Can I go home yet?

At the moment, I'm lusting over a glass teapot from adagio.com, my brain is bouncing between Gondor and Pemberley and my right wrist is aching abominably.

I asked my boss a couple months back about a new trackball, and when he saw the ace bandage today, finally believed that yes, I often mouse left-handed to relieve strain on my right. (we'll ignore the fact that the strain is about 50% WoW, 30% fanfic and only 20% work-generated.)

Dell has done something funky with its latest machine images: three new Optiplexes and a new Latitude have all been cranky little blue-screening, reboot-cycling, cum-scuking hobags for me. This makes for a rather frustrated Misha. Next Monday we get our new gal in and I'm going to toss her in the deep end and make her do any new setups that come in.

The running thing is going well. The cafeteria is convenient enough that breakfast and lunch can be done on my 15(ish)-minute breaks, while my lunch hour is devoted to my iPod and a randomly selected treadmill down at the IMA. I'm not despising the running bits (which are small as yet) and it's sort of satisfying to see the sweat on my workout clothes. I get a lovely shower after, 10 showerheads in the open all to myself while all the modest girls get to hit their elbows in the curtained stalls. Heh.

I'm not kidding myself - lunch is so far the only time I'm inspired to exercise this time of year. Leaving work only to see dark only inspires me to hie home and snuggle kittens. That will change as the equinox approaches, but it's still sucky right now.

I got asked today when I was reapplying to the master's program here at the UW, and I'm not. I'm steadily paying down my debt, I'm aiming for a triathlon this summer and I intend to play a lot of WoW and read a lot of fanfic. There's not much class time in there. I saw a little blurb about the iSchool's new Master in Information Management, and yes, it's a good place to go, but I'm not ready to go there yet. The classes I need to take are more immediate: tech skills and maybe ballroom dancing.

CSI and cake

I'm on RSI-induced hiatus from WoW tonight, but knitting doesn't torque my wrist that way, so I fired up the TV and the oven and made cake from scratch to go with my tea and knitting and CSI. P&P still tempts me, but I couldn't finish it in an evening.

Yummy, yummy cake. I think it was last week someone had linked to a recipe site (and at this point, it's lost to the mists of time) and I poked around and they'd done a comparison of home-baked versus a ton of mixes, and generally agreed (of course they would, since they're there to push their recipes) that home made was better and less artificially yellow and much tastier all around, and how did they get from homemade to all these plastic cakes anyway?

Conclusion: I have no idea where the mix makers are coming from, but I can tell you this: my version is perhaps less fluffy, but it's really damn good, even without frosting. (Didn't want to bother, and I'm not missing it much anyway.)

Random detail: I used my brother's bundt pan that he got from my cousins Christmas before last and left at my house because he'd lost the recipe (Triple-Chocolate Cake) that they'd given him with it.