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Posts tagged opera

Incredible!

Oh my lord… 64 bit flash!  Thank you, Adobe!!  Not only does it work in Firefox… I even got to resurrect my beloved-but-abandoned Opera and Liferea!

Today went pretty well, though I’m completely drained.  Had my last presentation this morning and had the odd feeling that I was saying exactly what I wanted but it still felt like maybe it was all gibberish to my audience.  I imagine that’s an ongoing problem with presentations as you get further into your studies.  Fewer and fewer people will know what the heck you’re talking about and fewer and fewer people will probably care, but there’s certain a way to finesse these things so that it’s obvious to your audience what you’re doing.  Things to learn!

Got a lot done today after the presentations, too, like getting my whole 260 paper outlined!  I’ve got a lot of work to do this week, but I think I’ve spaced it out into nice even chunklets, and that’s really the only way I get things done.  Here’s to hoping tomorrow is another incrementally successful day!

Titular mishap

Oh daily blog, what happened to you?  I wish I weren’t so busy and so frustrated around bedtime when I should be relaying to you all the triumphs of my days.  I don’t recall the last time I wrote.  Suffice it to say that several days have passed, included within them Halloween, the midterm for my TA class, and Lewis and I’s fourth anniversary of dating.  Seems a little crazy to be embarking on year five already!  Woot to that.

Today was good.  I got up early so we could drive to the Bay Area to go to the SF Opera with our old work buddies Charlise and Nina.  Turns out I got up an hour earlier than intended (5:45?  Goodness me.) so I got a lucky extra hour of sleep after that once I realized my time shifting mistake.  But we were still up and out of the house fairly early, and made it to the Bart with just a few minutes to spare to make our perfect train.  Ran into Nina at McArthur while changing trains, and then ran into Christine and Kim on the escalator coming up from Civic Center… turns out all four of us were on the same train!  Quelle surprise.  So we made it to the Opera, found Charlise, and had a lovely brunch at Citizen Cake.  Got to see Charlise’s apartment in the city for a moment, and had some coffee and purused books at Books, Inc. / Peets.

We got to go stand in line for a few minutes to get in the good standing-room-only spots (though Charlise had already reserved herself the first and second spots…) and we got to see a pre-opera lecture (short) about the work we were going to see.  Saw Boris Godunov, which was okay, though I didn’t like it as much as the last one we saw there, Ariodante.  But the company was superb and I had an excellent time galavanting around the city with our pals.  Yay Ask, and yay San Francisco.  Made me want to go Christmas shopping being so close to Union Square!

Okay, enough dallying… I really ought to get a little work done today while I still can.  Off to transcribe…

Aw, rats.

We had some.  In our grape vine!

So today was grapevine trimming day.  The Lawyers came over this morning and we cut down all the non-woody growth on the vine, which should be its natural wintering state anyway.  Found out that we didn’t have an infestation by any name, but definite evidence of prolonged hang-out-itude, so it’s good we were on top of it to dissuade any rodents from wintering with us.  We also took down the very poorly placed hackberry that was dangling threateningly over our neighbor’s yard.  It seems to be a volunteer from many years ago, but it was growing right against the fence and in between two obviously planted birch trees it seems to have been choking out.  Most (all?) the hackberries in Davis are unhealthy anyway, so it was sort of a matter of time before this one got all yucky and dripped sap and goo all over.  This is why our neighbor wanted it cut down!

Anyway, it does make us the tree-killin’ neighbors.  Our local busybody (and resident 8-year-old) was rather perturbed about the grape vine (though it’s in our back yard…) though hasn’t seemed to notice anything about the tree in the front the city cut down last week, nor the hackberry we took out.  He’s selectively protective, though I do have to allow the theory that since his best friends used to live in our house he has fond memories of the grapevine and/or palm tree.  It is a little suspect, I completely admit, that we moved in here two months ago and have lost three and a half (if you’re counting all the grapevine we took out) trees.  The city tree took everyone by surprise, though, since it turns out they didn’t tell anyone they were going to cut it down.  We just came home and it was gone!  Sounds like (from the Lawyers’ side) we’ll have some new trees in soon.  The city owes us one, too!

Other than that, it was papers, papers, papers today.  Finished the second section’s worth of homework from this week, and read the paper I set aside for myself today.  Should have perhaps done a little more with my evening, but I was feeling quite off post dinner and decided to take the night off.  Been spending a good amount of time getting Firefox all gussied up since I realized the new Ask doesn’t get along with Opera.  I was getting a bit tired of having to switch between the two for all my Flash based stuff as well… but I’m not sure how long the Firefox trial will go.  Just giving it a whirl for now.

Big small day tomorrow.  It’s Monday, my blessedly least intensive day, but it’s also the day the undergrads need to turn in their first essays!  Hopefully that won’t be too much chaos, but you never know.  I’ve already had a few last-minute panickers, but nothing too intense.  I’m more worried about the content of the essays and grading them than anything else.  Plus I have a lot of homework to do tomorrow… Lewis and I need to whip up an “interview schedule” for our socioling project, and I’ve got more exciting reading to do.  Egad!  It’s certainly never dull around here.