2 May 2004 - The archives are now current. For each post in the main archives section--not on this update page--I have removed the Movable Type comment function and replaced it with a link to the original Livejournal post. This is because the MT comment function was being used by tons of spammers and few people from whom I actually wanted to hear. I do currently allow anonymous commenting on my LJ posts, so if you want to comment on an archived post but don't have a LJ account, you are welcome to do so. If you don't have a LJ account but would like one, go to the
Create New Journal page--setting up an account is free, and you can use it just for commenting if you don't want to keep a journal on LJ's servers.
20 January 2004 - Remember that one part in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil"--the part where the technicians come to fix Sam's faulty heating system, but Robert DeNiro has already rappelled in and done a commando-style repair? "They fixed themselves," Sam claims in desperation. "They fixed themselves, eh?" sneers one of the technicians. "Machines don't fix themselves!"
This, in my experience, is true. Unfortunately, it is also true that machines and the things you make with them do sometimes break themselves. This seems to be the case with a handful of the pages I had on my website--pages that worked perfectly fine the last time I made major updates. Then, I left them alone, and they rewarded my neglect with technical petulance. I believe everything is fixed now, but feel free to drop me a comment if you notice I'm wrong.
Also, it occurred to me that creating an archives section doesn't do much good if you never archive anything. I fixed that, too; the section is now current.
I was born in Northern California, and I grew up in the Bay Area, in Dallas, and in Seattle, where I moved just before I started eighth grade. I moved to Southern California in 1994, but I still think of Seattle as home, even though I now drive like an Angeleno and sometimes catch myself saying it's "freezing" when the temperature drops below 70 degrees.
I now live in Orange County with my husband Jeff, two dogs, and an orange cat I brought home "for the weekend" in 1998. We bought a house in spring of 2001, and we love it, but I harbor a bit of nostalgia for the days when it was someone else's fault when things didn't get fixed. I'm finishing up a Ph.D. in English, 
with a concentration in early modern British literature and culture. I'm currently working full-time on my dissertation. At the moment, it's probably best if you don't ask me about it.
Jeff works full-time as a software engineer for a digital signal processing company, and he is also completing a Ph.D. in math. Ivy and Napa, the dogs, don't work much at all. Leo the orange cat works several hours a day as a domestic dictator.
Things I like include taking the dogs hiking, cooking, listening to rain, drinking martinis, taking long drives by myself, writing 
ridiculous
odes
to
celebrities, going to the ocean, and cultivating an unfounded optimism about
my gardening skills.
Things I don't like include evil clowns, shoulder tension, people who forget to turn off their blinkers on the freeway or play with the ring tones on their cell phones in restaurants, opossums, whole milk, insomnia, and Kathleen Turner.
