The scene is Wal-Mart, there are boxes everywhere and even though it’s midnight the place is still busy because it’s tax-free weekend. Apparently this weekend people will save about 151 million dollars. In New York I understand they spread it out over two full weeks, which seems like a much better plan to me because you don’t have everyone trying to get in at the same time, you can spread out the chaos.

So I’m standing, I didn’t get a basket because I didn’t want to get too much stuff. My attempt at self-constraint worked halfway; I just ended up with my hands full. I’m standing in line holding a pack of socks, two workout shorts, a fat toothbrush, a CD, and a little CD holder for my car. She hadn’t called back. I had few enough items to make the express lane. However here’s where the story turns sour.

There was a couple behind me, the woman remarked to the man under her breath, complaining about the speed of the line, “Why don’t they give them a seperate line?” The “them” obviously referring to the black people in the line. The man replied, “I don’t know.” You don’t know!? It’s amazing in such relatively enlightened times we can have such ignorant people. I stared dumbfounded at them for an uncomfortable amount of time, then walked to another line.

Well so I finally did it. I’ve been flirting with the idea of growing my hair long, really long. Either that or I wanted to cut it all off, not quite bald but buzzed. I went in to the hair place not quite sure what I was going to do, either get a light trim just to clean it up or take it all off, and I ended up with neither. To satisfy everyone’s burning curiousity here is the obligitory before and after picture. What do you think?

As of last night I have been happily in Austin, a much needed vacation and also a wonderful oppurtunity to visit my sister Charleen whose birthday is the driving reason for this visit. It’s interesting because we didn’t get along terribly well when we were both younger (and there were ten years between us) but now we seem to grow closer every year. The goal for this weekend, when not partaking in festivities, are to finish all of my email, including the ones from January and December that I still haven’t taken care of. I tried to get it done yesterday to try and beat the weekend email rhyme policy but there was just too much.

Yes, it’s a policy now! I’ve decided for the forseeable future every weekend all emails except ones where it would be wildly inappropiate will be composed and responded to in some sort of poetic form. Sure it will probably increase the amount of time each email will take, but whistle while you work, spoonful of sugar and all that.

I usually don’t post lyrics, but today I just couldn’t resist.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring
Bumped his head and he went to bed
and he couldn’t get up in the mornin’
Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

I was at work for 10 hours today doing cabling and other things that need to be done by tomorrow. We didn’t finish, so I’m going in tomorrow morning as well. That actually wasn’t that bad, the work was hard but it needs to be done and it’s not like I’m not getting paid. What really blew though was when I booted up my laptop and it told me “No Operating System Found.” What? Where did it go? What could have happened? Who knows.

On my old laptop I would have just popped the drive out and plugged it into my desktop (I have an adaptor) and seen what was wrong, however a tradeoff of the nice look of this new one is that there seems to be no good way to open it without messing a whole mess of things up. So I’m downloading Knoppix to boot from the CD-ROM and see if I can see what’s up. Honestly I wouldn’t care and just go straight to a recovery CD if it wasn’t for the Vegas pictures that I haven’t uploaded yet that are still on there. I really hope this doesn’t become a recurring issue like the ones I had with the GRX.

On a brighter note, I got my review copy of Andy King’s Web Site Optimization yesterday. I had some time to get started on it and it looks very interesting. I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web * SIGs here in town and I’ll also post something here. I have to be back at work at 9 tomorrow, which means I have to wake up at 7-ish (hour to get ready, hour to get there) so I better get to bed soon.

Well I just finished up my first day of real work. “Real” in that I went to an office for a set time and worked with other people and I’m going to be getting a paycheck. For years now I’ve worked by myself and for myself, and to be honest I never planned to get a job with a capital J because I didn’t want to be part of that enviroment. This is just a temporary engagement, so I’ll be back to my free-wheelin’ self in a few months, but to be honest I didn’t see this coming.

It was just last week that this offer came my way, and I thought about it quite a bit before accepting it. There are a number of downsides, including that it’s very far away from me (at Veteran’s Memorial and 1960 for you Houston people) and it’s full-time, meaning I don’t have a lot of room for summer things. The time thing was probably the biggest issue, because the oppurtunity cost of relaxation, social time, and other projects is high, but I think it’s going to work out well. The driving doesn’t really bother me because they’re letting me start an hour later so I miss most of the traffic and even though it’s still far away once I get some good music on my stereo I don’t really care anyway.

I don’t really have a formal job description, but from the looks of it I’m going to work on lots of computer troubleshooting issues, their website, some PHP and MySQL backend stuff, and Linux/BSD administration. I was worried about coming in today and I even had the first day jitters when going up to the office, but everyone is really nice and it seems like a great environment. Plus I’ll be working on things I love.

I need to watch what I talk about though, as I found out last night at Diedrich’s with Josh, Julie, Elissa, Ramie, and Chris when I almost put the entire table to sleep by talking about what WordPress is going to do with multimedia in the future. Actually I think Josh was secretly interested but won’t admit it. It’s really interesting, I just need to think of a way to describe it (without showing it) in non-programmer terms.

There are three hundred and seventy-two emails in my two inboxes; with the way I work each represents something I need to do, respond to, tweak, fix, file. I’m going to try and get each inbox (@mullenweg = personal projects, @swcdesign = work) under a hundred messages tonight, though I’m pretty tired.

The tiredness is great though, because it comes from a very active night. Things started at about 5 at The Button. I arrived with the Sarahs and went to see everyone when out of nowhere popped out Julie! How crazy is that? Well, you wouldn’t think it was that crazy unless you thought as I did that she was in New York. The whole gang—Sarah W., Sarah C., Ramie, Julie, Josh, Elissa, and Chris. (Yes that’s pretty much the whole “clique” list which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is also a pun. :)) So Julie pushed the button (she waited for me!) and then everyone headed to Van Loc for some pho but I actually had to go to Kim Son to meet a client.

I ended up at the wrong one, when he said the Kim Son downtown I assumed it was the one off of Travis where the big Kim Son sign is, but no. There is actually no restruant there, something I found after walking a few blocks to get there. The weather was comfortable though, so it wasn’t that big a deal. I ended up being a few minutes late though (theme of the day) to meet him at the one in midtown, about 10 minutes (drive) away.

David Caceres was going to join us but he couldn’t for some reason, but I have a lesson with him tomorrow so we’ll catch up then. So I ate dinner at Kim Son for my first time. Talking with Woody was great. He was one of my very first clients (two years ago!), and looking back he really took a chance in a way in hiring someone who really didn’t have much experience. Anyway he wants a redesign, and I’m exciting about it because it’s really time for one; the site is starting to show its age. Some things will be trimmed, some things will be added (including a psuedo-blog), and it’s going to look very different. Everything has changed so much in the past two years. Also discussing a redesign with my very first client, whose web page I’m slightly embarassed to link to now. :-p

The all-star big band concert at Moore’s was so good, I’m not even going to try and describe it. Basically it’s the best musicians of every instrument, most seldom seen together because they all lead their own groups. It just blew me away, and I was delighted to see my non-jazz friends were digging it as well. Sarah C. ducked out for the concert and really missed out.

The night wouldn’t have been complete with some pie, so the House of it was. Great fun, chocolate brownie, bavarian banana cream, coconut, peaches, and lots of whipped cream (melt). Also saw Joe and Marcos which was a nice surprise. There are a million pictures on the camera, but Elissa has some up already. All her pictures are going to end up here as she becomes the first official photomatt.net guest photographer. (Inspired of course by Julie’s guest entries.)

Now, I need to go practice.

I was late, but then again that’s nothing new. Earlier this afternoon at Saint Ambrose Church I completed my Confirmation.

What a night. That is all.

My key works but it seems the door is jammed somehow, so I’m currently locked out of my house, which is as they say a bummer. My battery runs low, but thank goodness for WiFi. I just need to wait a little while longer for someone to wake up (or answer the phone or doorbell) and I’ll be snuggled up in a warm bed. But right now I am very tired, very uncomfortable, and very annoyed.

Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great. After a little client work I hooked up with Josh, Sarah, and Ramie, whose blog we just set up so the domain might not resolve yet. (Power update: I just ran the extension cord on the side of the house to the porch, so it looks like I can finish this.) I ended up not getting out of the house until about 11:30, and after I picked everyone up we decided to go House of Pies (of course) because Ramie and Sarah were hungry, despite Sarah having already eaten twice already that night. (Having big hair must really work up an appetite.) Food was great, but after I stepped away for a phone call from Mike concerning WordPress (he had a funny PHP setup) they managed to pull the salt trick on me. This deserves a tangent.

My friend Rachel is deadly afraid of two things: mayonnaise and ketchup. So when I was eating with her, Josh, and Rene several nights ago at House of Pies (of course) I thought it would be funny to mix the two together and dip one of my cottage fries in it. When I held it up she responded with a fight or flight response and started waving two toothpicks at me in defense. It put it down and proceeded to eat my cottage fries (with just ketchup) but somehow I got persuaded into trying the ketchup/mayonnaise concoction. It was gross, and I’m told the reaction on my face was pretty amusing. (Actually I think that’s why most of this stuff happens, because I’m told that I tend to respond “animatedly.”) I went to the bathroom to wash my mouth out a little. Tangent time again.

I don’t know when, but at some point, most likely after I started hanging out with Josh a lot, I started putting a lot of sugar in water at restaurants. It’s cheap, which is nice, but it’s actually gotten to the point where I prefer it to soft drinks sometimes. I don’t always do it though, for two reasons: one, I use a lot of sugar, not as much as Josh does, but still enough that it freaks some people out; two, if the restaurant has the sugar in packets, it’s unusable because of said amounts of sugar required to make it good. (My Dad just left for work, and in coming out of the house ungummed the door for me. The morning has become rather pleasant though so I think I’ll stay out here and finish this up.)

This brings be back from the bathroom, and when I sat down I took a big gulp of my water, sticking my straw all the way to the bottom where the sugar was to help get the taste out of my mouth. I put a lot of sugar in my water, so the white at the bottom of the glass didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the salt.

Anyway tonight I fell for it again, but it was just a minor gulp from the middle of the glass so not nearly as potent as the last time. I had chocolate cream pie to get the salt taste out, so overall it wasn’t that bad, but I thought it was pretty funny that I fell for it again. (My Dad just looped back home, donuts in hand. How nice is that!) Dinner was a lot of fun, and it was neat catching up with Ramie who I haven’t seen since winter when she left again for New Haven (she attends Yale). We discovered there is no spoon.

Ramie had never seen the Red Button so that was the natural next step, and Ramie pushed it. I don’t think she has yet felt the full repercussions of the experience, but she will. During the meeting with the Button Guy we were told there was another hidden treasure we hadn’t discovered yet, namely a motion detector that set off a horn when you walk under the bridge. So we did all we could to set off any motion detectors in proximity but to no avail.

Somehow that turned into wrestling though, and two questionable characters accosted me by the bayou and even though they never got me close to it, I think everyone had fun trying. Josh had his turn too. I think at some point during the night (maybe a Josh tackle) I managed to scrape my knee; I don’t remember the last time I scraped my knee, which means I need to get outdoors more.

We ended up in a internet café type place in Sarah’s Dad’s apartment building (which was quite swank). There was some IM mischief, I set up Ramie’s blog, but most of the night was spent showing Sarah all the hilarious memes she missed because of her dial-up connection at her house. She got to know the Chubby Jedi, Angrybot, dancing and rapping plushies, and a few others I can’t remember.

The hour was late, and so we parted ways and went to get some rest.

Which brings me back to this porch, this door, which I think I’m going to go in now. It better not have jammed again…

Sleep? Breakfast, Emily, House of Pies. Study. School, paper. Walking through beautiful clovers. Bee sting. Study. Home and back out. Pizza, Sarah, water, sugar, driving. Study. Sarah #2, chairs. Ring ring. Josh, Diedrich’s, talk, House of Pies, talk, drive, talk. Left turn. Flashing lights. License, registration, heart beat like a humming bird. Drive home, 60 miles per hour. Study. Email, email, study. fin.

Dr Pepper has never tasted so good.

Being back in the City after the radically different environment is a strange socially organic feeling. It’s good to be home. And oh my goodness do I have some email to catch up on!

… and I need some sleep. Finishing up an admin package for a client tomorrow, as well as some satisfying personal project stuff. It’s Sunday so I don’t want to set the alarm, but I don’t want to sleep all day either. It’s been a nice weekend.

A remark was made to me the other day that there are scarce personal details of me on this site, a fact I can’t deny. This obviously means one of two things:

1. My life is so interesting I’m currently in negotiations with MGM over the rights to be used as the basis for the next Bond movie, or
2. My life is so incredibly boring that if I were to post details of it here people would actually fall asleep while reading and then the comment section would be full of random letters as a result of people’s heads hitting their keyboards.

The jury is still out on this one. Anyway, so today I was eating a cheese sandwich…