Day 25

God and I got a jump start on surprises today: I woke up at 8:30 and actually felt rested. Wow! I can't express how much I love not having to get up at 7:15 for an 8:00 class. Even better, I made a productive use of the morning, sorting papers, taking care of house stuff, setting my Scooba loose on the basement floor, that kind of thing.

In case I've never mentioned before, I own two robotic floor cleaners: a Roomba to vacuum the carpet upstairs, and a Scooba that I've been using to scrub the basement floor. The scrubbing needs to be done as a prerequisite to sealing the tiles (which needs to happen because the carpet was removed a while back after a very heavy rainstorm and water damage). Scooba is pretty high maintenance, though, and I'm not entirely happy with it for just that reason. Changing the water every 45 minutes, that I can handle. But dealing with all it's stupid complaining is tiresome. By this I mean it has come to frequently complain about its front wheel being stuck, even though when I take it out and try to clean it, there's nothing to clean, and it works fine. Then of course, you can't tell the robot to resume, no, you need to power off and restart the cleaning cycle, which means then it will complain that there's not enough water in the tank (since some of it was already used before the wheel malfunction). After a few rounds of this, then the battery will die, and the poor thing never actually finishes a complete cleaning cycle (and thus hasn't run it's self-cleaning in a while).

On a completely new but still moisture related note, when I went outside this mornig to go shopping I discovered it's really quite foggy. As in, I can't even see a full block ahead while I'm driving. Fortunately I saw well enough to make it to the bank to deposit the reimbursement check I finally received from Madrigal Dinner, and then to Sam's Club to of course spend a significant portion of that money. I'm trying not to feel too badly about that, though, because most of the expenses were for things like a huge massive block of toilet paper, and a giant container of honey, neither of which will need replacing for probably the rest of my life. Okay, fine, by next year, but still, not a weekly expense, thank goodness.

I also made some healthier decisions (I think) about what I bought in terms of food. The aforementioned massive vessel of honey aside, I made a point to pick out some fresh items from the bakery rather than the preservative laced plastic wrapped tasties that were, ironically, only slightly less expensive. This is not to say I made the healthiest choices ever, but still, better than normal, which is a good start for me.

After unloading all my wonderful groceries into the house I spent the afternoon and early evening over at MA, first to meet with Rich, my fellow webmaster, and then afterward to continue working on what we'd talked about. For any web geeks out there, if you ever need to dynamically position, say, a magically appearing/disappearing flyout menu, and you don't know at the start exactly where on the page it will need to be displayed (because you're displaying it relative to other elements that may be in varying locations), this site might be helpful for you: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/findpos.html.

Sometime today, while driving, I heard something on KTIS that I need to share: another Hebrews verse, this one is 13:15: "Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name." I'll have to wait until the end of the month, but I will need to go back and piece all of these Hebrews references together to see what I can make out of them.

My evening was far less adventuresome or exciting than my day. I cooked dinner (and by "cook" I mean "microwaved a container of fettucini alfredo with chicken from Sams"), did some floor scrubbing (and by "did" I mean "pressed a button and let the robot do the work"), rearranged some of my kitchen cabinets (now the dishes are above the dishwasher, and the food is right next to the microwave), entered my ideal schedule for next semester into the St Olaf Student Information System, and watched an episode or two from the first season DVDs of Joan of Arcadia. I love that show. The characters are so real... and the lead is cute. But star-crushes aside, I fell in love with the series because it's exactly the kind of filmmaking (or TV-making) that I want to do some day. A story with a moral, with a message, that's fun to watch, yet real to life. Some day, God willing, maybe my name can show up in the ending credits of something so great.