Yesterday, Sibylle and I spent most of the afternoon and some of the evening working on a new website for her piano studio. She has had sites in the past, and one weekend last spring I played around with some design ideas that resulted in a prototype site that never saw the light of day.
The site we began yesterday is farther along in just a few hours than the previous one, and it (hopefully) will be going live very soon now. As with many other activities we’ve shared in the past year, we discovered that working together on her business is something we do well. I thoroughly enjoy the design process as well as the nuts and bolts of CSS and XHTML. She is an excellent client who knows what she wants and doesn’t want, and is willing to say so. We were able to iterate through several changes to the site resulting in a layout we are both pleased with.
I’ll announce the launch of the site in a day or two, once we get the last wrinkles worked out.
One of the activities that occurs as two people begin to merge their lives is the redistribution of responsibilities. Where before you were responsible for everything, now, suddenly, there is another set of hands to accomplish what needs doing. Sometimes one or the other of you will setup to the mark and say, “I’m going to take care of this or that.” Other times you just start doing that chore or activity and it becomes yours. Perhaps the most difficult thing (at least for me) is to say, “This is something I can’t do well, would you please do it for us?”
In my case the activity is managing finances. It is not something that I’ve ever been good at, and it has led to difficulties in the past. Fortunately Sibylle is good at it and moreover, likes doing it. We spent quite a bit of time this week, culminating in a new spreadsheet last night, working out our long-term strategy and short term tactics to get our spending and debt under control. Sibylle is thorough, organized, and anal about money - exactly what we need. That I can rely upon her to tend this vital aspect of our combined household means a great deal to me. That I was able to confess my inability to do it justice in spite of the real or imagined social and family expectations that I should be able to do it, was a tremendous relief.
The colophon has been updated for the first time in a year, and I’ve removed the script that displayed random titles on the home page. Henceforth the only title will be, “zanshin.net: because not enough sites start with the letter Z.”
Also, I’ve been cleaning up the tag order on some of the ancillary pages, putting the footer inside the page container where it belongs.
Later this month Sibylle and I will be taking up residence in a townhouse in the neighboring suburb. In my entire life I have never lived in anything but single story dwellings. This is not to say that I haven’t lived in buildings will multiple floors, it is just saying that my dwelling has always had just one floor. (My parents house has a basement, but that’s their dwelling.)
I’m looking forward to living on multiple floors, after all, I have multiple virtual desktops on all my computers to segregate or group activities. Why shouldn’t my dwelling have divisions too? As Sibylle puts it there are public rooms, semi-private rooms, and private rooms. Having a staircase makes for a nice division between the public and semi-private areas of the house and the private areas.
The other aspect of the townhouse that I’m looking forward to is wooden floors throughout. Carpet is certainly nice, but much harder to keep clean - especially with cats in residence. As one of our cats requires twice daily insulin injections I’ve spend a fair amount of time in close contact with the carpets in the apartment and I am looking forward to a flooring surface that isn’t a magnet for every particle of dust, dirt, hair, skin cell, et cetera, that drifts down from above.
The last aspect of the new dwelling that will be wonderful is exposure other than north facing only. The apartment has openings only on one side, and that side faces north. Actual sunshine coming in will be marvelous.
As a resident of various cubical farms though-out my career, and more specifically, as a user of computer keyboards, I suffer from muscle spasms in my upper back periodically. The strain of holding ones arms up in the typing position for hour after hour, day after day, takes a toll on the large muscles in your upper back.
In my case I get a large knot or trigger point just to the right of my spine about mid-way down the right shoulder blade. Over the course of two or three days this spasm grows in intensity resulting in reduced flexibility and range of motion and disrupted sleep. Motrin or Aleve can dull the pain but don’t really release me from its hold. Laying on a tennis ball or similar object can sometimes flatten the muscle, forcing the knot to let go.
On Sunday I developed the latest of these knots and tried a muscle relaxant instead of regular pain killers. Sold under the name of Flexeril, it is really called cyclobenzaprine. It effectively knocked me off of the evolutionary ladder for a couple of hours. The first two hours after taking the pill were okay. The pain was still there, but perhaps diminished somewhat. Then we had dinner. Within minutes of eating I was incredible tired and unable to think straight. I laid down on the couch and, according to Sibylle, didn’t move again. At times I was hardly breathing. This stuff just knocked me out.
I vaguely remember her coming to see me and talking to me. She said my responses were nonsense and garbled. I had a very vague sense of unease but no way to express it or even really focus on it. After crashing for an hour or so I started to wake up and could talk again. Within a couple hours of eating I was upright and moving around. My guess is that the combination of cyclobenzaprine in my blood stream, and the sudden concentration of blood in my abdomen as a result of eating was enough to put me under.
Whatever the cause I will not be taking cyclobenzaprine ever again. That a pill so tiny could have a huge impact is amazing. Frightening.
I’ve cleaned up the footer presentation by removing the links to two older forms of the syndication feed. The only feed I am currently supporting is the 2.0 specification. Also, I fixed a display error where the footer was displaying outside of the page boundaries on individual posting pages.
Boring stuff, but necessary.
The link below is to a video shot by a British photo journalist in Iraq. It is not easy or pleasant to watch. However I think it is necessary to watch. Whatever your political stance, whatever your moral code, whatever your belief system, whatever your opinion on the Iraqi war, you need to watch this video.
At the end we are all of us humans. Whether we are Iraqi, American, Saudi, solider, citizen, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise, we are all humans. That there are humans on all sides of this horrifically complex issue dying is appalling.
I am reminded of a quote from a unlikely source, “I think the surest sign of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Sean Smith in Iraq.
An excellent fan-made commercial for iPhone, based on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They say that the third time is a charm, and in the case of getting a new passport that appears to be the case for me.
Attempt Number One Yesterday afternoon, armed with passport photos fresh from Target, we stopped at the post office on our way home. Sibylle opted to wait in the car and as it turns out she had a rather short stay. The post office only processes passports between the hours of 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. Naturally I missed seeing that sign and ended up getting rather brusque treatment from the woman behind the counter when it was my turn.
Attempt Number Two Looking at the USPS web site I determined that there were at least two post office locations within walking distance of my office downtown so I resolved to take care of the application over lunch today. Patience not being my strong suit I actually walked over to the first location shortly after 10:00 am only to discover that I had forgotten my birth certificate. (As it turns out I didn’t have that key document with me Monday afternoon either.) The postman was generous enough to review the application and statement of theft to save me any future hassle when I returned.
Attempt Number Three Leaving work a bit early today, and with Sibylle bringing the errant birth certificate, I was at the post office near home by 3:30 this afternoon. The postal clerk certainly knew his stuff and was able to rapidly process the theft letter and the new application. Since we are leaving in just 52 days I had to request an expedited passport; non-expedited processing is currently running 12 to 14 weeks.
At the end of all the paperwork, and when the fees have been collected you are asked, “Do you swear that you are <your name here>, that the information submitted is true to the best of your ability, and that the pictures are a likeness of yourself?” You say yes, and he stamps everything in sight vigorously.
In about a week I should be able to track the application’s progress on the State Department site, and, hopefully, in two or three weeks I’ll be getting an express letter in the mail with my new passport.