I need to use up at least 7 more days of vacation time by the end of the year, otherwise I'll have more than the 40 hours max that I can carry over to 2010. Unfortunately… we're kind of understaffed at the moment (for the next 7 weeks at least), so taking off an entire week, while possible, would be a jerk-face thing to do to all my cow-orkers.

So –
Instead of taking off an entire horizontal calendar week (Mon-Fri) I took off the next 5 Wednesdays (including today. YAY!) While it isn't nearly as good as a real week off, it looks just as good if you turn the calendar sideways. 🙂

It's also kind of nice to know that for the next month+, I won't have to work more than 2 weekdays in a row.

So I guess there are some people (pig farmers and such) that don't like the idea that referring to the H1N1 flu virus as "swine flu" could create a negative image for pork products and cut into sales. And because of this, we should just stop calling it "swine flu".

I totally agree. But the alternative is to refer to it as "H1N1", and how boring is that? We're not robots, we don't create common names with numbers in them!

To get around this, I propose that we pronounce the "1"s in "H1N1" as if they were the letter "I", and pronounce the "I" sound as "EE" like in the word "Hawaii". What does this get us? Instead of "Ay-ch one en one" flu, now we have "HEENEE Flu"! And that's 10x awesomer!

Uh oh! Better not catch the Heenee flu!

Remember YEARS ago, when Wal-Mart was being all patriotic and advertising all the products made here in the USA? When you walked into a Wal-Mart, you'd see signs and tags on items proudly proclaiming "Made In The USA".

I'm not sure what just reminded me of that, but there's definitely quite a contrast between "old Wal-Mart" and "new Wal-Mart"

The past 3 nights I've been having really bizarre and realistic dreams. The kind that cause me to wake up, and there are still "after images" remaining once I wake up. Actual visual hallucinations. So far it's been interesting, waking up, turning on my light, and seeing a room that isn't my room – not just not recognizing where I am, but seeing it as a completely different place. The waking up seems to be associated with a fear of something, although up until last night it never seemed to be connected with anything.

Last night though, I woke up knowing that something had just exploded. I turned on my light and "saw" a huge hole in the side of my room, looking outside.

I actually got up and walked towards the wall a few steps, but reality kicked in when I walked into my dresser – that wasn't there a second ago.

I can't figure out if this is really neat.. or really bad. I guess I'll have to wait and see what tonight brings.

Last night I received a call from Chase's Fraud Prevention group. I figured it was nothing big, since I've just used one of my Chase cards (I have 3, as a result of mergers turning non-chase cards into Chase cards.. some sort of witchcraft I think) to purchase several $6-15 orders from eBay, some from suppliers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Boy was I wrong. It was actually a $49.95 subscription fee to an online dating site, made on a card that I haven't used in over a year. A card that I physically shredded before I moved to my current apartment in July of 2008.

Chase made the whole process relatively painless. They closed the account immediately (it didn't even show up when I logged onto my account right after finishing the call), explained what they were going to do, what I was going to need to do (pretty much nothing, just fill out a "Affirmation of Fraud" for that they're going to mail me), and said not to worry about it at all.

I would have caught the charge this morning when I checked my accounts, but seeing that fraudulent charge would have thrown my entire day off balance. I'm glad Chase was on top of things.

Perhaps your experiences differ from mine, but as I went through school, creativity and imagination lost focus. From games and activities in early years, to almost entirely fact based 'by-the-rules' type projects in the later years. It almost felt as if moving away from creativity was being pushed as being a part of "growing up".

I think this can be seen in the attitudes of students as they go through the years. If you ask a class full of 6 year olds and a class full of 16 year olds if they want to be there, the 16 year olds will undoubtedly have a larger percentage that would rather be somewhere else – anywhere else. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of the biggest is that it's not fun.

What do you get when you focus a bit more on nurturing creativity? Stories. Art. Science. Technology.

Without creativity, there is no progress.

Look at it. "Autumnal"… I'm just sayin..
WEIRD!

Also, maybe we could just skip the Autumnal Equinox this year. It'll just be summer forever. Deal?