuff). I've got index cards in my purse with each book listed, the year, and whether I've read them. I'm about halfway through the list, and my interest continues unflagged and unabated.
- Web Project 1: The legendary, lingering site redesign. I've got the IA and site structure I want, just not the design. (massive case of designers block, which is also holding up Web Projects 2-6)
- House Project 1: Dresser Revamp (on hold - waiting for it to cool off before I paint it)
- House Project 2: Reconfigure stony part of back yard - too many weeds are getting through the 2 layers of landscapers weed suppressing cloth and all those pebbles. I need to kill them good, put down preen and get more stepping stones for that area. I'm probably going to try and make some mosaic stepping stones amidst the whole.
- House Project 3: Reconfigure the bed on the side of the house to extend all the way down, put down a border, mulch it, and get rid of the fern that strangles everything (waiting for it to cool down because digging in our crap-ass clay-y soil is no fun in the summer heat.
5. I work in a building that uses hip modern vaguely industrial design to signal the building/company's hipness. The steps near my cube that go to the meeting rooms I usually have meetings in are made of glass and metal and they shake a bit when more than 2 people are on them. There's semi-transparent lucite in some places, and transparent lucite with a lightly riveted metal grid over them - the half-walls are also transparent lucite lightly riveted to wood and metal posts. When I look down, my vertigo kicks in.
They are also in a big empty billowing space, and conduct noise by echoing it. If you are wearing non-sensible shoes (like say anything backless), your flapping heels clatter. That's on top of the fact that the metal grids bang down when you step on them. I walk down them and try to reduce the noise, so it's a ginger, slow, pained walk, heightened by a sense the stairs could collapse when they start shaking. These stairs are in front of the meeting rooms, so you know you are being observed through the meeting room windows by people bored in their meetings.
I make myself use the stairs at least once a day (going up feels safer than going down) because I don't want to give into the vertigo and it is the quickest way between my cube and the meeting rooms. I have to go up and down them simply because they freak me out so much. |
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[Jul. 21st, 2005|12:12 pm] |
This is a rare rare rare LJ post to jump on the Five Things meme. Because it's much more fun than agonizing over versioning.
I even will answer the questions in a relatively straightforward manner.
So, ask me for a Top 5 list, and I'll post my answers in the thread... |
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| Lyrics Meme: The Answering |
[Feb. 3rd, 2005|04:28 pm] |
I've bolded the answers to the ones no one got:
1. Oh I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints
A Case of You by Joni Mitchell
2. I'll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand*
Far Side Banks of Jordan by June Carter and Johnny Cash
3. I've got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay*
Raisa got it: Busted, Johnny Cash (I was listening to Ray Charles, who really pissed off Harlan Howard, the writer, by using the Cash arrangement on one of his Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums...)
4. Somebody must have an orphanage for / All these things that nobody wants any more*
Broken Bicycles by Maura O'Connell (more famously: Tom Waits, who wrote it)
5. Take my hand, take my whole life too*
Dagnabit got it: I Can't Help Falling In Love With You (UB40) (This is also Elvis' best song)
6. I felt he found my letters / and read each one out loud
Sister Havana got it: Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack)
7. Yet you're afraid each thing I do is just some evil scheme
MrsG got it: Cold Cold Heart (Norah Jones) (see also Hank)
8. The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all / the skies were never blue
I Never Cared For You by Willie Nelson
9. I'd love to see that old lazy Mississippi / hurrying into Spring*
Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans by Rosemary Clooney and hundreds of others (including some mediocre guy of American Idol last week)
10. The hills of Coors are nothing more than Blue Ridge wannabes
Old Dominion by Eddie from Ohio (I'm still peeved the state rejected it from the State Anthem competition.)
11. I remember we were driving driving in your car / The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
Dagnabit got it: Fast Car (Tracy Chapman)
12. I'm the language of the natives / I'm a cadence and a drawl
Grover173 got it: I am a Town (MCC)
13. I train my moods to bloom like flowers unfolding
Steel Rain by Chris Cornell
14. I'm in the mood for somethin' sticky, need my ice cream treat
Gotta Feeling For Ya by Kelly Willis
15. Shake it till the butter melts, shake it till the butter melts
Cosmic Thing by B-52s
16. Well sloe gin fizz works might fast / When you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass
Portland, Oregon by Loretta Lynn and Jack White
17. And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad / So I had one more for dessert.
Raisa got it: Sunday Morning Coming Down, Johnny Cash (although it was Kris Kristofferson, the writer, I was listening to...)
18. You look like a perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet
HeldinContempt got it: Save Me (Aimee Mann)
19. And you yell, why do they spare that one?*
Tjekanefir nailed the source of the song and even described the lyrics which earns her at least 1/3 of a point.
Pirate Jenny by Nina Simone
20. Give me a stand / A standing ovation, baby
Sighing Innocents by Tanita Tikaram
* Pick from multiple great singers (and some good ones...and some bad ones) |
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| Completely Inspired by Harriet_Spy and Tjekanefir |
[Feb. 1st, 2005|03:52 pm] |
Brace yourselves, people: I'm actually posting in my LJ.
I've always read the Harriet_Spy twenty lyrics game too late; someone always gets the ones I know before I get there. Imagine my delight to see and be able to participate in Tjekanefir's version! I thought I'd give it a shot myself - some of them strike me as being pretty easy, and I'm afraid a few are too obscure...
1. Oh I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints
2. I'll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand*
3. I've got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay*
Raisa got it: Busted, Johnny Cash (I was listening to Ray Charles, who really pissed off Harlan Howard, the writer, by using the Cash arrangement on one of his Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums...)
4. Somebody must have an orphanage for / All these things that nobody wants any more*
5. Take my hand, take my whole life too*
Dagnabit got it: I Can't Help Falling In Love With You (UB40) (This is also Elvis' best song)
6. I felt he found my letters / and read each one out loud
Sister Havana got it: Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack)
7. Yet you're afraid each thing I do is just some evil scheme
MrsG got it: Cold Cold Heart (Norah Jones) (see also Hank)
8. The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all / the skies were never blue
9. I'd love to see that old lazy Mississippi / hurrying into Spring*
10. The hills of Coors are nothing more than Blue Ridge wannabes
11. I remember we were driving driving in your car / The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
Dagnabit got it: Fast Car (Tracy Chapman)
12. I'm the language of the natives / I'm a cadence and a drawl
Grover173 got it: I am a Town (MCC)
13. I train my moods to bloom like flowers unfolding
14. I'm in the mood for somethin' sticky, need my ice cream treat
15. Shake it till the butter melts, shake it till the butter melts
16. Well sloe gin fizz works might fast / When you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass
17. And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad / So I had one more for dessert.
Raisa got it: Sunday Morning Coming Down, Johnny Cash (although it was Kris Kristofferson, the writer, I was listening to...)
18. You look like a perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet
HeldinContempt got it: Save Me (Aimee Mann)
19. And you yell, why do they spare that one?*
Tjekanefir nailed the source of the song and even described the lyrics which earns her at least 1/3 of a point.
20. Give me a stand / A standing ovation, baby
* Pick from multiple great singers (and some good ones...and some bad ones) |
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[Dec. 4th, 2003|10:22 pm] |
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*cough!* |
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[Oct. 20th, 2003|01:55 pm] |
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Peep! |
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[Sep. 18th, 2003|12:44 pm] |
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Hurricane Goes Boom. |
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[Aug. 26th, 2003|10:14 am] |
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Urgh. |
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[Aug. 16th, 2003|07:33 pm] |
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I'm completely ignoring the comments below. Lalalalalalalalala. Website Redesign Status? Still Blocked. |
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[Aug. 13th, 2003|11:20 am] |
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Look! I update this as frequently as I update my website! |
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| test |
[Aug. 11th, 2003|01:10 pm] |
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test |
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