60 Beautiful Minimalist Desktop Wallpapers

I love good minimalism in design, and I love just about every one of these wallpapers. I’m using Elegance right now, and it is making me very happy.

Simon Pegg on Fast Zombies

Have I linked this before? I feel like I have, but I can’t find it in the archives. Anyway, I also prefer the slow zombies. I find the idea of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of zombie casualties more terrifying than being chased down by one particularly agile one.

In other news, I went and got myself employed with a real job this week. I haven’t quite decided how I feel about that yet.

I’m fiddling with some stuff tonight, so I apologize if your Reader or Twitter is flooded with bad things. I tried to turn everything off, but you never know.

Oh hello there! In lieu of actual written content, this week we have photos! Well, a photo. I would write more, but I’ve been very busy visiting with friends and writing proposals and sitting around my apartment being intensely worried about things like my future, people hating me, and whether I accidentally plucked one eyebrow to be higher than the other. (I think I did. I constantly look like I’m gently mocking, which upon reflection is really truth in advertising.)

Okay, so as most of you know I’ve been trying to cook lately. I made corn chowder, and kind of semi-delicious brownies, and lasagne. This weekend I am going to make pulled pork. And something I have learned is that when cooking, one frequently uses the stove and oven. That’s right, you can tell your friends you read it here: ovens are useful when cooking.

Now, I am not known for being super nimble with the household appliances, but this is what I see when I look at my oven controls:

Because you are a reasonable person the first thought you had was likely: “Man, Jessica cannot focus a photo properly,” to which my answer will be, “Shut your pie hole, reader! God!” The second thing you might notice is that my oven settings are particularly inscrutable. I need a Rosetta Stone to figure out how to broil. Here is what I think, going in clockwise order from the top:

1. This is obviously the oven light control. I think.

2. I use this setting to cook things because it kind of looks like something in an oven.

3. This looks like an oven with nothing in it, so it is the setting to use if you want to accidentally leave the oven on all day while you go to work.

4. Minimalist setting! (I’m thinking broil?)

5. It looks like a mouse pointer clicking a splat. Maybe this is the setting to use regular expressions?

6. Set up the oven as a booby trap! With a falling pointy ceiling!

7. Set up the oven as an even more horrible booby trap — double pointy ceilings!

8. The “Fat Man” of oven settings: a falling pointy ceiling that sets off a nuclear explosion.

So, in essence, I’m pretty sure almost half of my oven settings are trying to kill me. This might explain a lot about my cooking.

I’ve been writing a lot lately. Not here, clearly (ha! ha ha ha!) but elsewhere on the Internets I have been throwing words around quite a bit. In fact, if we count from last Friday until this .. word.. right.. NOW — I have just over 3000 words in articles and blogs, 36 posts on my web community’s forum, and 1,192 lines of IM chat. And that’s not even counting private messages, cover letters (one of which I should be working on right now!), emails, and other forums.

It’s not, like, the wordpocalypse or anything, but suffice to say I have had a lot of opportunity lately to write and to ponder said writing, which brings us to today’s post topic. (Before I give the impression that I am busy or professional or whatever, it should be noted that I also spent 20 minutes this morning trying to drink my coffee without touching the mug with my hands.)

Jessica’s Writing Quirks

• Capitalization. I usually don’t capitalize “God” unless I’m writing for a very formal audience or referring academically to the Christian God. I realize it’s a little petulant, but I don’t believe in a god so he doesn’t get a capital. Also, my Mom and Dad get capitals, whereas everyone else’s moms and dads are in lower case. Sorry, everyone else’s parents. For what it’s worth, I still believe you exist.
• Sassmouthing. Speaking of god, I am always unsure how offensive “taking the Lord’s name in vain” is nowadays. Again, this isn’t an issue with a formal audience, but I frequently find myself wibbling over religious slang in more casual environments. I actually don’t swear that much in person unless I’m pretty upset but I am big on abusing Christian tropes. I just like the way they sound, honestly. I’m all “Goddammit” this and “Jesus” that and cursing people to eternal damnation in the fiery pits of hell. Perhaps I am just being too polite and Canadian, but this issue frequently gives me pause.
• Commas. I have written about commas before, and my campaign to bring serial commas to the world continues apace. However, lately I have come to realize that I use many more commas than necessary, and even worse I am developing an ugly comma splice habit. Look, this bullet point has three sentences so far and FOUR commas. It’s a comma infestation! I think part of the problem is that I talk with a lot of awkward pauses, mostly so I can wave my hands about in an agitated fashion, and so I throw in too many incorrect commas as part of “my voice” in writing.
• Spelling. I am actually blessed with pretty accurate spelling right out of my brain. I do spellcheck everything before it gets published, of course, but it’s more to catch typos than misspellings. There are two exceptions though: “weird” and “strength”. They are my spelling kryptonite. I managed years ago to teach myself mnemonics for the incorrect way to spell weird, and it just screwed me all up. And strength.. I get caught in a vortex of nggngnngnggn. So, in my writing, anything weird is strange, and anything with strength is just strong.
• Point of view. So okay, I set out a few months ago to start writing articles for content mills, yes? “How tough can this be?” I asked myself. “I can write 1000 words before breakfast for one of my blogs.. 500 word articles are easycakes.” In theory this is true, but the one thing I didn’t consider is that in my personal writings I am kind of always present. I think I am just fascinating, clearly, so sitting down to write 500 words that don’t involve me in any way was trickier than anticipated. And not abusing “you” is strange (NOT weird) too! I suppose in most of my hobby writing both YOU, the dear reader, and ME, the author, are pretty major characters, and without us I have a hard time knowing what to do with myself.
• I suck at final paragraphs.

That all being said, I wrote an article this week that I am actually kind of pleased with: Nerdcore and MC Frontalot Make Sweet Geek Music. It was my first article on a topic that I didn’t know intimately before sitting down at the keyboard. I actually did research! I feel like I managed to inject a hint of myself into the article without making it about me. Also, I like this sentence: “Nerdcore is a designation more indicative of lyrical content than musical composition.” It sounds all fancy-pants.

Anyway, enough dithering. Jessica write real good sometimes, and real we– strange other times. She is trying to write here on this blog at least once a week now. I’m sorry. Um, so.. yeah. The End!!

PS: I just realized that I forgot to say Happy Birthday to my sister earlier this week because I am, as the French would say, “a bad, bad, bad, BAD big sister, omg so very bad”. So Happy Birthday, Sallypants. I hope you had a nice day.

I don’t care. I don’t care what you believe.
As long as you are in my heart, you’re just as real as me.
Maybe.. maybe even more. Someone who’s touched so many lives,
Can never never die.
- “This Is Not The End”, The Bravery

I remember a Christmas — I think it was the last one, or maybe the second to last — and I got Mom a laptop. I was kind of flush with cash that year, and I wanted to get her something really nice and useful. Her eyesight was going, partially just due to the passing of time, and partially due to the diabetes, and I wanted her to be able to sit on the couch and watch DVDs and surf her lefty blogs with ease.

I felt pretty clever about it. I wrapped only the battery and put it under the tree. When she unwrapped it, she was completely confused, and I feigned incompetence. “Oh, shoot. I forgot the rest of the present! I think that goes… with THIS.” I pulled out the laptop and handed it to her.

She started to cry. I kind of knew she would. I think she was always amazed that someone would do something nice, would be inspired to be generous to silly old her. That was Mom for you. I began to cry seeing her cry. It was remarkably silly, and sweet. We hugged.

She passed away three years ago this weekend. I find it kind of clinically interesting.. I know something in me changed forever when she died. Not, like, mortally, but I see families and death and my life just slightly different because of it all. I’m under no illusion that I’m the only one. The vast majority of people will lose a parent during their lifetime, and the majority of those people will have loved their parent dearly. (And that’s not even touching upon losing a spouse or child.) So we’re a world of slightly broken adults. It’s just part of the gig of being human.

In truth, while her memory propels this vodka-fueled weekend (and vodka-fueled post, honestly), I have kind of expanded this Deathaversary ritual to include all the fucked up shit that I don’t have time to mourn in my day to day life.

This weekend is the time for me to drink and cry for the dumb wrong horrible world. For the people who are lost, or scared. For people who feel alone, who need help, who miss someone. For 55-year-old loving, wonderful, good women who drop dead on their living room floor.

The world is so fucking unfair sometimes. I’m sorry I can’t make it better. But, tonight at least, fix yourself another drink and I’ll put on some more sad songs.

So I have to preface any recipes with assurances that I don’t cook. I microwave perogies and buy whole roasted chickens, which is more sort of getting food hot than any actual cooking. Lately, however, I have been struck by an urge for new creative pastimes, and true cooking definitely falls into that category. I perused recipe sites, pondered the cold, rainy weather, and decided to embark upon an epic quest for .. corn chowder!

Start Here
As usual, the critical first step is to write up a detailed shopping list and then leave it at home. This “recipe” also doesn’t have any measurements, because measuring is how The Man wants you to cook. This being a corn chowder of The People, I just kind of made it up as I went along. I ended up with enough for several meals, which was perfect.

Cooking!

1. Get a pot that is appropriately sized for the quantity of food you want. My pot was really big.
2. If you have a gas stove, speak encouragingly to it. I usually tell my stove that, yes, the whole gas thing makes me antsy, but I won’t blow up on it if it won’t blow up on me. Also, your stove may have something called a “wok burner” which heats up really really hot really really fast. This, as it turns out, is suboptimal for slow-cooking so avoid it.
3. Chop up a couple of onions and a few cloves of garlic in big chunky pieces.
4. Chop up a bunch of carrots in smaller pieces. I used baby carrots, because I dislike peeling. (Did you know baby carrots are just regular carrots that have been peeled a lot? They are not, in fact, cute tiny carrots. I lost a little faith in my groceries when I learned that.)
5. Cut up some bacon in spoon-sized pieces. Mmm, bacon. Cut up some chicken in spoon-sized pieces. I got skin-ful chicken breasts, but I am a heathen who likes animal fat.
6. Heat up your pot with a tiny bit of oil. You want it to be quite hot, but not “wok burner” hot or everything will char too quickly and you will make a squinchy face at the smell.
7. Add your meats. Let it brown.
8. Add your chopped veggies. Cackle a bit like a carnivore and rub your hands together as the onion sizzles deliciously in bacon fat.
9. Add spices. I almost went with a mellow, sagey flavor (note: I love sage and will put it on everything), but decided at the last minute to go with Southwestern pizazz. That means cumin and cayanne pepper, along with salt and pepper.
10. Stare at the jar of paprika quizzically. Try and think of anything you’ve had that tastes “paprika-flavored”. Recall that the anime movie Paprika had a ominous parade of mind-controlling toys, which could be a bad sign. Go ahead and throw some in anyway.. it’s a pretty color, if nothing else.
11. Once everything is at least mostly cooked, turn down the heat. Add in milk, cream, creamed corn, cream of mushroom soup, and cream of celery soup. (You could have just added in cut celery, but you are lazy. So very, very lazy.)
12. Mix it all up, then dump in a mess of frozen sweet corn and another mess of frozen cubed hash brown potatoes.
13. Put in two bay leaves. Who knows what they do, but you saw it on Top Chef once.
14. Start the “too much starch needs more water, oh no there’s too much water add more starch” dance. Continue this on and off for the next hour while the chowder simmers.

Serving!

1. Has it been an hour yet? How about now? No? How about now? Oh man, that smells good.
2. Yay, it’s been an hour! Turn off the gas stove, and thank it for not blowing you up.
3. Serve with a ladle into a hearty-sized bowl. Top with a spoonful of sour cream and a couple of crunchy tortilla chips.
4. Nom.

Okay so let’s just put this on the table now: I watched Twilight: New Moon for the second time tonight. (The first time was a copy I liberated from the Internet when it came out.)

Somewhat in my defense I have a long history of watching or reading things simply to stay up on my popular culture. I dislike the entire Harry Potter franchise, but I have still read all the books and seen most of the movies. I even watched an episode of Friends once! It was kind of horrifying, but I felt the siren song of Jennifer Aniston’s hair.

There is certainly an element of “so bad it’s good” in the Twilight movies. They are poorly written, for the most part poorly acted, and oddly cast. None of the characters seem to know when someone is talking to them because they are all so damned reluctant to make eye contact at any point. (“Look at the floor! Look above his head. Look right! Bite your lip! Now look at the floor again!”) The first movie ended with a vampire prom (oh prom, is there anything you can’t fix?), and the second one had a marriage proposal cliff hanger. Yes, in a movie filled with vampires, werewolves, and soaring Italian vistas, the hook for the next flick was sodding Edward Cullen emotionlessly proposing. What will Bella do. WHAT WILL SHE DO. Sigh.

But the thing that I find most strangely compelling about the Twilight series is that there’s no joy in them at all. In a movie about love and the supernatural, everyone is so boring all the time. The cinematography is muted, the music is plodding, the characters all look drab. Social gatherings always end in clinical tragedy, good times interrupted by someone getting eaten or whatever. There are moments of solemn isolation that wouldn’t be out of place in a David Lynch movie (think the first half of Lost Highway) and seem so damn weird in a teen drama.

And ugh, those vampire protagonists. I think the Cullens are supposed to be timelessly beautiful, and in the book at least Bella is in awe of their grace and style, but every time I see one on the screen I just want to give them some undereye concealer and an application for What Not To Wear. Seriously, they are killing me with the v-neck sweaters and cardigans and sensible slacks. You’re legendary immortal bloodsucking creatures — have some panache! And I’m particularly confused why no one ever acknowledges that the little wiener Cullen brother is clearly wearing Hannah Montana’s wig.

None of the vampires appear to have any interests or thoughts.. about anything. I get the feeling they spend all their time sitting very still trying not to kill any humans, or at the most browsing the Eddie Bauer site for a sensible spring wardrobe. And I realize I am old and thinking far too practically about this, but what do Edward and Bella talk about on the drive to school every morning? (I noted also that Bella is now unable to operate her own motor vehicle when a boy is around. Perhaps she is too overcome with love to stay in her lane.) History? Literature? American Idol?

I actually like Kristen Stewart’s Bella. For lack of a better word, I find her to be.. quirky. She mumbles, twitches, and has no self-esteem. She wears ill-fitting men’s clothing and mostly just kind of blankly stares at people a lot. She seems like the kind of girl I would have hung out with in the art room in high school. Too bad about the overbearing boyfriend bit.

I mean listen, I have a weakness for crappy entertainment, but the plodding sensible joylessness of the Twilight series is just too much. Perhaps it’s because of the books’ Mormon underpinnings — Joseph Smith was srs business, yo — but I want to pluck Bella out of her Pacific Northwest setting and send her down to Bon Temps (from True Blood) for a long weekend. Now there are some vampires who know how to have fun.

I am totally not watching New Moon a third time, I can tell you that much. Yeah!

PS: Speaking of True Blood, I have developed a fictional character crush on Jason Stackhouse, god help me. Poor Jason Stackhouse. He is so dumb. So very, very dumb.. but at least he knows how to have a good time.

PPS: I went to Vegas with a whole mess of friends and shot a SHOTGUN at a ZOMBIE and wore a shirt that said “I’m blogging this.” which I was, honestly, but I just haven’t sorted the post out in my brain yet and this Twilight rant begged to be written. I blame booze. In general.

So I often purport to be some kind of a gamer. Maybe not an uber-gamer who is gettin’ off headshots and topping charts, but I am a person who plays a number of (video) games, and enjoys discussing said games. So it is with great trepidation that I publicly share with you, dear reader, my horrible gamer secret:

I don’t finish games.

I’ll give you a moment to ponder that. You know the big end of games, when you get a nice chunk of plot and a little sense of satisfaction for seeing it through? Nope. Not me. In fact, I can think of two games that I have finished in recent memory, and one of them is a “casual” PopCap title. (Plants vs. Zombies, to be precise.) The other game is Portal, which is widely considered to be both very good and very short.

This means that just in the last year I have managed to play and yet NOT finish Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Borderlands, Mass Effect, Zuma’s Revenge, and Torchlight. I enjoyed all those games! A few of them even consumed all my spare time for weeks, and then something happened, I wandered away from the computer for a bit, and I’ve never loaded the game up again. So what is it? Why am I incapable of finishing games?

I Like to Watch
I am one of the (apparently few) people who genuinely enjoy watching someone play a game. I’m not an entirely passive viewer, but more of a navigator, like the dude in the passenger seat during a rally race. I mentally keep track of quests, look up walkthroughs and spoilers (but withhold the information until requested!), help with directions, give opinions. I also like seeing the plot advance, and admire other people’s elegant gameplay.

Being a constant gameplay companion gives me a good 75% of the satisfaction I would get if I completed the game myself. Did I actually finish Parasite Eve or San Andreas? No, but I was the dude with the map, guiding the person at the controls when there was a sharp turn coming up.

I Don’t Like to Die
In games, dying happens a lot. It’s a constant in almost every game ever made, and the foundation of the worshiped save/load game features. Unfortunately, I generally hate to die. Sometimes I love my RPG character too much and feel bad about getting her killed, while other times the game just seems to be mocking me.

The exception to this rule is World of Warcraft. For some reason while dying all by myself makes me feel like a loser, leading 24 other people to their imminent demise is just good clean fun.

The Medium is the Fun Bit
I think at the end of the day I enjoy learning HOW to play a game just as much as playing it successfully. (Thus far I’ve spent more time reading up on Mass Effect gameplay than actually playing.) Show me a game that has its own jargon, an indecipherable UI, and a bit of strategy, and I will show you a happy Jessica. Once I’ve mastered the how and why of a game, though, and my interest tends to wane quickly. Blah blah more of the same and then there’s probably a boss fight and you probably save the world. I could do that, or I could continue to research optimal builds! And god help me if a game has its own wiki. Seriously.

I prefer to call this “interested in systems” rather than “has terrifyingly short attention span”, and I’d appreciate it if you would as well.

You would think I would have learned something of a lesson — or at least become more self-aware — after writing this post lamenting my inability to finish a game. In actual fact, the whole reason I took the time to write is because Mass Effect 2 is downloading in the background as I type. I put a huge 10 hours or so in on ME classic, but now I want shiny graphics and updated interfaces, and new stat weight systems to pour over. I’m totally going to finish this one though. For real! I mean it.

Google has worked really hard over the last week to fix their original privacy implementation, and in my opinion it’s much improved now. There are still issues, but it’s less scary than it was, particularly for new users.

My new Buzz issue is how to find new people to follow, and of course how new people will find and follow me. I mean, I have my dozen or so friends and family reading my buzzez, but how do I move beyond that? Are there people buzzing about the Vancouver Olympics right now? Can I find them?

I understand that Twitter has critical user mass, but it was pretty invaluable for this Olympics junkie all weekend. Event updates, opinion pieces — I was even easily able to find a few fellow Vancouverites and follow them for news from around the city. Perhaps I can do that in Google Buzz too, but it wasn’t immediately evident to me how so I just stuck with the tried and true option.

It’s unfortunate, because I adore the content-sharing features of Buzz. Being able to post simple links with a few lines of commentary and a photo (possibly right out of Reader) has revitalized my internet reading habits. So anyway, until I figure out the sharing and self-promotion aspects of Buzz, I’m going to do a weekly digest of my links here:

Sneak Peek of the Opening Ceremony Fireworks
I missed these (I’m on the wrong side of the city), but they look spectacular.

Google Buzz Surpasses 9 Million Comments
And they all said, “What the hell is this crap in my Gmail?”

Vancouver 2010 Vectorial Elevation
Vectorial Elevation is apparently another way of saying “pretty lights”. Anyway, these photos are beautiful.

How to Store and Organize Cats
Such a tidy cat storage unit.

Hello Kitty Pinhead Tattoo
Oh yeah, this was a good idea.

—————————————————————–

Vancouver is a wild party right now, with lots to see and do. I have already written a ton on the Twitter about the Olympics, and the first round of photos from this weekend are up. A few will appear below, but there’s more to come over the next 13 days!

	Granville Street is one big party.

I love Google. I really do. My quality of life would be so much more poor without them and their awesome Internet tools. I use Gmail and Reader and Docs and Picasa and News every day of my life, pretty much, not to mention, you know, internet searches. And I love Social Media! Sometimes we fight, but at the end of the day I’m actually quite fond of Twitter and Digg and other similar sites. I hate Facebook, sure, but I still appreciate the fact that it exists.

So in theory, I should be over the moon at the release of Google Buzz, the new Google-driven Social Media tool.

In practice… it’s not bad. It’s hard to tell how the service is going to shape up over time, but the immediate integration with almost all my other Google applications is really powerful. The interface is kind of ishy, particularly for comments, and at the end of the day it all pretty strongly resembles FriendFeed. The key at this point, I suspect, is hitting a critical mass of users. If anyone can do it, Google can.

Anyway, my pros and cons of Google Buzz after using it for a day:

CONS

1. Every time someone that I am following posts or comments, I get both a Google Buzz notification and a new email about it. This double notification will, over time, make me insane.
2. The comments interface is ugly. Google seems to want to emphasize interactivity with buzzes, but the comments are unthreaded and by design just seem to be piled haphazardly into a big white space.
3. Google is notorious for locking their tools away in a box where the rest of the internet can’t get to them, and I’m afraid I see that happening with Buzz. I think it’s great that you can connect other non-Google accounts such as Twitter right away, but the lack of RSS feeds makes me nervous. Without them, my Buzz is a lot less interesting and useful.
4. This is the big one: Google Profile Issues. On Facebook, I am “friends” with close friends, immediate family, remote family, ex-colleagues, my old high school class, and so on. The result of this huge social network is that I NEVER post anything to Facebook. What could I possibly put in my status that would appeal to such a diverse group? I get flustered just thinking about it.Buzz is tied to one’s email account. I use my email account for chatting with friends, sending resumes, catching up with family, and as a way to store information (train tickets, online purchase receipts, bills, etc). There are a lot of “personnas” embodied in one email address, and that works perfectly for email. Attach a social networking component, however, and these personnas get jumbled together. Should I aim my Google Profile and associated Buzz at potential employers, or my best friends? Ahhhh!

PROS

1. Buzz is integrated into Gmail. I love this so much, because I am on Gmail almost constantly. More importantly, almost everyone I know has a Gmail account so there’s a pretty huge pool of potential Buzz users, even right from the first minute it came online.
2. The mobile features are really neat, combining the status posting of Twitter with the location awareness of FourSquare, all in a delicious Google shell.
3. Buzz, as opposed to Twitter, is much better designed for sharing links. Way back in the day the first few generations of weblogs focused on sharing links to cool things found elsewhere on the Internet. That emphasis on content has fallen by the wayside a bit with Twitter and Tumblr and modern weblogs (mine included!). Buzz has some really nice link- and content-sharing features which brings that back into the forefront. No tiny URLs, lots of room to comment, and easy image sharing makes for the best social link-sharing platform that I’ve seen in a long time.

I’m still not sure what role Buzz will take in the long run for most people. If it were anyone but Google I would probably be predicting its slow demise, but rolling it out to millions of Gmail users could just be the hook it neesd to thrive in an increasingly packed Social Media scene.

Hello! Two things:

1) I got another article posted! I was paid .05 per word to write a first person account of some of the Olympic changes in Vancouver. My article is titled “Vancouver Waterfront Security Looks Good for 2010 Winter Olympics“, but could be otherwise known as “Things I Can See From My Window”. Note I included an incredibly amateur photograph taken from my deck, which they chose to publish. Dammit, Jim, I’m .. kind of a writer, not a digital imagery photo dude.

2) Here is a neat link (I know! A link! Go fig!): Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time. Over New Year’s Eve a friend mentioned that we are actually living in the dystopian future that we’ve all been worrying about. It seemed pretty profound at the time, although perhaps the copious amount of free blue booze I had been drinking contributed to that impression. However, upon sober reflection, I think there might be something to it. I’m framing a big essay-ish post about this all which I will likely never finish, but in the meantime here’s a little research. I’ve seen 32 of these movies. How about you?

Reasons I am stressing out:

• The only job on Craigslist all weekend was for a ‘native speaker of Albanian’.
• Bills, bills, bills.
• Approximately 80% of my food consumption for the past few days has been Corn Pops. Not, I should hasten to add, because of any horrible financial restrictions, but more because Corn Pops are delicious. I wish I was eating them right now. I’m high on sugar like an 8 year old at their first birthday party. (I only remember my first neighborhood birthday party because I came home and immediately barfed up vivid orange sherbet everywhere.)
• My little hobby group and social scene has been all pear-shaped lately.
• In a month I’m shepherding a group of about 17 people around Las Vegas for 3 nights. It’s going to be fun, but for now I need reservations, phone lists, plans, names, and pair of comfy shoes.
• I dropped my iPhone. It slid off my lap onto a hard surface. While it still works, the front cover is all cracked and chipped and oooooooooh I am so sad now. I loved my iPhone like it was the chatty, slightly bloated child I never had.

Good things about today:

• I am wearing very comfortable pants.
• There are Olympic Things going on! I can see a new security checkpoint for the convention center from my window. All traffic gets stopped in the road and then has to go through some temporary tents where they’re checked for bombs or weapons or alien DNA or something. I feel a bit like James Stewart in Rear Window, except instead of a broken leg I just have bedhair and it’s kind of cold outside.