Literally, two years… July 19th, 2005, when I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I’ve laid low the past couple of weeks on the internet, have refrained from visiting any website that might possibly leak anything on Harry Potter, and even have picked up other books to read patiently until then. Naturally my choices of books could have been better. Only someone silly like myself would go and start reading Stephen King’s “The Stand” one day before Harry Potter will be in my hands. But given how big a fan Mr. King is of Harry Potter, I think he’ll forgive me. For someone who has never finished one of his books, I strangely find Stephen King fascinating as a reader and literary genius. In his book critiques I’ve read, I’ve fallen for every book he’s lauded, and some of the greatest works he’s claimed as his inspiration I also share in my joy. So, I am determined to finish the book, if nothing else than my list of “unfinished books” is way too long!

I could go on for an hour or more on the events of the past two weeks, but to keep it short, as I’ve got to go to work *bah* I drove to Philadelphia with an AMUN staffer and we went to a Phillies/Cardinals game and went for actual philly cheesesteaks afterwards… the line to get the steaks was longer than getting in the game! But all in all I think the two of us had a lot of fun! This was of course only a few weeks after he also came up to Baltimore to go see the O’s and Yanks play. I’m not a huge fan of baseball, but I’m always up for getting out of the house a little bit. And its interesting to see how the real fanatics react with every pitch… I suppose I must look like that whenever i walk into a bookstore or the DVD section of any electronic store!

While I can’t go into them right now, I have seen the trifecta of summer movies… naturally Harry Potter on the Tuesday night premier, Transformers on the Fourth of July, and Die Hard 4. Gosh I miss going to the movies this often!!! They were all great in their own ways, even if HP was cut in half!!

I’m still patiently waiting for any answer on my work situation, but I am losing hope every day. *sadsigh*

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just try to cut in front of me in line!!!

What I am going deaf listening to::
Used To ~ Daughtry

So I started this post last week and managed to lose it (but long story short) I’m bringing it back because its actually kinda cool! I’m in the middle of cataloging my entire book collection, sadly most of which is going into boxes and storage, but being the anal-retentive/slightly OCD person, I want to know exactly where each and every book I have is located so I can find it when I’m suddenly on a whim to read Aristophanes or find out more about dalmations. I’ve completed 602 books cataloged and organized, and have about two hundred more to go. Not all of them were originally mine. Some have been inherited from family members who are a little more flippant about books. Don’t get me wrong, there are definately books that can be tossed or donated to the library without a second thought. But there are some that just need to be saved… they are just that awesome. One such book I found is “The Cuban and Porto-Rican Campaigns” by Richard Harding Davis. I think it was my maternal grandfather’s book. Like many of the books I inherited from him, it was published a loooong time ago, but until I opened up the credits page, I didn’t know how old. It was a first publication in 1898, the same year of the Spanish-American War!! Its a journalistic account first hand of a right-hand man of Teddy Roosevelt during the campaigns, which is in and of itself historical! (Remember, I have a degree in History!!) But what is really kind of cooler, this book has been such an influence that it is still being republished today!! Many books of the past get one publication and thats it… not enough sales, poor quality writing, a bad decision by the editor, etc. But according to Amazon.com a new edition was released in 2002, fascimiling the original to keep formatting and such. A quick search showed two booksellers selling the original London 1899 release (Mine is a New York 1898 release) for anywhere in the range of $35-$65, which is astronimically priced compared to the $1 my grandfather bought it for (and that was the “new book price”, he could have bought it for much less!)… So in short, I found a century old book in my house that is actually of historical significance and is the type of book historians go to for research on the Spanish-American War (First hand accounts? Absolutely!! no better type of resource!!)… it makes the historian and archivist in me just giggle with excitement!!

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nerdy

What I am going deaf listening to::
White and Nerdy ~ Weird Al

So, about a week ago I started getting these email messages like three times a day from my server stating that Wordpress is out of date and that I need to update. So I go ahead and update it, saving copies of all my layouts and customized themes, etc. And despite what some of the support forum posts stated about fantasico updating wordpress, it went off without a hitch. Except for one small detail. On my administration panel, I edited some of the PHP in the posting pages to include custom html for my avatars and my emoticons. Not wanting to rewrite five days of code, I put in a request to technical support to untar the backup and send me the files so I can copy and paste it, as the upgrade directions stated could happen. Instead they do not one but two sloppy restores, and at one point the blog’s database was gone. Thankfully they were able to restore it correctly, and I was able to reupgrade. Oh, and as it turns out if they couldn’t send me the files I wasn’t out of luck. I had a post I had been working on still under the old system and I was able to save the html code and put it into the new PHP files. For a while I thought it was all gone… it was only a three day minor panic attack, really… *sigh*

So eventually, hopefully i’ll update on the O’s/Yanks game I went to on thursday, my family’s incredibly lethargic saturday, and whatever it was i was updating last week (of which i’ve completely forgotten… this is why I’m supposed to update the blog… I have a horrific memory for these kind of things)
*Edit ten seconds later* Now I know what it was about!! I was about a unique antique book I found in my book collection… I’ll get back to that as well.**

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blehness

My television is currently diverting my attention with::
Standoff on me DVR!

scary thought, eh? I recieved my official notification that my application to become a notary public was accepted… But then again, it was rather expected. Its not like I’ve been convicted of heroin deals in West Baltimore or any such other matter. I’m a goody-goody-two-shoes by and large, and darned proud of it.

Anyways, I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Orson Scott Card’s Empire, which has been a bit different than his Ender Saga. Its set in the present or soon-to-be-present America with a overmilitarized and technologically superior leftest “Progressive Reformation” has splintered the nation after a double assassination of the president and vice president, which was part of the conspiracy all along. The other books of Card’s that I have read have never dealt with the pop culture, so it was a little strange having him just mention Jack Bauer in passing, American Idol, and even the most strange, Hari Seldon. Now who is Hari Seldon you ask??? Well if you do ask, you are not a fan of Isaac Asimov’s. I found it rather interesting that a writer who had been donned as a great science-fiction writer in his own right uses one of the fundamental characters in Asimov’s core greatest works as a father of science-fiction, the Foundation series. At first I was like “Harry Seldon, why does that name sound so familiar?” as almost simultaniously I spelt Harry as Hari, and then I was like, “no way he mentioned the psychohistorian” and then BAM!! he explains casually to the non-science-fiction-reader-characters in the discussion who Hari Seldon is and actually made a decent analogy to his own character…. though not to the granduer that Hari Seldon will go down in science-fiction history for. It was kinda cool to get the connection and chuckle just a little bit in only the way other science-fiction nuts would enjoy… a little internal joke for us to revel in…. and my mother would appreciate the Jack Bauer references.

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science-fiction geekiness happeh

What I am going deaf listening to::
Hello, Goodbye ~ The Beatles (and not the target commercial!!!)

What I am enriching my mind with::
Empire ~ Orson Scott Card (about four chapters left!)

slowly going mad… slowly going mad… slowly going mad… I have no attention span!!! slowly going mad… slowly going mad… slowly going mad…
It really says something when I’m working on a links list for an AMUN website, and every other link I have to stand up and do something else… no attention span whatsoever…
when I do spend more than five minutes in a row on it, I feel like i’m going mad… slowly going mad…

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completely bonkers!!!

What I am going deaf listening to::
Only Hope ~ Switchfoot

I’m still officially waiting to find out if my promotion at my work has gone through, and so the last week and a half has been stressing and tiring!! I had my interview on wednesday with my potentially new banking center, which went well from what I understand. But now I have to wait for a phone call to tell me whether it is going through or not, and lets just say answering the phones at my banking center is difficult to begin with. First of all, customers who have taken the time and gas to get to the banking center deserve first attention. We cannot simply interrupt an interaction, or hold up the line for a phone call. Secondly, and this is generally speaking: banking centers can’t give out personal information!!! That is what banking by phone is for!! They have tools, such as caller ID and access ID codes that they can use to determine your identity. We don’t have that at our banking center, nor do we have it in any banking center in the area. We can’t verify your pin numbers, we don’t know from which phone you are calling, and we get so much fraud, we can’t truly tell if you are the one calling or not. And for you people who get checks, we can’t verify funds in someone else’s account over the phone or in person!!! Would you like it if I gave your account balance to someone you might or might not have given a check to? What if the person stole your checkbook and needed to find out how much money you had that they could take? What if someone edits your check to clean you out? Banking institutions and credit unions have set procedures set out by Congress and the Federal Reserve on how to process checks and money orders, and believe me it does not begin nor end with the teller. We spend so much time answering phones for questions that common sense dictates we cannot answer that most of the time we simply cannot answer the phone to begin with. So on that rare occassion that we are expecting a phone call for an important matter, it can be sometimes not answered in expectation that it is another person asking for information we cannot give. The recruiter may have called on Friday, but I don’t know about it. I’d tell them to call my cell phone but I can’t answer it at work and they don’t call after hours. Which leaves only my home number, which I am not there to pick up. And I seriously doubt they’d leave all the information with my mom.

Anyways, enough of the rant… I went to the bookstore the other day after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and I saw a commercial for the upcoming The Golden Compass which is a book by Phillip Pullman and which is now a movie with a huge cast of stars including Nicole Kidman, my current heartthrob Daniel Craig (The New James Bond boys and girls!) and Eva Green (who was Vesper Lynd in the new James Bond!)… and its in my genre Science-fiction/fantasy. Oh yeah, there is no not-liking this movie, and the visuals look simply to die for!!! So I got on the website, and played around a bit, and here is the only thing you could really do quiz-wise, but always fun to do!

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nerdy

What I am going deaf listening to::
Empire~ Orson Scott Card (Audiobook)

OMG!!! Let me just tell you how annoying hotels can be!! So there are three/four of us in one hotel room, as is very normal for AMUN gettogethers. We were issued four keys, which we kept in our possession and never claimed lost or anything. So we got back from our meeting this afternoon only to find out that not only did our keys not work, none of the keys from our group worked. The hotel apparently randomly changes the security codes on the doors for customer protection. Okay, this makes it very very annoying to have to change keys around, especially if in our case, only two of the four of us were present to test our keys and replace them. But the most idiotic part of it was that the hotel didn’t even ask us for our names. They gave us new keys to our room without even verifying that we were residents in the room. Literally, i walked up to the desk and said (now four times today) “I need a key to room 222.” And all four times they gave me a key without question!!!! Dude, at one point I had to leave my laptop in here or risk one of the drivers in our group to potentially drive away to ohio or wisconsin with it. What is the point of changing security codes randomly for customer protection if they don’t care who they hand out the new keys to? Anyways, this kind of moronic behavior should be voiced. And what consierge doesn’t know the approximate price for a taxi to the airport or how long it takes for one to arrive? Isn’t that what they are there to know?… oh yeah all of this is going in my debrief you AMUN folks!! ggeeesssshhh!

On better notes, official MD meetings are over, but in AMUN togetherness, we had a blast with our kickball tournament and the barbeque at the L’s. We got a lot of work done, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, but it’s going to be really awesome in HG this year if I can really buckle down and get my portal up and functional again. For those of you who don’t know the acronyms AMUN, HG, and portal, its my non-profit I work for, my department (Home Government) and a webportal… but then thats probably getting a little past what you may or may not want to know about…

More later!

contemplating moronic behaviors

For those of you who may have met me during travels, or those with whom I volunteer with, ya’lls know that I get rather violently air sick on flights… on my weeklong trip to chicago in november, I actually take the train from baltimore to chicago, which is about an eighteen to twenty hour train ride. Usually for memorial day and labor day, i simply drive the eleven hours to chicago (or in this case i would have driven to champaign if I could have gotten off of work) to avoid an airplane. My motion sickness also extends to cars if I’m not physically driving them, so when i go on trips, i usually drive the entire way. Anyways, I survived not one, but two flights in very small planes yesterday evening. The first from Baltimore to Chicago went moderately well; the central part of the trip was at least smooth and I even opened up my eyes to look outside! The site was rather breathtaking… I could see the large cumulus clouds below, and wisps of transparent clouds just swept by under the plane… The wisps were moving at a good speed too, so it was interesting to watch them. They looked more like tiny bits of fog rather than actual clouds, but then again, that is what fog is. Off in the distance I saw this huge rocklike mountain of a cloud which looked more like a spaceship or flying machine from an anime rather than an actual cloud. And as we landed, we watched the glowing red sun set over Chicago. The second trip from chicago to champaign wasn’t that great. Fortunately I ran into another AMUN staffer in Chicago and we flew together… she got to see first hand that I actually do turn green on an airplane. But I didn’t regurgitate anything in two flights!! That is a definate good step. Alas, there will be more updates as I attempt to renew my interest for blogging…
Read on People!! Read On!

AMUN happehness

How many of you know out there that Memorial Day was created in the aftermath of the US Civil War? Or that Memorial Day was created to memorialize all those who died in the internal conflict, to re-unify the country in the late 1860s and 1870s? My coworkers often call me the living encyclopedia at work, maybe because I take five minutes and research something that might be of interest to people. In fact, according to some of the sites I’ve visited, there is a big movement to reinstill the importance of Memorial Day rather than a holiday for the beginning of summer.
Rather than a massive copy-paste mess, I’ve simply included some decent links that will help you to remember the holiday as it was supposed to be.

• US Memorial Day.org
• History Channel Minisite: Memorial Day

So on Monday, celebrate those who have fought for us, and remember those who died in that struggle. You don’t have to support a war in order to support the troops and honor the fallen. If you see a military veteran or active serviceman, thank him or her.

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somber and respectful

What I am going deaf listening to::
Keep Holding On ~ Avril Lavigne

I am finally, after over a year and a half of waiting, samantilles on LiveJournal. For those of you who may not know, I had my blog hacked into from a then fourteen year old girl who attempted to commit identity theft against me, and when caught in the act, acted viciously to destroy my blog, robbing me of my precious username which I had had on LJ for over five years. Not only did she delete my blog there and move it to an undisclosed name (for which she tried to steal my permanent status on LJ) but she deleted my entire friends list, many of whom I had only known on LJ, and have since sadly lost touch with. I started this blog as a replacement for my lost samantilles account, feeling hopelessly lost without my username… afterall, in the internet world, a rose by any other name is exactly something else entirely. At least for me a username is a key part of one’s identity, and I’ve had the username samantilles since I was fourteen (yeah, thats twelve years going by the same username, cuz i’m just that darned cool like that!) I’ve been rather upset for the past year and a half waiting for the username to be properly purged by LJ management to reassume the name, knowing all along the day I don’t check it is the day someone else might have the chance to snatch it up… but alas it is mine once more!!!! Oh happy day!!!

Oh, and by the way, congratulations George Lucas on Star Wars!! Thirty years ago today, Star Wars was released into the theatres, May 25, 1977. I have been a fan since 1992. Thank You George!!

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Relieved, estatic, joyous, and just plain ole happy to be samantilles once more *g*