Yesterday was one of those conflicted days where, hey, it's 67 degrees in early February and you've got three hours to kill. You have your bike. You have your book. But you're really tired. You have a class from 6:30 until 9:30 and then have to work at 6:00 the next morning. What do you do? Bike-ride or nap? Read in the lounge chair of the sunny quadrangle, or nap?
I napped with my window wide open and felt that was a fair compromise. What does Boulder reward me with? A next day even sunnier and warmer than that one, with no obligations to meet and no naps to take! I might go out on a limb here and say that this is the first time that nature has ever rewarded me for being lazy. (Or global warming has just gone on a total rampage with no regard either way for my laziness.)
In non-weather-related blog news (ah, if only ALL blog news could be such!) I am currently having an awkward etiquette problem that I'm pretty sure couldn't even exist until last year at the earliest. See, I'm a Scrabulous junkie (and I continue to call it Scrabulous despite the whole legal kerfluffle with Hasbro, etc) and I've been known to carry on 10 or 12 games at a time, playing them at work while my buses circle placidly around town, evenly spaced and happy.
Now, our network has always blocked Youtube and celebrity gossip rags and porn sites and things of that nature, but never bothered to block Facebook or any of its applications, probably figuring that it was OK if its employees wasted time in innocuous ways. Yesterday, though, Scrabulous (and Facebook) suddenly became blocked. Solidly blocked. Neither switching browsers nor going through tunnel sites nor adding s' to the http's worked at all.
The day before yesterday, I played an exciting, extremely evenly matched game with a stranger. She asked me for a rematch. I accepted and started the game, saying I'd play consistently the following day. Following day comes, Scrabulous is blocked. I can't even get ahold of her via Facebook to tell her what's going on. Having had this happen (players disappearing on me suddenly after starting a game), I know how frustrating this is.
Now my quandary has several solutions, but Miss Manners not having covered Scrabulous etiquette in any of her manuals yet, I can't decide which is the best:
a) Using the Scrabulous chatbox when I get home to apologize for my situation and offer to gallantly resign the game if she chooses not to play a one-move-a-day game;
b) Using the Scrabulous chatbox to apologize for my situation, but expect her to keep playing;
c) Decide to not care because this is the internet and there are assholes on the internet and everyone expects assholes on the internet and besides, Scrabulous games aren't promises signed in gold so I should just play when I wander by my computer and to hell with what she thinks about me because we will never meet; or
d) Demand that our IT guy unblock Scrabulous because my work is on-demand and rare, and the nature of it is that there cannot be extra work, really, so Scrabulous couldn't possibly be affecting my output, and risk being laughed at and having Blogger blocked as well.
Ideas?
Showing posts with label propriety. Show all posts
Showing posts with label propriety. Show all posts
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
There's a fox who lives, or hunts, or both, in the area around my workplace. She's always emerging out of the tall grass that borders Goose Creek, or trotting out from under a tow truck in the city towing lot, her mouth full of fresh rabbit or mouse, and nearly making me wreck on my bike. Today she was on the bike path, following it, as if she were human. When the path turned, she turned; when it went under a bridge, she went under the bridge with it. Due to it being 6AM when I'm riding, and not wearing my contacts, at first glance I thought she was a human - maybe a super short human, but a human nonetheless - taking a morning jog on the wrong side of the bike path. My first reaction was actually to be annoyed that some idiot would be jogging on the left side.
The feeling persisted, even after I saw that it was the fox, carrying a prairie dog this time. As we approached one another - we were going opposite ways - I felt this innate sense of wrongness riding my bike on the left side of the path, for fear this fox would suddenly realize that she was breaking the human laws of multi-use path etiquette and run over to her right, only to be squished by my tires. I actually looked around guiltily to make sure no one would note this egregious misuse of the creek path as we crossed.
We passed one another without incident - the fox is so accustomed to humans that she was not fazed at being passed at close quarters by a speeding bicycle. She glanced at me without the least bit of trepidation in her eyes.
Even though I know that kind of fearlessness is only in place because we're encroaching dangerously into these wild animals' territories, and that it would be healthier for them to maintain their fear of and separation from us, there's something I like about this effortless interspecies mingling. I like passing foxes at a distance of less than three feet and exchanging our species-specific pleasantries.
Once, Dan and I were lying on Norlin Quad and a fox came up and licked his foot. I liked that.
Once, back in Chicago, probably 10 years ago, I was walking home from a babysitting job in the dark and I saw a little oddly shaped black and white cat wandering in the grass beside me. It slunk nearer and I reached down and petted its back, which was strange, because the fur was long and a little wiry and the body was sort of flat and wide and the tail was excessively fluffy, even for a longhaired cat, and its nose was pointed and it wasn't really doing the cat-threading-between-your-legs thing. That was because it was a skunk. The realization was faster than this writing of the realization, fast enough for me to gently pull my hand away and keep walking. The skunk seemed moderately surprised, but after a few swishes of its tail, decided it was okay with being petted and wandered off without incident. I liked that, too.
And in Colorado, when I first got here, I was taking a hike with Camille and on the descent we walked under a mountain lion, who was stretched out on a high branch above us. All the notices in the mountain parks say to make a lot of noise around mountain lions and they'll be too intimidated to attack, so I said nothing and let Camille, who hadn't noticed it, keep talking. It lazily watched us pass, then turned its attention to more important bird activity higher in the tree. I liked that - later, when I got over my acute fear.
I've never gotten over the charmedness I felt when I fed campus squirrels trail mix from my bare hands. Or when I was driving on a mountain road and there was a certain overlook where, if you stretched out your hands with food in it, a bird would come swooping down and peck it out. It's a sense I didn't get in Estes Park, where they sell bags of chipmunk food for you to feed to their tame chipmunks, or somewhere in South Dakota, where prairie dogs are kept practically on farms and you buy special prairie dog food to feed them. I still chose to do it, hoping it would be the same thing, but it isn't. Not quite.
The feeling persisted, even after I saw that it was the fox, carrying a prairie dog this time. As we approached one another - we were going opposite ways - I felt this innate sense of wrongness riding my bike on the left side of the path, for fear this fox would suddenly realize that she was breaking the human laws of multi-use path etiquette and run over to her right, only to be squished by my tires. I actually looked around guiltily to make sure no one would note this egregious misuse of the creek path as we crossed.
We passed one another without incident - the fox is so accustomed to humans that she was not fazed at being passed at close quarters by a speeding bicycle. She glanced at me without the least bit of trepidation in her eyes.
Even though I know that kind of fearlessness is only in place because we're encroaching dangerously into these wild animals' territories, and that it would be healthier for them to maintain their fear of and separation from us, there's something I like about this effortless interspecies mingling. I like passing foxes at a distance of less than three feet and exchanging our species-specific pleasantries.
Once, Dan and I were lying on Norlin Quad and a fox came up and licked his foot. I liked that.
Once, back in Chicago, probably 10 years ago, I was walking home from a babysitting job in the dark and I saw a little oddly shaped black and white cat wandering in the grass beside me. It slunk nearer and I reached down and petted its back, which was strange, because the fur was long and a little wiry and the body was sort of flat and wide and the tail was excessively fluffy, even for a longhaired cat, and its nose was pointed and it wasn't really doing the cat-threading-between-your-legs thing. That was because it was a skunk. The realization was faster than this writing of the realization, fast enough for me to gently pull my hand away and keep walking. The skunk seemed moderately surprised, but after a few swishes of its tail, decided it was okay with being petted and wandered off without incident. I liked that, too.
And in Colorado, when I first got here, I was taking a hike with Camille and on the descent we walked under a mountain lion, who was stretched out on a high branch above us. All the notices in the mountain parks say to make a lot of noise around mountain lions and they'll be too intimidated to attack, so I said nothing and let Camille, who hadn't noticed it, keep talking. It lazily watched us pass, then turned its attention to more important bird activity higher in the tree. I liked that - later, when I got over my acute fear.
I've never gotten over the charmedness I felt when I fed campus squirrels trail mix from my bare hands. Or when I was driving on a mountain road and there was a certain overlook where, if you stretched out your hands with food in it, a bird would come swooping down and peck it out. It's a sense I didn't get in Estes Park, where they sell bags of chipmunk food for you to feed to their tame chipmunks, or somewhere in South Dakota, where prairie dogs are kept practically on farms and you buy special prairie dog food to feed them. I still chose to do it, hoping it would be the same thing, but it isn't. Not quite.
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