everything2
Yesterday I foolishly followed a link to everything2.com. It’s an amazing new source of much information, more diverse and multi-faceted and rather quicker than infoplease.com or xrefer.com, although xrefer is still pretty neat. And for literature, nothing I’ve found so far beats bartleby.com, but that’s just English lit… All pretty neat sites, and evidence that I am pretty dedicated to cruising the great information superhighway, going much too fast than is healthy.

Went to crew pactice today… we’re still coachless until Feb 15 by regulations, but we do conditioning practices together. So our captains inform us we should all come to the erg room at 1 pm, and we’ll have a nice fun workout together. So we all show up in our spandex, expecting something erg-based. Wrong. There are our captains wearing skirts and tube tops, and they explain to us that dancing is damn good exercise if you actively do it for a long enough time, and so we are going to have a little dance party, and they’ve made a mix cd. I gotta tell you, I love my captains! We went from Shoop through I Love Rock and Roll, through I Wanna L-l-l-lick You through to Like A Prayer (with the instruction ‘now, we have to be really dramatic for this one!’), all in our spandies underneath the flourescent lights of the erg room. (We could not locate the light switch.)
One of our coxswains came late, and sort of walked in and then stopped, and was very confused. We’re having a dance party! someone says to her. Uhh, she says, I just woke up… And we had a random person open the door, maybe to see who was playing music, and look at us in bewilderment and then leave quickly. We made sure not to overlap at all with the men, who did erg testing this morning. Hmm, erg testing or small dance party transplanted to the erg room? Let me think about this one…. Hehe. And by the end we were being absolutely silly and trying to figure out how to breakdance.

Love my team. LOVE my team!

And last night, crazy friends of my roommate’s over, conversations about penguins, and watching of all the random movies and flash animations we could think of online (rathergood.com, yatta, furnitureporn.com, all your base are belong to us… something about muffins, something about a big bunny). About the penguins — assuming that a penguin is 3 ft tall, then one 6 ft human divided by 2 equals 1 penguin. And we read questions to antarctic scientists from various grade schoolers, and also browsed the delightful animal reports by the Crocker Farm School 2nd graders. I wrote such a report once… It was on pikas.

That’s all for now… with the beginning of classes free time is going going one!

Going back to school today. Alaska Airlines let me check in online and print my own boaring pass. I was thinking, wow, this is pretty nifty, then I realized that it probably saves them a fair amount of money, if people print their own boarding passes. Less ink and money for the airline to pay for. Still, it was amusing to be asked to check the yes or no box to the questions about carrying dangerous anythings or having let anyone else pack my luggage. Haven’t actually packed my luggage yet, but I will be the one doing the packing….

For most of break, the only thing I’ve really done is go to the gym, and go skiing. Bought new-to-me Silva skis with a wood core and fiberglass on the outside, and hot waxed them myself. That was slightly messy, but turned out well. Only went skiing four times, though, it was pretty cold. And before this, the last time I went skiing was in 8th gade. And before that, 6th grade. But we used to go skiing (and I’m talked cross-country, classic) all the time when I was little. I’m just starting to feel like I’m getting back into it, and feeling how to move with the skis a lot better, and keeping up with my dad, but now I’m going back to Connecticut. Oh well, next winter break I’ll ski lots more!

All this exercise, though, and I’m starting to feel pretty buff. The other night I dreamt I went to Value Village, and there was a cart in the parking lot, so I pulled it in behind me. Then, in the store, some guy tried to take it from me. “hey, this is my cart,” I said. “No, it’s mine,” says the guy. Then another guy came up, felt my bicep and then the other guy’s, and said “Dude, you better let her have it!” That’s my anecdote of the week. 🙂

Listening to Smoke City. Sweet, smooth, perhaps a bit smoky, bossa nova out of the UK with the voice of Brasilian born Nina Miranda, and owing perhaps not a little to experimental trip hop music, of the Moloko type.

so I’m quietly sitting on my bed, catching up on a semester’s worth of email from my friend David, who was abroad in Ghana (and having a pretty cool time, as I now find out) and I notice a little noise. Maybe a little like breathing. So I lean over, and put my ear over my cats’ faces, but it’s not them breathing or snoring. So what else is on my bed making noise? What else but my laptop… so I pull out the power cord, and the noise stops. I plug it in again, and it resumes. And I reinterpret that maybe the noise sounds a bit like sucking, as my battery recharges and my laptop feeds off the power it draws through that plug. Maybe I sometimes refer to my computer as my baby, but for it to be making noises which to me seem like it is nursing, well, it’s a little strange… Why does it make this little noise while recharging?