Evite!

Okay, this made me laugh so I'll share it with you.

The cool web 2.0 way of doing things is to send "e-vites", that is, electronic invititations. However, just like our collective language-making dropped the hyphen off of e-mail, e-vites are written as "evites". Now, the French verb eviter (actually there's an acute accent on the first 'e' but I can't get ascii to work) is basically where we get the word 'inevitable', meaning unavoidable. So when I get an "evite" it looks to me like someone is saying to me: "Avoid!"

Lots of laughs for someone with temperamental social phobias.

Awakened from an apparent coma

So apparently I've been in a coma for the past three months. Seriously. I just woke up here at my desk with a ZZ Top (ever heard of him?) beard which, at first glance, seems to have been made a nesting ground for birds. On closer inspection, it looks like the birds cleared out when the drooling became a problem. In any case, checking my last blog entry, it looks like I was out for the entire first quarter. Well, we'll just call it hibernation.

But, good news! This means that its Q2 (god help me I'm apparently arranging my life into fiscal quarters?) so time for new goals! That's right. . its one of those sort of corporate overreach things where your work tries to mix in with your ideals. What horror.

No, I'm kidding. (Although if you know me (you don't) you know I do tend to hate what everyone else is doing.) In fact, the goals I've set are modest and potentially fun. So I'll only complain in awkwardly phrased asides.

Without further banter, here they are:

Work Goals:

1. Better time management
   - 42 hours of work per week average
   Yeah, I know the cool kids are all about 50 and 60 hour weeks. But frankly, I'll never be able to do that unless somehow my work is split between three or four separate and really interesting tasks, and someone else cooks my dinner. This goal is really about building up an excess so I don't have to feel stressed when things get busy in the ol' personal life and I have to miss a little bit of work time.
   
   - Get into work before 10 AM
   This goal is pretty important to me. I lose a lot of productivity when I get in at 11:30 as I have some times. I also lose a fair amount of sanity trying to catch up. Staying at work until 7:30 PM just to finish the day is pretty sh*tty (regexp?). Just to be reasonable though, I'll allow myself the equivalent of one accidental day a month to mess up and get in after 10.
   
   
2. Write in this blog
   I'm actually already having fun. I'm gonna try to keep this thing up to date and also every once in a while make some sort of work-relevant, constructive comment. As a corollary to this goal, I'd like to learn to get over how awkward the word "blog" sounds.
   

Personal Goals:

1. Keep practicing guitar about 10 hours / week.
2. Get some exercise! Its pretty outside now but soon it will be too hot to want to exist.
3. See a couple of live shows.
4. Keep reading (see the list of books that currently have bookmarks randomly strewn through them, much in the same way the books are randomly distributed throughout my apartment).
5. Take a sea-wife.
6. Rediscover Newfoundland. Come up with a better name for it.
7. Conduct a successful bombing/missile-ing campaign against Iran. (I need to make this one a priority if I'm gonna make it by the Russian Military projection of Good Friday! Although I think that May would be more reasonable/likely, inasmuch as murder is reasonable/likely.)
8. Get over the poetic joy of saying the name "Amadinejad"
   

You can see I'll be busy!