I just booked our plane tickets to go to Portland at the end of July. My mom and dad will join Matthew and me, and we'll be visiting my brother and his fiance. It will be the first time Matthew and Claire will have met, and it's also the weekend of the Oregon Brewers Festival. Beer-woo!

The problem is that now all I can think about is going to Portland. I desperately need a vacation, and I haven't left the city much this year (maybe a week in total) since Christmas. Plus I miss my brother and haven't seen Claire in ages. At least work will be quieter after tomorrow, but still two months is waaaay too long to wait. :)

I feel like a tech geek today. Actually I wish I was more of one that I am. Maybe I should've gone to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science instead of NU for religion....

Anyway, on to my geeky accomplishment of the day. You may have heard that Mozilla finally released Thunderbird 2. It's not that big of an update over 1.5, but I like to have the latest and greatest of these kinds of software (unlike my officemates who resent having to move from Eudora to TB and never want to update). I love Thunderbird, but it's only really usable in the work world because of the Mail Redirect extension. Unfortunately, when I installed TB 2.0 today, I was informed that the extension wasn't compatible with the new release! I spent waaay too long looking for a similar extension, or news about when the extension would be updated, to no avail. And then I read Mozilla's instructions on how to build a new extension. I did not build my own, but I did use my new-found knowledge to tweak the existing extension so that it would work in 2.0. And it works now!!!

/sad geektalk

I had a dream last night that I ran a marathon in one hour and was asking people whether that was a good time. Keep in mind that I can't quite run a half marathon in two hours. And that a one-hour marathon would be a world record. By over an hour.

I am *not* registered for the marathon this year. But I may start running again.

The crazy cat lady approves of this story. Or, more accurately, the people in the story.

My brother and his fiancee, who may or may not ever actually get around to planning their wedding, have discussed melded names. Which do you like better--Pollstein or Steinpoll?

Off to Ohio in two days. Yay!!! Grandpa is turning 80, and the whole family is gathering to celebrate. It's not the exciting spring break that all of my students are on now, but it'll work.