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Make your own Motivator/Demotivator here.

(Oh, btw, I’m definitely going to buy my ticket to Stockholm this weekend. [Wheee!] In preparation, and to get a bit of practice in, I’ve switched my Gmail language preference to Swedish — which was possibly not the brightest idea, because now I’m floundering a bit. “Svara” means “send,” and “Papperskorgen” is easy to remember b/c it’s so close to the German; “Vidarebefordra” can be parsed fairly quickly. I just tend to panic a smidge when faced with some of the bigger words, lest I inadvertently mark a friend as a spammer and block them forever, or accidentally delete my entire account.)

It turns out that, even with taking DragonCon Friday off (must remember to put in my time-off request, btw), I’ll end up with 15 vacation days by the end of this year. You can only roll 12 over to the next year, so it’s a matter or use them or lose them. (This happened to me once before, when I had to burn off quite a bit of time toward the end of December but left it so late that I couldn’t make plans, and wound up doing my usual thing, which is faffing about on the computer. If I’ve got to use the days, I’d rather go somewhere interesting.)

Iceland is apparently too expensive: flights alone seem to start around $800. Tickets to Seattle or Portland, OR, seem to be somewhat more reasonable — about $580. Reasonable, that is, until you realize that Lufthansa has a flight to Sweden for only $100 more. Destination Stockholm lists hotels that are not actually all that outrageous — most comfortably under US$100 a night, and they don’t charge more for single occupancy — and includes a pass card for free admission to gobs of museums and free public transit. HappyCow lists no fewer than 14 vegan-friendly restaurants in Stockholm; though I discovered in Quebec City that their listings are not always totally up to date, at least they’re a good indication of how vegan-friendly a city is likely to be, by the sheer number (or lack thereof) of listings.

I might have completely lost my mind, but I’m seriously thinking about doing this. I know a grand total of two people who’ve been to Sweden, but they both were highly complimentary about it; my own personal exposure to anything Swedish is, admittedly, limited to Ikea and to the Ingmar Bergman film class I took at university, but what the hell. The language is almost close enough to German (which I studied, and can kind of still use in a really mortifyingly limited way) that, with a little prep work, I could probably get by without hugely embarrassing myself too frequently. It would mean that I’d have to charge either the trip or the MacBook, not being able to accumulate enough cash reserves to do both, but . . . I’m kind of thinking it would be worth it.

Oh, and did I mention my tentative, crazy, “seemed like a good idea at 4:30 in the morning” plan is to travel over Thanksgiving? Yes, late November in Scandanavia: apparently the average temperatures then will be 1 to 5 deg C (roughly 33 to 41 deg F). And it would get dark really early. It sounds like my idea of heaven. Seriously: I’m getting giddy just thinking about it. I can wear a coat! An actual winter coat! And feel really sophisticated and worldly because I’m out gadding about after dark, even if dusk comes at 4:00 in the afternoon. (Hey, it still counts.)

Still haven’t quite worked up the nerve to book reservations yet. I’m going to give myself a couple of days to think, but my goal is to make a decision — and booking, if applicable — by the end of the week.

I completely fail to see the appeal of a sales tax holiday. I mean, yes, you save a bit of money — though the funding for government programs has to come from somewhere, and if it’s not coming from sales then they’ll get it some other way that may be less voluntary — but you also have to deal with ungodly numbers of people all trying to save 4% on their stupid purchases. (Yes, it’s four freakin’ percent.) To me, it’s worth it to pay that much and more, just to avoid having to deal with the infuriating crowds. For it to be worth the mobs and all their attendant hassles and rudeness, you’d have to be talking in the neighborhood of at least 50%.

Of course, in my foolish disregard for tax holidays, I’d arranged to meet Sarah at the Macintosh store at Lenox, so I could scope out the sexy little MacBooks — in black, of course.* The fact that I was still roaming the outer limits of the parking lot in search of a space while she had been standing in line to get into the bloody store for ages convinced us that we should just forget it and go straight to the bookstore instead. (We’re going back after work sometime next week. It’s so much better shopping for gadgets with friends; I certainly feel more comfortable poking and prodding if I’m not left alone with a possibly scary, commission-fed salesperson.) Inexplicably, the bookstore was not horribly crowded: not deserted, but not packed to the gills, either. (Where are people’s priorities?) Not that the book store trip was entirely successful — I’d mainly wanted a sort of advanced-beginner photography manual, one that assumes you’re familiar with the basics of actually working a camera but lays out various artistic approaches and techniques and helps you practice so your shots are less prosaic. Meh. At least Sarah managed to find some good manga.

I could just join a photography group around here, but I’m intimidated by the gearheads and serious photography people who know and/or care about F stops. I just want ideas and practice for better framing. I don’t want numbers or too much fiddling around with dials.

Weird moment for the week: While taking Nigel out for an afternoon airing, I ran into a brand-spanking-new neighbor moving in — who, as we were introducing ourselves, squinted at me in that now-familiar way and said, “Are you from Statesboro?” (Strictly speaking, I’m not, but I was stranded there for several, um, interesting years duing my adolescence.) She turns out to be at least the second person I’ve run into randomly who remembers me from middle school, though she hasn’t seen me in the intervening 20 years. Good freakin’ lord. Am I that sore-thumb-sticking-out weird, or is it that my own personal memory is so poor that can barely remember the names of my teachers and medium-close friends from middle school, let alone people who were in other grades?

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*My plan, once I’ve saved up another few hundred dollars, is to order a refurbished black MacBook, or possibly a Vaio notebook, so it’ll be easier to get online when I’m traveling.** I’m severely torn: the Macs are just sexy and very cool, but the Vaio model I was looking at, but which seems to have disappeared now that I’m trying to find it again, came with an integrated fingerprint reader. How cool is that? Completely unnecessary for my purposes and anything I’m ever likely to do, but it’s just so ridiculously cool. (An iris scanner would be even geekier, but it would have to be able to cope with the fact that my glasses get smudged by the slightest movement of air molecules.)

**Of course, purchasing the notebook would delay any recreational travel for a while, because there’s only so much cash lying around, but despite my near-constant urge to run off to Sweden or Vancouver for a week or two, I think I can deal with it. Having a new gadget is a wonderful distraction, and I’d have the knowledge that my future travels would be that much more fun. Anyway, I still need to check my accumulated vacation days, to make sure I’ll have enough to go to the CSE meeting in May. (Austin is not nearly as exciting as Iceland would be, but a professional convention does recompense a lot.)

• Dog destroys £40,000 Elvis teddy (BBC News)
  Okay, what kind of idiot leaves a dog to guard stuffed animals? Of course the teddies are toast. How was he supposed to tell the difference between priceless artifact and ratty soft toy?
  (tags: dog museum toys)

What is it about the Virginia/Poncey Highlands area that makes it so vulnerable to outages of all sorts? Are we situated on some sort of weird ley line that periodically sucks up all the utilities? (It’s probably just the fact that it’s an older part of town and the infrastructure is likely not as fancy-schmancy [sorry; technical jargon there] as in the areas with a lot of new growth, but that’s less fun for speculation.)

Between about 5:30 and 9:15 this evening, we were honored with about ten minutes of total electrical power. Maybe ten minutes. It got up to 84 deg F (about 28 deg C) in my flat, which is actually hotter than my ForecastFox plugin says it is outside.

I ranted reasonably recently about how maddening it is to be without water, but I think being without electricity is worse — at least when you would ordinarily expect to have power. Going hiking or camping and being without electricity is no big deal, but it’s infuriating when you’re at home. Everything you think of doing seems to involve electricity, whether it’s Googling to see how much flights to Russia cost (going through a serious travel jones at the moment) or turning on the light in the closet so you can find a sleeveless shirt because it’s so damned hot without the air conditioning.

Forget preparing proper meals, because everything’s in the fridge or freezer, which you’re afraid to open because the power might be off for days and everything will spoil if you open the door, or it requires nuking, baking, thawing, or some other form of heat energy added to it — and trying to toast a frozen slice of wheatberry bread over a candle flame should not happen to anyone. (I’m just saying.) Plus, there’s the anxiety about whether the power will stay out through the next day, and what you should do with the dog if that happens — you can’t bring him to work with you, but if you leave him alone in a flat without AC, then you’ll be consumed with guilt and anxiety that he’ll keel over and die.

At least I had a couple of magazines lying around, including the latest Bust,* which kept me nicely entertained until the sun got too low. Around sunset, I took Nigel out for a bit of a walk, reasoning that it would distract him from the distant thunder and also perhaps allow a little bit of a breeze, but I got all freaked out by the unnaturally spooky sky and weird yellow light, so that didn’t last long. While out, though, I did see the nice Georgia Power people driving down the street in their big truck; I successfully resisted my twin urges to wave and to yell “About bloody well time!” at them, which was probably good, because it only took them maybe half an hour after that to get the power working and — fingers crossed — to get it to stay on.

Somewhat predictably, this happened right after I’d given up, opened all the windows, and was trying to decide the correct number of candles to optimize my lighting without turning my flat into an outsized oven, so I had to spend another five minutes undoing all of that and then pep-talking my thermostat into checking the ambient temperature so it would turn on the air conditioning again. Not the most restful of evenings.

Oh, and it looks like a flight to Moscow in November would be about $850. Perhaps someplace ever-so-slightly cheaper would be in order. I’d originally thought about Iceland, just because it sounds fun, and also admittedly because I thought it would be kind of interesting to see some of the geothermal power stations, but then I realized it would be even more expensive. Also not super vegan-friendly food, which is also a major consideration. Le sigh. I’m in the mood for stark landscapes, old buildings, and a cool climate. . . .

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*They have a good article about the guilty pleasure of enjoying Real Simple magazine, which I found cathartic because I also know the illicit thrill of seeing my issue in my mailbox. Amazingly, though, when ranting about “every issue seem[ing] to have at least one no-shit-Sherlock maxim like ‘Be sure to keep those spare buttons that come with new clothes,’” they neglected to mention the article that truly made my jaw drop: how to wash your face. Seriously. One would’ve thought that most people with even elementary life skills could manage this, but apparently not. I can’t find the exact back issue that had this article, but I do distinctly remember them telling you to rinse your face well. (I think there was also one about how to shampoo your hair, and it emphasized getting your hair thoroughly wet beforehand. Definitely a NSS moment there.)

• A cool solution to waste disposal (Via /.)
  Drastically reducing half-lives of nuclear waste by chilling it to a few degrees Kelvin? Hmm. Intriguing, if possible, but does it become circular: producing energy to reduce the deadliness of what you’ve just used to produce energy?
  (tags: physics science nuclear_waste)
• Star Wars spin-off film (Via /.)
  If this is even remotely any good, I am so there. (Hey, couldn’t be much worse than Ep. I, after all.) And yes, I’m catching up on my Slashdot reading today. Pls bear with me.
  (tags: starwars geek fanfic film)