Areas of Unrest

8 December 2005 - No Two Snowflakes

I was having a sort of odd web server problem, which made yesterday's entry empty for a while, until I uploaded it again. And then I discovered that, for whatever mysterious reason, my browser on one account was not showing the latest version of the home page, but a previous version which didn't have the link to the latest entry. All most curious and I, frankly, have no idea what to do since things look fine from everywhere else. I'd tell you to email me if you can't see this, but then of course you can't see to email me.

I was thoroughly non-productive at the office today. So was everybody else, apparently, since Alex, Jim, and Andy went into a fit of decorating. There's garlandy stuff around every picture on the walls and strings of lights all over the place. They took our plush Anubis (Egyption god of embalming and an object of extreme veneration in our group because the only part of the body the Egyptians discarded in their embalming was the brain) and have him riding a reindeer. There's a tree and another set of lights with Winnie the Pooh characters for no reason that I can discern. But the main feature is a large Santa doll holding a sign which reads, "Hello Sunshine. Welcome to our Hooch. We're livin' the dream." All three of those are things our division chief is known for saying (and which we make fun of him for). His other favorite saying is, "You can't put lipstick on a pig." Or a reindeer, it seems.

I know more stuff is going up tomorrow, as the frenzy accelerates towards the decorating contest on our floor. Alex bought so many lights that I had to ask him what the power allocation for lighting was. (Something of an inside joke - satellites are always exceeding both weight and power allocations.)

So I started fearing that they might start hanging stuff around my area and realized I needed to do something in self-defense. The problem is that I think Chanukah decorations are more demeaning than enlightening. So I am going for a generic wintery look. I dropped by Michael's and got some glittery white yarn and crocheted up a bunch of snowflakes. The simple thing to do would have been to use a single quick pattern. But there are dozens of patterns for these things on the net and deciding was just too tough. So, just like in real life, in Miriam's winter wonderland, no two snowflakes are alike.