For aspiring world conquerors everywhere

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately. For those of you who have asked what is going on (and thanks for asking, I appreciate it), I’ll tell you.

I once read a book where the main character explained to her friend that, hard as it is to believe, the story about the baby being brought by the stork is not actually true.

Likewise, I’m really sorry to disillusion you, but in order to produce a baby you have to gestate that sucker for 9 months, and even if you have supportive friends, family and co-workers, it’s still a tiring process.

These days I work, eat, sleep and look forward to the time when I’ll be able to put four whole things on my to do list and have the energy to accomplish all of them. (The current limit before exhaustion and pregnancy-induced narcolepsy is three.)

But don’t get me wrong. Although kind people (thanks, Tim) have reminded me that sleep is even more unlikely after the baby is born, I figure I’ll be up at 3am feeding him anyway, so I’ll have the chance to write some entertaining (if somewhat incoherent) posts then.

All in all, I’ll take the third trimester over the first and second any day. Being tired can be tough, but I no longer have a constant, very personal relationship with every toilet (or bucket) in the vicinity. When people ask, “How are you feeling?” I can honestly say I’m feeling pretty good.

At 8 months, Jon and I are pretty excited. I think that I’m more excited, because while we’re both equally looking forward to the baby, I am also looking forward to additional great things, like pants that zip and lying on my stomach.

Yes, shortly after the labor, I am going to spend a good 20 minutes just rolling over continuously on our living room rug. It will be fantastic. Possibly, I will have Jon video tape this (the rolling, not the labor), and post it online, just so you all can share in the wonder.

Image credit: edited stork.

When I was in high school, I took a psych class that covered the different theories of why humans dream. One of the ideas was that we dream to solve problems from our waking hours. Our subconscious keeps hacking away at the problem while we sleep, so our brains don’t explode when we wake up and are faced with the same issues.

The theory seemed a little pat to me at the time, but it’s true that if I’m concentrating on something intensely during the day, sometimes I’ll dream about it. And sometimes after this type of dream, I’ll wake up feeling more able to cope with the situation.

Last night, during a completely routine dream about purging a church of hordes of bloodsucking undead (there was holy water in Poland Springs bottles stashed all around the church), my dream shifted and suddenly I was faced with a more pressing problem: how to organize my tasks and projects for work.

I guess I’ve been more stressed than I thought about getting my work in good shape before maternity leave. You’d think 5 weeks would leave plenty of time, but I keep getting wrapped up in day to day work, and postponing getting organized for leave. Lately, I’ve started working from home at night to have some uninterrupted time to get things together.

I’ve been working with Things and Evernote lately, and I recently tried out Daylite. I won’t go into detail here, because I plan on reviewing each application separately in later posts, but basically they are task and project manager applications with varying interfaces and features. A combination of these applications made an appearance in my dream, while I frantically tried to categorize tasks in time for other people to use the information.

It’s bad when your dream of fighting vampires is interrupted with work responsibilities. It’s even worse when you don’t technically consider it to be a nightmare until that point.

If you don’t have a key, it’s actually very hard to get into our building. It’s not that the security is tight, it’s just totally confusing.

When someone rings our doorbell, we have it set up so that the system calls a Grand Central (now Google Voice) number, which rings through to my cell phone.

When I get a call from “door?” (I labeled it back when I was only 85% sure that the number spamming my cell phone was the door) I pick up, and am asked if I want to accept the call. I press the button for yes, and am connected to whatever anonymous jerk is ringing my doorbell.

To explain the animosity: it’s never for us – we live in apartment 12, and our door system isn’t very intuitive, so people dial 1-2 all the time and just hope for the best. Not the best deductive reasoning there, but hey, it takes all sorts of people to run a world.

Consequently, I am usually irate, and after saying, “hello? hello?” and waiting about 4 additional seconds, I generally hang up. Lately, the calls have been more frequent, so I just hang up.

Even if I wanted to let this person in (which I don’t, because I don’t know them, and what if they are an axe-murderer?), I would hold down 9 until the door released. This works about half of the time. If I am actually expecting someone, I just go down and let them in.

So, while I appreciate most high tech things, and certainly support electronic systems that make it easier for me to control things from my couch, our doorbell system needs work. Manual systems are a pain, but automated systems that are broken are even worse because they are a tease.

Boo, apartment complex. Although, while you fail at doors, you are kind of accidentally spectacular at security – you can’t automatically let someone in even if you want to. So, good job, I guess.

Image credit: Invisible doorbell and security.

My very first job was at a fruit mart. My boss was fair in general, but pretty harsh about slacking off – if you had a second between stacking the carrots and taking a customer, you had better be wiping off the counters or restocking the salad bar. And if you’re going to the break area to use the bathroom, bring a mop with you and do the floors on the way.

Consequently, I’m pretty paranoid about others thinking that I’m slacking off at work. I like being productive, and get stressed if there isn’t enough to do. And I feel compelled to account for my time at work, which means I have a completely anal-retentive record of everything I do during the day, kept in Evernote.

Unfortunately, today my mental neuroses clashed with my physical reality.

You see, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t actually sit up in my office chair comfortably for 8 hours running. By 3:00PM, I was leaning back as far as I could while still viewing my computer screen. To anyone walking by my cubicle, I looked like I was either on cracked out on codeine or was trying to take a nap.

I swear, I wasn’t slacking off. Please don’t hit me with the mop. I just don’t bend much at the waist anymore. After fretting about this unnecessarily for 5 minutes, I discovered I could sit cross-legged and appear alert, albeit somewhat like an-overstuffed Buddha.

Problem solved. In a manner of speaking. Clearly, Buddha did not do a lot of desk work.

Image credit: carrots & Buddha

I need to take a post to highlight this useful site.

Before you purchase anything online, take a second to visit RetailMeNot.com.

This site offers coupon codes and discounts for just about anything. Do a search for the product you are interested in and for the company you are buying from. If there are any coupons available, the site will list the coupon code, the discount amount and the success rate.

Success rate is pretty useful. Once people try the code, they have the option to indicate if it worked for them or not. Coupons with high success appear at the top, with less successful or unreliable coupons below, marked as such.

I’ve used this site for 2 purchases online – my MacBook Speck Hard Shell case and for Shari’s Berries, a company that decorates chocolate covered strawberries the size of oranges. Multiple coupon codes worked on the laptop case, and the Berries coupon took off more than the cost of shipping.

In addition to offering discounts on products, this site also has coupons for services. Jon purchased another web hosting solution yesterday, and received a monthly discount.

So, thanks, RetailMeNot, for offering this service!

If you buy online, check the site out and save some money. Barring that, always Google “the product you want to buy + coupon code” when you purchase online. You may not find anything, but the Internet is pretty amazing due to the sheer number of contributors and a 30 second search is probably adequate to find any readily available, current coupons.

Image credit: retailmenot.

This is a sad day for us all.

Apparently, the ShamWow Guy is a devious character who purportedly beat up a prostitute after she bit his tongue.

More on the story here, here, and here.

I don’t know whether to feel betrayed that my illusions of the ShamWow Guy are gone (I mean, if you can’t believe in the ShamWow Guy, who else might be tainted? That Mr. Clean character has always seemed dodgy. And how can I ever trust those Charmin Bears again?) or to be amazed that so many people have posted about this. When did ours become a culture so concerned about the scandals of infomercial hosts?

Although, I have to admit that I’ve kind of always wanted a ShamWow. And I feel a little let down that the ShamWow Guy is not an upright citizen. Now I suspect his claims about the absorbency of the ShamWow are not to be trusted.

Rats.

Image credit: shamwow

I’ve been playing Tropico again.

For those of you who may not remember, Tropico is like SimCity, except you’re on an island and you are not a paltry mayor, you are El Presidente, so everyone must bow to your omniscient view from the sky. You also start the game with a palace.

First off, Jon figured out how I could play the game in Parallels on my MacBook. My mac is all for world domination, but sometimes the island music gets to it, so it prefers not to run Tropico directly.

Then, I opened up the game, set up my dossier to scale things towards total success in farming (I NEED my goat farms) and began my regime.

59 years into it, I was voted off the island.

See, generally you get a nice note every decade or so, reminding you to hold a free election. I must have picked a dossier that turned this feature off, or else the game has changed and you no longer get these reminders.

Apparently, not holding elections for 59 years has a slightly negative impact on your people’s feeling of liberty.

I figure, it’s good to find these things out in a virtual setting, before actually trying it on, say, France, and losing all the time and resources it took to conquer.

So, tonight I started a new island, this one concentrating on mining and building churches. (You have to build a lot of churches, or people get angry.)

I had another one going, but it was based on tourism, and all the tourist avatars are so fat and sassy that you just want to encourage the natives to eat them.

Unfortunately, there is no “Eat the Tourists” edict. Also, while that would probably raise your local population’s food-related happiness, it might strain your relationships with the US and Russia.

In any case, if you’ve never tried this game, I recommend it. Everyone should get the experience of watching teeny virtual papaya plants grow, and also the sheer awesomeness of building 10 construction offices and watching 50 little workers go to town on your apartment complex.

More on the new version of Tropico here.

Image credit: tropico and goat, cathedral & tourists.