divine angst

The air-conditioner in my church is off this week for repairs.

Of course yesterday and today would, then, be the first 80-degree plus days in weeks.

So. Hot. Good for voice. Bad for pits.

Sometimes I make something that is just so impossibly good that I can’t help but share it with everyone.

Pan-Seared Oven-Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Red Wine Shallot Sauce

One 1 lb. pork tenderloin (or thereabouts). Get one without “flavor added.”

Brine:
2 quarts water
2 tbsp kosher salt
1 tbsp white sugar
1 tbsp brown sugar
handful of black peppercorns
healthy amount of dried oregano (probably at least a tablespoon)

Pan sauce:
1 small shallot, minced
1/4 cup red wine
1/4 stock (vegetable works well)
1 tbsp dijon mustard (I used a roasted garlic dijon mustard)
1 tbsp butter

Mix the brine ingredients well, until the salt and sugars are fully dissolved. Add the pork to the brine (I ususally use a large zip-top bag) and refrigerate for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Remove the pork from the brine, pat dry very well, sprinkle all sides with a bit more kosher salt and some freshly ground pepper, and let sit for about 15 minutes. The tenderloin needs to dry out some before you attempt to sear it.

Heat 1 tbsp. vegetable oil in a large (at least 12″) skillet.

Add pork and sear for 1 to 1-1/2 minutes. Turn one quarter, and brown for another 45-60 seconds. Repeat for the other two quarters.

Remove pork to a baking sheet with a lip and transfer to the oven. Roast for 10-14 minutes, depending on how well-done you like your pork. The interior temperature should be at least 125-135 before you take it out of the oven.

While the pork roasts, mince the shallot and add to the skillet. (If you need to add a bit more oil, do so before adding the shallots.) Saute the shallots. If the fond begins to burn, add a tablespoon of water. When the shallots are tender, add the wine and stock and bring to a boil. Reduce by at least half.

When the pan sauce has reduced, stir in the mustard. To finish the sauce, swirl in the butter.

When the pork comes out of the oven, tent a piece of foil over it and let it rest for at least 6 minutes. This will allow the pork to continue cooking, and it should reach a temperature of 135-145 for medium. (I am personally OK with this; if you would like to cook the pork even further, go ahead and take it all the way to 155. The brine should keep it from getting too dried out.)

When you are ready to plate, slice the pork on the bias, cover with the pan sauce and serve.

SOOOOOO gooood. My tummy is HAPPY.

Recipe adapted from one in Cooks’ Illustrated magazine. Many thanks to those guys—they know what they’re doing.

In preparation for selling our home, Mr. Angst and I are doing some hard-core spring cleaning. To that end, we spent about an hour this afternoon going through our books. Mr. Angst has one more bookshelf to go through, but we’re basically done with the book-weeding.

And it’s hard. I have books that I’ve carted around for years in the hopes that I’ll reread them one day, or that I’ll use them for reference. I have books I read once and loved and wanted to hold on to forever. I have books I went through hell to obtain, so I would always have them. Yet somehow, books in all of these categories are going away. We now have two laundry baskets filled with books to take to the we-buy-your-used-books store. I don’t think we’ll get much—they’re pretty well known for not giving much cash for paperbacks. But I have a few complete series, and I have several first-edition hardbacks, and maybe we’ll get enough money back to buy some fine wine and get drunk.

I enjoy the feeling of productivity when I get rid of piles of things that I don’t need. So I feel good right now—clean, refreshed. But I also feel sad. Getting rid of books is sad. I know that the space we’ve freed up is now open for new and unread books, new books that may become favorites, but it’s still sad.

Still to come: the editing of the closet. I have many clothes to give away.

By the way, if you know you live in my city (trying to remain Googlenonymous here, so I won’t say where) and you want to peruse my to-be-given away books (or anything else, for that matter—we’re going to get rid of some furniture and other stuff, too), feel free to email me. I’d be happy to give away things to deserving strangers.

Watching: Yojimbo

Drinking: Cafe du Monde Coffee/Chickory blend with foamed milk—homemade cafe au lait

About to be eating: Cheerios Oatmeal with brown sugar, butter, and cream. Not a fat-free breakfast.

Doing: Preparing to start cleaning house (realtor coming next week!)

Update: Per Scott at L³, the new title of this feature is Friday Spies©.

OK, the © is just a funny. The fact is that Milbarge has been doing this Friday Five thing for a little while. So far, he’s restricted it to Fitz-Hume. Until now. I’m getting in on the action. Here are mine:

1. Tell me what’s in your desk drawers right now.

Top drawer: one of those organizer tray thingies, holding a myriad of paperclips in various sizes, some Post-its, several highlighters in various shades that I never use, a pair of scissors, thumbtacks, a nail file, pencils, and pens.

Middle drawer: eighteen thousand plasticware packets, all sans spoon, from when I go to the gourmet grocery and get soup for lunch.

Lower drawer: a tupperware bowl and a box of Quaker Raisin and Spice Oatmeal, some file folders, and a coffee cup.

2. How many states have you visited or lived in, and which of the others do you most want to visit?

create your own personalized map of the USA

I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, and New York. I guess I’d like to visit Alaska and Hawaii, but I’d also like to get up to the Pacific Northwest and then the Atlantic Northeast.

3. What was the last CD you purchased, and what was the last movie you rented/bought a ticket to?

I honestly couldn’t say on the CD—it’s been a while since I bought a CD. Does the Horowitz CD we bought my father-in-law for Christmas count? As for movies, the last movie we bought tickets to was a little thing called, “A Star is Porn,” a sort-of documentary about porn that showed just the non-sex parts of a sampling of adult movies. Pretty funny (the clips from “Edward Penishands” were hysterical, as were the clips from “Lord of the Dildo”). We last rented…um…”Napoleon Dynamite,” I think.

4. Have you ever sung karaoke? If not, what song would you be willing to sing in front of people?

OK, if you’ve perused my archives, you may have noticed that I sing in a choir. And I’ll admit it—I’m pretty proud of my voice. Pride goeth before a fall, though, and that’s why I avoid karaoke.

Basically, whenever I try to sing karaoke, I get really concerned about picking a song that’s good for my range, that I know the words to, and that I won’t screw up. Because I actually do sing. I know, this is insane—it’s karaoke! It’s supposed to be fun, and you’re supposed to make an ass of yourself! But I am afraid of making an ass of myself with my voice, so I usually end up picking a Patsy Cline song, because I like her songs and I know them and they’re (mostly) in my range. But they’re slow, and boring, and not really fun at karaoke. So lately, I just watch—one of my friends sings “The Highwaymen” and does all the voices, and it’s hysterical. Much more fun than me.

5. What was the best concert you’ve ever attended, either because of the performance or because it was otherwise memorable?

I don’t know….the one that comes to mind is the Vertical Horizon concert I went to in high school. My friends and I were the only people there. It was at a bar in our hometown, and I guess they just didn’t market it very well. It was pretty cool, though—we sat around afterward and chatted with the band some.

I pulled out my cellphone. I opened a browser window. Then I typed in the URL for that last school. I was going to make that phone call and I needed to look up the number.

But my browser auto-completed the URL for the status check instead of the main page, so I thought, why not? I’ll check one last time before I call. Name, password, click.

And there it is, in bold 24 point Verdana: Decision

Now I just have to wait on the mail. Imagine—in a few days, all the waiting will be over. (Unless, of course, they’ve waitlisted me. Now that would be peachy, wouldn’t it?)

I almost forgot this was coming out!

I mean, I didn’t forget, but with my current inability to know what month it is, I didn’t realize that it would be coming out in a short two months.

Ooh, golly. I’ve seen the special trailers and the “making of” thing, and I have my hopes up. I should know better, but somehow I can’t help it. Lucas may yet redeem himself from the hell reserved for those who create patois-speaking comic relief CG characters simply because they can.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Mr. Angst recommended this to me last week when I was casting about for something new to read, of the fiction variety. Then he warned me that Gibson uses a lot of his own made-up terminology, and that might frustrate me. I actually like that sort of thing in books, though, so I wasn’t frustrated. I enjoyed it. I’m generally a big fan of near-future sci-fi, anyway, so it’s not too surprising that I enjoyed this book, the first cyberpunk novel.

I can’t really divulge too much about the plot because, if you haven’t read it, the first thing I’d want to tell you would sort of ruin the first 80 or so pages. So, just an intro, then: Our main character is Case, a “cowboy”—a professional hacker. Except he can’t access the matrix anymore because someone got pissed at him and made it impossible for him to jack in. Until he’s hired to perform a task, and thus the plot unfolds.

The thing about this book that really impressed me was its prescience. Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984. Yet he writes details that are remarkably familiar, something that requires a really good understanding of human nature. Technology, in his world, has not made things different—it’s just made the same things possible in different ways. Plastic surgery has evolved into genetic manipulation; tanning beds are replaced by tweaking the amount of melanin in one’s skin. A latter-day Vegas is now in orbit, attracting the same crowd as today’s Strip.

The book isn’t long and isn’t a hard read, though, as Mr. Angst mentioned, you do have to read closely and carefully or you’ll get sort of lost. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in technology, cyberpunk, human-machine interaction, and to anyone who read Cryptonomicon. (Although I might be the only person who read that book before Neuromancer.)

Everybody seems to be podcasting lately.

I kind of like it. It’s like audio voyeurism. But I’m not sure I’m ready to podcast myself, yet.

Over at Volokh, Orin Kerr muses about the Harvard B-School hack, eventually concluding that what these students did wasn’t worth the punishment they received (rescinded offers of admission).

He bases his opinions on this post by Phillip Greenspun, which compares what the the B-students did to going up a level in the directory hierarchy and, voila!, finding their information. Now, I’ve seen a few other suggestions that indicate it wasn’t quite so simple as that—but it was certainly not beyond anyone familiar with using a browser, and certainly not a true hack. Some manipulation of some values might have been required to get to the desired location, but nothing more complex than that.

So, OK, it was a fairly easy backdoor that these people took advantage of, and they were punished for it.

Now, last night on NPR, the dean of admissions at MIT, which also had some students derailed by this mess, stated that they felt this act was ethically equivalent to breaking into the physical admissions office and finding their paperwork. Well, that’s called breaking and entering, and is a crime. According to Prof. Kerr, what these kids did would not be considered a crime—they essentially just visited a live-but-unpublished webpage.

So I’d say a better analogy is that this was more like wandering down a hall where you know admissions offices are and randomly trying for unlocked doors. And when you find one, you go in and start scrounging around on desks for the file folder with your name on it. Still ethically questionable—after all, you have to know you’re not really supposed to be in there—but certainly not illegal. The door was open! You just happened to come upon it! And look—my admissions decision is sitting on that desk right there!*

I don’t know the full extend of Harvard’s punishment for their 100-something admittees, but MIT apparently will let their group of 30-something reapply next year. That actually seems quite fair to me. They made a bad decision and got caught. That’s not to say the institutions themselves aren’t overreacting just a bit, but we should consider that, just like Heidi did, the finder of the original weakness could always have alerted the company first. Instead, that person spread the word.

*I’ve heard some rumors that Georgetown law school is considering similar punishments for students who access the admitted students’ site before receiving their actual letters of admission. I think this is hooey because how can they know how long it takes to get the letter in US Mail? If you have information to the contrary, I’d love to hear it; otherwise, if you’ve seen it on the boards, I think you can discount it.

I know I already posted about this but it bears repeating:

When did it get to be March? Half of my brain still thinks it’s January. Spring Break is next week, for goodness’ sake. (And St. Patrick’s Day, but that’s another, much more fun, post.)

I don’t write many checks any more, and checks used to be my internal clock reset button. I need a new way to convince myself that time is still passing.

Have you noticed that I’ve been pretty good for the last couple of days and haven’t bitched about a particular school not making any decision on my application?

I’m actually quite pleased that my online status remains at “complete”—mostly because I want to make sure that my letter of interest has time to get to them.

The letter also provides me with a ready-made excuse to call them next week if nothing has changed and say, “Hey, I sent some additional materials—have they been received? Can you tell me when I might hear something on my application, since I’ve been waiting twelve weeks?”

I’ll be sweet as pie and force that smile into my voice and they will Love Me. And they will offer me admission right then and there.

Or they’ll tell me that my application has been stuck behind the Xerox machine for three months and they just found it. Hm…that would suck.

It rained all weekend. Yes, ALL WEEKEND. That made my weekend somewhat less than sunny. But yesterday, out of the blue, the sun came out and it was GORGEOUS! Really!

But I had things to do indoors last night and couldn’t go outside and enjoy the sunshine so much. But no big deal, because I got up this morning and it was STILL SUNNY.

All day, I peered eagerly out my office window at the sunny sunshine and thought longingly about how I’d take a nice, long walk after work, in the gathering dusk.

And I got into my car in the underground basement at 5:30 and drove up the ramp, and pulled my sunglasses down off my head in anticipation of those bright, piercing early evening rays of sun, and…

THE SKY WAS CLOUDY.

That’s right, completely cloudy. And there’s a nasty chill in the air, as I discovered when I got out of my car at home.

It is not nice walking-around-the-neighborhood weather now. It is too cloudy and too cold and I am too hungry to put on sweatpants and a hoodie just to walk around in the dark and be cold.

Phooey, I say! Phooey!

Which Website are You?

via Res Ipsa Loquitur

Do you ever see late-night infomercials and wonder who buys all that stuff?

The other night my dad told me he’d bought some of these. He was so proud—he’d used them to organize the linen closet.

Now you know.

We share walls with our neighbors. One of our neighbors has been our bane. In the evening, they turn the TV up so loudly that I can hear 24 through the walls; in the mornings, I can often hear them screaming at each other.

Or at least I could.

They moved this weekend. I’ve waited to get excited because I wasn’t sure they were actually gone. The way they screamed at each other, one of them might have been leaving the other.

But it’s been two days and there have been no cars in their spots and I’ve heard no TV from that wall, and I haven’t seen them walking their yippy little poodle. They are really gone.

I am so happy.

from LQ:

Coke or Pepsi? Dr. Pepper. When I was a kid, we couldn’t get DP up north when we’d visit relatives, and that was the worst form of deprivation EVER. If we can’t get DP when we move whereever we move, I might cry. Diet Dr. Pepper, by the way, really does taste more like regular Dr. Pepper.

Chunky or smooth peanut butter? Smooth. I’ll eat chunky, I just don’t normally buy it. It always shreds the bread. (We used to call that “Wondercide.”)

White or wheat? All of it. I buy loaves of wheat bread for sandwiches and toast, I make French bread, and I pick up yummy sourdough when I want a nice loaf with dinner. I don’t like rye, but just about everything else is welcome. Cheese bread, nut bread, sweet bread….all of it.

Vanilla or chocolate ice cream? Vanilla. It just goes so well with everything. Especially if it’s Mexican Vanilla ice cream. Sweet cream is also good.

Perfect “after sex food”? Don’t usually eat after sex. But if I had to pick something that I could imagine being the perfect ASF, I’d say fine chocolate—a small, very rich, very decadent, very delicious piece of gourmet chocolate.

Butter or margarine? Butter. Butter, butter, butter. I buy margarine only for toast.

Coffee, tea, or neither? Coffee. Espresso. Cappuccino. I do like tea, and Aveda makes a great uncaffeinated blend, but coffee is how I start every day.

Sweet or dill pickles? Both, definitely. Also, I like bread and butter pickles. LQ is right about craving the sweet little gherkins, but there’s nothing like a crisp dill pickle with a great sandwich. Mmmm. It’s definitely lunch time.

Supidest thing a boy told me that I believed? When I was four, my brother told me that, when you were finished with your chewing gum, you should stick it on your forehead. We were on a road trip and I fell asleep after taking his advice. I spent most of that night in the bathtub while my mom tried every method in the book to get the gum out of my hair. And then she cut off all my hair because she couldn’t.

What do you want to be when you grow up? Happy. Content. A mother. A grandmother. A writer and a teacher and role model. What I do to make the rent is peanuts compared to those.

I’ve seen quite a bit of commentary on this article:

Some call them slackers. Others are more diplomatic. But whatever the moniker, “Generation Y” associates are getting a bad rap for what some say is a flabby work ethic and an off-putting sense of entitlement.

Attorneys from Generation Y-those born in 1978 or later-are plenty smart and generally well educated, say firm leaders and industry experts. But these young attorneys also are lacking in loyalty, initiative and energy, so the criticism goes.

First, I guess I’m not technically part of Gen Y, since I was born before 1978. But I have a hard time buying that it’s a bad thing for young lawyers to expect the quality of their personal life to be high. I’m certainly not prepared to leave law school and start living at a firm. What happens when I want kids? What happens to my husband? What happens to all the other things I enjoy—choir, cooking, dancing? Because of my personality, I don’t see myself as very likely to go into BigLaw.

Of course, if you do want to do “BigLaw,” it’s probably true that you’ll have to sacrifice some things—you’ll work longer hours and have higher billables. And it might be true that the partners will think you are a slacker if you don’t do the drudge work they assign with a smile. This article, then, might give you some insight into how to move up the ladder more quickly.

No, what really bothers me is that this article isn’t being read just by the people who want to go into BigLaw (and know what to expect) or just by the people who already know that they don’t want the big firm life. It’s that they’re being read by the 0Ls who don’t know what they want to do.

A lot of those people read the boards, where other young people who are all equally uninformed blabber about things like debt, and job prospects, and employment statistics. And they get frightened. I’ll be in so much debt; I’ll have to work 80-hour weeks! Or, There aren’t other jobs that pay well except in BigLaw! Or I’d better go to a school that sends lots of people to BigLaw because that’s means something significant about my own prospects. And then they read the article above and get even more scared.

Let’s get, then, some truths out of the way. Yes, law students usually have a fair amount of debt. Yes, BigLaw pays better than other lawyering jobs. And yes, the employment statistics do mean something—that a certain number of students get high-paying BigLaw jobs.

But there’s a lot missing from that worldview. There are other jobs besides BigLaw, and you will be able to pay off your debt in those other jobs. Maybe not as quickly, but so what? If you’re expecting instant wealth out of law school, maybe you’re focusing on the wrong stuff.

I can only hope that the junior associates cited in the article are the face of a changing profession. Maybe when they are managing partners, they’ll be able to assure first-year associates that their personal lives won’t be hijacked by the firm. Maybe they’ll even get around to abolishing the billable hour. Or maybe they’ll just be a little more understanding when a fresh, young JD doesn’t want to sleep in his office or would rather do more interesting work than document review. And they won’t make ridiculous statements like,

“They are more willing to sit back and wait for things to happen to them instead of making them happen for themselves,” the attorney said, adding that new associates today are more brazen than those in previous years. “They are willing to turn down work they don’t want to do. They don’t volunteer for committee or other firm work.”

What must those brazen young associates be thinking? Maybe it’s something like this: I’m $150,000 in debt and I’d much rather do something that makes use of it, so I’m not going to join a committee. Or, I’m $150,000 in debt and I’m out of here in two years when it’s all paid off. So I’m not joining a committee. Or even: I have two kids at home and I want to see them growing up. So I’m not going to volunteer to carry your briefcase for this case, and I’m not going to join a committee. Not to bag on committees or anything.

Other commentary: Narkoleptik, Jeremy Blachman, Orin Kerr, Raffi Melkonian, and JD2B.

You are a Slytherin!!! You are one bloody evil bastard. You make being a jackass look nice. How you manage to keep friends is a mystery to even the Department of Mysteries. The Ministry of Magic has been watching you since birth and had a file 10 inches thick of all of your transgressions. Wait until you hit puberty!

Harry Potter Sorting Hat Quiz brought to you by Quizilla

Oddly, I always end up in Gryffendor when I go through the Sorting Hat on the official Harry Potter site.

But Slytherin is acceptable.

I stopped into a little bijou-and-clothing shop yesterday while I was out picking up a cheesecake for dinner with my dad. I thought I might find a cute going-out top (I’ve been looking for such a thing for weeks, but I’m picky).

Instead, I found a pair of jeans. I was stunned when I tried them on and they fit—not too low-rise, not too tight, a nice wash, and the perfect length. They break right on my foot, so they’re not high-heels jeans, but they are great for sandals and sneakers. Also, they were $30. The absolute perfect pair of jeans!

Until I got home and cut the tag off and noticed it said “Ladies denim CAPRIS.”

That’s just sad. Nevertheless, I’ve been wearing them ever since. No one will ever know…except that I’m so stunned I’ve told almost everyone I’ve seen since I bought them.

I finally made it out to the mailbox today, after ignoring it since Thursday. My in-state school has accepted me, which is a lovely thing, even if I already know I won’t be attending it.

A la stag:

# of schools applied to: 5
# accepted: 3
# rejected: 1
# that have ignored my application since receiving it: 1

I’m that much closer to the end of all this. Mr. Angst should have a decision in a week or two, also, and then we can start writing checks.

The top song in the US on the day I was born?

Best of My Love, by the Emotions

In the UK?

Way Down, by the one and only Elvis.

I’m not sure how to feel about either of these.

Via THL.

I noticed that my TTLB rank is now “Adorable Rodent” (or it will be when NZ Bear finishes debugging). While I think this rank is definitely better than the snake one (if only because Mr. Angst really hates snakes), I am pretty ambivalent about it since I really don’t like rodents.

Not too long ago, I lived in this great apartment. I lived there for three years and really liked it. It was big, it was cheap, and it was in a great location—I could ride the bus straight to work. OK, the management was a little lacking, and I had a few friends get towed from our parking lot, but overall, I really liked living there.

After I’d been there about a year and a half, someone bought an empty lot down the street and starting putting up some garden condos—really lovely loft-like condos, almost a sixplex, really. The lot had all these lovely trees and they saved quite a few of them, so the condos were really nicely shaded and landscaped. I liked them and, had I been in possession of some money, might have wanted to buy one.

Until I began to suffer the consequences of someone building on a formerly wooded empty lot down the street from my own home.

We got rats. And we got a lot of them. And they were pretty big. They were wood rats, and they fled the construction site. Our building had some holes in the roof and they got into the walls and suddenly, everyone had rats.

After a few months of hearing them, I opened my pantry one evening to find one staring at me from the cereal shelf. I screamed, it jumped down to the floor and ran behind the sink to its hole.

So I called the management and asked to have someone come out and set some traps. It took a week or so, but they came out. And they set old-fashioned spring traps. I looked at the traps and told my landlord quite frankly that I would not be disposing of any rats that were killed in the spring traps and she told me just to make sure to call the exterminator when a trap went off. (I don’t think glue traps are all that humane, but spring traps in the cupboards where I kept my dishes didn’t seem right to me either.)

Sure enough, one afternoon, one of the spring traps went off and I opened the cupboard door just enough to see blood, gagged, and fled my kitchen. I called four times in the next twelve hours, trying to get someone to come take it away. Finally they did, and my landlady was kind enough to send a cleaning service in to take care of the mess.

After a few more months of traps (we didn’t have any more dead ones), I asked if they could seal up the holes. I was told, no, sealing up the holes would trap them in the walls where they’d die and then things would smell. I got the logic of this, and acceded. And we didn’t see any more rats for a while.

Until one morning. This was possibly the most mortifying experience of my life.

My aunt was in town and asked to stay with me for just one night. I offered her my bed, but she said she’d be fine on the futon. So she slept in the living room on the futon and I in my room. It was a weekend. I got up that Saturday morning to find her sitting up on the futon, reading, and my stainless steel colander upside-down on the floor.

“What’s up with that?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I woke up this morning and saw that little guy under there walking across the floor. I didn’t want him to suffocate, so I just put the colander over him.”

Little guy? I lifted the colander and there, still and sick, was a baby rat. Sick from the poison that the exterminators had put throughout our building.

I was mortified. I got a paper grocery bag, coaxed the little guy into the bag and removed him outside. Unfortunately, he was too sick to go anywhere and died on my back porch. I never used that door, which meant I didn’t realize it until…well, it was messy, let’s just say that.

My aunt was very cool about the whole thing—she didn’t think I was dirty, and I explained the construction problem and that we’d been trying to deal with the rat issue for months. She laughed about it, asked if she could use my bathroom to shower, and then she took me to breakfast.

But inside, I was still horrified. My poor aunt had to wake up to a dying baby rat while under my hospitality. I couldn’t get past it.

That was sort of the beginning of the end—both of the rat saga and of my enjoyment of that apartment. We had a few more incidents, including another baby rat that died behind the fridge. Then our building was sold to a new company and they promptly removed all the poison and sealed up the holes. And then my roommate got two cats, and four months after that, I moved out.

It is any wonder that I still get a little queasy when I think about rodents? I know, there are genuinely adorable rodents—chinchillas, sugar gliders, hamsters, and gerbils—but all I can think of when I hear “rodent” is facing down the rat in my pantry and the dying baby rat in my living room. :::shudder::::

I took a little time this morning to update my blogroll. The blogs I added are ones I’ve been reading for a while, but had forgotten to mark “public” in Bloglines. So, welcome to the roll if you just showed up, and know that I’ve been reading you for a while.

I suddenly find myself with an overwhelming amount of work to do.

A friend of mine recently got a new job with a startup and this startup hasn’t put a lot of effort into marketing. As in, their website is deplorable. Really. I’ve done work for him before, at his last job, and he’s a smart guy with an eye for things that are ugly and things that are pretty (yes, he’s gay) so he’s asked me to bid a redesign of their entire website.

Which is sweet, because a) it’s nice, creative, rewarding work and b) I need the cash.

Then he asked me if I’d also consider submitting a redesign of their logo. (Apparently the one they use was purchased from a clipart site. I somehow don’t think they also purchased permissions to use it on their marketing materials.) Since logos aren’t really my thing, I said I would give it a whirl but couldn’t promise anything really awesome. He said that wasn’t a problem, and that they’d still want me to redesign the website.

So all this happened and I, essentially, forgot about it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything till the weekend, so it just left my mind entirely.

So I’m just remembering this stuff as I prepare to leave work for Happy Hour.

And now, I guess, I have to sit down tomorrow and (whimper) dredge through the baby-puke colored website that’s currently up and figure out how to make it better. I’m going to have to build it new from the ground up, I’m sure. But I also promised my dad that Mr. Angst and I would drive to Nearby City where he lives and have dinner with him tomorrow night. (We’ll also be enjoying the company of my almost-became-a-priest cousin and his fiancee, both of whom are lovely people, but I’m pretty convinced the cousin thinks I’m a heathen.) And I need to clean, and do laundry. And I just started a new book that I’m really interested in.

I guess I’m just being whiny because I don’t really want to spend Saturday and Sunday working, I want to spend it relaxing. I know, I know—my reward comes in the form of cash!—but it still makes me whiny.