Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task

The next time you see someone doodling during a meeting, don’t criticize them for drifting off. It turns out that doodling is the mind’s way of keeping itself just busy enough to avoid checking out entirely and slipping off into a daydream, and doodlers actually remember more of that boring talk. (Judging by my college notes, this probably helped me remember a lot of otherwise-boring lectures.)

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Into the Rainy North

Final preparations are underway for our first vacation of the year.  We’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this week, hitting Hearst Castle, Monterey & Carmel, San Jose and San Francisco and visiting my brother brionv and his fiancee, my aunt, and sekl and non_seqvitvr. We’ll also be attending WonderCon for the second time.  We had fun last year, but figured on making it an occasional trip rather than something annual.  Then we decided to go visit people in the area, and found out the best week (i.e. when   was going to be done with her current job) was going to be the week leading up to the convention.  If we were going to be in San Francisco anyway, the con was cheap, so we might as well go.  (Then the perfect timing became irrelevant, but we had already bought tickets to the con, and I’d already arranged for the time off, so we were at least partly anchored to this weekend in San Francisco.)

It looks like this trip is certainly going to mirror last year’s trip in one more aspect: rain.  Someday we’ll have to schedule a trip up north at a time that it’s expected to be sunny.  (I’m guessing February isn’t it.)

Disappear-ring

One of the side benefits of going on a restricted diet to try to identify what the heck new allergy I’ve developed is that after working off the holiday weight gain, I kept going.  I’ve been hovering in the 150-155 range for most of the past year and a half, climbed up to the 155-160 range around Christmas, and have dropped down to the 145-150 range.

There’s only one problem: Back when I was fitted for my wedding ring, I weighed somewhere between 170 and 180.  And it’s been cold lately, so my fingers are even smaller than usual.

This morning while making my lunch, I stopped to washed my hands.  As I dried them on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle, the ring slipped off, landed on the floor, bounced a bit, then rolled right under the refrigerator until it pinged to a stop against something metallic.

Ordinarily I would have used the plumber’s claw to retrieve it, except for one detail: I haven’t been able to find it since we moved.  alenxa suggested using a BBQ skewer, so I took a flashlight, lay down on the kitchen floor, and looked for the ring.  Fortunately it hadn’t rolled too far back, but I still had to flatten my hand and reach under the refrigerator to get the skewer far enough in.  It took a few tries, but I got it back.  Katie helpfully finished my sandwich while I went to change into a shirt that didn’t have dust all over the cuff.

To top it off, it fell off again at work while I was leaning my chin on my hand.  It took a while to figure out where it landed, until I realized it had fallen into my shirt pocket.

New task: get ring resized.

The New Year

Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year’s Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the “auditions” for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were…not.

Slept in Thursday. Started out reading Greg Keyes’ The Hounds of Ash, a collection of short stories set in the same world as The Waterborn and The Blackgod. After 2 stories, decided to re-read the novels. Fortunately, we recently pulled them out of storage since alenxa was thinking of reading them. Ran some errands, ended up across from the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We’d already discussed replacing the mostly-dead PowerBook, both wanted to replace it with another Mac, and we’d even worked out which model we were going to get, so we just went for it. Then headed over for dinner w/ my brother & his fiancee (who flew back on Friday) & my parents, where we helped work through leftovers from the party.

Friday: more reading. Made a point of walking to lunch. Laundry. Working on my Flash site after a long delay. Watched 2 episodes of “Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs” (computer-generated nature show with prehistoric animals). Nice visuals, but I was bothered by some of the things that I can’t imagine could be extrapolated from fossils — like protective coloring & behavior that’s not based on skeletal structure.

Saturday: Shopping. Finished “Walking w/ Monsters,” watched “Helvetica.” More interesting than expected, but less interesting than was led to expect from reviews.

Current Music: Vienna Teng, “Whatever You Want”

Christmas: Day 1

Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I’d like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it’s been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a “relaxing” evening yesterday of laundry, dishes, and wrapping gifts, with a break for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

Today, went over to my parents’ for breakfast, meeting up with them and with my brother and his fiancee, who flew down Wednesday and are staying at their place. Then carpooled off to my grandparents’ house for the big family get-together. Follow-up with alenxa’s family on Saturday, originally scheduled around SIL and her boyfriend driving down from Oregon. With all the snow earlier this week, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to try the drive, so it looks like we’ll be hitting the post office sometime in the next few days.