What a miserable week.

I finished redoing all the work from last week. It went a bit smoother than I anticipated, but it feels like I missed an entire weeks-worth of productivity.

Tonight I am going back to the salon to get a pedicure. A spa pedicure, as the appointment card notes. This means they're going to soak my tootsies in a warm herbal bath before dealing with them. All this is part of my year-long 40th birthday celebration.

I switched my office keyboard back to Qwerty. Farewell, adieu Dvorak! It was a good attempt. But I really love the split keyboard and since I can't get that in Dvorak, I will need to Qwerty by day and by night. If the keyboard at home works out well, I'll get another one for the office.

My problem with it was resolved quickly. I had sent my email to Fentek, the company from whose website I ordered it from, as well as Comfort, the manufacturer, the night the keyboard arrived without its propper upper things. The next morning, Charles from Comfort called me to apologize and tell me they're expressing me the correct bottom to the keyboard. He called me again to double check which color I had as they were getting ready to ship me a grey board (instead of putty, the color I have. "Good thing I called back!" he said cheerfully). That afternoon, the rep from Fentek called to apologize for her delay in responding to my email (this is still less than 24 hours from when I clicked SEND, mind you). I told her Comfort was taking care of it, and she beamed, "That Charlie is a great guy, isn't he? He'll fix you right up!" It was a very pleasant experience.

So when you need an ergonomic keyboard, Dvorak or not, please visit Fentek and get yourself one there. :-) My keyboard is the ErgoMagic, with little lifter upper things to prop up the split panels.

The keyboard arrived. It's split all right but it did not come either in Dvorak or with the frame to support it. I sent an email to the company. I hope it can be resolved. I don't mind switching back to Qwerty...I really miss the speed at which I could type in it. Also, I have bad habits and in Dvorak, I need to keep glancing at my hands as I'm used to lifting them off the keys to hit letters I don't use a lot. In gaming we seem to use a lot of these obscurer letters and I keep messing up trying to find them.

Anyway, I've been terribly depressed. I entered all this work into the system last week and yesterday someone emailed me to ask why the numbers were wrong. Turns out, though honestly there was no way I could have known, that I was entering net amounts instead of gross. I was so upset just thinking of it made me well up in tears :/ At least fixing the errors has been going okay, but I am pretty unhappy to have to fix anything at all.

In today's horoscope....

You may feel like a sheepherder today who is trying to get the herd back to the homestead,
dear Aquarius. Yet none of the sheep want to move. They are dragging their feet, and
despite all your prodding and words of encouragement, they just don't seem to want to go.
Don't let yourself starve out in the fields because of a few stubborn animals. Go on back to
the ranch, have yourself some lunch, and come out again at a later time.

This weekend, Rob and I are planning a trip to Vancouver via Amtrak. Neither of us has ridden Amtrak before, so it should be interesting!

Must dash... Liz is back from Hawaii and I'm helping her tend the pre-sale Girl Scout cookies. Her daughter must surely have sold the most in her troupe... we had to use a cart to bring all the boxes in.

Rob and I are watching the Olympics on the Canadian channel, which airs events mostly live. Last night's women's figure skating, we watched twice -- once on CBC, where it was carried live and was over by 9PM (an important consideration for us left coasters) and then on NBC where it was tape delayed and finished at 11:30.

I was thinking Sasha Cohen had a very good chance to win after the short prgram. I hadn't seen Sarah Hughes before. Watching Michelle Kwan, she seemed older, more confident...but less joyful. I felt the same about Irina (I won't butcher her last name); the body was there but some of the spirit seemed lacking.

In prior years, the CBC did a good job of showcasing everything; this year, it feels like they caught some of that nationalism from the USA as now they are concentrating on the Canadian competitors. When we watched the CBC version of figure skating, they showed the Canadian skater, then turned to the ice hockey celebrations as their team had beaten the Americans to win gold before returning for the final six skaters. During the NBC bradcast, they showed all the skaters in those last two groups. Of course, it might have been the other way around if we had won in hockey!

I ordered a new keyboard which should arrive in the next few days. It's a split keyboard in Dvorak so I don't have to use my poor Dell keyboard. I had to flip some of the keys upsidedown so they'd fit in the Dvorak configuration and it feels funny. At least the keys work though. I had an older keyboard from an earlier Dvorak attempt and the keys stuck, which made typing difficult.

Happy b'lated b'day to you, too, Corey!

Which while typing that out reminded me of a story. :>

Liz was planning a business trip to New Orleans and someone from our Georgia office and I were planning the itinerary. They had meetings all day long for three days, but the last day was the travel day and they could sleep in and relax before their flights home.

"I want to walk around a bit," said the Georgian. "Last time Liz and I were here, we went to one of these little cafes for breakfast and had them, whaddya callits, bidets."

She was mortified two seconds later when she realized she and Liz had had beignets and not personal cleansing.

Happy birthday to me!!

This will be a good day. It is a payday! Jaime (Stirfry's mom) brought in little bags of chocolate treats! There were trays of fruits and pastries in the lounge! Tom and Leah are taking me to the Dahlia Lounge where I can have a slice of coconut cream pie (theirs is the best) AND to top it off, our candy delivery guy the Mountain Man will be here this afternoon!!

Can it get any better than that? ::sighs with joy::

One way to take lunch and not lose any sleep, Broos, is to make it the night before. Hopefully, it won't look so good that Suz will eat it, as some have done when confronted with a tasty treat lying unattended. ::hum::

My throat hurts. I am getting my hair cut today. And I am really married now. Last night, Rob felt so sorry for miserable me that he gave me my birthday gift early -- a wedding ring. We had tried on rings in Vegas but none of them seemed right. Then Melani and I were shopping and we tried on the Trinity ring and that's the one I wanted. It looks nice. I feel SO married :>

One thing I miss most about living in Hawaii is eating at Zippy's. They are a local "fast" food place that serves up heaping plates of local favorites.

What school trip was ever complete without someone in the class bringing a "ZipPack" bento for lunch? This includes a pile of rice, a fried chicken thigh, mahimahi and of course, a slice of fried Spam. Plus you could get a side order of kim chee :)

For my birthday, I'm playing the Fortieth Fantasy Game, wherein I have my favorite treats to eat. I don't want a ZipPack; I want Nappies. A dozen coconut Napples... which is wha they call their turnovers because the name of their bakery is Napolean's. Mmmm.... Naaaaappppples. The apple Napples are good too, but this is my fantasy.

I fill out the online order form and the shipping is more than the cost of the treats...but you know, it's not that I MUST have them, it's that I CAN. And so, I clear the form and sigh happily, knowing that a box of these is a click and a paycheck away.

I am a Green dragon.

One who may be catching the cold of her husband, who managed to spread whooping cough beyond the county line. Well, we don't know for sure that he has it, but he's been sick enough. He and my cherubs spent their weekend hacking up their lungs.

I took yesterday off to rest as it was another day after a night of little sleep, such that the thought of going to work had me in tears. I hate being exhausted. And I was hoping it would allow my body a chance to rally its defenses. We shall see!

Rain in Seattle. Not much of a surprise! What does get me is how many folks don't take the time to consider their fellow pedestrians.

Since it does rain here a bit, most buildings have awnings that hang over the sidewalks at least partially. So why do folks carrying umbrellas feel it is their right to walk or stand beneath the overhang with their bumbershoots open, occasionally giving the local folks no choice but to dash about outside that little bit of cover?

For you know one of the hallmarks of a Seattle-ite is that they do not carry umbrellas. Therefore, anyone who has one must be from someplace else!

Worse still are the ones who hold their raingear before them like a weapon, not looking where they are going and it seems to me that these folks are often at a height where the tips of the umbrella are at MY eye's level.

And at the very high end are those who walk in oblivious pairs, wielding two of these weapons and practically daring anyone to step between them!

You know, this is why they are holding raingear, to keep off the rain. Why do they feel that in addition to the umbrella they need that wisp of an overhang too? Gah!

And that, my friends, is a rant typed in Dvorak. Touch typed, even! Give me a few more days and I will be sailing right along!

If you are interested in learning this, get free typing lessons for a Dvorak keyboard here!

The keyboard is done. Now I need to get used to it. In a way it's like learning a new language. I find myself translating as I type. Years of touch typing to undo...but so far, not as painful as I fretted over. Indeed, in many ways it is a lot easier. The keys are set into logical patterns and I am already touch typing just very slowly.

The LAN guy had never heard of Dvorak before. Luckily, I had printed out the instructions on how to make changes to the registry so he followed them and all is well. Whew!

I do wonder why they had to change the placement of the punctuation, but the keys all seem to flow. I like having the period where the E key used to be. It's a simple but elegant placement. Even if I do tend to look down when reaching for it!

Iron Steph graciously added comments for us Netscape users. Now I can make my little observations like the non-Netscapers! Bwahahahaha! Wow! Typing Bwahahaha is VERY satisfying on this keyboard. I wonder if Mr. Dvorak used that phrase a lot himself?

I'm going to try switching to the Dvorak keyboard. My right wrist is often painful and now my arm and half my hand falls asleep or goes numb when I type.

The LAN guy needs to come to the office though to stick in the NT CD so that I can change configurations on my keyboard.

And then I need to go home tonight and switch there.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes me to return to gusts of up to 90 WPM!

Bwahahahaha! I'm so glad the M&M's registered; that allowed me to do my shopping early ;-)

I love looking at the things people register for. Last summer, Liz's niece got married and we were puzzled over her registry since at three different stores, she had registered for towels -- all in different patterns and none of which went together. Of course, that's what my linen closet looks like right now, but when you're registering, like Melissa said, it's to wish for things that match.

And of course right now, I'm going, "Hmm...gee, that would match my dining room too." It's the second best thing to being in a stationery store, to be in a linen shop. Betcha thought I was going to say shoes!

Broos sent me a joke email the other day which I thought about last night as Rob and I settled in to watch Antiques Roadshow. I'm straining to hear the commentator and Rob wanted to continue discussing the previous item -- which I had mentioned to Mr. B. was the one thing off "the list" that Rob does and I don't -- talk during the TV program rather than wait for a commercial. There's a disadvantage to the Roadshow in that they haven't got commercials, but Rob can usually express his contempt in brief observations.

A woman brought a silver tea set, handed down to the women named Margaret in her family. She had been told it was made by Paul Revere (which of course had Rob snorting and mimicking a previous, misinformed Roadshow participant: "George Washington ate from this bowl!"). Unlike the fake George Washington bowl person, Margaret researched her set and discovered who had really made the pieces. The Roadshow analyst, a Brit, confirmed her information and said, "This set is, like most American silver of this period, just average." Rob howled, "Oh, for Pete's sake...you lost the war; why can't you get over it?" Hehehe :)

I fear that my journal upkeep has been pretty spotty. I need to put up archives for January...and December. My apologies! Between checking for a dangblasted updated patch for The Sims and working on my new Greece, I forget to do this. I'll put it on my to do list.

The Lord of the Rings improves with age. Saturday was my third viewing and I find I enjoyed it even more than the previous two times.

The last time I saw a movie in a theater more than once was, I believe, Disney's Aladdin, because the boys wanted to go. I rarely encounter a movie that I want to pay to see over and over.

Thanks to our trip to the theaters, LotR is at number seven on the top ten; the prior week, it was eighth.

And I must admit, part of the pleasure of watching the film came from reading those silly "Very Secret Diaries." At certain crucial moments, I found myself thinking, "Uh oh...Sam will kill you if you try that!" hehehe!

The thing with the movie isn't that it's faithful to the book. It's faithful to an essence of the story. I could nitpick over thousands of little things, yet I love this movie because it loves its source. It's respectful of the nuances that rabid Tolkien fans expect while managing to create a tale that can be followed by those unfamiliar with the book.

Rob likes it because in the early scenes of Hobbiton, a flock of sheep grazes beside the road.

In two weeks, I'll be 40. I plan to treat myself to a day at a spa, getting my eyebrows ripped out, my back pounded by merciless Swedes and my toenails sandblasted. I will probably need a day off to recover from all that.