i can one up you: last night i dreamt that steve carell and i went to hawaii to steal a bunch of exotic, brightly-colored birds. we transported them back in a black velvet bag. when we got home, we opened the bag, and all except one was dead.

???

my coworker t. had to leave work a bit early, so i walked outside with him to warm up and get some fresh air and chat. as we strolled out into the atrium, a gangly and obviously british man darted in front of us, racing out the front door.

"OH MY GOD!" i whispered. loudly. "IT'S RI/CHARD QU/EST! OMFG!"

if you don't know who RQ is, he's one of the business anchors for cnn international, and he's totally and completely adorable and hilarious. he is, without a doubt, the most british person ever. and i kind of love him.

"hey, come on, i'll introduce you," t. said, starting to drag me over.

"HELL TO THE NO," i whispered again. loudly. because if you know me, you know i kind of worship famous-ish people, but am absolutely terrified of meeting them. i turn into Retardo Catherine - even more so than usual. all guffaws and flailing hands and incoherent sentences.

t. kept dragging, and i kept wiggling away, and i kicked and spat and eventually ran - gracefully i assure you - out the far door - but not before RQ turned around to see what the hell was going on. it was terrible.

and it reminded me very much of the ted leo encounter i had with kriston. short recap: kriston and i were drinking margaritas, ted leo was sitting next to us, i had an epileptic fit, and kriston eventually forced me to introduce myself and get a picture. which, admittedly, was fantastic, but it was one hell of a painful process.

which also reminds me of the fact that my coworker t. is KRISTON'S EVIL TWIN. you know there was that picture where everybody decided that yglesias, tommy and kriston were triplets? pyromaniac triplets? well, i present the suggestion that t. be added to their ranks, because, what the hell:

Before you make my upcoming flight to London miserable, please go read Yglesias and Bruce Schneier. Not because it will change anything. But because I'd like to see a tiny flicker of guilt in your eye as you tell me I'm not allowed to bring anything onto the plane besides a willingness to quietly sit still.

And speaking of the TSA, whatever happened to the alleged change in policy making shoe-removal optional? As far as I can tell, it's had absolutely no effect on screeners' insistence that you take off your shoes. I've tried every type of footwear I can think of, but it's never seems to make a difference. On the rare (and seemingly random) occasions when I'm allowed to go through the metal detector without pulling off my sneakers, all it buys me is a more thorough screening on the other side.

alright, i'll admiit it - atlanta has started to grow on me. it's got all these great neighborhoods, you see - the only problem is that you have to drive at least 15 minutes in between each of them. but contained within these adorable little neighborhoods like east atlanta village and little five points are great stores - good bars, restaurants, and boutiques.

and therein lies the problem. you see, i'm sick. i've got a fever. and apparently the only cure is more dresses.

I BOUGHT FOUR DRESSES THIS WEEKEND. what is wrong with me?!?! seriously. i hardly EVER wear dresses. skirts i'll wear on occasion to work, but i much prefer a pair of nicely-cut trousers or jeans. but i went on a freaking rampage this weekend. here's the damage:

a black cotton dress from american apparel. gah! i'm a hypocrite! i hate the owner of american apparel because he is a sexually assaulting public masturbating happy freak, but this dress was so cheap and so comfy. only turn off in the store is that the cashier was wear gold lame hotpants. well, what are you gonna do.

a blue print strapless dress from sugar britches in east atlanta village. it highlights my swimsuit tan nicely.

a red halter dress and a white dress (only $30!) from rene rene in little five points. my lord, i cannot recommend this boutique highly enough. it was the first time i'd been in there, and despite the fact that i was wearing what basically amounted to pajamas, was toting my laptop around and generally looked like a low-class shlub, the staff was gracious and helpful. they must have smelled my dress lust in the air. but seriously - the stuff in that store was GORGEOUS. great skirts, these beautiful wool sheath dresses for fall...sigh. it was like a dream. rene is an older, kind of kooky, flaming red haired lady, and she designs all the pieces by hand.

so, yeah. i'm a dress whore. what the fuck am i going to do with all these dresses? i don't really know. they're certainly not appropriate for work - unless i sling a cardigan over them, i guess - and it's not like i go to cocktail parties or similar events all that often. sigh. most likely i will just coo at them.

anyway, i recommend sugar britches, rene rene and pieces of adrene (the boutique where i got this dress) for your shopping needs. just beware. you might walk out in a daze carrying a dozen things you don't even remember buying.

When I was younger I had a terrible temper. It didn't really get me into fights or trouble — mostly it just produced figurative headaches for my parents and literal ones for myself. I think it's the Dutch blood in me: that sort of passionate disposition is what allowed their East India company to deliver such competitive pricing excellence to its customers, right? Right.

Well, puberty eventually wrapped up, I put a little more effort into controlling myself, and I generally started having fewer things to get upset about. These days I like to think I'm pretty good-natured guy. My ceaseless fury is mostly reserved for when I'm speaking to customer service representatives on the phone. Admittedly, if those poor souls were to get together and commiserate, I've got a feeling that the term "serial killer-like" might come up a lot. That's about right, I'm afraid ("it puts me on the phone with its manager, or else it gets the hose again"). It's nothing personal, guys — it's just that your discomfort will under no circumstances interfere with the satisfaction of my incomprehensibly inhuman desires (e.g. wanting my DSL connection to work).

So I mostly limit myself to a telephonic stress/voodoo doll these days. The primary exception is when I'm particularly tired and/or stressed out. Which brings me to this entry's inevitable apology: I'm sorry, tonight's left lane dwellers of I-66 and Rt. 29. Repeatedly tonight, as you and your right-lane coconspirators trundled along, collecting cars behind you like beads on some sort of furious charm bracelet, I was surprised to find myself projecting invisible beams of hatred in your direction with such intensity that I'm pretty sure I began to cook you from the inside out. So, uh, sorry about that.

Dr. Tom's prescription for Tuesday non-success:

1. Sleep through your alarm.
2. Post the morning roundup late. Immediately receive shit from commenters.
3. Hustle to work. Discover that your sandbox site was defaced by hackers about a month ago, due to an unpatched flaw in some third party software. The site's not very important (hence the lax security), but some stuff for DCist runs on it (at your expense) because the Gothamist guys have never gotten around to giving you access to host it on the DCist server. So it needs to be uncompromised, cleaned and secured.
4. Prepare to make tech support call to non-client marketing trade group that you find morally repugnant.
5. Time for meetings! Two hours should do it.
6. Drive to Charlottesville to see mom, who's been re-admitted to hospital (nothing too serious). Drive back.
7. Collapse into bed.

Also anticipated: a ticket on 66 for violating HOV (Fox 5 ran a story about me and my nefarious HOV-violating buddies last night). When the fuck is Friday getting here, again?

Sorry for the whining. I promise I'll deliver a post about an electronics project involving a demonic glowing cow skull as soon as I can finish it.

I'm back from a weekend in Atlanta filled with fried food, delayed flights and filial guilt. I had a great time, although I was pretty surprised to find myself making the trip. I'd even tried to cancel my tickets on Thursday night, but, low on sleep and frustrated by cheaptickets.com's slow password recovery feature, let the situation fester until Friday. And by then my mom was feeling well enough that she and my sister told me to head to Atlanta after all. From the sound of things, it was the right decision — mom appears to be doing very well. I'll be heading back down to Charlottesville in about 45 minutes to confirm it with my own eyes.

But, like I said, Atlanta was great. I was pretty disappointed to learn that the Cyclorama is this rather than this. But there was plenty of stuff to make up for that. Catherine gave me a tour of her office (I peered into Sanjay Gupta's office! Exciting!), which was cool, although we did get yelled at by a guide who thought we'd wandered off the tour.

Liz, who was introduced to us by Scott, proved to be approximately the sweetest person ever and gave us an incredibly great tour of Williams Street, aka Adult Swim HQ (I peered into Dave Willis's and Matt Maiellaro's offices! Genuinely exciting!).

And we spent some quality time with my old friend Chris, gaining a keen and not entirely un-terrifying perspective on the Atlantean post-fraternity lifestyle. To be fair, an important part of this lifestyle seems to be sitting in a pool and drinking beer. So it's not all bad.

Other than that, we passed the time by eating a lot, dropping by a few bars, participating in an on-the-street podcast for the local McSweeney's farm team, and generally having a pleasant time. So thumbs up to Atlanta. Driving everywhere still sucks, though.

Wah-wah pedals. Laser pointers. Firearms. These are the sorts of machines that are simply too much for fun humans to use objectively. You might have a considered, intelligent opinion about their proper use, but it'll melt away as soon as you get your hands on one. Motorcycles belong on this list, too.

So, I'll just get it out of the way, since people are asking, and this seems like as good an information-dissemination mechanism as any that are available to me. My mom got into a serious motorcycle accident Wednesday evening. According to the cops, some guy suddenly decided he really, really needed to make that right turn to get some gas — enough so that he was willing to do it from the left lane. I suppose my above list is unfair, since the accident wasn't her fault. But I'm still not feeling very fond of motorcycles at the moment.

The resulting breaks, as of the last round of CTs: clavicle, back, pelvis, ribs, right arm in twenty places. Amazingly, it appears that she'll be fine. The right arm is the worst of the lot, but today's surgery on it went well. It sounds like she'll probably be in the hospital for a week.

What comes after that, I don't know. I'm trying to prepare myself not to be surprised by whatever unpleasant surprises come up in the future. So far everything seems to be going great — but I suspect that when an ICU nurse tells you something is great, it really just means that it isn't horribly, horribly bad. So we'll see. She should be moving out of that unit tomorrow and back into the real world. I'm guessing that a sense of scope will arrive around the same time as her physical therapist.

Anyway, thanks for everyone's kind thoughts and sentiments (and balloons! no flowers in the ICU, so folks have been loading her up with mylar and helium). Honestly, everything is surprisingly fine. My sister has been incredibly great. My mom started off the afternoon groggy, but was pretty lucid and cheerful by the time I left this evening, all things considered. Things are going as well as can be expected. Her head is fine, her life doesn't appear to be in danger, and we basically know what has to happen next. That sort of clarity makes it possible to remain pretty even-keeled about all of this.

short version of the weekend: driving past a great, old-timey krispy kreme sign on the way to my coworker's house friday night. moderate amounts of booze at house (curse you, driving). donuts from said krispy kreme suddenly appearing at coworker's house. me proceeding to eat 2 3/4 of said donuts. pool party. moderate amounts of margaritas at said pool party (curse you, driving!). running, and the continued battle between me wanting to be able to run and keeping my toenail. i know, it's gross.

i may as well include monday night in the weekend roundup, because even though it hasn't happened yet, i think it'll be pretty great. i'm going to dinner with mrs. gray and bubba at joel here in atlanta. this requires some prefacing. mrs. gray is, as many of you know, charles' mother, and is pretty much (along with the rest of charles' family, as crazy and hillybillyish as he keeps telling us the extended portion of the family is) the icing on the cake of having charles as a friend. imagine how generous, fun and laid-back charles is already, and add three more to that, and you have his parents and his sister. (also imagine how much charles likes to drink, and add three more to that, and the equation is pure awesomeness.) they're going to tuscany? why don't you come along! it's sunday? come over for dinner! christmas time? of course you're heading to their renowned christmas party. johanna is graduating in chicago and you're not remotely blood relations? they'll get you a hotel room and take you out for dinner and drinks! so on and so forth. and, of course, if they're in your town for business, they'll obviously be taking you out for a super nice dinner.

then there's bubba. how to describe.

• I've got nothing to do with this. (Removed due to signs of life — actual communication! It's great.).

  So consider this post my pathetic cry to current and future employers, peers, relations and acquaintances: I actually know what I'm doing, I swear.

• This is astonishingly stupid. Like, almost audiophile stupid.
• I've now accidentally caught Dashboard Confessional on both Leno and Letterman. That dude really can't sing, can he? His wha-oh-wha-ohs are okay, but the rest is pretty miserable.

The wheels have been in motion for some time now, so yesterday kind of slipped by without me noticing. But congratulations are in order for various friends in our corner of the aspiring DC media conspiracy: Kyle, Heather and Sommer are all stepping into new roles at DCist, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm looking forward to reading more music stuff from Kyle; to Heather having a larger hand in the site's direction; and to Sommer finally having access to the budget necessary to pay down her not-inconsiderable debt in promised milkshakes.

But of course I'm also very sad to see Ryan step down. I imagine Catherine and I will write some more weepy posts closer to his departure date, but for now, suffice it to say that the guy is pretty amazing. I think DCist has had an unbelievable string of luck with its editors. Rob and Mike's encyclopedic knowledge of the city, organizational skills and affability helped attract and sustain readers and writers. Then Martin and Ryan stepped in with a level of talent and dedication that bordered on masochism. Martin's sticking around (the knots seemed pretty secure, anyway), but Ryan's off to pursue his boyhood dreams of a PhD in economic history.

I have no doubt that Sommer is going to be great as an EIC, but we're all sad that Ryan won't be around to occasionally save us. The level of dedication the guy has shown is more than a little ridiculous (and a testament to Lisa's overwhelming patience). If a writer said, "I had a post saved on my hard drive, but my computer broke and I can't afford to fix it," I have no doubt that Ryan would immediately start figuring out how much blood plasma he had to sell to raise the money. Not that Sommer wouldn't do the same — but Ryan's taller, and therefore probably has more blood. That's an important trait for an editor.

Hmm. I just biked back from Matt & Kriston's, where I consumed burgers, beer and Deadwood. That's all pretty standard for a Sunday night. What was out of the ordinary was what happened as I turned off 11th onto O. There was a skinny white kid wearing overly large shorts and a baseball cap in a particularly ridiculous configuration. And he said something to me as I whizzed by. I'm not sure what, but it definitely sounded indignant, and contained the phrase "my territory".

It was just a little too much. There I was, bike helmet, cargo shorts, ironic internet-themed t-shirt and Gap sandals — and at least mostly not predisposed to picking fights with neighborhood thugs — and I still couldn't stifle the snorted laughter that erupted.

I heard a response. It contained "aw shit", but I'm not sure what else. And it sounded kind of sad.

Anyway, my apologies, aspiring pimps of Logan/Shaw. I realize that yours is a difficult industry in which to find a foothold. It's not like there are internships on Craigslist that you can email your resume to. And even now, after you've found a position, you probably don't know who to approach about filling out the forms necessary to translate threatening neighborhood bicyclists into course credit. I mean sure, it's great that they gave that song the Oscar, but it hasn't changed the facts on the ground, right? It's just lip service.

Well, I wish you the best of luck. But I've gotta say, if you can't even scare the neighborhood's drunken, cycling nerds, I don't know how you're going to intimidate its hookers and/or gang-bangers. I'm sure you'll think of something, though. Maybe a bigger hat? It might make you seem taller.

a cool thing about work: generally, i feel like i'm working in the CTU offices on 24.

a few more cnn shots here.

let me give you all a little piece of sage advice: NEVER, EVER, IF YOU CAN EVER HELP IT, MOVE. ESPECIALLY NOT THREE TIMES IN UNDER A YEAR. IT'S A LITTLE BIT OF A BITCH.

take that as you will. as i sit amidst the ruins of carboard boxes and stacked ceramic bowls on my bed pillow, which is the only surface available on which to exist vaguely comfortably, i am still thankful - because i have the awesomest dad ever. on father's day itself he flew with me to chicago and is helping me with this total mess, not to mention driving back with me tomorrow morning. i am a lucky lady.

i'm also thankful that my week in d.c. was kinda great. dinner at palena, drinks all over the city, sporting events, family time, boyfriend time, friend time - it was wonderful to be back, even if it was for a shorter period than i would have liked. i still have a few more days there next week, but come friday, i'm off to the ATL till september (d.c. visits will dot that time, of course.) pictures forthcoming of the most recent activities as soon as i've puttied the shit out of my walls.

UPDATE: puttying is strangely satisfying. especially on zero hours of sleep and a few red bulls. anyway, the flickr stream has been updated with some random shots.

my beeeyootiful, talented, incredibly smart and soon-to-be-wahoo (WAHOOWA) lil sister graduated from high school yesterday. excessive photos can be found here. the best part: tom davis gave the speech, which was actually pretty funny. even funnier: when my brother graduated from thomas jefferson in 2001, davis spoke there as well...and gave the exact same speech. canned speeches: a congressman's best friend.

the party? was teh awesome. a smaller crowd than we were anticipating showed up, but that was actually good because a) more time to talk to wonderful people and b) lots of leftover beer that we'll need help killing the rest of the week. highlights of the evening included seeing all the great regular zuntaparty folks plus a few new faces, getting to know some of the lovely echoditto crowd that have made tommy so happy these past months and meeting the absolutely charming becks, one of my favorite bloggers. i mean, any night that ends around 4:30am with a bottle of whiskey being passed around and a rousing episode of karaoke revolution can't be a bad one, right?

emily was particularly gung ho with tommy's camera last night so you can expect some flickr action soon. thanks so much to everybody who came out!

UPDATE: drew comes through with the first photos.

UPDATE II: here's tommy's set.

tommy and i had the pleasure of attending ryan and lisa's wedding last night at the arts club of washington, and it was looooovely. everything about the ceremony was wonderful, including the vows that each of them wrote, which i usually pshaw. but tommy pointed out that it helps vows if you happen to be excellent writers. anyway, they both looked gloriously happy, the arts club was a beautiful setting, lisa was beautiful, the dinner was incredibly delicious, the cake (which was actually artfully arranged cupcakes from cake love) was actually....really good. i guess when you do let them sit out long enough they are, in fact, yummy, contrary to my previous thinking. the open bar was very open, and the dancing was fun. and one of my favorite parts of the evening? ryan, on his wedding day, was kind enough to bring me a stack of dcist temporary tattoos. god bless the boy.

photos here. frankly, a lot of them are really terrible - some because i didn't want to blind everyone with flash, some because i went on to get kinda drunk. but peruse freely!

don't forget: charles, tommy and i will be hosting a fine, fine party tomorrow night, starting around 10, and you're all invited. if i somehow neglected to get you the evite, just shoot me an email asking for details. my favorite "yes i'm coming" evite response thus far:

Michael (06/05)
if only to get to the bottom of this "tommy" craze, i'm there. plus i'm eager to discover that catherine is more than an alias that you created on your blog.

interesting theory. if tommy keeps popping in and out of the bathroom in a blond wig...well, just be prepared.

I can pretty well measure how rough a day it's been by how late it is when I open my RSS reader. It's 3:19 at the moment, and I'm only juuust thinking about hitting that BlogLines button. That means things have been busy.

It appears there was some sort of attack on our server farm at work; I was up late & early doing the roundup and launching a client site (and, uh, drinking, although not for the early part); and yesterday was so frantic that I still had two dozen or so emails left from it that actually needed answering.

On top of that, LastCall's Metro capabilities are broken. Given its relative stability thus far, the likelist suspect is a subtle change in RideGuide's HTML. The original HTML was a mess, resulting in some decidedly non-robust regexes involved in its parsing. It wouldn't take much to send them spinning off into oblivion — which is what I suspect happened. The smart money is on it being a real bitch to track down, too.

On the upside, Catherine gets into town tonight! Here's hoping absence has made her begin to consider Perl debugging a romantic way to spend an evening.

Between the LASIK and my generally geeky ways, my friends give me a lot of shit about my potential for becoming a post-human abomination. Digital-themed tattoo? I've thought about it, but probably not. RFID chip? Maybe in a few years. Intracranial bluetooth headset? Eh, I'll wait until I start seeing them in rap videos. I'm not actually all that anxious to modify my body in permanent ways.

But this... Oh man. I want this. The ability to feel electromagnetic fields, people. To tell when a wire is live, or a hard drive is being read, or a transmitter is on, or if a surface is ferrous. It's just a little too cool. Make it safe, then sign me up. Sorry, humanity.

proof the universe doesn't hate me (or, at least, tolerates my presence): as i was starting the arduous process of, you know, moving, about four days before i have to get out of here, i packed up garbage bags full of crap like my entire fridge, and that stack of lucky magazines i'd kept for god knows what reason the entire year. i dragged them down to the dumpster where i noticed all of them were absolutely overflowing with crap. jesus, i thought, what a pain in the ass. i dumped my trash on the floor and surveyed the situation. and what should mine own eyes see but my own salvation: the reason the dumpsters were overflowing is that there were boxes. millions and millions of boxes in perfectly usable condition that someone who had obviously just moved into the complex had used. having spent $20 just that morning on four boxes from the fedex around the corner, i literally did a little jumping dance. and then i made five trips between the dumpster and my apartment, carrying those precious boxes under my arms like so much discovered treasure. yes, i spent my sunday morning rummaging through dumpsters for cardboard gold. it was good. and now back to the packing!

i also just uploaded a bunch of photos to my flickr stream - most of me looking like a drunk ass, as usual, and i can't imagine you really want to see those. but i was walking around downtown chicago this afternoon on my way to a dinner party, and took some shots of that. the location of the dinner party was, i also thought, photo-worthy, as it was the corner condo of a building next to the drake hotel on lake shore drive with the most amazing view. here's the set of the evening.

I've finally got all of my photos from the beach uploaded — you can find them here, if you're so inclined.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to DOG V. CRAB, the video sensation that's sweeping the internet. The two combatants both struggled for victory. The real winner? The viewing public.

The video portrays just a small part of the overall fight. Credit to Genevieve for capturing as much she did; Wreck had already cornered a ghost crab behind some fencing earlier in the day, but nobody expected him to find another one. He sniffed and jabbed for a while as the crab warily snapped at his nose — I thought it could go either way at that point. But one quick lunge from Wreck wrapped things up decisively.

if i haven't killed myself, a classmate, or a small animal by the end of today, it will have been a success!

UPDATE: no animals or people were harmed in the process of this day. now i get beer and pool so am happy.

Some of you might remember me asking for career advice a while back. I ended up deciding to take the new job, then blogged the first day. Then everyone at work discovered this site (using their strange internet powers), and, aside from some generalities, I haven't mentioned it.

Well, let me fill you in. It's been about six months, I think. People use the phrase "it was the best decision I ever made" to describe getting a hair transplant, or buying a boat, or ordering a Cobb salad. So I'd like to avoid joining their idiomatic ranks, but I can't. It just seems so obvious. These are the smartest, coolest, funniest, most talented people I've ever worked with, and the job itself is interesting, varied and rewarding. I look forward to work every day. Okay, every non-hungover day.

The reason for my gushing: we're hiring. If you're geeky, really smart and interested in working in the non-evil sector, you should think about applying. You'd like it. Seriously.

I'm back from the beach, as you may have surmised. Photos and perhaps some recapping will come later, but at the moment I'm too exhausted. The short version is that it was a lot of fun. I showed up at work today around 1:30 saturated with sweat, dog hair and fatigue, but other than that the experience was uniformly great.

Oh, and for those interested: the EVDO worked wonderfully, but someone had an open access point very near our house, so it was unnecessary. It came in handy during the car ride back, though. The final stage of my EVDO catch & release strategy will come tomorrow.

woohoo! big congrats to my little brother peter, who just got his navy assignment for the next four years. the details:

he will be assigned to San Diego, CA on the USS Jefferson City, a fast Attack submarine of the Los Angeles class.

i have no idea what any of that means, but i do know san diego was one of his top choices (and, um, mine too. i wasn't going to be so excited about the prospecting of visiting him in, say, guam or connecticut). anyway, i'm so proud of him! you can see him in all his fabulousness in some flickr shots.

clearly my blogging ability up to this point has been driven by my frenetic obsession with veronica mars and my impending move to atlanta, and now that those two topics have dried up, it has become apparent that i am a big empty vessel, devoid of any content. the media management project goes full churn for the next two weeks, stopping only for alcohol fuel along the way, so it's likely blog stuff from my end of the site will be pretty lacking. but still - random things for your discussion:

I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.

There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.

1. catherine finds out she'll be working out at cnn.com in atlanta this summer. promptly starts freaking out about housing on the blog.

2. matt (who, incidentally, catherine knows through kyle) spends approximately two billion hours giving catherine neighborhood/general atlanta advice.

3. catherine spends approximately two billion hours on craigslist, which yields absolutely nothing.

4. matt is kind enough to post bulletins to friendster and myspace saying his clueless internet bud could sure use a decent place to live in atlanta.

5. matt's kind friend jeanie says, hey! i just bought an enormous gorgeous house in east atlanta. i might be willing to sublet a furnished room or two for the low low price of $400 including utilities and internet for however long you need.

6. catherine says hell yes!

and that is the story of how the internet saved catherine from living in a box outside of the CNN center this summer. i never thought i'd owe anything to myspace, but turns out, you just never know!

as for my dc stint, i'll be home from friday, june 9 until probably sunday the 18th, when i might head back to chicago for a few days to pack up all my worldly possessions. hopefully i'd drive back to dc by tuesday the 20th, then drive down to atlanta friday the 23rd. good lord, 26 hours of driving in one week, here i come!

and thus hopefully ends the period of catherine posting a boring blue streak about her logistical plans for the summer. praise be!

so i just registered for the 2006 marine corps marathon.

*shrug*

don't worry, this time around i won't be trying to bilk you all out of $2,000 for cancer.

is it wrong of me to not to follow up with people who are interested in my craigslist listing for my apartment because they can't spell words like "fill" and, um "apartment"?

Yesterday I had my LASIK appointment. I'll go ahead and ruin the suspense: I'm not blind.

The whole thing happened very quickly. I showed up, put my signature on a consent form and an uncomfortably large Amex receipt, and was whisked back in to the first of two staging areas. A woman named Zoya walked me through the contents of of my postoperative kit:

No rubbing your eyes, keep your eyes shut in the shower, don't wear eye makeup — "accidentally" saying this is apparently Zoya's little joke to the male patients, and when I didn't say anything she had to stop and point out how funny her gaffe was. Sorry for missing my cue, Zoya. I guess you don't get a lot of patients who're Cure fans.

As you can see, the kit contains instructions, some Tylenol PM for the postoperative nap, a slightly nicer pair of shitty sunglasses than the last one, steroid & antibiotic eyedrops, some artificial tears, and a totally awesome transparent mask for sleeping. I like to imagine it makes me look like Richard Hamilton, but so far the only real feedback I have is Charles bursting into laughter when I stumbled to the kitchen without taking it off.

Eventually I was whisked to a new antechamber. This one had all of the doctor's degrees in it, along with his various awards (which consisted exclusively of testaments to how many thousands of patients he had treated). The idea was clearly to set the patient at ease, if only by awing him with the facility's framing budget. But hey, the doc went to UVA for both undergrad and med school! Alright! It was good to know that any potential eye mutilation would come at the hands of a guy who's thrown up in the same places I have.

But the most fascinating part of the room was this:

Presumably setting 10 is only used for particularly severe medical emergencies.

Eventually the doctor came in, brimming with self confidence. He prompted me for questions — I'd already asked his staff everything I really wanted to know, but after my first query he said "alright, that was a good one! C'mon, gimme another", I felt I ought to comply. Then he said, "Alright buddy, let's go knock this thing out." He was very Top Gun. In other contexts this kind of guy would've bugged the hell out of me, but here I found it weirdly comforting. I guess I want American Supermen to be the ones manning lasers of all sorts. Even if they're pointed at my eyeballs.

So, the actual operation. At this point I'd been well-briefed, so there weren't many surprises. And the doctor narrated everything, which was also reassuring. They put in some drops, then some more. They taped one eye shut, then taped my other eye's lashes down to keep it open. Then some sort of wire device went in to really keep it open. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable, though, and everything happened too close to my eye for me to be able to see how evil-looking the tool was.

Then something else went on there — I don't know if this was the keratome or just something to hold my eye in place. But the doctor said for the nurse to turn the suction on, and I started to feel pressure (strangely, it felt like much more pressure for the second eye — the doctor said this was common). Then everything went dim. It was a fairly unsettling effect, but the alternative would have been worse, because this was when they made the corneal flap. There was a whirring, then the suction was turned off. Vision returned, blurrily. Then the doctor moved the flap out of the way, making things much, much blurrier.

At this point the blinking red light that I'd been told to train my sight on took up about half of my visual field, and it was hard to know whether to just keep my eye still, focusing on the part where I was looking, or to try to center on its middle. I settled for the former as the laser went off, and the doctor seemed satisfied enough.

This was the critical part, I guess, because the doctor's narration sped up. "Focus on the light, focus on the light, ignore the smell, focus on the light..."

Ignore the smell? What smell? Oh, right: the smell of BURNING EYEBALL. Note: scent analysis reveals that eyeballs are made out of hair.

Then it was over. They put the flap back and told me to close my eye. A shield was taped over the eye. And then they did the same thing for the other one.

A quick post-op check on the flaps' positions, and then Charles gave me a ride home. Needless to say, everything looked weird. The effect was like looking through lightly frosted glass. There were hints of new sharpness, but the halo effect coming off every light source made it hard to make anything out.

Things are better today, but it'll be a while longer before my vision completely settles down. Right now I still see a fairly strong halo effect coming off of all illumination sources (and yeah, I know it may persist to some extent). It's kind of like living inside a Barbara Walters special.

The worst part was waking up about 4 hours into an 8-hour dose of Tylenol PM when my neighbor decided to start lathing some metal (apparently). My eyes were hard to open, they hurt, and I felt like hell. Things were better once I got some more sleep, though.

So, complications? Nothing too bad. My eyes started feeling a little itchy about an hour ago. I mentioned the halo thing. And I'm pretty sensitive to light. Oh, and there's this:

But they say if I just stick with the ruby quartz eyedrops everything will work out.

ain't nothing finer than spending a sunday on campus, mucking around with dreamweaver. though it's not as if my day would necessarily be better spent outside, since chicago has been in a kind of 40 days, 40 nights, 40 degrees scenario for the past week and a half.

anyway, happy mother's day to mine and yours! with the help of my awesome mom today, i figured out a way i can get to the wedding, move my furniture, attend my little sister's high school graduation, and spend at least a couple of weeks in d.c. this summer.

that said, if any of you all have any sort of atlanta expertise, especially in regards to where the cnn building actually is and what neighborhoods are near it that might be good to live in, and whether or not a car is necessary, i'd love to hear from you.

back to the css! woo!

the logistics of this summer are going to bite me in the ass, i can feel it. i write down the following not at all because i think it would make an entertaining blog post, but more for my mental sanity, which is slowly unravelling.

so this is where the schedule stands thus far: