Today's thought from the office

"Busy" is the new "incompetent."

Also, I would like you all to admire my amazing willpower for not just posting links to pictures on Cute Overload all day.

OH how I do not want to work today

Words cannot even express.

In the duck pond today, there is a large, dark thing at the bottom, on the far side. It must be large, because I can easily see it from here. Every once in a while, a head pops up on the surface, shining in the sunlight. I think it's a huge turtle. It's been hanging out there for at least an hour now.

All I have to do today is write 2300 words, which I can do, no problem. But the sunshine. The trees. the outdoors. Maybe I should close the blinds for a while.

Awwwww

My pal Simon LeBon made it onto Go Fug Yourself. I will admit, he does look a little top-heavy in the picture. But you know. Middle-age spread and all. He can't help it.

A charming little story

With a lovely, illustrative picture!

My Three Shoes.

Okay, it's just a post at my flickr account. But I would have posted it here, too, so to avoid repeating myself, blah blah blah.

What it takes to title a book

Though I doubt anyone will really be interested, this is an interesting article about how people come up with book titles. Some excerpts:

There were many early names for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald had originally called the novel Under the Red White and Blue because it was about the American dream...Still another title that Fitzgerald considered was The High Bouncing Lover, a phrase taken from a rather bad poem he wrote but credited to the character of Thomas Parke D'Invilliers in This Side of Paradise. (I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that was a "fake" poem...But then, I never read This Side of Paradise.)

A high profile example of title changing was the switching from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone...The next instalments of the adventure might as well have been called Harry Potter, Part Five or just Harry Potter - Come and Get It.

Yeah, I'm a book nerd. So what.

Flickr!

Ok, who has a flickr account? I do! But I only have one friend on my contacts list, and I need more, so if anyone has one, let me know. There aren't that many pictures there so far, and a few are "friends only"...I'm not sure how I want to handle the privacy thing yet on it...but anyone who wants to see the hidden ones can just ask to be on my contacts list. Hee!

Nepotism

That's the word that I struck out on when I was in a spelling bee way back when. I was 13 and got to be the school's representative at the like inter-county spelling bee or something; I guess it was what eventually lead up to the national one. Anyway, I spelled it with an "i" instead of an "o," but you can be sure that I have spelled it correctly ever since.

Scripps National Spelling Bee: "WASHINGTON, June 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Katharine 'Kerry' Close, a 13-year-old speller from Spring Lake, N.J., won the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night."

Also I have this story I wrote about the spelling bee I was in...I wrote it while I was at Charged, but it never got published (not because it was bad, just because the site changed format and I was, you know, canned). If I can dig it up, I'll post it here...

Hilarity ensues

About a half hour ago, the previously mentioned gaggle of baby geese outside my office were all gathered--well, outside my office. One of the babies--who are now all rather more like teenagers in size--apparently thought it would be a nice idea to go for a swim, and he got himself stuck in the small, upper area of the duck pond, which has a wall surrounding it that extends about 6 or 8 inches above the water. He tried and tried to flap his little nubby wings and pull himself up onto the wall, but he couldn't do it! He was also been swimming around and looking at the rest of the herd as if saying, "Cmon guys, a little HELP here?"

A couple of times, the rest of the geese (5 or so adults, about 20 babies) went over to the side of the pond and just looked at him. Then they all turned around and went back to their grazing or whateer they've been doing.

After a while, the gaggle started to leave, the adults lagging toward the back and giving lingering looks to the pond-bound guy. When the rest of them were a little bit away, he tried really hard a couple of times to get out, and almost made it...but then it looked like he just gave up and started swimming around again.

Eventually the rest of the geese all came back and stood in a pile around this small part of the pond, drinking or something. One of the adult geese, maybe the mama, got in the water with the little guy. After a few minutes, though, all the other geese high-tailed it down the slope into the larger area of the duck pond.

Long story short, it took the stuck goose about 10 more minutes and at least as many tries, but he finally made it out, shook his fuzzy butt, and scurried off. I know this was all some sort of character building exercise!

(Also, a sidenote, just because it's funny: while we were watching this tale unfold, the guy at the desk next to me said, "This is more compelling than the entire Rocky franchise!" Hee!)

I AM DONE!

writing a 43,000 word book. At work. Yay me!!

Just thought I'd share that while waiting for all 113 pages of it to print.

She's baa-aaaaaack...

Oh yes, the aforementioned Lady in the Tan Shorts and Matching Sports Bra Ensemble. I saw her at the gym this morning, and apparently, she did not take my advice. Today, she sported a dark gray shorts and matching sports bra ensemble, again with the extra white sports bra underneath. Her back cleavage was better arranged today--instead of creating a mile-deep crevice down the middle, it was sort of hanging over the top right side of the sports bra. I don't know, is that better?

Anyway, I noticed that she had a weight lifting belt today. She wasn't wearing it, but she had it strategically placed on the floor next to her StairMaster. Perhaps she is trying to convince people that it's ALL MUSCLE, BABY!

But the point is, I went to the gym at seven o'clock this morning. Isn't that crazy? And I even had a somewhat enjoyable workout. It's so nice when it's not packed wall-to-window like it is sometimes at night. So many less smelly people to contend with.

Today's favorite song to exercise to is "Come on Eileen" by Save Ferris. A somewhat amusing story about that song that I remembered while listening to it this morning: when the original came out in 1982, the one by Dexy's Midnight Runners, I was nine years old. I watched them perform the song on Saturday Night Live with my mother. She said that they looked dirty (not dirty like lascivious, dirty like unwashed--and they did) and that they were not wearing underwear. I asked her how she knew that they were not wearing underwear, but she would not explain it to me. Oh, Mom. She's so funny.