Thursday, June 5, 2003
Exercise. At work, we celebrated Debrah's birthday, which is coming up soon. I gave her a baby orchid, Joel brought 2 huge platters: one of fresh strawberries and melon with a yogurt dip and another platter of fresh apple slices and a caramel dip. Cindy brought bagels. Kristina gave Debrah tiny pin-on buttons of one of her dogs. Researched Acrobat forms—there seems to be no way to create forms easily from within Word or Excel and have the form fields convert to PDF form fields automatically. If there was a way, I could not find it (and Adobe certainly didn't make it easy for me to find out how). Lunch at desk, tho I only ate half of 1 of the 2 deli-slice chicken sandwiches I brought because of the bagel I had eaten. Afternoon: admissions changes for James. Patrick calls me from Arcata around 3:00 PM. He says he's been doing a lot of driving; he forgot how much he likes driving. Room 322 at Hotel Arcata is comfortable. He's been taking a bath every day. His rental car had cat food spewed in the trunk from the previous renter. He said he fed squirrels the cat food, and I gave him shit about how that's not a great thing to do because it creates dependencies on humans that those animals shouldn't have. He said that the squirrels came right up to him like they were used to being fed food, so it wasn't him creating the problem. Ha! Helped Joel and Cindy with the Student Awards and Recognition Ceremony. The 7:30 PM bus arrived and left on time. Put an item for sale on eBay for the first time in perhaps over a year. There are so many more options than before! I'm exhausted! The item I'm selling is an old copy of Adobe PressReady; when I left Adobe I thought it might be useful to have in case I switched inkjet printers, but alas the product is now discontinued. After watching a few copies sell for $20 on eBay, I decided it's worth more to me as cash than anything else. Especially since we just bought a new printer (Epson CX5200) and it's not supported by PressReady. Got a wonderfully lengthy update from Chris De Lay about what's going on in his life. Got an e-mail from Brian Lewis saying he likes my journal (he says "diary"—whatever!). Is this blewis from Adobe or someone else? I replied to find out and to thank him for his comments. Ate the uneaten lunch sandwiches for dinner. Read M2M: New Literary Fiction while listening to various stations (Electronica, Abstract Beats, New Wave, Old Skool) on spinner.com. Realized that the title of that book: "M2M: New Literary Fiction" is not going to seem so new after a year or so—what were they thinking? In the introduction, the editor, Karl Woelz, holds exactly the same snobby opinion that Patrick does: that there's a distinction between "literary fiction" and all other fiction—a distinction that Patrick himself cannot define precisely but which has something to do with an assumption that certain kinds of fiction (science fiction, horror, fantasy) cannot also be literary fiction. I don't agree, but I'll entertain his fancy until more evidence (or even a definition) can be provided. It was Rob's birthday today, too. He and I traded e-mail—he needed advice about redesigning the Stem Cells Web site. I pointed him to Web Redesign by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler and gave a few other pointers, wished him a happy birthday.