Things continue much as they always have. Spring briefly came — rather, it’s fighting Summer over the thermostat and no winner has yet been declared. Temperatures hit 90 degrees this weekend, though they’ll be back down to the high 60s in the middle of the week. After this, I’ll be writing a strongly worded letter to Al Gore re: the effect of global warming on the now-crispy herb seedlings I planted in late March. My ivy was fortuitiously returned to my air-conditioned workspace a week or two ago, after thoroughly enjoying its repotting and recuperation, and thus escaped the hot death that visited the seedlings.

In the past six weeks I’ve had many an excellent weekend sleep-in and late breakfast; read many a post from other, more prolific bloggers; and taken not all that many photos of my cats, considering. (The effort of getting photos from the camera to my Flickr is frequently too much to bear. Sometimes the camera is even in another room. Also the cats are attuned to the whirr of the lens opening and, when they hear it, will stop whatever photogenic mischief they’d been up to.)

I do hope my life begins to settle out a bit in the next six weeks. I can’t seem to stay satisfied with much of anything: how I write, where I write it, what the desk is like, how I’m connecting to the internet, much less what I write. Instead I am grumpified by everyone’s need to pick their Top 5 random anything and post their choices on Facebook. I am made cranky by the proliferation of transcriptless videos in place of blog posts, posts that have images for the sake of including an image (I’m looking at you, personal finance blogs; you’re collectively lucky that I use AdBlock or I’d wish a plague on all of you), and mini-icons that some blogs feel the need to include on every post.

Public Service Announcement
I am NOT on any of the following linksharing services and/or social networking sites: Bebo, del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Kaboodle, MySpace, Meebo, Newsvine, Slashdot, RadiusIM, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo 360 or Connect or whatever they’re calling it now, or Windows Live. I am here at lastsyllable.net, reluctantly on AIM, and in Gmail. Needless to say, I have my own antiquated methods of passing on a link I happened to enjoy, and I do not appreciate the visual clutter of all this various bullshit begging me to click and send a link to each and every one of my friends. Even less do I appreciate the bigger icons that expand to a list of all these sites (and more!) on a hapless mouseover. I hardly even use tags, by Ovetchkin’s skates! And in my wee corner of the intertubes, such frippery will not be tolerated.

Also get off my lawn.

My overall mood has improved drastically.

The only sad part is that I had to take my potted ivy home to let it get used to shaded sunlight before I could place it at my new desk. It had spent the past year and a half under fluorescent lights, and when I took it home around the holidays, it burned when I put it in direct sunlight! So I’m going to baby it a little, repot it, then bring it in.

All the cool kids have one, or so I am told. I’m generally horrible about social networking sites. The big draw of Facebook for me, lately, has been finding people I went to high school with and staying connected to current and former coworkers — especially since my best friend set a Tetris Marathon score so high I can only gaze at it in wistful amazement, my attempts to beat it falling comically short.

LinkedIn has no such distractions. Also, I am also advised that it’s professionally beneficial and I am a total lemming in this job market, it’s best not to take chances.

Now, to see if I can find a nice, professional photo of myself to add (LinkedIn is nagging me because I have not uploaded one, nor have I been “recommended” by any of my shiny new connections). Most of my self-taken photos are, shall we say, candid. Not a very put-together presentation of myself. Okay, okay: I tend to be wearing the same old ratty sweater and holding a cat.

I am here to tell you that this is true, and that I survived the Snowpocalypse.

Just to set the stage for you, allow me to point out that around Valentine’s weekend, I had the apartment windows open and a breeze blowing through. Last Thursday, it was 63 degrees in Baltimore. There have been some colder days and nights, but I only expect to wear my winter coat for another couple of weeks by this time of year.

This morning, I put my stompy boots on and swept six inches of snow off the car. (I wish I had photographic evidence of this.) Plows and salt trucks had been out all night, so the roads were in decent condition; the major highway I take every day was wet, but clear. The parking lot at work was another snowy, slippery story.

There’s hardly anyone at work today — many people are working from home, and/or had to stay home with their kids, whose schools were closed — and the City of Baltimore has announced the activation of Phase I of the Snow Emergency, meaning that vehicles are supposed to have chains or snow tires, under threat of traffic citation. My Michigan upbringing laughs at your ridiculous request, even if I do drive a Yaris! Besides, the Winter Storm Warning for this storm expired at 2 p.m., so things are dying down now.

Here is what the tail end of a Baltimore Snow Emergency looks like (photos indulgently provided by Matt):

Yeah. If you need me, I’ll be buying up canned foods and bottled water.

[Post title taken from the headline of this ABC News story. Overblown much?]

The DirecTV commericals about their latest kind of DVR got me thinking, and I looked into Comcast’s pricing yesterday. Since we’ve been customers for more than six months (and hadn’t bounced a check or had the cable shut off), we could get the DVR box for free, no deposit. No installation fee, either, because Matt dropped off the old box and picked up the new one to install himself — he said it was blindingly easy. We dropped a channel package and are paying a total of $5 more per month for DVR instead. SO WORTH IT.

However, the DVR’s hard drive has a freaking LOUD fan that’s always on, even if the power is off. (Not if you unplug it, or in our case, turn off the power strip.) That might take some getting used to.

It has the most bizarre way of toggling the closed captioning. It was on when Matt hooked up the box, and neither of us could figure out a combination of buttons to turn it off — complicated by the fact that the captioning itself covered up menu options — and Comcast’s online FAQs directed me only to a mythical User Settings menu, without giving me a path to get there. My Google-fu then led me to a forum where people bitch about cable TV (there’s forums for everything, apparently). A post there said that to get to the User Settings menu, you have to turn the box off, leave the TV on, then push the Menu button, and the User Settings menu appears on the TV screen. Make a selection and turn the box back on. I am here to tell you it works, even if it is unbelievably weird and counterintuitive.

That done, I can record anything I like, even if it’s on during a Caps hockey game (Matt is a fan). Unfortunately, I’ve been out of the TV loop long enough that there’s nothing in particular I want to record. Suggestions, readers?

The title is self-explanatory. It’s Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, except with added bits where they fight zombies, written by Seth Grahame-Smith (author of How to Survive a Horror Movie).

When I first heard about this at the end of January, I said “Nothing about this can fail.” Now that I’ve had awhile to think about it, however … I’m a little more worried, for the same reasons I don’t like fanfiction: I generally hate it when people muck around with a story I liked, whether adding to it or fleshing out secondary characters or writing alternate endings or drawing in romantic relationships between characters. (I’d make an argument about disliking the Star Wars prequel movies, but that’s too easy.) For this book, I’m concerned that the zombie bits won’t be woven in with the original plot, the cuts will be too sudden and too bizarre, and the whole thing will read more like a clever way to cash in on the trendiness of all things zombie.

Of course, I don’t know much about this book other than the cover image (which ROCKS ZOMG) and the blurb on the publisher’s site. I hope that the transitions will be seamless, the writing superb, and when it’s out we’ll all wonder why Austen didn’t include the zombie parts in the first place. Until then … we wait, in fortified top-floor safe zones with weapons and a full pantry. With scones and tea.

[Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is published by Quirk Books and due out June 1, 2009. Preorder it on Amazon.]

I’m very excited about it, anyway.

And now the live Daily Show is on! Which I can enjoy with everyone, no matter what time we all watched the festivities.

Will update this post later with links to aforementioned videos and other good posts.

The Promised Edit, Avec Links

Saturday’s moving opening prayer from Rev. Gene Robinson, via The Swivet

Abi Sutherland of Making Light points out that “Today is like a wedding”

Shakesville points out Bush’s total discomfort with the whole affair

Kate Harding at Shapely Prose posts video of Aretha Franklin singing “‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’ while wearing the best hat in the history of millinery”

C-SPAN video of Barack Obama’s inauguration and address, via YouTube

Transcript of Obama’s inaugural address, at the Washington Post

Text of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Praise song for the day”, at Branches Up Roots Down

MSNBC video of Rev. Joseph Lowery’s benediction, via YouTube …

… and transcript, at the Chicago Sun-Times

A discussion of the unusually “safe” language of Obama’s speech and the whitewashing of his ancestor invocation — all the more striking aganst Rev. Lowery’s powerful prayer — at Diary of an Anxious Black Woman

Back at Shakesville: Video of Bush getting into the helicopter and leaving (just for that feeling of closure)

Also at Shakesville: Video of the new President and First Lady dancing to “At Last”, sung by Beyoncé

That’s it for the night. We made it to today, folks. The work begins bright and early tomorrow morning.

Instead I am MOTHERFUCKING PISSED that this whole celebration is going on around me, while I have to put my head down and get these pages done. If this is a “where were you when…” moment, then I was at work, not paying attention, and absolutely incensed about it.

Working onscreen has its own galaxy of bullshit, including the fact that 500 pages looks almost exactly like “not doing much”. Printed out, 500 pages makes a stack of paper about 10 inches high and clearly communicates how busy I am. One-page workflow sheets don’t have the same gravitas.

Which adds to the rage, let me assure you.

So here’s my resolution: One post, every month, for the rest of 2009. More is good, but not expected.

I’ll try what the pro bloggers suggest, even if it gives me hives: a schedule. *gasp!* Yes. I’ll prepare something in advance and post it, oh, around the 10th of the month.

Look for something new here then. I mean it this time.