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not a good day to be walking around campus

i know some blog readers are in colder places and with lots of snow. however, i was not expecting it to be this cold here today. let me whine about it for a while. going to roanoke today to buy more fayuca for el clan SB.

Chela's death

My life has been a disaster lately because my music is a mess. I have, as you can imagine, tons of music files in different formats stored in two external hard drives. They were all consolidated in a lovely iTunes library that took years to clean and fix inside my home computer, a 17 inch PowerBook named Chela (I tend to give my computers names after Yucatan comedians, and we have had Cholo, Candita, Nohoch, Dzereco, Cirilio, and others). Well, Chela died earlier this month. When I was in Mexico, apparently something went wrong with the power in my apartment and a spike killed Chela's hard drive. The music itself is still alive in the external units, but the XML file with the library is gone. All my iPods sync-ed with Chela. The back-ups saved the data, but my structure is gone and that has been driving me crazy.
I think a higher power is saying "You can't have it all! If you want to be in a relationship with your college sweetheart after 16 years, then you can't have a decently organized music library." Fair enough.

Cash and me

Cash has never been my friend. Pesos or dollars... we just don't get along when they are in cash form. I don't even have a real wallet. I just have a front pocket thing for the cards. However, today cash is my friend. I was looking for a raincoat and found a jacket I had not seen in years. As I tried it on, I noticed there were some papers in one of the pockets. The papers turned out to be three $20 bills. Cash is my friend today. 60 bucks that I had stored there a year or more again sure are friendly to me.

OmniFocus going crazy

Today I admire/envy my friends and colleagues in academia who only have one current research/writing project. My OmniFocus is going insane with the re-prioritizing of tasks based on the construction grant proposal we are working on. This will be (already is) an insane semester. Yikes.

Balls and no bones

Whenever there's a new restaurant in Blacksburg, Gena and I get very excited. After all, the options for having a decent meal here in the Burg are very, very limited. So, today we decided to to to Bulls & Bones, a new pub/brewery place on the 1st and Main shopping "mall" on Main Street. The place looked nice and clean, but it smelled pretty strong like corn. It was a little too intense, but that's ok. We were starting to get into the menu when suddenly the fire alarm went "bah bah bah" extremely loud. The servers said that it happens whenever they are brewing beer, which is probably quite frequently. We decided to wait and then the alarm was finally quiet, but it came back a few seconds later. After 10 minutes of more "bah bah bah" in deafening noise, we decided to leave and go to Lefty's instead. Mas vale viejo por conocido...

RW's B-day

Happy birthday to Professor Willerton from Concho River and the blog family.
Going to teach in 20 mins. I hope my students are ok after what happened last night at the GLC. I just don't know why we get these things. I don't know.

Inauguración

Estaba un día Concho hablando con su kech, y le contaba que hoy era la inauguración de Obama. "Ni que fuera tienda," dijo la otra. "No se dice toma de posesión?" Resultado: A Concho se le está olvidando el castellano correcto (pero los wayeísmos jamás).

New semester

Tomorrow is the first day of the spring 09 semester. I will be teaching two sections of the undergrad Writing for the Web course, and working on many construction-related projects. It will be a very busy semester, and there's a very high risk of me going crazy. But that risk has always been there. For all my readers in academia, I hope your new semesters rock.

A story of sunglasses

Every time I go to Mexico something happens to my sunglasses. Maybe I just get distracted because I don't control the environment as I do here in my little apartment. The thing is that I tend to misplace or completely lose sunglasses in Mexico like there's no tomorrow. Last month, in preparation for the trip, I packed a pair of old Dockers sunglasses and a super fancy pair of Izods from Ross that Marcela bought for me after paying $8. Yes, 8 bucks, because I knew they were not coming back. Well, the fancy $8 sunglasses came back, but I almost lost them twice, leaving them once in Marissa's car, and then leaving them at the table in Sanborn's with Manuel and mom. The extra pair of Dockers didn't make it back, tho. I have those to Patricio and I don't think he even got to wear them once, because they died inside Marissa's purse. I need to get a whole box of these $8 Izods and stop worrying about abandoning my sunglasses in Mexico again.

Bored?

Then, read this article about Concho River. Hee hee.