Making certain I close all my statements properly is less boring than changing all popup-style dates to combo-style dates ... but it's a near thing. Plus I have the added joy that one of the changes I did last night seems to have mysteriously stopped working, and neither I nor Vivek can figure out why. Right now I'm hopping from server to server, seeing if there's anyone who got my changes in the brief period where they existed & were actually working. Grr.

On the other hand, I'm finally listening to Music For Airports, and so far it's just delicious -- although that's an awfully heavy word to use for something as light as this is.

Absolutely no progress on the mysterious problem. Vivek has gone home with a (hopefully unrelated) headache. I guess I'll go back to making sure I've closed all my statements properly.

To lessen the tedium of the statements I've been playing with accesswatch. People from odd French domains read my journal. So does someone from HP, but I have no idea who. This is immensely cool. It is nice to be read by people I don't know if I know. (It's nice to be read by friends, too, but differently nice.) Still, I really wonder how someone in France found my journal in the first place.

My paragraphs are disjointing because long pauses are occuring between them. These are due to sleepiness; I've been really tired the last two days. I don't think I've had enough sleep in about two weeks. Having my mother here is lovely, but she stays up a lot later than I usually do, and since I know how much she values spending time with me I hate having to go to bed early -- but the last few days I've been getting very sleepy in the afternoons. Maybe I'll be able to sleep in tomorrow. Noon sounds like a good time to wake up.

Tonight my mom is making chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, which is one of my all-time favourite meals. I'm looking forward to seeing what Jim thinks of it. Given that three of the four ingredients (chicken, sugar, garlic, red wine) are high on his favourite foods list I don't see any way he could dislike it. Or, as my grandmother used to say, what could be bad?

Hmn. It's 4. If I'm clever I'll do a little more statement-closing and then flee home.

And now I'm home, sitting on the couch in the living room, using Jim's laptop with my ancient IBM keyboard plugged in so that I can type a reasonable speed. Jim's off at Fry's, trying to find Mindstorm Legos and hopefully also acquiring an adaptor (so that we can simultaneously listen to our discman's) and a copy of Dungeonkeeper (evil computer game that I played a demo of last night). My mom's sitting at the dining room table reading a Rex Stout novel, and Jinian (my lovely adorable tabby cat) is curled up on top of her scratching post. An atypical picture of domestic tranquility.

Writing from home is strange. Not just the setup -- writing on my keyboard, having a tiny laptop monitor -- but the things I notice. When I'm at work I tend to describe work, which means coding and co-workers and other webpages I've been reading. When I diverge from my environment it's to talk about the things I think of myself as doing, such as reading and being social. It never occurs to me to talk about my other environments, such as the lovely house Jim and I share (sadly a rental), or the sweet way my cat crawls into my lap and falls asleep there at the slightest opportunity. Writing from work is a shiny thing, something reflective like burnished steel. Writing from home is deeper, more personal.

My. That's a lot of suppositions to make based on a twenty-minute experience. Perhaps the half-glass of chablis I drank with dinner (which was delicious and did in fact meet with Jim's approval) has something to do with the changed perceptions as well.

Alcohol is dangerous stuff. I like it, so I try to stay away from it as much as possible. It makes me feel pleasantly warm and rich and open to the world, which are not ways I feel very often. And it's all so *simple*. Why not do this every night, to relax from my stressful job? Why not drink a glass of wine every time I'm annoyed or upset or unhappy?

You see the dilemma. There's such a fine line, and alcoholism runs in my family. I keep a very, very close eye on when I drink, and why, and how much. Tonight's half-glass of chablis (which I really like even though it's a cheap wine and all that) was with dinner, but I drink so slowly that it has spilled over into the rest of the evening. Jim is drinking pear cider, which I am stealing small delicious sips of. We both /own/ a lot of alcohol despite the actual drinking of it being a rare occurance. I'm not sure why this is, except that we both like the taste of it.

That turned into a rant, didn't it? Sorry. I don't think alcohol is a great evil or should be banned or anything. I just hate knowing that I like what it does to me.

Jim is, as you may have discerned from the above pear cider comment, back from Fry's. He found a copy of Dungeonkeeper, and a power adaptor for my CD player. He did not, sadly enough, find Lego Mindstorm sets. They haven't gotten any in yet. Now he's sitting here beside me on the couch, playing the game, while my mom continues to read Stout and make occasional amused comments about the Dungeonkeeper sound effects.

Oh, dear. In a moment of absolute cuteness my cat has curled up on her side, still on top of the scratching post. Her tail is tucked around her, and one paw is carefully settled under her nose. I wish I had a digital camera.

Preliminary judgement: writing from home comes up with longer, more rambling entries. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing yet, or if it'll last. I must try writing over the weekend, and then see what I think with the relatively clearly vision of a workday.