school ate her.

sorry, guys. i'm sure the 3.5 of you who read are dying to know how school is going, and the truth is that i'm lying in its belly, unable to look up from J. L Austin's How To Do Things With Words. i swear the blog won't die.

it's a lot of work. i'd say between four and eight hours a day. or at least i'm making it be up to eight hours day; it's entirely possible that it's not supposed to take us this long. last night i worked on two pages of writing for two and a half hours. writing two pages, it turns out, is way harder than writing four. and they totally know when you're manipulating margins and font size and they call you on it.

so, 11.5 months of this. i'm steeling myself. around february i'm guessing it won't feel so uphillish. i had visions of going to the gym every day. between work (two 5 hour afternoons a week, but it seriously affects the school time--you can tell that most of the students don't have jobs) and school, i'm lucky if i shower each day.

anyway. we're off to san francisco at the crack of dawn on friday for this one's wedding. my dress is altered and i practiced walking in my shoes--in fact, i practiced walking in them while reading the Austin book, sort of like runners train at a higher altitude than they compete in so that the real deal feels less difficult. no worries: i will not be studying during the ceremony.

i promise.

what i'm saying.

you haven't heard about school because:

on my orientation day, i got this packet of readings. and then later this one guy--the guy who gave me the packet--said something about picking up our course packet at an undisclosed location, at some point in the next week. and i thought, man, are you out of it--you gave me my course packet already!

no. that's the packet for the first two days.

i've been reading for five hours.

i'm drinking a shot and a half of bourbon and watching a sex in the city rerun.

or two.

i have to tell you, this may be the best thing i've ever done. and i mean school, not watching tv with a cocktail in my hand.

crash.

in case you're wondering what's holding up the vacation photos: the hard drive in my (otherwise gracefully aging) 867 mhz 12" aluminum powerbook G4 had to be replaced yesterday.

we had some warning, and a semi-recent back up coupled with the important files i yanked onto my ipod that morning should mean a complete recovery. i replaced the hard drive with a speedy 100 gig job, and it was a little pricey, but i was frequently running out of room on the old 40 gig hard drive (i know! did you ever think?) and i was entranced by the idea of having all my photographs on my actual laptop, instead of being leashed to an external hard drive.

except.

i've also been really jazzed about buying a copy of aperture, which won't run on my tiny PB (actually, i have run into at least one account of it being successfully installed on a machine like mine, but it requires some hacks and is slower than dookie). it occurred to me that now that i've dished for a fast drive, if i packed the machine with the most RAM available, maybe i could suffer through poor Aperture performance. or maybe install it on both our machines and use chris's new baby when i could (keeping the photo library on my new gigantic hard drive) and mine as a last resort. i even considered getting a processor upgrade towards this end, one that was more expensive than the hard drive replacement. which someone at work wisely and speedily talked me out of.

or.

i could try the new beta of Adobe Lightroom, which has more lenient system requirements, ones that my machine actually meets. but what if i get all into the adobe product and can't stand the trauma of changing over once i have an actual aperture-able machine? no foul, i guess, so long as i have something that works, but: oh, aperture. you look so sweet.

or.

i could potentially have put the money i spent on the hard drive against a macbook. and i wouldn't even need the black one. sigh. it's a non-issue now; the technicians are doing the surgery as we speak. i really couldn't have thrown the money at a new machine in good conscience, but i'm sure i could have assuaged the guilt somehow.

besides, i think computers in our house should be like cars in my parents' house. you buy new ones at staggered intervals, so that someone's always driving something newer and the other person is usually tied to a dog for a few more years. reverse; repeat. and with potentially five more years of educational discounts, i could be in for something really sweet come 2011.

we got a new addiction box.

everybody, get ready for video chat! we're also considering hosting a monthly video podcast from our bathtub.

but it won't be as cute as this.

she comes back

but she's very tired. she's sleeping. she had a grand time and all will be illuminated soon, surely. there is no one more glad that she's back than this guy.

who has two thumbs and is glad his girlfriend is sleeping in the next room?

go ask alice

have you ever noticed that claritin and lunesta look almost identical? this is an important observation when one is shoveling fistfulls of meds into one's face, trying and staunch the flow of ick.

very important.