My problem, it would seem, is timing.
For example, I bought the new used Mac a while ago on eBay. I came out about $300 ahead of the equivalent used model locally, and the upgrade path looks pretty good. I was this close to placing the order for all the required gizmos when I saw massive price reductions in the local paper on Macs that the new used Mac could only aspire to be. My upgrade window is crushed, and the trade-in value isn’t even that great anymore. I figure I’m going to go ahead with the upgrades rather than scrapping everything for a whole new system. It’s more environmental, and yeah, I realize that this is just the cycle of obsolescence kicking me in the teeth, but it still hurts to get kicked in the teeth, even when you know it’s happening.
Last night was another prime example. I’ve been beating myself senseless (again, metaphorically, and not in the teeth) with work lately, and I know I’m getting run down, so I promised myself I’d get a decent night’s sleep. It’s 8pm, I’m kinda drowsy, I do the math, and hey, if I crash now and get up at 6, that’s a respectable 10 hour recovery. I go for it, and of course I wake up at 11:30, which is when I probably would have gone to bed anyway, but now I can’t sleep until 3:30 or so. Would I have had better luck crashing at 9? 10? Who knows.
Timing’s been bugging me in other ways. I was rendered useless yesterday at work because someone would interrupt me every 4.7 minutes on average. I was mad enough that I was planning on shopping for some kind of chess clock mechanism to bring in so I could slam the timer button down every time someone said something. Of course, I went for the “sleep right away” plan instead, but if there were any 24 hour chess supply stores around last night, I tell you…
This all clicked as I was leaving for home tonight. I had a peach on my desk that I’d bought a few days before. It wasn’t ripe enough to eat at the time, so I put it aside, content to feast on chips and other non-peachy junk until it had matured enough to be savoured. It’s Friday night, and it’s not ready yet, but it’s clear that the 5 hour window of optimal peachiness would hit before Monday morning. Not wishing to work the weekend just so I could enjoy a peach, I took it home, where hopefully I’ll remember it in time. The place is actually pretty tidy right now, so my chances are good. Still, it’s not the peach experience I had planned on, and it’s all about timing.
In other news, I’m debating whether I’ve got a cold or really bad allergies. I’ve been crying and sniffling all day, and I hear allergies are really bad this year, but I’ve never had such an intense attack, so it’s kinda up in the air. I’m leaning towards the cold theory right now, which sucks because it breaks my streak of “not sick”, but on the bright side colds go away, and apparently it’s ragweed season for another 2 months. I thought that living downtown surrounded by concrete would make me immune to these things, but I have a feeling that co-workers are bringing the stuff in on their clothing that they wore in nice parts of the world while they enjoyed that thing called life.
I remember the thing called life. I’m talking to a lot of people who are just finishing school, and none of them seem to be in a big hurry to join the workforce. When I graduated, it was just the next logical step. I had bills to pay and my parents had moved since I went away to school (they left forwarding addresses, but it’s not like my room was still there). Regardless of my situation, most if not all of my classmates had a similar mindset. Maybe it was the training in logic, but none of us really questioned the “you’re done here, now go get a job” life path. Looking back, I wonder if I would have done anything interesting if I didn’t rush out to work, or if I would have just ended up sitting on my ass. A lot of things that seemed really complicated at the time are pretty straightforward now.
One trivial example is this site. I didn’t do an entry yesterday, but I did tweak the CSS a bit. You shouldn’t notice any difference, but there were some really stupid statements hiding in the code. Of course, I haven’t checked with any other browsers, but it’s stuff that just should work, and I know that it does and why, which is something I obviously couldn’t do a few months ago, so that was pretty cool. Oh, and if you’re going to mess with my head with a comment about how it looks like crap (moreso than before), you’d better back that up with a screenshot or I’ll come to your house and water your plants. In the eyes of the law, that’s not a threat, but things seem to happen when I have to take care of plants. If I could explain it, it’d be Bachelor University time, but that’s an advanced class that will probably only make sense in a few months. Again, timing.