Yesterday I called Donna from my car and she said, "Why does it sound like you're listening to Martin Luther King, Jr or something?" And I said, "Because I am listening to the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr on CD." And she said, "Oh, I'll have to borrow that for next year. I just did a unit on Martin Luther King."

When I pulled into the garage for the Houston CSS Meetup, another white car pulled into the space next door and the driver rolled down the window and called, "Keri? Are you Keri? Can you give me a hand with this?"
Apparently she has a gift for recognizing people based on fuzzy avatars and internet "auras". It was a great Meetup, though, and hopefully I can do more with her and that group. As she said to me, "When I saw your Prius, I thought to myself, "Oh, yeah, she's a geek. And we love geeks."

From this morning:
me: this just in - scientist conclusively determines vampires cannot exist
Lisa: hah!! I love what people spend their grant money on.... grin
me: well, i don't know if there was a grant.  I found it to be a fundamentally flawed proof, myself.
Lisa: hehe
me: his assumption that vampires convert every person they bite into another vampire ignores much of modern mythology. he seems stuck on Stoker.
Lisa: oh, piff!
(And then I went to the actual link and saw the comment thread, which pretty much covers that. Also, this math dictates that there can never be more than 512 vampires in the Buffy universe. Mmm, math. Tasty.)

It's been raining for days. The sky is gray, the wind is cold, and the ground is overflowing. Yuck. This also means drivers are way more obnoxious. I spent a lot of time in traffic with idiots. Of course, I usually do that - especially idiots who don't seem to understand the width of the car in relation to the width of their lane. Get inside the white lines and stop horning in on my space, please!

Yesterday at lunch I took the wrong bus and ended up off-campus at the Graduate Student Apartments, so today I walked both ways to get my food. It's probably better for me anyhow but my hands are cold now.

Last night I went to a Meetup - my first in Houston. The Houston Tarot Meetup was near my office, but even so I still got lost (in the rain) trying to find the streets that actually went all the way through. Silly dead-end neighborhoods.
It was a fun evening, although I did feel a bit like the new kid in school for a while. Then I got over it, because the discussion was so interesting. I think I was hoping for something a bit more academic-historical-spiritual from the Major Arcana discussion, but I have high expectations that are often so dashed. There was plenty of meat nonetheless, and the people seemed great.

I look forward to going to more meetings. And there's not a much better endorsement than that.
I did do a reading (I think I may have been the only person reading at the end of the evening?) for a total stranger, which was enlightening in many ways. I found, though, that my task as reader was parallel to my task as minister - after a while, I stopped talking and listened. We did get to some meaty bits over the course of the reading, which ended up lasting almost an hour. It was very good to feel the cards in my hands again. It's been a long time.
One great side benefit of the group are the deck reviews, with live decks. Folks will bring in the ones they've bought and loved, and pass them around or place them on display. Some of these are brilliant and gorgeous and I look forward to adding them to my (now diminished) collection. When I get said collection out of its bin. I think they're all even in the same bin, but I don't remember which bin that is. Someday I will finish unpacking.

Today has been an exercise in CSS frustration so far. There's nothing like nested divs to give one a big fat headache. My attempts to take this table-based layout and convert it to CSS are doubly stymied by the fact that we are using a content management system that divides the page in places that make CSS layout uncomfortable. I am working on it.
At least it keeps me busy.