My Casual Insanity: Update of the Miscellaneous Type

Hello good people in www land. I wanted to send out a quick update on some stuff that has been going on.

I've only told a few people so far, but I think it has been long enough that I can start to share. I finally quit smoking again! And this is not some half-assed attempt, it's been over 2 weeks already, and I've been feeling pretty good so far, no real cravings at all. I also have taken a hiatus from my good friend and sturdy companion, alcohol for that same time, which has been surprisingly easy as well. I was going to start drinking again after I got through this conference I had to work at for work, but now that I'm past that, I am actually thinking about staying away from the sauce for a little while longer. The past year or so I had been kind of reckless with my drinking, Not that I was getting plastered every weekend or trying to relive my college glory years, there were just some really bad nights, and even worse mornings where I would wake up and think, "what the fuck did I do last night?" I had a couple of nights where I blacked out, and that had never happened even in my glory days.

But fear not my friends. I will come back to the good juice, just hopefully with a little more perspective and wisdom.

The other lifestyle change I made with the new nonsmoking moniker is my diet. I'm back to cooking a lot more, and cutting out preservatives and all that horrible shit they put into processed foods to make it "taste better" and survive a mustard gas attack. (I've been doing some reading on MSG and aspartame, and I'll write on that in a little while)

My last post was a little rant about the wasting of time, and that day was a bad one. I ended up spending 11 hours at that meeting on Sunday, and did a grand total of maybe 2 hours of work. Monday was similar, 14 hours at the meeting, and probably 6 hours of work, a better proportion, but still a whole lot of wasted time.

I had kind of a redeeming day of meetings today. A couple of bad ones, but some good ones, and one really good one. A small group of us spent an hour and had a very productive discussion. I actually left feeling like I learned something. There may be some hope for this job yet...

Last thing I wanted to talk about is the Weather Chanel web page. I was checking the weather for the week the other day, and they had a video on there talking about the arrival of the Aurora Borealis being a sign that Spring is coming in the US. I've always been fascinated with the Aurora Borealis and it is a life goal to experience them in person. Here's a pretty cool video that shows what causes them, and it has some pretty good video of them as well.

I also stumbled on a pretty cool picture that I felt like sharing that shows the earth at night from space. It is a composite picture since the entire earth is not experiencing nighttime at once, but it is pretty cool and scary.

And the last thing abut the weather is a little bit of a rant about DC weather the past couple of weeks. We had better weather, and it is getting warmer, but damn it if the weekends have been kind of shitty, and Monday's have been awesome. And this weekend is no different...