Yay, Kalshane! And good to hear the pregnancy is going well for the GF, even with the GD--my SIL had that with her last two pregnancies, and both kids are as healthy as can be ten and fourteen years later.

Lots of good job~ma floating around, because my sister just e-mailed me with the news that she's got a new job that starts on Monday! She'd been laid of for about about a month, and has been trying to get a position with decent pay and more responsibility (she's been taking classes in project management and was hoping to get something along those lines). I'm waiting for her to call me and fill me in on the details.

I've found DHL to be much more reliable, except no US companies have DHL accounts.

Mine does. It's all we use. The guy who owns or founded the company lives kinda near my mom. He's apparently a character.

Some people have a way with words, and some people are Missouri Sen. Kit Bond. At a hearing on the president's foreign aid budget this morning, Bond explained the importance of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs this way: "Even though I spend a very large part of my time working on military defense matters and intelligence matters, I believe this committee is extremely important. Because the old saw that in a battle against ideology it's 20 percent kinetic and 80 percent economic development ideological."

OK.....

[link]

I do have to giggle at my work cafeteria's thinking sometimes. Usually, their Friday hot meal consists of some kind of bar set-up (hot wings, appetizers, during Lent it's usually a fish fry bar), but today they had an "April Fool's Dinner"--turkey with all the fixings, including dessert. I skipped it in favor of an egg-salad on rye with a side of mixed fruit, mostly because I had a turkey sandwich for dinner last night.

Because the old saw that in a battle against ideology it's 20 percent kinetic and 80 percent economic development ideological

Man, if I had a nickel for every time I said that...

I realized this morning that maybe our boss should have avoided mentioning upcoming raises just before a payday that's technically the third in a month, and therefore doesn't get the usual $5 insurance plan deduction. My immediate reaction was "Wow, all this just for me? You shouldn't have..."

Today's going so much better than yesterday. I was early to work for a change, I have actual work to do, I totally forgot today was free lunch day, and I am now noshing on Chicago-style pizza.

I love old tech stuff like this: [link]

This is just gorjus.

It is “an astronomical compendium, signed by Humfrey Cole, made in 1568 for the Elizabethan printer and publisher Richard Jugge. … The compendium includes a quadrant, room for drawing instruments, a compass, a universal equinoctial sundial, a table of latitudes of towns and an incomplete calendar.”

There are 519 other medieval scientific instruments on this compendium site, all of wondrous intricacy. There is even a sundial built inside a chalice.

This instrument comes from The Museum of the History of Science - the Ashmolean in Oxford.

One blog called it a "15th Century Palm Pilot."

Congrats on the job, Kalshane!

Because the old saw that in a battle against ideology it's 20 percent kinetic and 80 percent economic development ideological

Ain't that the truth, though.

shrift, have you had any Chicago-style thin crust since you've arrived here? I personally think it's much better than the thick crust pie, and completely different than thin crust elsewhere in the country--more sauce and cheese, so much that it comes off with your first bite of the slice, a definite preference for sausage (pronounced "saaas-age") over pepperoni, a cracker-like crust with a bit of chewiness, and cut into small squares as opposed to wedges. Some poor souls think that New York thin crust is the best, but I'd put Chicago thin crust up against their foldable slices any day!