The big news of the Monday is that "Ginger" has been unveiled. On the Today Show or something this morning, Manchester NH (right up the street!) Inventor Dean Kamen showed the planet his cool new transportation device, which is actually called the Segway. Kamen states will hopefully cause the car to go the way of the horse & buggy. At least for urban use, the Segway (I'm constantly tempted to spell it Segue, the way the word is actually friggin spelled, but hey -- it's the age of modern business and tech spelling. Screw English, right?) could change how people commute.
Interesting.
But it doesn't hover. IT, as Segway was known for a long time, is still earthbound and I'm pissed. I wanted something that hovered about two feet off the ground that you could thrust up above car height. Something Jetsons-esque, with a soft mechanical putter-putt noise. I wanted this big frigging announcement to blow my socks off, that a hoverbike is here in my life time. Eah, ye Gods! A Hoverfuckingbike!!!! I wanted to pass out from the anticipation, froth at the mouth. Realize all my nerdy girl dreams, all that science fiction, all the hopes, the promises of an untethered bike ride come to fruition!!!
Hoverbike! Hoverbike! But no.
Earthbound.
With wheels, and I'm sure some cargo space.
Segway is yet another penguin in my world of dreams of personalized vertical and horizontal non-airplaned flight. Sigh.
It's still kind of cool from what I read. It responds to your movements... adjusts, turns, speeds up... now if we can take it up in the air next... Mr. Kamen, you've got your work cut out for you in Segway Two.
In other news, this weekend it was December 1, it was 72 degrees. We did gardening. The boy was out in shorts coloring on the driveway. Doug cleaned out the garage (or as Moe Syzlack calls it, the "car hole") and now it looks quite tidy and roomy. One could park a damn car in there.
The Grinching in church went incredibly well. I read by myself at the 8am service... I haven't been up at 7am on a Sunday in a Dog's Age. So it was good to get up and out. There are a lot more people at our church at 8am than I initially thought. About 20 people. No kids. So I read to them, talked my spiel about the redemption of the Grinch. And they applauded.
Applause in church. Holy cow. That doesn't happen often in the Episcopal sector.
Doug and I read to a packed house at 10. We had the little kids and any parents who wanted come down and sit up front. We stood between the choir and the children's choir. Geoff was so excited to have the Grinch read that he got up and stood between us and "read" along. Jessica refused to play Cindy Lou Who, so she told her best friend (the one who had been bitten by Missy back in April) to play her. M got up and stood beside us when we went to read and we figured it out pretty quickly. The bargain that the two of them struck was that M would be Cindy Lou and Jessica would read the Psalm with her when we did the lessons. I think it is cute when kids bargain for stuff like that.
Anyway, the reading went phenomenally well. Doug and I do such a good job together. We had the entire congregation hanging on our words. When I was reading and he was standing beside me, he made Grinch faces and movements, mockingly, it was great. With his first Grinch speaking line he boomed out vocally and everyone jumped. It was hysterical. All the kids were so thrilled.
More applause. It was a message that was received with glee, with open heart, with joy. And after service people came up to us and were just bursting with thanks, and so happy that we shared that in that way. It felt really good to hear, "I never thought of it that way! How absolutely brilliant!"
Sweeeeet.
One of the moms, whose son is a month younger than Geoff, thanked us because all week her son has been talking about the Grinch. She read him the story and all week he's been concerned saying, "How can someone THAT bad change that fast? It isn't possible." Weird how sometimes 5 year olds can see. She kept telling him that it was possible, just believe. So when I explained my thoughts, it became very obvious to him. He was thrilled, and he turned to his mom and smiled and said, "I get it now."
How's that for amazing. I hope that the kids can carry that thought. We had some prayer time, I told them to pray for someone that they thought was Grinchy. Hopefully their prayers will be answered.
And we found out yesterday our pastor is retiring. His last day preaching will be January 27th. He's been at odds with the vestry for a while on a number of issues, and I guess is just sick of it all. He turned 65 recently, which makes him of retirement age. His wife does a lot of speaking engagements to women's groups. They will be all set financially with his church pension. They'll just have to find someplace to move to eventually, because the parsonage will become someone else's. Not sure when. Not sure how this all works in the Episcopal church. We shall see.
The Pats and the Steelers both won. The Steelers almost blew it; the Pats came from behind to win by one. Damn good weekend of football for those who care.
Pierre Brochant is the despicable businessman who finds his class A moron in François Pignon. A man who builds things out of match sticks, takes pictures of them, and is so pleased with them that he talks about them incessantly. He works in the tax office, and is a moron.
The night goes horribly, starting out with Pierre wrenching his back and needing to cancel the dinner date. His "idiot" is on his way over for pre-dinner interview. Pierre's wife Christine, whom he stole from his very best friend years ago, is so outraged at the fact he does this every week and finds it amusing, that she lets him have it. She insists he not go through with it in the future and he laughs her off. She departs, then calls back to tell him she is never coming home. The "idiot" is there, and Pierre realizes he needs the "idiot's" help. What ensues is a ridiculous tour de farce of mistaken identities, foot-in-mouthisms, and slapstick and hijinks that are almost Seinfeldian in nature.
I won't give away what happens, but it was a really enjoyable movie that I'd watch again. The man who played Pignon was genius as the idiot. And even though it was subtitled, (normally I shy away from that because reading the screen you miss a lot of the facial expressions...) it all made sense and was perfectly hysterical. I highly recommend.
Today I had a lunchdate with one of my former co-workers from the subsidiary of this company, at which I was employed for just under 6 weeks. He was in my group, customer support, and was recently laid off from the third job he's had since leaving The Sub... as I'll call it.
He lives in New Hampshire, just over the border from here, and has free time on his hands. So two other guys who work here in Corporate who also worked for The Sub joined us. We had a great lunch. Even though I only knew a handful of the people they discussed while trying to figure out where everyone ended up, it was fun to be out. I don't go out to lunch too often, it's expensive, and time consuming (I could be writing in the journal). But to have some fellowship with people is cool too.
On the way back, my buddy was driving, and we were detoured by a local cop. The road we wanted to drive down was blocked off and he had crime scene tape that he was pulling from one side of the road to the other.
Crime scene tape? Isn't that a tad.... over reactive? I mean, what kind of a crime scene could there be? All four of us thought that odd. So we drove down to the next intersection that could cross over to that street, and we were diverted through a parking lot of a doctor's office on the corner that has an entrance and exit on each road.
There was a car flipped over in the middle of the road, north of the intersection. All four of us where actually aghast. There were at least two other cars there damaged. As we drove through the Doctor's Park, we were trying to figure out how someone could end up UPSIDE DOWN when there was construction, and one lane, and a cop directing traffic. I mean, you've got to have some speed, you've got to hit something that can put your car up, there has got to be some physical umph there to get it up and over. So we thought maybe they were evading the police and cut through the area, hit the construction, lost control.
Regardless, that's gotta suck. And I didn't have my camera with me. So I have no proof that a little white car is flipped over in the middle of the road. There were tons of cops and fire trucks and ambulances there. It was quite a scene.
Lunch and a free show. Must be a Monday.
What else... I have three projects burning at work. So I have to focus and take care of them. One has to roll out this Friday. This Thursday is our company Holiday Party. It's local this year instead of in Boston, as it has been for the last three years. Two holiday parties ago one of the finance or legal department employees gave her keys to what she thought was a valet. The guy had on a jacket and everything. Gave her a stub from a ticket thing so she could claim her car. He was a car thief. Drove away with her brand new car, her briefcase, her laptop. Lots of company documentation. It was horrible.
I don't ever use a valet service at a restaurant. I'd much rather park it at a garage and walk over. In the chaos in front of a chi-chi Boston city restaurant, this kind of thing is fairly common.
Well. to work. Must be productive.
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